Via a Wretchard tweet:
Syrian rebels see Trump as honest foe and are “free of the burden of the harmful friend”
In a nutshell, that’s a pretty clear description of one major difference between President Barack Obama (D) and President Elect Donald Trump.
Here’s how Gordon Repinski and Holger Stark see us, as they say in so many words in their Spiegel Online piece from last Friday.
On that evening [on which Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump won the election and became President Elect Donald Trump], America experienced a revolution. The successful postwar Western model, rooted in mobility, enlightenment, and inclusion has been convulsed by this angry protest vote.
Because it couldn’t possibly be the case that the successful postwar Western model, rooted in mobility, enlightenment and inclusion has been rescued from the Progressive, cynically divisive identity politics, deliberately dependence-on-government-making Left of the President Barack Obama (D) administration.
And
It was a vote of no-confidence in globalized capitalism, an expression of America’s partition into liberal cities and backward rural areas.
Because it couldn’t possibly be a repudiation of too easily done and so too bad trade agreements and not at all a rejection of international trade.
Because rural Americans are just rubes, too stupid to keep up with their Betters of modern liberalism (read: Progressivism) in our cities.
And
The political system has experienced a delegitimization of democracy that makes it impossible to simply carry on as before. It is a delegitimization aimed primarily at the elite, Hillary Clinton first and foremost—a woman who represents this system more than any other politician.
Because elitism is a better form of democracy than actual democracy, and even a better form of democracy than American republican democracy. Never mind that Hillary Clinton, as the exemplar of this elitist, corrupt (literally as well as metaphorically) elitism is the raison d’être for that rejection—explicitly to rescue republican democracy from that elitism.
From coast to coast, demonstrators are burning flags and effigies of the president-elect while declaring that they refuse to accept Trump’s victory. But observers online are claiming that, in some cases, protesters were bused to the scenes—a telltale sign of coordination.
And
Others claimed to have found ads posted on CraigsList in which a Seattle-based non-profit was soliciting “Full-Time Activists.”
“We are looking for motivated individuals who are seeking Full-Time, Part-Time, and Permanent positions,” reads a line from the ad from Washington CAN! posted on Wednesday.
Is this the hatred of the Left, too? Carefully organized?
Howard Kurtz, that self-styled bastion of journalistic criticism who writes for Fox News has a piece out about a Trump-hostile media and “some pundits admitting they blew it.”
After producing a litany of…mistakes…made by newspapers and pseudo-journalists as they produced their erroneous analyses and predictions, though, this is all that Kurtz could conclude:
[W]e somehow decided that we knew what was best for them.
Kurtz is missing the point. His fellow pseudo-journalists didn’t miss their predictions because they misunderstood or blew off mainstream Americans—Americans outside their New York and West Coast bubble—or because they thought they knew what was best for us. That’s a symptom, not a cause. His fellow pseudo-journalists misunderstood and blew us off because they’re too biased to see the truth.
And so Kurtz exposes his own bias.
I suggest that the era of the NLMSM is past. It’s time for ordinary Americans to go elsewhere for our news and other information. It’s time for us to use our own judgment in evaluating that news and information.
The print and broadcast sources have shown they cannot be trusted; their output has no reliable value. Their output, at bottom, is no different than the entertainment fluff published by the National Enquirers or the Globes or the Stars of the entertainment industry. Kurtz and his ilk just take themselves more seriously.
Felix Hufeld, President of Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, is worried about an outcome of Donald Trump’s election. He’s concerned that financial regulations laid on in the aftermath of the Panic of 2008, regulations that expanded the reach of Government into men’s financial lives, will begin to be loosened during a Trump administration.
Barely 10 years after the start of the financial crisis I once more hear the bugle calls of deregulation.
And I have the impression that these sounds are becoming louder. That is not without risk.
To live life is to live with risk. The thing about risk, though, is that the more Government tries to mandate rules against it, the more Government increases the risks that ordinary folks must live with.
Hufeld has this much right, though:
The [financial] industry, just as politics and regulators, are in need of predictability and continuity—not regulatory volatility[.]
Indeed. Regulations need to be vastly reduced, Government gotten out of the way of free markets and the free citizens operating in them. And then politicians and regulators need to leave the remainder alone and stable and not constantly be adding regulations and “tweaking” others.
The problem Hufeld and other bureaucrats of the Left—both in Europe and in the US—have is that they can’t conceive the idea the ordinary citizens are fully capable of making their own financial decisions without Government holding their hands.
Or these bureaucrats worry about their own loss of power were ordinary folks freed to make their own financial decisions without Government holding their hands.
Or both.