With all the current huffing and puffing and virtue signalling (and sheer lying) cascading from the US and UK media over President Trump’s Executive Order on Immigration, Don Surber’s “Trump The Press” (available both in the USA and UK) offers a timely antidote to their hysterical rantings and distortions.

It’s a must read, not only for US pundits and hacks but also for their fellow scribblers here in the UK who mostly copy/paste them…(yes. including you DailyTelegraph) Mr Surber records some of the most embarrassing quotes from almost every big league American political commentator from both left and right who, imprisoned by their own bias and arrogance, failed to use those time honoured ancient journalistic skills of wearing out shoe leather to find out why millions of ordinary Americans were ignoring their advice.

If some of the sneering, contempt and sheer bias seems familiar this side of the pond it is because there are echoes here of the same failings from our own UK “experts” over the Brexit campaign.

Written with sardonic humour this is nevertheless a massive indictment of a profession that, though still dining out on Watergate, is, in essence, seeking approval by looking into the mirror.

BTW – I didn’t steal this from the review on Amazon UK….it was my review!!!!

Surber on experts and pundits

….and, of course, the highly regarded Chris Cillizza

Meanwhile, from giants of the right…

But the quote I loved the best because it is so true not just in America but here in Britain

On the surface a book that will make you smile at the cluelessness of these professionals – but, on reflection, also a tragedy when you realise it is also a sorry tale illustrating a collapse of integrity.

Buy the whole book – you’ll enjoy it…..

Reading the Daily Telegraph and/or The Spectator, both (reputedly) right wing organs one could be forgiven for thinking nothing much has happened during the period leading up to the Presidential election next November – except for a weekly sneer about Donald Trump. You just wouldn’t realise that for half a year several people have been jockeying for the Republican Party nomination.

Of course within a few days, starting with the Iowa caucus, there will have to be some column inches but the hacks will be operating in the dark without a compass. They have no bearings.

They have no bearings because, of course, reporting US politics is almost always a cut and paste job for the Brit hacks. They check the US media, find out what the pundits and the consultants and the academics are saying – then they alter one or two words and phrases and regurgitate the message to UK eyes.

Only the 2016 race is not going to plan.

It was all going to be so simple. Back in the early summer the Republican Party establishment had it all sussed out. The summer and early autumn would thin the ranks. “Outsiders” like Trump and Carson would flare brightly for a few weeks and then flame out. The young bloods like Rand, Walker, Rubio and Cruz would tear each other apart for the “conservative” vote and then former governor of Florida Jeb Bush, rich with big donor cash and the support of regiments of consultants led by so called “genius” Karl Rove, would come through the middle. By October the media and GOP establishment would be crowning him the unofficial nominee and all would be set for the dynastic clash of Bush v Clinton in November 2016.

Except it didn’t pan out that way at all. Despite all those consultants and over $100m in donations and the support of the official conservative media Jeb never lifted from the ground.

Instead Donald Trump has stolen all the oxygen. Despite weekly predictions of demise from the punditocracy Trump polling lead has been consistent. Attacks from the left and right media have regularly missed the target. Not a single big name media figure has come out in support – and it seems that a lot of ordinary Americans don’t give a damn.

This is why in the Telegraph/Spectator the cover has faded. They can no longer cut and paste what the pundits/consultants/academics are saying because there is very little to cut and paste. Since early December the “experts” have clammed up, scared witless by public mockery of their failed predictions. There is a subdued sneering at Trump but that is all.

What has never appeared in the Telegraph/Spectator is a serious analysis attempting to explain the phenomenon of Trump. It is sometimes put down to anger and frustration amongst older white males but if you look at the thousands who attend the Trump rallies there are a lot of younger folk as well – and women.

There is some evidence of support from previously Democrat leaning blue collar workers and elements of the black community, constituencies in which none of the other GOP hopefuls could hope to gain any traction.

Pennsylvania, anyone?

Of course nothing is certain and casting political runes is ever an unpredictable game. But even if Trump was to eventually fade post February US politics can never be the same. As someone has said he has not only ignored the rule book – he’s ripped it up and written another,

But of course, nobody in the Telegraph/Spectator said that. They feel much more comfortable and cosy with their heads stuck up their own derrieres….

A confession.

My first political action was helping my dad, a working class Tory, put a poster in our window for the 1950 election. Since then, until 2013 I was often an active party member but always a loyal Tory voter…sometimes while holding my nose (Heath) other times almost ecstatic with enthusiasm (Thatcher)

Admittedly from 2006 I had my doubts about Cameron and developed an interest in UKIP but I only actually joined UKIP in 2013 because of Diane James and Eastleigh. Until then, outside of Farage, many other UKIP figures did appear to me to be oddballs. Diane James was no oddball and, more importantly, she almost won – and that was why I joined. UKIP was obviously appealing to a considerable number of ordinary voters.

But I have never been a libertarian.

After all, who in terms of practical politics could honestly see a “libertarian” government being elected and then proceeding to dismantle the apparatus of the state? Ron Paul won the devotion of a handful of bright young Ayn Rand groupies. He managed to win straw polls yet remained electorally irrelevant. The Tea Party was a genuine grassroots movement with a laser like focus on fiscal probity that fired the 2010 election and began the undermining of the Democrats and their hold on political power that had been handed to them on a plate by the beltway GOP in 2006 and 2008. After 2008 the GOP leadership and their media pundits were all for going with the flow and working with the Democrats. The Tea Party and their biggest fan, Sarah Palin, went for Obama, Pelosi & Co with knives and baseball bats. The beltway pundits rolled their eyes but the voters liked what they heard. Meanwhile Ron Paul stood aloof from the Tea Party and watched as politics passed him by.

Similarly while UKIP was a tiny fringe cult where libertarians could play all day it attracted few votes outside the meaningless Euros. Once it began to be perceived as a populist party resonating with a shift in public mood in 1913 it began winning local council seats and making an impact in parliamentary elections. This was accompanied by a dramatic increase in membership and the expansion of the branch structure which in some areas generated a lively and energetic core of local activists. The result? More local election gains in 2014 and UKIP’s first MPs’

Not all of the pre 2013 kippers have been impressed, particularly the libertarians. Policy shifts on the NHS, taxation and welfare have led to mutterings about “red UKIP” and perhaps one can understand their concerns. But I also feel that some of them are maybe subconsciously uncomfortable with the influx of new members and the prospects of electoral success. They were happier being perceived as the followers of a fringe cult baying helplessly at the moon because it helped to reinforce their own conviction that they were prophets crying in the wilderness, ignored by an ignorant majority who would suffer on the Day of Judgement.

I would guess that the vast majority of the post 2013 UKIP intake are, like me, inclined towards small government. But we also recognise that a modern nation state is a highly complex structure that needs a modicum of direction if only to guard its citizens from the designs of those who wish us harm through criminal activity within or without the realm.

Of course any political movement needs to be grounded with principles – yet it must also seek to gain power to put those principles into practice. There are only three ways of doing this – by taking over an existing party, by creating a separate party and start to win elections or by some sort of coup or insurrection .Either way means getting your hands dirty with political action….and I really can’t see any of our libertarian dream weavers leaving their ivory towers to do that….

Peter Foster, The Daily Telegraph’s hack-in-residence across the pond, pens a hymn of praise for Michelle Obama’s 50^th birthday that would be the envy of every ambitious scribbler in Pyongyang. In his determination to ferret out the truth he fearlessly tracks down a cross section of everyday ordinary American folks who just happen to part of the Obama circle, fixes them with a steely eye and throws them the killer question.

On a scale of ten to ten just how wonderful a person is Michelle Obama?

I used to think Mark Mardell at the BBC had cornered the market in this type of sycophantic drivel but Foster has played a blinder here. Both of the Obamas are political hacks spawned by the corrupt Daley Chicago machine. Both have an invented back story which covers up the fact that they were eased along the political food chain by patronage and influence rather than achievement. But then what can one expect from “journalists” who merely regurgitate the wishful thinking mythology of the US media/cultural elite?

But brace yourselves, folks – Mr Foster is only using this as dry run for his forthcoming puff pieces on Hillary Clinton so make certain you stock up with sick bags…

via the inestimable Michael Yon  ….a spoof, of course, but it might touch a few nerves…

To the citizens of the United States of America from Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

In light of your failure in recent years to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately. (You should look up ‘revocation’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.)

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except North Dakota, which she does not fancy).

Your new Prime Minister, David Cameron, will appoint a Governor for America without the need for further elections.

Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

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1. The letter ‘U’ will be reinstated in words such as ‘colour,’ ‘favour,’ ‘labour’ and ‘neighbour.’ Likewise, you will learn to spell ‘doughnut’ without skipping half the letters, and the suffix ‘-ize’ will be replaced by the suffix ‘-ise.’ Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. (look up ‘vocabulary’).

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2. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as ”like’ and ‘you know’ is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. There is no such thing as U.S. English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take into account the reinstated letter ‘u” and the elimination of ‘-ize.’

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3. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.

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4. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers, or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you’re not quite ready to be independent. Guns should only be used for shooting grouse. If you can’t sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist, then you’re not ready to shoot grouse.

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5. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. Although a permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

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6. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left side with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.

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7. The former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline) of roughly $10/US gallon. Get used to it.

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8. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with vinegar.

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9. The cold, tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as Lager. South African beer is also acceptable, as they are pound for pound the greatest sporting nation on earth and it can only be due to the beer. They are also part of the British Commonwealth – see what it did for them. American brands will be referred to as Near-Frozen Gnat’s Urine, so that all can be sold without risk of further confusion.

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10. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play English characters. Watching Andie Macdowell attempt English dialect in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one’s ears removed with a cheese grater.

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11. You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies).

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12. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.1% of you are aware there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. You will learn cricket, and we will let you face the South Africans first to take the sting out of their deliveries.

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13.. You must tell us who killed JFK. It’s been driving us mad.

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14. An internal revenue agent (i.e. tax collector) from Her Majesty’s Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all monies due (backdated to 1776).

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15. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 p.m. with proper cups, with saucers, and never mugs, with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; plus strawberries (with cream) when in season.

God Save the Queen!

 

America gripped by second night of fury over not guilty verdict for neighbourhood watch man who shot black teenager armed only with a bag of Skittles

A quartet of low level  UK Daily Mail hacks who appear to get paid for cutting and pasting “human interest” stories from the US media could not resist parroting the “skittles” meme so beloved of those who portray Trayvon Martin as just some innocent kid walking along the street with a packet of sweets.

In a rather unbalanced piece which veers dangerously near to sympathising with  the “miscarriage of justice” mantra being orchestrated by both the radical left and the liberal elite there is, unsurprisingly, no reference to the longstanding  pre trial campaign mischaracterising and denigrating George Zimmerman waged by the establishment media.

Initially seized upon by the Democrats as an opportunity to kickstart Obama’s 2012 campaign it has now been hijacked not just by old time race card hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton but also by the tarnished apparatchiks of the Obama administration who see it as a useful tool to divert attention from their own lacklustre performance.

But skittles as a symbol of innocence might not be such the match winning factor that the shallow Mail scribblers obviously hoped for. We know that Martin’s high school career was not particularly trouble free and that he might well have not been unfamiliar with marijuana. It has also been suggested that the possession of skittles and fruit juice are two thirds of the recipe for something a little more streetworthy.

Not that the Mail and others would allow a burgeoning myth to be deflated by a cooler appraisal of events. After all  we all remember how that Tawana Brawley proved such a useful martyr for Al Sharpton…

Quote of the day from Hot Air comments re Sarah Palin returning to Fox

Here is my bottom line up front: Palin is right far more times than she is wrong, and is right far more times than most of the current elected GOP leadership. The fact that she has yet another platform to get her views and analysis out there is a GOOD thing.

For those folks who have a problem with her accent, her folksy humor, and her overall presentation, I humbly suggest that you turn the monitor volume down, and just be thankful that she is on the side of conservatives who want to save the country.

As a native Philadelphian raised in Upstate NY, I am good with her Alaskan twang, and would rather listen to her than to stomach one more syllable from some jack wagon in the Northeast or Left Coast who think themselves mightier than the rest of us (and thus more capable of running the country).

She’s no goddess, no saint, no single fountain of all that is good and right, but she is still more effective than so many who secretly wish they had her platform, her raw rockstar power, and her blessings.

Living and loving life, while living rent-free in the minds of statists and haters… Sarah Palin is one fortunate woman.

itzWicks on June 13, 2013 at 10:45 PM

This is, or was, Erika. She was a young student who was a real revolutionary. She and thousands of other brave Hungarians came out onto the streets of Budapest in 1956 to demonstrate against the communists who ran the puppet regime that governed Hungary on behalf of the Russian Soviet Union. She holds a gun because the regime’s secret police tried to break the demonstrations. When the Russian Red Army, flying the hammer and sickle flag carried by Romany Blythe, moved in to crush the uprising, Erika and her friends fought against their tanks with rifles, sub machine guns and petrol bombs.

They failed.

The Red Army’s hammer and sickle was triumphant and a new puppet communist regime brought back the secret police, the execution blocks and the prison camps. Erika was dead, killed in the last hours of the fighting while trying to help her wounded comrades. The dead hand of communist dictatorship gripped Hungary and the rest of Eastern Europe once again.

Western governments accepted the iron grip of Communism in Eastern Europe and Russia as a fact of life to be accommodated. Many voices in western academic and cultural circles, being of a Marxist bent, celebrated it.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the first western leaders to publicly denounce those communist regimes as evil and oppressive and, by implication, illegitimate. At a time when internal stresses and strains were beginning to distort the social and economic fabric of these tyrannies the impact of external condemnation from such influential voices were important factors in causing the red regimes to implode.

And in October 1989, 33 years after the uprising, Hungary became a free multi party democracy. How sad that Erika could not have been in the crowds celebrating that moment but, no doubt ,her spirit, and those of all those other courageous freedom fighters who died with her, was smiling down from above.

What would Erika have made of Romany Blythe’s theatrical posturing and ghoulish disrespect of Margaret Thatcher?

Not much, I suspect.

Probably with as much contempt as Lech Walesa and those of his Solidarity comrades who had welcomed her to Gdansk in 1988 when it was still under communist rule.

Those on the Left who still probably regard Thatcher as a hate-figure, have either forgotten the history of the Cold War or possibly never understood that Communism meant the virtual enslavement of millions of people in the East European countries, who loathed its ideology as much as Margaret Thatcher herself. It is simply not possible to imagine Thatcher visiting Russia in the 1930s, like certain Left-wing useful idiots from Britain, and being taken in by Stalin’s propaganda machine. Ordinary East Europeans took a different view of her to her critics in this country. For them she symbolised opposition to Communism; indeed she was given a tumultuous welcome by the shipyard workers in Gdansk when she visited them. She wept at the sight. The shipyard workers would have been puzzled to learn of the refusal of Oxford University, her old alma mater and one of the most prestigious universities in the world, to give her an honorary degree.

Amen to that, say I – and I am sure the spirit of Erika would agree….

At last – an American voice calling out Obama for kowtowing to the Latin American left on Argentina’s posturings over The Falklands (actually it’s a British voiceover for a vid produced by a US think tank)

Grateful thanks to our friends at The Heritage Foundation

So all Cameron’s brown nosing of President Obama and his Chicago Machine administration produces nothing but this stinking turd….

A FRESH transatlantic row has blown up after the US said it will not recognise next month’s Falklands referendum.

But then maybe Obama and his mates think that voting in the Falklands referendum will be organised in Chicago style with people voting early – and often – and the dead arising from their graves to cast their ghostly ballot.

Time, perhaps, to swiftboat the new US Secretary of State John Kerry. This could never have been done to St Hillary, as much the idol of the media/political elite as Obama but now she has briefly returned to Mount Olympus, Mr Kerry, a rather seedy and timeworn suit, needs to be the target of some home truths IF (and it’s a massive IF) Cameron and co have the cojones to do it……