Whatever happens, one side will be furious and incredulous that people could vote like that. I don't recall a time when both parties were so convinced the other was borderline insane. Even during the Vietnam war protests, people were angry but they just wanted policies changed. They didn't have a blood lust to see their opponents destroyed or killed. As a country, we are analogous to a desperately unhappy married couple who are staying together for the kids, even as they make the kids lives miserable. We'd be far better off to acknowledge irreconcilable differences and figure out how to divide the wedding presents.
For all its worth, early voting indicates heavy turnout on the Republican side although, you do not hear that from the biased liberal media. Anyway, cannot wait for Tuesday when I cast my vote. Then, we can all watch the results come on TV on Tuesday evening.
President is the winner when Trump-haters exploit tragedy US President Donald Trump arrives for a "Make America Great Again" rally. Picture: AFP CHRIS MITCHELL 2 HOURS AGO NOVEMBER 5, 2018 Facebook Twitter Email Identity politics has overwhelmed the Democrats and the left-liberal media in the US. The big winner continues to be Donald Trump two years after he harnessed white working-class voters against Hillary Clinton’s coalition of victim minorities. The Democrats and their media mates got it wrong again last week, overreaching in the wake of the murder of 11 Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh the previous weekend. Trump’s tweet after the worst anti-Semitic attack in US history that the “fake news media” is the enemy of the people may be an exaggeration, but the anti-Trump hysteria probably helped him. Typical of attempts to blame Trump for the murders was a piece in The Washington Post by Julia Ioffe, reprinted in The Sydney Morning Herald last Tuesday. Why would a Herald editor reprint such a piece, Andrew Bolt asked Sydney Institute director Gerard Henderson on Bolt’s Tuesday night Sky News media segment? Because it sounded exactly like the views Herald editors hear at work and on the ABC every day, replied an insightful Hendo. He also pointed out, correctly, that anti-Semitism has not been driven only by the far Right: the worst anti-Semites of the 20th century were Adolf Hitler’s Nazis and Joseph Stalin’s communists. There is no real evidence Trump is an anti-Semite, given his daughter Ivanka is Jewish, as are his grandchildren, as an emotional Sarah Huckabee Sanders pointed out at her White House press briefing on Monday last week. Bolt in his blog on Tuesday morning outed Ioffe for misreporting a Trump tweet from the presidential campaign that she alleged contained a Star of David (it was simply a red advertising star superimposed over dollar bills and a picture of Clinton, but was changed to a circle when some alleged the Jewish reference). So why does the Trump anti-Semite line get media traction? Many US news organisations have criticised Trump for his economic nationalist critique of globalism and figures such as former Federal Reserve chief Janet Yelland, Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros and former Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein, all three of them Jewish. They argue Trump’s criticism is reminiscent of the old and false anti-Jewish libel, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and lets Trump give free rein to white supremacists. Yet Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also a critic of Soros, and former Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders, a lifelong socialist, echoed many of Trump’s criticisms of global capitalism. Only one person is responsible for the Pittsburgh killings: Robert Bowers, 46, who screamed “All Jews must die” as he stormed the elderly group of worshippers. How terrible that obsessive Trump haters used the murders to score political points. As Karol Markowicz wrote in National Review, “Conservatives don’t get to mourn. Republicans spend the time following these attacks … beating back the sickening idea that they inspired the shooter.” Like the madness surrounding Christine Blasey Ford’s unsubstantiated allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in September, the latest round of partisan hysteria is likely only to help Trump. Ordinary voters will sympathise with a man who Israel says is the best friend Jews have ever had and who they know loves his Jewish daughter and grandchildren. The snubbing of a Republican by many of Pittsburgh’s Jews when the President visited last week will hardly be news to voters who know US Jews overwhelmingly vote Democrat. People wanting an insider’s take on the media’s inability to deal with Trump should get a copy of Newt Gingrich’s Understanding Trump. His sixth chapter, Toxic Identity Politics, is a brilliant tour through the fracturing of the Democrats as a mainstream political party. Gingrich nails the failure of Clinton to build a broad coalition of voters in favour of building support from myriad grievance groups. The voters who had always voted Democrat in the mid-west were just “the usual basket of deplorables”. Gingrich quotes gay Republican Peter Thiel: “When I was a kid the great debate was how to defeat the Soviet Union. Now … the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom … Who cares?” Gingrich quotes from Martin Luther King’s last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community: “There are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.” The Left has dragged the Democrats away from thinking based on the universal dignity of mankind — thinking that motivated the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson. Its concerns now centre on racism, gay and transgender campaigns and shutting down free speech in response to hurt feelings. This might work with young voters recently imbued with such values at US universities, such as the many young journalists now covering politics in US media. But such thinking only alienates older families and non-university-educated white men and women. Even African-American and Hispanic middle-class voters are becoming suspicious of the privileging of identity over prosperity. Radio National host Fran Kelly seemed shocked last week when RN played a Democrat ad for the upcoming mid-term elections that featured two African-American women complaining the Kavanaugh case made them fear their own husbands might one day be unfairly accused by white middle-class women. The Left’s move from the universal to the personal has left a yawning gap that smart conservatives can fill. Gingrich says it will be very difficult for young Democrats to “unlearn identity liberalism”. “People love talking about themselves and identity liberalism’s focus on narrow sub-groups … allows its practitioners … to obsess over their own uniqueness and how they are personally affected by racism, classism, sexism or whatever.” The left media’s focus on the “alt-right” and its alleged links to Trump has left the Republicans to talk about the concerns of working-class people for a better life for their children. You don’t have to be a white supremacist to fear uncontrolled immigration. Concern for your job will do it. As with political parties, the media will always take positions based on audience attitudes. But big media titles, like big political parties, need to be positioned near the centre, whether slightly left or slightly right. Extremes are for political and media minnows.
Eh, I usually agree with your temperature taking on things but not this one. Democrats are running hard on healthcare and taxes and they’re winning too. As a result many republicans are going on the record say they will protect pre x. Trump was pushing a middle class tax cut because democrats have been wiping the floor with that top heavy cut that decimated the middle class republicans in tax heavy states.