The Donald said he was going to do it and now he is.
The Great Wall of the Rio Grande, the Trump Wall will stretch almost 2,000 miles (3,100kms) from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, putting a gleam in the eye of graffiti artists everywhere. Banksy is said to be drooling in anticipation.
The estimated cost of this stunning feat of architecture is anywhere between $10 and $20 billion depending on who you listen to. Construction time is also a bit of a back-of-the-envelope exercise but by the time an exhausted bricklayer slaps the last bit of mortar on it, it is probable Donald Trump will be around 90 years of age.
In centuries to come anthropologists will marvel at it and wonder what far-sighted genius brought it into existence. Maybe even an old shyster like Erich Von Daniken will propose some unlikely theory that the Trump Wall was built by God who arrived by spaceship with the blueprint and a couple of trillion tons of prefabricated concrete.
Full column here.
RE: Jack The Insider says:
February 1, 2017 at 9:06 am
JTI,
Indeed you and Paul Kelly are quite correct.
There will be a price to pay in our own domestic politics, particularly as the ‘Trump’ populous doctrine spreads throughout the polity.
Unfortunately, the core of this international phenomena is that ‘mainstream’ political parties and specifically their parliamentary leaders have alienated so many of their foundation members. Their utterances and their performance so often represents an insult to our intelligence as voters.
But as evidenced by the ‘red swath of middle America’ little perhaps nothing can be done to avoid the ‘train crash’.
On the bright side, it represents a true test of our mutually agreed maxim ‘ the voters never get it wrong’!! If we are true believers then we must stand in defence of our maxim!!
So much of the current ‘hysteria’ is in my opinion just a gilded form of sore losers; the screaming is designed to ‘de-legitimize’ trumps electoral victory. Can you just imagine the reaction if the roles were reversed?
Trump won because the Democratic Party chose a pretty ordinary candidate, who took victory for granted in so much of the heartland and indeed ran a totally ineffectual campaign beyond the ‘luvvy’ already committed.
As I commented previously, the ‘progressives’ particularly in USA need to be careful they don’t provide more cement to Trump’s ‘deplorables’; because arithmetic suggests 8 years is the modern norm.
“Middle America” do tell us where you that is?
I think plmo and Razor have redefined the term to refer to geographical location.
Middle America? *raises hand*
It’s the so-called Reagan Democrats who came home.
Carl Sanburg talking about Chicago:
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders
We are the folks who Obama referred to:
“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Hillary said we were a “basket of deplorables ” and then was stupid enough to wonder why we didn’t vote for her.
The opinionistas at WaPo and the NYTimes refer to us as “flyover country” and couldn’t find us with a map, a compass and GPS.
These people made this happen–and they’re too self-involved to ask “why”?
Ask me again why the identity politics of the DNC is on the nose in the great midwest. And we’ll crucify them again in the 2018 midterms.
I’m afraid that also sounds a lot like identity politics.
Dwight, the Glaswegian bookmaker told me this when explaining why he had taken the Brexit Trump running double,
“the media and political class all live in London, New York, SF, Washington, LA, Boston and they don’t know or understand the people in the rest of their countries and don’t much like them either. ”
with very few exceptions they are still in the same mind-set, though i see the guardian has sent a couple of writers out to flyover country to report.
at least that’s a start, even if the reports do read like anthropologists describing a previously undiscovered hill tribe in Papua.
there has been a lot of excitement over a few marches and petitions and protests but i wonder if any of that has shifted a vote.
this was a lesson i learned as a young bloke in 1975, i marched and shouted with the mob about Gough getting the sack, and it seemed to me there was an unstoppable groundswell of opinion that would sweep him back to power. Nope, he got a belting.
apologies, that is not quite right, it was a lesson i was shown in 1975, it was many years later before i processed it well enough to say that i had learned it.
jack, it’s very easy for someone who picked the winner of a two-horse race to ascribe their success to superior insight, but that only holds up if they backed it for the right reasons. Even I can predict coin tosses fifty percent of the time.
The many companies that do polls are not the same people as the hated “media and political class”.* The US polls weren’t wrong because those doing the polling live in some elite leftist bubble.** Polling is not an exact science, but it is a science. No-one could have rationally predicted the very particular way that the Republican vote would pan out geographically, in such a way that it would get smaller but Trump would win nonetheless. It was fairly clear that Trump’s own people thought he was losing for most of the campaign, given their claims of system-rigging and voter-fraud.
IMO people indulging in post-Trump I-told-you-so-ism are doing this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_bias#Self-serving_bias
*Funny how Marxist class rhetoric is all the rage with the Right these days.
**Even funnier is the idea that, say, Fox News or the Murdoch empire are part of a leftist elite.
john, this bloke picked the winner of two races, when both were thought to have no chance, more, he did so for much the same reason.
his view was that the winning votes were outside the bubble, and he was correct in that, and that the media and political class were paying no attention to the areas outside the bubble because they neither like nor respect what they see there.
this lack interest in large parts of their own countries explains why the media got both these votes so badly wrong.
it also explains why the losing campaigns lost. candidate clinton didn’t bother to visit Wisconsin, took no notice of Bill’s advice etc etc. and the Remain were just as strategically useless.
these were not toss of the coin votes and his returns were not even money each of two.
it’s not i told you so from me, i did think brexit would win but i didn’t take the double and back trump. i certainly thought he could win, and i was amused by the pundits who said he couldn’t, but i did think that she would.
is polling a science, mmm, not much of a one is it, maybe a craft.
Not so much arithmetic, which is reliably repeatable into the future, as history, which is not. Just ask the inductivist turkey, whose experience tells him that every sunrise is followed by a sunset, until he wakes up on Thanksgiving morning!
the Dems did choose a poor candidate, and she did run a campaign that lacked decent strategy, and i can’t work out why people are so shocked at what Trump has done, it has been more or less just what he said he would do.
anyway, a blast from the past, a reminder of happier times,
http://tinyurl.com/zs5l6w9
this might be why he got a second term and she didn’t get a first.
RE: Dismayed says:
January 31, 2017 at 10:27 pm
Dismayed,
Hooray!!! See you can devote some analytic time if you are provoked into it!!
Of course, the vast majority of your comment, relies on your interpretation of what Trump might do. Not really what he has done in the last 11 days or so.
Fine by me, that you view his likely action from the ‘darkest’ perspective but don’t you think your time and effort might be better applied to criticizing what he actually does?
As I commented previously, I would suggest you be careful in using the Affordable Health Care and Pipeline issues as the basis for a general sweeping critique. Each and so many of the other issues are quite complex, their Executive Orders are either very ‘general’ or perversely very ‘specific’ in their application. That being said, to view them as possible auguries of future action is a reasonable viewpoint, but one with which I personally disagree.
Anyway, hooray again!! You bought a smile to my face albeit not the full belly-laugh of your previous efforts.
Just 12 days into his Presidency POTUS Trump has certainly shaken the established order of things, as he said he would do. We may not all agree with his actions so far but he is the duly elected President and quite obviously is out to change the way things happen especially for the USA. I note he already has an invite to visit England given to him just 7 days into his Presidency. Obama had to wait 3 years before he got an invite. Of course the “ratbag set” is calling for him to be banned from the UK but he will go am sure. Go hard Donald I say continue on as is, they don’t like the “cold steel” up em, as Pikey used to say!
jones.. not that stupid boy
Correction this was Lance Corporal Jones saying, the Cold Steel bit “Go hard Donald I say continue on as is, they don’t like the “cold steel” up em, as Pikey used to say!”
Yes, anyone who watched/listened to Bill Shorten’s speech on Tuesday may well query the necessity for the unusual number of times he remined the audience of the virtues of “standing up” for all manner of causes and reasons.
It appeared as though Bill did not realise we are all bipedal creatures. not just the Labor folk (but even then that could be questionable).
Bill full of “P and W” Carl imho the “opportunist’s opportunist” who will say anything to get elected.
How true – he wants to live in The Lodge. and is playing the cards to achieve that.
correction ; “reminded”
Streewth has an amusing article today.
Apparently the ACTU managed to send out a bulk email that had a subject of ”test” – the content was” hhahaha”
He then goes on to tell us that Bill, in his speech to the Press Club, reminded us all that he had three priorities this year, viz: ”jobs, jobs and jobs”. Strewth was wondering what the second and third priorities may be!
Geez, between the two of them it’s pretty depressing stuff these days.
Robin
You were quite right. According to our man on the spot, Darren, it was raining and bloody cold in Perth yesterday!
Dismayed must have been reading the 1978 weather report! Don’t you just love it…..
I don’t know what happened Monday. We had a total fire ban and extreme fire danger predicted. Patrolled the camp-sites the night before to put everyone on notice to extinguish campfires before midnight, put the signs out . . . and looked a right pack of wallys when it was struggling to crack 30 degrees and it rained most of the arvo.
That’s what you call an inconvenient truth.
Its the whales.
Actually the dismal one is living in a fact free world with a remnant brain in the final stage of a terminal meltdown. His misfiring synapses are causing multiple postings of links to opinion sites that have proved to been written by left wing idiots without any thought that their output is compromising their integrity.
BOM is hardly a left wing “opinion” site.
you better get a check you sound like robin you have a blood flow problem. robins to her extremities yours to your brain. Beautiful 23c in Perth just before lunch time.
http://www.bom.gov.au/wa/forecasts/perth.shtml
Dismal dismal dismal. Before you criticize learn to read. As dates are an alien concept to you I will let you know when I was talking to Tracy about the weather
Robin says:
January 30, 2017 at 2:47 pm
“Come over to Perth Tracy. They’re forecasting a max of 19 today with up to 100-mm rain in the next two days”
See the date pal?
30 January not yesterday pal They were not far out it got to 20 degrees. You quoting other days just proves your idiotic obsession with misreporting facts.
I agree you were wrong. Perth is not experiencing an ice age.
I should have added that I didnt understand why Dismayed bothered to pick a fight over that subject. It seemed a bit over the top.
ps very nice day here today!
Pointing out 21c is hardly cold is not picking a fight DOB. Robin has made ridiculous claims Perth has been on the edge of an ice age this year. Context DOB know the context before jumping in.
Dismayed, Robin makes ridiculous claims all the time. Whats the point of arguing with him? Youre not going to change his mind – or anyone else’s minds here.
I admire your energy but not your technique, which is counterproductive; basically every point you make gets cancelled out by the noise arising from the vitriolic delivery. Youre wasting your energy here. Nothing you say here makes the slightest bit of difference. A better thing to do would be to calm it right down and, if you really want to make a difference, find a venue where you can achieve that.
Bella 08;18pm.
“pigeon”pair heartless cretins”.
Not much point Bella being hysterical upsetting yourself using Dismayed feral language {bad habits } uses on Yvonne knowing your Rudd brought out 51 300 from the smuggling trade he created then locking them up 8880 kids among them . Blaming Dutton having “no ” part of Rudd cruel detention times, serves nothing .Dutton not only increased another 12 000 refugees from Syria coming , but he and Morrison left with a 1.2 billion bill on top of 11.7 billion Labor run up from Rudd days plus adding 10s millions applying health education services aircons ,many other goodies that Tony Burke failed on .Dutton let out the remaining 1830 kids to freedom more then Labor did in their cruel days .
I would not get angry Bella knowing the pathetic history on Labor and their callous treatment of detention rapes assaults etc jamming them in and leaving the Dutton crowd to try and sort out Labors mess adding the facts 1200 lost at sea lifting the John Howard policies the Pacific Solution of safety . The smuggling trade was opened up by Rudd Bella! Dutton doing the humane way releasing them. Sorry ,now ”calm down” on all this Bella!
Rodent= Delusional
Thanks for your well-meaning ‘concern’ Rodent, however, let me assure you that I do not take speech lessons from Dismayed or anyone else. This is all me mate & frankly, my choice of what you call ‘feral’ language is actually fairly tame when you consider the subject at hand is often politicians’ & their dodgy deceptions.
Methinks you just may have a conniption if I ever did ‘hysterical’ here.
Finally Rodent you have my kindest permission to stop worrying about my non-compliance with the ‘truths’ you study in The Oz for hours, I’m just not suited to obedience.
My best though, Bella
Bella, Rodent worries unnecessarily about girlies who don’t fall into line with how he thinks is appropriate behaviour.
I was seriously considering throwing it all in, not reading newspapers , not worrying about what the Australian Government, Trump etc are doing, not caring if I upset anyone on this blog until I went to a gathering last night to meet the political cartoonist Zunar here in Penang. I feel quite sure Bill Leak has heard of him, but I know for sure Kudelka has.
This man has been arrested 10 times on charges that they just make up on the spot when they get him to the police station. They stopped him from leaving the country to receive an award from the Cartoonists for Peace in Geneva….why….because they could. The Inspector General of Police here has told his police force that he is a danger to democracy and must be stopped drawing his (very clever and funny) cartoons because Najib is portrayed as corrupt….uh, duh! He also issued a directive that Zunar should stick to drawing Donald Duck and Minnie Mouse…which he did by drawing Najib as Donald the Duck and Rosmah his wife as Minnie the Mouse.
When we complain about freedom of speech and falling into line, I think of this man and say to Rodent and others just f*ck off, you have no idea what freedom is about.
Great post Penny.
Just googled Zunar & wow, the powers that be there really don’t take to humour do they?
So he’s facing 43 years in prison for nine political images he posted online and five of Zunar’s books were banned because the contents are ‘detrimental to public order’! Shocking.
My best, Bella
It may not be all systems go for those detainees – I see that they are going to be subjected to America’s ”stringent ”screening of migrants. As they are all from countries on the banned list, that could mean that their acceptance is not guaranteed at all? Early days yet I’d say.
Gidday Dwight,
What do you make of Trump’s presidency thus far?
12 days in? Too soon to judge. I think he’s figured out that as long as he keeps moving forward the establishment won’t be able to stop him. Hopefully, when the Democrats stop spitting the dummy, and he has his Cabinet appointees confirmed, we’ll get a better idea. By July 4th, we should have a clear picture.
His choice for the Supremes was outstanding. Gorsuch was rated by someone the most “Scalia-ish”.
I met the late Justice Scalia once at a luncheon–very incisive intellect. Although he did dodge half of my niece’s question.
Personally I’m hoping Gorsuch gets the same treatment in Congress as Obama’s nominee got from the GOP. Sauce, goose, gander.
I was quite impressed with Gorsuch too. Young, sensible bloke apparently. Poor fellow. Because Trump likes him everyone will think he’s no good.
Never mind what happens with Trump in his own country,. Judging by comments over the wall the Trump phenomenon is going to have its impact on Australian politics. The Coalition will fracture and the far right will go off to One Nation and Shorten will run around playing politics with everything he can.
Altogether a rather depressing outlook.
I think that will happen a bit, but not as much as you might think judging by East Berlin. That lot are not mainstream, despite the mass-delusion to the contrary that seems to hold sway over there. It’s like a variation on the Dunning-Kruger effect, where the more nutbag-right you are, the more you think you’re the average bloke.
Refer to the end of this post:
Just to make it quite clear to fellow bloggers – my comment that I have recopied underneath here was addressed TO Bassy, and was not a reproduction of something Bassy had said to me. I appreciate it may have looked like that. I was having a light-hearted go at Bassy for landing me with the ”Avon” tag which another blogger has chosen to latch on to and use in personal slurs!!
Bassy, I know you wouldn’t be that mean!! Still love you – even though you know I don’t like being called Avon. Forgiven just this once.
Yvonne says: January 31, 2017 at 12:52 pm
BASSMAN:
”Avon. You are an appalling creature”…………….etc etc
Avon you are still dragging your Victim placard around with you. You never go anywhere without it do you. You continue to prove me correct.
Now try and restrain yourself. You need not respond. Nobody cares……
🙂