Grace & Steel Podcast: Independence Day for Britain (and England and Scotland); Trump Dismantles Crooked Hillary; etc.
07/07/2016
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Episode 43 of my podcast is now posted here (with copious links). In Part 1, we celebrate June 23, the Brexit, or Independence Day, as Nigel Farage so properly called it. This was the happiest political night of my life: more so than Reagan winning in 1980, even more so than Pierre Trudeau losing in 1979. (Fly in the ointment of the last example: Conservative Leader Joe Clark.)

Brexit was the perfect binary division. All the good people, like Nigel Lawson, James Dyson and Joan Collins, supported Leave. All the creeps, like Theresa May, Alan Sugar and Bob Geldof, supported Remain, which also boasted the support of the Conservative Party, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Greens, the Bank of England, George Soros, Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau, the clever-Dick pundits and the entire globalist establishment.

There’s a reason voters are not presented many referenda; given the chance to say No, the people will do so. The reaction from the globalists was first shock, then fury and finally a mixture of panic and defiance. How dare hoi polloi disagree with their betters. We demand another vote, with the proper result this time. They predicted financial disaster in the wake of a Leave vote and didn’t bother to disguise their Schadenfreude when the markets went briefly wobbly. They have no clue that their economic forecast was prima facie confirmation of the weakness of their system. As one of my Twitter followers remarked, “If one referendum in one country can crash the world economy, then maybe globalism wasn't such a great idea.”

The flag that will be saluted on the new national holiday Farage spoke of will surely be the Cross of Saint George. England chose Leave by 53.4%-46.4%. Scotland, on the hand, went 62%-38% Remain. My Welsh cousins chose Leave 52.5%-47.5%, while basket-case Northern Ireland went 55.8%-44.2% Remain.

Scotland is likewise a basket case and, to mix metaphors, a millstone around England’s neck. It is England’s Quebec. The parallels are uncanny. English Peters are robbed to pay Scottish Pauls. To add insult to injury, the Scots never stop demanding more money and sovereignty. Devolution is an outrage, and it is unsustainable, as the-then Scottish MP for West Lothian, Tam Dalyell, argued in 1977:

For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable members tolerate...at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on English politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

MP and former London Mayor Boris Johnson bollixed his chance of succeeding David Cameron as Prime Minister with a last-minute, too-clever-by-half attack on Farage for “xenophobia” (which is the new “racism”). It appears that the new PM will be perennial failure May, a risible feminist who hates Conservatives and British liberties in equal measure. Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne is surely right that neither the Tory nor Labour parties will survive Brexit. (The Lib Dems fell into irrelevancy some time ago.)

In Part 2, we celebrate another triumph, Donald Trump’s June 22 vivisection of Hillary Clinton. I’m beginning to think The Donald is reading my mind. The day before his New York speech, I remarked that looking back to 1900 I could not think of another Presidential candidate boasting Hillary’s unique combo of corruption and incompetence. And those qualities were the two poles of Trump’s address.

Trump introduced the “Crooked Hillary” meme months ago, back when no one dared imagine that Bill Clinton would doorstop Attorney General Loretta Lynch for a 30-minute “private” conversation that in no way prefigured the Justice Department letting Hillary skate for her numerous, egregious violations of national security. He has continued to jab at her ever since and at Trump SoHo delivered a knockout blow: “She gets rich making you poor.” This is the political slogan of the century—and it is so very powerful because it’s true, and everyone knows it. The Clinton Foundation is at the heart of all her disasters: her illicit, unsecure server and the 30,000 deleted emails, setting the Middle East and North Africa on fire, condemning American diplomats to death and lying about it afterward.

Hillary is such a weak candidate that Trump could win simply by going negative—a powerful political technique that John McCain and Mitt Romney never cottoned on to—but he offers voters something positive as well, real hope and change. Not the trickle-down globalism, the cheap chalupas of Hillary and Obama but the real rising tide that lifts all boats: America First.

Off-the-cuff Trump has become a rather good orator, and I expect many other fine speeches in the months to come. The NYC speech, however, was so devastating and so prescient that I’m doubling down on my election prediction: Trump wins 58% of the popular vote and 420 electoral votes.

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