Panic in the Left's Giggle Factory

Babette Francis - Quadrant Online, November 19th, 2016

He isn't making with the gags himself, but Donald Trump is boosting global merriment by inspiring his critics to make monumental jokes of themselves. They simper, they sob, they pack suitcases and, most of all, they sneer non-stop at voters deemed so less intelligent than their precious selves.

If US President-elect Donald Trump achieves nothing during his four years in the White House, he has at least given us days of laughter following his election. In this grim world of ours there is often little to laugh about, so thank you, Mr. President-elect, for the hilarity following your election. Observing the mainstream media scrutinizing the tea leaves (and their own entrails) has been side-splitting.

Take the ostentatiously virtuous Peter van Onselen, columnist for The Australian, who wants to tear up his US passport because of the Trump triumph. Perhaps he could tear up his Australian passport as well - just so long as he doesn't litter our streets with its debris, as angry Clinton supporters have been doing in 'blue' states in the US.

You see, van Onselen says he could not look his daughters in the eye if he did not protest Trump's stated intention to see Roe v Wade overturned and, more generally, because of Trump's attitude to women.
Well how does Professor van Onselen look his daughters in the eye while babies in China and India are being aborted purely because they are female? And why didn't he tear up his US passport when President Bill Clinton seduced an intern in the Oval Office, lied about it and plunged the US into years of hearings and impeachment proceedings? Or when Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy parked a one-night girlfriend in a pond, left her to drown and did not report the accident until the following day? And has Professor van Onselen told his daughters about all John F. Kennedy's affairs, including his fling with a mafiosi's mistress?

If Trump does indeed succeed in overturning Roe through the appointment of Supreme Court justices who are strict constitutionalists and do not extract abortion rights from an imaginary "penumbra" surrounding the right to privacy, the issue of abortion would revert to being decided by individual states, which is as it should be. It is the voters in those states who would decide the legality - or otherwise - of abortion, not the nine justices in Washington. Professor van Onselen apparently dislikes the notion of ordinary voters having a voice in life-and-death decisions, favouring the view, apparently, that such matters should be the province of the elites consisting of people like, well, Professor van Onselen.

This attitude mirrors the rejection of a plebiscite on homosexual marriage by Australia's very own politically correct brigade. Such decisions, you see, are far too important to be left to ordinary voters and should be decided in the rarefied atmosphere inhabited by the elite. If the people don't vote as you wish, abolish the people and appoint another people.

But back to the US, where a long list of celebrities threatened to leave the US if Trump were to be elected: Barbara Streisand, Rosie O'Donnell, Cher etc. As a satirical piece circulating widely online puts it:
"...Canadian border residents say it's not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, liberal arts majors, global-warming activists, and green energy proponents crossing their fields at night. 'I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,' said southern Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. 'He was cold, exhausted and hungry, and begged me for a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn't have any, he left...'

"In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields, but they just stuck their fingers in their ears and kept coming. Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals just south of the border, pack them into electric cars, and drive them across the border, where they are simply left to fend for themselves after the battery dies. 'A lot of these people are not prepared for our rugged conditions,' a Mountie in Alberta said. 'I found one carload without a single bottle of Perrier water, or any gemelli with shrimp and arugula. All they had was a nice little Napa Valley cabernet and some kale chips'. When liberals are caught, they're sent back across the border, often wailing that they fear persecution from Trump high-hairers."

The meltdown in academia warrants a trigger warning of its own. American professors have cancelled mid-term exams and delicate students are receiving trauma counseling, not to mention drawing solace from bonding with "therapy dogs", colouring books and "safe spaces". There is even a feminist scholar offering classes on "Healing from Toxic Whiteness". (I am not joking)

Then there is our very own Virginia Trioli (on an annual salary of $235,664) of Their ABC, querying the IQ of Trump voters and claiming that their favoured candiate was staring at his wife's breasts in the polling booth. True, Virginia didn't know she was still live and on air, but if a male journalist had said that Bill Clinton was looking at Hillary's breasts or queried the IQs of Clinton supporters, we can reasonably expect that his career prospects would have dimmed considerably. It was the ABC, remember, that bounced columnist Piers Akerman from Insiders after he dared raise the matter of Julia Gillard and her light-fingered former swain.

Missed in all the media bias is the rejoicing in Hungary, Tel Aviv and in Egyptian President Al Sisi's government.

But we must not take it all too seriously. This is a week for laughter, so I will end with a meme circulating on the internet. President Obama, it is being said, will leave a copy of the Koran on the bedside table of the master bedroom in the White House and a Muslim prayer mat on the floor, the object being to spook in-coming President Trump?

Delicious and "deplorable", as Hillary might say, and probably not true. Probably.

Babette Francis is the National & Overseas Co-ordinator of Endeavour Forum Inc., an NGO having special consultative status with the Economic & Social Council of the UN.

Comments [12]

ianl
November 19, 2016 at 1:35 pm

The "meeja" reverse with pike is genuinely amusing. I cannot speak for the ABC and Fairfax as I have not regarded them for many years now, but The Australian is going through endless pogo stick moments. Essentially the editorial policy before the US election was that Trump was a smelly, loutish brigand who had no chance of winning and therefore deserved very little beyond the occasional sneer. So all the Talking Heads fell in line and did just that. Now we have acres and acres of walkback while trying not to say walkback (I was wrong and I've said so - the result surprised me). But the walkbacks are hilarious in their blatant, obvious hypocrisy.

And I was shown a recent cartoon by Larry Pickering, who can still do the odd pointed piece, wherein Obama is supposedly showing Trump around the White House. Obama points to a couple of mundane switches side by side on a wall and says: "This one's the light switch and the other one dumps a large hydrogen warhead on Beijing".
Made me laugh out loud, anyway.

Bran Dee
November 19, 2016 at 1:42 pm

Much to be liked when someone as respected and charming as Babette Francis [born in pre-Partition India] exposes the hypocrisy of the academic elite opinion of PVO who spoils the tone of my favorite paper and my favorite cable TV.

The harmless internet mention of the Koran and the prayer mat might one day fall foul to 18C in Australia but it would more likely invoke the Muslim blasphemy law in Pakistan and also, more worryingly, now in Indonesia.

Warty
November 19, 2016 at 2:08 pm

Well, Peter van Onselen came in for a savaging here, not that I'm complaining, because sanctimony seems to ooze from the various orifices of our favourite (not) The Australian columnist. I was foolish enough to download a Kindle edition of his book Battleground, where he goes in for a bit of savaging himself: he does a very well-supported, I must add, demolition job on Tony Abbott. I think our Jody would have liked the excoriation inflicted on our budgie-smuggler hero, but Peter's job seemed personal. It was akin to my wife itemising my many undoubtedly odious faults when having coffee with her friends, at Wahroonga's Butcher's Block cafe. I hope she wouldn't ever do such a thing, but I can imagine their smirks when all is revealed. Well, that's Peter van O's approach to Tony.

Jody
November 19, 2016 at 6:11 pm

I do hope those bien pensant all head further north into Canada; that way they'll be as far away from me as is humanly possible. They really are the most impossible, narcissistic, self-serving, egotistical demographic I've seen in my over 60 years. Only those who left for "beautiful Nimbin", in waves of transhumance in the 1960's, have their found their equal. Pass me the bucket.

Peter
November 19, 2016 at 6:41 pm

Dear Babette
What joy to read you. There must be hope for the world. Peter

Michael Galak
November 19, 2016 at 9:54 pm

Dear Babette,
Thank you for this splash of satire and fun. This is hilarious, enjoyable and politically toxic to the point of being lethal. Can we have some more, please? More of the same? I mean much more?

Bill Martin
November 20, 2016 at 1:04 pm

This is to wholeheartedly support Peter's and Michael Galak's comments.

johnhenry
November 20, 2016 at 2:19 am

Speaking of humorous post-election memes, I heard a good one a few days ago, which I sent to one of my oh-so-distraught Obama-loving relatives:
This is the first time in history a billionaire white man will move into public housing after kicking out the black family that now lives there.

ianl
November 20, 2016 at 8:51 am

Can it possibly be deliciously true that when Waffle finally phoned Trump, Greg Norman, defacto Aus Ambassador and the Great White Shark, answered the phone ?
This is the sort of story one really wishes to be so joyously true.

Colin S
November 20, 2016 at 10:52 am

I hear many praises for both Hockey and Beazley as our US Ambassadors. If that department didn't even have Trump's phone number on tap, they are both useless. They were useless politicians too. mags of Queensland
November 20, 2016 at 11:22 am

What really makes me laugh is the fact that most of the cry babies in the US didn't even vote! Perhaps if they had done so their precious Hilary might just have got there. Thank God they didn't!

Jody
November 21, 2016 at 4:44 pm

I absolutely cannot wait for the new Skynews "Outsiders" program with Rowen Dean, Mark Latham and Ross Cameron!!! They've been on the 'Trump Train' and it should be very entertaining - the direct opposite of political correctness, they're claiming in today's "Australian". Three cheers.