Friday 9 November 2012

Can't please everyone, can you?

It seems the re-election of Obama to the Presidency in the US has not made quite the positive impression on absolutely everybody that it may have done on some of us.

Everybody's favourite bad-haired billionaire Donald Trump can only be described as less than pleased by the outcome. He didn't hang about in expressing his opinion as to the outcome of the thing, and it was quickly picked up by the world's media. An example of the response here, with much of what he said, but to pick out a couple of favourite highlights:

"Lets fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us."

"This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy! Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble...like never before."

Hmmm. Those pesky democracies which, when the result doesn't go your way, aren't democracies, can rather wind up somebody who thinks that their wealth gives them the right to do what they want, can't they? Surely, since he's quite so rolling in cash, the universe should arrange itself as to his wishes. I certainly know what I'm laughing at.

The very mechanism by which the American people have decided their own short-term political future has him screaming like a spoilt child. It's quite amusing - partially stymied in Scotland by locals who didn't want a golf course, and wind farm and hundreds of homes on their doorstep, and now again in his home country by the votes which are among the few things he still can't buy. Lovely.

As for the content of his rant itself - if anything, the world is in fact, I think, drawing something of a collective sigh of relief. With all the pollsters claiming it was too close to call, the voters in the end gave Obama a reasonably comfortable victory, and a firm mandate to at least try to make some of the real change he's been striving for. With Congress and the House of Representatives so split it's difficult to see how he'll ever be able to get anything too radical through, but at least he's still there to try.

As for Romney, you have to wonder how much some of what he, and other Republicans, have been saying lately has worked against them. I've written in recent entries on some of the scandalous comments coming out of the Religious Right's mouths lately - just maybe they stirred something in more rational-minded people and got them out there to vote.

Whatever actually settled it, I'm glad it's gone the way it has. These are unstable times and the last thing I personally wanted to see in the White House right now is a right-wing religious fundamentalist on some kind of modern-day political Crusade. Let's all hope Obama doesn't squander the opportunity the voters have given him, with any luck getting up Mr Trump's nose again in the process.

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