the death ride of donald trump

How did we get here?
As Donald Trump stampedes the Republican Party towards what I'm predicting will be its greatest ever electoral defeat, I gots to know how this all came about.
Let's reflect.
When the Republican Party began their selection process for a Presidential nominee a year ago, there were 17 candidates for the American Presidential nomination.

1. The large field of candidates kept the more discerning majority vote divided. Trump's vote quickly rose to a constant twenty to thirty five percent, and remained united and very loyal, based in part on the fact that people had waited a long time for someone strong enough to stand up to media manipulations. With a continuing large field of candidates Trump was able to engage in a classic Divide And Conquer strategy.

2. Liberal Left wing media groups and commentators initially tried to marginalise Trump by labelling him racist over his promise to reestablish the border and shut down illegal immigration. These groups persistently misreported Trump's comments about criminals and gangs coming into the United States from Mexico. Partisan media reporters falsely claimed that Trump was slandering all Mexicans. Trumps initial robustness in seeing off liberal media attempts to derail his campaign was very appealing to many of us. It appealed to me.

3. Trump's initial put downs of Governor Jeb Bush were witty and not cruel. "Jeb's holding a meeting tonight up the street right this moment," he said, "and everybody there is asleep."

4. Trump's spur of the moment remark to a journalist about John McCain not being a war hero was fair enough and again quite refreshing in a way, The fact that the media tried to manipulate reportage of the remark to discredit Trump, was a further reason for many of us to stand by him. An interviewer had put it to Trump: "John McCain says your supporters are crazies." Then in an attempt to prevent Trump answering the interviewer had continued: "And John McCain is a war hero." It was at this point that Trump said: "He's not a war hero. What's he's a war hero because he got captured? I prefer my heroes not to get captured." All fair enough since the citation of McCain as a war hero was being used explicitly and dishonorably to make McCain's criticisms of Trump unanswerable. Follow up reportage of the incident was often unfair to Trump, failing to mention the initial quotation from John McCain which had led Trump to dismiss the epithet war hero when the epithet itself was being used to prevent him answering McCain's slander of his supporters.

5. Trump's response to debate moderator Megyn Kelly's legitamate questions about his attitude to women, were also witty and robust. His later persistent internet criticisms of Megyn Kelly were unfair but one had the feeling that Megyn Kelly was revelling in the elevation his enmity had provided to her career. So most of us did not take offence at this stage.

6. Trump's low brow remarks about rival candidate Carly Fiorina's appearance were the first wake up call for many that even if Trump got the nomination, he might not be worthy of support. But the remarks in themselves did not stop his momentum. Similar low brow remarks about Rand Paul and other candidates would over time accrue into a significant disaffection for Trump among many loyal Republican Party voters. This disaffection is not going to go away or be stifled by rhetorical incitement to hate Hillary. The beating heart of the Republican Party does not now and never will hate Hillary. We oppose her honorably in the political sphere. That is all.

7. The field of candidates remained large. Jeb Bush couldn't walk away from the fight which he had spent a hundred million dollars on and which he had been expected to win. I also think he stayed in for so long on a point of principle, ie to answer Trump's insults to his family, and out of regard for his supporters. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz stayed in nearly all the way because both had a reasonable chance of beating Trump if everybody else dropped out. I believe there is some evidence that Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey stayed in the race after a certain period only to run pass defence for Trump. I think Governor John Kasich of Ohio was doing similar. But with Kasich the jury's still out. I am suggesting that Kasich did not attend this week's selection convention because he knows full well some of us, including at one stage the commentator Charles Krauthammer, think he has "an arrangement" with Trump. If I'm right Mr Kasich may be trying to foster a plausible deniability as to the motivations for his long running campaign which continued long after he had any chance of securing the nomination. Mr Kasich only dropped out of the race after Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz had done so.

8. Doctor Ben Carson stayed in the race close to the finish because he always had a reasonable chance of winning. He seems to have forgiven Trump's suggestion that his references in his autobiography to a youthful penchant for violence were akin to "a pathology like child abuse." It is likely that Trump made peace with him simply by offering him a direct role in the Administration should Trump win the Presidency. This peace is not to Doctor Carson's credit in my view. Governor Mike Huckabee has also reached an accomodation with Trump, possibly rendered easier by Trump never having found it necessary to demean Mr Huckabee as vituperatively as he did some others. Huckabee was never a serious threat to him in the polls. A daughter of Huckabee's at some stage in the campaign became a Trump staffer. I wonder.

9. Over the course of the year, the large field of candidates slowly thinned. Too slowly to allow any united opposition to Trump. The seventy percent of registered party members who didn't want him most of the time, was always divided between at least four main alternatives and at least another five who had no chance but were still in the race. Some of the also rans were probably there because this was their time to shine. I mean they knew they were part of a huge story. They knew that Trump's participation was making the process a world wide media event. This was their chance to be seen and heard by the largest audience most of them would ever encounter. The likes of Senator Rand Paul and Lyndsey Graham, probably realised this whole event was bringing them personal publicity that they would never see again. They actually weren't able to walk away.

10. Most of the candidates refrained for most of the campaign from confronting Trump with the sort of put downs he was dishing out to them whenever it suited him. This holding of fire, while they hoped Trump's fire might clear the decks of some of their other opponents, made Trump look invulnerable, larger than life, supreme among lesser men. It was not good strategy.

11. Finally Marco Rubio landed some master punches on Trump with the classic line: "You're not a self made man. If you hadn't inherited 200 million dollars, you'd be selling two dollar watches on the Brooklyn bridge." This at least made Trump look mortal. But it was too little too late. And some of the other candidates and not a few commentators, sought short term advantage over Rubio by pretending to think he had let himself down by speaking so directly about Trump. They still didn't understand the situation. Trump was walking away with the ball game precisely because no one else had offered him any serious opposition.

12. Also late in the campaign, Chris Christie aided Trump with a particularly vituperative attack on Marco Rubio. It was classic showboating but it flustered the younger man. Chris Christie's attack was in my view carried out solely to help Trump and not with any reaslistic prospect of helping Christie's own campaign.

13. The media having taken a drubbing from Trump early on, particularly in regard to his exploitation of public concerns about the historic liberal bias of that same media, remained reluctant to vent more serious critiques of the Trump candidacy. There was little discussion of Trump's property deals involving known members of New York's five mafia families. There was little examination of Trump's four separate business bankruptcies and the circumstances under which banks continued lending him billions of dollars following each bankruptcy. There was no public exposition of the fact that Trump's entire fortune is based on borrowings. I am suggesting that Donald Trump is not a successful businessman in any positive wealth creating sense of that word. He is a successful borrower of billions from New York based banks who keep lending to companies controlled by him in spite of the fact that he keeps refusing to repay the billions they had previously lent him.

14. Using a mix of internet trolling techniques, genuine wit, courage, sheer gall, occasional insight, and a fine instinct for the popular mood, Trump has defied the expectations of media pundits and political power brokers to gain the Republican Party nomination for the Presidency of the United States. My prediction is he will not win. But he may just finish off the political grouping that has allowed him to hijack it. For ever. In that sense I am referring to his candidacy as a death ride. I am concerned that the Republican Party itself may not come back from this one.

the story of my argument with eric trump son of the putative president

Eric Trump: "Ted Cruz. He's got no friends at all. Two words. No friends. No friends."

James Healy: "Classy Eric. So about fifty percent of the Republican Party will not now or ever vote for your father. Above 90 percent of people whose parents immigrated to America or who are immigrants themselves will never under any circumstances vote for him. The Dems will never vote for him. So how exactly do you envisage your father winning the election? I've got news for you Eric. Two words. Donald Trump. No votes. No votes. He's going to lose every State of the Union."

out of the frying pan into the funny farm

Roger Ailes has been removed as Chief Executive at the Fox News television network over suggestions by a fired presenter that he sexually harassed her.
Fox will now be headed up by dashing octogenarian about town Rupert Murdock.
No disrespect.
Some of my best friends are octogenarians.
I kid you not.
But this is an improvement?
Putting phone tapping, police bribing, politcian subverting, Rupert Murdock in charge instead of bottom pinching Rodge?
(He didn't pinch her bottom, he asked her out. - Ed note)
(****ing hell. - Heelers note)
So Rupert Murdock has stepped in to clean up Fox.
It's like something out of the Book of the Apocalypse.
Or the Benny Hill Show.
Or both.
Fox is finished.

the story of my argument with the greatest american political commentators of the age

Laura Ingraham: Acquiesced to Trump and now endorses him. When the cameras are off, she also appears on occasion to be quite uncivil towards people forced to work with her at Fox News.

Ann Coulter: Acquiesced to Trump and has endorsed him.

Sean Hannity: Acquiesced to Trump, and has effectively endorsed him.

Mark Steyn: Acquiesced to Trump and then appeared to go absent without leave when it became clear that Trump was somewhat lacking in certain qualities and that perhaps a little modest criticism might be in order. As Trump moved towards winning the Republican Party nomination Steyn stopped updating his open access website altogether. It was most extraordinary. A normally verbose and prolific commentator, Steyn has written nothing salient to warn of what I regard as Trump's adventurism and/or wrong mindedness, nothing about Trump's gratuitous insults to another candidate's wife, not a jot on the matter of Trump's disgraceful attempts to criminalise President Bush for Bush's decision to free Iraq from Saddam Hussein's murderocracy. Perhaps Steyn regards these matters differently to me. But Steyn was a strong apparently sincere apologist for the Iraq War. If he has changed his views, I think the least he might do is let those of us who were influenced by him, and more importantly the families of those who fought for us in Iraq, know precisely why his views have changed. This would be more honorable than simply disappearing off the stage to supposedly research a new book while a pirate seizes control of the Republican Party. (No disrespect to the Trumps. They know they're pirates.)

the story of my argument with donald trump

Donald Trump (American Presidential candidate speaking via the Twitter website ): "Ted Cruz broke a promise to the Republican party by not endorsing me tonight."

James Healy: "The insults you directed towards Ted Cruz' wife Heidi during the selection process rendered any such promise void."

today they said

Brian Hayes: (An Irish Member of the European Parliament writing in the bankrupt Irish Independent newspaper) "Europe is breathing a sigh of relief that democracy in Turkey has triumphed over the attempted coup by the army."

James Healy: "Turkey is not a democracy. The process under which President Recip Tayyip Erdogan was appointed bears only romantic similarities to what we call democracy. There was a vote of course. But the Muslim Brotherhood all across Turkey had intimidated or murdered other candidates to prevent them competing. In many Turkish constituencies, people were effectively choosing from among candidates whom Eerdogan and his Islamist backers had allowed to run. As for the sigh of relief Brian Hayes breathes at the defeat of the coup... According to the leftist Euronews channel (no friends of mine) Erdogan has been lynching army members this week in the streets. Soliders have been beaten, stripped naked and paraded for the cameras. Erdogan's authorities admit to detaining 6000 members of the army. Several thousand Judges have been dismissed from office. An estimated 30,000 teachers and teaching staff have been fired. Teachers? Yes that's right. The real enemy of Islamists. Teachers. Erdogan is using the coup as an excuse to destroy those sections of Turkish society which he cannot control otherwise. Turkish democracy is dying before our eyes."

saddest ironies at the end of the world

Reading Michael Jansen a correspondent whose writings on the Middle East have appeared for many years in the bankrupt Irish Times newspaper.
I have just been told Michael Jansen is a Muslim.
A little vein on my forehead is throbbing.
I think the Irish Times might have made Michael Jansen's adherence to the peace loving religion of Islam clear to its readers earlier. I mean earlier in Michael Jansen's decades long apologia for Muslim terrorism masquerading as reportage of the Middle East in the pages of the Irish Times.
It would have been nice that's all.
To let us know.
That this character continually excoriating Israel, America, Britain, President Bush, and Prime Minister Blair, in general, and the war against Muslim Terrorism in particular, was herself a partisan adherent of the Muslim faith.
Instead I've watched and wondered as Michael Jansen moved seamlessly from rather blatant advocacy of soviet backed thug Muslim dictators in years past to her present day manipulations of truth on behalf of Jihadis and the Caliphate.
Incredible.
This was the character we allowed to impugn Mr Bush and Mr Blair our wartime leaders.
Nobody cried stop.
Lumme.
Okay.
The phrase Michael Jansen used today that caught my eye was a quote from the Quran.
Michael Jansen was suggesting that her quote "There shall be no compulsion in religion," is somehow indicative of the overall tenor and direction of the Quran.
It isn't.
The Quran and the recorded sayings of the Prophet Muhammed known as the Hadith, are full of instructions to destroy all non Muslims.
That's why we're in the middle of a world wide Jihad war.
Thanks a bunch Prophet Muhammed.
There shall be no compulsion in religion indeed.
Except for people who don't believe in your one.
Look.
I'm not so different to Michael Jansen.
Ten years ago in a welter of wishful thinking, I had myself half persuaded it might be true that the religion of Islam could be peaceful and that the terrorists who use it as their guiding ideology were simply an aberration blotting an otherwise holy faith.
An internet blogger styling himself Pochuychev suggested in a comment on my website at the time that I knew nothing about the Quran.
Mr Pochuychev was of course absolutely correct.
The last ten years of burgeoning Jihad mayhem have given me ample time to recognise that fact.
But Michael Jansen seems incapable of admitting she's ever been wrong.
Michael Jansen still refuses to recognise or report that Muslim Jihadis are engaged in an all out terrror war against the human race.
Her naive anti Americanism formerly and shamelessly deployed on behalf of Muammar Qadaffi in Libya, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and the Assad family dictatorship in Syria, has since morphed seamlessly into a monolithic acquiescence to the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Isis and the Caliphate.
The West is always to blame in Michael Jansen's universe.
Muslims are never responsible for their own psychoticism as far as she is concerned.
She's like Michael Moore on amphetamines.
And the Irish Times (bankrupt, bolshevick, IRA infiltrated, at one time Soviet controlled, and still virulently anti Christian) this same Irish Times I say, didn't even trouble to tell us that their Middle Eastern correspondent was rooting for the Jihadis this past forty years because she was one of them.
Here is the news.
The Irish Times is bankrupt not because of the internet.
The Irish Times is bankrupt because of its failure to exhibit even basic standards of truth, probity and integrity in being open about the agendas of its contributors. I mean its failure to exhibit those things ever.
It is interesting to note that at present the Irish Times is lobbying the Irish government to tax internet companies Google and Facebook, and to give the proceeds to the Irish Times.
Although I hold no brief for Google or Facebook, I am opposed on principle to my government taxing profitable international companies on behalf of bankrupt IRA run front operations which either deliberately with malice aforethought as part of a leftist conspiracy or through  sins of moral omission in incompetently failing to make clear the partisan prejudices of their contributors, have become complicit in world wide Jihad.

live feed from the republican party national convention usa

Rudy Giuliani (former Mayor of New York): "I am sick and tired of seeing the defamation of a good man by the media. Donald Trump is a good man."

James Healy: "He defamed himself Rudy. Donald Trump defamed himself when he jeered at the appearance of rival candidate Ted Cruz's wife Heidi. Donald Trump defamed himself when he sneered about rival candidate Rand Paul's personal appearance. Donald Trump defamed himself when he suggested rival candidate Doctor Ben Carson's autobiographical references to a youthful violent streak were tantamount to a pathology like child abuse. Donald Trump defamed himself when he insulted rival candidate Carly Fiorina's face. Donald Trump defamed himself when he claimed rival candidate Jeb Bush's brother President George Bush was wrong to remove Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq. Donald Trump defamed himself when he claimed that rival candidate Ted Cruz's father had something to do with the Kennedy assassination... I can see no excuse for pretending Donald Trump has been the victim of any defamation other than that which comes from his own mouth."

the mafia's attempted reverse take over of the republican party of the united states of america

I believe sovereign countries should reestablish their borders.
I believe the collapse of borders being forced on us by the United Nations and by the European Union is facilitating only IRA drug dealers and Al Qaeda Muslim terrorists and their associated ilks.
I suggest that we must cease to permit the IRA, Al Qaeda, Chinese Triads, Cosa Nostra, the Russian Mafia, the Zetas, MS 13, the Farc, the United Nations, the European Union and/or Amnesty International to define immigration law in their own interests over the heads of the citizenry.
We are not their farm animals.
It is a prerequisite of sovereign nations that the people elect their leaders and that their leaders are accountable to the people.
By reestablishing our boarders we will end the situation whereby an incompetent venally corrupt German Chancellor or an illegally installed power usurping Pope, can overnight at a whim without any public consultation, fling open the gates of every country in Europe to the Muslim Jihad cult which is currently threatening all humanity.
The Europe of sovereign nations is our only hope to repel Muslim Jihad at the gates.
As for Donald Trump.
I still counsel against voting for him.
The clue is in the title.

the crunch question

Question: Why did the Turkish army launch its attempted coup now?

Answer: A few months ago the President of Turkey brought the country to the brink of war with the Russia ruled by Vladimir Putin. I would hazard this was the last straw for the army. They were inches away from going toe to toe with a resovietising nuclear armed pychopath on behalf of their own recaliphatising Islamist psychopath. At this point, I'd say they decided on their coup.