The Presidential Election
OK, so I got Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado wrong, but hey at least I got the election right! Not bad for a Limey, even if I do say so myself. My warmest and sincerest congratulations to President-Elect Donald J Trump. I have of course sent a private message of congratulations as well.
I entertain a shrewd suspicion that the suspiciously high Democrat vote in Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado was boosted by both dead voters and Mexican voters, and possibly by some dead Mexicans as well.
The MSM Have Egg On Their Faces
The MSM have been all over the shop like’s a dog’s breakfast. They got the election wrong, they’ve got Donald Trump wrong and their predictions of doom and gloom are ridiculous.
Newsweek magazine even went so far as to do a Chicago Daily Tribune and run off initial copies of the magazine with a smiling Hillary Clinton on the front cover. The Tribune of course wrongly predicted that Canaris’s man Governor Dewey had beaten the American patriot Harry S Truman in 1948.
Truman went on to save South Korea, not something that Dewey would have done. Dewey would have thrown South Korea to the wolves (I was going to say dogs, but that might not have been politically correct).
Newsweek are of course rushing round saying they also had a cover with a smiling picture of Donald Trump on it as an alternative. Oh, really? Funny how we haven’t seen it, at any rate not one printed before Wednesday morning.
As I suggested last week, the MSM don’t know how to read polls. As Dr Goebbels could have told them, the first rule of propaganda is not believe the rubbish you’re putting out. The Clinton-leaning polls were propaganda for the electorate to swallow, not the media!
My 2.5-5% rule of thumb seems to have worked out pretty well. The FBI’s last-minute intervention to try and save Hillary may have swung 1-2% of voters her way, but it wasn’t enough. I detected signs of a last-minute swing, but of course many had already voted.
One group which does not seem to have been polled is the Amish. Indeed, since they tend not to in for mobiles and landlines, I am not quite sure how you would go about polling the Amish.
You could try going from door to door the old-fashioned way, but they’re such nice people, the pollsters would probably be invited in for lemonade and cookies.
Please don’t write in and say there aren’t any Amish in England, so how do I know they’re nice! I’ve been to Pennsylvania. I get around, when not banged up in the hoosegow for trying to save people from being fried.
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President Trump
So what sort of president is Donald Trump going to be? Having confounded the pollsters and the MSM by accurately predicting a big win for Trump, allow me to make another prediction. (I’m getting good at this – perhaps I should start selling fortune cookies!)
Donald Trump is going to be a great president. I think he’s going to be Reagan-plus and is going to make America proud. He’s not going to talk a lot, like Obama – he’s going to do a lot, again unlike Obama. I am already hearing some seriously good choices for his first Cabinet. It won’t be a Cabinet of yes-men and -women (there will be some women in it).
It will be a strong team, and President Trump will listen to them. He will make informed policy and personnel choices. I think you’ll find that even in the heat of the campaign trail he was thinking deeply about the transition and his new team. Donald Trump is a lot smarter than the media give him credit – he was in the campaign to come first, not second, and he had a good idea he was going to win.
Not sure that nice man Steve Forbes will get the Treasury slot, although Forbesy would be my first choice. John Bolton has got to be in the running for Secretary of State. Lt-General Flynn, a serious individual with respect, is a shoe-in for either National Security Adviser or SecDef. I think there will be some across-the-aisle appointments, possibly including that nice man Jim Woolsey.
Director Brennan will finally be making way at CIA (yippee!) and Director Comey at FBI will be lucky if he can get a job issuing traffic tickets on I-10 in New Mexico. I am hearing Congressman Randy Forbes for SecNav. He has very sound views on sea-power and wants a 350-ship navy.
President Trump will back the military and look after veterans, in a way that Obama did not. As his early concessions on two of the more humane aspects of Obamacare show he will be willing to make concessions. He’s also a deal-maker. In his dealings with Russia he is likely to prove a peace-maker.
It’s not going to be a happy time for terrorists, however. ISIS are basically going to have their butts shot off, and a good thing too.
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Will the DVD Try and Assassinate the President Again?
I have no doubt they will be drawing up plans right now. Whether sanction for an operation to proceed would be given is another matter. When the assassination attempts against Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and George W. Bush were sanctioned hardly anybody in the West had ever heard of the
DVD. The result was that Germany was able to stay deep in the background.
That will no longer be possible. A German assassination attempt on an American president now could lead to war. There is no possibility of a Warren Commission style cover-up. However, there is no room for complacency. I sincerely hope that President Trump will have his own back-up security. I also hope that the post of DNI will be abolished and the Secret Service will be restored to the control of the Department of the Treasury.
It will also be vitally important to ensure that all those in the line of succession are loyal to Trump and willing to carry on his policies. Speaker Ryan has got to go, frankly. Incidentally I don’t accept that the ignorant dork from Dorking, Michael Sandford, who tried to assassinate Donald Trump, worked alone. Always follow the money – who bankrolled him for his trip to the States?
I take this opportunity to condemn outright the outrageous statement by Guardian freelance Monisha Rajesh that “it’s about time for a presidential assassination”. No it isn’t, Monisha. We are fed up to the back teeth of political assassinations, mostly sponsored by the DVD. You need to be prosecuted, either here or in the US. If the Guardian continues to pay you then we know where they stand.
Last week’s result was great news for America, Britain and the Free World.
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My Reading This Week
Two fine books have featured in my reading this week. One was “Rudolf Hess: A New Technical Analysis of the Hess Flight May 1941” by John Harris and Richard Wilbourn (The History Press, 2014). Harris and Wilbourn seem to have republican sympathies – they are determined to rope King George VI and the Duke of Kent in on the conspiracy.
Readers will know the basic facts. Our community partner Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess flew solo to Scotland on May 10th 1941 in a twin-engined Bf110, where he bailed out near Eaglesham. Jerry then alleged, absurdly, that he was insane, a line enthusiastically promoted by German agents in Britain, including MI6’s Frank Foley. In the years since there has been a determined effort to suggest that it wasn’t Rudolf Hess at all, but a doppelganger, who happened to look like Hess and was also able to fly.
Of course it was Hess, and of course he wasn’t acting alone. The authors have researched the Hess flight meticulously and come up with some interesting insights. Firstly, they correctly identify the aircraft as a Bf110E-1, Works Number 3869. Secondly, from an examination of the fuselage, they correctly conclude that the aircraft was NOT fitted with a long-range oil tank. That is important, because it rules out a non-stop flight from Augsburg to the west coast of Scotland.
With high confidence they identify the refueling point: Göttingen. Whilst fuel was important, the oil was even more so. You won’t see this on Wikipedia, or any of the other Janet & John versions of the flight. The oil tanks on the Bf110E didn’t carry enough oil for the flight – they had to be topped up en route.
They also rule out bailing out as part of the plan, commenting on the difficulty of bailing of the 110. You stood a very good chance of wrapping yourself around the tail. They also correctly identify the landing ground: RAF Dundonald. The big question is not where he was going to land – Dundonald is a no-brainer – but who was in the meet and greet party?
My guess is Frank Foley, or a more senior Abwehr double-agent inside MI6 such as Claude Dansey, the German-sympathising Duke of Hamilton and the Cabinet Secretary Sir Edward Bridges, or a senior official from the Cabinet Office. Each of them was in on the planned coup, which would probably have kicked off with the assassination of Winston Churchill.
Why did Hess bail out? The answers are that he was late and that Churchill had got wind of what was afoot through MI18.
Night had fallen by the time he reached the Dundonald area, the airfield’s lighting system was rudimentary, Hess had no training in night landings and he was being chased by an RAF Boulton-Paul Defiant night-fighter, which had been ordered to shoot him down.
The authors convincingly demonstrate that the carefully-planned flight went wrong over the North Sea, where Hess missed Point C, the critical waypoint, where he was due to make his turn towards Scotland. That cost him valuable time.
I have another suggestion for the delay: just as Vice-President Johnson’s office screwed up time zones in 1963, giving the game away on the Kennedy assassination, the Abwehr and Hess screwed up over the recent implementation of British Double Summer Time.
I suspect that Hess only realised after he had crossed the Northumberland cast and the light began to fade that his timing was out by an hour. The reception committee would doubtless have been warned about the scrambling of the Defiant and made good their retreat, probably by air, when Hess failed to show.
The second book on this week’s reading list was an excellent tome by my good friend Dr Robert Kaplan: Germany’s Handbook: Germany’s Manual of Operations, Soft Power Strategies and Tactics to Rule the World (New Field Press, 2016). Dr Kaplan cogently and succinctly sets out German tactics for political domination. It’s well worth a read. Robert Kaplan is an historian of high intelligence and perceptive insight.
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This Week’s Movie Review: The Accountant (2016, dir. Gavin O’Connor)
Starring Ben Affleck and Ann Kendrick, this movie, released to theaters in the UK this week, isn’t for everyone. It’s intelligently scripted and thoughtfully acted, so it’s unlikely that many Democrats would enjoy it.
The plot is well thought-out, with a surprising twist at the end. The violence is tastefully done and the Bad Guys get it, in the end.
The support cast is strong. I particularly J K Simmons as Agent King. He was excellent as a senior CIA officer in Burn After Reading, so good you would have thought he worked on the 7th floor in Langley as his day job. He’s not as funny in this movie, but he gets a bigger part and plays it well.
I recommend The Accountant, unless you’re a Democrat, or a Republican who thought Trump was going to lose, in which case you may do a Hillary and lose the plot.
Two sad departures from the scene this week: the great Canadian singer Leonard Cohen and the great American actor Robert Vaughn. Robert Vaughn was a much finer actor than many give him credit for. He will of course long be remembered for his role as Napoleon Solo in The Men From U.N.C.L.E.
Written off as lightweight TV, the idea for the series actually came from Ian Fleming, who quite deliberately turned the focus away from the KGB as the Bad Guys, to a mysterious and sinister agency he called T.H.R.U.S.H. Ring any bells?
Robert Vaughn attracted a new generation of fans for his role as the ageing grifter Albert Stroller in Hustle. He was brilliant.
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Michael Shrimpton was a barrister from his call to the Bar in London in 1983 until being disbarred in 2019 over a fraudulently obtained conviction. He is a specialist in National Security and Constitutional Law, Strategic Intelligence and Counter-terrorism. He is a former Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies at the American Military University.
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