"We are living in the time of Nero"
Nov. 8th, 2024 07:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kathleen_daileyI spent all day Tuesday, all night Tuesday, and most of Wednesday morning in the Mount Sinai ER with spouse, who had injured his leg. He was finally released midday on Wednesday, at which time I finally looked at the news, which I'd purposely avoided, only to find that the very worst had happened.
Yesterday I tried repeatedly to write something about the US election, but then I read Andrew Coyne's column in the Globe and Mail and saw that he'd said it all.
The whole column is very much worth reading. The future that Coyne foresees--for the United States, for Canada, for the world--is chillingly credible:
As Coyne says, "All of this will wash over Canada in various ways--some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it."
The polls are showing that support for Pierre Poilievre is already strong enough to suggest that he'll form a majority government in the next federal election.
Yesterday I tried repeatedly to write something about the US election, but then I read Andrew Coyne's column in the Globe and Mail and saw that he'd said it all.
Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.
The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.
The whole column is very much worth reading. The future that Coyne foresees--for the United States, for Canada, for the world--is chillingly credible:
Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fuelled by his ill-judged tax policies--he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes--and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.
Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants--finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so--will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.
As Coyne says, "All of this will wash over Canada in various ways--some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it."
The polls are showing that support for Pierre Poilievre is already strong enough to suggest that he'll form a majority government in the next federal election.
