Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/08/kenyan-journalist-reports-on-us-election-like-americans-report-on-other-elections.html
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I really hope Biden’s victory will put the U.S. back on track toward re-joining the club of politically stable OECD liberal democracies. Seeing the number of people who voted for a manifestly and demonstrably unfit tin pot dictator last week and knowing they’re still out there, though, my more realistic fear is we’re going to be seeing a lot more non-satirical reporting like this on the U.S.
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Yah. Before Trump, conventional wisdom was that you couldn’t openly say racist and bigoted things.
Trump showed that you not only could say them, but that it was a very productive way of getting votes.
Expect more anti-immigration, anti-brown-people, anti-Muslim rhetoric in the lead-up to the 2022 mid-term elections. And even more in 2024.
I said “anti-Muslim”, but I couldn’t think of a way to say anti-non-Christian in a way that wasn’t awkward. Right now it’s Muslims, but expect that umbrella to open more to include others. For example, those traditional scapegoats the Jews. Or even Hindus, but they seem to keep a very low profile here.
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Trying to find the lie, tho…
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This reminds me of a video combining a speaker voice reporting on celebrations of Kim in North Korea with pictures of a parade for the British queen.
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Outstanding satire. Like the best satire, mostly true, although here are some favorite silly tweets.
Sources say US strongman, Donald Trump, has barricaded himself inside the presidential palace vowing not to leave unless he is declared winner of the country’s disastrous election. AU mediator, Monica Juma, is currently trying to coax him out with promises of fast food.
As officials in crisis-wracked US struggle to count votes for a fourth day, African nations have offered to send contingents of math teachers to help speed up the process and bolster capacity in what many on the continent hope will become the world’s newest democracy.
Following his declaration as president-elect, analysts have warned Joe Biden that “one does not simply walk into the White House. Its Black Gates are guarded by more than just Secret Service. There is evil there that does not sleep and the Great Eye is ever watchful”.
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Every two years, deplorables will try to take over a branch of the government. This problem isn’t going away, and any Democrat that thinks this is over needs to be replaced by someone with the will to fight for this emperiled democracy.
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I’m expecting worse before then. From the peeks I’ve taken into right-wing Bizarro World, there’s a concerted effort already underway to paint this election result as illegitimate. It’s utter BS, of course, but it’s targetted at a vast audience of known rubes (Il Douche’s campaigns were, in large part, an effort to build the largest sucker list in the history of grifting). Some of those marks are armed and prone to violence.
Biden’s win has bought liberal democracy in America a few more years’ time, but unless he embraces a truly progressive agenda rather than more neoliberal-lite business as usual that’s about it.
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THIS should be required reading for all Americans. Especially schoolchildren.
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Along the same lines…
(an incompetent coup attempt is still a coup attempt)
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Getting any sort of agenda will require bipartisan efforts as the Dems did not win clear control of Congress. I’d argue that Trump garnered as many votes as he did because far too many white people believed the lie (and are apparently ignorant of the actual definition of the classification) that “Biden-Harris is socialist” when it’s quite clear that Biden is centrist and Harris leans a bout farther left. And I’m talking anecdotally about well educated affluent white people that I’ve heard express that sentiment.
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It’s weird - they can’t govern, they can’t do a proper coup…it’s almost as if Republicans were incompetent…
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This is why the Georgia run-off is so crucial. If the Dems can get a Senate majority, Yertle’s obstructionism will be irrelevant and the only “bipartisan” agreement Biden will have to worry about are those between “centrist” Dems and progressive ones.
If the Party of Demonstrable Bad Faith maintains its majority in the Senate, nothing productive is going to happen outside Executive Orders, bipartisab efforts or not. Right now with planned EOs I’m seeing much-needed damage-control returns to the status quo ante for items like the Paris Agreement and DACA, but that’s taking us back to 2015 and not forward past 2021.
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They are basically going straight to the “jump the shark” scenarios outlined in this Lessig podcast
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Reminds me of this Onion piece…
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I would love to shake the hand of Mr. Gathara, this is brilliant. Are there other journalist who hold a mirror up to the US the way he has? The point he is making is very familiar to me and is nothing new, but honestly, it still stung to read this.
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And this is why “bipartisan efforts” are a bunch of horse shit. We already went down that road. Obama ended up passing the GOP’s healthcare plan with zero GOP support and they’ve spent the last decade trying to kill it with zero plans on how to replace it.
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This report is too close to the truth to even be considered satire. We have sanctimoniously assumed that we have a lock on the democratic process and are far ahead of other democracies in the world. Now we have learned how easy it can be for an authoritarian to lead a huge percentage of the electorate to support a wannabe dictator with no morals and no principles beyond greed and power.
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Well, since most of the racists here have a hard time telling a Hindu from a Muslim, and definitely think all Sikhs are Muslims (tHeY wEaR tUrBaNs!!!), I think the concern is valid.
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Not just that, but (for the moment, at least) Republicans still have the Senate and Trump paved the way by loading the Supreme Court with partisan hacks and doing damage that won’t get fully reversed in the next four years, which will give the next Trump a running start on destroying democracy and getting his insane policies enacted.
I’m guessing this is going to be the response to all Democratic administrations, going forward. They went through tortured justifications for why the Obama administration was illegitimate, but they’re not bothering with justifications anymore. It just is, because they don’t agree with it.
And Obama appointed a bunch of Republicans to his cabinet as a bipartisan gesture. Republicans responded by calling him illegitimate and an autocratic, radical left-winger. There’s no winning.
Most of it I wouldn’t call satire. The only satirical bits were the ones involving this administration meeting with African envoys and accepting help from Africa. Everything else was pure description - with an unexpected tone, normally reserved for reporting on Africa, but totally accurate in content.
Edit: I mean -
https://mobile.twitter.com/themainichi/status/1325237861080297473
We are now absolutely the dysfunctional 3rd world country dealing with an authoritarian government trying to suppress election results.
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