The Rumble in the Jungle Redux...

En Garde in the bunker…

Echoes of the rumble in the jungle from October 1974 between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (you Millennials will simply have to look it up). Today in the ring two very different men indeed. One a success as a capitalist, the other as a Marxist community agitator. One man confidently backed by years of doing, the other a small petty insecure loser backed by communist slogans and bromides. The new president is old school American, while the past president is a post-American radical. One a builder, the other a destroyer. The election of Donald Trump was a repudiation of Obama’s radical course, that would undoubtedly have accelerated with a Hillary Clinton victory. It is now the Democrat Party that is in disarray, a result of the total dismemberment of the Democrat power base over the eight years of Obama’s disastrous administration.

Daniel Greenfield in today’s FrontpageMagazine:

Obama is a coward.

Trump will call someone a name while Obama will anonymously source a smear through three levels of staffers, political allies and reporters.

Trump called CNN “Fake News” on camera. Obama sourced Operation Rushbo, targeting Rush Limbaugh, through a variety of White House people and left-wing allies. Trump will boot reporters he doesn’t like. Obama authorized secretly hacking the emails of a FOX News reporter. Trump had an openly hostile conversation with the Prime Minister of Australia. When Obama wanted to call Netanyahu “chickens__t”, he did it by having one of his people anonymously plant it with a reliable media sycophant, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, before later having a spokesman disavow it.

Poultry ordure doesn’t smell any worse than that.

But Obama is very careful to launch dirty attacks without getting any on his hands. The insults are anonymously sourced. The retaliation comes out of the bowels of the bureaucracy. And he only finds out about it from the media. That allows him to retain what he cares about most: his popularity.

Obama and his people like to think that their dishonesty is a superpower. They pat themselves on the back for stabbing everyone else in theirs. Sometimes their smugness over how well they use the media to lie and smear gets out of control. Like the time Obama’s Goebbels, Ben Rhodes, boasted to the New York Times about how easy it was to fool everyone about the deal to protect Iran’s nuclear program.

After Trump won, it was business as usual.

Talking about a rumble in the jungle, it is painfully clear that the other GOP contenders were the epitome of the go along to get along crowd of political types so common in today’s culture. While some were good men, and even OK governors or senators, not one could have pulled this off the way Trump did. He tossed the “rule book” of decorum from the moment he announced he was running. The other rumble in the jungle candidates were so sure of themselves that he knocked them down like ten pins. The media from the outset, declared the GOP in a state of confusion and disarray due to the large numbers of contenders. They gave voice to Trump’s Republican detractors while claiming Trump was finished every time he said or did something that violated some sacrosanct code the media invented. The Republican challengers were not up to the rumble in the jungle task and soon fell out, leaving Donald Trump the last man standing.

If Obama had walked away he may have shown the first sign of maturity in his public life. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. So now it’s on. The rumble in the jungle gauntlet has been thrown down by him. He had the power of the presidency to throw his weight around, and a compliant press fawning at his feet for eight years. Now he’s a private citizen. Let’s see how loyal his minions are. Let’s see who is willing to take a fall for him. Or who will turn and bring him down. The full force of a reconstituted Justice Department must pursue all avenues to put him and his cabal out of business and face the full rumble in the jungle extent of the law.

More Daniel Greenfield:

When Obama boasted that he could have beaten Trump, he meant that he could have done so using the same tactics that worked so well against McCain and Romney. Like most of the media, he had failed to understand that these tactics don’t work against Trump because he is a moving target.

Trump created his own brand. Unlike most presidential candidates, he doesn’t need consultants, and unlike most Republicans, he isn’t worried at all about likability. That’s why he won an election and still has majority support for his policies, including the most controversial ones, despite poor likability.

Obama is obsessed with being liked. In the media space, effective messaging depends on likability. But Trump upended the same formula that had ruled presidential politics since Nixon vs. Kennedy. Instead he casually tosses likability aside to grapple with opponents, rivals and enemies. Trump won this election by forcing opponent after opponent to either fight him on his own terms or back away.

This includes the media, which has tried to grapple directly with him, with disastrous results.

The Obama machine, a massive propaganda matrix that alternates between lying and gaslighting, is not built to handle Trump. And Obama isn’t built to handle Trump either. Obama’s hipster transgressiveness made him seem cool when up against Romney or McCain, but everything Trump does embodies real transgressiveness. The machine is built on limiting the freedom of action of Republicans by intimidating them with political correctness and potential smears. But Trump doesn’t care about any of that.

Trump is willing to throw everything into an attack. Obama’s people build complicated traps that he walks through without thinking twice. Obama plays chess. Trump overturns the board.

President-elect Trump at the Carrier Plant, Indianapolis, Dec 1 2016…

He resonated with the people. The Dems put up a phony show with Bernie the pace setter, just like they did in the primaries leading up to the 1960 election. Adlai Stevenson was the Bernie of his day, but Kennedy was already the chosen one. Hillary was an awful candidate and the embodiment of everything wrong with the DemoMarxist party and the system in Washington, the very same that Trump had vowed to clean up.

Donald Trump, at least in this election, captured the American spirit. The same spirit that forged a country through grit and determination. The same that extended the frontier until there was a nation from sea to sea. The spirit that said nothing is impossible as the people traversed a continent with the telegraph, the railroad, electricity and the telephone; that could span waterways and build to the skies. It was the old American spirit of confidence in itself, the one that dreamed big and became the greatest nation on earth. The “no apologies for being American” spirit. That was palpable at every event. Genuine and from the heart as he spoke to the heartland.

The “rumble in the jungle” that turned the American political system upside down, and ushered in a brand new era of “don’t mess with me” has only just begun to show its influence on America and the rest of the world.

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