I’m used to Australian commentary on the American election to be one-sided and Democrat, but the AFR piece this morning – These times call for a serious president, not a childish one like Donald Trump – reaches a new low in stupidity and ignorance. You would at least think that after eight years of Obama, he might be just a touch reticent about his own judgment in such things, but instead he can still write about the difference between outsiders entering the race when Obama did in comparison to now when the outsider is Trump:

In 2008, the challenger was The One. In 2016, it’s The Donald. Then, the themes of the day were hope and change. Now, the themes are anger and retreat.

If he can still write “The One” and the words “hope and change” without feeling the irony and disappointment, then this is one commentator who can with the greatest safety be ignored. I wonder why he thinks all this is taking place after eight years of Obama:

Every day, the liberal international order that has existed for 70 years seems less liberal, less international and less orderly. The United States has inched back from the world and challengers have stepped into it. The West is drooping. The historic project to unite the European continent seems shaky. The Middle East is a bloody mess. There are more refugees, asylum seekers and displaced people than at any time since the end of the Second World War.

So his solution: more of the same. So let us have a look at who will be president if it is not Donald Trump. This is from Instapundit:

CLINTON FOUNDATION GOT $100 MILLION FROM “BLOOD MINERALS” FIRM: Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unaccountably delayed implementation in 2009 of a congressionally mandated certification process designed to bar human rights abuses by mining companies in Africa.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock found a hundred million reasons for Clinton’s dallying. Two years before, the Clinton Foundation got a $100 million pledge from the Vancouver, Canada-based Lundin Group.

Lundin is one of the giants of the global mining industry, with huge operations in the Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia. Those operations were repeatedly condemned by human rights groups claiming native populations were being forced to flee their homelands and even being killed because they stood in the way of Lundin projects.

“’Blood minerals’ are related to ‘blood diamonds,’ which are allegedly mined in war zones or sold as commodities to help finance political insurgencies or despotic warlords,” according to Pollock. Lundin has a long history of “cutting deals with warlords, Marxist rebels, military strongmen and dictatorships” in war-torn Africa.

The least surprising aspect of this story? Spokesmen for the Clinton Foundation and Lundin refused to comment.

Not the Nine O’Clock News, or the news anywhere. And this is one that comes to our attention. How many others just like it are there?

Which really does make this article more than odd which is A Response to My Conservative #NeverTrump Friends on why he won’t vote for Hillary. Why is such an article even necessary? How can anyone who is even remotely Republican think of voting for her?

Here, then, are nine reasons (there are more) why a conservative should prefer a Trump presidency to a Democrat presidency:

• Prevent a left-wing Supreme Court.

• Increase the defense budget.

• Repeal, or at least modify, the Dodd-Frank act.

• Prevent Washington, D.C. from becoming a state and giving the Democrats another two permanent senators.

• Repeal Obamacare.

• Curtail illegal immigration, a goal that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with xenophobia or nativism (just look at Western Europe).

• Reduce job-killing regulations on large and small businesses.

• Lower the corporate income tax and bring back hundreds of billions of offshore dollars to the United States.

• Continue fracking, which the left, in its science-rejecting hysteria, opposes.

For these reasons, I, unlike my friends, could not live with my conscience if I voted to help the America-destroying left win the presidency in any way.

I just don’t understand how anyone who understands the threat the left and the Democrats pose on America will refuse to vote for the only person who can stop them.

It is hard to understand, almost as hard as to understand why people on the left also want to vote for Hillary.