The Republican candidacy of Donald Trump – what to speak of his victory in the presidential election itself – was such an outlandish prospect, that it had been completely written off from the moment he had announced his intention to run.
The conservative media in the US accuse their liberal counterparts of being out of touch with the ground realities but it was the same conservative media that had written him off. The liberal media were simply deferring to their judgment since the likes of Fox would presumably know more about the average Joe conservative voter that the Republican Party seeks to represent.
In one internal election process after the other, Trump bulldozed through all expectations, despite what most of the punditry were saying. Once he finally won the party’s candidacy, and later, when he won the election, videos of renegade pundits predicting his candidacy and victory emerged. These were individuals, very few in number, who had predicted this on news programs, while their co-panelists laughed at them.
Online readers can hear in the video below the guffaws of the host and other guest when US Congressman Keith Ellison called a Trump candidacy.
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In the aftermath of the leaked footage and phone call of NAB chief Justice Javed Iqbal’s conversation with a female, there has been some debate about whether this was a case of harassment. Those who argue it was a case of harassment say that though the conversation sounded consensual, there was an imbalance of power here as the Bureau was investigating the case of the lady’s husband. We won’t know till more details come out.
A clip, however, has gone viral in its aftermath, much like those who had gotten Trump’s victory right before anyone else had.
In the very short period of time that Manzoor Pashteen was allowed on Pakistani television channels, he had made a startling revelation about the head of the national commission on missing persons. That he would hit on and harass the female relatives of said individuals.
Manzoor Pashteen pointed out Chairman NAB(then head of missing persons commission) harassing women long ago but no one listened pic.twitter.com/C77ZKv9xzb
— Ali Yusufzai (@AliYusufzai5) May 23, 2019
The head of the commission back then, of course, was Javed Iqbal.
Even dyed in the wool Pak-Studies types, the sort who usually won’t have anything nice to say about Pashteen, are sharing this video on their social media accounts in the aftermath of the recent Javed Iqbal leak.
Post-Script: Pashteen, unfortunately, is right about a lot of things. It would do the national discourse a whole lot of good to allow his PTM some airtime. Strong nations encourage debate, not stifle it. We’ll be all the better for it.
