FULL: Donald Trump at Morning Joe, May 20, 2016- ‘Would you consider Sanders as your running mate?’ May 20, 2016
(Spoiler alert: The question about Sanders as Trump’s VP choice comes at the tail end of the interview, and Trump’s answer was that Sanders should run as an independent. The interview is wide-ranging and deals with foreign policy, China, Mexico, the Islamist threat, the terrorist attack on EgyptAir and a bunch of other stuff. — DM)
A fractured Democratic Party threatens Clinton’s chances against Trump, Washington Post, David Weigel, May 18, 2016
(How many disappointed Sanders supporters will vote for Trump in the general election? — DM)
When Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont took the stage this week after falling short in the Kentucky primary, supporters of Hillary Clinton wondered whether he would finally soften his tone and let her move on to a general election against Donald Trump.
They didn’t have to wonder for long.
Sanders credited Clinton’s victory to “a closed primary, something I am not all that enthusiastic about, where independents are not allowed to vote.” He commanded the Democratic Party to “do the right thing and open its doors and let into the party people who are prepared to fight for economic and social change.” And then he promised that he’s staying in the race until the convention. “Let me be as clear as I can be: We are in ’til the last ballot is cast!”
The performance prompted cheers across a crowd of about 8,000 in Carson, Calif., highlighting the mistrust and alienation that Sanders’s most ardent fans feel about Clinton, the Democrats and their “rigged” system. Yet the whole spectacle also sent shudders through those supporting Clinton, who are growing increasingly irritated by Sanders’s ever-presence in the race — and nervous that he is damaging Clinton.
All of it seems to have come to a head in recent days, as bitterness on both sides has boiled over and prompted new worries that a fractured party could lead to chaos at the national convention and harm Clinton’s chances against Trump in November. Two realities seem to be fueling it all: The nomination is, for all intents and purposes, out of Sanders’s reach yet his supporters are showing no signs of wanting to rally behind Clinton.
“If you lose a game that you put your heart and soul into, and you lose squarely, you can walk off the court and shake someone’s hand and say, ‘Well done,’ ” said Rep. Diane Russell, a Maine legislator and Sanders supporter. “If you don’t feel like the game was working fairly, it’s hard to do that.”
On the other side is this view: It’s also hard to win a general election with a protracted, divisive primary battle that won’t go away. “The way he’s been acting now is a demonstration of why he’s had no support from his colleagues,” said former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank.
Sanders supporters are crying “fraud” over delegate selection and threatening to sit out the election. They have promised to press their case to the convention floor. It happened in 2008, in the final throes of Clinton’s failed bid against Barack Obama. What remains unclear is whether this year’s divisions will go deeper or longer.
An explosive weekend convention in Nevada, where Sanders supporters turned on the state party chairwoman for overruling their challenges and seating Clinton delegates, exposed the depth of the acrimony. In his statements since then, Sanders has made no attempt to heal it.
Sanders is also keeping his supporters riled up by making what many Democrats view as an unrealistic, and even dishonest, view of his candidacy, given Clinton’s large lead in delegates.
“There are a lot of people out there, many pundits and politicians, they say Bernie Sanders should drop out, the people of California should not have the right to determine who the next president will be,” he said at Tuesday’s rally, insisting that the state had enough pledged delegates to put him over the top.
Increasingly, Sanders’s most passionate supporters claim that the primary has been rigged. A Reddit user’s chart comparing the first wave of exit polls with Clinton’s stronger-than-expected performances has been circulated — most famously by Sanders surrogate and actor Tim Robbins — as evidence of election fraud.
Clinton’s 16-point victory in New York is explained by the state’s onerous registration rules and by the still-unexplained purge of Brooklyn voter rolls. Anyone questioning her lead of three million votes can find solace in a CounterPunch article titled “Clinton Does Best Where Voting Machines Flunk Hacking Tests.”
“Do these people read newspapers?” said Bob Mulholland, a California superdelegate and Clinton supporter who has accused Sanders supporters of harassing his peers. “Are they reading some chain email with bogus numbers? I hold Sanders somewhat responsible for this, because he comes across on TV as a very angry old man, riling people up.”
As Kentucky slid away from Sanders on Tuesday, some of his supporters saw a culprit in Alison Lundergan Grimes. The secretary of state and 2014 candidate for U.S. Senate, a longtime supporter of Clinton, even went on CNN to declare Clinton the winner.
“Hillary doesn’t even care anymore,” wrote one Sanders supporter, tweeting a link to a story about alleged fraud in Kentucky.
“Yet another state we would’ve won if everyone could vote,” another supporter wrote on Reddit.
“Better watch out for illegal conduct by Grimes since she said electing Clinton is more important than doing her job,” tweeted another.
The evidence for the last claim was a video clip from a rally with Clinton and Grimes, where the secretary of state said she was “not only here to do my job” but also to back her candidate. It was cut and distributed by America Rising, a conservative opposition research firm adept at finding wedges between Clinton and the left.
As Sanders has fallen behind Clinton, more conservatives have looked for ways to exploit the angst. On Tuesday morning, Fox News sent a morning-show host to the streets of New York to ask voters if the primary had been rigged for Clinton. Dan Backer, the conservative attorney and treasurer of the pro-Trump Great America PAC, has egged on Sanders supporters on Facebook with pep talks like “Bernie will win the most primaries and can still take the most pledged [elected] delegates while narrowing the total vote gap.” Trump has also announced a kind of snarky solidarity with Sanders, telling voters and Twitter followers that the senator should bolt the party over his foul treatment.
“Bernie Sanders is being treated very badly by the Democrats — the system is rigged against him,” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. “Many of his disenfranchised fans are for me!”
The Sanders campaign has endorsed none of this — but it hasn’t tamped it down. Sanders’s sympathetic response to the Nevada convention fracas angered the state and national party, with DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz comparing the worst scenes there to the violence at Trump rallies. Asked if there had been any actual fraud in the primaries, Michael Briggs, Sanders’s spokesman, suggested that the Democratic Party’s infrastructure had been sabotaged in a way that hurt one candidate.
“Most state parties tried to do a good job,” he said, “but often they are short on resources and there are institutional impediments to a fair process, like super-early registration, party-switch deadlines, closed primaries, complicated party registration rules, bad voter lists.”
Sanders himself has made harder-to-argue cases against the Democratic primaries. The truncated debate schedule struck supporters of both candidates as unfair, something the party seemed to acknowledge by tacking on more of them in March and April. Although Clinton is on track to win a majority of pledged delegates, Sanders has suggested that early support for Clinton among superdelegates, the party leaders and elected officials who get an automatic convention vote but are not bound by their state’s popular vote created a barrier no candidate could scale.
“It is absurd that you had 400 establishment Democrats on board Hillary Clinton’s campaign before anybody was in the race,” Sanders told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in an interview last week. “That stacks the deck in a very, very, unfair way for any establishment candidate, and against the wishes of the people.”
At the same time, Sanders and his supporters argue that superdelegates should consider bolting Clinton and backing him, based on polls that show him leading Trump as her favorables sink. That irritates Clinton supporters on two levels: by suggesting that the voters got it wrong and by dismissing the judgment of the sort of elected leaders whom any president would need to pass an agenda.
“If you believe you represent the people, and the people are uncooperative with your goal of winning, you have to find some explanation,” said Frank, whose appointment to the DNC rules committee sparked anger from Sanders’s supporters. “Look — I understand you have some disagreements, but does the overwhelming view of the black leadership, LGBT leadership, women’s leadership — does that count for nothing?”
As they contemplate Sanders’s “contested contest” at the Philadelphia convention, Clinton supporters think warmly back to 2008. By the time those primaries concluded, as many as 40 percent of Clinton voters said they could not support Barack Obama. The most dedicated PUMAs (Party Unity My A–) became TV stars; the vast majority of Clinton holdouts eventually went for the ticket. While Clinton’s favorable rating with Sanders supporters has been falling, many of his endorsers think that can be reversed.
“I want people to see this as a fair process, because I’m not in the ‘Bernie or Bust’ camp,” said Russell, the Sanders supporter from Maine. “I love this campaign, but I love my country more. And I tell the ‘Bernie or Bust’ people, if you’re angry at the end of this, you’re not going to take it out on the DNC. You’re going to take it out on the most vulnerable people — the ones we are fighting for.”
Will Trump’s Supreme Court List Finish Off #NeverTrump? PJ Media, Roger L. Simon, May 18, 2016
Donald Trump released his long-awaited list of possible Supreme Court nominees today. All eleven are conservatives, most originally appointed to appellate courts by George W. Bush. Compared to anyone Clinton or Sanders might conceivably appoint, they all could be regarded as “strict constructionist” in the Antonin Scalia mold.
One, Allison Eid of Colorado, clerked for the currently most conservative justice Clarence Thomas. She was also speechwriter for William Bennett. Who knew Reagan’s Secretary of Education needed writers – he’s a distinguished author himself – but Eid is clearly no slouch. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of the jurisprudence of another potential nominee, Missouri’s Richard Gruender:
In Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota v. Rounds, No. 05-3093, a panel of the Eighth Circuit upheld an injunction that struck down a South Dakota informed consent law that required abortion providers to inform patients, among other things, that an “abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” Gruender dissented, arguing that the law was constitutional and did not unduly burden women seeking abortions or infringe on the freedom of speech of physicians. The Eighth Circuit heard the case en banc and ruled in 2008 by a vote of 7–4, in an opinion authored by Gruender, that the law was, on its face, constitutional.[10][11]
Diane Sykes and William Pryor, both also on the list, have been bandied about for some years as possible Republican SCOTUS nominees.
I could go on, but the point is this – Trump, thus far, has delivered as promised. This list would build a Supreme Court that most, if not all, Republicans could more than live with for many years. I know there will be hold-outs who will claim Trump is prevaricating and will end up nominating, say, Gloria Allred (not very likely, I think). Or that he should have Ted Cruz on the list. Who knows? Over time that could change.
But I think I can confidently say the #NeverTrump movement just took a mortal blow.
Trump, Ryan and the Islam Problem, PJ Media, Roger L. Simon, May 15, 2016
One of the main areas of contention between Donald Trump and Paul Ryan is the question of Muslim immigration. In early December, when Trump first made his proposal (now a “suggestion”) to stop all such immigration until we “understood what was going on,” one of the first to react in high dudgeon was Ryan, who declared: “This is not conservatism.”
He was applauded for his four-word pronouncement by those “conservatives” at the Washington Post, who called his response “near-perfect.” Actually, to me it seemed morally narcissistic and had little to with conservatism, pro or con. Ryan wanted to disassociate himself as quickly as possible from the ugly and seemingly racist Trump.
But let’s look more closely at what the speaker said during that response:
When we voted to pause the refugee program a few weeks ago, I made very clear at the time: there would not be a religious test. There would be a security test. And that is because freedom of religion is a fundamental Constitutional principle. It’s a founding principle of this country.
Aside from the obvious — if people are fighting and killing you in the name of a religion, how do you ignore the “religious test” — what about that “security test”? Is it really happening or are people slipping into the country by various means, including an open border, with no test whatsoever? What about reports of an ISIS camp eight miles from El Paso?
And, perhaps more importantly, did that “pause” Ryan voted for actually take place in any meaningful way? According to the New York Post a “surge operation” bringing Syrian refugees to America was already in operation this past April. By “surge operation,” Gina Kassem — regional refugee coordinator in Amman — told reporters, it was meant the resettlement process that normally took 18 to 24 months would be sped up to 3 months. (Some pause!) And the figure of 10,000 refugees that has often been proffered by the administration was a minimum, not a maximum.
What is the maximum and how will they be vetted? And just how do you “vet” during a “surge”? Is that what Ryan really meant by a “security test”? I doubt it, but Trump should ask him at their next reconciliation meeting. As they say, Paul’s got some “xplainin” to do.
Now this isn’t a simple question. The Syrian people have suffered mightily at the hands of various psychotic despots, secular and religious. Trump has called for supporting more extensive refugee camps in the region, an idea that makes more sense than bringing them here. (He has also called for the Gulf states to pay for them — good luck with that.)
The main point is that this is a significant campaign issue and intelligent solutions have to be discussed. Trump has put Rudy Giuliani in charge of studying this from his side, an excellent choice.
There may be a short-term fix, but there won’t be a short-term answer. This is a very long-term problem, the longest one we have, dwarfing the deficit and everything else — civilizational, really. Will we be America or will we go the way of Europe and turn semi-Islamic like France in Houellebecq’s novel?
It wouldn’t be hard. We have been living under an administration that has been an enabler of Islamism. Obama has chosen to ally himself with Islamists like Turkey’s Erdogan, Egypt’s Morsi and, most stunningly, Iran’s Khamenei, while abjuring Egypt’s al-Sisi, who seeks to reform Islam. Go figure.
On top of all that — it’s hard to believe this — there are reports our administration was colluding with Russia in an attempt to get Israel to give back the Golan Heights to Syria in some putative peace settlement. Syria? Needless to say, Mr. Netanyahu was not amused.
In any case, on the immediate question of Muslim immigration, Trump may have sounded excessive and even been excessive. That’s his technique — he likes to get our attention, then negotiate. But in this particular negotiation (not, for example, on entitlements) the basic talking points — and the American people — are on Donald’s side. Ryan should listen.
Will America Follow Britain further Into, or away from, the Abyss? Dan Miller’s Blog, May 14, 2016
(The views expressed in this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
The Muslim invasion is changing European and British demographics to the degree that some countries will soon have Muslim majorities. Will America follow Europe? What about our Publican and Demorat elites? Will we reject them and the unelected bureaucrats they have spawned and empowered?
America needs to vote for her own version of Brexit this November.
British and European Demographics
Paul Weston is the vile “Islamophobe” who dared to read — aloud and in public — a passage from a book written by another vile “Islamophobe,” Winston Churchill, a couple of years ago. For that, he (Weston, not Winston) was arrested.
So what if Weston spoke accurately? He offended Muslims and that can’t be tolerated. Besides, Britain is terribly “racist” even though Islam is not a race.
Meanwhile, London’s East End is losing its native population and the place looks “less like a British city, more like Baghdad.”
The European Union and Britain
Currently, Mr. Weston of the Liberty GB Party is campaigning for Britain to leave the Europen Union, a force for unrequited love, charity and destruction. So is Nigel Farge of UKIP.
Here’s a long video about the EU and why Britain should leave it. It’s over an hour long but well worth watching. It’s principally about economics, the destructive power the EU has given unaccountable bureaucrats and the stifling of democracy.
As you watch and listen, please consider the similarities and differences between the EU and governance of, by and for the Publican and Demorat Establishment in America. Both have empowered and continue to expand unelected bureaucracies.
I was disappointed that the video does not deal with the immigration problem which will continue to plague Britain if she remains in the EU. Perhaps the topic was seen as likely to displease Britain’s already substantial Muslim population and prompt them to vote to remain in the EU. Remember, London just elected its first Muslim mayor.
Here’s another “Islamophobic” EUophobe:
Democracy and self-governance are seen by far too many as absurdly old fashioned. In Obama’s America, where would we be if governance were taken away from our betters in the Publican and Demorat Establishment and returned to the vulgarian little people? Do we need great Establishment intellects to think for us so that we don’t have to do it ourselves? The vulgarian dummies living in EU member states haven’t had to think for years. Now, with the upcoming referendum, those in Britain l have a chance to do so. We will have a chance this November.
Obama has told the citizens of once-great Britain that membership in the EU is economically and otherwise good for them — perhaps even as good as His presidency has been for citizens of His America. Many disagree with “the smartest person in any room;” those in Obama’s America who do may even elect Vulgarian-in-Chief Donald Trump as President shortly after citizens of Britain who cherish self-governance may vote to exit the EU.
Conclusions
America does not yet have the same Muslim demographic problems as Europe or Britain. Unless we halt or at least reduce Islamic immigration and cease to subsidize it we will eventually. One way to minimize the problem is to get rid of the politically correct “Islamophobia” nonsense and speak of Islam as it is rather than as though it were a benign unicorn.
The elites of the Publican and Demorat establishment are a big part if the problem. Just as Britain seems to be moving toward leaving the EU, we need to diminish the power of our own elected elites by electing “vulgarians” to replace them. We also need to reduce the very substantial power of the masses of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats they have empowered. There is no need to replace them.
Can Trump Save Mexico? PJ Media, Roger L Simon, May 13, 2016
(Mexico, along with nearly all of Latin America, is endemically corrupt. The United States already has more than enough corruption and we do not need to import more. — DM)
I love Mexico. I have been there dozens of times from the border to the Chiapas jungle. I love almost everything about it.
But like so many, I detest their government. It has been a disaster longer than I have been alive. And glorious as the art and architecture may be, there’s that other more depressing Mexico – the land of El Chapo, mordidas and murder – the desperate barrios you see from the cab if you accidentally stray from the Zona Rosa or Polanco or one of the other tony neighborhoods of the Distrito Federal. This is the world’s capital of income inequality.
Mexico, wonderful as it is to visit, is intolerably corrupt. Corruption in Mexico even merits its own Wikipedia entry. Most of us who have been there on multiple occasions have experienced it. I have paid a mordida to their cops myself more than once for traffic infractions I didn’t commit to avoid being hauled off to jail. It’s just the price you pay for enjoying yourself down there, sort of like meeting the troll at the bridge.
The corruption never seems to change, no matter who is in power, with a large percentage of their population living in unspeakable poverty. The misery of these people is so extreme you avert your eyes when confronted by it and try to pretend it’s not there, so it doesn’t affect you too much. But you can’t.
The USA has for generations been the stopgap for this poverty, providing work for the Central American jobless, the millions of illegal aliens in our midst, who send remittances home from the storefronts we see across Los Angeles and other cities of our country. It’s always been like that, with America, inadvertently or not, enabling this corrupt Mexican system, often for the advantage of America’s corporations but not her people. I never thought it would be different.
And then along comes Donald Trump wanting to build that wall and make Mexico (gasp!) pay for it. Needless to say, Mexican officiales went ballistic, notably former president Vincente Fox who accused Trump of bringing back the era of the “Ugly American” and went so far as to say that Trump’s election could lead to “war” between Mexico and the United States. Other officials are taking a more modern approach, initiating a public relations campaign this June to counter the view of Mexico being promulgated by the man they call “The Clown.”
But public relations is the last thing Mexico needs. It needs change. Public relations, in this instance no more than spin on a grand scale, is the enemy of that. It simply papers over a bad situation and prevents it from improving.
Ironically, Donald Trump is Mexico’s best friend right now – not of the officials, of course, or their extraordinarily large billionaire class – but of the Mexican people themselves. By actually bottling up the border and reducing the flow to legal immigration, something that has not been done for decades, if ever, Trump and his allies are forcing the Mexican government to deal with their own problems. That’s not going to happen as long as El Norte is here to solve everything for them. It never happened while the border was open and will never happen until it’s closed.
Mexican officials and our liberal-progressives think Trump is acting like a racist, or is one, for proposing this action. But actually, whether he realizes it or not, Donald is giving Mexico a little amor duro (tough love, in Spanish) that it sorely needs, has needed for one helluva long time. Whether Mexico will be able to accept it is another matter. But that’s always the question with “tough love,” isn’t it?
Trump Derangement Syndrome, Front Page Magazine, David Horowitz, May 12, 2016
I don’t think I speak for myself alone when I confess utter bewilderment at the number of conservatives – among whom I count long-term friends – who seem to have lost their marbles when assessing the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, to take one example that can stand for many, is an astute analyst – in my view one of the best political commentators writing today. Yet he is the author of this opening paragraph in Monday’s paper, which leaves me scratching my head, and embarrassed for my friend: “The best hope for what’s left of a serious conservative movement in America is the election in November of a Democratic president, held in check by a Republican Congress. Conservatives can survive liberal administrations, especially those whose predictable failures lead to healthy restorations—think Carter, then Reagan.”[1]
I can’t think of anything that is right about these sentences. The president’s first business is the nation’s security. Did Reagan really repair the damage that Carter did? It is true that he pulled the nation back from Carter’s policies of appeasing our enemies and disarming our military. But he failed to retrieve Carter’s greatest foreign policy disaster. It was Carter who brought down America’s ally, the Shah of Iran, and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini back from exile, thereby transforming Iran into the first jihadist state, and America’s deadliest enemy. Neither Ronald Reagan nor both George Bushes could undo that.
Could a Republican Congress – assuming that there would be a Republican Congress if Trump lost – hold a Democratic president like Hillary Clinton “in check”? How did that work out during the destructive reign of Barack Obama? With Republican majorities in the House and Senate Obama had no real problem in becoming the first American president to build his legacy around a policy that can fairly be described as treasonous – providing a path to nuclear power and ballistic missile capability to an Iranian regime that is our nation’s mortal enemy, has already murdered thousands of Americans, and is ruled by religious fanatics who have made no secret of their determination to destroy us.
Bret Stephens and an all-too-prominent cohort of inside-the-beltway conservatives want to turn the presidency over to Hillary Clinton “to save conservatism.” What can this mean? Have they forgotten who Hillary Clinton is? As Secretary of State she was the foreign policy captain in an administration that abandoned Iraq, thereby betraying every American and Iraqi who gave his or her life to keep that benighted country out of the hands of the terrorists and Iran (not that any Republican had the temerity to say so). ISIS is as much her godchild as Barack Obama’s. In creating the vacuum that ISIS filled Hillary was only carrying on the Democratic foreign policy tradition that Jimmy Carter inaugurated of sacrificing America’s security to pie-eyed internationalist delusions. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported the overthrow of an American ally in Egypt and its replacement by the Muslim Brotherhood, the fountainhead of al-Qaeda and ISIS. She colluded in the overthrow of an American ally in Libya – a country posing no threat to the United States – thereby turning it into a base for ISIS and al-Qaeda. It was Hillary who was behind the gunrunning scheme to al-Qaeda rebels in Syria that led to the Benghazi disaster. She denied Ambassador Stephens – her American pawn in Benghazi – the security he requested in order to cover Obama’s retreat in the war on terror (it was election time), and then lied about his murder and that of three American heroes to the American people, to the mothers and fathers of the dead heroes, and to the world at large. According to the official version she approved insulting the prophet Mohammed was the problem not the terrorist onslaught that she and Obama had helped to unleash. Now we have learned that she willfully violated America’s Espionage Act, resulting in tens of thousands of her emails, classified and unclassified falling into the hands of the Russians and other adversary powers, and leading to how many future American casualties we can only guess.
This is the president that Bret Stephens and Bill Kristol and George Will think would be better for conservative values and conservative concerns than Donald Trump, a man who has raised an admirable family (a character-reflecting feat his detractors always overlook) and whose patriotism in the course of a long public life has never been in question. Nonetheless, it is Hillary Clinton – this serial liar, this traducer of the nation’s trust, this corrupt taker of $600,000 speaking fees and multi-million dollar gifts from foreign governments while acting as Secretary of State –this wretched individual who in their eyes is “survivable” should she become president.
And what isn’t survivable? “What isn’t survivable is … a serial fabulist, an incorrigible self-mythologizer, a brash vulgarian, and, when it comes to his tax returns, a determined obfuscator.” I blush for my friend making these charges, first because they are sins common to most politicians (with admittedly less flair than Donald Trump) and second because of the reason he gives for why they should matter: “Endorsing Mr. Trump means permanently laying to rest any claim conservatives might ever again make on the character issue.”
The character issue! Oh yes, that vital conservative weapon. And how did the use of it actually work out when it was put before the entire nation? Approaching the end of Clinton’s second term, Republicans made a political season out of his bad character and actually managed to impeach him for abusing women and lying to a grand jury. But when it was over, there wasn’t a pundit or pollster around who didn’t think that Bill Clinton would have an odds on chance of being elected to a third term in 2000 if the 22nd Amendment had allowed him to run.
This is not serious stuff, yet it is being peddled by first-rate conservative intellects and the fate of our nation may yet hang on it. The greatest obstacle to a Republican victory in November is the fratricidal war now being waged by the “Never Trump” crowd against the only person who might prevent the disaster awaiting us if the party of Obama and Kerry and Hillary and Sharpton prevails in November.
Their Trump hysteria notwithstanding, I still have the highest regard for the intellects of Bret Stephens and George Will and their comrades-in-arms. But I am hoping against hope that they come to their senses before it is too late.
Donald Trump, Bill Whittle and Republican Principles, Dan Miller’s Blog, May 11, 2016
(The views expressed in this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
In 2012, after Mitt Romney lost the presidential election, Bill Whittle delivered an address on Republican principles. The Timid Republican Party has substantially ignored those principles and is not guided by them. Party candidates nevertheless continue to mouth them at election time. Perhaps they understand what the voters want and recite their fealty to get their votes. Once safely in office, they revert to ignoring those same principles.
During the current Republican nomination process, the Establishment has chastised Donald Trump for not being a “real” Republican and not adhering to Republican principles — the principles which they themselves ignore, by which he abides and by which as our President he will continue to abide. As they cringe at his refusal to mince words and to be politically correct, they seem uncomfortable with his wealth and his decision to finance his own primary campaign. Trump is very comfortable with being rich and is rightfully proud of what he has been able to do because of it — including not being subservient to wealthy donors and donor collectives to which Establishment members are themselves subservient.
While watching the video, please ponder what Trump would say — and do — as our candidate and then as our President.
It strikes me that Trump and Whittle care more about “Republican principles” than do members of the Republican Establishment. Trump is substantially more likely to support and adhere to those principles than the Party Establishment has, and than any candidate it would prefer has or would. In recent months, the “unwashed vulgarian” Republican masses have shown that they do as well. They are right.
Trump: Unexpected and Unconventional but Suited for Our Times, American Thinker, Scott S. Powell, May 11, 2016
One of the most extraordinary things about Donald Trump’s primary victory in the Republican Party is that he received more votes from people identifying as Christian than his closest competitor Ted Cruz — the son of an evangelical pastor and one who profusely displayed his Christian identity in speech and temperament. In contrast, by standards that many believe to be the essence of Christian character as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, Donald Trump has been anything but meek, merciful, or peacemaking in his political rise. Some have likened him to a one-man wrecking ball. So what’s going on?
No one doubts that these are unusual times, with more forces pulling the United States down than at any other time in history. There is plenty of blame to go around for America’s spiraling state of decline, but at the top of the list are two things: First, we have had a culture captured and constrained by secular progressive political correctness. Second, we have an overbearing federal government that has corrupted both parties, the bureaucracies, and even the supposedly independent Federal Reserve.
At the grassroots, Republicans have tried to bring about a corrective, and they did succeed in getting many conservative reform candidates elected to congress in the last six years. Yet the stranglehold of political correctness and the corruption of Washington from special interests and lobbyists have proven insurmountable. Washington, DC — a metropolis producing very little with limited industry and almost no manufacturing — has become the richest city in the country, while driving the nation to the edge of financial ruin, as manifest in a national debt exceeding $19 trillion, 47 million people on food stamps, and a true unemployment rate that may be three times higher than the manipulated official rate released by the federal government.
Even as white Christians have diminished in their overall percentage of the population at large, according to the Pew Research Center, they still account for nearly seven in ten Americans who identify with, or lean toward, the Republican Party — about the same percentage as in the 1980s during the Reagan years. The problem is the GOP — despite its success in gaining majorities in both houses of Congress and controlling the power of the purse — has been ineffective as an opposition party during the Obama years.
The tipping point for many Christians came with a realization that the Republican Party was as incapable of protecting their rights and values at home as it was feckless in stopping an errant foreign policy that undermined trust with allies and emboldened enemies.
Two unnerving breaches of protection prompted many to recognize compelling qualities in Donald Trump over other candidates. First, he exuded an unapologetic toughness about building a wall and stopping the wave of illegal immigrants flooding over the Mexican border. Second, he was unequivocal about obliterating ISIS quickly and decisively — ending its wanton slaughter of Christians and other ethnic groups. And bridging both of these issues, in the aftermath of ISIS-inspired attacks in San Bernardino and Brussels, Trump unhesitatingly opposed Obama’s wish to take in undocumented Syrian refugees, “until we figure out what the hell is going on.” In that alone in the eyes of the majority, Trump demonstrated he was presidential, putting the protection of Americans as the top priority.
Political correctness and intolerance, which debilitates critical thinking, discourse and debate, has been shaping American culture for more than a generation. Throughout the seven plus years of the Obama administration, political correctness has driven domestic and foreign policy — with disastrous results. Obama has gone beyond anyone in recent memory in assaulting the First Amendment, undermining both speech and the exercise of Christian religion. We now see among liberals and secular progressives operating in the Democrat Party an Orwellian power structure that seeks to advance a statist, socialist and globalist transformation of the U.S. by silencing opposing views through the courts, misinformation, and distortion of the truth. Call it “newspeak” as Orwell did or the successor term “doublespeak,” its purpose is the same: to shape the masses thinking and obfuscate what is really going down.
Political correctness has not only prevented development of an effective strategy to deal with Islamist terrorism. It has turned U.S. relations in the Middle East upside down. The Obama administration celebrated the ouster and replacement of Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak, a long-standing U.S. ally, with Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi. A similar glee was initially expressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the news of Muammar Gaddafi being hunted down and killed, only to be followed by increased mayhem in Libya, leading to the tragedy and humiliation of the U.S. at the hands of terrorists in Benghazi.
But for many Christians, the bridge too far was Obama’s rebuke of Israel and his end run around the U.S. Congress, in forcing through a fundamentally flawed nuclear deal with Iran. Iran is both the top exporter of hate and the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism whose longstanding primary targets are the United States (often referred to as the “big Satan”), and Israel (the “little Satan”).
Everyone recognizes that Donald Trump is a flawed candidate. His Christian supporters certainly know this as well or better than his critics. But they also recognize that sinners are all that there are to choose from and that America’s precarious position at home and abroad requires an unconventional leader with unusual characteristics — some of which may not be aligned with a stereotypical Christian temperament.
One thing few could disagree with is that Trump deserves credit more than any conservative for fracturing the foundation of political correctness, upon which rests the entire liberal superstructure.
In fact, conventional conservatives may have reached a limit in expanding their audience. In contrast, it appears to be harvest time for Trump. His style of common sense plain talk has the potential to make huge inroads into both independent and liberal constituencies who are just now waking up to the absurdities of political correctness. While many still can’t see clearly, the fog is lifting, and the soul, spontaneity and humor of America is making an incipient revival, even in the midst of rancor.
If one can get past the braggadocio, narcissism and other negatives of Trump’s character, on the positive side he exudes confidence, ambition and a keenness to make good deals, get results and win. He is bold, direct and doesn’t shy away from confrontation. Mr. Trump is quite social and clearly likes to entertain, but he is also tough as nails, unrelenting and unpredictable with adversaries. He is unquestionably and refreshingly patriotic.
It turns out that some of these qualities are among those most vital to rebuilding relations with America’s allies and restoring respect — even fear — from adversaries. Mr. Trump’s irectness also suggests he is the best-suited presidential candidate to take on America’s greatest threat — insolvency. He could break the cycle of denial that completely engulfs the Democrat Party, and has hitherto prevented predecessors from doing much of anything regarding the nation’s out-of-control spending, deficits and unsustainable debt. Additionally, Trump’s toughness may be the key virtue needed to rule in a divided country and to successfully downsize and restructure federal agencies and get Washington out of the way of the American economy and its people.
Although the GOP believes it has a big tent, understandably many party members with well-established positions and values have great difficulty in accepting for the highest office in the land a newcomer candidate as fundamentally different as Donald Trump. To them I would say, unusual times with threats on every front at home and abroad call for an unconventional candidate. And it’s not so hard after all to recognize qualities in Donald Trump that make him in certain ways uniquely well-suited for our times.
WarSclerotic 
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