Judge Jeanine One on One w/ Donald Trump 6/4/16 FULL Special Interview, Fox News via YouTube, June 4, 2016
Posted tagged ‘Republicans’
America’s Biggest Losers: The Right’s Commentariat
June 5, 2016America’s Biggest Losers: The Right’s Commentariat, American Thinker, Clarice Feldman. June 5, 2016
(If the Trump Hater’s Club prevails, the biggest losers will be the American people. — DM)
It’s looking to be a long hot summer, full of violence against Trump supporters, exposure of Clinton wrongdoing, and continued loathsome behavior by the president, academics, and the media. To its shame, at this crucial juncture many of the once-respected members of the right’s commentariat are failing their readers and proving to be America’s biggest losers.
Space constraints prevent me from detailing all the wrongdoing of Hillary Clinton and her aides and allies, but here are just some turned up this week.
Breitbart reports that it is now clear that Hillary shared the names of covert U.S. intelligence figures on her unprotected server, which had been targeted by “Russia-linked hacker attempts”, jeopardizing their lives and operations. (Compare and contrast her behavior with that of Lewis Libby and the difference in the politicized responses of this administration with Bush’s. Or even with this administration’s response to clear lawbreaking as opposed to scurrilous, baseless claims in the prior administration.)
When Bush commuted the sentence of Libby, who had not leaked the name of a covert agent — and actually he should have pardoned him altogether but failed to — Hillary was quick on the draw:
“This commutation sends the clear signal that in this administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.” Clip and save this should she be indicted and pardoned on far worse conduct — actually being the source of the leak of real covert agents.
The scandals continue to involve the Clinton Family Foundation as well the emails. As Don Surber observes, however, “Press scrutiny — applies to Republicans, not Democrats.”
The [Clinton] foundation’s latest Form 990 shows that as of December 31, 2014, Hillary and Bill and Chelsea and their hedge fund son-in-law sat on $439,505,295 in assets. That’s pretty good for a “non-profit.”
In 2014, they received $24,313,685 in contributions and $113,957,283 in grants, including government grants.
That $439 million in assets is 17 times larger than that $25 million hedge fund that son-in-law ran into the ground by hedging on Greek debt. That $439 million represents a hefty investment fee for some person or company lucky enough to land the account.
The foundation spent $248,221,698 in 2014:
$95,887,139 on salaries and benefits.
$20,786,529 on travel.
$17,249,876 on professional and consulting services.
$14,200,147 on conferences and events.
$14,196,240 on UNITAID commodities expense
$13,519,824 on meetings and training
Et cetera. Oh and $33,692,599 was spent on direct program expenditures. Sure, this is all legal, but as a charity, this is not on the up and up. The Clintons used this as a way to launder foreign donations (which would be illegal if they were campaign donations) to finance her campaign in absentia.
Compare this to the Trump Foundation, whose latest Form 990 covered the year 2012.
Income: $1,259,851 (all from Trump)
Disbursements: $1,712,089
Expenses: $5,305.
Assets: $1,717,293.
Short. Simple. No staff. No travel. No consulting services. No conferences. No meetings. No training. It’s just, here is the money, here are the charities I want to give to, and here is the audit (which cost $5,305).
Hillary, as we know, is a master of the art of projection — attributing her own misdeeds to her opponents. This week she used a suit against Trump University by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as a talking point. But there’s a far bigger scandal he’s ignoring — CGI University, “a shady joint venture of Laureate and the Clinton Global Initiative”.
The Laureate Education went private in August 2007, in a multi billion dollar, risky, hugely leveraged transaction, closed in the last gasp of the bubble. The leveraged buyout was completed around August 2007 for approximately $3 billion in debt plus equity. The driving force behind the deal is of Friend of Bill (FOB) hedge fund king Steven Cohen, a poster child for bad hedge fund behavior.
[snip]
After the deal closed, the schools had great financial difficulties and these capital suppliers grew concerned. Bill Clinton’s pals were feeling squeezed as a profitable exit seemed less and less likely.
To dress the deal up in 2010, Bill Clinton was brought in to serve as “Chancellor,” a part-time position for which he was collecting $16 million through early 2015. This extraordinary compensation was never properly disclosed until 2015. Many of those on the hook paid Bill and Hillary big fees for speeches as well. Bill Clinton was thus collecting from both Laureate equity and debt suppliers. The Laureate CEO, Doug Becker, is involved as a Clinton backer, Clinton Global Initiative and Clinton Foundation donor and involved in the International Youth Foundation, a recipient of favors and money from the Clinton-led Department of State. [emphasis added]
Incredibly, in 2013 the International Finance Corporation announced a record setting $150 million investment in Laureate at a time when its financial condition was rocky at best. Clinton’s involvement sealed the deal. Then the Clinton Global Initiative and Clinton Foundation entered into a joint venture with Laureate to create CGI-University. Yet none of these related party disclosures are included in any of the Clinton Foundation or Clinton Global Initiative filings for relevant periods (starting in 2008 or so).
New York State law requires specific approvals for an entity to hold itself out as being a university. In this case CGI (a fraud) created CGI University (a fraud) in league with Laureate, a fraud.
There’s also a private suit against Trump University in California where Trump’s criticism of the judge handling the case has drawn press rebuke. Of course, that ignores Obama and Hillary’s attacks on judges, as James Taranto notes with examples.
As a rule, a show of public disrespect for judicial authority is a foolish litigation strategy. It worked for Obama with Chief Justice Roberts because, like Mr. Clinton before him, he had virtually all Democrats and most of the media cheering him on. Criticism of a Democratic president for traducing democratic norms is inevitably discounted for partisanship. President Hillary Clinton would get away with it for the same reason.
And I must add to this review by Taranto mention of the inappropriate and unprecedented dressing down Obama gave the Supreme Court justices at a State of the Union Address where they were powerless to respond. This was a display of unpresidential and inappropriate behavior, which I do not recall getting much in the way of media censure.
I stopped watching television years ago, but if you still do and don’t have amnesia, you might remember this video example Andrew Klavan links to comparing Dana Bash’s reaction to the press denouement on the charge Trump hadn’t donated to veterans organizations when he had and her attack on Major Garrett for asking a deservedly tough question of Obama on the Iran deal about which he was flat-out lying. She made clear that tough questioning of a Democratic president on false claims is over the top but fake claims against a Republican candidate are just what the press’s job is. This is why nobody who can think with any degree of discernment pays TV news much mind.
In any event, in the private suit against Trump University, Trump has a point. The judge is clearly biased and the suit is — pardon the expression — trumped up.
To quote Facebook poster Jennifer Verner about the judge (an activist in MALDEF who appointed to represent the plaintiffs law firms which contributed almost $700,000 to Clinton’s campaign directly and through speaking fees):
So it took me about 10 minutes on the INTERNET to find that the California La Raza Lawyers Association lists MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund) as an affiliate group, and that MALDEF is one of the organizations that have been actively protesting Donald Trump. Lazy Jerks at CNN need to get their facts straight. The La Raza judge needs to go, not because he’s Hispanic, but because his political activity leads to a conflict of interest.”
From the California La Raza Lawyers Association. Look up which groups have been organizing the protests at the Trump rallies. Notice MALDEF? Oops.
Using the courts with the help of partisan prosecutors and judges to beset and discredit their opponents is a standard Democratic trick. It works so often because the folks more interested in keeping their white togas spotless will not ally themselves with a colleague or party official charged with wrongdoing no matter how preposterous and biased the charges. (See the cases against Lewis Libby, Senator Ted Stevens, Congressman Tom DeLay, and Senator Rick Perry.)
This vicious, no-holds-barred Clinton campaign will continue on to November, and what makes it worse is that while we can count on the major media to continue to front for his opponents, hiding their gaffes and wrongdoing and exaggerating his, some people who should be Trump’s allies are joining in the fight against him.
Bill Kristol has put forth National Review writer David French (who in January said he’d vote for Trump if Trump got the nomination) as his third-party choice.
Daniel J. Flynn at the Spectator responded:
What he lacks in experience he lacks in money and name recognition. David French enjoys a level of popularity above Eddie Spanish but somewhat below Jimmy the Greek. Even among National Review’s stable of writers, French ranks, at least in terms of reader familiarity, as something of a b-lister — not appearing, for instance, in the list of the magazine’s “notable” contributors at Wikipedia.
[snip]
Mistaking the views of a cliquish community inside a 64-mile band of clogged roadway for popular sentiment in the country outside of it, beltway conservatives inflate their influence. They imagine themselves as shaping the opinions of conservatives and quadrennially playing Republican kingmaker. So, imagine the terror of witnessing the rise of a candidate who not only stood them up at their annual CPAC gathering but dared call their bluff on immigration and challenged the orthodoxy of a busybody foreign policy that made the last Republican president and his party terribly unpopular. If nothing else, Trump’s success screams “the emperor has no clothes” at the ruling clique that rules in the way the D&D dungeonmaster imagines he does. French’s failure would further emphasize their impotence.
In sum, whatever else French is, he’s this year’s Admiral Stockdale — a nice man being thrown into the ring without training in boxing or gloves.
Others have gone further and said they’d vote for Hillary over Trump. This, even as the evidence of her corruption, incompetence, and lack of regard for either the rule of law or national security become impossible to ignore.
Oddly enough, these right wing critics did not get behind Ted Cruz in the primaries when it became a two-man race and Cruz was clearly the most conservative of the two choices. My friend “Ignatz Ratzkywatzky” responds to those of the commentariat who assert they are backing French or even Hillary because of their deeply held “principles”:
Is it actually a principle if its result is electing someone diametrically opposed to and intent on destroying those things that the principled person supposedly believes in?
Sounds more like a conceit to me.
Sounds like it to me, too.
Mickey Kaus, a Democrat, has long argued that immigration and open borders were big issues that needed to be addressed. He faults the right for failing to do so:
If they’d stood up to the Democrats — harnessing some of that GOP grassroots anger they knew was out there! — they could eventually have cut a different sort of deal, one that guaranteed enforcement as a precondition for any discussion of legalization, but that did offer eventual legalization to immigration-oriented Latino voters. Why didn’t they do that? ** Answer: Because Amnesty First reform wasn’t just a practical sop to an ethnic voting bloc. It’s what the GOP business elite actually wanted — i.e., a steady flow of eager, wage-restraining workers for the foreseeable future.*** Maybe this is also the reason why the allegedly hard-nosed elite actually believed all the polls ginned up by Latino activist groups (most prominently an outfit called Latino Decisions) designed to show that they really had to cave on immigration fast or else their party was doomed.
Some are even going so far as to suggest that at least one big Republican donor active in the gay rights movement is behind opposition to Cruz and Trump for failing to support his gay rights stance. If so, I think they are making a big mistake and are America’s biggest losers. The right’s commentariat failed over the past eight years to convince voters of their positions and are now doubling down with no real economic consequences to themselves. Perhaps they are already drafting emails and letters dated January 2017 begging for more contributions in order to “fight” Hillary. They seem to be well insulated from the costs the base has borne as a result of their ineffectiveness. And now they are adding “feckless” and “conceited” to any honest description of their work.
As for me — should that horrible-to-contemplate prospect of a Hillary victory come to pass, I will toss the begging letters of these losers into the trash.
FLASHBACK — Bill Kristol’s Candidate: It’s ‘Important to Say’ White Working Class Communities ‘Deserve to Die’
June 1, 2016FLASHBACK — Bill Kristol’s Candidate: It’s ‘Important to Say’ White Working Class Communities ‘Deserve to Die’, Breitbart, Julia Hahn, June 1, 2016
According to new reports, The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol wants fellow professional Republican and National Review staff writer, David French, to run an independent presidential campaign.
The prospect of a French run has received some support via Twitter from professional Republicans who oppose the candidate selected by the voters. However, French’s prior controversial writings could alienate a core constituency of the American electorate— namely, white working-class voters.
While Donald Trump has called on the GOP to become a “worker’s party”— a development Sen. Jeff Sessions called for two years ago, ironically, in the pages of the National Review— French has defended the idea that white working-class communities “deserve to die.”
Specifically, French wrote a piece in support of Kevin D. Williamson, who had said:
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
French described Williamson’s piece as “excellent” and said that Williamson’s words were “fundamentally true and important to say.”
French went on to dismiss the struggles white working class Americans endure.
“Citizens of the world’s most prosperous nation, they face challenges — of course — but no true calamities,” French wrote.
While French suggests that the decline of America’s middle class and manufacturing power is no true calamity, others could argue that the greater a nation or culture, the more sorrowful it is to witness its decline — much the same way that history would mourn the destruction of the Palace of Versailles more than the totaling of Justin Bieber’s car.
French insists that the devastation of the working-class’ livelihoods is unrelated to failed federal policies such as mass immigration:
[I] have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.
French, instead, suggests that the decimation of these communities is due to the laziness of the American worker:
Millions of Americans aren’t doing their best. Indeed, they’re barely trying. My church in Kentucky made a determined attempt to reach kids and families that were falling between the cracks, and it was consistently astounding how little effort most parents and their teen children made to improve their lives. If they couldn’t find a job in a few days — or perhaps even as little as a few hours — they’d stop looking. If they got angry at teachers or coaches, they’d drop out of school. If they fought with their wife, they had sex with a neighbor. And always — always — there was a sense of entitlement. And that’s where disability or other government programs kicked in. They were there, beckoning, giving men and women alternatives to gainful employment. You don’t have to do any work (your disability lawyer does all the heavy lifting), you make money, and you get drugs.
Mr. French’s blame-the-victim approach is notable for two reasons. First, it presents a novel view of human sociology in which people can lose their cultural pride, their means of economic survival, their sense of identity, their self-worth, and even suffer direct discrimination with no corresponding fallout. Second, it underscores one of the unique aspects of professional Republicanism. While professional Democrats advocate for the use of government power on behalf of their base, professional Republicans like Mr. French seem to argue that their own base deserves what’s coming and, as penance, should be left defenseless.
When readers responded with outrage to French’s piece, French doubled down in a post entitled “The Great White Working-Class Debate: Just Because I’m ‘Nasty’ Doesn’t Mean I’m Wrong.”
In recent decades, these white working class communities — and their inhabitants — have been economically devastated and are quite literally dying off. A study by Princeton economists revealed that white, middle-aged working-class Americans without a college degree are experiencing a rapid rise in morbidity. The report found that the rise in their death rates was tied to, what The New York Times described as the “pessimistic outlook among whites about their financial futures.”
“Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” one of the Princeton economists told The New York Times.
Even French’s boss, Rich Lowry, in his own column about the mortality rates of the white working-class, hinted that a kind of loss of social pride might be the cause. “The white working class is dying from the effects of a long-running alienation from the mainstream of American life,” Lowry wrote. In his piece, Lowry seems to perhaps be hinting at what Pat Buchanan described more starkly:
A lost generation is growing up all around us. In the popular culture of the ’40s and ’50s, white men were role models. They were the detectives and cops who ran down gangsters and the heroes who won World War II. … They were doctors, journalists, lawyers, architects and clergy. … They were the Founding Fathers. … What has changed in our culture? Everything. The world has been turned upside-down for white children. In our schools the history books have been rewritten and old heroes blotted out, as their statues are taken down and their flags are put away.
Ironically, while French has said that his “life’s work” has been “building a conservative movement that represents our nation’s best hope for the greatness Trump claims to crave,” French’s candidacy could help install Hillary Clinton as President and put her in a position to end forever the chances of the conservative movement’s electoral success.
As National Review’s Rich Lowry seemed to suggest more than a decade ago, large-scale Latin American immigration will be “suicide” for the Republican Party. As National Review warned two decades ago, “The Republican hour is rapidly drawing to a close … being drowned — as a direct result of the 1965 Immigration Act.”
Today, the U.S. foreign-born population is already at an all-time high of 42.4 million. Every three years, the U.S. adds another city of Los Angeles made up entirely of foreign-born immigrants. Yet Clinton has publicly released on her website a plan to dissolve the nation’s borders within her first 100 days in office.
Similarly, while French claims to be concerned about the rapid pace of Muslim immigration, his candidacy could help install a president who is openly campaigning on expanding Muslim migration. Based on the minimum numbers she has put forward thus far, Clinton would import 730,000 permanent migrants from the Muslim world during her first term alone.
Yet admittedly, French is not opposed to all aspects of a Clinton presidency. As French has previously said, “On trade, Clinton will almost certainly be superior to Trump”— noting that Clinton “would probably maintain the trade-policy status quo, and while that status quo creates winners and losers — as any status quo would — free trade has long been an overall positive for American families.”
The Republican electorate, however, seems to disagree. While many candidates in the GOP primary championed French’s views of ideological “free trade,” those candidates were resoundingly rejected by voters.
Kristol’s Betrayal gets Serious
May 30, 2016Kristol’s Betrayal gets Serious, Front Page Magazine, David Horowitz, May 30, 2016
Reprinted from Breitbart.
Over the Memorial Day Weekend, Bill Kristol doubled down on his betrayal of this country with a pair of tweets:
“Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate–an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.”
“Those accused of betraying GOP by opposing Trump can take heart from P. Henry 251 years ago today: ‘If this be treason, make the most of it!’”
This fatuous invocation of an American patriot to justify the betrayal typifies the arrogant disregard for political realities shared by all those involved in a defection that could produce even greater disasters than the Obama era’s 400,000 deaths by jihad and 20 million refugees across the Middle East.
A week earlier a Never Trump diatribe appeared in National Review, written by Charles Murray. To summarize why “Trump is unfit outside the normal parameters” to be president, Murray cited these words by NY Times columnist David Brooks:
Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa. . . . He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12.
This is a perfect instance of “Trump derangement syndrome,” the underlying animus that motivates Kristol and his destructive cohorts. Dismissing Trump as an ignoramus and a stunted twelve-year old is the stuff of schoolyard put-downs, not a serious critique of someone with Trump’s considerable achievements. Yet this is typical of Trump’s diehard opponents on the right.Is Trump more unprepared than Barack Obama whose qualification for the presidency was a lifetime career as a leftwing agitator? And how did that work out? Despite the lacunae in his executive resume, Obama is now regarded as “one of the most consequential presidents in American history” by reasonably qualified experts.
Can Trump be reasonably criticized, and is he something of a loose cannon? Of course he can, and yes he is. But criticisms that focus exclusively on the candidate miss the larger reality of this election, which is not merely a contest between two candidates but a clash between two parties and constituencies with radically differing views of what this country is and should be about, and even more importantly about the threats we face and how to deal with them.
Obama’s most consequential domestic legislation is the Affordable Care Act, which he had no part in writing. It was the work of leftwing think tanks and the congressional Democrats. So it will be with Trump, which is why all the blather about his vagueness or impracticality on policy issues is beside the point. Will he build a wall the length of the Mexican border? Probably not. But will he secure the border? Probably so. Will a Democrat – whether Hillary, Bernie or Joe Biden, secure our borders and stop the flow of illegals, criminals and terrorists? Certainly not. In addition to their decades long war for amnesties and open boarders, Democrats are responsible for the more than 350 “Sanctuary Cities” that openly defy federal law and provide safe havens for those same illegals, criminals and terrorists.
Open borders, Sanctuary Cities, importing unvetted Muslim refugees from the Middle East are but the tip of the iceberg in assessing the threat that the Democratic Party and its candidate (whoever it is) pose to America’s national security. For twenty-three years since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the Democratic Party has been the party of appeasement and retreat in the holy war that fanatical Muslims have declared on us. The first bombing of the World Trade Center misfired but still killed 6 people and wounded 1,000 others. Clinton never visited the site while his administration insisted on treating it as a criminal act by individuals who needed to be tried in criminal courts, an attitude that would culminate in Barack Obama’s refusal to recognize that we were in a war at all, and certainly not one with fanatical Muslims. To a man and woman the Democratic Party’s elected officials continue to participate in and support this denial.
Following the first World Trade Center bombing, there were three more devastating attacks on American assets by al-Qaeda’s barbarians during the Clinton administration, with no response and no change of mind towards the nature of the threat. There were also massive security breaches, including the theft by Communist China of America’s nuclear arsenal and the publishing of all our hitherto classified data from America’s nuclear weapons tests. Clinton’s leftist Secretary of Energy published the reports for the world to see, as she put it, “to end the bomb-building culture.
Following the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration focused on Afghanistan, which had provided al-Qaeda with a base to attack us, and Iraq, which had violated 16 Security Council resolutions designed to enforce the Gulf War truce, which Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein had repeatedly violated and prevent him from reviving the massive chemical and nuclear weapons programs we had destroyed. In 1998 Saddam threw the U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, a further violation of the Gulf War truce and a clear sign of his determination to revive his weapons programs. Embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton fired 451 cruise missiles into Iraq, a pointless response that was correctly seen by critics at the time as an attempt to deflect attention from his appearance before the grand jury looking into his personal disorders.
The Bush administration put 200,000 troops on Iraq’s borders, which prompted Saddam Hussein to re-admit the inspectors, but then to throw obstacles in their path. Bush went before the UN and secured a 17th Security Council resolution, unanimously passed, in the form of an ultimatum to Saddam to destroy any weapons of mass destruction he possessed and provide proof that he had done so. Bush also went to Congress and got an authorization for the use of force from Senate but not House Democrats. The ultimatum date came and went, and to prevent the word of the United States and the commitment of 200,000 troops from meaning nothing, Bush proceeded to invade Iraq. But before he did so he gave Saddam the option to quit the country in which case the invasion would be called off. A simpler measure would have been to assassinate Saddam, since he was the Iraq problem. But thanks to a law passed by the post-Watergate Democrats the CIA is prevented from assassinating foreign leaders, which made the invasion necessary.
Within three months of the invasion, with American troops still in harms’ way. The Democrats who had authorized the use of force and spoken in favor of the removal of Saddam turned against the war and began a five-year campaign to sabotage it. The Democrats reversal – and betrayal of our men and women in arms – was triggered by a presidential primary in which a leftwing candidate, Howard Dean, was running away with the Democratic nomination. This betrayal prevented us from pursuing Saddam’s generals and chemical weapons into Syria, and bringing Assad to heel. Bush managed to rescue the war effort and defeat al-Qaeda on the battlefield through the “surge” that Democrats opposed. But then Obama took charge and implemented, the Democrats’ America-is- guilty platform of appeasement and retreat, creating a power vacuum in Iraq and Syria that ISIS quickly filled. At the same time, the Democrats have systematically taken down our military which is now at its lowest levels since World War II.
This is the issue that defines the coming election. A party in denial about the Muslim holy war against America and its allies, whose basic instinct is to weaken America’s defenses and enable her enemies, is opposed by a party that wants to rebuild America’s strength, secure our borders and put the safety of our people first.
The Kristol attack on the Republican Party and its candidate Donald Trump, is an attack on all Americans, and needs to be seen in that light.
But is Trump nasty enough?
May 25, 2016But is Trump nasty enough? American Thinker, James Lewis, May 25, 2016
Donald Trump, we are assured by the first two big pages of Google when you search for “Trump news,” is the meanest, nastiest, most racist (etc., etc.) son of a bachelor to come down the pike in many a long year. Our angelic media cultists are shocked, shocked by… (etc., ad nauseam). The GOPe has battled heroically to protect us from this beast, but the idiot voters out in the boonies (etc., etc., you remember the rest). So here we are, stuck with a nominal Republican who actually fights. Forty million ticked-off voters are backing him, and they don’t care about niceties. Being nice got this country into the ungodly mess we have today. The other word for “nice” is “gimme da money, sucker!”
I didn’t like it when Trump insulted Carly Fiorina in the debates, and I hope that backstage he has apologized to her. But it’s pretty clear why he performed his spectacular war dance in the debates. It’s not Jeb Bush who was the big target. It’s the embedded Washington power cult, both nominal parties, the Permanent Government now grown fat and lazy with trillions of dollars regardless of performance, the corrupt city machines in Chicago and New York, which are now state and regional political machines, the Senioriate in Congress — people with enough seniority to laugh at passing presidents — the radical Lefties Obama has planted as delayed-action bombs in the bureaucracy to explode in future “leaks” and “exclusives” for their pals at the New York Times, the Soros money-power cult that finances and directs the Democratic radical base, tens of thousands of lobbyists who have welcomed the Muslim Brotherhood and similar sweethearts to their moneyed ranks, and the NYT-WaPo Organs of Propaganda who put old Soviet apparatchiks to shame.
Question: Are the real power brokers in DC sufficiently scared yet to listen to fed-up voters?
Probably not. Right now if the Don dropped his famous line “You’re Fired!” nothing would happen. Nothing.
The Donald drove our old, beloved National Review into spectacular hysterics, where it is still stuck, trying to figure out how to climb down from its tall tree without looking ridiculous. Still, a hoo-hah may turn out to be useful, since any comfy power cult can use a good purgative every few years. It’s been too long since Bill Buckley graced its pages. Those terrified old moths flying out after the Donald’s O-kaze (Japanese great wind) are already settling down on more peaceful pools in the swamp.
The big, big question is whether anything can shake our deeply dysfunctional establishment, which actually welcomed the Nazi-era Muslim Broederbund with open arms, including Muslim Sister Huma and her hubbie the exhibitionist. The Ikhwan feeds Muslim terrorism, and has ever since 1929. Its high point was the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the greatest Arab peacemaker of the 20th century. Now the Brotherhood has its tentacles deep into the Clintons (witness Sister Huma and Hillary), as well as in Turkey, which has just announced that Überfuehrer Erdogan is taking dictatorial power in the only Muslim nation that managed to keep a modern, tolerant state alive for fifty years. Just to demonstrate the new power of neo-Ottomanism, Erdogan ordered his US-equipped air force to shoot down an annoying Sukhoi-24 (from behind, violating agreed-on flight rules), and killed the surviving pilot who ejected and was parachuting down. Putin was trying to embarrass Erdogan by exposing criminal collusion between Turkey and the demonic followers of ISIS, an obvious collusion that has been ignored by Barack Hussein Obama and NATO. So Erdogan shot down the Russian jet that was getting too close to his own ISIS-oil smuggling operation. Now the Russians have backed off Erdogan, who is stilling getting billions of dollars of Iraqi oil stolen by the Islamic State, when it isn’t massacring Christian children for their parents’ religion.
None of this, none, should be happening. The greatest moral and strategic failure of the West since the Cold War has been to collude in the rise of Jihad. Not just tolerate. Not just retreat, but actively collude in a criminal movement by any definition of international humanitarian law. In the aftermath of World War II and the Nuremberg Trials, the West uniformly agreed that genocide was about as evil as evil gets. Terrorism was clearly understood as deliberate murder and mayhem directed at innocent non-combatants purely for political gain. Armies wore uniforms and insignia that clearly identified them as combatants, and therefore more likely to be targeted than innocent bystanders. Von Clausewitz had nothing but contempt for the irregular Cossacks who hid in the general population in the wake of national armies, to rape, loot and kill non-combatants. War is the worst thing people do to each other except for ISIS-type outright sadistic killing of the most innocent for the sake Allah and his bloodthirsty priesthood.
Post-WWII rules of combat emerged against the fresh history of the Rape of Nanking and the Holocaust. With the crumbling of the Soviet Empire it looked as if domestic mass-murder might also be almost universally condemned. Millions of people expressed noble intentions. Now we can see that the Rad-Left/Jihad alliance was already being planted in the 1960s and 1970s, according to Admiral James Lyons and others. The United Nations lost every last shred of decency when the genocidal Sudan was elevated to the Human Rights Commission of the General Assembly, and Kofi Annan literally stood by and did nothing during the Rwanda genocide.
Nobody knows these days how to define “terrorism,” but before the rise of the Left/Jihad Axis of Evil, the meaning of terrorism was clear enough. Terrorism is murder, plain and simple, deliberate murder against civilians, regardless of age, gender and all the rest. Every civilized nation has incorporated post-WWII definitions of criminal murder of civilians in its codes of military justice. The Dutch Army has punished its own soldiers who stood by during the Srebrenica massacres and did nothing. The United States, Britain, Israel, and a few other countries enforce rules of decency in combat.
But the United Nations has surrendered completely to the dark side, singling out Israel and favoring Jihad. According to the “authoritative” ulema of Saudi Arabia, the ruling priesthood, ISIS is doing nothing un-Islamic. The Ayatollahs of Iran advocate nuclear genocide every single day, and we just found out that the White House used a thirtyish English Lit major to lie to a compliant media about the contemptible US-Iran deal. But he is just a scapegoat. American collusion with genocide-promoting Ayatollahs comes from the top, and dontcha forget it.
Of course Anti-American hatred is rife at the Jihad-controlled UN and the massively corrupt EU, all busily revising the truth to make the 7th century war theology look normal.
These are the defining events of the Obama era. They are not incidental side effects. They are completely intentional, and the once-proud city of Washington, DC, is now completely degraded, morally and even in matters of national survival. George Washington was an intensely, even an obsessively moral man, a man who kept a diary to track his own faults, where he fell short of his own ideals. It was not an unusual habit in the founding generation of the United States. Everybody knew about political, sexual, and moral corruption, because they could see it in plain sight in France, England, Ireland and the rest. The Founders knew all about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. They understood history and they understood politics, because they understood human nature. But in spite of their intimate knowledge of the worst things that people can do, they had higher hopes for the New World.
Donald Trump is fighting to become the new broom in the fetid swamps of DC. His voters don’t care much about nice manners, maybe because they know or suspect the Augean stables that need cleaning. They are right on the facts and right on the moral issues. They are placing their hopes in Trump, who is a mere human being, no more and no less.
It will take more than one person to make things better. Trump has been quietly telling the truth about taboo subjects like Jihad and the puritanical strictures of PC. The newsies are predictably fainting in horror, or pretending to. But morally they are fluff, blowing with the winds of fashion, from day to day. Total lightweights, every single one. The web-based media are both freer and more morally serious.
Trump is a serious guy, I believe, since he has been talking about the same policies in the same words since 1988. He has been consistently close to the mainstream of conservative thought, on almost all the things that matter. The media obsessed with trying to destroy him, and he has survived so far. (Without help from National Review and The Weekly Standard).
The liberal attacks will never stop. If they ever do, it will mean that Trump is finished. This is a fight, and it will remain contentious as long as the Left controls the corporate media. Get used to it. Flags and parades come long after the war is over, if ever.
But Trump has the right enemies.
It will take a lot of people, working together to rescue the country and the culture, to make a difference.
Abraham Lincoln’s generals kept losing battles to Robert E. Lee’s more agile forces in the first part of the Civil War. Finally, in despair, Lincoln asked “Where can I find a general who fill fight?” The answer was Ulysses S. Grant, who was not a perfect human being.
American voters have been asking the same question.
Now we have a general who will fight.
He’s not just a pretty face. In fact, he’s not even a pretty face.
But he’s got a good sense of humor, and so far he’s beaten a lot of the competition.
At some point, if he succeeds, he will need a lot of support from people who share the same basic values. Many voters are skeptical, which is the right thing to be.
But this is the best chance we’ve had in many years. If Trump is good enough — not perfect, just good enough — he will need a lot of help.
It’s up to you.
Mitt Romney ends recruiting efforts for an independent candidate
May 18, 2016Mitt Romney ends recruiting efforts for an independent candidate, CNN Politics, Eric Bradner and Jim Acosta. May 18, 2016
Washington (CNN) Mitt Romney won’t launch a third-party presidential campaign of his own and has stopped trying to recruit somebody else to do it.
The 2012 Republican nominee had attempted to recruit a challenger to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But prospects like Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse said no, and Romney is now dropping his efforts, a source familiar with Romney’s thinking told CNN. The news was first reported by Yahoo News.
It’s the latest blow to the “Never Trump” movement — a group of conservatives led by Romney, blogger Erick Erickson and The Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol — to find an alternative to Trump.
Romney still hopes a candidate will emerge. But an adviser to the “Never Trump” efforts confirmed Tuesday night that the efforts are looking grim.
Part of the challenge, a key “Never Trump” official said, is that prospective candidates need to hear a campaign plan that involves money, staffing, viability, key states to target and a plan to get onto the presidential debate stages.
But the people making the pitches, the official said, “aren’t campaign managers. They’re writers, activists and politicians. You need someone to say, ‘this is how I’d make this real.’ The odds remain low.”
A list of prospects that include Sasse, Romney, former Marine Gen. James Mattis, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Ohio Gov. John Kasich have all publicly said they’re not willing to launch campaigns at this stage.
Romney had been heavily involved in the recruiting efforts. He encouraged Sasse, the freshman Nebraska Republican, to run — but Sasse, who has three small children, said he’s not in a position to consider it.
Meanwhile, GOP officials are maneuvering to shut down talk of an independent candidate.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Sunday that a third-party bid would be a “suicide mission.”
“They can try to hijack another party and get on the ballot, but, look, it’s a suicide mission for our country because what it means is that you’re throwing down not just eight years of the White House but potentially 100 years on the Supreme Court and wrecking this country for many generations,” Priebus said on “Fox News Sunday,” anticipating that a conservative third-party candidate would split the Republican vote and ensure a Democrat wins the White House.
Trump’s Moment
May 13, 2016[M]ight we make Trump the precedent-shattering break from historical practice? We very well might, for the simple reason that only someone who is genuinely an outsider—a way outsider in every way—like Trump stands a chance of restoring some semblance of sensible government. One can imagine a President Trump governing like “President Dave” in the movie from the mid-1990s, and saying “Why do we have 55 federal job training programs? How about eliminating at least two-thirds of them?” Rinse and repeat. In other words, what is required is a disposition much different than Ross Perot’s risible slogan of “getting under the hood and fixin’ it.”
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I recant none of my previous criticisms of Trump’s unsuitability to be president, but the case that he—and he alone—has an unprecedented opportunity to disrupt (in the right ways) the crisis of American government today deserves to be understood. The most sophisticated, though perhaps sophistical, case comes from our friends at the Journal of American Greatness, though even they admit that they may be reading more into Trump than is there. (And c’mon Decius, no one who uses the term “noetic heterogeneity” is going to get a job in the Trump Administration.)
I have a simpler case, and, unusual for me, it doesn’t require any classical metaphysics. I keep coming back to the curious fact that so many Bernie Sanders voters (almost half in West Virginia) say they will vote for Trump if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination. This can’t be because they think Trump is a socialist. And I doubt the dislike of Hillary sufficiently explains it either.
I think the explanation lies in this chart:
This trend is well-known among public opinion survey monkeys, and it is worth observing several things. First, the overall decline in public confidence in the competence of the federal government. Second, notice the two places where the trend reverses—during the Reagan years, and right after 9/11, when President Bush and the national government was wholly focused on its chief responsibility: defending the nation. Third, it is conspicuous that there has been no upturn at all under Obama. You’d think he could expect some bump even from a weak economy. If you break down this data by party (see next chart) you can see that Obama doesn’t even get much of a bump up from Democrats.
Finally, look at public opinion about the government from this point of view, which finds that 79 percent of Americans—four out of five—are frustrated or angry with the federal government.
Some observations. First, you’ll note in the first chart that back in the early 1960s, public confidence in the federal government was fairly high, even though liberals told us that the Eisenhower years were dreadful, etc. As James Q. Wilson once pointed out, in 1960 what most people had in front of them was a government that had successfully accomplished some large things: it had won a World War in short order; it had educated millions of troops who came home from that war through the G.I. Bill; it has begun the interstate highway system, an eminently practical undertaking. California built a huge water project (for people back then—imagine that) and other things.
In those days, the government wasn’t trying to solve poverty, promote self-esteem, heal our souls, etc. It[s pretty easy to see that public confidence in the federal government began its long term decline exactly when the government became incompetent at foreign and domestic policy simultaneously. Liberalism has never recovered from this. But neither has the Republican Party ever achieved much serious reform. And the quagmire of the Iraq War under Bush deprived Republicans of an example of the one thing they were supposed to be able to do better than Democrats. (Yes, the surge worked, and we prevailed before Obama threw it away. But it cost too much and came too late to stave off the political damage to Republicans.)
Meanwhile, what do liberals want to build today? No new dams or highways, but high speed rail that no one will ride and urban transit systems (like DC’s Metro) that they can’t maintain. A health care system that remains hated by a majority of Americans. An airport security system that everyone knows is a costly joke. Need I go on? Liberals and the media would like everyone to think that people are disgusted with “gridlock” in Washington (which is only liberal code for saying conservatives should unilaterally disarm so government can do even more things). I don’t think that’s it at all. I think a majority are disgusted with an incompetent government. The mode of public conversation about the federal government is contempt, not frustration that it isn’t doing even more.
Most of the leading candidates of both parties talk about “reform,” but mostly offer mere tinkering. Republicans offer tax cuts; Democrats offer more free stuff. Neither is credible any more. Which brings us to Trump. His difference from the political class is obvious, and has been widely remarked upon, so I won’t repeat that part of the story. Bottom line: we reached a point of such bipartisan disgust with the government that someone like Trump looks like the only kind of person who could conceivably take it on.
One more key political fact, though: We have never elected someone with no prior experience in public office at all to the presidency. (I count being supreme commander of Allied armies in WWII—Eisenhower—as experience in public office. Ditto Grant, etc.) Only once has a major party ever nominated someone from the business world with no experience in public office: Wendell Willkie in 1940. He was a very credible figure, and might have won in the absence of the growing shadow of war.
So might we make Trump the precedent-shattering break from historical practice? We very well might, for the simple reason that only someone who is genuinely an outsider—a way outsider in every way—like Trump stands a chance of restoring some semblance of sensible government. One can imagine a President Trump governing like “President Dave” in the movie from the mid-1990s, and saying “Why do we have 55 federal job training programs? How about eliminating at least two-thirds of them?” Rinse and repeat. In other words, what is required is a disposition much different than Ross Perot’s risible slogan of “getting under the hood and fixin’ it.”
Does Trump understand the nature and magnitude of the problem, and thereby his extraordinary opportunity? I’m doubtful, but he just might kindof, sortof grasp it in his instinctual, elemental way. And his very brashness might be just the kind of approach to accomplishing a few things.
You can find the extensive background to the three charts shown here from the Pew Research Center.
Donald Trump, Bill Whittle and Republican Principles
May 11, 2016Donald 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.
Clueless Republicans Don’t Realize It’s the Democrats Who Have the Problem
May 11, 2016Clueless Republicans Don’t Realize It’s the Democrats Who Have the Problem, PJ Media, Roger L. Simon, May 10, 2016
I’m a bit perplexed with the continued resistance of so many of my right-wing brothers and sisters to Donald Trump. If it’s just his brash style and vulgar taste, his preference for glittery gold over brushed nickel or flat black for his bathroom fixtures, I could understand it. I’m a flat black guy myself. But it’s so much more than that.
The latest “betrayal” is that Trump admitted his tax plan was negotiable Imagine that—a tax plan being negotiated between the administration and Congress! Never heard of that before…. oh, wait.
Never mind that the Trump plan, even negotiated, would be considerably lower than just about any on offer and well within the parameters of conventional GOP proposals. (Now be honest—who would you rather have negotiating for you, Donald Trump or Paul Ryan? Who do you think would get a better result?) Nevertheless The Donald, in the opinion of the cognoscenti, once more has shown himself to be a feckless character not worthy of support—and the Republican gulf widens.
Or so we’re supposed to believe, even though he has the nomination completely nailed down, signed, sealed and delivered, everything but set in bronze.
Meanwhile, to almost everyone’s surprise, the Democrats are still fighting, their internal enmity growing as Comrade Bernie wins primary after primary, sometimes by large majorities, and Lady Hillary clings to her super delegates like a three-year-old to a blanket. What happens if she loses California? According to West Virginia exit polls, a full third of Democratic primary voters are ready to defect to Trump. In the latest poll of swing states, Donald is already ahead of Clinton in Ohio and neck-and-neck in Florida and Pennsylvania. And the big show is just getting started.
It is the Democrats, not the Republicans, that have the problem, but you wouldn’t know it if you watched, say, The Kelly File or had your Internet perpetually wired to National Review or The Weekly Standard, where the writing is as elegant as the thinking, these days, is often fuzzy. The Democrats are fighting a real war of ideas, disreputable though those ideas may be, while the Republicans fight a status war among themselves, a battle over control, not, except in the margins, over ideology.
Am I wrong? Remind me again where Trump, at least currently, is not a conservative? Taxes, check. Deficit, check. Immigration, check. Sanctuary cities, check. Strong defense, check. Supreme Court, check. Veterans, check. Common core, check. Iran deal, check. Israel, check. Healthcare, check. Pro-life, check…. Oh, yes, Planned Parenthood. He thinks the part of that operation that treats cervical cancer is okay. What a sin.
But…but…but… he has those whacky ideas on NATO and nuclear weapons and trade.
Are they so whacky? Other nations maybe should pay the part of NATO they contracted to. And the Japanese and South Koreans themselves have been talking about building nukes. Wouldn’t you after eight years of Obama? And then trade, who would doubt it could have been negotiated better, considering how our foreign policy deals have been negotiated?
And of course there’s the matter of Muslim immigration. He wants that restricted for now. So do most Americans, according to polls. Again, this is the opening point of a negotiation. Who knows where it will end? But no one, other than the extreme left, would like to see the Syrian refugees pouring in. Trump will have the public on his side in preventing it.
As I said, the real problem is with the Democrats. They are the ones in true disarray and are likely to remain so through their convention. This is a huge gift to the Republicans if they can only suck it up, shelve their egos, get together and take advantage of it. It doesn’t matter whether you are a neocon, a social con, a libertarian, a financial con or just a plain con. Ideology is so last year. (Well not completely, but it doesn’t have to be on the front burner all the time, does it?) Just do it.
Trump: Unexpected and Unconventional but Suited for Our Times
May 11, 2016Trump: 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.
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