23 Oct 2016

“You’re a Patriot? Did You Ever Think Reagan’s Party Would Become Putin’s Poodle?”

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2016fridge375

David Frum display his intellectual virtuosity by arguing all the possible conservative approaches to this year’s election. He gets mine pretty accurately.

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” So wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of this century’s bravest voices for human freedom. Solzhenitsyn defied a police state to speak his truth. All that’s asked of us is to vote our consciences.

Your principles reject Hillary Clinton. Your values are offended by Donald Trump. Why choose either?

People sometimes tell you to vote as if your vote were the only one that mattered. But that’s just silly. Your vote is never the only one that matters, not even in Florida in 2000.

Voting is an expressive act. It’s your opportunity to send information to the political elites. Of course, you’ll usually choose an imperfectly good enough choice over a worse choice. But sometimes the two choices are both so bad that you want to send a message to the whole system: Remember me! In 1912, nearly 1 million Americans voted for Eugene Victor Debs for president. Did they waste their votes? Debs was the only candidate promising unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, a half-day holiday on Saturdays, and old-age pensions. He lost. His ideas won. Did the Americans who voted for John Anderson in 1980 or Ross Perot in 1992 waste their votes? No, they changed politics. The Anderson voters punished the Democrats for nominating a candidate who was not liberal enough; the Perot voters punished the GOP for breaking its word on tax increases. Both parties learned their lessons—and did not repeat their mistakes.

For months, Paul Ryan urged you to swallow your distaste and vote for “the nominee” in order to advance a Republican agenda through Congress. Look at Paul Ryan’s face today. He has learned the hard way that Donald Trump cannot be trusted and will advance no agenda except his own.

Worse, Trump discredits and disgraces everything he touches. There likely won’t be a Republican party after 18 months of a Trump presidency, just a tangle of warring factions soon to be swept away by a Democratic wave in Congress in 2018. President Trump will then start making deals with the new Democratic majority, and probably more happily so—he always was a Democrat at heart, as he has repeatedly said over the past 40 years. His only consistent interest is self-enrichment. Since he’s so incompetent at business, his default mode of self-enrichment has become cheating and bilking people. Think of that in the Oval Office! Think of that at the head of the Republican Party.

Maybe you’re pro-life? Trump obviously isn’t, no matter what his surrogates preposterously assert today.

Maybe you take seriously those things you send back in 1999 and 2000 about restoring dignity to the presidency? You’ll be electing Trump despite his own on-the-record confession that he harasses and gropes women.

You recoil from the Clinton Foundation? Trump’s is sleazier—and penny-ante, too.

You’re a patriot? Did you ever think Reagan’s party would become Putin’s poodle?

The Supreme Court? If there’s one lesson to learn from Trump’s career, it is to never trust his word for anything.

Yet you don’t want to empower Hillary Clinton either! A President Clinton will probably face a Republican Congress. She’ll do a super-Obama: act by executive order, subverting constitutional restraints in order to aggrandize government and advance the social and cultural transformation of America. You can’t assent to that.

What you want to do is send a distinctly conservative protest against both Hillary Clinton’s progressive ideology and Donald Trump’s con-man narcissism. The bigger the protest vote total, the more respect your conservative ideas can demand in future. Hoist the “Don’t Tread on Me” banner, and check out who else is on the ballot: Libertarian, Independent, or Constitution Party.

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11 Feedbacks on "“You’re a Patriot? Did You Ever Think Reagan’s Party Would Become Putin’s Poodle?”"

Hrefn

Such nobility! But the assertion that votes for Anderson and Perot were transformative somehow for the major parties who “learned their lesson” is dubious. Even if true, such an effect can only influence subsequent elections. Meanwhile, we get 4 years of Hillary. And perhaps many more years of her Supreme Court nominees.

Politics is the art of the possible. It’s messy. There is no such thing as a perfect candidate. You can throw your vote away on some ideologically pure candidate, but please do not deceive yourself that it is anything but a gesture which the political world will ignore. If you stay home, you have the same net effect on the election.

I am voting for Trump because the alternative is so much worse. Read his “Gettysburg Address”. It’s actually pretty good.



Hrefn

Plus, regarding Hillary, do you really want to increase the odds of listening to that hectoring self-righteous voice for the next four years?



Cactusjack

“Our menu today is fried catshit or stewed dogshit. ” “Guess I’m not all that hungry. Just bring me a glass of water. “



Hrefn

Cactus Jack, each of ’em will make you throw up. But one of them will give you toxoplasmosis.



RICK

The claim that, by Anderson or Perot, the parties learned their lessons presumes, nay, insists upon, that things were worse then than now. For isn’t a lesson learned predicated on a betterment when speaking of futurity?

I say, for whatever lesson learned, it was to be more deceiving, more duplicitous, more cunning. Part and parcel of that is a preparation of the people to become inclined to be hoodwinked. Arise the uninformed, the tyranny of the ignorant.



Nori

David Frum is a Conservative who shares the exact same gun control beliefs as Obama,Holder, and Hillary. He would circumvent Congress to penalize and demonize firearms manufacturers the same way they did tobacco companies. If that’s what passes for Conservatism now it’s no wonder the Republican Party Reptiles are imploding.



JDZ

I am not the greatest admirer generally of David Frum. In this case, Frum was not arguing his own position, but rather offering three different approaches a conservative might take toward the coming election. I quoted the version coming closest to my own views.



GoneWithTheWind

And that is why the Republican party is known as the stupid party. Imagine the Democrats throwing a big race, especially the presidency, for any reason. They thirst for power and when they get it they use it. The Republicans, seemingly, thirst to claim that their personal belief system is the only right on and everyone else is without integrity and a moral code. that is why we will have to endure higher taxes, less constitutiional rights and And losing our jobs to millions and millions of illegal aliens.



Burke

It’s true that we’ve reached what seems an all-time low; nevertheless, since Reagan (if memory serves) it have always been a matter of chosing the lesser evil.
Sure, Trump is an unknown quantity; but, if Hillary is elected (and it seems she will be), there is no doubt at all: It doesn’t matter the size of the protest vote, Dems will have the control of SCOTUS for the next decades. And I think we can affirm with certainty: USA as we knew it can’t survive that.



WallaceLeMay1968

Most. Cuckservative. Piece. Ever.



JDZ



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