Erick Erickson, unlike so many others, is a real conservative who is able to stay in touch with reality.
In 2008, I held my nose and voted for John McCain. “If you don’t vote for him, Barack Obama will win,†they said. Barack Obama won anyway.
In 2012, I held my nose and voted for Mitt Romney. “If you don’t vote for him, Barack Obama will win,†they said. Barack Obama won anyway.
Now in 2016, they tell me if I don’t vote for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton will win. I suspect she will anyway. But I am done holding my nose for a Republican candidate.
I could do so with Romney and McCain because, at the end of the day, though I disagreed with them on a lot of policy, I did not think either was a profoundly immoral person …
Donald Trump is different. … No one enters Trump’s orbit without getting stained. Pastors suddenly think God is off his throne and the only way to get him back is to vote for a man who supports gay marriage and men in their daughters’ bathrooms. Pro-life activists demand we vote for a man who wants to keep open Planned Parenthood. Small government conservatives demand we support a man who wants a powerful Presidency and a strong Washington. Free trade Republicans demand we vote for a protectionist who would punish any business that sets up shop elsewhere. Border security Republicans demand we vote for a man who hired illegal aliens for cheap labor and who, until he ran for President, supported open borders.
Enough.
I’m not holding my nose for a Republican candidate for President who is not a Republican. I will not hold my nose and vote for a man who funded the Clinton machine for years and had them at his wedding. I will not vote for a man who funded Democrats against Republicans then funded establishment Republicans against conservatives. I will not hold my nose for a man who mocks the values I hold dear. I will not hold my nose and vote for a man who mocks my God.
And I tell you this truthfully — if you vote for Donald Trump, do not ever expect a better candidate. Support for Trump sets a threshold for immoral cretins running for office. If he can get your vote, they can get your vote. You will find no better candidate in the future if Trump is who you support now.
Donald Trump has no virtue. He has no good character. And he has provided no good argument for me to vote for him other than that he is not Clinton. He’s just a Clinton donor who is as morally flawed and terrible as her.
Ferster was hoping to put his archery skills to good use September 11, 2016, but not on a bear, and certainly not in a life-or-death situation. He and his 11-year-old brother, Lane, were elk hunting in Montana’s Crazy Mountains when a black bear responded to their cow call.
“We weren’t even fifteen minutes out of the pickup and I decided to cow call twice,†Ferster told the Billings Gazette.
The bear burst from nearby cover and closed to within 15 yards in an instant. Ferster said it appeared to be after the “elk†and not after he and his brother. Ferster has had this occur before while elk hunting, so he raised his hands and shouted at the bear as he had done in the past.
This bear, however, wasn’t deterred.
The bear began pouncing up and down on its front legs, much like a grizzly does when it presses down on a recently killed animal. Ferster is used to dealing with grizzlies, too, so much so that he has quit hunting in several areas that held the bigger bears. But despite his usual caution, he had failed to bring either a handgun or bear spray with him on this elk hunt.
He drew his bow in readiness for a possible attack, but his movement caused the bear to surge toward him.
“He came at 100 miles an hour,†Ferster said. “I had a split second to aim and hit him in the only place that would stop him in his tracks.â€
That place was the eye. His arrow met the bear’s left eye, driving inward and upward through the bear’s head. It dropped the bear almost at Ferster’s feet, the broadhead lodged just inside its skull and the nock touching Ferster’s leg.
James Kirchik takes a 75-Year-Old Harper’s story, “Who Goes Nazi?” and finds that it often applies word-for-word in the current American context.
Written by Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, the article presents readers with the aforementioned “macabre parlor game†in which she secretly assesses which guests at a random social function might “go Nazi†given the proper political and social conditions. As Thompson keenly observed from her time in Germany, there was no single demographic “type†of Nazi supporter; workers and businessmen and intellectuals and landed gentry all backed Adolf Hitler’s political movement, just as workers and businessmen and intellectuals and landed gentry opposed it. There were even Jews, Thompson wrote, “who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis.†Nazism, Thompson argues, “appeals to a certain type of mind,†not a rigid composite. As such, her article is a timeless analysis of the authoritarian mentality and makes for disturbingly relevant reading today. …
“Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi,†Dorothy Thompson wrote. “Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them. Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.†… These people are lacking “something in them,†a moral code, and their very large numbers are a troubling indicator of a rot in the American soul.
