Erick Erickson, like the rest of us, found the first presidential debate a painful and unseemly experience, endured without anesthetic.
Holt had an entire section of the debate dedicated to cybersecurity and let Donald Trump take the business to Hillary Clinton over her emails. Except Trump did not. Yes, there was a specific question about Clinton’s emails earlier in the debate, but Holt set it up perfectly for Trump to take on hacking and security of her emails and Trump repeatedly failed to litigate the issue.
For her part, Clinton failed miserably to build the case against Trump about stiffing middle class workers. She tried, but she did a very poor job of it. It came across flat and emotionless. But, like John Kasich, we now know her father’s occupation.
Trump came across stronger in the beginning, but as the night went on he yelled more and more. He interrupted more and more. He was more and more off putting and annoying. All Clinton had to do was smile and laugh at him.
The Clinton criticism of Trump turned out to be true. She repeatedly baited him and Trump took the bait every single time. He hurt himself on the issue of his taxes and then set himself on fire with the birther issue. Clinton, however, never knew when to shut up. She was the Neil deGrasse Tyson of politics, taking the joy out of Christmas songs by too much needless and boring exposition.
At the end of the night, Clinton outperformed Trump only because she came across as less angry.
Ben Domenech, at the Federalist, explains that Cruz’s unexpected move was indeed a calculated and prudential sell-out.
[Cruz’s change of position] came due to those who had been some of Cruz’s most prominent backers. The Mercer family and Peter Thiel played critical roles in elevating Cruz from a virtual unknown in the state of Texas to knocking off a popular Lieutenant Governor in an extremely competitive primary. Now they are prominent backers of Donald Trump, and the threat of a well-backed primary campaign for Cruz in 2018 was increasingly real, with Rep. Michael McCaul and former Gov. and DWTS star Rick Perry showing themselves to be very competitive against him. Cruz’s former media backers had turned on the populist, and the potential for a well-backed challenger against Cruz in Texas was real. Had Trump lost narrowly to Hillary Clinton, as seems the likeliest outcome today, the timing of Cruz’s race would’ve made him public enemy number one among the Trump crew.
A move by Ted Cruz to endorse Trump in Cleveland wouldn’t have satisfied anyone already opposed to Cruz, but it would’ve seemed like par for the course among all the Republicans who’ve lined up to back the nominee, which now includes all the candidates this cycle except for Jeb Bush and John Kasich. The move to endorse now seems ideologically baseless, because it is. It seems like an act of political self-defense, because it is. And it seems opportunistic, because it is.
You know how if you are ever on an execution squad, one person has blanks instead of bullets, and you don’t know which of you it is?
To save the national conscience, I think those in charge of the elections this year should have two identical boxes. One is a ballot box, one a shredder.
Each person is given two ballots, and puts one in each box. You don’t know which box is which.
If you’re absolutely decided for one of the horrors running, good for you. you can vote both ballots the same. But if you don’t want to vote for either, and don’t want it on your conscience, you can leave it in the lap of the gods. Vote the down ticket according to your conscience, fill the top of each ticket with one of the ass-clowns and rest easy. It was not you but the fates.
Regular readers must be aware by now what I think of Donald Trump. The hell of it is: Joss Whedon’s tv programs and movies are good. They are filled with wit and with a genuine appreciation of the human capacity for heroism. But, politically, Joss Whedon is obviously a totally self-congratulatory conformist airhead.
Whedon has started his own Super PAC, called “Save The Day,” which is intended, just like Spike’s self-sacrifice in the final episode of Buffy to close the hell mouth, save the world from ending, and… elect Hillary Clinton!
Joss Whedon is going to do his personal bit to save the world from a Trumpocalypse by producing a series of videos featuring famous Hollywood actors, all self-importantly preening for the camera while delivering cutesy, but puerile, admonitions to register and vote… against Trump and in favor of everything really stupid people believe to be good.
Yech! One wanted to believe that Tony Stark (Robert Downey) is smart. The sad truth is obviously that he is a total waste, and might just as well go back to the cocaine. One used to believe that Julianne Moore was desirable. The sad reality is that she is a left-wing shrew with a foul mouth.
These people are so incredibly stupid, so incredibly self-entitled, and so incredibly annoying that one could almost be in favor of letting the Great Old Ones rise again and destroy the world just to be rid of them (“The Cabin in the Woods” (2012) allusion), or vote for The Donald just to spite them. Almost.
Ken Robert and I don’t agree on a few tiny details, but he has put his finger precisely on why it is impossible to support Donald Trump.
My disdain for Donald Trump has little to do with Republican vs Democrat. It has much more to do with what I was taught growing up about being a decent human being.
Much of that was taught to me by my father, a man who wasn’t perfect but always tried his best to be decent toward and honest with everyone he met. Trump is just about everything I was taught not to be, and it’s become almost all but impossible to hold onto whatever respect I once held for people I know who support him.
It doesn’t feel good to lose that respect. I was also taught to look for the good in people, and I still believe there’s good in almost everyone, but I find less of it when I hear people cheer for a man who embodies everything my father taught me to disdain: bullies, liars, blowhards, braggarts, and cheats. To me, championing a man who displays those behaviors on an almost daily basis demonstrates a fundamental flaw of character.
Based on what I was taught, you just don’t do the following: You don’t mock the disabled. You don’t disparage someone for being a prisoner of war, even if you disagree with their politics. You don’t take money from a proclaimed charitable foundation and use it to pay $20,000 for a painting of yourself to give to your spouse. You don’t claim you’ve given a million dollars to veterans that you haven’t given, then, when the press discovers and reports that you haven’t, try to cover your ass by giving it in the middle of the night before calling a press conference the following day to berate the media for calling you on your dishonesty. You don’t insinuate things about the parents of a fallen soldier you could have discovered were false by checking just because you got your precious feelings hurt when they criticized your proposed ban on people who practice their religion which is about as direct a violation of the U.S. Constitution as someone can cook up. … You don’t do so many things this man does almost every day.
If we disagree on these things, we simply don’t share the same values. If I criticize these things and your response is to laugh with derogatory glee, you come across like a toothless jackass braying as you lift a leg to take a piss on human decency.
We can debate the impact of a minimum wage hike, the best approach to healthcare, the effectiveness and constitutionality of a gun regulation proposal, and a great many other things, but human decency isn’t on my list of debatable topics anymore and it never should have been to begin with.
My father was a Republican, but he was not a straight ticket voter, and I can’t believe he would have ever cast a ballot for this man. As the father of a handicapped child who died very young, he would have severed any ties he had to Trump the day the candidate mocked a reporter’s disfiguring congenital joint disorder.
I think my father would have agreed with my basic argument against such behavior: “Fuck that asshole and the festering pile of shit he rode in on.â€
I agree with him on the basic equation that, if Trump’s rudeness, vulgarity, shameless lying, and bullying do not repel you, if you think they are cute, if you think they constitute a really clever strategy for defeating democrats and winning elections, there is something seriously wrong with you.
Publius Decius Mus (aka Mousey) is back, lying on his klinÄ“ and being interviewed by one of those self-important Alt-Right blogs, which recently sprang into existence to repair the “exhausted soil” of the Conservative Movement with “fertilizing, re-sowing, and diligent cultivation.” Well, I am skeptical of their diligence, and I think the Alt-Right is bent on sowing only the most noxious and pestilential political weeds, but I will grant that they have plenty of male cattle manure to offer to fertilize the soil.
So the anonymous guy who wrote the now-famous “Flight 93†essay — you know, the “intellectual†defense of Trump that’s been talked about endlessly for the last eight days — is now back with a “restatement,†where he responds to the multiple critiques of his first piece. I have the same problem with the restatement as I had with the first essay, and it’s the same problem I’ve had with every single allegedly intellectual defense of Trump I’ve ever read.
Simply put, these folks don’t defend the real, live Donald Trump. They create someone else entirely — we’ll call him Fake Trump — and defend Fake Trump against all comers. Fake Trump, for example isn’t going to embroil us in foreign wars. But Real Trump supported both the Iraq invasion and the Libyan intervention (Flight 93 dude calls Libya “perhaps the worst security policy mistake in US historyâ€), and during this campaign (just last week!) has supported indefinite foreign occupation for resource extraction.
Fake Trump is going to put a stop social justice crusading and defend life. Real Trump at best doesn’t care about religious liberty or abortion and at worst not only declares that Planned Parenthood does “wonderful things,†he’s arguably one of the sexual revolution’s most ardent practitioners.
Fake Trump, to quote Flight 93 dude again, is “mounting the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation.†This is spit-out-your-coffee hilarious. Real Trump doesn’t know the slightest thing about the Constitution, but he’s more than happy to suppress your free speech rights if it means the media is more compliant, and he’s more than happy to take your home from you if he can replace it with a Trump casino.
Mousey is back, responding with feigned humility to the widespread attention his Grand Trumpkin Manifesto in the Claremont Review received, and making essentially lame efforts to respond to criticism.
In the first place, I did not notice a lot of people calling Mousey “cowardly” for using that pen-name out of Livy. I think most people agreed with me in simply finding it extravagantly pretentious and downright incongruous in combining the highfalutin’ display of Classical erudition in service to the sloping-simian-forehead preference for Know-Nothing-ism redivivus which is the ideological foundation of the Trump Movement.
Secondly, the problem with Mousey’s “Flight 93” analogy is its hysterical hyperbole. Yes, Hillary becoming president would be bad, but it would not really be quite as bad a Obama being elected. Obama was a red-diaper-baby from a no-kidding Communist family straight out of the extreme radical left-wing fringe with a personal background as professional agitator and close pal of Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers. Obama was elected with the wind at his back, successfully promoted by the partisan media and entertainment industry into a Pop Culture phenomenon roughly as popular as the Beatles in 1964.
Hillary, by comparison, is just a greasy, greedy, cynical democrat pol, now old and wrinkled and with all the charisma of a Metropolitan Museum mummy. Obama walked into office with a revolutionary mandate. Hillary, if she wins, will really be a lame-duck, seat-filling an Obama Third Term that should never have occurred. The likelihood of her winning a second term is poor.
It’s always bad seeing a democrat elected, but consider the alternative.
Mousy is a delusional Trumpkin, who thinks that the Trump candidacy is actually about something political. He is obviously an idiot.
Donald Trump is not conservative. Donald Trump is not political. Donald Trump doesn’t love you or the other numbnuts and yobbos supporting him. Donald Trump knows from nothing about policy, political theory, the Constitution, the Administrative State, and he could care less.
Donald Trump is only about Donald Trump. He is the complete pragmatist. The Administrative State? Trump has been working in cahoots with the Administrative State all his life. Trump’s real estate projects were all built via special permits. concessions, and tax breaks from and political bargains with the Administrative State, and Donald has been paying off the politicians running it throughout his career. Donald Trump is an operator, not a revolutionary.
Yesterday, Trump announced a great big shiny new $159 billion unfunded Child Care entitlement, suggested by his daughter(!). There’s your revolutionary reformer of the Administrative State in action.
Does Mousey even really care about entitlements, deficits, and the Administrative State? I wonder.
He sums up his defense of Trump being not dangerous, prone to tyranny, or insane, thusly:
Trump by contrast promises not to launch misguided wars, to protect our borders, and to focus immigration policy on the well-being of the currently-constituted American people. Who is truly more moderate: the colorful loudmouth with the sensible agenda or the corrupt, icy careerist with the radical agenda?
So, the sensible agenda consists of Nativism and Isolationism?
I don’t disagree with the batrachian inhabitants of the Buchananite fever swamp about the absence of American responsibility and general undesirability of admitting Muslim “refugees.” But, I think myself that the hubbub about Hispanic laborers is foolish and misguided, and the notion of the same country that owns the Statue of Liberty building a thousand-mile anti-immigrant wall is self-contradictory.
The United States inherited from Britain, after WWII, the role of guarantor of Freedom of the Seas and Policeman of the World. It is not some kind of happy accident that the US has the dominant voice in international financial treaties, that the US dollar is the world reserve currency, and that US culture is the world standard. American economic prosperity is directly linked to America’s role of world leadership. Doubtless, White House Administrations could do a lot better job of devising coherent policies and defending them against foreign and domestic critics, but retreat and Isolationism would be a cowardly and lousy option.
And so, we arrive at the real crux of the matter. Donald Trump is not a conservative or really a Republican at all. Our ill-designed primary system misfired, our lamentable culture clocked in, the failures of our educational system were felt, and the crooked timber of humanity did it again. It should have been a landslide Republican year. There were plenty of worthy candidates, but demos gave away the nomination to a charlatan and a buffoon.
Demos prefers noise and excitement to gravity and substance every time. And, like Mousey there, a portion of demos has become infected with some ancient strains of American political pathologies, making them sick and mad.
We obviously lose whatever happens this year, but I think we probably have more to lose via the election of Donald Trump. There is the issue of Trump’s instability, irrationality, and unpredictability. You really ought not to give supreme power to a limitlessly spoiled narcissist. Rome did it a few times, and the results were not pretty.
But it’s even simpler than that. Both candidates are dishonest and gravely flawed. Either one of them, I think it is easy to predict, will preside over scandals and sensational disasters. Either one of them will soon become an albastross around that candidate’s respective party’s neck. I’d rather have the political corpse of Hillary around the democrat party’s neck. (Though I won’t vote for her.)
There is finally the danger that Trump’s election could empower within the Republican Party the stupid, primitive, grotesque Alt-Right elements which reject all real conservative principles in favor of fundamentally un-American, discredited, and reprehensible ideas. Rejecting the wise-ass morons of the Alt-Right is reason enough not to vote for Donald Trump all by itself.
The Alt-Right rejects the conservative intellectual tradition and all serious ideas in favor of Populism, yet at the same time a number of its mouthpieces are prone to strike poses of learned Classicism, using pennames out of Livy like “Publius Decius Mus,” making reference to the strategic deficiencies of Hannibal, and throwing in a bit of Greek (thymos/θῡμός) for purposes of insult.
I’m afraid that trying to pretend to be Victor Davis Hanson, Donald Kagan, or Cato the Elder while trying to peddle a combination of the politics of Pat Buchanan and Millard Fillmore does not really impress anyone.
I am referring, of course, specifically to The Flight 93 Election, the latest grand Trumpkin manifesto, which Claremont Review ought to have been ashamed of publishing.
Mousey’s thesis is, of course, arrant rubbish. Hillary is just another democrat, a democrat not even as leftist as the current 8-year inhabitant of the White House. Hillary isn’t nearly as ideological as Obama, nor is she nearly as slippery and competent as her spouse. Doubtless, were she to be elected, it would be a bad thing, and we could expect a re-play of the first Clinton presidential term. We should expect Hillary to try for One Big Leftwing Thing. If the Republicans in Congress turn back her assault, we again win the mid-term elections, Hillary pulls in her horns, and (blessed) governmental gridlock recurs. Hillary hasn’t got Bill’s gifts and there is no reason at all to assume that she would be a popular president or be likely to win re-election. On the contrary, I think there is an excellent chance that Hillary will screw the pooch, wind up buried in more scandals, and end her term putting the democrat party right behind the 8-ball for a long time to come.
Trump, on the other hand, is an extremely dangerous gamble. What might, or might not, an incredibly spoiled, willful, narcissistic 70-year-old millionaire, who may not be playing with a full deck, do? It is impossible to predict. That is the problem with making a geriatric Caligula president.
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Ben Shapiro, at Daily Wire, did a fine job of demolishing Mousey’s nonsense.
What sort of “fundamental†change is Publius looking for, you ask? (“Interesting choice of phrase, that.” — Barack Obama) Not conservatism – that’s failed: “Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption?â€
No conservative would actually write this. Decentralization and federalism, combined with a renewed societal focus on virtue implemented at a familial and communal level, are the solution to an encroaching federal government. They are the only solution.
But what is Publius’ solution? Why, Trump, of course! “[Matthew] Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion.’ That sounds a lot like Trumpism,†writes our Roman hero.
So in other words, screw conservatism, let’s get the Big Government corporatist ad hoc blue dog Democrat in here. The guy who donated to Hillary Clinton will surely fix things better than founding ideals ever have.
From there, Publius moves on to blame. Why won’t conservatives just agree with him? Because they must be paid off! “Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others…. So what do we have to lose by fighting back? Only our Washington Generals jerseys—and paychecks.†This is the last refuge of the desperate Trump advocate – everyone with whom they disagree has been bribed. The system is rigged. Someone ought to ask Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham or Breitbart.com just how much money they’ve lost backing Trump with the ardently hot passion of a thousand smoldering suns. The answer: not a dime. And they’ve gained ratings and presumably, the massive money that comes along with such ratings. Some of us have actively foregone significant money not to worship at the Trumpian altar. It’s truly incredible how Trump supporters darkly suggest that Jonah Goldberg is somehow getting rich off of opposing Trump but simultaneously say National Review is going bankrupt. Which is it, dolts?
A shock example of anti-Trump media censorship was caught on tape when Reuters ordered its cameraman to cut live footage of Trump receiving praise from African-American Bishop Wayne T. Jackson in Detroit.
The incident occurred as Jackson presented Trump with a shawl, a bible, and offered his prayers as the black audience cheered and clapped.
Perhaps aware of the devastating impact the optics of this moment would have on the media’s efforts to demonize Trump as a racist bigot, a voice is heard off-camera saying, “He’s getting a shawl!â€
The cameraman then says, “I’m shooting this, I don’t care what they say….I’ll take a demotion for this…. you?â€
“Shut it down,†insists the director,†followed by another voice asking, “Shut this down?â€
“Yes Michael, do it,†orders the director.
We then hear the word “blackout†and the camera shakes before the live feed is cut.
