Gavin MacInnes explains why Donald Trump’s candidacy, no matter how you look at it, is a Good Thing.

I still believe Trump is a snowplow who is paving the way for Ted Cruz. At the last second, he endorses Cruz and we get all the bravado of the former with the brains of the latter. However, it’s possible Trump goes to the finish line. I ain’t mad at that, either. The Democrats, the mainstream media, neocons, liberals, and college kids are all part of the same hive. They want to fight but they don’t want to win. They’re like that crazy Latina girlfriend in a screaming panic who won’t shut up until you grab her by the wrists and say, “Shut the fuck up. I got this.” We need to throw her onto the couch, grab a beer, and get back to work. That’s ultimately what she wants too. She just doesn’t realize it yet.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Joshua Green notes that last night’s debate finally found an effective way to make Donald Trump shut up, just start a serious discussion about policy.

The broad and beleaguered field of Republican presidential candidates, all but ignored during the raucous Summer of Trump, finally found a way to silence the GOP front-runner: they talked about policy. Wednesday’s CNN debate at the Ronald Reagan presidential library began with all the bluster and histrionics we’ve come to expect from Donald Trump. He sucker-punched Rand Paul right out of the gate. He bickered with Jeb Bush. He mugged, squinted, and brooded. And then he did something no one anticipated. He fell silent.

In a wild melee that moderators struggled to control, the 11 candidates jockeyed and sparred throughout. But unlike the low-calorie Fox News debate in Cleveland, CNN’s torturous three-hour affair veered into policy issues for long stretches—stretches during which Trump entirely disappeared.

While his more polished and policy-fluent opponents delved deeply into discussions about issues ranging from how best to fight Islamic terrorism to their assessment of Supreme Court judges to marijuana legalization, Trump barely participated. When he did chime in, he had little to contribute beyond insults and boasts about how his own personal toughness and negotiating prowess would reshape the geopolitical order. Asked how, for instance, he would get the Russians out of Syria, Trump replied, “I would get along with a lot of the world leaders that this country is not getting along with.”

Trump didn’t exactly flop. His bluster and showmanship carried him through, for the most part. And the crush of candidates straining for attention filled the awkward pauses and silences left by his inability to speak in any meaningful depth about subjects besides immigration and his own wealth.

Read the whole thing.

There is a decades-old custom followed by most candidates for the presidency of wearing American flag pins on their left coat lapel. Of course, wearing an American flag lapel pin doesn’t mean very much. It doesn’t really prove that you are genuinely patriotic or genuinely love America.

But failure to follow that trivial practice tends to be noticed and to provoke comment. Barack Obama ran into questions from reporters about not wearing one back in 2007. Obama initially characteristically sneered at the custom, but pressure mounted and by the next Spring of the election year, Candidate Obama fell into line and began wearing the flag pin.

In the run-up to this election, we have another representative of the radical left-wing of the democrat party who is obviously more comfortable denouncing America for institutionalized injustice than participating in conventional displays of patriotic symbols. Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (as you can see in the above photo) has been substituting a gold lapel pin in the place of that conventional US flag.

Naturally, one wondered: Is it a small gold hammer-and-sickle? Is he wearing (sentimentally) the symbol of the IWW (Wobblies)? Looking into it, I found that I was not the first to inquire. And the correct answer may be given here.

Bernie Sanders is deliberately side-stepping the flag lapel pin issue, by wearing instead the gold badge which identifies him in the Capitol building to security as a US Senator.

After all, how could we expect Senator Sanders to wear the flag of a country like ours. Senator Sanders denounced America as unjust in a speech he delivered just yesterday evening.

[I]n my view, it would be hard for anyone in this room today to make the case that the United States of America, our great country, a country which all of us love, it would be hard to make the case that we are a just society, or anything resembling a just society today.

In the United States of America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant. ..

[T]here is no justice when so few have so much and so many have so little.

What would Sanders do if he were present for the playing on the national anthem?

Stephen L. Miller read some and tells us those emails portray a Hillary better suited to an Assisted Living facility than the White House.

If I were to approach a person on the street and list off traits like “doesn’t drive,” “needs food prepared,” “needs help with the remote control,” “needs people to bring her beverages,” “has trouble remembering things,” and “doesn’t pay her own bills” about someone anonymously, he wouldn’t think I was referring to a current presidential front-runner in the year 2015. He would think I was referring to his poor nana, whom he had to place in a home because she wouldn’t stop yelling at the lamp and was at risk of accidentally microwaving her dentures.

But, as we now know courtesy of the ongoing FOIA e-mail dump, all of these traits accurately describe the current Democratic front-runner and (as she is always eager to remind us) doting grandmother, Hillary Clinton. Amidst the e-mail revelations, an alarming pattern is developing about Clinton’s personal dependency on those inside her inner bubble. She isn’t just delegating important tasks to underlings, as any executive might; these aren’t urgent matters of national security, such as aides’ fetching satellite intelligence or the latest reports relevant to a managing executive. Rather, it appears that Hillary is either helpless or unwilling to perform even the most menial and trivial of daily tasks. In a recently released e-mail from January 3, 2010, she personally messaged an assistant, wishing her a Happy New Year, and then offered a demand list to start the year off:

I’d like to work w you to prepare a menu for Jason. Also does he give me a monthly bill for the food he buys and prepares for me? Could you or he buy skim milk for me to have for my tea? Also, pls remind me to bring more tea cups from home . . . Can you give me times for two TV shows: Parks and Recreation and The Good Wife?

Read the whole thing.

Establishmentarian James Lileks finds himself tempted to remove his JEB BUSH button and start rooting for The Donald.

The Donald, laid out the skyscraper’s blueprints, and said, “We’ve got a problem. The geological surveys were wrong, and there’s just not enough bedrock to support 95 stories. We’ll have to scale it back.”

I don’t doubt that at that moment, Trump narrows his eyes, lets the tension build, keeps his tongue as the the clock on the wall ticks — a beautiful, 19th-century clock made by one of Europe’s finest clock makers, finest pearl on the face and ivory on the sweep hand. Not that he supports killing elephants; he’s a big fan of elephants, he had a statue of one outside the Atlantic City casino, which, by the way, made more money its first year than any casino in history, the people loved it . . . Anyway, the moment builds, the clock ticks, sweat starts on the brows of the engineers.

Trump nods. Then he speaks. “Find a way.”

“You mean — double the footings and cross-brace the structure?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

Quick looks among the engineers: The legends are true. Another clears his throat: “We need an inertial dampening mechanism at the top of the structure, or it will sway in high winds. Right now, the design just has penthouses.”

Trump nods. “The views will be tremendous.”

“But people will be sickened by the motion of the structure.”

“The problem with America today is too many people are throwing up. I can change that.”

A sigh of relief around the table.

I imagine that’s how it goes, right? That’s why I know this man is such a threat. He gets things done. I look at the rest of the candidates, and I’m pretty sure not one of them ever went on-site with a hard-hat and solved the problem of weak water pressure on the 82nd floor. If Donald Trump can built a 95-story skyscraper and have a heckler ejected in a news conference, of course he can build a wall and find every illegal and put them on a bus to wherever. He’d do it by decree, right? I am so waiting for someone to do the decree thing for stuff I secretly want.

He’ll ride a horse up Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, right? Say he’ll ride a horse and I am off Jeb’s team in a second.

Hat tip to Robert Laird.