Jim Treacher (pay attention, Publius, and see how it’s done) makes the absolutely best possible case for Trump.

He is responding (angrily) to the above tweet on “American Greatness,” one of those self-important little Alt-Right sites, founded, it tells us, because “The soil of the conservative movement is exhausted. It needs fertilization, re-sowing, and diligent cultivation if it is to thrive again.”

(Personally, as a life-long Movement Conservative, I get pretty sick of this bunch or that bunch of inferior writers who want to substitute Nativism (and frequently merely as the polite, public version of White Nationalism) for Conservatism telling me that Conservatives have failed them by not winning every election and public policy battle in their short lifetimes, and therefore all conservative intellectuals should step aside in favor of Pepe the frog and Donald Trump.)

Trumpkins like Mousey have only this one argument: if you are not for Trump, you are electing Hillary, and Hillary’s election would be the worst disastrous irreversible Apocalyptic thing, and it will be all your fault!

I don’t precisely fit the paradigm of Mousey’s conservative target, who is supposed to be saying: “I’ve always found a way to support every Republican nominee and mostly have been proud to do so, even when some of them had not been my ideal candidate and I found serious reasons for disagreement. Trump is the first one I consider beyond the pale, because of” — the reasoning varies a little. “As such, I simply cannot vote for him, and I find that to be the saddest thing ever to happen in my political life.”

Like a lot of people, I have no intention of voting for either Donald or Hillary. But this is not the first time I declined to vote for the Republican nominee. I didn’t vote Nixon in 1972, the first presidential election I was old enough to vote in. I considered (correctly) that Nixon was not a conservative and was not trustworthy, and I certainly wasn’t going to vote for George McGovern, running as the candidate of commies, either. I threw away my vote by casting it (ironically) for John Schmitz, a whacky Bircher.

I also voted for neither major party candidate in 1992. I knew personally and liked George H.W. Bush, but thought his breaking his word on “no new taxes” made it impossible for me to support him. I obviously wouldn’t vote for Bubba either. So I voted that time for Pat Buchanan (a vote I have come to regret over the years). I think Trump is less conservative and even less trustworthy than Nixon, and a more preposterous presidential candidate than John Schmitz. And I’m not sad in the least. I have no problem at all declining to support Trump.

Where I guess I differ from Mousey there is I never supposed that my single vote was actually determinative, so I do not believe that my abstention from supporting Trump means I will have elected Hillary. Au contraire, I would suggest to Mousey that the people really responsible for electing Hillary (who seems, at this point, unavoidably destined to win) are all the low-grade morons who chose to support an unqualified, unelectable laughingstock with an atrocious character over a huge number of qualified and legitimate other candidates, pretty much any of whom would actually have beaten Hillary with a landslide. When Hillary wins, I have to break it to you, Publius, old boy, it will really be your fault. Jonah Goldberg and Bill Kristol did not make all you lemmings jump off the cliff.

And you can stop all the recriminations and appeals. You bozos are not qualified, not remotely, to replace serious conservative intellectuals. In the first place, you are not really conservative. Your political posture is a kind of anti-leftism buried in a larger volume of anti-elitism and xenophobia. You essentially oppose at least some significant portion of the left-wing agenda by adopting precisely the reactionary postures of irrational animosity and failed resentment that the left loves to accuse conservatives of being all about. You are the left’s dream opponents.

We are obviously not really on the same side. You guys are Nativists (if not downright 1488-ers) with your knickers in a twist over some Hispanic worker with a leaf-blower in his hand. You don’t want limited government. You want entitlements for you, just not for those other guys over there. You want a Bismarkian alliance between a government on the Right and your own White lower middle class. You are not in favor of economic liberty or laissez faire or free trade. You want protective tariffs to defend you from foreign manufacturing competition, and you want closed borders and a wall to protect you from domestic labor competition. You are not interested in defending freedom outside the United States. That kind of thing is for Jewish neocons. You want nothing that is not all about you personally. The correct foreign policy is pre-WWII “America First” isolationism. No wonder you guys are not professional conservative intellectuals. You obviously failed both Economics and History at school.

And let me add one more very important point. The rest of us are really sick and tired of hearing about how you dipshit imbeciles are impatiently waiting to take over political and intellectual leadership from the unworthy cadre presently in charge on the Right. Well, Trump is going down in flames, and you are, as your candidate would say, Losers! Yuge Losers! You have nothing to sell but resentment, bad economics, and discredited and reprehensible political impulses. The Know Nothings lost in the 1850s and they are losing again in 2016. You are not taking over anything. You will be discredited by this election, and your kind will, in future, soon cease to have influence over Conservatism or the GOP.

A FB friend writes:

Out of 16 candidates in the primary, the disaffected Republican electorate cast a little over 3 million votes for Trump, abetted by 12 million democrats voting in open GOP primaries and sent Trump to the convention with majority of the delegates. The GOP shouldn’t have prevented a floor fight, but they did and we now are expected to vote for a democrat on the GOP ticket in the presidential election.

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Another friend adds:

Utah has voted Republican since 1964. Trump has been ahead in Texas by about six points and at one stage, by just two. Romney took it by 16. Similar polls are found in other historically red states like Georgia, South Carolina, and Arizona which has been reliably Republican since Ike and has voted Democrat just once in the last 16 presidential elections. People who regularly vote GOP are abandoning the party in droves. And this didn’t start after the Tic Tac tape. In aircraft crashes this is what is called ‘Controlled Flight Into Terrain’. The only thing surprising about all of this is the near-delusional denial by some.

Do you think Bill made this face before or after Donald said Hillary would be in jail?

HuffPo:

Donald Trump on Sunday threatened to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Hillary Clinton for her use of a personal email account while she was secretary of state.

“I didn’t think I’d say this but I’m going to say it, and I hate to say it, but if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception, there has never been anything like it and we’re going to have a special prosecutor,” Trump said during the presidential debate, referring to her emails.

Clinton responded by inviting viewers to fact-check what Trump was saying on her campaign website.

“We have literally Trump, you can fact check him in real time. Last time, at the first debate, we had millions of people fact-checking. So I expect we’ll have millions more fact-checking because, you know, it is, it’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” she said.

“Because you would be in jail,” Trump said to Clinton.

The great lines keep on coming this presidential election, don’t they?

The liberal MSM is gloating this morning:

Politico: Raddatz, Cooper crack the whip

Forbes: Donald Trump Schooled By Moderators Martha Raddatz And Anderson Cooper At Second Debate

The NYT was particulary smug: Martha Raddatz and Anderson Cooper Steered Debate With Sharp Questions:

They dug for revelations, extracting news nuggets — a rarity on a debate night — like Donald J. Trump’s admission that he had used a nearly billion-dollar loss to avoid paying federal income taxes for years.

They pressed for specifics, interrupting the candidates to demand concrete strategies for handling conflict in Syria and reforming the nation’s health care system.

And they posed blunt, provocative questions at a forum that typically feels more like public broadcasting than cable news: Had Mr. Trump ever sexually assaulted a woman? Did Hillary Clinton really believe that her use of a private email server was not “extremely careless”?

The duo overseeing Sunday’s presidential debate, Anderson Cooper of CNN and Martha Raddatz of ABC News, seemed to cast off the hand-wringing pressures on this year’s crop of moderators — Is fact-checking mandatory? Are interruptions O.K.? — and put themselves directly in the mix of a high-stakes encounter.

The immediate response was praise from many journalists and some grumbling from partisans.

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Hey, Trumpkins! If Donald Trump is sooo smart and competent, not like all those low-energy democrat punching-bags in the normal GOP, and Trump is going to able to change all the rules, stop the US from being cheated, and negotiate much, much better, beautiful, yuge! smarter deals… So, how come, why is it that last night we found Donald Trump in a debate moderated by (hostile liberal butterfly) Anderson Cooper and (democrat establishment attack dog) Martha Raddatz, who both shamelessly interrupted him, kept him from successfully driving home any of his major points, curtailed his time, and who together behaved with lightly concealed democrat partisanship?

Shouldn’t a so much smarter guy be able to avoid being pushed around and manipulated this way? Wouldn’t a smarter great negotiator be able to secure for himself a balanced and fair set of debate moderators?

NYM “What If?,” February 25, 2016:

Hillary Clinton in 2016 is obviously completely different from Barack Obama in 2008. Obama entered the campaign surrounded by imaginary butterflies and unicorns. Hillary enters on her broom, accompanied by flying monkeys. Barack Obama was so lovable that every adolescent girl in America, male and female, young and old, had a crush on him. NBC’s Chris Matthews famously found his leg trembling with nearly homoerotic adoration of Obama. Nobody’s leg will be quivering for the old and wrinkly Hillary.

Obama was the Magic Negro, the wise friend from another race whose acceptance of you proves that you are exceptionally worthy, and whose aid brings about your survival or your victory in your quest. Hillary is every man’s shrewish wife, the pot-throwing termagant who drives all of America out to the nearest saloon to drown our collective sorrows. Hillary is the mean old lady, heading up the Ladies’ League For Social Reform that is going to ban everything that’s fun. Obama was Chingachgook, Queequeg, and a younger version of every Morgan Freeman character. Hillary is Lady Macbeth.

It would take a miracle effectuated by a political genius of the first water to make Hillary electable, especially in this unfavorable year. The Republican presidential nominee in 2016 has the key to the Oval Office in his pocket as long as he is normally presentable and can walk and talk.

Maybe Hillary can win after all, though, because it just so happens that she is married to a political genius of the first water. …

[I]f I were Bill, how on earth could I possibly cause the unamiable, unattractive, scandal-infested, mean old Hillary to win in this most unfavorable year?

Well, what if… what if that slick old Bill actually did think up a way? How could he do it? Well, there is one way, after all. Just suppose it was possible for Bill Clinton to hijack the GOP nomination.

Suppose Bill Clinton figured out the sole, solitary possible way that he could shove a big, fat monkey wrench into the Republican Party’s Presidential Election Campaign’s works.

Let’s say, for instance, that Old Bill knew another feller, that he had a buddy, a good friend, not in politics actually, but a fellow in some respects kind of like himself, brash, shameless, fond of the ladies, appetitive, hugely out-going, and larger-than-life. Bill’s friend, like himself, would be a wealthy and successful person, a celebrity, a performer, and a chap vigorously able to go after what he wants free of ethical inhibitions.

One can picture Bill sitting down with his pal Donald, and saying, “Donald, old boy, I need you to do Hillary and me a solid. …

then Bill (behind the scenes) masterminds The Donald’s campaign, knocking out one legitimate GOP candidate after another with shameless insults, abuse, and outright baldfaced lies.

Donald gets the nomination, but it could be that Bill has a plan in mind to sink the Trump campaign right about the end of next September. Photographs of Donald (like Berlusconi) in the sack with some underage girls just happen to fall into the hands of intrepid NY Times reporters in the nick of time. The GOP campaign sinks suddenly in scandal, while Donald smiles over the stories of his sexual prowess, and Hillary coasts in after all.

What if?

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Erik Eriksen, “I am Fully Embracing This Conspiracy Theory,” July 7th:

I am beginning to believe Trump is a Clinton operation designed to get Hillary elected. Trump is, after all, the only Republican who ran who was a Clinton donor. He is also the only Republican running who called Bill Clinton to discuss running before he even got into the race.

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NYM, “Is Trump Deliberately Throwing the Election?”, August 4:

[I]t’s only the beginning of August. The boxcar-loads of opposition research the Dems and their media allies have been saving up are still just sitting there, waiting to be unloaded and fired.

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One little ten-year-old tape of Trump having a locker-room-style conversation was released and the Trump Campaign is reeling. Just think how much more damaging material the democrat presidential campaign and the MSM has that’s not yet been released. What kind of leak do you think they would have done if Trump were currently ten points ahead in the polls?

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