Category: Politics

Hillary the Irrelevant

Poor Hillary is reduced to reading from a crummy book  at the Grammys while President Donald J. Trump prepares for his first State of the Union address.

Hillary the Inevitable has become Hillary the Irrelevant.

Meanwhile, Hollywood liberals 'argue' that border control, a constitutionally-mandated function of the Federal government, is 'white supremacist' and that a physical barrier is a symbol of hate.  Actress Alyssa Milano tweets:

Let’s be clear: Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants are rooted in white supremacy. His racist wall is a symbol of hate.

How could any reasonable person disagree with that?

President Trump’s Considerable Achievements

The following ought to convince you if you don't wear a pussyhat or suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Daniel McCarthy:

He won states in 2016 that had been out of reach for Republican presidential candidates for 25 years or more: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. For all that the people who now criticize Trump had talked about broadening the Republican Party’s appeal, it was Trump who actually broadened the party in the way that counts—by winning elections rather than by scoring meaningless diversity points with the priesthood of multiculturalism.

As President, Trump has delivered relief to some 80 percent of taxpayers. The tax law just passed has also taken the teeth out of Obamacare, removing the feature most philosophically objectionable to conservatives—the individual mandate, which forced citizens to buy a private product (or at least a product whose profits lined politically connected private pockets) as a condition of living. If Obamacare truly is the great service that Democrats insist it is, now the public can freely choose to purchase it.

The economy has been performing well under President Trump, and there is no reason to be stingy about crediting him for what he has not done. After all, if free-market economics is correct, the best course a government can take is usually to leave well enough alone. Trump has done that and something more: He has sent businesses a powerful signal. Job-creation and entrepreneurship were choked during the Obama years by what Robert Higgs has called “regime uncertainty,” the fear that at any moment unexpected new regulations could make new ventures hazardous. That fear has been dispelled under Trump, who has made a start at dismantling old regulations and—even more importantly—is trusted not to impose capricious new ones.

The character of an administration—as distinct from the personal character of the President—is of the utmost consequence not only in domestic policy but also for foreign policy. Under Trump, ISIS has been smashed militarily. But the spirit that animates ISIS has also received blow after blow. Instead of Americans being cowed and timid, more worried about giving offense than asserting the justice of our civilization, there is a new vigor in the country’s words and deeds.

In the same way that the socialists and liberals who thought communism half-correct were not the men and women to bring the Cold War to a peaceful end, liberals and give-no-offense Republicans are not the ones who will annihilate the morale of Islamist radicalism. President Trump can be crude in how he expresses the will to win the war of confidence. But for too long we have had leaders who refused to speak in the language of America First and Western Civilization First, even as they invaded Iraq and brought regime change to Libya—violent actions that were spectacularly counterproductive. To see liberals now claim that President Trump’s intemperate tweets might make us more enemies—as if our bombs and nation-building escapades had not been doing that for 15 years—is telling.

Trump may go too far; others refused to go far enough. Not violent language but clarion language, in place of violent but strategically impotent actions, is what we need. That was what Ronald Reagan gave us at the end of the Cold War, in place of the futile hot wars and weak language of the administrations that preceded him. He won on the battlefield of morale. President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is a masterstroke in this regard. It merely acknowledges an on-the-ground reality, but its symbolic importance is vast. It shows Islamists and their sympathizers that their cause is losing ground, and it puts pressure on regimes such as Saudi Arabia to choose between clinging to Islamist ideology or accepting differences with the United States in a diplomatic fashion.

And these are only some of Trump's accomplishments in just one year in office. The entire article is excellent. Read it!

Don’t Get Fooled Again

A little ditty from The Who to stiffen the spines of Republicans and inspire them in their stand against the filthy, mendacious Dems. Politics is war, and if you don't have it in you to fight, then get off the battlefield.  Too long have you believed that politics is gentlemanly conversation, even while absorbing blow after blow from the Alinskyite Dems.  But a leader has emerged to teach you otherwise by his example. Now learn the lesson.

Hang Tough, Republicans!

Lyrics below the fold. 

Continue reading “Don’t Get Fooled Again”

Trump the ‘Trigger’

Trump's shoot-from-the-hip style forces leftists to show their true colors while keeping them in a state of impotent frenzy. That can't be bad, can it? 

Robert de Niro, Italian hothead and HollyWeird liberal, loses it 'bigly' over Trump in his latest outburst, wherein he calls Trump in public a "fucking idiot" and a "fucking fool" and on and on.  And there is this even worse earlier stream of invective from de Niro. 

Examples are easily multiplied (praeter necessitatem).

Sanctimonious ‘Liberal’ Hypocrisy, Death to PC, and the Destruction of Obama’s ‘Legacy’

El Rushbo explains, in his inimitable style, the appeal of Trump to his base.

The (intellectually) attractive Myron Magnet details how Trump spells death to political correctness drawing on recent columns by Peggy Noonan, Shelby Steele, and Andrew Klavan. 

The preternaturally prolific Victor Davis Hanson relates how "Trump is commonsensically undoing, piece by piece, the main components of Obama’s legacy."  Hanson appreciates that Trump hatred has more to do with his style than his policies:


To many progressives and indeed elites of all persuasions, Trump is also the Prince of Anti-culture: mindlessly naïve American boosterism; conspicuous, 1950s-style unapologetic consumption; repetitive and limited vocabulary; fast-food culinary tastes; Queens accent; herky-jerky mannerisms; ostentatious dress; bulging appearance; poorly disguised facial expressions; embracing rather than sneering at middle-class appetites; a lack of subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity.

In short Trump’s very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show. There is not even a smidgeon of a concession that some of Trump’s policies might offer tens of thousands of forgotten inner-city youth good jobs or revitalize a dead and written-off town in the Midwest, or make the petroleum of the war-torn Persian Gulf strategically irrelevant to an oil-rich United States. 

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Trump Speaks the Truth and Snowflakes Melt

Here:

Is there any question Haiti is a s***hole? Who’s offended by that? If it wasn’t a s***hole it wouldn’t be one of the most prominent recipients of American charity aid on Planet Earth. And it isn’t like this country has ignored Haiti — we’ve been trying to lift it out of s***hole status for more than a century, with absolutely no result whatever. In 1910, President William Howard Taft granted Haiti a large loan in hopes that Haiti could pay off its staggering international debt and therefore achieve a larger measure of independence from Europe. The result? Haiti defaulted and U.S. tax dollars were poured into a bottomless pit.

[. . .]

The open-borders crowd doesn’t want to talk about that, though, and it wants to call you racist if you’re opposed to a deluge of immigrants from the worst places on earth. That’s why Trump’s “s***holes” objection is big news rather than the fact there are so-called political leaders who can’t agree to reorient our immigration policy toward taking people who can successfully assimilate here.

Between the two, the crude man who tells the truth and looks out for his own citizens is preferable to the genteel man who sells us out for cheap labor or ballot-box fuel for a political machine. If Trump is the former, so be it.

Exactly right. The career politician is concerned primarily about his career and the power, perquisites, and pelf it provides. Despite what he says, the typical Republican is not primarily concerned about the welfare of the country.  So he talks and talks, but never gets anything done, as if politics is endless gentlemanly discourse and nothing more.  Well, talk is cheap and it allows the evasion of hard decisions.  

Relevant is the following quotation from Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1985: 

According to Donoso Cortés, it was characteristic of bourgeois liberalism not to decide in this battle but to begin a discussion. He straightforwardly defined the bourgeoisie as a “discussing class,” una clasa discutidora. It has thus been sentenced. This definition contains the class characteristic of wanting to evade the decision. A class that shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict. (59)

Trump is rude, crude, devoid of gravitas, self-absorbed, and given to exaggeration. He has orange hair. A statement he once made suggests that he is tolerant of pussy-grabbing. But so what given that he understands and threatens to act upon the following:

1) There is no right to immigrate.

2) Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country.

3) There is a distinction between legal and illegal immigration, and the latter must be severely curtailed if it cannot be stopped entirely.

4) Potential immigrants must share the values of the host country and respect its culture.

5) Potential immigrants must be assimilable and willing to assimilate.

6) With respect to immigration to the USA, preference ought to be given to potential immigrants from Ireland and Norway, say, rather than from Haiti, say.

No Democrat really believes (as opposed to insincerely giving verbal assent to) all or even most of the above, and few Republicans would be willing to act upon these propositions.

This is why Trump is our last chance. If he caves, then it's all over.

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Victor Davis Hanson explains the Trump administration's first national security strategy. 

The theme of the Trump document is American restoration. In Reaganesque fashion, the administration sees itself as similarly overturning an era of strategic stagnation, analogous to the self-doubt, self-imposed sense of decline, and thematic malaise of the Carter era. Instead, the “strategic confidence” and “principled realism” of the Trump Administration will purportedly snap America back out [of] its Obama recessional in the same manner that Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s.

If the United States is not strong, then the world order will weaken: “America first is the duty of our government and the foundation for U.S. leadership in the world. A strong America is in the vital interests of not only the American people, but also those around the world who want to partner with the United States in pursuit of shared interests, values, and aspirations.”

The document gives short shrift to the idea of a utopian global community of fellow nations seeking to follow similar progressive agendas. (The United Nations is mentioned briefly in passing just twice). Instead, there is a Manichean subtext that the beleaguered Western-inspired world is, and will always be, under assault by its antitheses. The proverbial free world cannot survive such an existential struggle if a United States—plagued by self-doubt and hollowed out economically and spiritually—proves wanting.

Yet the Trump national security strategy—likely the work mostly of H. R. McMaster and his deputies Nadia Schadlow and Dina Powell—is just as antithetical to the 2002 George W. Bush vision that called for preemptive measures to stop regimes that posed threats on the horizon to the U.S. world order. And the Trump doctrine says little or nothing about nation-building or seeking to remake the world in the image of a consensual, free-market democracy like the United States, which then would spend blood and treasure in liberating the unfree and poor, and thereby lessening world tensions.

The neo-con approach failed. So did the hard-Left Obama strategy. Time to try a Jacksonian approach in the spirit of good old American pragmatism.

The Sad State of Public Discourse in an Age of Ideology

The inability to follow an argument and respond reasonably and civilly to what an author actually maintains is a mark of the present miserable state of public discourse. Even prominent conservative commentators display this inability. A recent example is the Never-Trumper and NRO contributor David French's febrile flailing at Tully Borland.  Professor Borland ignited a firestorm of controversy when he presented an argument why Alabamans ought to vote for Roy Moore. Chad McIntosh, in a fine defense of Borland, accurately restates Borland's main argument:

Comparing Moore to opponent Doug Jones, Borland argues that a Moore victory would be the lesser of the two evils in a binary election in which these are the only two viable options. Why? Well, even if Moore is guilty of sexual assault and seeking sexual relationships with girls as young as 14 some 40 years ago, as accused, that is very unlikely to have policy ramifications today, whereas Jones supports a policy of unrestricted abortion today.

Don’t be misled here: Jones supports killing a fetus up to the moment of crowning, the moment a baby exits his mother during birth. That isn’t your typical pro-choice position. That’s almost as extreme as they come. So, as Borland sees it, “either Jones knows exactly what he’s doing in supporting killing babies in utero but doesn’t care, in which case he’s a moral monster, or his moral compass is in such need of calibration that one should never trust his judgment in moral matters.” Borland therefore concludes that one is morally justified in voting for Moore, whose win would result in lesser evil.

This is a very strong argument. You will not appreciate its strength, however, unless you appreciate the grave moral evil of unrestricted abortion, abortion at any stage  of fetal development, for any reason.  Unless you are morally obtuse you will understand that the intentional killing of innocent human beings is morally wrong and that the pre- and almost-natal human beings in question are human individuals in their own right, not globs of tissue or parts of their mothers.

McIntosh again:

The closest French comes to a substantive response to Borland is in the following:

"Of course we’re always choosing between imperfect men, but there are profound differences between conventional politicians and a man who tried to rape a teenager when he was a D.A. Believe it or not, the American political ranks are chock-full of politicians who possess better character than Moore, whose pasts are far less checkered. I don’t even have to get to the difficult process of line-drawing to have confidence in declaring that Christians should not vote to put a credibly-accused child abuser in the Senate."

But this is misdirection. That the American political ranks are chock-full of politicians who possess better character than Moore is beside the point, since they aren’t running against Moore. It’s Jones running against Moore, so that is the only comparison that matters.

That's right. It's Jones against Moore, and exactly one of these two will be elected. Not both and not neither. 

It is also important to note that while character matters, policies, programs, and ideas matter even more. People of the 'Never X' mentality seem not to understand this.  French apparently thinks two terms of Hillary and all her damage to conservatism would be a fair price to pay for keeping Trump out of the White House with all the good he has already done in less than one year in office.

But suppose you are not convinced by the Borland-McIntosh argument.  Then you should at least have the decency to admit that it is a reasonable argument. But that is not what French does. He heaps abuse on Borland. See McIntosh piece for documentation.

Trump’s Pensacola Speech

That was a great speech last night. I enjoyed every word of it.  I share Judge Jeanine's enthusiasm.  

"But how can you of all people, someone who is always going on about how language matters and who rails regularly against its misuse, stomach Trump's exaggerations and falsehoods? He self-servingly claimed, for example, that he beat Hillary in a 'landslide' when we all know he lost the popular vote."

I will respond with an answer an erstwhile leftist friend gave when I complained to him about Obama's utterly brazen lying and bullshitting. His response was that all politicians lie. (Of course, a lie is not the same as a false statement, and while we know that Obama and Hillary are brazen and very skillful liars, it is much less clear that Trump comes up to their level of intentional misrepresentation of facts.)

The point, of course, is that we overlook the faults of those whose views we share.  If you were to prove to me that Trump is as shameless a liar as Obama or the Clintons, I would respond: "You may be right, but he is our liar."  In other words, he forwards the agenda we think salutary and impedes the agenda of hate-America leftists.  And that is what really matters.

I think Trump is basically right in his ideas and that, had he not beaten the destructive leftist Hillary, then the "fundamental transformation" Obama promised would be upon us in short order.

Bear in mind what I have said many times before: no lover of a thing desires that thing's fundamental transformation. Now a patriot is one who loves his country, ergo, etc.

Dennis Prager puts his finger on why the Never-Trumpers opposed and still oppose Trump:

They do not believe that America is engaged in a civil war, with the survival of America as we know it at stake.

While they strongly differ with the Left, they do not regard the left–right battle as an existential battle for preserving our nation. On the other hand, I, and other conservative Trump supporters, do.

That these comfortable yappers and scribblers who form una clasa discutidora do not see the existential threat to the Republic is largely due to their isolation in their echo chambers. They need to get out of the swamp and into the heartland.