Politics – Page 25 – Maverick Philosopher

Pence’s Departure a Stunt?

While Trump and Corker took potshots at each other, Vice President Mike Pence engaged in an intentionally polarizing stunt by showing up at an Indianapolis Colts football game only to depart in a huff when players from the San Francisco 49ers (predictably) knelt in protest during the national anthem. It was an utterly gratuitous effort to sow race-based dissension and animosity in the country — the diametric opposite of the kind of behavior we normally label "presidential."

Polarizing? We are already polarized. There is no need for any polarizing. VP Pence was merely taking a stand at one of the poles, the pole of patriotism and decency and respect, and protesting the antipodean ingratitude and disrespect of the louts who protest an imaginary 'systemic racism.'

Intentionally polarizing? How does Linker know what Pence's intentions were?

Stunt? Pence was courageously pushing back against destructive leftist scum.

Predictably? So the louts lack free will and must be expected to engage in bad behavior?

Gratuitous? Not at all. It was a warranted response to the loutish behavior of know-nothings.

Effort to sow race-based dissension? Again, how does Linker know what Pence's intentions were? And again, the dissension already exists. There's no need for any sowing.

Race-based? What does race have to do with this? Pence was standing up against unpatriotic behavior at a NATIONAL Football League event.

Unpresidential? Not at all. Pence courageously took a patriotic stand. He did his job. Had he not done what he did he would have been unpresidential.

As for Trump, it is eminently presidential of him to call for the elimination of NFL subsidies.

It looks like we have a bit of a disagreement here.

An Identity-Political Paradox

Leftists hold that borders and walls are 'racist' and 'hateful' and 'fascist' and that the nation state is an illegitimate construct. They bristle at talk of national identity and national sovereignty. Is it not then paradoxical for these same leftists to embrace identity politics at the sub-national level?

And if walls are 'racist' and 'hateful' then so is Obama's Wall:

Trump’s Best Line in the U. N. Speech

Peggy Noonan:

A great line—because it spoke a great truth—was this: “The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.” Mr. Trump then paused and looked at the audience. It struck some as a “please clap” moment. It struck me as a stare-down: I’m saying something a lot of you need to hear. You’re not going to like it, and I’m going to watch you not like it.

How's Socialism Doing in Venezuela? (A short video)

Trump Eight Months In

He is doing pretty well, according to Hugh Hewitt. Surprisingly well, I would add, if you consider the formidable factions arrayed against him: the Democrat Party; the liberal media; knuckleheaded Never-Trumpers; Deep State operatives; Ryan, McConnell, McCain and the rest of the milque-toast, go-along-to-get-along, appease-the-Left careerists among the Republicans.

Sympathy for Hillary

To be competitive and indeed successful in this world often demands a level of self-assurance and inner certainty that is incompatible with acknowledgment of the sober truth about oneself. This is especially the case in the upper reaches of the political game. So perhaps we should forgive Hillary her pathetic, self-serving book, What Happened. She is a leftist for whom the political is everything. How can one expect her, at the end of her career, to enter into the equanimity that permits a balanced view of things? She is no philosopher. Ever the activist, she is incapable of calming down sufficiently to see things in perspective.

The human predicament has its tragic sides. One is that success is too often predicated upon inordinate self-confidence and blindness to faults.

Trump Derangement Syndrome

Charles blows a gasket.

Trump is Flawed but Hillary Would Have Been Far Worse

Here:

Shall we rue his election, as “Never Trumpers” continue to do? Well, first of all — He’s what we’ve got for the next 41 or 89 months. Had we gotten Hillary instead, we would not have encountered fewer lies from the Oval Office, nor from whatever new bathroom she would have selected to store her next-generation stealth computer server. In a world where Benghazi was caused by a YouTube video that almost no one saw — and which no one conceivably viewed through its painfully not-soon-enough conclusion — and in which a Secretary of State had exchanged tens of thousands of emails regarding her yoga classes and daughter’s wedding dress, one need not fantasize to grasp how much public lying would have emanated from a new Clinton West Wing, Oval Office, and from under the President’s desk had we been Hillaried.

Hillary would have assured the Obama Revolution a prospective permanence, endangering the future of the Republic without slowing the rise of the seas or healing the planet. Would Michelle Obama by now be the ninth Supreme Court Justice casting tie-breaking votes? Or Barack? Or a kindred soul? If so, before we mourn an imperiled Second Amendment, what would have become of the First Amendment? In a world in which the politically deranged and morally challenged Southern Poverty Law Center can defame the most decent of Christian religious-freedom advocates, groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, as “Hate Groups,” what would have been left of religious freedom under a Hillary? And what of the embattled First Amendment right to speak one’s mind freely in an environment where there is no inducement to violence, no imminent lawless action, but a plethora of campus intolerance and university schemes aimed at taxing speech into silence by imposing exorbitant “security fees” and moving conservative groups and scholars to off-site inaccessible venues and to obscure dates when students are otherwise engaged?

Trump Haters, Supporters, Neither, and Both

Another brilliant column by VDH. I am tempted to quote, but it's all good.

Is Trump Divisive?

To say of Trump or anyone that he is divisive is to say that he promotes (political) division. But there is no need to promote it these days since we already have plenty of it. We are a deeply and perhaps irreparably divided nation. So it is not right to say that Trump is divisive: he is standing on one side of an already existing divide.

Trump did not create the divide between those who stand for the rule of law and oppose sanctuary cities, porous borders, and irresponsibly lax legal immigration policies. What he did is take up these issues fearlessly, something his milque-toast colleagues could not bring themselves to do.

And he has met with some success: illegal immigration is down some 50%.

Liberals call him a bigot, a racist, a xenophobe. That they engage in this slander shows that the nation is bitterly divided over fundamental questions.

Too often journalistic word-slingers shoot first and ask questions never. Wouldn't it be nice if they thought before their lemming-like and knee-jerk deployment of such adjectives as 'divisive'?

Language matters.

How to Know You are in a Mass Hysteria Bubble

Scott Adams:

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness . . . .

"So sad!" as the Orange Man might say.

Tucker Carlson on Bill Kristol

In this brilliant segment, 3:13 in length, Carlson 'unloads' with full justification on Bill Kristol, a man I used to read and respect.

A Real Red Scare This Time

The so-called Red Scare of the '50s and '60s was not a scare but a genuine threat. For a real red scare see my man Hanson, Why Does the Left Suddenly Hate Russia?

The piece concludes:

So what drives this about-face?

Not the fact that Russia tried to cause chaos in 2016, as it has for many years with all Western democracies. Perhaps it is only because a supposedly unbeatable Hillary inexplicably lost to the unlikely Donald Trump — thanks to her own campaign’s incompetence rather than Russian collusion.

Had Hillary Clinton just campaigned in Wisconsin once, and more in Pennsylvania and Michigan (and less in Georgia and Arizona), President Hillary Clinton might now be lecturing us about her reset 2.0 outreach to Vladimir Putin.

Instead, a moment after her electoral demise, “the Russians did it” trope bloomed, the disseminated Steele–Fusion GPS file resurfaced to become the buzz of the properly toadyish media, and “collusion” was born — a charge that so far has not proven true, even though it has consumed thousands of hours of investigations, and millions of hours of media hysteria.

As a result of a McCarthy-like Russian-under-every-American-bed hysteria, we now have all became far less safe in an already very, very dangerous world.

Category: Politics