It ought to be obvious that anyone seeking entry into our country should be ideologically certified. We have no obligation to accept subversive elements. Now those who promote Shari'a are subversive elements. Therefore, we have no obligation to allow them in. Indeed we, or rather the government as representing us the people, has a moral obligation not to let them in.
This is just common sense. Trump, not Hillary, possesses this common sense as he made clear in his outstanding Phoenix immigration speech.
But you loathe Trump the man, don't you? And you have some good reasons. I suggest you make a distinction. There is the candidate and there is the candidate's ideological agenda. Both of the candidates have deeply flawed characters. But one supports a destructive leftist agenda and the other does not. And one or the other will be the next president. It won't be Jill Stein.
So, if you are a conservative, is it not obvious that you must vote for Trump?
The following is by Chris Jackson. I found it at The Remnant and I reproduce the whole of it here. It receives the coveted MavPhilnihil obstat.
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This is the most critical presidential election in the history of the United States. Hillary Clinton, a corrupt, radical pro-abortion, anti-Christian, career politician threatens to change the face of America forever. If elected, she will name three to four Supreme Court justices, cementing Roe v. Wade into the Constitution and losing the court for generations, if not forever. Hillary Clinton opposes home schooling and believes it is the government’s right to educate children and not the parents. She will restrict religious speech and persecute Christians who refuse to support her radical social agenda. She will promote illegal immigration and allow millions of unvettted illegal immigrants into our country. The illegal population will vote democrat far into the future so that no candidate with anything approximating Catholic positions will have a viable chance to be elected president. So despite obvious disagreements with him, I believe Catholics have the moral right to vote for the only viable alternative to Hillary Clinton in this election: Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is the first Republican candidate for president to publicly offer a list of Supreme Court justices he will select from. All of the names have been vetted by undeniable pro-life organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. Neither Mitt Romney nor John McCain offered such assurances. Donald Trump has also promised to ensure protections for religious free speech and against punitive governmental action for citizens acting out of religious conviction. In addition, he has just named Mike Pence, a pro-life leader and champion of religious rights as his running mate. There is absolutely no moral justification for any Catholic to vote for Hillary Clinton or to assist Clinton in wining the presidency through not voting or voting for a non-viable third party candidate. The stakes are too high. The price of defeat this November means an anti-Christian executive and judicial branch with no opposition party in congress to offer any effective resistance into the foreseeable future. In other words, not voting for Trump in this election is choosing to commit suicide for our nation and our families.
If you say that Trump is the 'lesser of two evils,' you invite the riposte: why vote for anyone who is evil? Say this instead: "Despite Trump's manifest negatives, he is better than Hillary." And then go on to explain why he is better.
Politics here below is not about Good versus Evil. It is not so Manichean as all that. Politics here below is about better and worse.
Via Burgess-Jackson, I came to this piece by Robert P. George and George Weigel, An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics (7 March 2016). Appended to it is a list of distinguished signatories. Excerpt:
Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to be president of the United States. His campaign has already driven our politics down to new levels of vulgarity. His appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice are offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility. He promised to order U.S. military personnel to torture terrorist suspects and to kill terrorists’ families — actions condemned by the Church and policies that would bring shame upon our country. And there is nothing in his campaign or his previous record that gives us grounds for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government.
I will respond to these points seriatim.
A. It is true that Trump is unfit to be president, but so is Hillary. But that is the choice we face now that Trump has secured the Republican nomination. In the politics of the real world, as opposed to the politics of utopia, it will be either Trump or Hillary: not both and not neither. Are they equally unfit for the presidency? Arguably yes at the level of character. But at the level of policy no clear-thinking conservative or Catholic could possibly do anything to aid Hillary, whether by voting for her or by not voting for Trump. Consider just abortion and religious liberty and ask yourself which candidate is more likely to forward an agenda favorable to Catholics.
B. Yes, Trump has taken vulgarity in politics to new depths. Unlike milquetoast conservatives, however, he knows how to fight back against political enemies. He doesn't apologize and he doesn't wilt in the face of leftist lies and abuse. He realizes that in post-consensus politics there is little or no place for civility. There is no percentage in being civil to the viciously uncivil. He realizes that the Alinskyite tactics the uncivil Left has been using for decades have to be turned against them. To paraphrase Barack Obama, he understands that one needs to bring a gun to a gun fight.
C. The third sentence above is something one would expect from a race-baiting leftist, not ffrom a conservative. Besides, it borders on slander, something I should think a Catholic would want to avoid. You slander Trump and his supporters when you ignore their entirely legitimate concern for the rule of law and for national sovereignty and suggest that what motivates him and them is bigotry and fear. Trump and Trump alone among the candidates has had the courage to face the Islamist threat to our country and to call for the vetting of Muslim immigrants. That is just common sense. The milquetoast conservatives are so fearful of being branded xenophobes, 'Islamophobes,' and racists that they will not speak out against the threat.
If they had, and if they had been courageous conservatives on other issues, there would be no need for Trump, he would have gained no traction, and his manifest negatives would have sunk him. Trump's traction is a direct result of conservative inaction. The milquetoasts and bow-tie boys need to look in the mirror and own up to their complicity in having created Trump the politician. But of course they will not do that; they will waste their energy attacking Trump, the only hope we have, in violation of Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment. What a sorry bunch of self-serving pussy-wussies! They yap and scribble, but when it comes time to act and show civil courage, they wilt.
D. I concede that Trump's remarks about torture ought to worry a Catholic.
E. It is true that Trump's previous record supplies a reason to doubt whether Trump really shares Catholic commitments. But is it not possible that he has 'evolved'? You say the 'evolution' is merely opportunistic? That may well be. But how much does it matter what his motives are if he helps with the conservative agenda? It is obvious that his own ego is the cynosure of all his striving. He is out for himself, first, and a patriot, second. But Hillary is also out for herself, first, and she is manifestly not a patriot but a destructive hate-America leftist who will work to advance Obama's "fundamental transformation of America." (No one who loves his country seeks a fundamental transformation of it.)
We KNOW what Hillary and her entourage will do. We KNOW she will be inimical "to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government." Now I grant you that Trump is unreliable, mercurial, flaky, and other bad things to boot. But it is a very good bet that some of what he and his entourage will do will advance the conservative agenda.
So I say: if you are a conservative or a Catholic and you do not vote for Trump, you are a damned fool!
Attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good." The idea is that one should not allow the pursuit of an unattainable perfection to impede progress toward an attainable goal which, while not perfect, is better than the outcome that is likely to result if one seeks the unattainable.
Here is another formulation, not as accurate, but pithier and replete with trademark MavPhil alliteration: Permit not the pursuit of the perfect to preempt the possible.
Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Barack Obama, who has proven to be a disaster for the country and for the world, was elected in 2008 in part because of conservatives who could not abide John McCain. And he was re-elected in 2012 in part because of disgusted conservatives who fail to heed Voltaire's principle and refused to vote for the milquetoast conservative, Mitt Romney. But surely it is obvious in hindsight that the milquetoast would have been preferable to the radical?
And now we face another ugly choice, this time between the vulgarian Trump and the hard-leftist Hillary. Some will vote for neither or throw away their vote on a third-party candidate. If you are a liberal, I warmly recommend that you vote for Jill Stein.
But if you are a conservative, you must vote for Trump. What is the force of the 'must'? It is at least prudential, if not moral. It is surely not legal. You are not legally obliged to vote in these United States. This is the way it should be.
Politics is a practical business conducted in a far from perfect world. While it is not always about the lesser of evils, in most situations it is, including the one before us. But perhaps we should avoid the word 'evil,' which I have found confuses people. Let's just say that in the real world political choices are not between the good and the bad, but between the better and the worse. Real-world politics is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in the bad. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses nolens volens, willy-nilly. Not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.
Now maybe that is too strong a way of putting it if precision is at a premium. After all, if you refuse to vote for Trump, that is not a vote for Hillary since you may vote for neither. But by not voting for Trump, you aid Hillary inasmuch as you fail to do something that you can very easily do that will have the admittedly tiny effect of impeding her in her Obaminable quest to "fundamentally transform America."
I am of course assuming that Trump is better than Hillary. That is easily shown by the SCOTUS argument which has been elaborated by any number of distiguished commentators including William J. Bennett, Dennis Prager, and Hugh Hewitt, not to mention your humble correspondent. The responses to the SCOTUS argument that I have seen are breathtakingly lame. I am not in the mood to go over this ground again. In any case it is time for lunch.
Don't be a fool. Don't let the best or the better become the enemy of the good. Try to achieve something achievable. Don't pine after the unattainable. Impossible dreams are for liberals, not reality-anchored conservatives. It did not surprise me when I learned that Ted Kennedy's favorite song was The Impossible Dream. Figures!
Too many of our rights, liberties, and securities already hang by a one-vote thread. A Clinton Supreme Court would surely do away with them. It is a better bet that a President Trump together with Vice President Pence and a Republican Congress would ensure that Scalia's seat or any other open seats would be filled by a conservative. If you are a conservative who cares about the future of this country, there is only one choice. A vote for anyone else, third parties included, only helps Clinton and brings liberals one vote closer to ruining our republic as we know it.
If you care at all about the country, please read Bennett's piece, and please try to not let your loathing for Trump the man get in the way of clear thinking. For if you do, then you are no better than a gushing, emotion-driven liberal.
One of the reasons put forward by some conservatives for voting for the controversial Republican nominee is that not voting for him would be “a vote for Hillary”. It’s important to understand why this is a really bad argument.
I agree that it is a bad argument, and for the reason Professor Anderson gives, namely, that if the choice is between A and B, one might vote for neither. Note that Anderson doesn't name any conservative who gives the really bad argument, but if there is such a conservative, wouldn't charity require us to construe 'A non-vote for Trump is a vote for Hillary' as a loose way of saying that not to vote for Trump is to aid Hillary?
Surely the latter — not to vote for Trump is to aid Hillary — is true. Or if not 'surely,' then 'arguably.' I will now try to argue it out.
There are of course candidates other than Trump and Hillary, but they have no practical chance of winning. I guarantee you that Gary Johnson, the Libertarian/'Losertarian' candidate will not be the next president of the USA. So, practically speaking, it will be either Trump or Hillary. Not both and not neither. Now suppose you are a conservative who votes for neither: you refuse to vote for Hillary because she is a leftist, and you refuse to vote for Trump because he is an obnoxious vulgarian and 'no true conservative' or for some other similar reason or reasons. By not voting for Trump you aid Hillary. You are not thereby voting for her, of course, but you are aiding her because you are failing to do something that would harm her in however slight and insignificant a way.
Anderson speaks of the "neutrality of a non-vote." But are non-votes politically neutral?
Consider a simple voting situation. Socrates Jones is up for tenure. He receives five votes against and three votes for, with three abstentions. He's out like Stout. Were the non-votes — the abstentions — neutral? Not at all. If the three abstainers had voted for, then Jones would have been in like Flynn. So while it would be absurd to say that the abstainers voted against Jones, it remains true that their abstentions were not neutral. You could say that the abstainers were complicit in the denial of tenure to Jones. They failed to do something which is such that, if they had done it, then Jones would have received tenure.
Or consider a hiring decision, which is a better analogy. It is down to a choice between A and B. A receives five votes, B three, with three abstentions. A gets the job. Clearly, the abstentions are not neutral. If the three abstainers had voted for B, then B would have got the job.
I suppose the neutrality question is the nub of the issue.
My thesis is that IF (i) one is a conservative and wants to see the conservative agenda advanced and/or the leftist agenda impeded, AND (ii) one believes that Trump, as awful as he is, will advance the conservative agenda somewhat and/or impede the infiltration of leftist totalitarianism into every aspect of our lives and institutions, while Hillary will go full-steam ahead in implementation of the leftist agenda, THEN to abstain from the choice between Trump and Hillary is to aid the leftist agenda and to work against one's interests as a conservative, which implies that one's non-voting is NOT politically neutral.
The thesis I am opposing is the negation of the foregoing. If you deny the first conjunct of the protasis of my conditional thesis, then I show you the door, or rather, I don't let you in the door in the first place. If you accept (i) but deny (ii), then we have an entirely different discussion which I am not interested in having at the moment. The precise question in this post is not whether (i) and (ii) are both true — I assume they are both true — but whether, given (i) and (ii), one aids Hillary by abstaining. I say yes.
Certain conservatives want to be able rationally to resist the following sort of 'bullying' speech from someone like me:
If Hillary gets in, then we can expect all or most of the following: four more years of illegal immigration from the south; four more years of largely unvetted Muslim immigration, including Syrian refugees; four more years of erosion of First and Second Amendment rights; four years in which Hillary can make 2-5 Supreme Court appointments that will change the complexion of SCOTUS for years to come; four more years of attacks on civil society, the buffer space between the individual and the state apparatus; four more years of sanctuary cities and the flouting of the rule of law; four more years of assaults on the likes of the Little Sisters of the Poor and others who stand in the way of the pro-abortion agenda; four more years of exploding national debt; four more years of leftist infiltration of our institutions, four more years of Obama's "fundamental transformation of America," and more.
Now Trump, as awful as he is, is all we have to stop or impede all or some of the foregoing, and there is a good chance he will do some impeding while there is NO chance that Hillary will do any impeding, quite the contrary.
Therefore, if you are a conservative, then you ought to do what you can to stop Hillary; at a bare minimum you ought to vote for Trump. If you do not, you are aiding Hillary contrary to your interests as a conservative.
What is the force of the 'ought' in my conclusion? For present purposes it suffices to take it as a merely prudential ought. It would be imprudent of you, even if not immoral, to abstain given your acceptance of (i) and (ii) above.
But have I really shown that your abstention, given your acceptance of (i) and (ii) above is not politically neutral? It seems to me that I have. By depriving Trump of your vote, and persuading others to deprive him of their votes, you are lessening the number of votes he receives. How can that be politically neutral?
“We do not pay ransom. We didn’t here, and we won’t in the future.”
Barack Obama might like to have that one back this morning, to stick a pin in the moving finger that writes. But the finger done writ, and it won’t come back to cancel a single line of the president’s fatuous fib that the United States didn’t pay $400 million to ransom four hostages taken by the president’s friends in Tehran.
Perhaps the president can take some solace, thin as it is, in the fact that nobody believed him, anyway.
'Fatuous fib' is not quite the phrase. It is a brazen lie from a man who specializes in the brazen lie. And not just the lie, but every mode of mendacity.
A mere picture of the man would suffice to define homo mendax.
Vote for Hillary and you will get more of the same. The difference between her and Obama is that she is not a very good liar.
Why is this? Permit me a speculation. Hillary is much older than Obama. She grew up in a time when it was understood that there is such a thing as truth and that lying is wrong. So at some level she knows she is doing wrong when she lies. This dim awareness interferes with the efficacy of her lying. But Obama is the POMO-prez. Truth? What's that?
His brand of leftist replaces truth with narrative.
A dog whistle is, according to Wikipedia, “political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup.”
Saying that Hillary Clinton lacks the physical and mental stamina to take on ISIS [as Donald Trump said in his speech last night] is literally saying the thing that supposedly needs to be dog whistled as a supersecret message. It can’t be secret, coded messaging when it’s the thing he says!
What you believe, or claim to believe or say you believe—not what you do or how you act or what the results of your actions may be—defines you as a person and makes you “good.” It is how your life will be judged by others and by yourself. In 19th-century France, the gastronome Jean Brillat-Savarin told us that “You are what you eat.” In 21st-century America, almost all of us seem to have concluded that “you are what you say you are. You are what you proclaim your values to be, irrespective of their consequences.” That is moral narcissism.
So George Will has proclaimed himself to be free and above the Republican Party — most specifically the Republican Party whose current standard bearer by millions of votes is Donald Trump, a man Will obviously abhors. As the columnist said in his speech, Republicans should “make sure he loses. Grit their teeth for four years and win the White House.”
I understand why Will loathes Trump, but Will is more the quisling than the conservative when he advocates against Trump and therefore for Hillary.
I won't repeat what I said yesterday about the folly of putting up with Hillary and her crew for four years and then winning the White House.
An excellent, balanced, piece by Charles Kesler. Charles R. Kesler is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books.
Here is perhaps the deepest connection, the subterranean link, between the decidedly strange bedfellows, Leftism and Islamism: both deny the absoluteness of truth and both make it subservient to power and arbitrary will.
But how is it that Islamists attack objective truth? Aren't they theists? Don't they believe in an absolute source and ground of being and truth? Yes indeed. But their God is unlimited Power. Their God is all-powerful to the max: there are no truths of logic, nor any necessary truths, that limit his power. The Muslim God is pure, omnipotent will. (See Pope Benedict's Regensurg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity.)
So we who form the Coalition of the Sane and Decent have our work cut out for us. It is a war on two fronts: against radical Islam and against their leftist enablers such as Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary 'Milhous' Clinton.
If you refuse to vote for Donald Trump because he is in several ways a loathsome individual, then I pronounce you a fool in point of the political. You don't understand that politics is a practical struggle, not a gentlemanly conversation. It is not about perfection or ideological purity or choosing the Good over the Bad. It's about better or worse in the ugly concrete circumstances in which we presently find ourselves.
The argument of George Will and others of the 'bow-tie brigade' is patently lame, as lame as can be. They will do what they can to stop Trump the vulgarian know-nothing. In so doing they support Hillary. When this is pointed out, the response is that after four years of Hillary, we will elect a 'true' conservative to the White House.
This ignores the fact that after four years of Hillary it may be too late. Four more years of illegal immigration from the south; four more years of largely unvetted Muslim immigration, including Syrian refugees; four more years of erosion of First and Second Amendment rights; four years in which Hillary can make 2-5 Supreme Court appointments; four more years of attacks on civil society, the buffer space between the individual and the state apparatus; four more years of sanctuary cities and the flouting of the rule of law; four more years of assaults on the likes of the Little Sisters of the Poor and others who stand in the way of the pro-abortion agenda; and more.
Here is another question for George and Bill Kristol and the rest of the bow-tie boys: who will be your candidate? David French? Lindsey Graham? Jeb!?
You boys live in Cloud Cuckoo Land. You are expecting the resurrection of Ronald Reagan. It ain't gonna happen.
Given the preternatural crapaciousness of the bow-tie arguments, I am permitted to psychologize.
What Will and the boys fear is the loss of their Ps: their power, position, perquisites, and pelf. They want the status quo in which they can continue to yap and scribble as before and enjoy the high life. They understand that a third term of Obama in the guise of Hillary is a better bet for them than a populist coup.
Being a conservative, I advocate limited government. Big government leads to big trouble as we fight endlessly, acrimoniously, and fruitlessly over all sorts of issues that we really ought not be fighting over. As one of my slogans has it, "The bigger the government, the more to fight over." The final clause of the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution enshrines the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." So the more the government does things that grieve us, by intruding into our lives and limiting our liberties, the more we will petition, lobby, and generally raise hell with the government and with our political opponents.
If you try to tell me how much soda I can buy at a pop, or how capacious or incapacious my ammo mags must be, or how I must speak to assuage the tender sensitivities of the Pee Cee, or if you try to stop me from home-schooling my kids, or force me to buy health insurance, or force me to cater a same-sex 'marriage' ceremony, then you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it. Think of how much time, energy, and money we waste battling our political enemies, working to undo what we take to be their damage, the damage of ObamaCare being a prime example.
So if you want less contention, work for smaller government. The smaller the government, the less to fight over.
Or do you like fighting for the sake of fighting? I'm Italian: a lover, not a fighter. I prefer la dolce vita to bellum omnium contra omnes.
