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The Tragedy of Trump
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Aug 22, 2019 07:52:11   #
slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas
 
The American Conservative: The Tragedy of Trump, By Rod Dreher • October 24, 2016 (pre-election)

The dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency are more familiar than Trump’s authoritarian unknowns, because we live with them in our politics already. They’re the dangers of elite groupthink, of Beltway power worship, of a cult of presidential action in the service of dubious ideals. They’re the dangers of a recklessness and radicalism that doesn’t recognize itself as either, because it’s convinced that if an idea is mainstream and commonplace among the great and good then it cannot possibly be folly.

Almost every crisis that has come upon the West in the last 15 years has its roots in this establishmentarian type of folly. The Iraq War, which liberals prefer to remember as a conflict conjured by a neoconservative cabal, was actually the work of a bipartisan interventionist consensus, pushed hard by George W. Bush but embraced as well by a large slice of center-left opinion that included Tony Blair and more than half of Senate Democrats.

Likewise the financial crisis: Whether you blame financial-services deregulation or happy-go-lucky housing policy (or both), the policies that helped inflate and pop the bubble were embraced by both wings of the political establishment. Likewise with the euro, the European common currency, a terrible idea that only cranks and Little Englanders dared oppose until the Great Recession exposed it as a potentially economy-sinking folly. Likewise with Angela Merkel’s grand and reckless open-borders gesture just last year: She was the heroine of a thousand profiles even as she delivered her continent to polarization and violence.
And: One can look at Trump himself and see too much danger of still-deeper disaster, too much temperamental risk and moral turpitude, to be an acceptable alternative to this blunder-ridden status quo … while also looking at Hillary Clinton and seeing a woman whose record embodies the tendencies that gave rise to Trumpism in the first place.

Along these lines, there was a quite good Peggy Noonan column in the WSJ last week (now, alas, behind the paywall, but I found the whole thing here), saying that if Trump were not a “nut” — which he clearly is — he would be winning this thing by a landslide, because a lot of folks are sick and tired of the status quo that Hillary represents. Excerpt:

Mr. Trump’s great historical role was to reveal to the Republican Party what half of its own base really thinks about the big issues. The party’s leaders didn’t know! They were shocked, so much that they indulged in sheer denial and made believe it wasn’t happening.

Because she is largely in sympathy with Trump’s political views, she is “particularly sorry” that Trump is a nut (me too! me too!). She wonders what would have happened if we had had a Sane Donald Trump. For one, she says, he “would have won in a landslide.” Excerpts:

Sane Donald Trump, just to start, would look normal and happy, not grim and glowering. He would be able to hear and act on good advice. He would explain his positions with clarity and depth, not with the impatient half-grasping of a notion that marks real Donald Trump’s public persona.

Sane Donald Trump would have looked at a dubious, anxious and therefore standoffish Republican establishment and not insulted them, diminished them, done tweetstorms against them. Instead he would have said, “Come into my tent. It’s a new one, I admit, but it’s yuuge and has gold faucets and there’s a place just for you. What do you need? That I be less excitable and dramatic? Done. That I not act, toward women, like a pig? Done, and I accept your critique. That I explain the moral and practical underpinnings of my stand on refugees from terror nations? I’d be happy to. My well-hidden secret is that I love everyone and hear the common rhythm of their beating hearts.”

And: Sane Donald Trump would not treat the political process of the world’s greatest democracy as if it were, as somebody said, the next-to-last episode of a reality-TV series. That’s the episode that leaves you wondering how the season will end—who will scream, who will leave the drunken party in a huff, who will accuse whom of being a whore. I guess that’s what “I’ll keep you in suspense” as to whether he’ll accept the election result was about. We’re being teed up. The explosive season finale is Nov. 8. Maybe he’ll leave in a huff. Maybe he’ll call everyone whores.

Does he know he’s playing with fire? No. Because he’s a nut.

Ben Stein agrees with Noonan that Trump is a nut, but he’s voting for Trump anyway, because he thinks Trump is less of a nut than Clinton. This is not persuasive, but this is true: Trump’s a nut. I don’t doubt Peggy Noonan at all. But we have a choice of nuts this year, and that’s the tragedy. It’s a tragedy the greatest nation in history does not deserve.

The only real question for conservatives and Republicans now is what happens to the Right and the GOP, its political vehicle, in the wake of Trump’s loss. #NeverTrumpers will be strongly tempted to indulge in bitter “I told you so!” recriminations. Trumpers, likewise, will be strongly tempted to indulge in bitter “You stabbed him in the back!” polemics. All of this will work to the advantage of President H. Clinton, of course. What is needed is for the GOP establishment to humble itself enough to admit those who, like Noonan, accept the critique of the party and the system that Trump’s candidacy embodies, however, well, nuttily. And the Trump insurgents — including their leader — need to have the sense to realize that it advantages them not at all to drag this fight with Republicans out past the election. Their candidate will have received a thorough, resounding rejection by voters in an election he likely would have won had he not consistently spoken and acted like a nut.

Do I think this (humility on both sides, uniting in the face of Hillaryism) is likely to happen? No, I do not. But I hope I’m wrong. The Trump people, like their candidate, are not known for their ability to think strategically and to restrain themselves for their own good. And the bitterness and spite among Republican regulars is going to blind them to their own role in creating this mess. I overheard a conversation the other day in which some Republican lamented that “we” — meaning the GOP — “have Donald Trump.”

“We don’t have Trump,” his interlocutor shot back. “We have Paul Ryan. He’s ours.”

And I thought, “Who’s this we?” The party isn’t yours anymore, mister, though admittedly it’s hard to say who it belongs to or what it stands for. Because Trump did not build any kind of movement, and doesn’t have any obvious heirs in the party leadership, there’s no telling where the GOP is going after November.

But we can be sure it’s not going back to the way things were pre-Trump.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/tragedy-trump/ (very slightly edited)

Reply
Aug 22, 2019 08:13:19   #
jeff smith
 
slatten49 wrote:
The American Conservative: The Tragedy of Trump, By Rod Dreher • October 24, 2016 (pre-election)

The dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency are more familiar than Trump’s authoritarian unknowns, because we live with them in our politics already. They’re the dangers of elite groupthink, of Beltway power worship, of a cult of presidential action in the service of dubious ideals. They’re the dangers of a recklessness and radicalism that doesn’t recognize itself as either, because it’s convinced that if an idea is mainstream and commonplace among the great and good then it cannot possibly be folly.

Almost every crisis that has come upon the West in the last 15 years has its roots in this establishmentarian type of folly. The Iraq War, which liberals prefer to remember as a conflict conjured by a neoconservative cabal, was actually the work of a bipartisan interventionist consensus, pushed hard by George W. Bush but embraced as well by a large slice of center-left opinion that included Tony Blair and more than half of Senate Democrats.

Likewise the financial crisis: Whether you blame financial-services deregulation or happy-go-lucky housing policy (or both), the policies that helped inflate and pop the bubble were embraced by both wings of the political establishment. Likewise with the euro, the European common currency, a terrible idea that only cranks and Little Englanders dared oppose until the Great Recession exposed it as a potentially economy-sinking folly. Likewise with Angela Merkel’s grand and reckless open-borders gesture just last year: She was the heroine of a thousand profiles even as she delivered her continent to polarization and violence.
And: One can look at Trump himself and see too much danger of still-deeper disaster, too much temperamental risk and moral turpitude, to be an acceptable alternative to this blunder-ridden status quo … while also looking at Hillary Clinton and seeing a woman whose record embodies the tendencies that gave rise to Trumpism in the first place.

Along these lines, there was a quite good Peggy Noonan column in the WSJ last week (now, alas, behind the paywall, but I found the whole thing here), saying that if Trump were not a “nut” — which he clearly is — he would be winning this thing by a landslide, because a lot of folks are sick and tired of the status quo that Hillary represents. Excerpt:

Mr. Trump’s great historical role was to reveal to the Republican Party what half of its own base really thinks about the big issues. The party’s leaders didn’t know! They were shocked, so much that they indulged in sheer denial and made believe it wasn’t happening.

Because she is largely in sympathy with Trump’s political views, she is “particularly sorry” that Trump is a nut (me too! me too!). She wonders what would have happened if we had had a Sane Donald Trump. For one, she says, he “would have won in a landslide.” Excerpts:

Sane Donald Trump, just to start, would look normal and happy, not grim and glowering. He would be able to hear and act on good advice. He would explain his positions with clarity and depth, not with the impatient half-grasping of a notion that marks real Donald Trump’s public persona.

Sane Donald Trump would have looked at a dubious, anxious and therefore standoffish Republican establishment and not insulted them, diminished them, done tweetstorms against them. Instead he would have said, “Come into my tent. It’s a new one, I admit, but it’s yuuge and has gold faucets and there’s a place just for you. What do you need? That I be less excitable and dramatic? Done. That I not act, toward women, like a pig? Done, and I accept your critique. That I explain the moral and practical underpinnings of my stand on refugees from terror nations? I’d be happy to. My well-hidden secret is that I love everyone and hear the common rhythm of their beating hearts.”

And: Sane Donald Trump would not treat the political process of the world’s greatest democracy as if it were, as somebody said, the next-to-last episode of a reality-TV series. That’s the episode that leaves you wondering how the season will end—who will scream, who will leave the drunken party in a huff, who will accuse whom of being a whore. I guess that’s what “I’ll keep you in suspense” as to whether he’ll accept the election result was about. We’re being teed up. The explosive season finale is Nov. 8. Maybe he’ll leave in a huff. Maybe he’ll call everyone whores.

Does he know he’s playing with fire? No. Because he’s a nut.

Ben Stein agrees with Noonan that Trump is a nut, but he’s voting for Trump anyway, because he thinks Trump is less of a nut than Clinton. This is not persuasive, but this is true: Trump’s a nut. I don’t doubt Peggy Noonan at all. But we have a choice of nuts this year, and that’s the tragedy. It’s a tragedy the greatest nation in history does not deserve.

The only real question for conservatives and Republicans now is what happens to the Right and the GOP, its political vehicle, in the wake of Trump’s loss. #NeverTrumpers will be strongly tempted to indulge in bitter “I told you so!” recriminations. Trumpers, likewise, will be strongly tempted to indulge in bitter “You stabbed him in the back!” polemics. All of this will work to the advantage of President H. Clinton, of course. What is needed is for the GOP establishment to humble itself enough to admit those who, like Noonan, accept the critique of the party and the system that Trump’s candidacy embodies, however, well, nuttily. And the Trump insurgents — including their leader — need to have the sense to realize that it advantages them not at all to drag this fight with Republicans out past the election. Their candidate will have received a thorough, resounding rejection by voters in an election he likely would have won had he not consistently spoken and acted like a nut.

Do I think this (humility on both sides, uniting in the face of Hillaryism) is likely to happen? No, I do not. But I hope I’m wrong. The Trump people, like their candidate, are not known for their ability to think strategically and to restrain themselves for their own good. And the bitterness and spite among Republican regulars is going to blind them to their own role in creating this mess. I overheard a conversation the other day in which some Republican lamented that “we” — meaning the GOP — “have Donald Trump.”

“We don’t have Trump,” his interlocutor shot back. “We have Paul Ryan. He’s ours.”

And I thought, “Who’s this we?” The party isn’t yours anymore, mister, though admittedly it’s hard to say who it belongs to or what it stands for. Because Trump did not build any kind of movement, and doesn’t have any obvious heirs in the party leadership, there’s no telling where the GOP is going after November.

But we can be sure it’s not going back to the way things were pre-Trump.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/tragedy-trump/ (very slightly edited)
The American Conservative: The Tragedy of Trump, ... (show quote)


well you started off with a lie . so no need to read any further .

Reply
Aug 22, 2019 08:22:23   #
slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas
 
jeff smith wrote:
well you started off with a lie . so no need to read any further .

I would'a thought...for you, it was the choice of Pat Buchanan's liberal rag as my source.

The American Conservative was founded by Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell and Taki Theodoracopulos in 2002 in opposition to the Iraq War. Daniel Strauss wrote: The idea of The American Conservative was that there were enough who disagreed with mainstream conservatism—libertarians, paleoconservatives, and civil libertarian conservatives, among other dissenters—to warrant such a publication.

Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative. He has written and edited for the New York Post, The Dallas Morning News, National Review, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Washington Times, and the Baton Rouge Advocate. Rod’s commentary has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, Beliefnet, and Real Simple, among other publications. He lives in St. Francisville, Louisiana, with his wife Julie and their three children.

Reply
 
 
Aug 22, 2019 08:38:55   #
moldyoldy
 
A visionary article, the predictions were accurate. But they did not count on Russian intervention.

Reply
Aug 22, 2019 09:10:41   #
Rose42
 
slatten49 wrote:
The American Conservative: The Tragedy of Trump, By Rod Dreher • October 24, 2016 (pre-election)

The dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency are more familiar than Trump’s authoritarian unknowns, because we live with them in our politics already. They’re the dangers of elite groupthink, of Beltway power worship, of a cult of presidential action in the service of dubious ideals. They’re the dangers of a recklessness and radicalism that doesn’t recognize itself as either, because it’s convinced that if an idea is mainstream and commonplace among the great and good then it cannot possibly be folly.

Almost every crisis that has come upon the West in the last 15 years has its roots in this establishmentarian type of folly. The Iraq War, which liberals prefer to remember as a conflict conjured by a neoconservative cabal, was actually the work of a bipartisan interventionist consensus, pushed hard by George W. Bush but embraced as well by a large slice of center-left opinion that included Tony Blair and more than half of Senate Democrats.

Likewise the financial crisis: Whether you blame financial-services deregulation or happy-go-lucky housing policy (or both), the policies that helped inflate and pop the bubble were embraced by both wings of the political establishment. Likewise with the euro, the European common currency, a terrible idea that only cranks and Little Englanders dared oppose until the Great Recession exposed it as a potentially economy-sinking folly. Likewise with Angela Merkel’s grand and reckless open-borders gesture just last year: She was the heroine of a thousand profiles even as she delivered her continent to polarization and violence.
And: One can look at Trump himself and see too much danger of still-deeper disaster, too much temperamental risk and moral turpitude, to be an acceptable alternative to this blunder-ridden status quo … while also looking at Hillary Clinton and seeing a woman whose record embodies the tendencies that gave rise to Trumpism in the first place.

Along these lines, there was a quite good Peggy Noonan column in the WSJ last week (now, alas, behind the paywall, but I found the whole thing here), saying that if Trump were not a “nut” — which he clearly is — he would be winning this thing by a landslide, because a lot of folks are sick and tired of the status quo that Hillary represents. Excerpt:

Mr. Trump’s great historical role was to reveal to the Republican Party what half of its own base really thinks about the big issues. The party’s leaders didn’t know! They were shocked, so much that they indulged in sheer denial and made believe it wasn’t happening.

Because she is largely in sympathy with Trump’s political views, she is “particularly sorry” that Trump is a nut (me too! me too!). She wonders what would have happened if we had had a Sane Donald Trump. For one, she says, he “would have won in a landslide.” Excerpts:

Sane Donald Trump, just to start, would look normal and happy, not grim and glowering. He would be able to hear and act on good advice. He would explain his positions with clarity and depth, not with the impatient half-grasping of a notion that marks real Donald Trump’s public persona.

Sane Donald Trump would have looked at a dubious, anxious and therefore standoffish Republican establishment and not insulted them, diminished them, done tweetstorms against them. Instead he would have said, “Come into my tent. It’s a new one, I admit, but it’s yuuge and has gold faucets and there’s a place just for you. What do you need? That I be less excitable and dramatic? Done. That I not act, toward women, like a pig? Done, and I accept your critique. That I explain the moral and practical underpinnings of my stand on refugees from terror nations? I’d be happy to. My well-hidden secret is that I love everyone and hear the common rhythm of their beating hearts.”

And: Sane Donald Trump would not treat the political process of the world’s greatest democracy as if it were, as somebody said, the next-to-last episode of a reality-TV series. That’s the episode that leaves you wondering how the season will end—who will scream, who will leave the drunken party in a huff, who will accuse whom of being a whore. I guess that’s what “I’ll keep you in suspense” as to whether he’ll accept the election result was about. We’re being teed up. The explosive season finale is Nov. 8. Maybe he’ll leave in a huff. Maybe he’ll call everyone whores.

Does he know he’s playing with fire? No. Because he’s a nut.

Ben Stein agrees with Noonan that Trump is a nut, but he’s voting for Trump anyway, because he thinks Trump is less of a nut than Clinton. This is not persuasive, but this is true: Trump’s a nut. I don’t doubt Peggy Noonan at all. But we have a choice of nuts this year, and that’s the tragedy. It’s a tragedy the greatest nation in history does not deserve.

The only real question for conservatives and Republicans now is what happens to the Right and the GOP, its political vehicle, in the wake of Trump’s loss. #NeverTrumpers will be strongly tempted to indulge in bitter “I told you so!” recriminations. Trumpers, likewise, will be strongly tempted to indulge in bitter “You stabbed him in the back!” polemics. All of this will work to the advantage of President H. Clinton, of course. What is needed is for the GOP establishment to humble itself enough to admit those who, like Noonan, accept the critique of the party and the system that Trump’s candidacy embodies, however, well, nuttily. And the Trump insurgents — including their leader — need to have the sense to realize that it advantages them not at all to drag this fight with Republicans out past the election. Their candidate will have received a thorough, resounding rejection by voters in an election he likely would have won had he not consistently spoken and acted like a nut.

Do I think this (humility on both sides, uniting in the face of Hillaryism) is likely to happen? No, I do not. But I hope I’m wrong. The Trump people, like their candidate, are not known for their ability to think strategically and to restrain themselves for their own good. And the bitterness and spite among Republican regulars is going to blind them to their own role in creating this mess. I overheard a conversation the other day in which some Republican lamented that “we” — meaning the GOP — “have Donald Trump.”

“We don’t have Trump,” his interlocutor shot back. “We have Paul Ryan. He’s ours.”

And I thought, “Who’s this we?” The party isn’t yours anymore, mister, though admittedly it’s hard to say who it belongs to or what it stands for. Because Trump did not build any kind of movement, and doesn’t have any obvious heirs in the party leadership, there’s no telling where the GOP is going after November.

But we can be sure it’s not going back to the way things were pre-Trump.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/tragedy-trump/ (very slightly edited)
The American Conservative: The Tragedy of Trump, ... (show quote)


Interesting article. But what's next? There's Trump vs one of the horrific democrat candidates. All I see are articles that criticize Trump yet everyone seems to ignore the abysmal state of the democrat party. Both parties are in a sorry state. People want change? Nothing is going to change unless its demanded and its not demanded as seen by the lack of a standout democrat candidate. By the look of things the democrats will change nothing if they win.

Nikki Haley should run.

Reply
Aug 22, 2019 09:24:08   #
Floyd Brown Loc: Milwaukee WI
 
slatten49 wrote:
I would'a thought...for you, it was the choice of Pat Buchanan's liberal rag as my source.

The American Conservative was founded by Pat Buchanan, Scott McConnell and Taki Theodoracopulos in 2002 in opposition to the Iraq War. Daniel Strauss wrote: The idea of The American Conservative was that there were enough who disagreed with mainstream conservatism—libertarians, paleoconservatives, and civil libertarian conservatives, among other dissenters—to warrant such a publication.

Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative. He has written and edited for the New York Post, The Dallas Morning News, National Review, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Washington Times, and the Baton Rouge Advocate. Rod’s commentary has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, Beliefnet, and Real Simple, among other publications. He lives in St. Francisville, Louisiana, with his wife Julie and their three children.
I would'a thought...for you, it was the choice of ... (show quote)


We are just a nation of sheep that have been lead to believe that those on the left have no real place in the world of right-wing thinking.
We have been divided as a nation on this basis.

This is sad & damaging if we continue to be so deeply divided.
If we want to have a proper & fitting society we need to end this travesty.
As individuals we need to admit that there is & can be a fair & fitting balance of both ideologies.

I say we are at the door that will open this nation to realize its true future.
That there is room for us all to live in a nation that now has this room for us all.

It is only living together as one that will lead to what each of us wants & needs.
A nation divided has little promise of having a successful future.

Those that seek to control the masses.
First strive to divide them.

If you find your self dissatisfied with the way things are you need to take a good look at just what it is you believe is right. You need to not listen to some one tell you what to think.

It is only each of us deciding not to be divide by others.
That will free us from the control of others that put their own gains first.

A bit more critical thinking individually may well leave us all better off.

We are faced with a well run system that works over time dividing us as individuals.
It works to keep many from meeting their true potential as individuals.
Racism is a big culprit in dividing us.

Reply
Aug 22, 2019 09:55:47   #
ziggy88 Loc: quincy illinois 62301
 
Trump is simply asking the world to invest in America, move their businesses here and only pay 15% taxes. The estimate now for money coming back to America is a robust 6.5 trillion dollars. At 15% the money going into the treasury would amount to 975 billion buckaroos just from the move.

Bureau of Labor Statistics
This would not of course include the jobs it would create and the taxes the new hires would pay. With the unemployment rate of 4.1% at a sixteen year low the Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that blacks in the workforce is at 6.8% the lowest ever in forty five years it has reported these stats. We need to have more in the work force to keep my social security checks rolling in believe me.

Earlier this month tucked inside the new immigration bill there is a part called “Securing America’s Future Act of 2018.” This will amount to a new National ID card that everyone will need to work and vote that will rid us of illegal immigrants voting and companies hiring cheap labor.

Just this January World Net Daily reported and I quote:
“Abortion: President Trump on Jan. 19 became the first sitting president to address the March for Life, speaking in person to hundreds of marchers at the White House and via live telecast to the tens of thousands of marchers on the National Mall.

Tax reform: Trump praised Apple’s announcement that it will repatriate overseas cash holdings and pour $350 billion into the U.S. economy over the next five years, saying his policies allowed the tech giant to bring massive amounts of money back to the United States, which is a huge win for American workers and the USA!

Jobs: Americans’ optimism about finding a quality job averaged 56 percent in 2017, the highest annual average in 17 years of Gallup polling and a sharp increase from 42 percent in 2016.
Small businesses: Small-business confidence hit a record high in 2017, according to the National Federation of Independent Businesses. Its Small Business Optimism Index was an average of 104.8 in 2017, the highest in the history of the the survey. Juanita Duggan, the president and CEO of the NFIB, cited the optimism on policy changes from Washington under President Trump as the reason for the increase in confidence.

Stocks: The Dow Jones Industrial Average traded above 25,000 points for the first time Jan. 4, just five weeks after closing above 24,000 points for the first time.”


Small Business
The jobs created by small business is going to rock the economy because lower taxes means business expansion, new employees, more entrepreneurs with money to invest in small businesses and above all new wealth for the masses with money in everyone’s pocket as spendable income will increase massively.
Word from DC is the Donald wants to increase the federal minimum wage from the current $7.25 an hour to $15.00, but DACA and immigration reform will come first.

COLA
The Social Security Administration will give the 61 million retirees a 2% cost of living adjustment as even more is promised for next year. The average retiree will be getting an extra $27 per paycheck from the fed that will mean even more money for everyone to spend.
There has been EPA reform with 700 people leaving the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump wants to shrink it to Reagan-administration levels.

UN Budget Cut
Trump cut the United Nations budget by $285 million meaning they will have to go on an austere budget. This came after the UN mocked Trump’s move of the US embassy to Jerusalem.
The biggest Tax reform in US history with $3.2 trillion in tax cuts and overall simplification of the tax code so that you can put it on a post card happened in December 2017.
The Donald’s leadership of U.S. Armed Forces forced ISIS to collapse in Syria and in Iraq.
There were 67 deregulatory reforms that rid small business of intrusive regulations.

Conclusion
Well we could go on and on, but I think you get the picture. Trump has taken up the banner of prolife so eventually murdering babies in Planned Parenthood will be over and the agency abolished. The new administration is certainly a breath of fresh air. The President has a lot more on his plate for the next two years like ridding us of the swamp things, correcting the Veteran’s Administration mismanagement, building up our military, cleaning up of HUD where Dr. Carson said there was 500 hundred billion missing! He has a lot to accomplish, we just need to get out of his way and turn him loose!

Reply
 
 
Aug 22, 2019 10:07:16   #
slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas
 
Rose42 wrote:
Interesting article. But what's next? There's Trump vs one of the horrific democrat candidates. All I see are articles that criticize Trump yet everyone seems to ignore the abysmal state of the democrat party. Both parties are in a sorry state. People want change? Nothing is going to change unless its demanded and its not demanded as seen by the lack of a standout democrat candidate. By the look of things the democrats will change nothing if they win.

Nikki Haley should run.
Interesting article. But what's next? There's Tr... (show quote)

I agree with all you write here. The article defined Clinton as an unacceptable alternative...as did I.

Nikki Haley would a viable presidential candidate.

Reply
Aug 22, 2019 11:38:25   #
vernon
 
moldyoldy wrote:
A visionary article, the predictions were accurate. But they did not count on Russian intervention.


You are really a nut case. when are you going to admit that the hillery hired a a spy to do a number on Trump,and they failed .
And Slat you are to well educated to put trash like this on line under your real name,I thought you had more character.

Reply
Aug 22, 2019 11:42:38   #
slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas
 
vernon wrote:
You are really a nut case. when are you going to admit that the hillery hired a a spy to do a number on Trump,and they failed .
And Slat you are to well educated to put trash like this on line under your real name,I thought you had more character.

Thank you, Vernon, but I tend to think putting articles like this online exhibits character. Pat Buchanan, Rod Dreher and The American Conservative magazine did not consider it "trash". Neither do many others.

Reply
Aug 22, 2019 11:46:13   #
nwtk2007 Loc: Texas
 
slatten49 wrote:
The American Conservative: The Tragedy of Trump, By Rod Dreher • October 24, 2016 (pre-election)

The dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency are more familiar than Trump’s authoritarian unknowns, because we live with them in our politics already. They’re the dangers of elite groupthink, of Beltway power worship, of a cult of presidential action in the service of dubious ideals. They’re the dangers of a recklessness and radicalism that doesn’t recognize itself as either, because it’s convinced that if an idea is mainstream and commonplace among the great and good then it cannot possibly be folly.

Almost every crisis that has come upon the West in the last 15 years has its roots in this establishmentarian type of folly. The Iraq War, which liberals prefer to remember as a conflict conjured by a neoconservative cabal, was actually the work of a bipartisan interventionist consensus, pushed hard by George W. Bush but embraced as well by a large slice of center-left opinion that included Tony Blair and more than half of Senate Democrats.

Likewise the financial crisis: Whether you blame financial-services deregulation or happy-go-lucky housing policy (or both), the policies that helped inflate and pop the bubble were embraced by both wings of the political establishment. Likewise with the euro, the European common currency, a terrible idea that only cranks and Little Englanders dared oppose until the Great Recession exposed it as a potentially economy-sinking folly. Likewise with Angela Merkel’s grand and reckless open-borders gesture just last year: She was the heroine of a thousand profiles even as she delivered her continent to polarization and violence.
And: One can look at Trump himself and see too much danger of still-deeper disaster, too much temperamental risk and moral turpitude, to be an acceptable alternative to this blunder-ridden status quo … while also looking at Hillary Clinton and seeing a woman whose record embodies the tendencies that gave rise to Trumpism in the first place.

Along these lines, there was a quite good Peggy Noonan column in the WSJ last week (now, alas, behind the paywall, but I found the whole thing here), saying that if Trump were not a “nut” — which he clearly is — he would be winning this thing by a landslide, because a lot of folks are sick and tired of the status quo that Hillary represents. Excerpt:

Mr. Trump’s great historical role was to reveal to the Republican Party what half of its own base really thinks about the big issues. The party’s leaders didn’t know! They were shocked, so much that they indulged in sheer denial and made believe it wasn’t happening.

Because she is largely in sympathy with Trump’s political views, she is “particularly sorry” that Trump is a nut (me too! me too!). She wonders what would have happened if we had had a Sane Donald Trump. For one, she says, he “would have won in a landslide.” Excerpts:

Sane Donald Trump, just to start, would look normal and happy, not grim and glowering. He would be able to hear and act on good advice. He would explain his positions with clarity and depth, not with the impatient half-grasping of a notion that marks real Donald Trump’s public persona.

Sane Donald Trump would have looked at a dubious, anxious and therefore standoffish Republican establishment and not insulted them, diminished them, done tweetstorms against them. Instead he would have said, “Come into my tent. It’s a new one, I admit, but it’s yuuge and has gold faucets and there’s a place just for you. What do you need? That I be less excitable and dramatic? Done. That I not act, toward women, like a pig? Done, and I accept your critique. That I explain the moral and practical underpinnings of my stand on refugees from terror nations? I’d be happy to. My well-hidden secret is that I love everyone and hear the common rhythm of their beating hearts.”

And: Sane Donald Trump would not treat the political process of the world’s greatest democracy as if it were, as somebody said, the next-to-last episode of a reality-TV series. That’s the episode that leaves you wondering how the season will end—who will scream, who will leave the drunken party in a huff, who will accuse whom of being a whore. I guess that’s what “I’ll keep you in suspense” as to whether he’ll accept the election result was about. We’re being teed up. The explosive season finale is Nov. 8. Maybe he’ll leave in a huff. Maybe he’ll call everyone whores.

Does he know he’s playing with fire? No. Because he’s a nut.

Ben Stein agrees with Noonan that Trump is a nut, but he’s voting for Trump anyway, because he thinks Trump is less of a nut than Clinton. This is not persuasive, but this is true: Trump’s a nut. I don’t doubt Peggy Noonan at all. But we have a choice of nuts this year, and that’s the tragedy. It’s a tragedy the greatest nation in history does not deserve.

The only real question for conservatives and Republicans now is what happens to the Right and the GOP, its political vehicle, in the wake of Trump’s loss. #NeverTrumpers will be strongly tempted to indulge in bitter “I told you so!” recriminations. Trumpers, likewise, will be strongly tempted to indulge in bitter “You stabbed him in the back!” polemics. All of this will work to the advantage of President H. Clinton, of course. What is needed is for the GOP establishment to humble itself enough to admit those who, like Noonan, accept the critique of the party and the system that Trump’s candidacy embodies, however, well, nuttily. And the Trump insurgents — including their leader — need to have the sense to realize that it advantages them not at all to drag this fight with Republicans out past the election. Their candidate will have received a thorough, resounding rejection by voters in an election he likely would have won had he not consistently spoken and acted like a nut.

Do I think this (humility on both sides, uniting in the face of Hillaryism) is likely to happen? No, I do not. But I hope I’m wrong. The Trump people, like their candidate, are not known for their ability to think strategically and to restrain themselves for their own good. And the bitterness and spite among Republican regulars is going to blind them to their own role in creating this mess. I overheard a conversation the other day in which some Republican lamented that “we” — meaning the GOP — “have Donald Trump.”

“We don’t have Trump,” his interlocutor shot back. “We have Paul Ryan. He’s ours.”

And I thought, “Who’s this we?” The party isn’t yours anymore, mister, though admittedly it’s hard to say who it belongs to or what it stands for. Because Trump did not build any kind of movement, and doesn’t have any obvious heirs in the party leadership, there’s no telling where the GOP is going after November.

But we can be sure it’s not going back to the way things were pre-Trump.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/tragedy-trump/ (very slightly edited)
The American Conservative: The Tragedy of Trump, ... (show quote)


Trump a nutt? Maybe. Maybe not. He seems to always be one step ahead of his opposition. Hmm. And he did bring out the true nature of the democratic party; that being a bunch of leftists with no morals at all, willing to do anything and everything to get their way, to force their way upon us all. Maybe it took a nutt to bring that all to the surface. And now we ALL know.

Reply
 
 
Aug 22, 2019 11:50:49   #
vernon
 
Rose42 wrote:
Interesting article. But what's next? There's Trump vs one of the horrific democrat candidates. All I see are articles that criticize Trump yet everyone seems to ignore the abysmal state of the democrat party. Both parties are in a sorry state. People want change? Nothing is going to change unless its demanded and its not demanded as seen by the lack of a standout democrat candidate. By the look of things the democrats will change nothing if they win.

Nikki Haley should run.
Interesting article. But what's next? There's Tr... (show quote)


It doesn't matter who runs Trump is going to be elected and by a landslide .

Reply
Aug 22, 2019 11:51:02   #
slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas
 
nwtk2007 wrote:
Trump a nutt? Maybe. Maybe not. He seems to always be one step ahead of his opposition. Hmm. And he did bring out the true nature of the democratic party; that being a bunch of leftists with no morals at all, willing to do anything and everything to get their way, to force their way upon us all. Maybe it took a nutt to bring that all to the surface. And now we ALL know.

Certainly, there's some truth in what you write here, Nwtk. Trump is quite the Artful Dodger.

Reply
Aug 22, 2019 11:55:55   #
vernon
 
slatten49 wrote:
Thank you, Vernon, but I tend to think putting articles like this online exhibits character. Pat Buchanan, Rod Dreher and The American Conservative magazine did not consider it "trash". Neither do many others.


I don't consider Pat Buchanan any type of good republican and I don't read a rag that is nothing but rinos,and they are not with the republicans of the day.

Reply
Aug 22, 2019 11:59:52   #
nwtk2007 Loc: Texas
 
slatten49 wrote:
Certainly, there's some truth in what you write here, Nwtk. Trump is quite the Artful Dodger.


Yep.

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