As has been noted incessantly, Trump has a number of serious character flaws. Like the vast majority of politicians, he has a narcissistic personality. Like the vast majority of politicians, he's a lying conman. He intensely erratic. And so forth.
Everybody knew all that before the election, yet he still got lots of votes.
And I'm (mostly) glad he did - Trump has wildly exceeded my expectations.
Why?
Because Trump has instigated events that have brought crystalline clarity to the fact that the
vast majority of the elite, including politicians, bureaucrats, news
media, academia, entertainment, athletes, etc. are self-serving,
lying, narcissistic, nasty people who'd go to any length to
destroy anyone who gets in their way (including Trump).
And vast swaths of American citizens, especially independents and
the moderate right and a bit of the moderate left, have had their
eyes opened to this corruption for the first time ever and they are
astounded, dismayed, and mostly still in shock. But they will
recover, and then the political debates, while unfortunately ever
more vitriolic and even violent, will also, I think, be more realistic, if not about
the topics of debate, but at least about the elite.
And that's a good thing.
18 comments:
Just saw this from Thomas Sowell: ”Liberals are for helping people who are disadvantaged, while I think conservatives want to stop people from being disadvantaged. In other words, liberals want to help the poor while they’re poor, but really the biggest benefit is to stop them from being poor, and that’s something they [liberals] have little interest in.”
I know he's 86 now and probably doesn't want the hassle, but I do wish he could be put into a prominent position where his incredible calm wisdom could be part of the dialogue.
You opened your eyes and that's what you saw? Yesterday a friend was telling me abuot Prester John and how Europeans kept moving him around Asia and then Africa until finally there was no unexamined place where he could still be. So I told a little-known story about what happened when Da Gama reached Calicut in 1498.
As Christians, they expected to find Christians in India (the 'Thomas Christians'). And so they did.
For 6 months Da Gama and his men attended daily 'mass' at the Cristian church they found at Calicut. It was a kshatriya temple.
[Harry:] You opened your eyes and that's what you saw?
Isn't this enough: [Bret:] ... Trump has instigated events that have brought crystalline clarity to the fact that the vast majority of the elite, including politicians, bureaucrats, news media, academia, entertainment, athletes, etc. are self-serving, lying, narcissistic, nasty people who'd go to any length to destroy anyone who gets in their way (including Trump).
That NYT editorial in the previous post is a perfect example.
The irony here is that things the progs have done are far worse than anything Trump has managed. You really need to own that.
Harry wrote: "You opened your eyes and that's what you saw?"
Just to be clear, my eyes were already open.
The important part is that lots of other people had their eyes opened.
he's a lying conman. He intensely erratic. And so forth.
That's quite the endorsement of your man, Bret. Watching the endless passion play entitled "Trump--the Horror" that has been running since the election has made me recall a Monty Python skit from the 70's about a TV game show based on bigotry. The host announced the results of a contest in which the TV audience had been invited to submit their most derogatory epithet describing the Belgians. Third prize was given to "the phlegms". Second prize went to "the sprouts". The winner was "dirty rotten Belgian bastards".
Something analogous illustrates the plight of our fevered, splenetic progressive friends. Starting with the self-evident truth that Trump is an asshole on many counts--he's the last person one would want as a co-worker, neighbor or son-in-law--they then run up against the irksome reality that the Founding Fathers seem to have knocked off early to hit the tavern and forgot to provide a constitutional mechanism for removing a president for simple assholery, a fatal flaw in an otherwise perfect constitution. Did they not worry about the sensibilities of the beautiful people, not to mention the opinions of enlightened Europeans and Canadians?
Consequently, the Dems, the media and all the other usual suspects are faced with the challenge of converting barroom insults everybody agrees with into something of intellectual substance and respectability. They are trying with boundless energy and outrage (do they all train?) and hair-splitting legal and psychological creativity to find a way to make assholery an impeachable offence or proof of mental incompetence. This quest is reflected in sordid tabloid gossip and 24/7 scandal-mongering by much of the formerly staid and professional MSM, which has abandoned any pretense of non-partisanship and is now sniffing underwear far and wide and spouting McCarthy-like Russophobia and other conspiracies galore from unnamed but, of course, reliable sources. It appears to be great for business (the Donald could have told them that) and is resulting in record profits for outfits like CNN and the NYT, but so far no increase in their all-time low credibility or in the popularity or electoral success of the Dems. Each new outrage is met with the widespread response: "Maybe, but...Obama...Hillary...Pelosi...Warren".
This headline is I think my favorite in that it sums up the childish frustration the media has descended to. I mean, any busy new president could be forgiven a hundred falsehoods, maybe two in a crisis, but Mom always told me that was the max and if three hundred isn't a high crime and misdemeanor, I don't know what is!
Peter, so you would have preferred Hillary?
How in the world do you take that from what I wrote, erp? I was basically sympathizing with Bret.
Sympathizing with Bret for what?
I really don't get the outrage at Trump even if he is all that you say when the media destroyed all the other candidates and left Trump standing thinking he was the easiest for Hillary to beat, he was our only choice. That they were wrong is hardly surprising. The left still hasn't learned that, contrary to the song, wishing doesn't make so. ��
What many people worldwide don't get is just how enraged We, the People are at how Soros/Obama et al. has left our country at war with itself.
We have hippie neighbors with whom we've had cordial and often humorous exchanges of opinion over the years. For the first time ever, they are seeing things a bit differently now. BTW they are a typical American family. She's of half Sikh and half Moslem parentage who was born here, but spent part of her childhood in New Delhi, who writes computer programs. He's a southern redneck morphed into a chemist working at a company makng eco-friendly building materials.
Peter wrote: "...dirty rotten Belgian bastards..."
LOL
Peter wrote: "...the Founding Fathers seem to have knocked off early to hit the tavern and forgot to provide a constitutional mechanism for removing a president for simple assholery..."
Well, they did actually including mechanisms: the electoral college, and Trump did approach the line where the electors needed to consider preventing his election but decided he fell just a bit shy in the assholery (unfit to be president) category; and "high crimes and misdemeanors" is not well defined and while a (big?) stretch to consider any of Trump's actions as qualifying, a Dem house and strongly Dem senate might make such a stretch.
Peter wrote: "...three hundred..."
It made me laugh when the lead false statement identified by the article you linked to was "He got the date wrong in two separate ways." I wonder how many false things I say. For example, how many times I say something like "Last Saturday I did X" when in fact it was last Sunday, not Saturday, but I just didn't remember correctly. Fortunately for me, people of course don't have the time and energy to fact check such utterances of mine. I'd like to think I don't get as many things wrong as The Donald does and hopefully not even as many things wrong per utterance (The Donald has far more utterances per day than me I think), but I'm not even totally sure.
And my progressive friends are in the same boat. Them: "Trump lies continuously." Me: "Which lies are you referring to." Them: something like "he said he had more attendees on inauguration date than anyone else!!!" Me: "The horrors, the horrors! Errrr, why do you possibly care that he said that? What difference does it possibly make?" I mean if you're gonna complain about a politician lying (which is ridiculous in and of itself), why not focus on the earth shattering lies, not that he got dates wrong or made a (unprovably) false claim about the number of people somewhere? I'm not gonna scan the list of 300 false statements, but surely there's something more important than he got a date wrong? If that's his worse falsehood, then he's a saint!
I may be up here in nice, polite, peaceful Canada, erp, but believe me, I get how enraged your half of We,the People are, just as I get how enraged the other half is. You'd have to be stuck alone without Wifi on a desert island not to. I think it's very sad and alarming, but there you go. I also understand why people would vote for Trump over Clinton, who makes my teeth hurt whenever she opens her mouth. But I'm still with Kevin Williams of National Review who said before the election that both parties chose egregiously flawed candidates whose sole main qualification to be president was that they were not the other. It's one thing to vote for the guy, quite another to forget all one's bedrock moral and political principles to try to make a silk purse out of a sow by lionizing him as a hero who will save the nation and fulfill its original promise.
Peter wrote: "I get how enraged your half of We,the People are, just as I get how enraged the other half is."
While I, of course, wasn't around in past historical periods, it feels like the rage on both sides in comparable or even beyond the rage prior to the civil war and/or prior to WWII.
Can this level of rage abate without a violent conflict?
Yes Peter, moral equivalence uber alles. If only we were smart to see that.
That's the big question, isn't it, Bret? And it's one no non-American can answer. Christopher Hitchens once wrote that an outsider listening to political rhetoric in America could be forgiven for thinking you were just two speeches away from another civil war. I'm assuming most people on both sides just assume it will work itself out somehow, but I dunno. Frankly, you're beginning to remind me a bit of the Greeks, who famously love Greece to a man and woman but despise most other Greeks.
Meanwhile, the list of impeachable offences just keeps on getting longer.
Driving a cart on a golf green? Even if he owns said green? That is truly horrible and even I can get behind impeaching him now!!!!!!!
Peter wrote: "Christopher Hitchens once wrote that an outsider listening to political rhetoric in America could be forgiven for thinking you were just two speeches away from another civil war."
With the attempted massacre of republican congressmen that seriously injured Scalise, it may be that the hot civil war has already started.
I really don't see how things get better though. Progressives aren't gonna suddenly like the deplorables any better and the deplorables aren't gonna start liking progressives any better, or, at least I can't imagine how.
erp:
No liberal democracy can thrive or even survive without some general agreement on baseline political morality/rhetoric and the use/misuse of government and the political process. Such is implied in the whole notion of constitutional government. To hold one's own side to account for these, even without reference to what the other side is doing, is not moral equivalence by any definition of the phrase.
Civil wars almost always go down in history as tragic, painful wastes, but the reason they keep occurring is that too many people want them.
Progs, especially the younger generations don't know how to do anything useful, so they can't win the battle with conservatives. The huge bureaucracy needs to be cut down completely, ditto the public sector unions and then things will settle down to the survival of the fittest and we'll have to build our society from the bottom up again. Luckily this time we'll have a road map.
Peter, sorry, I forgot. I used moral relevancy sarcastically because IMO there is no moral relevancy between classic liberalism and socialism. One elevates the human condition and one reduces it to the lowest common denominator -- the latest tragic example being Venezuela.
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