Monday, October 24, 2016

Who He?


Ross Douthat is now the conservative columnist for the New York Times (since David Brooks has finally let his inner self have its head) and is a clear find. I plan to start reading him on a regular basis since his political position seems to be very close to my own ... and he expresses it so much better.

I discovered him referenced on the Breitbart Internet news site with the following op-ed snippet. If you want the link, it is  HERE ... but it offers little more than the following burning logic:

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.
This record of elite folly — which doesn’t even include lesser case studies like our splendid little war in Libya — is a big part of why the United States has a “let’s try crazy” candidate in this election, and why there are so many Trumpian parties thriving on European soil.
Of course, next I had to learn a little more about this man ... he has impressive credentials ... see: Wikipedia Bio. I have no clue if he is planning to vote for Trump, but I think he is leaning anti-establishment and therefore just might. But, from what I've read so far, I'm convinced he's "not for her".

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