Artifices

The world that the major media outlets paint for America is an artifice ... an artifice with a comfortable connection to previous establishment constructs.

The world that Trump offers is also an artifice ... an uncomfortable reality that dismisses many tenets that we thought were sacrosanct ... and, claims he ... were leading our nation into a Clockwork-Orange dystopia ... such as we see in many Democrat-controlled urban areas. He has offered America a rocky path back to that shining city on the hill.

I like Trump’s illusion better.

Pardon Me?

Trump's best line at the Catholic charities event a few weeks back was the one about Hellary bumping into him and saying, "Pardon me?" Now, she has lost the election and he is soon to be confronted with this choice. It is clear to most Americans that this woman is guilty of many serious transgressions. The aura of years of malfeasance hangs over her like that cloud of dust around Pigpen. She has skated through life ignoring all the ethical and legal boundaries and never really been punished for it ... except of course by losing two attempts at the presidency. But she has also been richly rewarded financially for her arrogant flaunting of our laws.

But is her punishment enough that she has been twice denied the big POTUS prize? This is the decision that Trump will have to make ... unless of course Obummer makes it for him ... which I consider quite unlikely ... due to his obsession with his legacy. Like always, Obummer prefers to let others do the dirty work. But even if this happens, I believe that the Clinton Foundation and its bevy of capos should be prosecuted with the full might of Trump's Justice Department and his IRS.

The question then presents itself ... what if Obummer doesn't let Hellary off the hook? My answer is simple. If Trump pardons her, then he will be sending a clarion message to his voters that he is (re)joining the Establishment ... the very people he opposed in this past election. As THE agent of change, showing mercy to this evil, evil woman  would be the Christan thing to do, but not the right thing to do. This past election was not just the Globalists versus the Nationalists ... it was also the Establishment against the crockery breakers, the Populists. Thus, a presidential pardon would also send too clear a message to future politicians that laws are for little people ...and Republican campaign promises are also will o' the wisp.

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".

Blinders

I was on a Skype call yesterday with some college classmates and I was put in the uncomfortable position of having to explain why I am going to vote for Trump. To a man, my classmates, many of whom profess to be Republicans, were down on The Donald ... and I do understand their aversion ... because Trump has an uncanny way of sticking his finger in the eyes of the establishment. I won't say that they were looking down their noses at him, but they clearly weren't in awe. Nor am I ... but I still think I would prefer having a finger in my eye than a suicide vest going off next to me.

Maybe it is my humble background ... but I have never considered myself as refined. For instance, I still like Dick Cheney when most liberals ... and many conservatives ... hate him with a passion. For what? Because he showed a determination and uncanny competence in protecting us after 9/11. Our current president, Obummer and his presumptive successor, Hellery, refuse to show half the competence to protect us as both Cheney and Trump obviously engender. Those two elite Democrats, Hellery and Obummer, are wearing blinders to our grave dangers for reasons that confound me. Perhaps it is their predilection for globalism? Maybe it is their desire to hold on to power by not admitting incompetence? Maybe it is inherent anti-Semitism that has caused them both to be so pro-Muslim? Perhaps, it is just a Saul Alinsky style revolutionary fervor? Maybe it is all those things and more?

But whatever it is, they both are wearing blinders and Donald Trump, as crude as he comes across, isn't. He is a realist of the first order ... perhaps the reason why he has been so successful in business. That is why I will vote for him whatever are the ancillary risks. I do know that, if Trump is elected, he will do some un-conservative things that I won't like ... and he will blurt out some unpresidential zingers. (So I guess I can also be accused of wearing blinders.) But I am convince that he will do enough good things to help put our country back on a path toward renewed greatness.

Election Prediction

It seems clear that President Obummer, abetted by the corrupt Washington establishment, has fulfilled his pledge to fundamentally change this country. It also seems clear that, due to the immense popularity of the otherwise unsavory, non-establishment candidates, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and, to a lesser extent, Ted Cruz, large swaths of Obummer's subjects are very unhappy with these establishment changes.

I therefore predict that the current presidential contest will be a wave election ... and, if it becomes a choice between an establishment and non-establishment candidate, the non-establishment candidate, of either party, will win in a landslide.

Antidisestablishmentarianism

This strange long word involves a 19th century revolution against and in defense of the established religious order in England. And this is similar to what is happening in the United States today ... evidenced by the political campaigns of Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

These three anti-establishment candidates are clearly embraced because they represent a populist revulsion against how both political parties have been governing. This revulsion is also evidenced by the fact that both parties combined only have a 12% approval rating in Congress ... and by the Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party, and Black Lives Matter movements.

And the establishment members of both parties are fighting back. The Democrats have pretty much neutered Bernie Sanders with super delegates to its convention and with the voting patterns of mostly Southern minorities. So, Hellery Clinton, the establishment Democrat candidate, appears to have prevailed.

On the Republican side, in a desperate twist, Ted Cruz has suddenly become the establishment candidate..And Donald Trump seems well on his way to upsetting the establishment bloc in his party. However this bloc has not given up ... and are posing a number of different tactics to deny Trump its nomination ... including a possibly contested convention and/or a changing of the convention rules.

Moreover  this revolution is not a trivial uprising. Both Trump and Sanders have been drawing enormous crowds at their political rallies ... and their primary campaigns have won many wide and surprising victories. But both political establishments clearly do not want to hear the voice of the people ... and, I predict, will suffer as a consequence.

The upcoming presidential election, if Trump is the eventual nominee of the Republicans, will be a clear contest between the establishment and the non-establishment ... ergo, antidisestablishmentarianism ... and many anti-establishment Bernie Sanders fans may indeed vote for Trump!

Eating Their Children

The Republicans are getting vicious. Jeb Bush is doing his best to eviscerate Marco Rubio ... a strategy that makes Jeb look petty. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are finally in a cage match ... talk about being petty! Chris Christie is a little gentler with his brickbats for his fellow Republicans ... preferring to save most of them for Hillary Clinton. Even a former candidate, Lindsey Graham, offers zingers for Cruz and Trump. The bystanders to this mayhem, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, John Kasich and Rick Santorum, all have been relatively pacified ... primarily I believe due to lack of advertising funds, Maybe after all the smoke clears, one of them will have a chance to shine ... but this is doubtful.

The media talking heads like to paint this fight as a competition between the establishment candidates -- Bush, Rubio, Kasich and Santorum ... and the outsiders -- Trump, Christie, Carson, Huckabee, Fiorina and Cruz. Rand Paul seems somewhere in the middle ... maybe that is his grand strategy. And so it seems that the major skirmishes are within these camps ... the semi-finals so to speak. The expectation then is that the final Republican internecine contest will be between the outsiders and the establishment standard bearers ... possibly Trump and Rubio.

I would love the winner in the finals to be Rubio, but I am afraid it will be Trump ... a lot having to do with Jeb's vicious attacks on Marco.

If the Republicans are eating their children, the Democrats may be eating their children and grandchildren ... but that is for another time.

Time Travel

Almost three years!  That is a very long time for a deteriorating old man (me) … and for a rapidly disintegrating country (the USA) to endure. President Obama has almost three more years of malignant mischief-making in which to vex many of us with his folksy haughtiness, his managerial inattention, his foreign-policy screw-ups, his self-righteous preaching, his corrupt posse, and his profligate spending. I think Ann Coulter hit the nail on the head when she said, “If Obama was trying to destroy this country, what would he be doing any differently?”

But in a very strange way what President Obama is now bulldozing may end up being beneficial for us.  His reign of destruction (aka, "hope and change") may be similar to the early twentieth-century Dadaist art movement and its raucous nihilism ... which fostered some of the most innovative art in centuries.  His attempted razing of many of the pillars upon which this country was founded and prospered has caused many of us to rethink our purpose and rededicate our lives.  The Tea-Party movement is symptomatic of the grass-roots resurrection of what was once great in America. There is, I believe a creative cleansing to take place among the rubble of what Obama is now working.  

Many in the current establishment and media can't or won't sense this resurrection ... but our younger generations will soon compare what we have become to what we once were ... and re-learn those things to be cherished. I firmly believe it's in our DNA. Just as Abraham Lincoln talked about a “new birth of freedom,” I judge that we will be, once our Fearless Leader leaves office, ready to rid Washington of much of the political pollution that persists there.  Of course all may not be repaired, but I pray that enough will be fixed that our country might have another few hundred years of freedom-loving and innovative time travel ... which isn't, I think, what Obama had in mind.

Afterward: If what I am herein predicting does indeed come about, I suspect that some historians of a liberal bent ... of which there are many ... will say that this was what Obama was about all along. Note to any future readers ... don't believe it!  

Baby Steps

There is a schism brewing in the Republican Party over the Paul Ryan-Patty Murray budget deal … just at the wrong time … see: Business Insider Article.  This revolt revolves around the fact that this “bipartisan” deal raises taxes (“fees”) and also increases spending (through sequester rollbacks).  The tea-party branch of the GOP rankles at this Democrat-lite solution … while the establishment Republicans believe that this deal will remove this budget issue from the table for the 2014 elections.  In other words, "take what we can get and move on (baby steps … or incrementalism) and we will have more leverage after the elections."

I am sympathetic to both positions. However, one argument that has caught my attention is that Democrats have used incrementalism for generations to get us into the dire predicament in which we find ourselves today … a debt abyss from which it is almost impossible to extract ouselves.  So, if the Republicans now try to adopt incrementalism as their solution, they are once again playing the Democrats’ game. Yes, I realize that not playing this game jeopardizes Republican chances in 2014, but then I strongly suspect that our Kardashian-obsessed American electorate will not wake up to our real fiscal peril until confronted with the cataclysm that awaits if we continue down the fiscal path blazed by the progressives among us.

Being babied is seldom an effective cure for self-indulgence.