Posted on 03/17/2016 2:57:57 PM PDT by onyx
He is a globalist and full of hot air the same as Levin, Hannity and the rest of the media...gone, lost forever!!!
“Podhoretz’s theory, get-even-with-’em-ism, to me that describes Obama. I think that’s what the entire Obama administration has been.”
Exactly. That’s what set the stage for Trump, who now is implying that he will act out the revenge model for older white men. He won’t, of course, just as Obama has left blacks worse off than when he started.
But this whole pattern of revenge politics started with Obama and the full enactment of the Alinsky model.
I think it’s stupid pessimistic to rant “once a liberal always a liberal” (even allowing for the modern meaning which is oxymoronic — illiberal liberals).
Trump has gotten where he has by an unorthodox method. By assembling a populist parade. This means perforce embracing a mixture of political philosophies. But perhaps it’s the only thing that can even begin to cement this fractured nation back together. To try to move a heap of fragments to the right or any other direction is almost a nonsensical pursuit. And I believe we need to better distinguish the role of church from that of our government stewards. To treat them reflexively as unified causes us grief in two directions. It whitewashes evil (chattel slavery and slaving preachers, anyone? or more modernly, the welfare equivalents of charity?) and it gets churches satisfied with a dumbed-down implementation of Christianity.
Is that what you are seeing here ?
I don’t.
He is laying out Podhoretz’ argument.
In the end he says -
“Is that who you are? I don’t think that’s it, myself.”
i.e., he disagrees with Podhoretz.
And of course -
“Podhoretz’s theory, get-even-with-’em-ism, to me that describes Obama.”
I don’t see anti-Trump here.
Hating something doesn’t necessarily have to mean vengeance. It can simply mean nonsupport.
I resemble your remark.
They all drank from the Beck poisoned chalice. Sucks to be them I suppose.
And for what its worth, and not entirely relevant here, John Podhoretz is a pale shadow of his dad Norman.
I’ve been reading “Commentary” for a very long time indeed.
A week ago I was in a Twitter debate with Jonah Goldberg and was really getting him. Podhoretz tried to come to his rescue—a sure sign I was winning.
No, but Obama campaigned on vengeance, and I think that has become the new model.
So I thought about how I would answer it.
For me, it's not about aligning around my principles, it's about aligning around my goals. I can tolerate a less principled candidate as long as I think he's best positioned to achieve my goals. Of course, there is a minimum principles line I won't cross, but I don't think that Trump is anywhere near that line. But we have to win the election first for any of it to matter, and I don't think the "principled" Cruz has the general crossover appeal to win.
So what are my goals? Right now, they are simple: first, build the wall; second, screw Mitch McConnell. We can go from there.
So who's in the best position to do that?
-PJ
Ok, I heard this but I wanted to digest it first.
Rush still doesn’t get it. I think many Cruzers here do, but just as many Trumpers here do (to be honest), they write off this weakness by saying, “Well, he’ll do something different in office.” What I’m speaking of is that he HASN’T “done it.”
I know others have other concerns about Ted, but my main concern is that he can’t DO the conservative “things” as president because he lacks the force of personality, the innovativeness, and the imagination, and my proof is that in the Senate he . . . didn’t . . . do . . . anything. The votes he did have are not reassuring.
THIS is the thing I’ve been emailing Rush and David about for months. The caller is right when she says it’s a “trust issue.” But why do people have less trust in Ted? The answer is clear: he had a shot. He either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stop anything. Either way, it’s failure.
I don’t know if the right-wing/very conservative group will every realize that or try to realize that about Ted-—not that they have to AGREE-—but they do have to at least understand why he isn’t winning over the conservatives en mass. Rush has refused to go there. He dances around it. He still treats it like some mystery.
So, back to Podhoretz, no, if the economic debacle would have come in 2006, Obama STILL would have been president. His rise just would have been less of a surprise, because Hillary didn’t have answers then any more than she does today.
But when you get to Trump-—and he has warned it will get worse with our debt-—why do people “trust” him? Well, he HAS been successful in the business world, he HAS dealt with financial failure and overcome it, and he HAS negotiated successfully with foreign business leaders.
And we’ve been over this last thing a million times: people have received NOTHING from “constitutional conservatism.” It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: our survival is at stake, and people are reflexively in some cases (and more thoughtfully in most) going with the guy who is addressing THAT as opposed to “how we get there.”
It can only be so by the permission of the people who choose to uphold it, or discard it.
Yup. A country that isn’t surviving can’t even worry about its constitution. It’s dead, overrun.
Ted has seemed too clever by half in some circumstances. Sometimes when faced with a poop and the demand to pick it up by the clean end, one simply has to put one’s foot down and say no.
That is a great point, and I think you really are onto the key core of Trumpism, which is, “Fix the freakin’ problems.”
Moreover, I’m a little sick of Levin, NRO, Podhoretz, and all these other clowns thinking they get to define what conservatism is. By their definitions, Lincoln, Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Madison would NOT be “conservatives.” They ALL believed in a protective tariff. They were ALL “America Firsters.” Hell, Lincoln even protested the Mexican War thinking that it (rightly) would add slave territory to the Union (and, yes, I’m glad we got Texas and Arizona. The problem wasn’t Mexican territory, it was the southern slaveocracy . . . but I digress).
I keep coming back to the Bible, and Paul’s comment that the “law kills but the spirit gives life.” This gets back to your point. Conservatism exists to serve US. A “free market” exists to serve the people and allow them to be prosperous. How has that worked out for the US?
Lincoln stated what you said in the Gettysburg address, namely a principle is only good if it is “dedicated to a proposition”-—in this case that the United States is a great country that needs its borders defended and its economy revived. To parrot the principles without ever finding a way to actually connect it to the proposition yields a separation of the two and usually a rejection of the principles as ineffective.
You know, when Washington was overrun by the Brits in 1814, Madison skeedaddled out and left the government in James Monroe’s hands. Monroe was Sec State, but the Sec War was running around out of touch and couldn’t do anything anyway. So Monroe assumed the presidency and the SecWar to go along with the Sec State, successfully organized defense and re-started construction of weapons.
Poor Jimmy Madison tried. He was in the saddle almost three days straight trying to catch up with the army. But the point is, Monroe didn’t look at the Constitution and say, “Gee, I’m not allowed to do all these things.” He just saved the country.
Caller: “...we already know what Cruz is gonna do because he’s already done it.”
You mean like Ted’s vote to help push through TPA/TPP?
You mean like Ted’s Corker bill vote that gave Iran the means to bomb us into the stone age?
You mean like taking loans from Goldman Sachs for his Senate campaign, then conveniently failing to disclose that to the FEC?
You mean like taking the oath of office from Stabby The Clown?
You mean like hiring Neil Bush as your campaign finance manager?
You mean like attending a private closed door meeting with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich?
You mean like siding with the BLM thugs, OWSers, and La Raza racists against Donald Trump?
Spare me all this talk of Ted’s ‘consistent conservatism’, etc. It’s nothing but a bunch of hype and advertising. False advertising, at that.
My principals are GOD, FAMILY, CONSTITUTION, CORPS, and COUNTRY.
I am a Cruz kind of guy, but so far Trump has not trampled on any of my core beliefs.
If Cruz can’t make the grade in the primaries, I will vote for Trump.
This, more than anything else, is the basic rationale for Trump's appeal.
People want to argue the finer points of ideological purity while the damn house is on fire. They simply fail to see that most voters want a fireman to put it out before everything's lost.
Perhaps after we've got everything secured, and the house put back into order, we can start talking about running it from an ideological perspective again.
Bingo! Me too......giving you a cyber handshake.....;)
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