Posted on 08/23/2015 11:54:00 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I must admit I have enjoyed the Trump-a-palooza this summer. The truth is, I have thrown in the towel on America so I don’t think our elections mean very much. It’s just a question about how fast we intend to drive into the abyss. Being old I should be rooting for slow as that means I can reach escape velocity before it gets ugly. On the other hand, life is for living and sticking around long enough to see the collapse has its attractions.
I can go either way so the elections are just entertainment at this point.
Six months ago I was thinking the Democrats would anoint Hillary, after the usual dalliances with a true believer, who excites the fever swamp types. It’s the GOP’s turn so this is when the party hands out their lifetime achievement award. The GOP would be figuring out if they can run Bush or if they have to find someone with the same polices, but a different last name.
Now, I think something is happening here. Clinton is now immersed in what could very well be the scandal of the century. There’s no way to wriggle free of the mishandling of classified data. You can finesse financial laws and ethics rules. You can’t finesse this stuff. News reports suggest there may be dozens of people who have violated the law and conspired to hide their involvement. This is Watergate level stuff given her position.
On the GOP side, Donald Trump just gave a speech in a stadium. If you are a member of the Party leadership or an advisor to one of the candidates, you should be in a panic. Trump went from sideshow at the start of the summer to leader of a revolution at the end of the summer. In-between, the GOP took their best shots at the man and did not leave a mark. Watching Trump’s crowd last night I kept thinking, “something is happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”
One thing that is clear is I was the only guy to figure out that Trump was Beppe Grillo. The other thing is the ossified and blinkered chattering classes are wholly unprepared for what’s happening to them right now. They spend their time reading each other’s tweets, promoting each other’s work and chatting with one another at play time. They are not even aware of the vast network of writers, bloggers and trouble makers out there complaining about the status quo.
The best evidence of that is the deranged ranting of Kevin Williamson at National Review with regards to Donald Trump. It’s like watching a robot whose CPU errors out and the robot goes berserk, smashing itself into walls. When it is a bunch of metal it is funny. When it is a human being having a nervous breakdown, it’s sad and pathetic. In this case it is emblematic. Conservative Inc. is cracking up over what’s happening outside the Acela corridor.
Trump may turn out to be a poor spokesman for the massive crowds mobbing his events. I’m not a big fan of his style and I don’t think he has thought much about any of these things, other than immigration. That puts him way ahead of the dreary dishrags running for office, but the leader of a revolt needs a coherent platform. Maybe that comes, maybe not, but the crowds are not going away.
That’s why the rest of the candidates should be scared. To get these crowds for Bush or Walker or Kasich, you would have to round up the people at gun point. Even then, you would probably have to lock the gates to keep the people from fleeing the arena once the dreary dullard started talking. Those people at the Trump rally are not buying what the GOP is selling, even if they may not be sold on Trump as a candidate.
I don’t know what they do at this stage. These things can burn out on their own or they can break up like the Tea Party. The trouble is the GOP had corrupted the grass roots long ago so they could tear apart the Tea Party movement without too much trouble. The trouble here is this is ad hoc and completely outside the control of the “grass roots” organizations that exploited the displeasure pver Obama. This is a revolt against those organizations, especially the GOP establishment.
I’m skeptical about Trump. I think his lack of restraint will be his undoing. But, we’re seeing a collapse of the middle. The parties and the press are now bullhorns aimed at the public and the public gets it. This is not about Trump. He’s just the flag around which the dispossessed can rally. You can take down the flag and the people may disperse, but the dispossessed are still there. Someone will come along with a new flag eventually.
Very well reasoned and written. It resonates a lot with me and I’m sure many others out there.
You’re actually better at this than George Will.
I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not.
I must have written this in my sleep and used a pseudo name because from the very first word to the last period this sums up my thoughts exactly.
He wins the internet! My sentiments exactly!
Great point!
Yeah, this bugged me WAAAAaay less than George Will.
I think our own people are better than presstitutes.
WHO in their right mind would PAY to go to J-School today..??
I didn’t agree with all of it, but this was still a good post.
My thoughts, too, except I am only 69 so I may have a couple of decades to see where the bottom of the chasm is and how sharp are the rocks. We went over the edge some time ago but we have half a combat parachute slowing the fall a bit, not enough to change the ultimate result or the direction, though.
“I’m skeptical about Trump. I think his lack of restraint will be his undoing.”
I find his lack of restraint refreshing. I think many others feel the same way.
You must be a speed reader!
I was watching Fox the other night when they were waiting for Trump to speak and they kept repeating the meme that his claim to fame is being a reality TV star.
But this is not true. He was a star of REALITY long before reality TV was invented. Trump has been in the national eye since the 1980s.
So why does he appeal to the only truly disenfranchised people in the America: the working middle class? He isn’t one of us. He didn’t work his way up from blue collar beginnings.
Here’s why: in a nation that creates wealth through overpriced startups that are invented just for the IPO and an eventual buyout long before anything useful is produced, Trump is a builder. He actually puts up casinos and hotels, instead of building a virtual casino on the internet and then selling shares via GoFundMe.
Yeah, he did some time on Reality TV, but most of America’s Trump experience has been with him doing stuff and being larger-than-life. The allure of a President who DOES CONSTRUCTIVE THINGS is powerful since we haven’t had one of those in a very long time.
A slow toddler is better than George “My wife works for Walker” Will.
Exactly.
Trump is that Man on Horseback that appears during the breakup and collapse of civilizations and great nations. In history some of them have been good for a few years of glory but not for any restoration of what was before. Napoleon. Octavian. Schickelgruber. Peron.
Quite the opposite, but I retain quite a bit.
Kivin Williamson is a one man list to which I would add the name Michael Medved.
“That’s why the rest of the candidates should be scared. To get these crowds for Bush or Walker or Kasich, you would have to round up the people at gun point. Even then, you would probably have to lock the gates to keep the people from fleeing the arena once the dreary dullard started talking.”
Hilarious! All of it is, I just picked some sentences I could copy.
Social ferment is building that this country has not seen since perhaps the 1970’s.
Only it has a different flavor this time, not so much in favor of the “Flower Children”, but for the restoration of something like taking pride in BEING an American citizen, when the value of that commodity has fallen to perhaps its lowest level in the existence of the concept known as “the United States of America”, founded in 1776, and matured into one of the fairest and most equitable system of society and economics ever evolved on this planet. There are no hereditary social or economic classes, and mobility, both up AND down, has been unrivaled by any other republic the world has ever seen.
Yeah .... “Heil Schickelgruber” probably wouldn’t have worked.
Well,I’m only 61, but neither of us may have that long...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=september+2015
I’m only 55.
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