Posted on 02/11/2016 11:06:56 AM PST by wayoverontheright
While the GOP establishment--that would be Karl Rove, National Review, Charles Krauthammer, The Weekly Standard, Fox News, on and on--cannot entertain the thought of a Donald Trump presidency, they are equally thoughtless as to why he's so popular among conservatives. The consistently failed predictions of Trump's demise are rivaled in futility perhaps only by the enviro-nut forecasts of planetary doom perpetrated by a harmless gas. They've been mystified from the get-go about what for them is Trump's inexplicable appeal.
They're clearly looking in the wrong places in order to figure him out.
Brain dead? Of some 500,000 votes cast yesterday in the Granite State primaries, nearly half were divided between a self-declared socialist, and an undeclared one. And the Trump voters are brain dead?
Because the punditocracy is looking at Trump instead of his following, they aren't seeing the root causes of the emotional uprising that is happening right before their dis-believing eyes. They are oblivious to the intensity of the emotions--the frustration, the anger, the tedium with the status-quo that exists outside their warm, brightly-lit-but-opaque bubble. They don't get us, so they call us names.
Admittedly, the Trump phenomenon is not reason-driven. We need to accept that the establishment thinkers probably have that part correct. No, it is emotion driven. We are having a hissy fit. So what? Don't answer that.
We don't know who to trust anymore, so we're just going to go with our gut on this one. Sometimes, emotions just need to rule. Do revolutions occur without them? After all, what good has believing in the pundits and their chosen ones done for us?
In defense of the punditocracy's futility at putting a finger on the pulse of Trump's following, it must be acknowledged that we don't know why we are so drawn to him either. We have other perfectly good candidates yet we're drawn to Trump. It's a gut thing. Something triggered a bond, what was it? Something very powerful sustains it, what is it?
When Donald Trump stood on that stage in the first Fox debate and declared that he had had enough of political correctness, it was a cathartic moment for us. When I say "us", it's apparently not limited to frustrated conservatives. We all watched for him to back down like all the rest. He didn't back down, heck, he doubled down. A significant emotional event it thus became. Then he gored the media's ox. That struck a nerve too.
For 50 years PC had policed our words, ascribed nefarious intent to innocent expressions, imposed awkward new phrases, invented new words and required their use. Redefined old ones. PC insulted the religious among us, put a wall up between the races, altered the relationships between men and women, and ultimately exacted real-world consequences.
Political correctness had imprisoned our very thoughts. All to protect fragile sensibilities, all to coddle myriad victims of the "established" ways of thinking. Our nature is that we don't want to be "offensive". At first, it didn't seem to be a big sacrifice. So we put up with it. A slippery slope it most surely has become.
We held it in, we dutifully became the land of the once-free. We did nothing when transgressors were publicly punished. So there's some guilt at work here.
We can’t open doors for our women, or compliment them on how they look in the workplace. There are needless awkward moments when the check comes on the first dinner-date. Chivalry, under attack. Chastity and modesty, nope, can't even present them as an option. Those damned "para espanol, oprima el numero cinco" phone prompts.
Our cherished symbols are under assault. Some flags are now evil. Some statues are deemed "offensive", unless they're naked. We can’t say certain words, we can’t profile criminals in a sane way. Speaking of profiling, we're human, we can’t stop thinking the thoughts we think when encountering a Muslim in a mall, or an airline queue. And we’re made to feel guilty about it. They're claiming the ability to read our minds, while simultaneously requiring us to read minds in order to determine which of these people want to kill us, and which of them don't.
We've kept it all in. For so, so long. Go along to get along. Maybe some booze will help. Don't say anything, it'll just rile 'em up. "Here, have a drink" we were told, by our own. "Listen to us", they said, "not all Muslims want to kill us. It's RADICAL Islam, get that? Have another drink on me."
We probably thought we had our anger under control. We no doubt sublimated it, and that only caused the anger to seethe, and grow. More recently we see PC being wielded as a weapon against us by enemies, people who want to kill us, so PC was no longer benign, it had become existential.
We must have been drunk for decades, not sure how long. What's been going on with us is not unlike an addiction. At first harmless, and so rewarding, then the consequences. But we just couldn't stop. We were one big, collective hangover, head pounding, about to throw up......
And then Donald Trump spoke those words.
He's tired of this PC crap. Oh my God, so are we! Is this our opportunity to ditch the bottle? Right or wrong, we saw in him perhaps our last chance to finally slay this dragon.
From Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats: A song called "S.O.B."
"My heart is achin', my hands a-shakin' , Bugs a'crawlin' over me...."
Yep, that was us.
That was us when George W. Bush finished his term having grown the government by just shy of a third. That was us when we were handed John McCain as our 2004 nominee. That was us when Barack Obama said "you didn't build that". That was us when Nancy Pelosi marched across the front yard of our Congress wielding that big ol' gavel. That was us when Mitt Romney- Mitt Freakin' Romney-,who had provided the template for Obamacare, was shoved down our gagging throats.
And after each and every setback, we acquiesced, we stuck by our drinking buddies, and we sang the second line of Nat's song....
"Son of a bitch! Gimme another drink!"
Then....
Mitch McConnell sold us out. The Corker amendment greased the skids for the Iran Nuclear agreement. Then Paul Ryan increased the debt ceiling, all the way to March of 2017.
"My heart is aching', my hands a'shakin', Bugs a'crawlin' over me...."
Another drink?
Not this time. Nope. We've had enough of the sauce. Donald is going to be our AA sponsor. We're ditching our drinking buddies, we're getting new friends, and the old ones can take a hike.
We prefer friends now our old drinking buddies don't like at all. And Donald doesn't even drink.
Ok, so there is an element of irrationality. Yep, our reverence for The Donald is absolutely born of anger, fear, and sheer tedium with what our addiction to fake conservatism has wrought. I think I speak for others when I say we know he's not a conservative's dream. For us to dream of the day when we can be purists again, may require that first the PC dragon be slain. Right now, he's the only dragon-slayer we see. We have not the luxury of being purists anymore.
We really don't like Trump's penchant for "making deals". Making deals at the executive branch level is what got us into much of this mess. We don't like his solution for the outsourcing of jobs. A 35% tax on vehicles made in Mexico? Really? There are better solutions. Between sips, we'll talk with him about those things.
At least Donald Trump has the big issues right. He sees immigration as the biggest problem, and he sees how immigration is indelibly linked to the Muslim problem. His announcement that maybe we ought to put immigration from Muslim countries on hiatus indicates that he understands the ties between immigration and the Muslim problem. PC bedamned. Hallelujah! This problem simply cannot be solved without saying PC bedamned. Donald Trump is the only one to suggest that maybe there is no solution to the problem of Islam that doesn't involve consequences that may, by necessity, have to accrue to all Muslims in this country. He gets something we all sense. He said it, and now we can say it.
And he doesn't even use a teleprompter! How refreshing is that! From his mind right straight to his mouth, and out those constantly pursed lips. Outspoken? You bet, that's what we want to be. Again.
Make no mistake, Donald Trump struck a huge nerve when he railed against PC. This is where the anger and the frustration resides, deep in our psyche. Stuck in our craw. Even we don't realize how angry we are. We sense PC is run-amok, we instinctively know we must change the cultural trajectory, or the politics can never change.
This is why we continue to give Donald Trump a pass on his less-than-staunch conservatism, why we will keep on giving him a pass, and why the pundits can't figure him out. They're looking in the wrong place for answers.
Intoxicated with Donald Trump? Just the opposite, he's going to help us get clean.
So we've left the pub and our old drinking buddies behind, and we're going to have a few sodas with the Donald.
Son of a bitch! Gimme another drink!
Donald J Drumpf = Hillary
If Trump wins the nomination the GOPe will either remain in power or will hide in the shadows for a year or two before they retake it.
Yes, Sanders got 58% and Trump got 35%.
Flashback to 1994...
"Some thoughts on those angry voters. Ask parents of any two-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It's clear that the anger controls the child and not the other way around. It's the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week....Parenting and governing don't have to be dirty words: the nation can't be run by an angry two-year-old."
-- ABC World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings in his daily ABC Radio commentary, November 14.
BS. Right from the get-go they will treat him like they should have been treating obomma all along. They’ll try to block everything he’s promised. All of a sudden they’ll be all for a government shut-down.
Not even close
But then you can always rely on that staunch conservative Mitch McConnell
The best exposition yet on why so many of us like Mr. Trump. Thanks for posting.
| Can I ask you a question? This is a very long contribution. How is it that you were able to grasp what it says, type out your response and submit it in less than 40 seconds from the time the post first appeared? And what does your comment "Donald J Drumpf = Hillary" have to do with the what the story was about? |
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.
Theodore Roosevelt
Trump would never, ever shut down the government. He would cut a deal with the corrupt congress.
Thank you for the post!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.