Posted on 02/11/2020 7:43:26 AM PST by Kaslin
Writing in the Atlantic (This is No Way to Beat Trump) Thomas Nichols, a self-described former Republican and #NeverTrumper, castigates Democrats for their failure to take down President Trump, in light of the disorganized Iowa Caucus and the partys unimpressive stable of candidates. In the piece, Nichols pretends to dispense hard-headed political advice. In fact, the article reveals why he and the Democrats he wants to help are floundering. Their perception of the world is so distorted by manic dislike of President Trump that they have ceased to act as a responsible political party which can offer a reasonable alternative.
The very premise of Nichols case, and by extension that of the Democrat party and all its putative candidates, is that beating Trump must be their principal goal, eclipsing all other concerns. Nichols thinks the Democrats are not attempting to do this -- which is preposterous. But more interestingly having come to this false conclusion, he has no prescription for exactly how to beat Trump, only that it must be done.
Of course, beating Trump has been the monomania of the Democrats (and #NeverTrumpers) for over three years. Its the first and last thing out of all the candidates mouths when they speak, and one of the few things they agree upon.
The Washington Post recently ran a typical article highlighting the malady entitled Tempted to despair: Trumps resilience causes Democrats to sound the alarm. Huh? Are we talking about a presidential campaign or a soap opera? Its quite as if Trump were ill, the Dems suffering heirs hoping hell just die -- which is probably not far from the truth.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
3 years?! Try 14+. They came unhinged during the Iraq war and have grown worse by the year.
They came unhinged a long time before the Iraq War.
Irrationality is a very corrosive mental state. The normal barriers to creeping fears and outright silliness have broken down, and critical reasoning powers have failed.
The swarm of homeless people that populate the larger cities that have been under liberal governance for the past several decades are a symptom of that loss of simple human circumspection and common GOOD sense. Those people are America’s failures, feeling alienated and excluded to the point they do not even maintain a veneer of civil behavior.
Reminds me of Grelber (in the comic Broom Hilda), the log that had a sign “Hate at a rate” and loved to insult everyone.
However, Grelber was funny.
Democrats are pathetic.
The real problem the Democrats have is that in order to beat Trump, they have to come up with better policies than Trump has already put in place. But the Democrats are only interested in tearing down what Trump has done, and there are no better policies. All they can focus on is his personality, while Trump is working to get tangible results for Americans.
Exactly.
Ah, the original “The Purge”.
Their other problem is that they are campaigning on a vision of America that is the opposite of reality, and then calling on voters to elect them to improve it.
-PJ
The best thing is we get six more months of Democrat in fighting or popcorn please!
Nichols is a prominent #NeverTrump Twitter personality under the handle @RadioFreeTom.
Every once in a while, I get blocked by him for calling him #FactFreeTom on his Twitter feed.
Nichols is a US Naval War College University professor and a SFB [MittForBrains] who DOESN'T UNDERSTAND that the direct enemy is the Democrat Media and fanatical partisan Democrat federal "judges".
A War College prof who can't identify an easily identifiable enemy. Go figure.
I just saw a clip on FBN of Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Californistan) speaking today at a House hearing with Fed chair Powell.
He felt compelled to inform anyone whod listen that Obamas job numbers were better than those of President Trump, who was fortunate to inherit a blossoming economy.
Since this isnt the first time Ive heard a Dem or talking head utter this absurdity, Im guessing this will be a talking point until the election.
bookmark
“Their other problem is that they are campaigning on a vision of America that is the opposite of reality, and then calling on voters to elect them to improve it.
-PJ”
That’s right. Their “vision of America that is the opposite of reality” is because they cannot recognize the real truth because to them, the truth is whatever they want it to be.
It is impossible to have honest discourse with such people, let alone address and solve problems.
-PJ
“They have to convince their voters that wages are down, that people are out of work and can’t find jobs, that racism is rampant, that the “rich” are getting richer while they are being left behind, that the environment is at risk...
-PJ”
You made my point about them believing the truth is what they want it to be.
Thank you.
The kind of fear-mongering and street talk that Democrat/Progressives cultist leaders have engaged in from before the November 8, 2016, election has brought us here--all for the reason of protecting and continuing their "progressive"/regressive 'transforming' of America from its roots in Constitutional limitations on power to one in which "the People" would be dumbed down and propagandized so that they would, like sheep, follow false "shepherds."
After the 2016 Election, many of the "sheeple" Progressive followers say they are "afraid." That is what they are hearing from their captors, the Progressives, who do fear they may lose grip on their control of everything from education to local government.
What is "fear"?
An ancient text enlightens us, "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." - Holy Bible
On the other hand, man-induced fears induce nothing but ignorance and more fear.
We might seek out thoughts from the author of The Conservative mind, Dr. Russell Kirk, in the following excerpted portions of his, The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man:
"A Michigan farmer, some years ago, climbed to the roof of his silo, and there he painted, in great red letters that the Deity could see, 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.' These words are on that roof yet."Without knowledge of fear, we cannot know order in personality or society. Fear forms an ineluctable part of the human condition. Fear lacking, hope and aspiration fail. To demand for mankind freedom from fear, as politically attainable, was a silly piece of demagogic sophistry. If, per impossible, fear were wiped altogether out of our lives, we would be desperately bored, yearning for old or new terrors; vegetating, we would cease to be human beings. A childs fearful joy in stories of goblins, witches, and ghosts is a natural yearning after the challenge of the dreadful: raw head and bloody bones, in one form or another, the imagination demands. . . . And there are things which rightfully we ought to fear, if we are to enjoy and dignity as men. When, in an age of smugness and softness, fear has been pushed temporarily into the dark corners of personality and society, then soon the gods of the copybook headings with fire and slaughter return. To fear to commit evil, and to hate what is abominable, is the mark of manliness. They will never love where they ought to love, Burke says, who do not hate where they ought to hate. It may be added that they will never dare when they ought to dare, who do not fear when they ought to fear. Time was when there lay too heavy upon man that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. Soul-searching can sink into morbidity, and truly conscience can make cowards of us all. Scotland in the seventeenth century, for instance, tormented itself into a kind of spiritual hypochondria by an incessant melancholy fawning up upon the Lords favor. But no such age is ours. Forgetting that there exists such a state as salutary dread, modern man has become spiritually foolhardy. His bravado, I suspect, will stand the test no better than ancient Pistols. He who admits no fear of God is really a post-Christian man; for at the heart of Judaism and Christianity lies a holy dread. And a good many people, outwardly and perhaps inwardly religious . . . today deny the reality of reverential fear, and thus are post-Christian without confessing it. Christianity always was a scandal; and I rather think I began to fear God because I discovered that terror to be so unconventional, impractical, and off-color in our era. . . . Before I began to think much on the spiritual diseases of our century, I revolted against the disgusting smugness of modern Americaparticularly the complacency of professors and clergymen, the flabby clerisy of a sensate time. Once I found myself in a circle of scholars who were discussing solemnly the conditions necessary for arriving at scientific truth. Chiefly from a perverse impulse to shock the Academy of Lagado, perhaps, I muttered, We have to begin with the dogma that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. I succeeded in scandalizing. Some gentlemen and scholars took this for indecent levity; others, unable to convince themselves that anyone could mean this literally, groped for the presumptive allegorical or symbolical meaning behind my words. But two or three churchgoers in the gathering were not displeased. These were given to passing the collection plate and to looking upon the church as a means to social reform; incense, vestments, and the liturgy have their aesthetic charms, even among doctors of philosophy. Faintly pleased, yes, these latter professors, to hear the echo of fife and drum ecclesiastic; but also embarrassed at such radicalism. 'Oh no,' they murmured, 'not the fear of God. You mean the love of God, dont you?' For them the word of Scriptures was no warrant, their Anglo-Catholicism notwithstanding. With Henry Ward Beecher, they were eager to declare that God is Lovethough hardly a love which passes all understanding. Theirs was a thoroughly permissive God the Father, properly instructed by Freud. Looking upon their mild and diffident faces, I wondered how much trust I might put in such love as they knew. Their meekness was not that of Moses. Meek before Jehovah, Moses had no fear of Pharaoh; but these doctors of the schools, much at ease in Zion, were timid in the presence of a traffic policeman. Although convinced that God is too indulgent to punish much of anything, they were given to trembling before Caesar. Christian love is the willingness to sacrifice oneself; yet I would not have counted upon these gentlemen to adventure anything of consequence for my sake, nor even for those with greater claims upon them. I doubted whether the Lord would adventure much on their behalf. . . . The great grim Love which makes Hell a part of the nature of things, my colleagues could not apprehend. And, lacking knowledge of that Love, at once compassionate and retributive, their sort may bring us presently to a terrestrial hell, which is the absence of God from the affairs of men. . . . Every age portrays God in the image of its poetry and politics. In one century, God is an absolute monarch, exacting his due; in another century still an absolute sovereign, but a benevolent despot; again, perhaps a grand gentleman among aristocrats; at a different time, a democratic president, with an eye to the ballot box. It has been said that to many of our generation, God is a Republican and works in a bank; but this image is giving way, I think, to God as Chumat worst, God as a playground supervisor. So much for the images. But in reality God does not alter. . . . What raises up heroes and martyrs is the fear of God. Beside the terror of Gods judgment, the atrocities of the totalist tyrant are pinpricks. A God-intoxicated man, knowing that divine love and divine wrath are but different aspects of a unity, is sustained against the worst this world can do to him; while the goodnatured unambitious man, lacking religion, fearing no ultimate judgment, denying that he is made for eternity, has in him no iron to maintain order and justice and freedom. Mere enlightened self-interest will submit to any strong evil. In one aspect or another, fear insists upon forcing itself into our lives. If the fear of God is obscured, then obsessive fear of suffering, poverty, and sickness will come to the front; or if a well-cushioned state keeps most of these worries at bay, then the tormenting neuroses of modern man, under the labels of 'insecurity' and 'anxiety' and 'constitutional inferiority,' will be the dominant mode of fear. And these latter forms of fear are the more dismaying, for there are disciplines by which one may diminish ones fear of God. But to remedy the causes of fear from the troubles of our time is beyond the power of the ordinary individual; and to put the neuroses to sleep, supposing any belief in a transcendent order to be absent, there is only the chilly comfort of the analysts couch or the tranquilizing drug. By fashionable philodoxies (opinions) of our modern era, by our dominant system of education, by the tone of the serious and the popular press, by the assumptions of the politicians, by most of the sermons to the churchgoers, post-Christian man has been persuaded to do what man always has longed to dothat is, to forget the fear of the Lord. And with that fear have also departed his wisdom and his courage. Only a ferocious drunken farmer is unenlightened enough to affirm a primary tenet of religion in great red letters, and he does not know its meaning. Freedom from fear, if I read St. John aright, is one of the planks in the platform of the Antichrist. But that freedom is delusory and evanescent, and is purchased only at the cost of spiritual and political enslavement. In ends at Armageddon. So in our time, as Yeats saw, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Lacking conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the captains and the kings yield to the fierce ideologues, the merciless adventurers, the charlatans and the metaphysically mad. And then, truly, when the stern and righteous God of fear and love has been denied, the Savage God lays down his new commandments. Sincere God-fearing men, I believe, are now a scattered remnant. Yet as it was with Isaiah, so it may yet be with us, that disaster brings consciousness of that stubborn remnant and brings, too, a renewed knowledge of the source of wisdom. Truth and hardihood may find a lodging in some modern hearts when the new schoolmen and the parsons, or some of them, are brought to confess that it is a terrible thing to be delivered into the hands of the living God. . . ." - "The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man" - Russell Kirk.
11/22/1963.
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