Rush Limbaugh ponders a Trump debate against Pete Buttigieg: 'What's gonna happen there?'

Fox News ^ | February 12 2020 | Brie Stimson

[Pappy Smear]

My Democratic friend says, “America would elect a lesbian for president, but they are not going to elect a gay guy.”

[bert]

-——Many people——

“Many people” are mostly women who lack the intellectual fortitude to resist being politically correct.

You are dead on, absolutely correct

[napscoordinator]

They are hiding the fact he has a husband. He’s never on tv with him. Why do you think the voters in Iowa wanted their votes back? They didn’t know he was gay. They are going to keep this on the down-low until after the election. Blacks will vote for him because they will be unaware he’s gay. Remember 80 percent of the country do not pay much attention to politics.

[John O]

So you could say that Buttplug feels the Bern? lol

[Rockingham]

That is where Trump's use of Twitter and the news media come in and is so effective. Unlike almost any Republican candidate since Teddy Roosevelt, Trump invites controversy and uses it to his advantage.

For example, in 2016, Trump made public comments and sent out a tweet that provoked his adversaries and the news media to denounce him as racist and xenophobic for comments about Mexican rapists and murderers pouring over our minimally protected Southern border and for him being determined to build a wall to block them. Trump's adversaries and the news media went nuts and repeated or referred to what Trump said many times over.

In that manner, without spending a nickel, Trump got the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of campaign ad spending on the immigration issue and established himself as a genuinely against mass immigration. Trump did not stumble into this but planned it out in advance. Trump, the novice Republican Presidential candidate, used the opposition playbook against them.

Similar tactics against Buttigieg would have the news media and the Left smearing Trump far and wide as a hater for asking if the country was ready to have a gay president who is married to another man. And Trump could add, for example, that with Buttigieg as President, anyone who had traditional moral values and thought homosexual conduct was wrong would be denounced and persecuted. Trump could also point out that the only other gay President we had, James Buchanan, was so ineffective that some historians think he helped bring on the Civil War.

In response, Trump would be widely condemned by the Left, the Dems, and the news media, but absolutely every voter would know that Buttigieg was, literally, a Democrat c*cks*cker. And Buttigieg and his advocates would find his competence called into question by his sexuality.

We shall see, but if the monkey-faced gay Buttigieg is the Dem nominee, I expect that he will prove to be a catastrophically weak candidate. And lots of Black and Hispanic voters will abandon their accustomed loyalties and vote GOP.

[NetAddicted]

Doesn’t his statement play into the DemonicRat’s screed that we’re all homophobic?

[M Kehoe]

Hi.

Reporter: President Trump, what do think about homosexuality?

President Trump: each to his own...

Have you asked the mullahs in Iran or Putin that question?

5.56mm

[bert]

That doesn’t matter

The left capture of thought and language must be destroyed

To oppose a queer is to be politically correct. Queers in politics are to be eschewed and ostracized.

[nicollo]

I agree with you about Trump being a disrupter like TR.

Too bad, thought, that TR’s disruptions promoted the leftist, progressive agenda.

Trump, yes, TR, not admirable.

[Rockingham]

I think that TR and Republican urban progressives are too often misunderstood by conservatives today and get lumped in with Wilson and the Democratic party's progressives. For the most part, TR and the Republican progressives were not anti-business but wanted honest and effective police, honest business practices, clean water, reliable sanitary sewers, and healthy, properly labeled food and beverages.

Moreover, TR and the GOP progressive movement were fundamentally pro-free enterprise and not socialist in their thinking and aims. They were reformers, not radicals or revolutionaries. And they were strongly pro-American, with TR especially determined to see America's Navy become capable of global operations to protect American business and commerce.

Notably, from the Civil War until the Depression, the Democrats and Socialism were marginalized by the success of GOP policies and the effectiveness of GOP Presidents and Congresses. The Depression upended American politics and gave the Left a long era of power, growing roots and tendrils that remain in place and continue to sustain them.

[nicollo]

TR wanted direct control of industry, with discretion for him to decide when/where/how - all in the name of the common man, of course.

And that doesn’t even get into his direct democracy and activist courts agenda, both for which this nation is still paying deeply.

[Rockingham]

The driving force of TR's reformism was opposition to the corruption and predatory commercial practices that were routine in the era. Big business regarded that state of affairs as routine and rightful, and legislatures and courts at the time usually agreed, being pervasively under the influence of virtually open bribery.

The initial round of progressive laws and regulatory agencies proved to be inadequate. This led TR and other Progressives to urge a more intrusive set of regulations and agencies. This was after TR was out of office. His proposals failed to gain many adherents.

You mention activist courts. Modern legal scholarship mostly considers the legal decisions against progressive reform measures as judicial activism and based on invalid constitutional theories.

[nicollo]

The driving force of TR's reformism...

was political opportunism, ego, and a loathing fear of that which he could not control, which is at the heart of the progressive project.

I get why conservatives like TR's personality, machismo, etc. etc. but he was wrong on so much and, worst of all, he launched the progressive tide that took over the nation under his cousin FDR.

There is NOTHING in the Constitution that supports corporate, public or other corruption. It must be addressed within and not around Constitutional protections, for which TR had little patience. His kind blamed corporate and political corruption on the Constitution and used that as the excuse to dismantle it.

Btw, TR loved Croley.

[Rockingham]

I get it: you don't like TR. Consider though the larger context and issues that animate your dislike of him. I suggest that claims of a supposed Progressive wrecking of the Constitution obscure more complicated and equivocal circumstances. Put simply, Progressives won political power because Americans voted for them and their ideas. Why was that? And does it matter today?

From the early years of the Republic, America underwent extraordinary economic growth, internal development, and industrialization that forever altered our original mostly rural and agricultural society. As America's wealth and cities grew, so also did public and private corruption, predatory business practices to maximize profit and power, and squalid living conditions for large swaths of the population.

By the late 19th Century, much of the country's commercially sold food was contaminated, adulterated, or outright rancid, the water was commonly unsafe, and household sanitation amounted to throwing food and human waste into the public streets where, at best, open sewers might carry it to the same local waters that provided water for human consumption and seafood. Drugs usually lacked a scientific basis and were usually ineffective and often unsafe.

Businesses though suffered little in the way of national regulation even when the country's public health and safety were directly at stake. Swindled and sickened consumers and injured workers were on their own. Workplaces were often unnecessarily dangerous, with owners protected by a set of legal doctrines known as "the unholy trinity." Railroads were virtually free from regulation for decades, often imposing rates and conditions of carriage that unfairly burdened or cheated customers disfavored by managers or owners. This was normal in businesses of all stripes.

Large scale, routine public corruption protected and enriched private interests. Public appointments and jobs were often sold, even at the federal level. Prostitutes were available for public officials, with cash routinely delivered to Congressional and state legislative offices. In most states, even into the 1960s, legislative sessions were distinguished by nonstop partying for legislators sponsored by lobbyists and interest groups.

Federal regulatory and reform efforts were impeded for decades due to arguments and litigation over various constitutional issues. The creation and operation of civil service was challenged as an infringement of the President's executive authority. The regulation of railroads and other industries and businesses was said to exceed federal power under the Commerce Clause and to transgress an implied right to freedom of contract.

Gradually, these constitutional arguments were defeated and repudiated by the Progressive movement. Most conservative legal scholars today regard that as the correct result, with the doctrines put forward against reformist measures seen as false and a form of judicial activism in themselves. Yet many conservative economists seem ignorant of this and, after a layman's reading of old Supreme Court cases, elaborate arguments that attempt to reinstate long repudiated, unsound constitutional doctrines.

In challenging modern liberalism, many conservatives also rely on arguments and rhetoric that echo Christian fundamentalism. In both instances, sinners are called upon to reject evil and return to virtue and the time-honored doctrines.

In politics, this leads to a conservative constitutional revanchism that invites political futility and electoral disaster. Are Americans really going to vote for those who promise to drop federal regulation of food and drugs and of products and services as unconstitutional? To void federal worker protection and long-established reforms like civil service and federal anti-corruption laws? Or to defund Social Security and Medicare as unconstitutional?

Moreover, as Justice Scalia argued, after about 75 years, Supreme Court decisions acquire political and reliance interests that confer legitimacy in spite of any intellectual errors that they may have. I think that is mostly correct. If so, then arguments against Progressivism should be recognized as mostly historical and cannot soundly be the basis for current political action or constitutional challenge.

[Still Thinking]

If that’s the case, why did the other “guy” change his last name when they got “married”?

[Still Thinking]

Ewwww.

[Still Thinking]

Yeah, but Ebola was on stage against Captain Queeg and Governor Goodhair. Not exactly lumberjacks themselves.

[Rebelbase]

“Black Democrat voters tend to take a dim view of gays and to have traditional views as to marriage and family.”

Agree on the gay part but have you looked at black marriage statistics lately?

[Rockingham]

Yet Black Democrat voters tend to be affiliated with churches that hold to traditional Christian teaching.

[nicollo]

There's much to say for your assessment of the "larger context" of industrializing America, as therein is your error: the issues that so animated the progressive were neither dominant nor indomitable within existing political forms and society at large.

Quick example from your post:

By the late 19th Century, much of the country's commercially sold food was contaminated, adulterated, or outright rancid, the water was commonly unsafe, and household sanitation amounted to throwing food and human waste into the public streets where, at best, open sewers might carry it to the same local waters that provided water for human consumption and seafood. Drugs usually lacked a scientific basis and were usually ineffective and often unsafe.

Those who suffered from "open sewers" and unsanitary living conditions were isolated and already transitioning away from such conditions. The vast majority of Americans in no way lived in these conditions, and, literally, none of the readers of the scandal sheets that publicized these conditions suffered any of this.

Your take is that America "had to change" in order to meet these challenges. My take is that America deals with these challenges innately and that "reform" merely exacerbates the problems, as we've seen across the 20th century.

And that's my problem w/ TR and the progressives. The headrush of reform was unnecessary, the problems exaggerated, existing structures adequately met the needs of the people, and the solutions were more dangerous than the problems addressed.