Pastor John Pavlovitz of North Carolina
Progressive Christianity. How delightful.
Posted on 04/09/2018 7:26:42 AM PDT by servo1969
Have you ever heard of John Pavlovitz?
Right. I hadn't heard of him either. Still, thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can quickly learn about him.
According to Pavlovitz's online bio, he's a "ministry veteran," which is his weird way of saying that he's been a practicing minister for a while. He says that he is "trying to figure out how to love people well and to live-out the red letters of Jesus." Get that? He's about "lov[ing] people well." He's also a Leftist darling:
Pavlovitz, forty-eight, is a Wake Forest resident, minister at North Raleigh Community Church, and father of two young kids. He's also the writer behind Stuff that Needs to be Said, a blog that calls out hypocrisy in plain language, with the president and his ardent followers within the religious right earning particular scorn.
His style--compassion paired with a no-bullsh-t, emperor-wears-no-clothes attitude, all informed by an inclusive brand of Christianity--has endeared him to millions of readers. This year alone, twenty-three million people have viewed his blog, and he has over sixty thousand Twitter followers. His words have been featured in Slate, Cosmopolitan, and Quartz.
Pavlovitz has written a book: A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community. According to his website, it "shares a bit of John's story and a vision for spiritual community that allows everyone a place." In it, he explains that "we don't have to share someone's experience to respect their road. As we move beyond the lazy theology and easy caricatures that seek to remove any gray from people's lives, we can meet them in that grayness, right where they are without demanding that they become something else in order to earn proximity to us or to a God who loves them dearly."
Did you get all that? He's selling his vision of love, fellowship, understanding, and oneness with God. Isn't that beautiful? What a nice man. Anyone with that kind of commitment to love, community, and respect must be the kind of person who would reach across the political aisle using mutual respect as a basis for developing a common polity that serves all of America, right?
Wrong! Forget about it! Pavlovitz is a true Progressive and that trumps faith any time. He hates you and everything you stand for.
And here's the really funny thing about his hypocrisy and his hatred: If you work your way down the list of all the things he says are wrong with you, the evil conservative, you will discover an absence of actual facts and lots of psychological projection. (For those unversed in therapy speak, psychological projection happens when someone tries to deny the ugliness within by projecting it upon innocent others.)
With that introduction, allow me to fisk Pavlovitz's most recent post, entitled "Trump-Supporting Friend -- This Really isn't About Donald Trump." Or, as I call it, "When It Comes To The Incredible Hatred And Bile Built Up Inside Of Me, It's Not Me, It's You." I'll quote Pavlovitz and follow each quotation with my comments:
Trump-supporting friend,
What we've got here is, failure to communicate...
I know you think I'm preoccupied with this President; that he is the reason I'm so angry and bitter and frustrated these days--but you're wrong.
He's not lying. As you will see, Pavlovitz is indeed angry, bitter, and frustrated -- and it's all your fault.
This isn't about Donald Trump.
It's never been about him.
Well, it may not be about Trump, but prepare yourself for a catalog of Trump's alleged wrongdoings, all based upon misstated facts, irrelevancies, or opinion in lieu of facts.
It wasn't about him during the campaign or on Election Day.
Well, thank Heavens for small mercies. Pavlovitz at least forgives Trump for his temerity in campaigning and winning against Pavlovitz's express wishes.
It wasn't about him when recordings of him boasting about sexual assaults surfaced.
In common with all Progressives (and NeverTrumpers), Pavlovitz is incapable of listening to what Trump said. What Trump said is that he made moves on one woman and backed off immediately when she said "no." What he also said, speaking in the abstract, is that when you're a rich, famous billionaire, you can do anything you want with women and they'll let you. Bruce Bialosky, who was on the road with ELO during the height of their fame, agrees:
What Trump said about some women throwing themselves at celebrities or rich men is sadly true. There I said it. The Left is unwilling to admit it except for in the case of Bill Clinton. There were many things Trump said, but the one that cut to the heart of the matter was this phrase - "And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything." Well maybe not anything and maybe not at your discretion, but there are too many women who encourage men of fame or fortune to have their way with them.
We all know this unless you have cut yourself off from mainstream society. Just recently the story surfaced that baseball star, Daryl Strawberry, was having sex with women in the middle of games while with the New York Mets, using dugout employees as hound dogs to hunt out women who would participate in these episodes. What would possess the women to do this is apparently quite clear. He was famous and making a large salary.
Have things changed much since women threw their underwear on stage in the 1960's at Tom Jones concerts?
A friend of mine told me that he was at a club in a private room with Prince, the recording artist. A woman was ushered in and performed oral sex on Prince and then left. What would be the cause of this other than she bragged to her friends she did what she did with Prince.
I saw this in action myself when I was the tour accountant for ELO (Electric Light Orchestra) in the summer of 1978. At the time they were the biggest band in the world and it was a huge, expensive tour. ELO certainly did not have the reputation of the Rolling Stones, but was still a Rock 'n' Roll band. Women made themselves available to band members and the supporting act we carried on the tour. My God, for some reason they even made themselves available to me -- and I was just the tour accountant. But for a 25-year-old male, it was quite a bonus.
Trump never said he assaulted anyone. He's too smart to have said something so dumb. As I've said from the beginning, I can readily imagine that, if Trump hadn't been cut off, he would have ended that comment by saying something along the lines of "at least, that's what Bill Clinton keeps telling me." Now back to Pavlovitz:
It wasn't about him when he said protestors [sic] at campaign rallies should be roughed up.
Definitely not one of Trump's finest moments, but it turns out that there's more than the anti-Trump version of the story that made the Washington Post. First, here's the WaPo version, which is similar to a dozen other versions from anti-Trump media outlets:
Donald Trump said Sunday that the protester who interrupted his rally at a convention center here on Saturday morning was "so obnoxious and so loud" that "maybe he should have been roughed up."
Mercutio Southall Jr. -- a well-known local activist who has been repeatedly arrested while fighting what he says is unfair treatment of blacks -- interrupted Trump's rally and could be heard shouting, "Black lives matter!" A fight broke out, prompting Trump to briefly halt his remarks and demand the removal of Southall.
"Get him the hell out of here, will you, please?" Trump said on Saturday morning. "Get him out of here. Throw him out!"
At one point, Southall fell to the ground and was surrounded by several white men who appeared to be kicking and punching him, according to video captured by CNN. A Washington Post reporter in the crowd watched as one of the men put his hands on Southall's neck and heard a female onlooker repeatedly shout: "Don't choke him!"
As security officers got Southall on his feet and led him out of the building, he was repeatedly pushed and shoved by people in the crowd. The crowd alternated between booing and cheering. There were chants of "All lives matter!"
"Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing," Trump said on the Fox News Channel on Sunday morning. "I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a trouble-maker who was looking to make trouble."
If Pavlovitz had shown the slightest intellectual curiosity, though, he might have discovered that there was a bit more to the story -- and that the facts might explain Trump's later, unfortunate and unfiltered but arguably justified, venom:
No one kicked him or called him racial names. He laid in the floor refusing to get up & leave. Every time they got him on his feet he would try to lay down again. When they did finally get him on his feet & headed towards the door he tried to run back into the crowd shouting & screaming Black Lives Matter garbage. Finally when they were escorting him out of the crowd & towards the door is when he pulled up his outer garment revealing his BLM shirt.
A member of Black Lives Matter came looking for trouble & found it!
Moreover, if one watches the video that drove the MSM narrative, there is no punching, kicking, or shoving to be seen. Instead, Southall, like the anti-hero in Fight Club, is beating himself up. The other people shown in the video are simply trying to remove him.
It's apparent by this point, that Pavlovitz is doing something that's examined in a wonderful post entitled Trump Admits Affair With Stormy Daniels, "Melania Had The Baby And I Had My Needs." In it, the author, Jericho Cook, explains the Progressive rush to judgment, irrespective of facts, whenever the story involves Trump. (Be sure to read the whole article.)
Now back to Pavlovitz:
It wasn't about him when he left refugee families stranded at the airport.
Yeah, about that. Obama put together a list of terror sponsoring countries. Where Trump offended Progressives was that he actually tried to protect America from people coming in -- unvetted -- from those same terror sponsoring countries. Admittedly, he announced the policy abruptly, with the result that some people missed flights and tens of . . . well, just tens ended up being scrutinized more closely. The horror! The main mess at airports resulted from protesters showing up and blocking traffic.
It wasn't about him when he attacked the Press.
First, a little "what about-ism." I can't find evidence of Pavlovitz getting upset when Obama repeatedly attacked Fox News and its audience (here's one example), the only media outlet that wouldn't carry water for Obama. I also can't find Pavlovitz getting upset when Obama bugged the press. Not "bugged" as in "bothered," but "bugged" as in installed listening devices to spy on them. If you don't complain about Obama's behaviors, you really have no standing to complain about Trump's.
Second, the moment Trump became a viable candidate who could take down Hillary "The Anointed" Clinton, the media stopped reporting about him and, instead, engaged in non-stop, frequently dishonest, partisan attacks. Whether as a candidate and an individual, Trump continued to have his right to free speech, and using that right he forthrightly challenged their endless falsehoods. Here's a little free legal advice for Pavlovitz: The fact that we have a free press does not mean that we have a press that is allowed to be free of criticism, especially when it deviates from the truth.
It wasn't about him when he sabotaged the Affordable Care Act.
The above statement perfectly exemplifies the heart of all Progressive complaints about Trump: He made promises during his campaign, people voted for him based upon those promises, and he then proceeded to carry out those promises. Moreover, Progressives cannot wrap their mind around the fact that their wishes and ideals are not set in stone but, in this representative democracy, reflect the will of the winning voters. In this case, although Trump was unable to get Congress to repeal Obamacare, he carried out his campaign promise to the best of his ability by reversing Obama's executive orders.
Another thing about life in Progressive-land, is that when they bypass legislation because the American people disagree with their policies, whether they use ephemeral executive orders or outright unconstitutional actions, their actions are pure and good. However, when the American people reject those policies by placing the government entirely in the hands of Republicans, and these Republicans then follow the rule of law to reverse the Progressive's illegal or extra-legal acts, that's fascist. It's all so easy when you understand.
It wasn't about him when he blamed racial violence on "both sides."
Clearly, Pavlovitz hasn't been paying attention to the violence emanating from the Black Lives Matter people, whether in Baltimore or Ferguson or in other places in which activists gather. Moreover, had Pavlovitz read beyond the headlines and looked at the facts in Charlottesville, as Trump did, he would have seen that, in addition to a scattering of ugly white supremacists, there were also people there who simply objected to having activists attempt to recreate a full-out Communist revolution by tearing down statues left and right.
Incidentally, just today, I got called a white nationalist, which is another way of saying white supremacist, for arguing on Facebook that blacks are equal to whites, that we are all God's children, and that the government should treat all people equally. The bar for becoming a white supremacist is getting lower ever day.
And it isn't about him today: it's about us.
This is about me and it's about you.
It's about my grief at the ugliness you feel emboldened to post on social media now, the nastiness you seem newly capable of, the disgusting words you now so easily toss out around the dinner table.
About that ugly naming calling and nastiness Pavlovitz decries, I do believe I mentioned that, just today, I was called a white nationalist for saying all races are equal. To further clarify, my disgusting words are "liberty," "freedom," "equality," "rule of law," "content of character," etc.
That's quite a contrast with what I hear regularly in my house, my neighborhood, my Facebook community, and my reading of the MSM, all of which are Progressive enclaves. There, the "disgusting words" and "nastiness" include such exciting insults as "racist," "sexist," "misogynistic," "bigoted," "homophobic," "Islamophobic" -- all of which words and nastiness are directed squarely at you and me. In a sane world, Pavlovitz's words and ideas are manifestly and objectively a lot nastier than mine. No wonder, then, that he wraps himself in psychological projection.
It's about my disbelief at your sudden tolerance for his infidelity, his cruelty, his intellectual ignorance, his disrespect for the rule of law--things you once claimed you could never abide.
Last things first: Can anyone tell me when Trump has shown "disrespect for the rule of law"? I keep having that line thrown at me. The execrable Madeleine Albright just called Trump a fascist. Every day Leftists claim that Trump has thrown away the rule of law. But nobody ever tells me what exactly he's done that violates the law.
Looking back on the federal government in the last nine years, it was Obama who ignored all laws regarding immigration. It was Obama who boasted about circumventing the law in all ways possible to grab guns. It was Obama who started bombing Libya without Congressional authority. It was Obama's Department of Justice that made up the rules as it went along, including ignoring the New Black Panther's when they were unequivocally caught on camera engaged in voter intimidation. It was Obama who on a regular basis ignored Congress's explicit directives regarding the Affordable Care Act and just made up rules as he went along to try to keep the whole misbegotten thing alive.
It was Obama who created the DACA program out of whole cloth, violating long-standing Congressionally-enacted immigration law. He also gave his imprimatur to sanctuary states and cities, which are express violations of federal immigration law -- and it was Obama who argued in Arizona, when it tried to enforce federal immigration law, that immigration law is the sole purview of the federal government which, under Obama, can therefore refuse to enforce it.
It was also Obama who weaponized the federal bureaucracy, especially the EPA and DOE, which repeatedly enacted regulations that had the force of law -- and that not infrequently were directly counter to actual law.
It's that kind of thing that shows "disrespect for the rule of law." To place that accusation against Trump is pure projection. If you look at the last year, Trump has done nothing outside of the powers vested in him by the Constitution or demanded of him by Congress. He's enforcing the laws as written. Indeed, when the Progressives objected to his executive orders (apparently Obama is the only one allowed to use them), and Leftist judges supported those objections, Trump didn't ignore the judges, he backed off and tried again.
There is not a single thing Trump has done that violated the law.
As for Pavlovitz's infidelity accusation in the above quoted paragraph, I'm not going to make my infidelity argument again. You can read it here. Let's just say that I knew Trump was no saint going in, but his sins are on his soul and do not involve American politics.
It's about my incredulity at your surprising resentment for marginalized people; for your inability to muster any compassion for those who are hurting or frightened or threatened.
I have lots of compassion for marginalized people -- including marginalized American people. I have compassion for those Americans, white, black, brown, yellow, pink, green, whatever, who lost their jobs because of policies that favored rich Leftists while leaving ordinary Americans out in the cold. I have compassion for the very poor Americans of all cultures whose jobs are being destroyed by the inrush of illegal aliens who undercut them by taking pay under the table.
I have compassion for the poor people in Latin America whose governments are utterly cruel and corrupt, but who are able to continue that behavior thanks to the flood of remissions they receive from those they encourage to cross into America illegally (and at great physical risk). America is the safety valve for Latin American dictators.
I have compassion for the young girls and boys who are part of this flow of illegal aliens in the USA from Latin America, to serve as slaves in the sex trafficking industry.
I have compassion for the Americans whose lives are destroyed by the heroin that comes over that porous border with the illegal aliens whom the Progressives so adore.
I have compassion for Americans of all colors trapped in communities riddle with the return of old-fashioned deadly diseases. We'd mostly done away with those diseases, in part through stringent border control that made sure people coming in were not carriers. Thanks to Obama's open border, especially his 2015 decision to allow in thousands of children and instantly distribute them throughout America, those diseases are now rife, and it's not entirely clear whether herd immunity is strong enough to protect communities.
I have compassion for Americans of all colors whose neighborhoods are overrun by the ultra-violent MS-13 gang that Obama invited in.
I also have compassion for Americans of all colors whose family members were killed by illegal aliens. Accidents and murders always happen because life is cruel, but had Obama complied with the rule of law, these deaths would never have happened. Obama's illegal open borders are the but-for cause of countless unnecessary deaths.
Yeah, I have a lot of compassion. I just don't have compassion for tyrants, drug smugglers, sex slavers, illegal alien murderers and drunk drivers, and illegal alien disease carriers. So sue me. Looking at the laundry list of horrors visited on Americans by Pavlovitz's so-called "compassion," it strikes me that he is projecting again. I have a lot more compassion than he does.
It's about my disappointment at your easily manipulated nationalistic fervor; how the God and Guns, America First, Love it or Leave it rhetoric, so easily took root in your heart--how hostile to outsiders and foreigners you've become.
I love America. Trump loves America. Obama was embarrassed by America. So excuse me for wanting as a leader of my (and my children's) nation someone who actually likes this country. Nor does Trump comply with the "bad nationalist" trope, which Progressives think means "Hitler seeking world domination." It was more the socialist part than the nationalist part that led Hitler to war. In any event, Trump is mercifully free of nation-building or nation-conquering fervor -- unlike Obama who happily bombed other countries. Trump has been a more peaceful president abroad than Obama.
About those guns: Check this or this to see my thoughts about the Second Amendment's centrality to individual liberty. Put briefly, without the Second Amendment, everything else in the Bill of Rights is a dead letter. If you don't believe me, ask Hitler's victims, or Pol Pot's, or Stalin's, or Castro's, or Kim Jong-un's, or Mao's, or . . . oh, never mind. You and I both know that their victims died where they stood, from bullets or knives or starvation or gassing, or whatever else a twisted imagination could supply, or the "lucky" ones were sent to gulags or concentration camps. They had no way to defend themselves against tyranny.
You know what I called an unarmed citizenry? Targets.
With regard to Trump's and his supporters' alleged hatred for foreigners and outsiders, I'd like to remind Pavlovitz that his Progressives only recently, and without explanation, turned on a dime regarding those same foreigners. Democrats used to care about people at home (or, as they called them, voters):
"Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave. Deportation is crucial." -- Barbara Jordan
"When push comes to shove, there is only one realistic way that you can stop illegal immigration into this country, and that is by making it illegal and being tough enough that illegal immigrants cannot work in this country." -- Democratic Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, 1985
"No sane country would (reward illegal immigrants), right? Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission, and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee full access to all public and social services this society provides -- and that's a lot of services. Is it any wonder that two-thirds of the babies born at taxpayer expense in county-run hospitals in Los Angeles are born to illegal alien mothers?" -- Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, 1993
Why the change? Did those Progressives suddenly develop "compassion"?
No, they suddenly developed a need for new voters. A combination of their job-killing economic policies and their newly developed Marxist passion for identity politics, turned off innumerable white lower- and working-class voters (who are still the largest voting bloc n America). If you don't have the voters you need at home, just import them from abroad.
One of the negative side effects of the Democrats' new pro-illegal immigration policies is that it badly hurt blacks, but Democrats don't care. They've figured that, thanks to Obama, blacks were will be permanent Democrat voters no matter how badly their policies hurt them. The same holds true for Jews, who keep justifying to themselves that it will all work out fine for them as the Democrats import ever large numbers of Middle Eastern Muslims. Immured in their political faith, they turn a blind eye to the lessons of the Jews in France and other parts of the EU.
The base line is that Democrats need new blood -- and that new blood comes from South of the Border. This isn't compassion. It's pure, hardcore vote-getting. Nothing more.
It's about my amazement at your capacity to make your faith so pliable, that you could amen a compulsive liar, a serial adulterer, a fear-mongering bully; a man in nearly every way antithetical to the Jesus you've always said was so dear to you.
Let me turn the microphone over to Dennis Prager:
I do not agree with those -- right or left, religious or secular -- who contend that adultery invalidates a political or social leader. It may invalidate a pastor, priest or rabbi -- because a major part of their vocation is to be a moral/religious model, and because clergy do not make war, sign national budgets, appoint judges, run foreign policy or serve as commanders in chief. In other words, unlike your clergyman or clergywoman, almost everything a president does as president affects hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of non-Americans. If a president is also a moral model, that is a wonderful bonus. But that is not part of a president's job description.
[snip]
The second problem with the adultery-matters-in-a-political-leader argument is that the policies of a political leader matter much more -- morally -- than that individual's sexual sins, or even character. It is truly foolish to argue otherwise. Would we rather have as president a person with racist views who otherwise had an exemplary personal character or a believer in racial equality who committed adultery?
[snip]
The fact is it is none of my business and none of my concern whether a politician ever had an extramarital affair. To cite just one of many examples, a president's attitude toward the genocide-advocating Islamic tyrants in Tehran is incomparably more morally significant. That is just one of many reasons -- on moral grounds alone -- I far prefer the current president to the faithful-to-his-wife previous president.
I agree with every word Prager says, and there is no more thoughtfully moral man in America than Dennis Prager. But let's get back to Pavlovitz, who's pretty sure that the whole bunch of us are human cesspools (and who isn't shy about saying so):
It's about my sickness seeing you excuse away his coddling of racists, his public attacks on the FBI, his impulsive firings of Cabinet members, his Tweet rants against individual citizens and American companies.
Let me take those insults . . . er, points in order --
Racists: It seems appropriate to repeat here that I got called a racist today because I said the races are equal. Let that sink in. As far as Progressives are concerned, the new metric for racism is failing to agree with the principle that there is a racial hierarchy. At the top are blacks and Muslims (even though the latter are an ideology, not a race), then Hispanics, then Asians, then whites. Considering that Progressives are dividing America up by race -- and worse, by a hierarchy that posits that some races are better than others -- I can't think of anything that more perfectly exemplifies racism. If you want Progressive psychological projection, you've got it right there.
Attacks on the FBI: Yes, Trump is attacking the FBI, but let's consider why he might be doing that, before castigating him for doing so. We know that the FBI has been investigating Trump since June 2016, and the documentary evidence points to the fact that the investigation was based upon a manifestly flawed document created by paid Hillary operatives; we know that we have evidence that upper-level FBI operatives were conspiring against Trump, starting with Comey who illegally released FBI documents to trigger a special prosecutor; and we know that the FBI engaged in a manifestly fake investigation to cover-up Hillary's national security violations.
Just on those facts alone, with nothing more, is correct to attack the FBI. It's corrupt and needs to be called out. And keep in mind that, much as the Progressives wish it weren't so, Trump is the FBI's boss. It's his job to call them out for corruption and ineptitude.
Impulsive firing of Cabinet members: I have no idea what's impulsive about getting the right person for the job. But let me unpack a few things at issue in that one little clause. First, when Trump entered the White House, he was treated as radioactive by the GOP establishment, so he couldn't get experienced people to work for him. When he proved himself, and was able to get seasoned people to come on board, he started to fire those people who couldn't get the job done or whose skills were no longer necessary. Trump himself has said that he likes the dynamic of having different people. Third, there's some what-aboutism here too, because Obama also had people rolling through his cabinet.
Tweet rants: This is purely a matter of style. Because the media is so hostile to Trump, and routinely misrepresents, misquotes, or partially quotes what he says, he communicates directly to the American people via tweets. He's also just a feisty guy. And frankly, after decades of supine, polite Republicans whom Democrats routinely rolled, conservatives are happy with a president who fights.
Obama, incidentally, fought too. It's just that the media thought his offensive utterances were pure gold, and treated them as wisdom, rather than obnoxiousness:
"If you've got a business - you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."
"You got into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
"...I've got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."
"But I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking."
"No, no. I have been practicing...I bowled a 129. It's like -- it was like Special Olympics, or something."
"We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick."
"The Cambridge police acted stupidly."
"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."
"We can't have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don't mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back."
I could go on, but you get the point. Obama was not a nice man, but his supporters pretended he was.
It's about my grief seeing you respond to his near-hourly display of recklessness and overreach, with a shrug of your shoulders or a turning away from it all.
I don't know what Pavlovitz is talking about there. It's opinion that's completely at odds with reality. The reality is that this allegedly reckless and overreaching man has managed to accomplish more good things in a few months than Obama did in years:
I know that you, my readers, can think of more, but I think that list is a fairly good indicator about what an effective president Trump has been. Again, in a two-party system, you may not like the current administration, but it's what the majority of voters under the electoral college system wanted and Trump is a powerful enough leader to ensure that they get what he promised them. That's good, not bad, and it's certainly not evil -- especially considering that his policies would have been mainstream in the second half of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st.
Incidentally, regarding that last point, about renegotiating trade policies, look at this brilliant tweet he put out just today about China:
President Xi and I will always be friends, no matter what happens with our dispute on trade. China will take down its Trade Barriers because it is the right thing to do. Taxes will become Reciprocal & a deal will be made on Intellectual Property. Great future for both countries!
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 8, 2018
That tweet is a perfect, optimistic posturing that allows China to be successful with Trump, rather than having either country lose. There is nothing reckless about it.
It's about me watching you ignore in him, the very things you claimed made Hillary Clinton the 'greater of two evils' when you voted: blatant corruption, financial impropriety, pathological lies, lack of morality.
What political corruption?
What financial improprieties using his government position?
What serious lies? And when I say serious, I mean serious.
Heck, we conservatives aren't stupid. We know that Trump puffs. He boasts. He exaggerates. He's the equivalent of the commercial promising that "these are the best crackers ever!" But on the stuff that matters, Trump is truthful. As Saleno Zito so perfectly said of Trump, "The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."
Hillary, on the other hand, lies about essentials: Essentials such as Americans dying on foreign shores and essentials such as national security -- that kind of stuff. There are innumerable articles about "Hillary's lies," so I chose this as a representative one.
Ultimately, what Progressives such as Pavlovitz don't want to acknowledge is that we, the People, are not children. We can separate wheat from chaff and, yes, we have to do that sometimes with Trump. With Hillary, though, it was all chaff.
It's about my sadness at seeing you make a million tiny concessions--and how easy it now is for you to sanction actions, that only two years ago you'd have told me fully disgusted you.
I don't know about you, but I'm not making concessions. Like you, I love my country. And like you, I have accepted that it will be a flawed man who saves it. As long as Trump's crudeness doesn't touch upon his governance, I'll forgive him, and I bet you will too.
And in that, I'm sure Pavlovitz willingly forgave a slick teleprompter reader who open our borders, abandoned our friends abroad, handed over security and treasure to our enemies, savaged our economy, gutted our military, and dramatically increased racial disharmony. Again, we're seeing projection here and lots of it.
Most of all, it's about me realizing that when all this is over--we are still going to have to deal with all of this. Our fractures are going to outlive this Presidency.
On this, I agree with Pavlovitz. It may take decades to recover from the damage Obama did to our national security, our military, our foreign alliances, our economy, our borders, etc. Trump is doing yeoman's work to fix it, but as long as Progressives cling to their racism ("blacks are inferior and can survive only with our white liberal wealth"); Islamophobia ("Muslims are scary, so just nod and say yes to everything they say or do"); misogyny ("women are helpless victims; men who think they are women are really women so let them compete against women and win everything"); bigotry ("all Trump voters are evil"); and all those other ugly behaviors Progressives project upon us, things are not going to go smoothly.
You see, I really don't give a damn about Donald Trump.
He doesn't matter to me. He never has.
The beautiful symmetry of what Pavlovitz said is that Pavlovitz doesn't matter to Trump either. So, everyone can be happy.
He's a three-time married, C-level reality TV celebrity, with a long and well-documented resume of sexual misconduct, financial disasters, and moral filth. He's a professional predator who's spent his life exploiting people for personal gain. That's who he was before and who he will be when he leaves office.
Yeah, you can insult his TV career and his womanizing (which men seem to admire), but at least Trump doesn't have the blood of hundreds of thousands of people across the Middle East (and, eventually, I suspect, across Europe) on his hands.
I haven't forgotten how Obama abandoned the Iranian people in 2009 because he wanted to make nice with the mullahs. This allowed Iran to continue terrorizing its own people, to prop up Assad in Syria, to continue to fund and weaponize Hezbollah, and to fund terrorism around the world.
I haven't forgotten how Obama failed to be a stabilizing force during the Arab Spring. Instead, he knocked out Mubarek of Egypt, who was America's ally, and installed instead the Muslim Brotherhood -- a move so disastrous that 2 million Egyptians later turned out to drive the MB from office. Obama also completely destabilized Libya, which had been neutral during the Gulf War, and turned that nation into a deadly terrorist haven.
I haven't forgotten how Obama pulled troops out of Iraq against all of the best advice, creating a vacuum that ISIS filled -- and then, when ISIS first appeared on the scene, Obama dismissed it as the JV team. The Yazidis and the other tens of thousands of people ISIS slaughtered, tortured, raped, and enslaved would disagree.
I haven't forgotten how Obama caved instantly to Assad on chemical weapons, allowing a simmering Civil War to explode, with the death and dislocation of hundreds of thousands of people.
America is strong and, given a decade or so of good governance, not to mention the death of the pernicious social justice doctrine that's turning Americans into hostile tribes, we'll probably recover from his presidency in a decade or two. One can't say the same about other parts of the world.
The hundreds of thousands of dead across the Middle East -- all thanks to Obama's policies -- won't get that chance to recover. The people consigned to living in the dirt because ISIS and Assad destroyed any semblance of infrastructures across the Middle East probably won't recover well.
Obama is also responsible for flood of millions of Muslim refugees from the Middle East and Africa into Europe (although European leaders,all of whom are childless and therefore have no stake in the future, aided and abetted that sin). If Europe, in 20 years, has turned into an oppressive sharia continent or is mired in a blood religious war, I'll certainly know where to place the blame. It won't be Trump; it will be Obama.
Donald Trump, the President will be gone one day, and his disastrous Presidency will be well preserved. History will have documented his every lie, every misdeed, every abuse of power, every treasonous betrayal--and he will be fully revealed as the monster that many of us are fully aware that he is.
That's not why I am so disgusted and so filled with sadness these days.
I don't care about Donald Trump because I don't know or live alongside or love or respect Donald Trump.
I know and live alongside and love and respect you--or at least I once did, and I'm going to have to try and do that again.
Our relationship and our family and our church and our neighborhood and our nation are going to be trying to clean up the messes long after this President is gone.
When this is all over, the divides and the fractures and the wounds between us are going to remain.
This is why I'm angry and bitter and frustrated; not because of Donald Trump--but because of me--and because of you.
The above few paragraphs are all blah-blah. As I hope I've demonstrated, Pavlovitz doesn't have a factual leg to stand on. He's either projecting his internal hatreds and biases onto Trump and his supporters, or he's profoundly ignorant of facts beyond propaganda headlines. Also, at a very profound level, he, in common with other Progressives, refuses to accept that, in a two-party democracy, it's not treason for the winning side to put its winning policies into play. That's how Obama did it ("I won"). Indeed, Obama was worse that any American winner who has come before, because he frequently implemented his policies without regard for the law or the Constitution. At least Trump, now that he's won, is playing by the rules.
Pavlovitz boasts that he stands for love, respect, and community. He needs to look more closely into his mirror. Looking at the post I fisked, one sees a man filled with overwhelming bile that he hides from by projecting it onto people with whom he disagrees. That's not loving, respectfully, or community-building. That's just mean.
Progressive Christianity. How delightful.
Bookmark.
FMCDH(BITS)
He has the smarmy know-it-all look that leftists often have with an air of condescension and a glare that says I want you dead.
“Progressive Christianity” - an oxymoron, to be sure.
His lips have the look that have savored many a meatwhistle.
Read later.
I hate the religious left.
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