Free Republic

So Trump thinks Cruz has a temperament problem because he name-calls and alienates in the Senate. And the groupies will now nod their heads. I see elsewhere Trump is disagreeing with Scalia. Or, kind of disagreeing. “Kind of” is all he ever does on anything.

Trump is in no sense a conservative. He’s a rhetorical triangulator. Which means if he ever got elected to anything, he’d take up positions squarely in the mushy middle, after talking like a conservative early. It’s a recognizable pattern.

He’s a Democrat. If I’m going to vote for a Democrat, I’ll just go ahead and vote for Hillary.

I acidentally shot super glue into my eye and it glued shut immediately. I was trying to get the new tube to dispense glue and turned it up to look down into the hole...it released and shot a few drops right onto my eyeball. It was hot and immediately glued shut. Nothing I could do.

I was working for a doctor at the time. In fact, I was working on a patient at the time. We made custom appliances for patients after repairs of their tendons.

My boss trimmed the excess glue from my eye, then sent me across town to an ophthalmologist. He put some sort of ointment in it, put a patch on it, and said “it will come off in a few days.” And it did.

Amazing to watch people who call themselves conservatives support a candidate who is willing to use government power to steal from the weak. If you fail private property, you fail everything. This moral blind spot will grow into a massive abuse of power. It’s a serious, serious character failure - or used to be, among small-government conservatives. Shame.

Behold, the power of a cult of personality. I’ve always been fascinated by the times in the history books when one erupts, but never thought I’d get to see one on American soil - and among the “conservatives”, no less.

By the way, Trump is not going to deport the Mexicans, nor is he going to build a wall. He is the candidate most likely to ignore his own rhetoric a month after he says it.

“The Trump virus infects his followers and makes them incapable of arguing on the merits, they resort invariably to the ad hominem and gratuitously insult those who intrude facts into the debate.”

It’s not a virus, it’s an elective affinity. He attracts followers who are like him. Stuck in the junior high stage of argument, where you respond to a substantive objection by making a fart noise with your armpit.

A Congressional committee can’t fire anybody, indict anybody, send anybody to jail. They can’t enforce their own subpoenas.

Every 4 years FR gets unbearable. You just have to mostly ignore the threads till after the nomination is decided. Political debate is when all humans are at their worst. Including conservatives.

In 2014 Trump supported abortion rights for women 9 months pregnant.

He doesn’t have the money. He’s running on free air time right now. He won’t liquidate hard assets to fund his campaign.

This thread proves Goldberg’s point, and painfully. You make a simple assertion of fact like “Trump is not a conservative” - a point of substance, and one debatable with facts and logic - and within seconds the supporters begin the substance-free name calling, and the pre-recorded exegesis of the demonstrable false dilemma takes up the rest of the white space.

I never thought I’d see an old style cult of personality erupt among conservatives, but I’m watching it, with all the fascination due a slow-motion train wreck. It won’t end well, and the landscape will be littered with executed partisans at the end. Cult leaders always betray the first generation in order to grow the second. Something here about being doomed to repeat history. Sad.

Sad, but actually fascinating at the level of pure intellectual curiosity. I do enjoy (it’s a sort of hobby) sociological crowd-watching. When I can’t make it to the mall to watch teenage girls shriek over a 15 year old kid with no observable qualities, I can now just come to a freeper show and collect the shrieks of the freepers as they swoon over another bad boy who - what? - offended daddy? Is that what you wanted all these years? Someone to finally say rude things to daddy that you couldn’t say yourself? Wow. Those of us who’ve retained our reason and can’t identify one good quality in the strutting blowhard are just....fascinated.

Meanwhile, a conservative governor with a record of economic governance drops out of the race. Another conservative governor with a history of actually fighting the left and winning is largely ignored.

Allow me to blow some rational oxygen into the room between shrieks (you can stagger back here and resuscitate your sanity after it all blows over):

No. No, Donald Trump is not:

1. putting the media in their place (they’re laughing)
2. removing the establishment GOP from their seats of power (they’re still there)
3. going to run for the presidency without taking money from “special interests” (he doesn’t have the liquid assets)
4. going to deport the illegals (he’ll change that position overnight when he is pressed on the details. Watch.)
5. build a wall and make Mexico pay for it (again, he is the most malleable under pressure of all the candidates)
6. not, I say, a conservative on any issue. (He will say anything, then reverse himself within a day.)
7. Not different because “he fights”. (No, he bluffs, then backs down when called, or just lies about what he said. He’s a poker player. The table is attracting real pros. Just watch.)
7. Not going to win the GOP nomination.
8. Not going to be President of the United States. Or hold any public office, for that matter.

Now go ahead and put those posters up on your bedroom wall, but you’re not going to the dance with that idiot.

He’s a horrible person.

It’s not important that candidates pass trivia tests, I agree. That’s inside the beltway perspective, imposed on candidates for decades by Washington press corp, who want to revel in their minutia as an intellectual status symbol. I’ve longed for years for some candidate to brush it off on the way past the questioner to an articulation of the correct principle. Principals make encyclopedic knowledge unnecessary.

That said, this is the opposite of what Trump is doing. The candidate who would simply say “I don’t recognize the name. What’s the point of the question?” - would be the one I’d like. But the opposite of this is to be thin-skinned and whiny, complaining that some reporter is trying to play “gotcha”, as if the leader of the free world is not going to have “gotchas” played on him all day long.

Trump is not brushing past trivia in order to articulate principle (which would Reagenesque.) He’s whining. He’s a fragile flower with a thin coat of bluster on top. And not a conservative.

The roundabout treats drivers like they’re adults.

They are all over the suburbs where I live and they are great. They process more traffic than any other intersection simply because they let you use your judgement instead of imposing a stop when there is no traffic coming. I had never seen any till I moved here and it took me about a day to get used to them. If I hit 10 round intersections on my way to work I’ll drive though 8 of them without stopping, and that is what you call superior technology.

A roundabout is a libertarian intersection. Stop if you’ll hurt somebody or yourself by not stopping. There is no reason in the world to stop just because a light is on a timer, or because a red sign stands beside the road. These are classic examples of law as a blunt instrument; in order to regulate bad things away (the collision) we accept the regulation of good things away (driving through when there is no other car) .

I argue that the roundabout is an intersection designed by libertarian principles, and are empirically superior.

So, campaign workers selectively registering voters? Nothing here.

It’s not borderline. It’s an absolute cult of personality. They never end well for the groupies.

What is not arrived at by reason cannot be reasoned away. The Leader simply abuses his crowd till they turn away, if they still have any assets left.

In this case, the delusion is that, somehow, Trump is “sticking it to” the GOPe and the press. Nobody thinks that but the followers. The rest of the world is just watching in amazed wonder at the glee of the junior high boys hooting and farting from somewhere behind the bus. In the end, they just disappear, because there aren’t enough of them to take over.

They just disappear.

There’s no chance at all that Trump will reduce the Federal agencies. None. The Federal government doesn’t work like a company whose single owner is also the CEO. Trump kowtows to power and bluffs everybody else. His talk right now is in the latter category; later, if elected, (he won’t be, but let’s play), he’ll need Congress to do anything, and he’ll absolutely shift like the wind to get it. That means make deals; and that means government grows.

Tough talk is bluffing. Conservative talk is a different thing. Trump is not a conservative.

Trump changes as the misc candidates drop out and his gap in the polls begins to close. As the race for the nomination tightens he’ll become a poll watcher and start modulating his answers to questions. In the end, he’ll be talking just like the centrist Democrat that he is. He’ll eventually contradict everything he’s saying right now that the red-meat eaters are loving. Watch and see it happen.

The only reason he’s different right now is he can afford to be. But at heart his policy views are more malleable than any other candidate in the race. I’m telling you this is going to happen. A year from now this Trump-mania will be studied by sociologists as an episode in the recurrent madness of crowds.

Megyn Kelly is asking these candidates tough, fair questions that they’re dodging. She’ll be looked upon (by right and left) as the star of this political season, and will collect awards like trinkets. It’s amusing to watch the right wing castigate reporters for asking “gotcha” questions of the men they praise for being tough guys. Trump is a 12 year old boy who is mad at a girl.

My hope is that the GOP nominates the candidate who is the most conservative at heart. There are a few people in this race who actually believe in limited government and Donald Trump is not, has not been, never will be one of them.

All the rest is delusion, destined to pass.

For every person on Free Republic who thinks it’s cool to call a reporter a bimbo on Twitter (these are the people e-mailing “pwnd” gifs), there are 100 people who are just embarrassed for him.

He’s not going to be President.

Beck is demonstrably correct about Trump’s positions. He is the most liberal candidate in the GOP race. With a history of shifting opinions like he has, anything he saying right now wouldn’t carry with him into office. He’ll flip flop bigger than anybody you’ve ever seen.

Nonsense.