Category: Trump Derangement Syndrome Watch

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“I can kill you with a thought.”

The WSJ had a big scolding editorial this morning about how Trump needs to repudiate Roy Moore because they think the Dems put Trump in check by forcing Franken’s ouster.  The problem with that is their deadline was last night, and Franken’s announcement wasn’t till this morning…

So I have to wonder how that crow they’re eating right now tastes, given that Franken was a total ass about the whole thing, and didn’t actually resign today? Instead, he gave himself a wide window to defenestrate, er, change his mind. And you never know, Roy Moore might lose yet.

The WSJ thinks Trump is playing chess with the Dems. He’s not playing chess. He’s playing four-dimensional galactic troll kriegspiel, and the WSJ hasn’t figured that out yet, much less the Dems.

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The left can’t help itself.

Shades of Admiral Akbar! Whoda thunk it? “It’s a trap!”

Or going back even farther in the cinematic history of grand traps being sprung: “It’s a fake! We’ve been suckered in!”

This whole sportsball contretemps over a presidential tweet is turning out to be nothing more than a reaction to Grand Master Imperial level trolling. It is to laugh. At the libs. And at the left. Do they want more Trump?

Because this is exactly how you get more Trump. And just a little self-control on the proggy side would render the trap ineffective — but they Just. Can’t. Help. Themselves.

Now, while my sides are splitting with mirth over how everyone from LeBron James to the Wall Street Journal (see their lead editorial this morning — they are clueless) walked right into this with their eyes (and big mouths) wide open, that doesn’t mean that I don’t really wish someone would take the President’s smart phone away from him. Because I do.

But then I remember something. He’s not a politician. You can’t expect him to act like one, because he’s just as sick and tired of politicians as many of the rest of us are. (For his next act, I’d love to see him tweet out that the people of Arizona ought to fire John McCain, war hero turned traitor to his people.)

Anyway, I’ll bet the NFL owners are starting to wish they’d hired Condi Rice instead of Roger Goodell. Goodell has been nothing but a disaster from day one, for all his prating about zero-tolerance for player misconduct when he was first hired. And falling into this trap — which he could have avoided a year ago, by simply invoking and enforcing existing player conduct rules — has got to hurt on top of the revelations last week about all that helmet-banging causing CTE, according to one expert, possibly as far back as O.J. Simpson (and probably farther).

It will be interesting to see if this particular brain damage goes on to infect the NBA this season. Because if it does, the NBA will be as dead to me as the NFL has been since Colin Kaepernick wasn’t shut the hell down the first time he sat for the Anthem.

We can always watch college ball. And you know what? If the brain damage starts there, too, who needs sports? I found it hilarious that the WSJ editorial ends with: “The losers are the millions of Americans who would rather cheer for their teams on Sunday as a respite from work and the other divisions of American life.” I spent the entire weekend cleaning out a big walk-in closet and never once felt motivated to turn on the TV to watch sports. Hell, I can’t think of the last weekend when I was motivated to turn on the TV to watch sports.

Frankly, any given Sunday, I’d rather read a book.

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That slippery slope is going to be quite a ride.

A friend noted that one of our local television stations had prematurely labeled church vandalism (Nazi-esque, pro-Donald Trump graffiti spray-painted on the exterior) in a southern Indiana county last February as a “hate crime”, prior to discovering that, in fact, the church organist vandalized the building as a protest against Donald Trump.

Talk about egg on their face.  But, nah, let’s talk about “hate crimes” instead.

On some level, all crimes are potentially hate crimes. Designating certain types of crimes as official hate crimes under law is an exercise in legislative opinion (and as a primarily-political opinion, it makes for bad law). It’s all well and good to fix in law that vandalism of a religious property is a hate crime, to be prosecuted with special attention to the mental state of the perpetrator; but once you have designated one thing as a hate crime, you’ve got a foot stuck in the door to eventually broadening the definition of a hate crime. And we’re already headed down that slippery slope, with “thoughtcrime” already being sanctioned, however unofficially, by the media and by various Internet services like Facebook and Twitter.

And you thought 1984 was just a book.  “Two-Minutes Hate,” anyone?

I, for one, strongly believe that tearing down Confederate memorials is a hate crime. Not because I hold any brief for slavery, or for the rebels and their ill-conceived secession and the war it engendered, but because to destroy or remove these monuments destroys our national history out of no emotion other than hatred for that history. As an historian, I strongly believe that we MUST embrace our history honestly, warts and all, and not try to erase the “uncomfortable” parts just to make ourselves feel better.

On the other hand, there are people out there who believe the opinion I just expressed is itself a hate crime. The next thing we know, it may become a hate crime to express opinions that are out of the mainstream.*  If you think that’s impossible, don’t think the First Amendment will protect us from that; remember, the Second Amendment is very clear that the right to bear arms is not to be infringed, yet there exists a multitude of local, state, and federal laws that significantly infringe the right. Legislators can always find a way to get around the Bill of Rights, and with the right (meaning the left) judges in place, they can take away God-given rights we have long thought inviolable.

Don’t be so quick to label anything as a hate crime. Or at least, wait until the investigation is complete and the facts of the case have been made public. Remember that a lie can make it around the world twice while the truth is still lacing up its boots.

_________________________

* Oh, wait — as I pointed out, it already is, on Facebook and Twitter.

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It’s not moral relativism to blame both sides.

I was accused of moral relativism on Facebook when I stated that both sides were to blame in Charlottesville.  This was supposedly because, by blaming both sides equally, I was entirely absolving one side from blame in the death of the young woman who was struck by the jerk in the car.

I can’t parse that, and you probably can’t either.  To me, that young woman would still be alive today if both sides had stayed the hell home.  There is indeed blame on both sides.  Both sides are full of hate and both sides espouse hate.  That one side in this particular contretemps espouses hate against non-whites, and the other side espouses hate against those who hate non-whites, seems immaterial to me.  Either side is as bad as the other.

After all, the SS blackshirts were just as bad as the SA brownshirts whom they destroyed.  But that’s history, after all, and not many people actually learn history anymore.  But the analogy holds.

I was so assaulted because I dared (in this person’s opinion, anyway) to diminish the culpability of the white supremacists who, after all, started it all by having their protest in the first place.  However, I suspect the real reason for this assault on my integrity is merely because the person who did so is a rabid neverTrumper who will never back down from his now-untenable position; I mean, come on, the guy was elected and he’s president, and he’s not a Nazi.  And by insisting that I’m letting the Nazis off by including antifa in the mix, this person is implicitly stating that antifa bears no blame whatsoever.  Does he support antifa?  I’m going to guess he’d be horrified if someone told him that.  But that’s what he’s doing by claiming it’s moral relativism to blame antifa equally with the Nazi group for the death of that young woman.

As I told him repeatedly, if antifa hadn’t shown up, that young woman would still be alive.  But it would have been even better if neither side had shown up at all.

However, the main point this person misses in the process of being all het up about spreading the blame around is that any culpability for the young woman’s death is not placed on the group — it’s placed on the person who actually ran that car down the street and killed her with it.  And that’s an important point.

In our system, the group to which that young fool belonged won’t be on trial anywhere except in the court of public opinion.  The court of law that will try said young fool for vehicular homicide isn’t going to be interested in his political views, or what hate group he happens to belong to — they will be concerned only with his disregard for the law and the consequences of that disregard.  And that is because our courts are courts of law, not courts of political justice.

Make no mistake — antifa would like nothing better than for our courts to become courts of political justice, wherein they could, in Stalinesque show trials, condemn the 1% to death and then start in on the bourgeois middle class.  Which is why I oppose antifa as much as I oppose asshole white supremacists who dress up in swastika-festooned clothing, wave the swastika flag, and play at being National Socialists just like the bunch of pin-headed, slack-jawed wanna-be Hitler Youth they are.

These two groups are two sides of the same adulterated coin.  National Socialists vs. International Socialists.  All left-wing, no matter how hard the left tries to push them off on the right (the soi-disant “alt-right” being little more than a fabrication of feverish brains on the left side of the spectrum).  All of the repugnant ideologies on parade last weekend, nay, since it became clear that Donald Trump was a serious threat to Hillary Clinton’s coronation, originated on the left.  The KKK?  A left-wing Democrat institution for many, many years.  Fascists and Nazis were both leftists, and made no bones about being leftists, despite generations of Gramscian historians who have tried to frame them as being phenomena of the far-right.  Black Lives Matter?  Left-wing anarchists with a desire to destroy the police as a force for civil order.  Name a disruptive domestic terrorist group that has been in the ascendant in the past two or three years, and every one of them is a tool of the left.  Hell, even the Southern Poverty Law Center has become a leftist tool of destruction, by tarring innocent and well-meaning right-wing organizations with the “hate group” moniker.

And they are all to blame for what happened last weekend.  Because they have weakened the social structure of this country to the point where such things not only can happen, they are happening — with great regularity.

What is most alarming about this is that the number of people actually involved in these actions is tiny in comparison to the rest of the country.  In other words, we could easily scrum ’em if we chose to.

I fear we’re coming to that.  And sooner than we think.  It’s going to be messy.

And there won’t be a damn thing that’s morally relative about it.

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And the response from the left? *crickets*

You know what irks me more than anything else about the Scalise assassination attempt?

None of my liberal friends have explicitly disowned or condemned what happened yesterday. Except for a few non-specific posts about sadness that people can be evil, I’ve seen nothing on the left like the posts I’ve seen on the right.

No human being should be anything but outraged about what happened on that ball field yesterday. I used to think that was a universal moral imperative. Now I’m not so sure the other side believes in moral anything anymore.

If the left wants to be taken seriously in the future, it needs to step up, condemn this violence, and start disowning antifa and BLM and all the other lefty hate groups they’ve allowed to spring up.

The left can spend all day pointing fingers at what they claim is a neo-Nazi, neo-Fascist fringe right (which is hilarious, because real Nazis and Fascists were socialists, as I have pointed out numerous times on this blog), but the fact is that nobody on the right is going around tearing up college campuses, play-acting presidential assassinations, and now shooting politicians for no reason other than that they are Republicans. We’re on a slippery slope to escalation right now, and all the left is doing with their hippie tears is greasing the ways to general insurrection. Hope they can live with that when it matures into open warfare.

And if any of my left wing friends read this and become angry, tough toenails. You own this mess because you couldn’t accept the results of an election that proved the country really didn’t want your fundamental transformation. Don’t try to shift the blame off on people who just want to be left alone and get on with their lives.

My biggest problem with the left at the moment, though, is that they don’t seem to realize how much damage they’re doing to their own party’s legitimacy. They need to consider very carefully what is going on in the hearts and minds of the silent majority who were responsible for Donald Trump’s election. The actions of the left — or more to the point, their inaction in stopping the political and actual violence taking place in their name — only cements the desire in the hearts and minds of the silent to throw more of them to the curb. While some may consider that a good thing, I don’t. Tension between left and right is healthy in a democratic republic. The actions of the fringe left coupled with the inaction of the soi-disant “moderate” left threatens that tension and thereby threatens the very fabric of the Republic. For that reason alone, the left has a vested interest in controlling their run-wild fringe before they bring down all before them.

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You want more Trump? Because…oh, you know the drill.

Well…that’s how you get more Trump.

Steve Scalise, aide shot in Virginia

Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., told Fox News he left just before the shooting. As he walked to his car, a man asked DeSantis if it was Republicans or Democrats practicing. About three minutes later, at around 7:15 a.m. the shooting began, DeSantis said. It reportedly last about 10 minutes.

All y’all on the left really need to start policing your folks better. The violence and threats aren’t coming from our side, and even under your Anointed One, the right always promptly disavowed anyone who talked this kind of smack.

The left has never apologized for this kind of thing, though, or done much to prevent it from escalating, and I doubt it will start now.

If the left had an actual leader who would step up and vociferously condemn what is going on, that person might actually have a chance in 2020. But the “leaders” on the left are too busy trashing Trump and trying to find ways to block his agenda.

I have said it before and I will say it again: I am not a huge Trump fan, but this kind of behavior is precisely what got Trump elected, and to let it go on continues to damage the Democrats more and more. The silent majority is not happy right now, and as we saw in 2016, plenty of them vote, and they are pretty much unpollable because they won’t talk to pollsters, whom they tend to view as slanted and dishonest. And that’s how you get an election where it’s supposedly Hillary in a walk, and then instead you get Trump as a complete surprise to the media and the establishment — but not to the people who are sick and tired of the status quo in Washington.

Ben Sasse said it best in his maiden speech in the Senate: “The people despise us all.” And he was and remains 100% correct.

The folks out there who are whinging about how Weimar-esque the US is starting to look (and that includes some folks on the right — it’s a theme that comes up regularly at Instapundit, for instance) don’t seem to understand that, contra Santayana, history really doesn’t repeat itself; it merely repeats overarching themes.  There will be no American Hitler, because the silent majority remains well-armed and unwilling to kowtow to anyone who bids fair to take those arms (and the rights they protect) away.  There may be hard and bad times coming in America, but a true dystopia seems to me to be pretty unlikely.  And of course, it will never be as bad here as it will be in the rest of the world, given it’s still true that when America gets the sniffles, the rest of the world catches cold — or worse.

The American spirit still lives in a lot of Americans.  As much crap as I throw at GenX, GenY, and millennials, there are plenty of patriots in those groups as well.  These Americans may not speak out or make their true feelings known until the feces truly impact the turbine, but they will step up when their country needs them.  Count on it.

Despite the worst the Democrats could do to us, we shrugged off a Great Depression and won a World War.  What we have today isn’t nearly what our parents and grandparents had.

We can prevail — but we need to put a stop to the turbulence on the left that is being driven by a completely irrational hatred of Donald Trump, capitalism, and classical liberal conservatism.  Put bluntly, the left wants to destroy our country, or “fundamentally transform” it as their Anointed One put it.

But there’s still a lot of us out here who have no interest in being transformed, either fundamentally or otherwise.  The left should fear us.

That they don’t — yet — speaks volumes.

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The left is punch-drunk.

Fox News front page headline:  “Party hopes to ride Trump fatigue to a 2018 House takeover”

This is my laughing face.

(Note:  That’s not the headline of the story it links to, which is actually, “Democrats now targeting 79 House race, but do they have the money and message?”  Not quite so upbeat.)

More likely the GOP will hang on because people are fed up with the constant thrum of left-wing BS about Trump.  Every day it’s a different alarmist progressive story, and none of it actually is true.

I guess the left hasn’t noticed yet that the people who voted for Trump really don’t like them very much.  To date, I have yet to see the Dems win one of the recent special elections, about which they assert that each one going to be a referendum on Trump.  So far, Trump is way out front of them.

The Dem bench is old and frail and busted-down.  Nobody really wants to vote for them.  Senile Nancy Pelosi, stupid Maxine Waters, the moronic Dianne Feinstein, and the corrupt Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who was so bad she had to step down as the chair of the DNC.  Nothing but tail-enders of a dying socialist breed.  They will be gone soon, their power dissipated, their party in ruins.  Even Libertarians might have a chance now.

And then, Kathy Griffin — I mean, honey, if you want more Trump, that’s exactly how you get more Trump.

Must say that I’m still not a Trump fan, but I have to admit that he’s got the left so bamboozled, they’re just throwing anything they can at the Teflon to see if it will stick.  And that’s great stuff in my book.  It’s like watching the monkeys at the zoo throw poo at each other.  Great political theatre.  Keep bringing it; you’ll marginalize yourselves even more the longer you keep it up.  And that can only be good for the Republic.

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“Worse off than 100 years ago.” Really?

said someone in response to a post on Facebook of an LA Slimes, er, Times, article entitled “Our Dishonest President” (to which I refuse to link, go look it up yourself).  Specifically, she said:

this is so true and the people fell for it now they are complaining. oh well so what let them suffer his idiotic ways until it will take years to recover from what he already has done. you people who voted for him in my opinion are just as hateful as he is and self centered. you were afraid of hilary and what she would have accomplished to make america greater than it was but now we are worse off than we were 100 years ago. lets stop him before its to late and keep him under careful watch. but you people who thought he was a change for good may you all suffer the consequences. its to bad you had to drag us into it with you.

Ignoring the last eight years and the near-irreversible damage they did to the Republic (national debt doubled, healthcare in a shambles, international reputation wrecked), not to mention your near-complete inability to write like an educated person, really doesn’t reflect well on your thesis, sweetie.

Further, as an historian by training who spent quite a lot of time studying the first half of the 20th century, I take issue with your assertion that we are “worse off than we were 100 years ago”. I doubt you would like to live in 1917, if for no other reason that you would not have a vote.

Suck it up, snowflake.  Or do you want more Trump?  Because this is how you get more Trump.

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You want more Trump? Part I dunno what.

So, this happened.

New GOP Star Born When California Dems Forcibly Remove Vietnamese Senator for Criticizing Tom Hayden

Sen. Janet Nguyen (R) was the star of last weekend’s California GOP convention because she was forcibly removed from the floor of the Senate on Feb. 23 for criticizing the late Sen. Tom Hayden (D), who was honored by his former colleagues two days before.

I’m going to make it plain that I am lukewarm as hell about Trump, even if I think most of the things he is pledging to do need to be done (and wouldn’t get done with a more “conventional” GOP president, and may still not if the “conventional” GOP Congress doesn’t start playing ball).  And I hope people understand that when I repeatedly say, “if you want more Trump, this is how you get more Trump”, I mean, stupid moves like the one linked above are how the Dems unintentionally solidify GOP support, i.e., “more Trump”.

All the protests and the heckling and the sit-ins and the crocodile tears from the press and the unfunny assassination jokes — that’s how you get more Trump.  And you’d think the Dems would be able to wrap their minds around that and find a different, more adult way of dealing with their loss.  You know — like the right did when Obama was elected.  We weren’t happy about it, and we snarked about it, and certain idiots came up with conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory about him, but in the main, the right does things differently from the left — primarily, it doesn’t act like a spoiled baby with a poopy diaper when it doesn’t get its way.

At this point, the left is just damaging itself to no good purpose.  If you think this hasn’t resulted in the creation of a ton of closet Trump Democrats, kind of like there used to be Reagan Democrats, you haven’t been paying attention.  And the last thing I’m going to say about that is that the American Republic is not a healthy place if the balance of power swings too far either direction.  I can get along with a Kennedy Democrat, or a Scoop Jackson Democrat, or even a Zell Miller Democrat.  It’s these far-left socialist redistributionist anti-capitalist Democrats that I have a problem with.  This country was designed to be run from the center, and we’ve almost completely lost track of that.

It’s time for compromise, and neither side will ever have a better chance to do that than right now.  That’s what Trump is all about:  The Deal, which by definition requires compromise.  If you don’t want to compromise, don’t expect to get more than short shrift from him.

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Children should not be allowed to vote.

This kind of thing makes me more and more convinced that Robert Heinlein was right and we need to require intelligence tests with a reasonably high passing grade to qualify to vote.  He suggested the solution of a quadratic equation which would be randomly generated and shown on a screen before you got to the ballot.  He also suggested that there should be no minimum voting age; if a 13-year-old girl could solve the quadratic, she should be allowed to vote.

Heinlein also suggested that voters should be military veterans with an honorable discharge in order to vote.  Which would disqualify me since I never served, but that’s on me, not anyone else.  (Besides, Heinlein left open the possibility that anyone could serve a term, discharge honorably, and obtain the franchise.)  For some reason this position got Heinlein labeled as a Nazi — or worse — by the soi-disant cognoscenti, few of whom ever actually read Starship Troopers and didn’t understand the logic behind it.

The childish minds at work in this video cannot possibly encompass the intelligence or the moral discipline to evaluate properly the issues of the day and cast a ballot accordingly.  Want to secure the ballot?  Start ensuring that the people who cast them can actually articulate their personal political and moral philosophy.  Mooning the Trump Tower in Chicago doesn’t rise to that level.  Kids and drunks do that kind of thing, not intelligent adults.

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