Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Open Comment Thread (2016-03)

I'm way behind on posting a new Open Comment Thread. But here it is, with somewhat updated graphic for the age of Trump.




Please talk about anything you want to here, including but not limited to the following:

64 comments:

  1. First!

    I'll lead off by noting that one of Dreher's entries today is the confluence of two of your selected topics: Trump and Catholic Bashing.

    The narcissism of Dreher is very much evident in that post. Here we have a letter by conservative Catholics who are concerned about the potential GOP nomination for president of a pro-choice non-conservative -- you'd think that would be a common cause with Dreher.

    Nope -- he'd rather engage in some barely-veiled schadenfreude:

    the conservative Catholic establishment [is] paying a price for its overidentification with the Republican establishment.

    Because Neocons! or somesuch. And he's backed up by a (fictitious?) "conservative Catholic" who Dreher quotes:

    To hell with the Republican establishment and the Catholic neocon establishment. And to hell with the Pope for his comment about not being a Christian for wanting to build walls.

    I say fictitious, because I don't know many "conservative Catholics" who would write "to hell with the Pope" for public consumption, even when disagreeing.

    So it's a Blue Ribbon Day for Dreher. And more cover for his closeted Trump support.

    #NeverDrump

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    1. Here's the open letter from Conservative Catholics, worth reading.

      Drump isn't conservative, nor is he Catholic (anymore).

      Hat tip, email from CatholicVote. (Great site)

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    2. the conservative Catholic establishment [is] paying a price for its overidentification with the Republican establishment.

      What was the subtitle of Rod's first book again? Where did he work when he wrote it?

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    3. Lol. Yeah, I can't listen to Rush Limbaugh right now because he uses the word establishment about 3 times per minute on average. Start talking about actual ideas or you will resemble goth wannabees smoking Sampoernas and whining that if the world were fair Cocteau Twins would be at the top of the pop charts.

      Having pointed this out, I feel like I should say this. The conservative coalition has crumbled or is crumbling if a con-man can come in and run the tables the way Trump has.

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  2. For the record, I am a Rubio supporter, warming up to Cruz as a whoever-can-beat-Trump candidate, but I am voting for Kasich on Tuesday since he's closest in Ohio. You have to be strategic this time around.

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  3. Two free protips:

    1. Although I believe I was the first here to recommend Rubio, the sad thing is the chances are vanishingly small that Americans will ever choose a nominee with a lisp. Christie's already gone, and Rubio is now poised to follow him before Florida. Of course everyone will give alternate reasons for their lack of success. Voters, like all humans, are rationalizing creatures, not rational ones.

    2. Ted Cruz could immediately add 10% to his voting take if he decided to drop that affected...pause.for.effect...in the middle of sentences. Whether he understands it or not, he's not prosecuting a case for a voting jury - voters aren't obligated by the same things jurors are - he's trying to sell a product to people with all the freedom stacked on their side of the transaction.

    The big tossup now on our side (beyond simply the delegate count showdown) is whether Cruz can attract more voters beyond the dedicated conservatives he's depending on than Trump can lose out of the traditional Republican/Conservative base. The fact that there are prominent conservatives and Republicans publicly declaring they'll vote for Hillary over Trump tells one just how far back in line pragmatic politics lies behind other motivating factors.

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  4. As a rebuttal to the above, let me post this link to another Catholic blog, Mahound's Paradise, that takes the letter and its authors to task (and not because of Trump or the GOP):

    http://mahoundsparadise.blogspot.com/2016/03/robert-p-george-george-weigel-et-al.html

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    1. That guy is insane. I FB friended him when I saw he went to Tufts, my graduate alma mater, then immediately regretted it. He is way, way off the deep end. Scarily so. Seriously.

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    2. It says a lot about someone when they don't name the person they are criticizing in their writing.r It lends a cabalistic feel to your enterprise. Suddenly you find yourself in the middle of a group of like-minded people who "get the point."

      I've been guilty of this at times here on this blog, I'll admit.

      BTW, this is exactly the kind of back-and-forth I envisioned when I started the open comment threads awhile back.

      But going back to Mahound, he doesn't really tell us how Pope Francis has ruined the church. We are all supposed to have already come to that conclusion, I suppose. Then at the end, Weigel et George et alia are instructed to "man up!" which I suppose means they should pull an Ali Agca.

      Here's another sample of Mahound's position in the Pope Francis anger spectrum. Taking Fr. Z to task for not worrying about a Pope Francis remark

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    3. ...seems a little like gnat straining if not exactly camel-swallowing.

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    4. To Pauli's point, by not naming Pope Francis in the piece, it seems to me that Mahmoud is painting his ad hominem with faux courage -- making it seem like a Soviet dissident piece criticizing Stalin but not naming him because of the repercussions. Which is both false and cowardly, IMO.

      Not to mention that the piece makes no substantive point (and what's with the class warfare angle, anyway?).

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    5. (and what's with the class warfare angle, anyway?).

      That's what gives it all away. Envy motivates the wannabees.

      And although the whole brandy-sipping characterization is entirely irrelevant, it should be noted that it's mostly inaccurate also. When George Weigel spoke in Grove City, PA, he chatted with everyone after his talk then went out for beers at a local joint. He didn't request a private room somewhere to sip brandy in.

      Weigel gets attacked from all sides: the ridiculous "Catholic" left, the three-steps-away-from-schismatic Catholic right and the less intellectually gifted who run blogs since it's easy and free. He's a nice guy and he deserves his success; he's earned it.

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  5. Speaking of Trumpism being proto-fascism (if not the real deal), we have today's story on the campaign manager roughing up a reporter. When the Trump campaign was confronted with the incident, the official response was to attack the victim.

    Of note: The victim is a reporter from Breitbart -- which has been the friendliest news organization to Trump this side of "Fox & Friends".

    P.S. Note the classy Ann Coulter response. She's bucking for the Leni Riefenstahl role, I guess (since Eva Braun is taken, Christie has locked down the Goering spot, and Sean Hannity is in the driver's seat for Goebbels').

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    1. This is going to force an interesting moral dilemma if it comes down to Trump v. Clinton: what price will voters be willing to pay to avoid one versus avoiding the other.

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  6. Thanks for the shout out, Joseph. I appreciate it.

    So, this is Oakes Spalding of Mahound's Paradise. Please, guys. You're calling me a "coward" for not NAMING Pope Francis in that piece, or for not taking the space in that piece to explicitly and at length explain why I do not like Pope Francis? Please. I've done each of those things in twenty other posts as you are well aware. If you want to disagree with me, fine. But don't be stupid.

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    1. Hi, Oakes. Sorry I haven't read your other posts, but rather I only commented on that one noted by Joseph.

      I'll restate my disagreement with it thusly: Whether the letter writers didn't also criticize he-who-shall-not-be-named for being "Vulgar...oafish...shockingly ignorant...demagogic.." is wholly irrelevant to the validity of their criticism of Trump in the letter. Rather, the payload of your piece, as I read it, was a veiled indirect attack on Pope Francis -- on grounds with which I disagree -- presented in an anti-anti-Trump class warfare wrapper. Hence my take.

      So we'll just agree to disagree. And I'll take your word for it that you've written 20 other posts on the topic, and skip the reading.

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  7. Today's topic being addressed by our government-of-enumerated-powers: Diapers. Pull quote:

    “Unless Congress acts, we don’t have a program to help struggling families buy diapers for their children,” [Director of the President's Domestic Policy Council] Munoz wrote.

    Indeed we don't.

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  8. Relevant commentary:

    Gabriel Sanchez

    Similarly, I remain baffled by the legion of conservative-to-traditional Catholic writers and web-loggers who are falling over themselves to support Donald Trump, a candidate as low-brow and rank as any that has ever graced the American political scene. (Could it be that conservative-to-traditional Catholicism, at least in America, is also rank? We shall see.) Then there is another blogger, an ex-Catholic, who, though well meaning, seems intent on making a certain aesthetic lifestyle choice made possible by income most folks have no access to the singular ideal to which all should strive if they are truly committed Christians and not just lapdogs of late-modern liberalism.

    Commenter Janet Baker, in response

    I had exactly the same thought this morning! What is it you would have us do, dear sir? I myself wish we would stop writing about it and begin building a third party like FIDESZ only better. I mean you and me, but especially you, a guy with education and connections, and all the distributists and all the traditionals and conservatives and medievalists and monarchists and dyarchists and — oh all of us. I wish we’d step away from news shuffling and act.

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    1. You had to do some work to pull that nugget from Mr. Sanchez's post, Keith. I've read it several times now, and I still can't figure out what in the Wide Wide World of Sports it's about. (Or maybe its obscurity is intentional and the joke's on me -- if so, I'll go join Ribbentrop for some Frosted Flakes.)

      Anyway, that's why I laughed when I read the first sentence of Ms. Baker's comment....

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    2. I'd been assuming that Ms Baker was being facetious. But, after reading some of her other comments, I'm not so sure.

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    3. The first thing I thought of when I breathlessly clutched all those writey written blog thoughts about all the distributists and all the traditionals and conservatives and medievalists and monarchists and dyarchists to the bosom of my mind was this.

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    4. It's sort of like LGBTQ. Gay men are like, what? Less than one percent of the population. So you got to add in lesbos and trannies and "queers" -- whatever the distinction is from gays -- and then what do you get? Still less than one percent.

      So add the Birchers, distributists, mediavalists, etc together and my guess is you have way less than one percent. And since a very small numbers of these politically homeless people vote, there's effectively even less. Of course a higher percentage of them have blogs, so their number always seems larger to people who live online like G. Sanchez.

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    5. My first horse laugh was at Sanchez trying in vain and failing to distinguish himself from Dreher, the unnamed blogger in his third sentence.

      But overall my impression was that, politically, these were the equivalent of people who work really, really hard on getting the subtle, distinguishing curve of the goblin ears for their cosplay costume just right, or the political equivalent of someone who fills his living room with three Ping-Pong tables covered with skirmish geography and tiny lead figures from the English Civil War, loupe in eye, painstakingly painting a grenadier. But one day, one day, that army will be ready.

      In other words, hey, maybe it's more engaging than stamps. Or, in other words, like Benedict Option moonings, like a rodent farm, this is what raising prey items looks like.

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    6. At least the guy doing the English Civil War miniatures keeps to himself and his like-minded buddies, and doesn't publicly look down his nose (with or without the loupe) at the rest of us. And there's some craftsmanship to what he's doing, to boot.

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    7. Bottom line, ISTM, is that people like Dreher and Sanchez primarily dedicated to these sorts of hothouse diversions telegraph a certain sense of entitlement to having others protect their political interests for them while they engage in more "civilized" pursuits, not unlike Dreher expecting the teacher to fight his battles for him on the motel room floor.

      STM that the fastest route to cultural extermination or, as Dreher refers to it, the Benedict Option.

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  9. When you hitch your wagon to a black hole, bad things happen. Ben Shapiro is an honest and fair commentator, and was the last major objective voice there.

    RIP Andrew Breitbart. You are missed, and now your name is being sullied.

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    1. Breitbart has become unreadable. The comboxes are horrible -- filled with nakedly racist filth. It makes me embarrassed to say I'm a conservative.

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    2. Donald Trump is what racism means now, i.e., racism means being a blond billionaire with an Eastern European wife and a Jewish daughter. Plus anything else anyone wants to include.

      I wonder what would happen if conservatives began to casually refer to any liberal doing anything they didn't like as pedophillic: "That Vox.com - just a nest of pedophilia from top to bottom."

      Kind of a shame, really, that Liberalism's Orwellian Quds force has not only captured just about every pass on the mountain of language these days but has also managed to install checkpoints at which Liberals and Conservatives alike dutifully submit to body cavity searches in order to be allowed to pass.

      Once you capture a peoples' language, everything else is just clerical work.

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    4. Lest anyone miss my point or come to the conclusion that there might not very well be Breitbart commenters posting, "Yeah, we oughta lynch all them niggers and wetbacks!", my point is that if you concede to use the terms "racist" and "racism" these days you are conceding to using terms that have already been entirely repurposed to liberal ends against you, no differently than if you were to couch your speech in such terms as "gender confirmation surgery" or "women's reproductive health rights".

      It's already baked into the cake: if you even use the terms these days, you are voluntarily speaking Liberal, having implicitly already confessed and repented to your thoughtcrimes against the Truth. Compared to everything else that the term has been hijacked to include, real cases of real, historical racism these days are statistically non-existent.

      This is one reason Republicans too often resemble a gang that can never seem to shoot straight. They simply don't know how to say no to speaking in language already structured to defeat them.

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    5. I hear ya, Keith, but I think a lot of the combox garbage at Breitbart is racist by any definition. You don't have to cede ground to the Left to find the N-word objectionable.

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    6. Well, if the N-word is what you're referring to specifically of course I'll take your word for it. I'll confess I seldom tackle 2,000- and 3,000-comment threads.

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    7. I'd add that the racism in the Breitbart comboxes is more the profound racism of the ideas stated than the use of particular words to express those ideas. And just because the left has appropriated "racist!" as an argument-ender doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist.

      The even more troubling problem I had with Breitbart was the blind unthinking adherence to The Trump. Any criticism or questioning of Trump is turned immediately into us-vs-them name-calling or accusations of ill will toward America. Which of course fits with how Trump himself responds to criticism.

      #NeverTrump

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    8. Just checked out Chronicles Magazine and it appears that they are backing Trump. I think that follows; it's in the paleocon narrative that there haven't been any REAL conservatives even in a presidential race since Pat Buchanan ran, and this is their big chance to stick it to the establishment. It's wacky and sad. Tom Piatak penned an overly long article about how all the anti-Trump people are now "joining" the goofballs who are protesting at his rallies. The accusation is that we are blaming him for violence directed towards him, which no one on the right is doing AFAIK.

      There appears to be a major realignment going on where you have certain elements of the right joining the Trump band-wagon and others pushing themselves away, wanting no part of it. I'm in the latter group, suffice to say. I'm planning to vote for him over Clinton if I need to, but not proudly.

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    9. Pik, I'll point out that everything you say about racism would be true whether there were any actual examples of it or not. Well, at least insofar as someone can explain why X, whether in the form of words or ideas, is peculiarly racist while Y is not. If "racism" can't be delimited - and easily delimited - racism's no longer a real thing, merely a polemnical technique.

      But that's the beauty of the liberal approach: they just attach "racism" as a pheromonal marker and everyone is thereafter afraid to even question it.

      I'll give you an example of the sort of distinction I'm talking about.

      Particularly in light of what Christian denominations have claimed about the religion of Islam, Trump's famous statement about banning all Muslims from the U.S. "until we can figure things out" may easily be unconstitutional, impolite, impolitic, incendiary, and many other things, but - unless racism can mean anything we want it to mean, at our discretion, in order to tar an opponent - it simply can't be racist. Muslims (or Mexicans) are no more a race than Christians (or Americans).

      But, like I said, I haven't plumbed the 1,000s-comment-length threads there, so I'll take your word for it.

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    10. Well if we must, then let's just substitute "bigoted" for "racism" in my prior comment.

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    11. Well, okay, then. I'm as bigoted against Hillary Clinton as anyone.

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    12. I guess the term "ignorant" will do:

      "I think it has to do with the fact I'm very, very strong on the border, and he happens to be extremely hostile to me. We have a very hostile judge. He is Hispanic, and he is very hostile to me."

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    13. Thanks, Pik. Here's the full transcript.

      I get you don't like Trump. Me, I guess I'm just not as sensitive. Just sounds to me like Trump's laying public groundwork for a motion to recuse or appeal, particularly after he establishes from the beginning that the judge's ethnicity is nothing to him personally.

      I'm not particularly for or against Trump, but I am against the Stupid Party running another typical circular firing squad, particularly after it has had plenty of time and opportunity to grasp the same things Trump has grasped and run with and offer better alternatives.

      The only candidate I'm against right now is the one who will choke and lose to Hillary Clinton, and we'll find which one that is soon enough.

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    14. Losing to Hillary Clinton will not require the loser to choke. Just show up with more flaws than strengths, a decent amount of hubris and no plan. That describes Trump to me.

      He MIGHT have everything and then some that he needs to defeat her. But he has shown us nothing except bumper slogans and Buchananite platitudes, and he mainly appeals to people who are angry and want a strong man to beat up the other guys' strong man. Since he can't elucidate how he will accomplish all his making-things-great schemes, I can only assume he expects his followers to accept him on blind faith. Sorry, that's God, not a candidate for pres.

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    15. Congratulations on Kasich.

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    16. You're right, I don't like Trump. Guilty as charged.

      But I think the objective reader of even the full transcript (which makes it worse, IMO) of the Trump statement can only conclude that Trump was blaming a lost (in part) summary judgment motion on a Hispanic judge because of his Hispanicness.* "Laying public groundwork for a motion to recuse or appeal"? Seriously?

      *Which shows Trump's ignorance not only because of the ethnic assumption, but also because of the false assumption that all Hispanics by their nature are in favor of illegal immigration by other Hispanics.

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    17. Oh, I think Trump was obviously trying to have his cake and eat it, too, on the one hand laying down a marker that he has no personal feelings against Hispanic ethnicity; on the other hand that, should he lose under an Hispanic judge the feelings of Hispanics in general toward those against illegal Hispanic immigration should be considered as a contributing factor.

      Incidentally, if it were only Trump that assumed that Hispanics in general disfavored those against illegal Hispanic immigration and if such an assumption did not in fact infuse the entire political universe, there would be no broader concerns about how candidates performed vis-a-vis illegal immigration with Hispanic voters. But the opposite is in fact the case: the general political knee jerk consensus is that any given presumed Hispanic will oppose someone against illegal Hispanic immigration.

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    18. The general political knee jerk consensus is that any given presumed Hispanic will oppose someone against illegal Hispanic immigration.

      All too true.

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  10. Scott Adams on the media and Trump:

    In the future, the media will kill famous people to generate news that people will care about.

    As an obviously media-obsessed monkey, naturally I must disavow myself as well.

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  11. Here's what I think a lot of Republicans haven't yet thought forward to yet: what are they going to do if faced with a Trump/Cruz or a Cruz/Trump ticket?

    Despite what a lot of the liberal lambs believe, Clinton and Sanders aren't running against one another, they're running alongside one another: Sanders is collecting those voters who won't vote for Clinton and vice versa. This cycle there could easily be a Clinton/Sanders ticket (given the superdelegate machinery, Sanders/Clinton is nigh mathematically impossible).

    Believe it or not, Trump and Cruz are doing the same thing: runing alongside one another, one scooping up the voters the other can't get and vice versa.

    Bottom line come November, the team on either side that can score the most from their basalt base up into the middle range of undecideds/independents will win the Presidency.

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  12. Dreher critiques a National Review article by Kevin Williamson here; the Dreher piece is TLDR for me -- apologies. But that's not of note -- what is noteworthy is Williamson's response, which includes this:

    I think Dreher’s argument is in the end sentimental: We have moribund, economically stagnant communities whose social and economic problems are not going to be changed by any public policy, and Burkean-Kirkian arguments about affection for local particularities, true now as they always have been, do not address those problems, either. The culture of the white underclass in America is horrifying. It’s brutal. And its products are obvious. To understand this plainly and to write about it plainly is not callous, despite Dreher’s insistence to the contrary....

    ...Sentimentality about our backwards communities, and circumlocution regarding their problems, isn’t mercy at all, nor is it—I hate the word—“empathy.” It’s cowardice, a refusal to look at the thing squarely as it is and to do what it is necessary to do.


    As we know in these parts, you can say that about the vast majority of Dreher's output, and about his Benedict Option in particular.

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    1. I saw a link on Facebook to a liberal site that characterized Williamson's piece as an illustration of the conservative's contempt and hatred for the poor.

      Maybe Williamson does hate the poor, but as a non-sentimentalist on a lot of things myself, I think the divide does make it hard for sentimentalists to understand non-sentimentalists.

      There may also be something to the political divide explained by the contrasting views as expressed by Ivan Karamazov -- "'I love mankind,' he said, 'but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons.'" -- and by Jonathan Swift -- "I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth."

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    2. Williamson's non-sentimentalist perspective is what powered the eugenics movement, for example, the position that individuals carrying genetic defects like cystic fibrosis should be sterilized to prevent the downstream transmission of the disease within the gene pool.

      A statist non-sentimentalist eugenicist might try to mandate such sterilization, either absolutely or as a condition of some state benefit not conditioned for individuals not carrying such genes. A more passively libertarian non-sentimentalist eugenicist might instead simply exclude medical consequences of genetic disease from state-funded medical benefits such as Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, etc., allowing nature to take its toll over time.

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    3. To Tom's commment, the takeaway from the original Williamson article (it'll cost you a quarter if you're not an NRO subscriber) is that the working class angst is not due to China and Mexico, or to The Man, but is more due to the destruction of our culture and in particular, the destruction of the family. Trump plays into this by giving an avenue for blaming others, and by adopting the role of National Daddy. The wrap-up:

      The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump's speeches make them fell good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn't analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

      I guess I can see why liberals think this means he hates the poor, b/c they think the destruction of traditional culture and the "expression" that results from that is an objective good (while denying that there are objective goods). But I'll venture to say that you and I know better.

      To Keith's comment:

      Williamson's non-sentimentalist perspective is what powered the eugenics movement...

      I have no charitable response.

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    4. I'd want to use "sentimentalism" in these contexts to refer to a tendency to be persuaded by (and therefore to make) arguments that appeal to feelings. "Non-sentimentalism" would then be the tendency to be unpersuaded by arguments that appeal to feelings, and therefore to make arguments that are indifferent to (and in practice often rough on) feelings.

      Whether one tends to favor sentimental arguments is a separate question from whether one tends to favor eugenics. There are arguments in all cells of the (sentimentalist, non-sentimentalist) X (for eugenics, against eugenics) matrix.

      For what it's worth, to me sentimentalism appears to be at the root of the current support for abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide, although there are some "reduce the surplus population" non-sentimentalist arguments circulating.

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    5. It's difficult to see the eugenicist's argument that the best way not to pass on a genetic defect is not to pass on a genetic defect as anything but non-sentimentalist. Sentimentalism does creep in when sterilization is favored over extermination.

      Whether this is the sort of universally objective non-sentimentalism Williamson is recommending or whether he is operating from his own custom blend of sentimentalism and non-sentimentalism favoring his own conclusions I can't say, not having read the article in full. However, if he excludes easily available objective wage stagnation data and it's drivers - globalism, outsourcing, insourcing, and the replacement of labor by technology - and substitutes the symptoms of economic collapse for the causes, particularly the destructive effect of traditional male breadwinning employment on the family, I'd suspect he has.

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    6. The destructive effect of the loss of traditional male breadwinning employment on the family

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    7. Seems to me that all Williamson argued vs. Dreher was that Dreher's sentimentality was inadequate to addressing the problem and would only prolong it. It doesn't mean that Williamson was arguing from "a custom blend of sentimentalism and non-sentimentalism", much less from non-sentimentalism of a type that "powered the eugenics movement"(!?!).

      And I'm with Tom, in that the eugenics argument has nothing to do with sentimentalism vs. nonsentimentalism (much less of a type displayed by Williamson). Unless one is arguing that respect for the dignity of human life in all its stages and for the sanctity of the marriage bond are sentimentalist arguments, I guess, which is bunk.

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    8. Pik, are you privy to the complete Williamson article? If you are, you should quote those parts supporting your conclusions which aren't supported by the Dreher excerpts.

      And if you want to subtly rework the conditional words I just posted to fit your own needs - I didn't say Williamson necessarity was using a custom blend, only that your reported conclusions of Williamson denying globalistic factors suggested it - be my guest, but I'm still not sure I see the distinction between Williamson's non-sentimental utilitarian perspective that "Dreher's sentimentality was inadequate to addressing the problem and would only prolong it" and the identical non-sentimental utilitarian perspective of the eugenicists that alternatives to sterilization would only prolong the continued transmission of the genetic defect.

      I understand that equating these utilitarian perspectives seems to attach something unpleasant to Williamson who, like you, dislikes Trump. Perhaps, if/since you have access to the full article you can supplement what has been excerpted from Williamson so far with his arguments from the piece similar to those overriding the sort of bare utilitarianism perspective both Williamson and the eugenicists appear to me to share.

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    9. I am, but the Williamson comment I posted above is sufficient to make the point.

      Beyond that, I've said what I've needed to say. You'll have to spend your own quarter to characterize what type of eugenic-fueling-non-sentimentalism is present, or not present, or otherwise in the original article.

      And if you think that my point was because I don't like Trump or like Williamson for not liking Trump too or whatever, then you'll think whatever you think despite what I say.

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  13. Given the facts on the ground right now, I'm not sure I understand the utility of continuing to fume about Trump. Instead, how can those facts be deployed to the best results?

    Up above, Pauli says Trump "mainly appeals to people who are angry and want a strong man to beat up the other guys' strong man". If that's true, in most of the primaries to date including the non-Ohio contests just concluded those people proved to be either more numerous than non-angry people not wanting a strong man to beat up the other guys' strong man, more motivated, or both, and it's difficult for me to see why or how that trend would suddenly change.

    Assuming that there's no tacit conclusion already baked in that Hillary Clinton would ultimately make a better President than Donald Trump, a conclusion far from tacit with a number of people already, what can be done to the best end of winning the White House while, even if reluctantly, accepting the reality not only of Trump but of his supporters, the only reasons he is where he is right now at all?

    In other words, is making Trump and his supporters go away, shut up, or fall in line in some other direction reality-based thinking anymore? If not, some follow-on questions:

    Kasich won Ohio, but in doing so he deprived not only Trump but also Ted Cruz of those delegates. What should he do with respect to the next batch of delegates to be awarded?

    Upon winning the Northern Mariannas Trump became the first and only candidate to qualify under RNC Rule 40, though Cruz may very well match him somewhere down the line. Is moving those goal posts a good idea?

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    1. I think the destruction is already baked into the cake, whether Trump is nominated or not. Yes, the Trumpians will be upset (see the Trump statement today about riots) if he's not nominated. But if Trump is nominated, conservatives are being asked once again to shut up and fall in line behind a non-conservative, despite winning the House for the GOP in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. I don't think I'm alone in saying "screw that" (even though not threatening riots in the streets). It's one thing to swallow one's principles to elect a soft Republican, but it's too big an ask to elect a fascist.

      Kasich should go away if he's interested in denying Trump the nomination. I hope he does that. If he's willing to get on board with Trump, then he'll stay in so that he can have something to trade if it comes to that.

      I'm agnostic on Rule 40 and the various machinations. Sounds to me like either it won't matter (see above) or a game time decision.

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  15. During this Holy Week, Hollywood showed its utter contempt for Christianity in general and Catholics in particular. http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2016/03/26/bozell-graham-column-unholy-week-hollywood

    Anybody putting odds on them doing it to Muslims during Ramadhan?

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