Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
This post originated in June 2015 and undergoes update since then.
Today’s Fight Is Between Nationalism And Globalism
And Between Great Beauty And Great Ugliness
DONALD J. TRUMP CONTRACT WITH THE AMERICAN VOTER
The Christian observes the drama of life and says, “Awesome, let ‘er rip!” The Talmudist and the Mohammedan observe the drama of life and say, “I don’t like it. Let’s slap rules on it.” Expectedly, therefore, the likes of Bill Kristol and Huma Abedin have gone postal at Donald and Melania Trump. The Trumps are Christian. They don’t have time for political correctness. And neither does their country, which is Christian.
The boys at Power Line are belittling Donald Trump. To one such effort I commented:
Aw, lay off Trump, guys. 11th Commandment. And you are sounding more driven by class consciousness (academic/lawyer vice entrepreneur/
The more is talked about, the more thinking occurs, the better the outcome will be. You know that in principle, why want to stifle it in re Donald Trump? It sounds small and is small when big and open is needed. And please lay off the toupee jokes. That really is a cheap shot, cheapening the shooter. Hillary kind of stuff.
Let the man talk and be grateful for it. Also, a whole lot of voters Republicans need feel refreshed by his candor, regardless of accompanying crotchets and shenanigans. Stomping on Trump is stomping on those voters. You really can get along without them, and with the visual of a circular firing squad?
Trump may well be a Clinton plant. So, find out if he is or not. That’s a proper lawyer’s job. What impresses me about Trump is the loyalty of the offspring of his three families. Even an old girlfriend. And a former wife. That tells me something very personal about the man, that at least in that character check-block, his offspring vouch for it. They do not have to.
We have seen in nine consecutive administrations now how academics and lawyers habituated to seminars, bureaucracies and court rooms handle national affairs. Their timidity is earth-shaking. Their penchant for parsing is paralyzing. Trump may or may not possess the understanding, intellect and courage begged for by the spirit of the times. Why not be glad he is willing to show whether he does or does not? Certainly nine consecutive administrations have shown that academics and lawyers, qua academics and lawyers, are bereft of necessities.
One does not try to puncture babies just because they may be not perfect.
The Friday 22 July 2016 Presser
FWIW, I concur with Michael Mann’s comment. Also, would like to emphasize that the Bloomberg article, which reads like a cat bringing a rat in the house as a trophy, is sourced this way: The person close to Trump’s thinking …. That’s about as weaselly worded as I can imagine, protecting from charge of libel. Easily a person who hates Trump, not on his staff, but psychically puts her/himself in Trump’s frame of mind, supposedly, and, keying off passages from his extempore Friday, says or writes what the article purports to report.
Trump’s point Friday was that Cruz attacked his wife. He did, see Mann above. Trump was seriously joking about PAC-ing Ted. The person close to Trump’s thinking — namely, anyone who saw the video — decided he was just serious and reported out the same. Dishonest.
Tactically, now IS the time to forewarn political enemies so they are not emboldened, later, to snipe. I think that’s what Trump was doing Friday at the presser from which this Bloomberg story was fabricated. And yes, when you have a bat, let potential opposition see you warming up with it. Cruz and Kasich are not even in Trump’s league. They flatter themselves that their punching up at Trump, or threatening to, has merit. But they needed a little demonstration and got one.
So his wife is stacked and beautiful and he travels in moneyed circles. So what?!
Update 1: The Washington Compost gets oily with Trump, but that’s expected. This one is a pretty competent example of the genre.
Update 2: Are Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump the best candidates? Also here. I commented:
Carly and Donald speak in languages every American understands and knows are NOT misdirection: the languages of battle. Everyone knows the nation is in civil and inter-national war, simultaneously, and Carly and Donald communicate as if it is. Ted Cruz also but, so far, not so persistently, openly or vividly as Carly and Donald.
Both could win. Whether either, or any other R candidate, grasps the profound differences between business negotiation and statecraft is an unanswered question, so far.
D candidates don’t believe in business negotiations or statecraft. They believe in driving submission to their dream-du-jour, their utopian vision, whatever that is today, but always something along the lines of, globally: me decide, you submit.
Update 3: Piling on (good, about time!) Andrew Klavan and Jonah Goldberg at Instapundit. The comments are electrifying. Here is mine:
Klavan and Goldberg belong to the entertainment class, which is to say the chattering class, conservative-schtick section.
There is one principle worth standing on/fighting for: power. Power bestows opportunity to make value and meaning (e.g., Trump Tower, a presidential campaign, a brigade combat team, etc.). Love is power. Power is love. Seek power and you will have love.
Entertainers do not understand this phenomenology, this ways of the world. Their want is for an audience who pays to be entertained by them. That is their operating principle and it is powerless.
Update 4: Bit of an interesting wrangle today at Legal Insurrection over a post by the site’s host, Professor William A. Jacobson. I commented:
I don’t want the Republican party to heal., [wrote one LisaGinNZ]. Neither do I.
I think Trump in this case is using the term *captured* metaphorically, meaning, someone who is dependent rather than independent. A POW is a dependent, which is not to disparage one for that condition. Trump I think is implying that McCain, today and for long, depends on persons he would best not. He is saying McCain is owned and someone who is not owned — e.g., Trump — is better suited to high national responsibility than someone who is owned. That is the truth we see confirmed at least hourly at the White House.
As others have pointed out here, salivating for a chance to say Trump has done himself in is unbecoming. It is low.
Standing beside all of that is this: John McCain has harmed his country in civilian service more than he helped his country in military service.
Update 5: Elizabeth Price Foley at Instapundit highlights an oped in USA Today by Donald Trump. I commented:
Thanks for highlighting this, Elizabeth. Trump is providing a great service to his country. Most of the commenters here have no idea what power is, what it is for and how it is used.
I am fed up with the stupidity of conservative, libertarian and liberal thought and discourse, so called, although I know I have to endure its persistence. The power-players here are Americans and Anti-Americans. Conservative, libertarian, liberal, progressive whatever is BS. So is the mountain of prediction of who can and who cannot win this or that.
Donald Trump is an American, he cares about America and is unafraid to say so and how and why. Whom he chafes does not care about America and is probably un-American, or embarrassed to be American, in the recesses of their soul. I don’t give a hoot if Trump has warts, what he has up his sleeve, how he combs his hair, how many wives he has, whom he has supported. He talks like a fighting American who loves his country. That I care about.
Update 6: VDH pretty much drives the tack straight in.
Update 7: Angelo Codevilla on the ruling class and Donald Trump.
Update 8: Sharyl Attkisson: Fact Check: The Washington [Com]Post On Donald Trump And John McCain.
The Clearest (No Spin) Summary Of FBI Report On Hillary Clinton Email
Update 9: Rush Limbaugh: Trump Teachable Moment: How Come Liberals Can Savage McCain’s Service?
Update 10: Donald Trump And The High Priests Of The Press.
Update 11: At Power Line, Steven Hayward asked for reader comments, here, on Donald Trump, getting largely response opposing the Power Line team’s sentiments, which disparage Trump. Hayward illustrated the bulk response of readers here.
To the first post, I commented twice:
To the interrogatories:
1- The issues are not important at this stage. Demonstrating a willingness to fight is.
2- The interrogatories assume a new POTUS would take over a system in stasis and pretty much keep it that way, asking only, have you experience to manage it and what would you do with it? Well, if there is an issue at this stage, it is the system itself, not elements of it or how one would manage them. The whole, not pieces thereof, is the question now. Randy Barnett and Rand Paul imply that when they warn against appointing judges who rule from judicial restraint rather than Constitutional validity. The whole system is way, way, way beyond Constitutional at this point, and that is the issue at this stage. The interrogatories appear not to appreciate that fact and so sound flaccid, anachronistic.
To the second choice:
1- Cruz
2- Fiorina
3- Walker
In other words, fighters.
Walker rouses my suspicions, though I sense his wife is a good and strong woman. I am not impresssed that he did not protect the staffer of his whose home John Doe raided at midnight.
and:
Another thought. In day-to-day operations, the issues enumerated by the interrogatories are not POTUS’ agenda or, variably, even concern. They belong to staffs in and out of the White House. We get same-old-same-old largely because the staffs, where the work (bulleted choices, justifications) is done, stay largely the same even across administrations. And the staffs really stay the same for establishment candidates, at least, through the years. And those staffs almost uniformly descend from a handful of Ivies and their social milieux — largely now queer or wanting to be, for acceptance to power circles, they think — which are anything but thoughtful and for decades quite palpably Anti-American.
So I am uninterested in what a candidate says on record about any issue, any at all. I AM interested in who staffs their backoffice that actually has the world-view and generates the choices for a candidate or POTUS to make. I do not hear Trump, Cruz or Fionina staffers, which suggests to me they are — with luck most of them — from real schools, normal families and sane society. And Cruz at least — as also David Petraeus — proves that Ivies can graduate a genuine, highly skilled and courageous patriot in a position of high national responsibility.
To the second post I commented once:
Rush today in a brief segment pointed out that the voters Trump inspires are the ones the GOP needs to win elections, especially the White House. GOP will never receive enough Hispanic votes to win the White House, so their obsession with doing that is stupid, an agenda for losers. But they can win the White House with the white vote — i.e., Pro-Americans — specifically Trump inspires: those who are fed up with GOP promising this and that different and then doing big-government, condescension, global mash-up, sanctimonious, Anti-American Democrat agenda, claiming they haven’t enough power to execute for why voters sent them to D.C. (Are you listening, Joni Earnst?)
Rush is right on this, and conservative commentariat — who Rush points out think all is accomplished when they win a verbal match but never actually DO ANYTHING — bashing him are, like Democrats, working against the great majority white vote — i.e., Pro-American, which includes plenty of blacks, whites, purples, browns, magentas and yellows — both conservative and liberal, they need to win elections, especially the White House.
Stupid, stupid, stuck-up attorney Republicans. I have not for years given them and will not give them one red cent until they deliver their promises to remove government at all levels from off the people’s back, behave patriotically, defend the USA, defund several entire Federal Executive Departments and get their bureaucrats’ noses and taxpayers’ monies out of the USA system of education.
Update 12: Ronald Kessler: … if Trump makes it to the general election, he’ll know what to do.
Update 13: Scott Johnson at Power Line on the Donald Trump / Megyn Kelly / Eric Erickson donnybrook. I commented:
I am glad Trump is not a puritan. Americans are a bawdy, brawling, brainy bunch, and then they throw a toggle and go full puritanical, faking primness and shock. Donald does not do that, he is consistent. And with his innate showmanship and all others’ attention, his team gets to zero out their name-recognition budget. He’s right, PC is nonsense and Americans know that it is. It’s also Communist, a KGB subversion project, and that few know. The best of Americans screw up their courage and move hands away from that toggle to puritanical prissiness when tempted to throw it.
Update 14: Trump on Kelly’s question inquisition
Update 15: Re the Fox News inquisitions of 06AUG15 and follow-ons: Erickson and Kelly will live to regret what they have done in re Trump, although likely they will not associate the boomerang with their acts in this particular. Kelly was/is working for Murdoch to promote Hillary and Jeb. Erickson (were he real it would be Ericsson) was/is working for Erickson.
Update 16: Sarah Palin: Trump Stumps Media Kingmakers
Update 17: Glenn Reynolds: Trump Indicts America’s Ruling Class
Update 18: A glimmer of common sense at Power Line.
Update 19: Elizabeth Price Foley, a fine mind, observes wisely
Update 20: Reality has caught up with King Abdullah of Jordan, at least superficially.
Update 21: The estimable Elizabeth Price Foley tack-drives into the Republican Establishment
Update 22: A significant dissent at Power Line between John Hinderaker and Paul Mirengoff
Update 23: USA Today: Hurricane Trump Blows Away Speech Police
Update 24: Roger Simon at PJMedia gets it
Update 25: Kyle Wingfield’s thoughts
Update 26: Mixing it up with headliners
Update 27: Kurt Schlichter: Five Serious Truths About Immigration That GOP Candidates Have To Accept
Update 28: Scott Johnson at Power Line is having second thoughts about dismissing Donald Trump
Update 29: David Paul Kuhn at National Review makes points Scott Johnson is seeing.
Update 30: I spy a guy who leads and attracts people who lead and lets them lead and has happy employees and family. Is emotionally and sartorially eloquent, stands and speaks self-confidently, knows the tut-tut-ing against him and laughs right through it.
I spy a guy who lifts hearts of people who know they really don’t have to live in ghettos because they have abilities they can refine and use to gain self-confidence, by being and doing good, which is what they really want.
I spy a guy who loves America and Americans and is being loved right back by them, white, green purple, brown, yellow, blue, black and turquoise. Even mauve!
This one isn’t about issues, competence or hair or personalities. It’s about love. It’s about time!
Update 31: How long it has been since qualificaiton for office was a concern. I think general popularity of Trump, Cruz and Fiorina indicates Americans want no more drama queens straddling their nation’s affairs. They want at the top people who can actually handle those affairs and discharge responsibilities they entrain in their nation’s interest, fairly, promptly and efficiently. A leader and organizer who attracts leaders and organizers who are loyal to their nation. That, I think, is the heart of surging enthusiasm for Trump, Cruz and Fiorina. One denies or deprecates that at one’s peril.
Update 32: A commenter wrote here:
The scam is over. We know the republican manginas are worse than useless. Treasonous, actually. Trump is a masculine reaction to effeminate republican treachery.
Update 33: The GOP may have talent, but it has squandered the trust that might win it the country’s permission to do anything with it.
Update 34: John Hinderaker at Power Line inspired a lively comment thread today under title Take A Lesson From Trump: Stand Up To The Media. I commented twice:
“Hey, he isn’t conservative enough for us, but he does some things well, and I hope we are fair to him!”
Perhaps a post detailing the first phrase of that sentence?
I suspect at root it means “not the right social/academic orbit,” not one of “us,” but that’s unfair pre-judging.
Trump reminds me of a specific type of New Yorker, one I found both humorous and refreshing when I lived in the City (note the aerie tone of “us” in that capital C): the New Yorker who habitually, effortlessly and with evident enjoyment cuts through FUD and makes one feel disinfected and clean afterwards. Note Trump speaks of those who like him, of those he knows, of those he likes, and of those who do not know or like him or he them. This is important. Civic affairs for him are personal affairs, as they are for the type of New Yorker I loved to watch operate.
For this type of New Yorker, morality is treating persons as persons personally. Principles have nothing to do with it. Acts only matter, person to person as persons. Living is getting things made, not being a this or a that, to include not being a conservative or a liberal. This type of New Yorker is a builder of physical, moral and spiritual structures. Of families and working societies. There is about them always something very tough, very funny, very serious and very sweet. They inspire loyalty because cultivating the myriad forms of life is the humanly essential.
Such New Yorkers also are open books. One knows by observation that they are all there, all up front, everything in view. And they will tell you so, happily. If they want to give someone the finger, they do it up front and high, dramatically, in full color on rolling public cameras and microphones, not sneakily, feigning privacy, up side of their nose or cheek. Such are men, or women, and I think they are fun. One thing they are not is puritans, and that makes me happy.
Why DO you think Trump is insufficiently conservative?
and:
“The lack of push back against the liberal media and political opponents by GW Bush was the biggest disappointment of his entire administration.” Ditto! Incidentally, that lack started with the WMDs lie … that there were none. There were tons of the stuff, many kinds. Syrians have been getting some of it on their necks. Even Rove later admitted it was a mistake not to push back against the WMDs lie … and it was a lie, a straight up lie. The anthrax attacks post-9/11 were the two of a one-two punch, classic military procedure, using weapons-grade anthrax from … Saddam Hussein.
Once DNC/MSM saw they could get away with that WMDs lie, they opened the floodgates and ever since that’s all they do. Until Trump starts pushing back. And NOT apologizing. And Americans see/hear that so-fervently-wanted push back and shout, “Yea, Verily, Yea!” People feel they can trust Trump, at least to beat hell out of DNC/MSM liars, operators. No other “Republican candidate” is doing that … except Cruz and Fiorina. No others inspire that trust.
Walker is a huge disappointment to me. Weak knees in a fight off his Wisconsin graze. Afraid of MSM.
“The GOP may have talent, but it has squandered the trust that might win it the country’s permission to do anything with it.” — quote from Instapundit today. O yeah! And Power Line team thinks trust in leadership is not essential, that promises and melodies, status and staffs are enough to inspire? No one trusts a leader who does not fight and defeat a known bad guy. Republicans have not been fighting much less defeating whole armies of known bad guys.
Update 35: A commenter or two had a thought I did today: the Republican establishment will do something really nasty to Trump. My thought: so nasty it will be highly visible and end the Republican Party much for the same reason the Whig party ended in this country, sclerotic, Anti-American; and inspire an actual second party (not a third, because there is only one party now, with two names).
With luck, the Almighty will deign to exploit that occasion by, finally, illuminating the really enormous Anti-American activites that have broken our and our forebears’ hearts. Such as: the loss of China to Commies, the loss of half of Korea to Commies, the loss of Vietnam to Commies, the loss of Iraq to Caliphists, the loss of Iran to Sharia Commies, the loss of Europe to Commies, the loss of Venezuela to Commies, the loss of American jobs and lives to Commies and, par excellence, the loss of President Kennedy to Commies.
Update 36: Donald Trump has a very loyal family, in three parts, to whom he is loyal. Look at the pictures, read the histories.
This election is about love of country and love of family. Several commenters here recall Schleiermacher’s denomination of Christianity’s cultured despisers. Substitute America’s cultured despisers, right here in the comments. Frank Capra, yet! Of all the smug, sanctimonious sneering racing about these days, that’s got to be in the lead. Frank Capra loved his country and made loving art about it. Who today does that?
Regarding fatalists in politics: that is social/political science, aka made-up shit. This social movement and election are about love, and the pollsters and media types are as far from grasping that fact, much less measuring it, as I am from my minority. I am not an American conservative. I am an American. That is enough.
Update 37: Robert Davi with sage observation and advice.
Update 38: Peggy Noonan: America Is So In Play
Update 39: Traitor To His Class [:-)] Page 2
Nothing is more terrifying to the elite than Trump’s embrace of a tangible American nationalism.
Update 40: I’m Winning Because Americans Are Tired Of Being Patsies
Update 41: Mark Steyn on handling the Obamamedia: Get Lost, You Palace-Guard Creeps
Update 42: Jack Cashill on punishment by Neo-Puritans
Update 43: The actuality of women in the Israeli Defense Force
Update 44: How TARP Created Trump
Update 45: Nice notices for Melania.
Update 46: Roger Simon: How Trump Can Win The General Election
Update 47: Donald Trump And Fourth Generation War
Update 48: James Huffman: The Real Cause Of Campus Racism
Update 49: I wish I could express to my satisfaction the reason I am comfortable with Donald Trump doing whatever he wishes/can do. He makes me laugh, not at him, with him, even for him. I enjoy watching him and his families, they love one another. I love that they do. They are relaxed and at ease in their roles in life. They build things.
They are New Yorkers of a certain deeply rooted type who have panache and know lots of people with whom they can get lots of things done, mainly built. Rockefeller Republicans would not be amiss as long as one is thinking Nelson and especially his father JDII.
When I lived in New York I had occasion to observe the breed, and from even deeper NYC roots. (The Rockefellers are new money, you know, as are the Trumps.) What I saw always made me happy, made me smile in recognition and admiration. And gratitude for these new comers.
Remember Nelson’s finger at the Attica prisoners? (IIRC he did this also at a Senate (?) hearing during Nixon succession discussions, but I do not see that confirmed just now.) Something in that was very, very right in the sense of meet, right and salutary, as we Anglicans say. Such is how many, including I, feel about what some — I’ll say, prigs — call Donald’s boorishness. Prigs are boorish, but unlike Donald and Nelson, who use boorishness as a tactic merely, prigs actually are boorish and try to hide the fact behind sanctimony. We all know that. Jesus was accused of being boorish, and by standards used to make the accusation, He certainly was, deliberately and rightly. The standards were evil.
It was not a life I wanted to lead but I enjoyed watching it and still do.
Update 50: Mark Steyn catches the insouciance and humor of Trump the man and campaigner: Notes On A Phenomenon
Update 51: This statement by a Trump advisor is accurate:
On Monday’s Breitbart News Daily, Donald Trump’s Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller said this election represents “binary choice” that boils down to a decision of “nation-state versus globalism.”
Also this is true: two globalist cartels are extant, temporarily allied: Secular oligarchs and Salafist Jihadists. Both are puritanical hegemons. Puritanism is the bane of humanity. It is a mental weakness driving an adamantine morality, which is to say, conjuring the Devil.
Update 52: Give Billy Hollis an A for clarity at Instapundit:
The key quote: “The central truth of Trumpism as a phenomenon is that the entire American working class has legitimate reasons to be angry at the ruling class.”
Plus, the ruling class seems genuinely baffled by that fact. They really thought that just doing deals with each other, tweaking the bureaucracy, and converting the media into a propaganda arm to sell it all was a totally viable long-term strategy. They thought it was even the right thing to do; after all, those rubes don’t really understand enough to make decisions for themselves or come to the right opinions based on just the facts, do they?
The toxic combination of incompetence and arrogance has finally reached critical mass.
Average people don’t have the time to follow the details of politics and economics. For decades, they trusted the media to provide them with enough to decide who represented their interests and the interests of the nation as a whole, and therefore who to vote for. In that environment, a combination of press influence and ad campaigns was sufficient to get enough votes to keep that political class secure in their position and isolated from the rubes.
But reality always wins in the long term. The dissonance between what the political class tells us and what people see in their daily lives has reached the point where a large minority of the population (and perhaps a majority of voters) simply doesn’t believe anything they’re told by the political class anymore. They’ve seen that it doesn’t really matter who in the political class they vote for – the end result is the same. They’ve grown to understand that the campaigns were just a collaborative effort between the political establishment and the media to get the “right people” into office.
They’ve seen that corporate and financial types somehow always manage to come out OK, no matter how many blunders or frauds they commit. So they come to the understandable conclusion that the .01% are in on the game. They have realized that much of the frenetic activity that goes on in DC is just a dance to ensure that the corporate cronies (who furnish the money the political class needs for their propaganda activities) get what they want to keep on supporting the “right people”.
The anger has gotten out of the control of the political class to manage and dampen it. They never expected this. Their faith in their own abilities was too strong for them to expect it.
So they literally don’t know what to do about it. They never thought they would have to deal with an unmanageable entity like Trump.
I’m not a Trump supporter, but I have to say I’m quite enjoying watching him force them into acceptance that they are not nearly as smart or capable as they thought they were, and that they can’t count on controlling everything through their traditional tools forever.
Update 53: Two terminological clarities one hopes to hear from Trump and Cruz soon, hard, steady, indomitably and indefatigably:
1- Salafist Jihadis instead of Terrorists, Islamists, Islamic Fascists, etc
2- E Pluribus Unum as answer/rebuke to conjuring identity politics, multi-culturalism, deconstruction, justice, peace, equality, etc.
Update 54: Trump’s wives and offspring, all of them, are loyal to him. That tells me all I need to know. It tells me he is a man, indeed, a good man. Cruz’s family also is loyal to him so far as I can tell, and not just for ambition’s sake.
No one is ready to be POTUS. No one could be. So the electorate, men and women, discriminate between candidates on the basis of who they sense to be the most manly, and most of the time they will pick who seems (between “seems” and “is” the devil plays merry hell) the most manly because POTUS is a CIC and women, except for very rarely and then quite readably, are not constructed for combatant command.
A man is. A good man especially is. Trump and Cruz are qualified for POTUS. So is Sarah Palin, as a rare woman with proven combatant construction. Democrats’ only qualified candidate in view is Jim Webb.
Update 55: I think these thoughts from and about Trump and Iraq highlight something important about his suitability as POTUS: incomprehension of military affairs. His syntax and conceptual orbit when speaking of matters military suggest not only unfamiliarity, which is unremarkable so long as one is seen to be learning same, as RR did, but also incomprehension therewith. Similar to Ben Carson’s, though his incomprehension rests on pacifist assumptions, absolutely disqualifying Carson as POTUS. Trump’s incomprehension of military affairs rests on an assumption that business affairs are the only kind in the world and the only kind that matter.
In the event — POTUS is par excellence a military commander — assuming universal applicability of the business model would degrade national sovereignty, solvency and supremacy as much if not more than assuming universal applicability of the soi-disant expert, globalist, unelected bureaucrat model, which The Fraud fosters. If Putin likes you, you may be a patsy in his eyes, militarily speaking, which, for POTUS, is all that matters ultimately.
I have no doubt Trump is a patriot. Even a fighter. Even for freedom, personal and group. But a self-aware, need-to-be military commander outside the business model? I am today not sure about that. RR knew he had to learn military affairs, and he did. DT shows no such self-awareness, not that I have seen, and I keep looking and hoping. Not that what I think matters, but for what it’s worth, if anything, there it is.
Update 56: Limbaugh speculates that Trump’s efforts Saturday evening were an appeal to D/L voters based on the assumption that he has the R nom sewed up, or even if he does not, he still needs to, strategically, appeal to D/L voters even now in case he does get the nom. That makes sense to me. Particularly in view of the fact that South Carolina is an open primary state.
The man rides media like a caballero rides a horse: loose rein but strong moral, emotional and intellectual connection with the mount so the animal knows always exactly what is expected of him and does it. A caballero makes no show unintentionally. Such would break the bond between mount and master.
Would Olivier’s Hamlet or Richard III stand accused of “emotional incontinence?” Nay, rather, of emotional eloquence.
Still, that garish off-red background was a masterful ploy by CBS personnel to stand the Republican Party against a mocking Socialist Background, for target practice. Whoever had and executed that subversion, under the noses of the RNC’s freshest and finest, won the debate Saturday evening, IMO.
Update 57: Probably everyone has seen this, but in case not: Noonan on what’s happening, including why Trump.
For me, she catches the point Rush and so many others make: GOP donors and old-line intellectuals forgot they need GOP voters (… or do they?). And, what is new to me, she specifies said donors: hedge fund operators.
She does not there elaborate upon the other phenomenon I find fascinating: old-line GOP intellectuals, conservative and libertarian, also have forgotten they need GOP voters and to delecate them or give them a powerful reason not to. Or have they? That question intrigues me. Have the old-line GOP intellectuals, like the GOP donors, perhaps, consciously and deliberately decided that they do not need GOP voters because they can share DNC voters at the federal branch level and still get what they want, a comfortable, privileged life for themselves?
If donors and intellectuals have decided that way, they justify Codevilla’s estimate that Americans, the country class, are orphaned politically, having no voice whatsoever, and that they will find a way, one way and another, to make their wishes known and implemented. I think the main wish Americans have is to reestablish and not denigrate their national sovereignty, solvency and supremacy. That wish goes today under the rubric of immigration, control of, for the general benefit of Americans, not the private benefit of predators, cronies and rent-seekers, who wear labels both D and R as the ruling class.
Update 58: Donald Trump embodies the essential truth of freedom. Answer to Frankfurt School’s assertion there is no core: Sez you.
Update 59: One does not work real estate or politics without working with one mob or another, one gang of neck-breakers or another. Politics is a dirty business, about power, not morality. The issues are not Trump’s appeal, on-putting or off-putting. His freedom is. He embodies the essential truth of freedom. So does Cruz. It is to that cynosure that voters across the artificial divisions, the hashtags, are responding, for or against. Trump par excellence and Cruz more sotto voce ring the chant, E Pluribus Unum. For and against that power of being the electorate ranges, and far and away mostly for.
Update 60: Noonan: Trump, Sanders And The American Rebellion
Update 61: Yes, about loving the non-credentialed. However, even more so, about freedom for Americans. The credentialed — ruling class — have entrained the end of American sovereignty, which means the end of American freedom. And they talk about it so openly because they think they got it done, irreversibly.
The end of American freedom means the end of American security. A woman’s first concern in life, and all through it, is security for herself, her children and her husband. Trump’s women are all still with him, as free women. That tells other women all they need to know about him. And it tells other men he is one of them. More than education, it’s about security inside freedom.
Update 62: Roger L. Simon: The Republican Establishment Needs To Stop Worrying And Love The Donald
Rather than being afraid that Donald will lose, many establishment folks, I suspect, are afraid he will win. It will not be business as usual and most human beings seek business as usual, especially successful ones. What, for example, is more conventional and unchanging than the Democratic Party? They have patented stasis under meaningless junk terms like liberal and progressive. Nothing ever changes. Republicans are at risk of doing the same thing with the word conservative. If I hear another candidate claim to be the most conservative, I think I’ll bang my head against the table. I can’t be the only one who feels that way.
Update 63: Pat Buchanan: Nationalism And Populism Propel Trump
Update 64: Peggy Noonan gets it in 2016. Related. Related, from Codevilla.
Update 65: Robert Reich: The Establishment Is Dying
Update 66: Mar-a-Lago built by Marjorie Merriweather Post (see also Camp Topridge), owned by Donald Trump.
Update 67: The Complete Guide To Fleeing President Donald Trump’s America (Good riddance!)
Related: Angelo M. Codevillla and James Lileks do not like Donald Trump. I think class as an analytical rubric eisegetes the phenomenology of life rather than exegeting it. I think protected and unprotected are the fundamental phenomena people feel. Class is a foreign or in any case very superficial analytical rubric. And its formal use in sociology and economics is from communist/humanist thought, not direct existential experience such as motivates classical philosophy and Christian theology.
Update 68: An Overthrow Of The Government
Update 69: Ann Coulter has a little fun at the expense of pundits
Update 70: Camille Paglia appreciates the phenomenon
Update 71: The nation is in civil war. Trump’s language and points, therefore, are appropriate battle actions.
Update 72: Pat Caddell: The American People Have Figured Out They’ve Been Screwed By Free Trade. Trump says Americans see three threats to their security: immigration, free trade and Moslems. He’s right.
Update 73: Michael Goodwin: Why It’s Time For A Trump Revolution This essay by Goodwin is about the most cogent, elegant on the subject that I have seen. Every sentence strikes home, rings a real, mellifluous bell. In that regard it reminds me of this recent paragraph by Glenn Reynolds:
The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it. — Glenn Reynolds
Update 74: Why Trump appeals to Rockefeller Republicans
Update 75: Rush Limbaugh: What Palin’s Trump Speech Says About The State Of The Conservative Movement
Update 76: Phyllis Schlafly Makes Then Case For President Trump
Update 77: Mark Steyn at a Trump rally in Vermont: Notes On A Phenomenon
Update 78: Interview with Washington Compost … on his territory!
Update 79: #TheChalkening — Students For Trump Troll Campuses
Update 80: PC Suppression Of Public Concerns Fuels The Trump Phenomenon
Update 81: “The thinking behind the ‘Nuit Debout’ is to find new confidence in our own strength precisely because we don’t trust those who rule us any more,” 20-year-old political science student Victor said.
“When they (the government) say that they’re working for young people, it’s a huge lie. They’re just trying to halt the momentum.”
Update 82: Donald Trump: Let Me Ask America A Question
Angelo Codevilla exposed details of the phenomenon Trump identifies in 2010: America’s Ruling Class — And The Perils Of Revolution
Update 83: There were WMDs in Iraq. This writer give a dodgy explanation for why GWB did not counter the lie that there were none: George W Bush accepted the lies and criticisms against him because he felt it might be harmful to the morale of our troops and could hurt our intelligence community if the details got out.
Update 84: In Search Of Donald Trump’s Scottish Roots
Update 85: Paul Johnson: When Excess Is A Virtue
Conrad Black: Donald Trump, The Centrist, Has Attracted An Army Of Disaffected Patriots
Update 86: The Surprising Weakness Of Invincible Institutions
Update 87: My comment on a Spengler article supporting Trump: Indeed, Russia is not the biggest threat to the USA. But noting that is not solving the problem. Nor is saying jihadism is. After WWII an international structure was created to keep the peace and stable communications.
That structure’s obsolescence by on-going natural hubbub of nations — and anti-national sovereignty activists — demands a new, fresh structure for doing the same: keep the peace and guarantee communications. The Solons (statesmen) have NOT produced the same.
Here is a suggestion: Three Brothers Doctrine.
Update 88: Scott McConnell: Why Trump Beat The Republican Establishment
Update 89: Now this is significant, about Hirsi Ali, discussing Donald Trump. I have always been suspicious of this girl. A self-promoter is always insane, and a liar.
Update 90: And for an air-cleaning chuckle and hoot, try this masterful propaganda masquerading as news by the Sacramento Bee.
Update 91: Wayne Allyn Root: My Fellow Republicans, If You Don’t Vote For Trump You Should Never Be Trusted Again
Related: Kurt Schlichter: The GOP Establishment Has Learned Nothing From Its Failure
Update 92: Salon (!): Donald Trump Is Going To Win: This Is Why Hillary Can’t Defeat What Trump Represents
Update 93: Petraeus, who was just at Bilderberg, has joined lefties to push gun restriction/confiscation. Good grief!
Update 94: The Washington ComPost at a rally in Greensboro, NC
Update 95: However, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that no such star is high on the list of those being mentioned.
Assuming those stars actually have light sufficient for a career of staring, I’m glad none is on Trump’s short list — precisely because they are political stars, careerist professional politicians!!!
I’d like in office anyone BUT a professional politician, anyone BUT one who craves the office, anyone who is NOT thinking about THEIR future. The very mind-set which produces the concept of a political star with a future I find smug, anxious, cynical, elitist, and un-American.
If you want my vote because you want your concept of a career for yourself, you don’t give a damn about my soul and you don’t deserve my vote. You deserve the sole of my shoe.
Update 96: I mentioned the Trump/Rocky similarities you note, Paul, right here months ago! I think I remarked Trump as a Rockefeller Republican or at least mentioned the parallel. And you know that Rocky is your schoolmate.
The New York manners — originally from Holland, as Orangemen — of the men are very similar, but their family affairs are not. Trump’s children, children-in-law, wives and even former girl friends are unanimously loyal to him. Rocky’s not so much. Another difference: the Trumps live and work from New York City whereas the Rockefellers of Rocky’s era, at least, felt they owned it. And a final difference: the Trumps are Americans, the Rockefellers are seminal Globalists (from Indiana, interestingly, where one still sees their wells slowly pumping out in fields of corn and other crops).
I, too, watched that convention. Riveting it was! Machinations it illuminated. It took the party to the moral low road, to defeat and to lasting contention and confusion. Vivid theatre and violent outcome.
Update 97: John Hinderaker at Power Line has sound thoughts about Melania Trump here and here. Comme il faut.
Update 98: Trump is not a candidate, not a party leader, not a politician. He is a visible embodiment of a movement. That movement is creating a second political party, so far unnamed, but definitely neither Republican nor Democratic, conservative nor liberal. The punch and counter-punch on blog comment strings reflect merely confusion, and not a little anger-bearing frustration, regarding what has happened. A Nationalist movement has happened and a party is forming around it to oppose the Globalist Democratic-Republican Uniparty. Ted Cruz belongs to the Uniparty. The Uniparty is trying to abort the Nationalist movement.
Update 99: Kenneth R. Timmerman: Trump Awakens The Sleeping Giant Of America
Update 100: I think the story here is that Putin — who controls WikiLeaks — is backing Trump, much as Khrushchev did Kennedy. The FSB must be crawling all over the Hillary campaign now. Good! USA, India and Russia should form strategic alliance to quieten MENA and check China. There is a chance Trump can see to do that. I think Putin can. It’s a wise move.
Update 101: Jake Novak: Sorry, Hillary, Friday’s Headlines Will Be About Trump
Update 102: I think the question at trial now, in this election, is whether the Moslem Brotherhood gets to build out its mole, minder and advisor positions in the Three Branches into Cabinet Secretaryships and their Deputies and Assistants, Judges and Justices, especially at SCOTUS, and Senators and Representatives … OR … gets their fat, furtive fannies flung out das Fenster.
The Moslem Brotherhood is who/what politicians and bureaucrats mean when using the PC term moderate Moslem. Shows how deeply the MB has cut and burrowed into the Three Branches. Moderate means they’ll settle for waiting 20 years and slow strangulation instead 20 weeks and a quick shot to the head to replace the US Constitution with Sharia.
The MB is the most salient element of the Global Salafist Jihad inside USA governments, schools, banks, law firms and businesses. Hillary is their girl. Lefties in general are their useful idiots. And very useful they are. I don’t know that Donald sees them, and what to do about them, but I am sure he is not their man or sympathizer and once up close and personal with the phenomenon will know what to do about it. Like lefties, the MB is very stupid, after all. And their stupidity harms far and wide.
Update 103: A true and beautiful essay by David Solway: Domesticating Donald. I commented:
I concur with Roger Simon’s comment on this one, including thanking intellu3times for his history of intelligent contributions on essays at PJ Media. Donald and Melania Trump said last Friday that papers on foreign and domestic policy will appear soon. Let’s see.
Also, I invite attention to his opening at the presser last week with talk of respect for the USA and that no country now has that and that all countries should. To get quickly to what respect means, think Sicilian. Think Russian, for that matter. Think Theodore Roosevelt, even William McKinley. You get my meaning.
Now, the language of respect is not the language of an isolationist. And one using that language, if they mean it — and I have no doubt Donald and Melania Trump mean it — does not threaten consequences of disrespect. If you get my meaning.
The Bush people went into Iraq without a plan for follow-on. And they left untouched two other major contributors to Global Islamic Jihad: Iran for Shiite Jihad and, the biggest one by money and time spent, al Saud for Salafist Jihad. They mostly recovered in Iraq, finally and thankfully, by letting General Petraeus mix COIN and CT operations and handed over a mostly successful purge of Iraqi Baathists (Communists) to … well, a very corrupt Iranian stooge, al Maliki, whom The Fraud deserted for ideological reasons. al Abidi is a vast improvement on al Maliki, as Iraqis realized he would be, but The Fraud deserted him too, again for ideological reasons, and then resolved to muck about in al Abadi’s efforts, subverting his successes. The Fraud then went into Libya without a plan for follow-up, and again, predictable chaos ensued. Ditto Syria until The Fraud’s legacy hove into mind and s/he unleashed a dribble of US assets to make bragging rights for themselves.
My reason for that recital: from the point of view of a builder, if you don’t have a comprehensive plan before you even consider groundbreaking, and haven’t assessed the costs — secondary and tertiary as well as primary — of implementing your plan, and haven’t even resolved to complete the project, then you shouldn’t get started in the first place. That’s not isolationism. That’s common sense. That’s Donald and Melania Trump, as best I can make out.
Update 104: What a beautiful lady! I would be a proud American to have Melania Trump as my First Lady.
Update 105: What did General Anatol Alexis Gogol say about American/Western research?: something like, Where would Russian technology be without it. A delightful Brit TV movie named Sleepers made the same point but with regard to Russia needing a strong Britain socially and financially so as to maintain Russia’s own strength.
Heraclitus: conflict is the father of all things. Everyone needs someone strong enough to stand up to them or they can’t make anything, literally. My wife once commented that that is why she came to live with me. One hand can’t clap. One person can’t tango.
Russia will support the candidate who is strong enough to stand up to Russia and deal fairly with her. That is Donald and Melania Trump. Hillary is too easy, a pushover, does nothing to hone Russia’s abilities, creates no opportunities for Russia to strain a muscle. With Hillary, Russia would have to clap with one hand, can’t be done, wouldn’t get Russia anywhere. Vlad wants a sparing partner who can go the distance with him. I think he should have one: Donald and Melania Trump.
Update 106: Weekly Standard is anti-Trump. Kristol has been consistently subverting Trump. Good at it, too. I imagine they’re working on Pence to quit the ticket. The opening they saw and that their handlers demanded they exploit was comments on the Moslem Brotherhood liar Khan. That tells me the Kristol, Giuliani, Paulson, Ryan et al are stitched up by the MB. This election is about nationalism vice globalism, as not a few, including Trump, have said. But what KIND of globalism? This kind: it is about whether USA continues as a sovereign nation state with its original Constitution or dissolves into the Salafist Jihad’s Sharia — of which MB is a member and would like to be sole practitioner — which is far, far stronger and more rampant than the secular globalists could even dream of being. Hillary’s strength comes far more from the Salafist Jihad than it does from Wall Street, Silicon Valley or the empty-headed, drugged-out monied left. Ditto FOTUS. That’s what Donald and Melania Trump are up against. And Americans.
Update 107: The movement Donald and Melania Trump embody does not want to destroy the GOP. It wants to oppose and defeat the Democratic-Republican Uniparty that includes persons such as, Paul Ryan, Famiglia Clinton, Harry Reid, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Bill Kristol, John McCain, John Podhoretz, Chuck Schumer, Kelly Ayotte, etc.
And the reason that movement wants to defeat said Uniparty is because said Uniparty is controlled, as is Western Europe now, by the Salafist Jihad, in our case, the Moslem Brotherhood, who aim to replace the USA Constitution with Koranic Sharia (aka the diarrhea-by-mouth of sheiks, imams, ayatollahs and the like). The movement that includes Donald and Melania Trump wants to get to it with the culture war against Salafist Jihad and win it.
Update 108: The goal of Republicans should be to find the right answers to these problems.
What are they? How many years have you and your class and guild had to find them, and not? Just like a Democrat, We need change!, well, yeah, you’ve said that for decades and nothing ever pleases you and you haven’t pleased anyone but yourself and your peers. And you sure as shootin’ haven’t solved the problems you say we have. That’s called prattling impotence where I come from.
The ideas given in the post are about political maneuvering, not problem solving. The problems are intellectual and spiritual, not political, at least not in the first instance.
Yes, Reagan era is over, sitrep far otherwise now, but no, what now passes for conservative principles ain’t worth spit. They have produced exactly nothing, or rather, a Democratic-Republican Uniparty, which is an eight-bit name for nothing. Spengler himself just described Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz with metaphor earthier and rather father through the GI tract than mine here.
Tobin has incinerated a straw man. Typical conservative chinless sanctimony. He grasps the movement the way an ant grasps the ocean. It’s big, buddy, it’s big, and it makes very powerful weather.
It’s a good thing the Democratic-Republican Uniparty is using their bureaucracies to burn down their own breeding sheds — schools — turning their own offspring into mountainous morons.
Update 109: This ends weakly, but before that, it provides salient data points in re the Democratic-Republican Uniparty: by The Conservative Treehouse: Presidential Politics And The Current Status Of The UniParty …
Update 110: Hilarious! Soviet/Russia have conducted active measures inside all major US institutions since the 1920s at least, without stop and with capital success. Crickets from US officials for nearly a century. NOW, suddenly, those officials are worried? And haven’t been doing the same to the Soviet/Russia since at least the 1940s?
Sounds more like a wind-up by officials to call off the elections out of an abundance of caution, and a real concern for the reliability of our democracy. Translation: so Democrat and their Republican Deep State fellow-travelers can stay in place indefinitely. THAT would be 110% success of near century-old Soviet/Russian active measures to collapse the USA from inside. Second translation: Democrat-Republican Uniparty internal polling says Donald and Melania Trump will win the election so they are thrashing about for a pretext to suspend the election, permanently or until they can be certain of winning it.
Update 111: DONALD J. TRUMP CONTRACT WITH THE AMERICAN VOTER
Update 112: NPR: Here Is What Donald Trump Wants To Do In His First 100 Days
Update 113: Glenn Greenwald, when he’s right, he’s right:
The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination. The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. . . . Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently.
Update 114: Don Surber: Kissing President Trump’s Ring
Update 115: Bourbons Of ThePress, Believed By But 15%, Straggle On In Defeat
Update 116: How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen
Update 117: I think Tom Brokaw is lazy, just as some generals and admirals, retired and active, are lazy. The plush, the glitz and glamor, the aphrodisiac that is power gets hold of not a few, especially if they are not to it born.
Patton was uncomfortable in the lavish London “cat house” “Beetle” Smith procured to him. So many, many would feel they had “made it” to be in such surroundings. And that would make them ripe for blackmail of exquisite subtlety.
A few have noted, accurately, that DJT did not need to stand for or serve as POTUS. In every way except duty-wise as a citizen, doing that is a diminishment of life to him. On such profound renunciation and detachment rests true power to lead, to cultivate and not to yield.
Update 118: VDH: The Method To Trump’s Madness
Update 119: Jean Yarbrough: Trump — And Tocqueville?
Update 121: Henry R. Nau: What Trump Gets Right About U.S. Foreign Policy
Joel D. Harrison: The Most Important Thing You Need To Know About Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Theology
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
