WHINOs, RINOs, Donald Trump, Bright, Shiny Objects, and The Intervention.

In the tech industry, many of us refer to a lot of the new technologies that come down the line as “bright, shiny objects” – things that tech people look at that are new and potentially interesting but rarely turn out to be anything other than an attention-grabber and a distraction from more important things.  Applied to the election season, this should sound familiar.  But if you’re missing the analogy..here’s a reality-check, people: Donald Trump is this week’s bright, shiny object, and he is not going to amount to anything but a couple of magazine covers and some (once again) very disappointed, misguided individuals who thought he was The Great Conservative Hope.

I don’t like “National Review” much, given the social liberal bent they often display. Right now, though, they seem to be on a tear.  And I do like two of the NR writers quite a lot: Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson. They’re great writers, solid conservatives, and are virtually always spot on target. Williamson is more of a libertarian than most, but he doesn’t let it get in the way of his intellect…. This past weekend, both Goldberg and Williamson addressed the blonde-haired (toupee’d) gnat that is Donald Trump. Let’s take a look at how they characterize Trump and the Trump-pets (Jonah’s term for the fans of this election season’s allegedly conservative, GOP-wannabe bright, shiny object). Goldberg starts off:

I don’t like “National Review” much, given the social liberal bent they often display. Right now, though, they seem to be on a tear.  And I do like two of the NR writers quite a lot: Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson. They’re great writers, solid conservatives, and are virtually always spot on target. Williamson is more of a libertarian than most, but he doesn’t let it get in the way of his intellect…. This past weekend, both Goldberg and Williamson addressed the blonde-haired (toupee’d) gnat that is Donald Trump. Let’s take a look at how they characterize Trump and the Trump-pets (Jonah’s term for the fans of this election season’s allegedly conservative, GOP-wannabe bright, shiny object). Goldbergstarts off:

There have been times in the past when I’ve gotten crosswise with certain segments of the conservative base and/or with the readership of National Review. And, because, like the Elephant Man, I am a not an animal but a human being, I have always had at least some self-doubt. That’s as it should be. People who share principles should not only hear each other out when they disagree; they should be able to see each other’s points and hold open the possibility that one’s opponents have the better argument.

This is not one of those times, at least not for me.

I truly, honestly, and with all my heart and mind think Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are making a yuuuuuuge mistake. I think they are being conned and played. I feel like a guy whose brother is being taken advantage of by a grifter. I’m watching helplessly as the con artist congratulates him for taking out a third mortgage.

“Grifter” is the perfect word.

grift•er

n. Slang.

1. a person who operates a sideshow at a circus, fair, etc., esp. a gambling attraction.

2. a swindler, dishonest gambler, or the like.

Trump is a grifter.  He’s a sideshow act – an attraction. But that’s what Trump does. I don’t begrudge him being a business man. I begrudge him doing it as a fake conservative who is trying to promote his own interests. He’s a fraud. Goldberg proceeds to promote what I believe is a good course of action: an intervention for the Trump-pets.

I’ve written many times about how I hate the term RINO because conservatives should consider themselves Republicans in Name Only. The Republican Party is a vessel, a tool for achieving conservative ends. It’s nothing more than a team. Conservatism is different. It’s a body of ideas, beliefs, and temperaments. The amazing thing is that Trump is both a RINO and a CINO. I’m sure he has some authentic and sincere conservative views down in there somewhere. But the idea that he’s more plausibly conservative — or more loyally Republican — than Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 100%, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) 84%, Scott Walker, or any of the others is just flatly absurd. It is vastly more plausible that he is a stalking horse for his dear friend Hillary Clinton than he is a sincere conservative.

Trump supporters need an intervention. I want to sit them down at the kitchen table, reach into a manila envelope, and pull out the proof that he’s a fraud. The conversation would go something like this…

And then Goldberg proceeds to lay out the reality of Trump’s alleged “conservatism” and the reality of where he has stood for years. Could Trump have had an epiphany and changed course? Perhaps. But on ALL of these: Immigration, Abortion, Obamacare, Hillary, Economics? Bloody unlikely. (I’m not going to quote Jonah’s documentation of all of Trump’s left-wing beliefs on these topics. You can read his article or look at Isaac Cohen’s breakdown).

Via: Red State

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The Rise of House Clinton

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays. Dear Reader (including Josh Duggar who foolishly got a job at the Family Research Council rather than as a party planner on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane), Bill Clinton is the greatest gaslighter in modern American politics. 

This is from the Wikipedia entry on “Gaslighting”: Sociopaths frequently use gaslighting tactics. Sociopaths consistently transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically, are also charming and convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing. Thus, some who have been victimized by sociopaths may doubt their perceptions. Some physically abusive spouses may gaslight their partners by flatly denying that they have been violent. Gaslighting describes a dynamic observed in some cases of marital infidelity: “Therapists may contribute to the victim’s distress through mislabeling the woman’s reactions. . . . 

The gaslighting behaviors of the husband provide a recipe for the so-called ’nervous breakdown’ for some women [and] suicide in some of the worst situations.” A truly sociopathic liar (though his sociopathologies hardly end there), Clinton has a gift for making other people feel like there is something wrong with them for objecting to his deceptions. At the outset of the 1990s, liberals had worked themselves into a moral panic about sexual harassment. If anything, it was a bigger obsession than the campus-rape panic we’ve been witnessing over the last few years (no doubt in part because there was more factual basis to the problem). Male politicians — Bob Packwood, John Tower, et al. 

— had their careers summarily ended because of their “womanizing” — a term popularized by Tower’s predations. (Ironically, the original meaning of the word was to “make effeminate,” i.e., to turn into a woman. Given the mainstreaming of sex-change surgery, maybe it’s time to rehabilitate the older definition?)

Via: NRO

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Fascism and Socialism: Still Not Opposites The Eurasian movement of Putin and his allies draws from both Nazism and Stalinism.

Editor’s Note: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.

Dear Reader (Including the trenchcoat-wearing FCC minister with breath like he’s been sucking a urinal cake looking over my shoulder, tapping hisBIC pen on his glass eye, and sighing every time I write something he doesn’t like)

I’ve got to bang out this “news”letter pretty quickly. I’m sitting in a too-small fake wicker chair at the coffee shop at the Broadmoor (one of my favorite hotels, btw). The time difference here puts me two hours behind at six in the morning. Plus, I don’t want the housekeeping staff to find the body in my room. If I didn’t need coffee so badly I would have taken care of that already. But one must prioritize. I think the high altitude here is making my brain itch.

FASCISM, AGAIN

Timothy Snyder has written the best piece I’ve seen on what’s going on in Kiev. It’s worth reading just as a primer. But it’s also interesting in other ways. I had not read a lot about the “Eurasian Union,” a proposed counterweight to the European Union, in much the same way the Legion of Doom is a counterweight to the Justice League. Putin and a band of avowed “National Bolshevik” intellectuals are in effect trying to put the band back together. Snyder writers:

The Eurasian Union is the enemy of the European Union, not just in strategy but in ideology. The European Union is based on a historical lesson: that the wars of the twentieth century were based on false and dangerous ideas, National Socialism and Stalinism, which must be rejected and indeed overcome in a system guaranteeing free markets, free movement of people, and the welfare state. Eurasianism, by contrast, is presented by its advocates as the opposite of liberal democracy.

The Eurasian ideology draws an entirely different lesson from the twentieth century. Founded around 2001 by the Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, it proposes the realization of National Bolshevism. Rather than rejecting totalitarian ideologies, Eurasianism calls upon politicians of the twenty-first century to draw what is useful from both fascism and Stalinism. Dugin’s major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, follows closely the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi political theorist. Eurasianism is not only the ideological source of the Eurasian Union, it is also the creed of a number of people in the Putin administration, and the moving force of a rather active far-right Russian youth movement. For years Dugin has openly supported the division and colonization of Ukraine.

Via: NRO

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Jonah Goldberg: Cruz Using Obama-Style Strategy to Defund Obamacare

National Review editor Jonah Goldberg told Fox News Monday morning that Texas SenatorTed Cruz was attempting to employ a Barack Obama-style strategy in his quest to shut down the government over Obamacare—a strategy Goldberg predicted won’t be successful.

Goldberg reiterated his disapproval of Obamacare and its implementation problems, but added that he was no more enamored of Cruz’s call to make the passage of a continuing resolution contingent on the defunding of the ACA.

“The defund-Obamacare strategy that he’s pushing is simply not going to work,” Goldberg said. “It’s a misreading of the political moment. The idea that somehow Ted Cruz will be able to create a political tsunami that will change the minds of at least twelve Democrats in the Senate just strikes me as utterly fanciful.”

“In some ways Ted Cruz is doing the same sort of strategy that Obama did in 2008 and 2012, of making these arguments about bringing change to Washington in terms of these populist, grassroots kind of forces,” Goldberg continued. “That has not worked for President Obama, and I don’t think it would work for Ted Cruz either.”

“…Interesting analogy,” host Martha MacCallum replied.

Watch the full clip, via Fox News:

Via: Mediaite.com

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