While Donald Trump is disgusting, he can teach us an important lesson

Something interesting - actually a few layers of things that are interesting - occurs to me as I read about how Squirrel-Hair is unreservedly diving into the heart of the matter by responding to Hillionaire's remark about S-H's "penchant for sexism" and her campaign's trotting out of Billy Jeff the Zipper as the effective weapon of the moment.

First of all, S-H is not wrong. In fact, it's pretty obvious that BJ the Z is an ill-advised poster boy for a mature and gentlemanly view of women.

Secondly, the question is raised, mainly because Trumpbot comment-threaders are already insisting that it be raised, as to whether any other Pub candidate would be willing to go there. The sexism-charge was levied at S-H, not any other candidate, and so we can't be 100 percent sure. But there is a high likelihood that any of them, even the most scrappy (here think Ted Cruz) would try to give it the let's-strive-for-dignity-and-a-substantive-discussion-of-actual-issues spin.

And this brings up a disturbing question: Are we now in the Age of Red Meat, where the most admirable trait a candidate can exhibit is to immediately respond to any personal affront with maximum vociferousness, to stomp on anyone who begins a political food fight with an unproductive distraction about something like identity politics, to use such an instance as an opportunity to demonstrate one's scorched-earth chops?

This is a question about which LITD has some skin in the game. In the course of this post, I have so far used the monikers Hillionaire, Billy Jeff the Zipper and Squirrel-Hair. Longtime readers are also familiar with my use of the synonym Freedom-Haters for Democrats, and their leftist cultural endorsers, of the synonym Most Equal Comrade for Barack Obama. But in each of these cases, great care was given to making sure that the newly-coined term did in fact productively provoke someone hearing it or reading it to consider what the person or phenomenon in question was really all about.


But there we are. Once again, S-H has addressed the public's deep thirst for an unvarnished addressing of plain truths before us.

The sad thing about it is that it did not come from a real conservative. But at this late date, that is not what mainly matters to the supremely frustrated post-American voter.

So the lesson, late as it is for real conservatives  to be learning it, is that we live in raw, crude times much as we've been trying to stave off since the birth of our modern movement. It is what it is. If the point is winning, you must be able to speak forthrightly about BJ the Z's track record as one who thinks of women as sexual playthings, if BJ's "wife" is going to trot him out as a campaign weapon.

Hesitate to do so, and you leave the field wide open to narcissistic blowhards who not only are not conservative, but don't have the best of track records when it comes to dealing with women themselves.

You can't wage this war on an idealized battlefield.

We win or lose in the real world.