Here at LITD, we've discussed many times the fecklessness of a pundit or talk-show host taking the I'm-just-objectively-analyzing-this-unpreecedented-phenomenon stance regarding S-H. Hell, these people are i the opining business. They make a living taking strong positions. And now they go all Edward R. Murrow over the most cartoonish public figure in their lifetimes.
Anyway, Allahpundit excerpts a great deal of Rush's tortured (and that's another thing that kills me, the way he starts one of these interminable parsings with "It's very simple, folks") examination of his reasons for his hunch.
Then he grants the possibility, given that the next seven months are not likely to proceed in a linear fashion, that S-H could pull out a narrow win, but feels that Rush is, well, going way overboard here.
And then he excerpts from Ross Douhthat's fine, albeit grim, NYT column about what has happened, and then offers just a bit of his own thoughts on a key point of Douthat's:
I can imagine all sorts of scenarios — the Hillary landslide, the barely-hanging-on narrow Hillary win (which I think is most likely), the narrow Trump win, but … the Trump landslide is a toughie. I could even understand it if Rush was counting on some deus ex machina to upend the electoral table, whether an economic crash, a terrorist attack, or a string of very ill-advised protests-turned-riots by SJWs that drive voters towards Trump’s authoritarian message. (If you’re a Trump critic, read Sean Trende’s argument for why the 2020 cycle and the heightened risk it brings of black-swan disasters is when you should start really worrying about a populist-nationalist candidate’s chances.) Rush isn’t predicting that something extraordinary will happen to shift liberals towards Trump, though. All he’s saying is that in a populist climate, an underwhelming oligarch like Hillary Clinton will surely end up the target for a broad-based revolt among most of the electorate. It’d be some neat trick for the candidate who embodies “identity politics for white people” to peel off enough members of the Democrats’ racially diverse coalition to win (never mind Trump overcoming his problems with women voters), but a day after the Trumpocalypse, anything seems possible, I guess. Vaguely.Incidentally, isn’t there a bigger story out there today than whether Trump can pull off a win against Hillary this fall? The conservative-media belief that a strong “true conservative” candidate would be unstoppable in the primaries has now been conclusively disproved. Ross Douthat:Trump proved that movement conservative ideas and litmus tests don’t really have any purchase on millions of Republican voters. Again and again, Cruz and the other G.O.P. candidates stressed that Trump wasn’t really a conservative; they listed his heresies, cataloged his deviations, dug up his barely buried liberal past. No doubt this case resonated with many Republicans. But not with nearly enough of them to make Cruz the nominee.Trump proved that many evangelical voters, supposedly the heart of a True Conservative coalition, are actually not really values voters or religious conservatives after all, and that the less frequently evangelicals go to church, the more likely they are to vote for a philandering sybarite instead of a pastor’s son. Cruz would probably be on his way to the Republican nomination if he had simply carried the Deep South. But unless voters were in church every Sunday, Trump’s identity politics had more appeal than Cruz’s theological-political correctness…Finally, Trump proved that many professional True Conservatives, many of the same people who flayed RINOs and demanded purity throughout the Obama era, were actually just playing a convenient part. From Fox News’ 10 p.m. hour to talk radio to the ranks of lesser pundits, a long list of people who should have been all-in for Cruz on ideological grounds either flirted with Trump, affected neutrality or threw down their cloaks for the Donald to stomp over to the nomination. Cruz thought he would have a movement behind him, but part of that movement was actually a racket, and Trumpistas were simply better marks.Conservative talk-radio hosts who “affected neutrality” between Trump and Cruz? I can’t think of anyone like that. Can you?
I'll put it this way, straight up: the only ostensible conservative opener you can trust is one who is forthrightly and vehemently opposed to Donald J. Trump. Oh, and equally opposed to Hillary Clinton.
A chicken in every American's pot (wetbacks excluded), until he turns the burner off on January 20.
ReplyDeleteAlready he's acting more humble, surrounding himself with his beautiful 3rd wife and his glamorous daughters from another mother in his Indiana and presumptuous party victory speech. Winning!
ReplyDeleteHe loves winnas! Bobby Knight, he's a winna, he knows how to win. Mike Tyson, he's a winna! Winnas all!!!!!
ReplyDeleteHey, you can always move to Jamaica, and then call this blog Late in the Cay.
ReplyDeleteIn a series of recent interviews, he sketched out plans that include showdowns with business leaders over jobs and key roles for military generals, executives and possibly even family members in advising him about running the country.
Shortly after the Nov. 8 election, President-elect Trump and his vice president — most likely a governor or member of Congress — would begin interviewing candidates for the open Supreme Court seat and quickly settle on a nominee in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia.
He would start “building a government based on relationships,” perhaps inviting the Republican leaders Paul D. Ryan and Mitch McConnell to escape the chilly Washington fall and schmooze at Mar-a-Lago over golf and two-pound lobsters.
On Inauguration Day, he would go to a “beautiful” gala ball or two, but focus mostly on rescinding Obama executive orders on immigration and calling up corporate executives to threaten punitive measures if they shift jobs out of the United States.
And by the end of his first 100 days as the nation’s 45th leader, the wall with Mexico would be designed, the immigration ban on Muslims would be in place, the audit of the Federal Reserve would be underway and plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act would be in motion.
“I know people aren’t sure right now what a President Trump will be like,” he said. “But things will be fine. I’m not running for president to make things unstable for the country.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/05/us/politics/donald-trump-president.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1
But really, what is so different about Trump's agenda from Cruz' except that Cruz claims to be more Christian?
ReplyDeleteWell, there's that, plus Cruz's basing his policy on Contitutional principles, plus basing his opposition to the "A"CA on replacing it with plain and simple free-market economics, plus a foreign policy based on clarity: No uncertainty about who our allies are, and our adversaries and enemies. Plus a focus on the cultural rot (real focus, not just "we'll all say Merry Christmas again")
ReplyDeleteA free marketeer who also wanted to focus on cultural rot. Haven't we been there, done that? Still doing that with the War on Drugs, formerly known as the War on Crime and even a constitutional amendment at one time to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages? How'd that work? It is said you cannot legislate morality. Nor can you legislate public taste, as bitter as it may seem. But, hey, I'm with you, not liking either of the apparent choices in November, but, as usual, will have to go with the lesser of 2 evils as they appear to me. The sky did not fall during the first 2 Clinton administrations, so in that regard, it is less likely to fall under another. Trump will increasingly soften his tone as he pants for power during the next 5 months. Vincente Fox down there on the other side of our weak borders is already extending an olive branch, let's see how Trump reacts. Of course it's a set-up. Cough it up Donald, let's see how you roll now with reality.
ReplyDeleteYou're setting up a straw man. Of course you can't legislate morality or public taste, but a president, or even someone with a prominent Congressional role, can speak forthrightly about a return to the values held and espoused by our Founders and those who made our culture great.
ReplyDeleteThey have a bully pulpit from which they can say, "Here's who we ought to be as a people."
ReplyDeleteIn a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
ReplyDeleteThe symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.
As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.
These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.
We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.
We remember when the phrase "sound as a dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation's resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.
These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed. Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.--Jimmy Carter, who you have ceaselessly called the worst President in history here, delivered this televised speech on July 15, 1979,
Rotten presidents can give great speeches.
ReplyDeleteHe was only second worst.
I'll look for a great speech uttered by Jackson.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, a God quote from # 3:
ReplyDeleteWe answered to the call of duty in a way so spirited, so utterly without thought of what we spent of blood or treasure, so effective, so worthy of the admiration of true men everywhere, so wrought out of the stuff of all that was heroic, that the whole world saw at last, in the flesh, in noble action, a great ideal asserted and vindicated, by a nation they had deemed material and now found to be compact of the spiritual forces that must free men of every nation from every unworthy bondage. It is thus that a new role and a new responsibility have come to this great nation that we honour and which we would all wish to lift to yet higher levels of service and achievement.
The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else. Woodrow Wilson, Address of the President of the United States to the Senate...July 10, 1919
Wilson was a chunk of dog vomit, too.
ReplyDeleteBut noe of these - Jimmuh, Wilson or Jackson - can top the Most Equal Comrade. See latest post.
ReplyDeleteFunny God, I guess, because all of the candidates who claimed that God told them to run are out of the race. Now Rick Perry is panting to become Trump's veep. Hilarious!
ReplyDelete