Category Archives: Popular Culture

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Trump’s Support

129 Comments

Ann Coulter’s crush the last time around was Chris Christie, and this cycle she’s been fawning over the Donald. But it looks like even she can’t defend him any more. I wonder how many other eyes will clear of scales? As Geraghty writes:

Donald Trump didn’t suddenly change in the past few days, weeks or months. He’s the same guy he always was, the same guy that most of us in the conservative movement and GOP have been staunchly opposing for the past year. He didn’t abruptly become reckless, obnoxious, ill-informed, erratic, hot-tempered, pathologically dishonest, narcissistic, crude and catastrophically unqualified for the presidency overnight. He’s always been that guy, and you denied it and ignored it and hand-waved it away and made excuses every step of the way because you were convinced that you were so much smarter than the rest of us. You were so certain that you had received some superior wavelength giving you special insight into the Donald; only you could tell that it was all an act. Only you could grasp that his constant courting of controversy was just to get attention from the media. Only you could instinctively sense that his style would play brilliantly in the general election and win over working-class Democrats. (SPOILER ALERT: It isn’t.) You insisted that you could “coach him.”

You came to those conclusions not because you’re smarter than the rest of us, but because you’re actually more foolish than the rest of us. You insisted Occam’s Razor couldn’t possibly be true– that Trump acts the way he does because this is who he is, this is the way he is all the time, and he will always be like this. You fooled yourself into believing that Trump was playing this nine-level chess that only you and a few others could perceive and understand. Only you could see the long game.

As he says, there is no long game. I really do think that he’s trying to figure out how to get out of this. Trump is like the dog who chases cars, but now he’s realizing he won’t know what to do if he catches one.

Jim is angry. So am I.

[Update a few minutes later]

Trump castigates Scott Walker for not raising taxes, and thinks that “health care and education” are among the top three government functions.

But yeah, let’s elect this “conservative.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

The culture that created Donald Trump was “liberal,” not conservative. (Scare quotes because it’s not really liberal, it’s leftist.)

[Update a while later]

A top Trump strategist quits and warns America about him.

I didn’t need the warning.

[Thursday-afternoon update]

[Bumped]

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The Republican Race In CA

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The latest polling of likely voters shows a dead heat between Cruz and Trump.

It’s worth noting (as the article doesn’t) that CA is winner-take-all by Congressional District. So if that polling holds, Cruz would probably pick up about half the delegates. But we don’t know what the race will look like by the time CA has come around. Trump may have already taken enough delegates, or there may be a last-minute push on to prevent him.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

David Brooks

25 Comments

A shorter @Instapundit: “Eff you“:

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.

They brought this on themselves.

[Saturday update]

More Brooks links.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

“Burn It All Down”

51 Comments

Why this isn’t something a conservative would, or should say:

If you’re ready to burn down the world, you’re part of what’s wrong with the world. There are plenty of places on this planet where “burning it down” has been tried — Syria, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, the territories of Boko Haram — and the results are never anything short of catastrophic. It’s easy to forget, but even in the toughest of times, Americans are incredibly blessed compared to those living everywhere else. Our wealth, our spirit, our untapped potential, and our capacity for renewal are mind-boggling. And yet some significant portion of the population relishes the thought of sending it all up in flames.

You dare not call yourself conservative if you belong to this arson-minded mass. Conservatives are here to preserve, create, and build, not to ignite and destroy. Insofar as the torch is an American political tradition, it’s not a conservative one — it’s the recourse of our country’s worst radicals, from the Klan to the Weather Underground to the Black Panthers to Timothy McVeigh.

Victor Davis Hanson calls what we’re witnessing “Republican nihilism,” a dangerous strain of the historical perspective that there is nothing to approve of in the current social order. It’s a self-evidently ludicrous perspective when applied to our country as it stands today.

If you think that Trump will be a conservative, in any way, you’re deluding yourself.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Trump Versus Hillary

3 Comments

Preferring the pirate:

As for the other option, do not believe it is necessarily survivable. A Clinton Restoration will be very much like the Bourbon Restoration in France, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Hillary will use both the legal and illegal powers of the Presidency to systematically dismember the American Right, seeking to use her term(s) in office to permanently cripple its ability to block the social-justice warriors’ agenda. She undoubtedly looks on Obama’s weak and easily distracted measures with contempt. The use of the IRS to attack right-wing institutions was fully uncovered during the Obama administration without effective consequence. Therefore we can expect it to be used much more consistently and systematically under the Clinton Restoration. A number of measures will be used to permanently handicap the Republican Party, such as Puerto Rican statehood and, possibly, the abolition of the Electoral College, allowing corrupt urban machines to flood the ballot boxes with the votes of the Deceased-American demographic. The FCC will be used to muzzle conservative media and a progressive majority on the Supreme Court will erode all ten Amendments of the Bill of Rights.

As I’ve noted repeatedly, the silver lining of a Trump presidency is that it might finally stir some sense in the Congress of its Constitutional prerogatives.

But I’d still prefer that it doesn’t come to that.

[Late-afternoon update]

The perils and promise of authenticity.

As I’ve repeatedly said, I totally get the anger. These are people I grew up with in Flint, and I know them well and the “elite” on both sides of the aisle have shat on them repeatedly, for decades. But the tragedy of this desperate search for authenticity is that it has resulted in them being taken in by a confidence man.