Tag: politics

Note: this is based on the prepared text, not the one Donald Trump actually delivered, which was fairly similar. Key passages:

America is far less safe – and the world is far less stable – than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America’s foreign policy.

I am certain it is a decision he truly regrets. Her bad instincts and her bad judgment – something pointed out by Bernie Sanders – are what caused the disasters unfolding today. Let’s review the record. In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map.

Libya was cooperating. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing a reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was under control. After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region, and the world. Libya is in ruins, and our Ambassador and his staff were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos.

Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. Syria is engulfed in a civil war and a refugee crisis that now threatens the West. After fifteen years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before.

This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction and weakness.

Translation: no more neoconnery. He’s rhetorically going after Hillary here, and is correct to do so, but he’s dialectically including the Bush administration’s aggressive foreign policy as well. 2016-2009=7, not 15. This is the real reason why the conservative media is opposed to Trump; they want their foreign wars.

The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents, is that our plan will put America First. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.

It’s important that he directly called out globalism here. America First could be empty rhetoric, but rejecting globalism puts some teeth into it.

The damage and devastation that can be inflicted by Islamic radicals has been over and over – at the World Trade Center, at an office party in San Bernardino, at the Boston Marathon, and a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist.

Islam. Not radical Islam. This is potentially significant, as the problem is with Islam itself, not the various variants of it. It is Mao’s old fish/sea challenge.

we must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place. My opponent has called for a radical 550% increase in Syrian refugees on top of existing massive refugee flows coming into our country under President Obama. She proposes this despite the fact that there’s no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from. I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people.

Translation: no more Muslim immigration. Not quite as good as going back to admitting only white Christians of good character, but it’s a very good start.

We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration

He’s either lying to the American people, again, or he lied to the elite media that he specifically calls out as a problem in this speech. I’d bet on the latter.

By enforcing the rules for the millions who overstay their visas, our laws will finally receive the respect they deserve.

Translation: deportation. Again, it’s a start.

I pledge to never sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers, or that diminishes our freedom and independence. Instead, I will make individual deals with individual countries. No longer will we enter into these massive deals, with many countries, that are thousands of pages long – and which no one from our country even reads or understands. We are going to enforce all trade violations, including through the use of taxes and tariffs, against any country that cheats.

This includes stopping China’s outrageous theft of intellectual property, along with their illegal product dumping, and their devastating currency manipulation. Our horrible trade agreements with China and many others, will be totally renegotiated. That includes renegotiating NAFTA to get a much better deal for America – and we’ll walk away if we don’t get the deal that we want.

Holy cow, I NEVER thought he’d take on NAFTA directly. This is phenomenal stuff, even better than I’d anticipated. There are brief throwaways about “fixing” TSA and Obamacare, and while it would have been better to simply announce that they’d be shut down, all in all, he hit the three main issues that are on the table good and hard: immigration, free trade, and globalism.

As for the other two big ones, gun control and the Fed, he didn’t mention them nor did I imagine he would. Trump isn’t interested in gun control and he’s probably not equipped to even begin thinking about the monetary system. Trump is not only more appealing to the Alt Right than I thought he’d be, he’s also more appealing to conservatives and moderates than I would have imagined. It was such a good speech, it even won over the cuckiest of cuckservatives:

Trump is definitely speaking to the moment. He may not be speaking to you, but he is speaking to many, many people in the country right now…. That’s rhetorical gold. All of it. I have never heard Trump or any other politician since Pat Buchanan put it so succinctly.

8.5 out of 10. I see no reason to revise my prediction that the election will be “a Trumpslide of Mondalean proportions.”

Meanwhile, the man who was Trump before Trump, Pat Buchanan, sums up what we saw taking place at the Republican National Convention:

The crisis of today’s Republican Party stems from a failure to recognize, after Reagan went home, and during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, that America now faced a new set of challenges.

By 1991, America’s border was bleeding. Thousands were walking in from Mexico every weekend. The hundreds of thousands arriving legally, the vast majority of them Third World poor, began putting downward pressure on working-class wages. Soon, these immigrants would begin voting for the welfare state on which their families depended, and support the Party of Government.

By 1991, free trade had begun to send our factories and jobs overseas and de-industrialize America.

By 1991, an epoch in world history had ended. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Cold War was suddenly over. America had prevailed.

“As our case is new,” said Lincoln, “so we must think anew and act anew.” Bush Republicans did not think anew or act anew.

They were like football coaches who still swore by the single-wing offense, after George Halas’ Chicago Bears, the “Monsters of the Midway,” used the T-formation to score 11 touchdowns and beat the Washington Redskins in the 1940 NFL championship game, 73-0.

What paralyzed the Republicans of a generation ago? What blinded them from seeing and blocked them from acting on the new realities?

Ideology, political correctness, a reflexive recoil against new thinking, and an innate inability to adapt.

The ideology was a belief in free trade that borders on the cultic, though free trade had been rejected by America’s greatest leaders: Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

The political correctness stemmed from a fear of being called racist and xenophobic so paralyzing, so overpowering, that some Republicans would ship the entire Third World over here, rather than have it thought they would ever consider the race, ethnicity or religion of those repopulating America.

The inability to adapt was seen when our Cold War adversary extended a hand in friendship, and the War Party slapped it away. Rather than shed Cold War alliances and rebuild our country, we looked around for new commitments, new allies, new wars to fight to “end tyranny in our world.”

These wars had less to do with threats to vital interests, than with providing now-obsolete Cold Warriors with arguments to maintain their claims on national resources and attention, not to mention their lifestyles and jobs.

With Trump’s triumph, the day of reckoning has arrived.

The new GOP is not going to be party of open borders, free trade globalism or reflexive interventionism.

The new GOP is not going to be a republican party. It is an American party, which is to say that it is, for all intents and purposes, the White party. That doesn’t mean it won’t have any non-white support; what most people don’t understand is that more than a few Hispanics, Asians, and even blacks want to live in a mostly white country.

The age of ideology is over. The era of identity politics is upon us, courtesy of those who eroded and expanded America’s demographics in 1965.

This is an open thread for Trump’s speech tonight. Discuss as you see fit, but keep it civil.

I’m not even going to pretend to be following this, but apparently Ted Cruz’s gang is still butthurt or something.

Iowa and Colorado delegations have left RNC convention. Will not return

Of course, the Colorado “delegation” is the one that wasn’t elected, so it’s a little ironic they’re upset about Trump’s team running a rules game on them. Strategic geniuses, those guys.

This is an open thread to discuss the Republican National Convention.

The most dishonest politician in America faces being upset in his home district:

Following a new primary election poll showing that House Speaker Paul Ryan has plummeted to well below 50 percent in his home district, Ryan is out with new mailers assuring Wisconsin voters of his desire to secure the border, and urging them to support him in his contentious August 9th primary election.

The new mailers touting Ryan’s support for border security is interesting given that just last year, Ryan championed a spending bill that fully funded President Obama’s open borders agenda– including funding sanctuary cities, executive amnesty, and the release of criminal aliens. The mailers also come amid new reports indicating that, one month after his election, Ryan plans to bring up “criminal sentencing” measures that could release thousands of criminal illegal aliens from prison onto the streets.

“Keeping America safe is a big job. And it’s the most important one there is,” the Ryan mailer reads. “Protect our Homeland— that means securing the border, confronting Islamic Terrorism, and tackling new threats by stopping them from reaching our shores… Paul Ryan for U.S. Congress… Vote Tuesday, August 9th”

However, new reports indicate that immediately following his primary election, Speaker Ryan plans to bring up legislation that could release thousands of criminal illegal aliens from prison and into American communities.

As Roll Call reports, “The House will take up legislation to overhaul the criminal justice system in September, Speaker Paul D. Ryan said.”

I’ll be very disappointed in the people of Wisconsin if they fall for this cuckservative charlatan’s faux change-of-direction on immigration. Paul Ryan is the most dishonest politician in America since Bill Clinton hung up his quivering lower lip.

Even the mainstream media is beginning to admit that Hillary Clinton is an almost exceptionally horrible candidate:

With a toxic cloud hanging over Clinton’s makeshift campaign office at the Radisson hotel in Manchester, Clinton’s chief speechwriter, Dan Schwerin, and her top policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, decamped for Sullivan’s mother-in-law’s house in the Seacoast town of New Castle to rethink the entire campaign’s approach.

There, huddled together in the February snow, they scrapped her spaghetti-on-the-wall policy approach and came up with a sturdy slogan that aimed to capture the historic nature of her candidacy while making a pitch to African-American and Hispanic voters: “Breaking Down Barriers.”

There was just one problem: Their candidate hated it.

“This is useless,” a frustrated Clinton vented when Schwerin and Sullivan — two of her longest-serving aides — presented the new plan to her that glum Tuesday morning of Feb. 9 in her Manchester hotel suite.

The feeling was mutual. Her staff admired her attention to detail, but knew she was often her own worst enemy. Clinton is known for taking a draft of a speech and changing it some indelible way to make it more literal and less readable. (The joke at her Brooklyn campaign headquarters is that she would take the public safety slogan “If You See Something, Say Something,” and, in her literal-minded way, change it to say, “If You See Something, Alert the Proper Authorities.”)

The entire episode illustrated Clinton’s paradox: On the one hand, she’s a deeply involved candidate who trusts her own instincts. But on the other, she still struggles, after all these years, when it comes to messaging — and remains almost hostile to the idea of a narrative that Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and even Donald Trump seem to craft so naturally.

Her best campaign strategy is to go into hiding until November and hope that the Democratic demographics do the job for her. It’s not a good sign when even your campaign staff are joking about how clueless and inept you are.

Interviews with more than half a dozen Clinton allies inside and outside her campaign reveal a candidate who remains deeply insecure when trying to commit to a message about her campaign, and reluctant to indulge in the rhetorical flourishes that make for the rousing poetry of campaigns.

Of course she’s deeply insecure. She’s never achieved one single damn thing on her own. She couldn’t even manage to keep her husband faithful.