Tag: politics

A Churchian sermon on politics

A Churchian cuckservative, appropriately named Peter Wehner, preaches a sermon against Donald Trump in the New York Times:

Among the most inexplicable developments in this bizarre political year is that Donald Trump is the candidate of choice of many evangelical Christians.

Mr. Trump won a plurality of evangelical votes in each of the last three Republican contests, in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. He won the glowing endorsement of Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, who has called him “one of the greatest visionaries of our time.” Last week, Pat Robertson, the founder and chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, told Mr. Trump during an interview, “You inspire us all.”

If this embrace strikes you as discordant, it should. This visionary and inspiring man humiliated his first wife by conducting a very public affair, chronically bullies and demeans people, and says he has never asked God for forgiveness. His name is emblazoned on a casino that features a strip club; he has discussed anal sex on the air with Howard Stern and, after complimenting his daughter Ivanka’s figure, pointed out that if she “weren’t my daughter, perhaps I would be dating her.” He once supported partial-birth abortion and to this day praises Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. He is a narcissist appealing to people whose faith declares that pride goes before a fall.

Mr. Trump’s character is antithetical to many of the qualities evangelicals should prize in a political leader: integrity, compassion and reasoned convictions, wisdom and prudence, trustworthiness, a commitment to the moral good…. At its core, Christianity teaches that everyone, no matter at what
station or in what season in life, has inherent dignity and worth.
“Follow justice and justice alone,” Deuteronomy says, “so that you may
live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you.” The attitude
of Thrasymachus is foreign to biblical Christianity. So is Trumpism. In
embracing it, evangelical Christians are doing incalculable damage to
their witness.

There are few Churchian phrases I hold in more contempt than “damage to their witness”. It’s passive-aggressive manipulative nonsense. In combination with their actions, use of the phrase shows what forked-tongued liars the Churchians are. The Churchian “witness” is pure poison. They preen and posture and virtue-signal and criticize and condemn, driving genuine believers from the pews while simultaneously welcoming women and sexual deviants and atheists to the pulpits.

Any decent, honest, self-respecting man would rather pledge his life to Satan, Cthulhu, or the Nameless Spirit of the Abyss than live life the way these mealy-mouthed, nominal Christians do. They don’t follow Jesus Christ and worship God, they follow public opinion and worship at the altar of social approval.

The punchline: Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the last three Republican administrations.

I don’t know if Jesus would vote for Donald Trump or not, but I know that he wouldn’t constantly lie like the Churchians do. And frankly, I think he’d drive an awful lot of Churchian sermonizers out of the Church with bullwhips, just as he drove the moneylenders out of the Temple.

Super Tuesday results

This is your open thread for posting them here and discussing them. It sounds like the only real question is if Cruz can hang onto Texas, but we’ll see. The best live results site is Decision Desk.

The Lone Star State has the biggest cache — 222 Democratic delegates and 155 for Republicans. 

And perhaps no candidate is fighting harder for that prize than Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. The senator went all out on Monday, holding rallies in voter-rich Dallas, Houston and San Antonio in hopes of at least defeating national front-runner Donald Trump in Cruz’s home state.

“We are going to have a very good Super Tuesday,” Cruz assured the Dallas crowd. Cruz has maintained a polling lead in the state, but knows a surprise loss there could doom his campaign. 

For Republicans, the second-biggest prize is Georgia, with 76 delegates at stake. Both Trump and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio put in face time with voters Monday in the final hours before polls open, while Cruz stayed rooted in Texas.  

If you voted in the primary, feel free to mention what the general impression of your local polling place was.

UPDATE: Trump very nearly swept. They’ve now called Virginia, so Rubio isn’t going to win anything. Cruz couldn’t grab Oklahoma, but he did hang onto Texas.

Happy Super Trumpsday

Happy Super Trumpsday, everyone!

Today we bathe in the tears of the GOP establishment. The salt must flow!

#SuperTrumpsday

A good performance today will confirm Donald Trump as the Republican candidate thanks to the GOPe’s desire to stack the deck and force “electable” moderates on the party’s conservatives.

Memo to Republican leaders: Be careful what you wish for.

Hoping to avoid a repeat of the messy fight for the Republican nomination in 2012, the party drew up a calendar and delegate-selection rules intended to allow a front-runner to wrap things up quickly.

Now, with Republicans voting in 11 states on Tuesday, the worst fears of the party’s establishment are coming true: Donald J. Trump could all but seal his path to the nomination in a case of unintended consequences for the party leadership, which vehemently opposes him.

“Trump has significant advantages, and that’s the way the system is designed,” said Joshua T. Putnam, a political science lecturer at the University of Georgia with an expertise in delegate selection. “It’s right in line with what the folks designing these rules wanted. It’s just not the candidate they preferred.”

No wonder the GOP has been losing the political and cultural wars for 30 years. Their elite leadership is strategically incompetent.

Jeff Sessions endorses Trump

The general impression is that this endorsement should finish off Ted Cruz once and for all:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) endorsed Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Huntsville Sunday evening. Sessions promised a “Gang of Eight” type of immigration reform bill would not will be passed in a Donald Trump presidency.

“There is an opportunity this year, Tuesday, and we have the opportunity — we have an opportunity Tuesday. It may be the last opportunity we have for the people’s voice to be heard. You have asked for 30 years, and politicians have promised for 30 years to fix illegal immigration,” Sessions said.

“The American people have known for years these trade agreements have not been working for them,” Sessions stumped. “We now have and will soon have a vote on the Transpacific Partnership TPP), Obamatrade, and it will damage America. It will create a commission that undermines our sovereignty, and it should not pass. Donald Trump when he gets elected president will see it does not pass.”

Sessions said Trump is not perfect, but nobody is and endorsed the candidate.

“This movement, he doesn’t take money from political groups and lobbyists. He is committed to leading this country in an effective way. You know, nobody is perfect. We can’t have everything, can we, Mr. Trump? But I can tell you one thing, I think at this time in my opinion, my best judgment, at this time in America’s history, we need to make America great again!” Sessions said, repeating Trump’s campaign slogan.

“I am pleased to endorse Donald Trump for the presidency of the United States,” Sessions endorsed.

Given that Sessions is supposed to have written Trump’s immigration plan, this is hardly a surprise. But combined with Christie’s endorsement and Maine Governor LePage’s endorsement, it means that the preference cascade among officeholders has started and it’s only going to increase.

All of the conservatives nattering and bitching about how Trump isn’t a conservative are behind the times and missing the point. It doesn’t matter what your national policies are if you don’t have a nation. First things first. Sen. Sessions recognizes that.

Does that mean Trump can be trusted to build a wall, to deport all the illegal immigrants, and severely reduce the flow of immigration? No. But a) he’s the only candidate who might, and b) he’s the Republican nominee.

Deal with it and decide if you prefer President Trump or President Hillary. Because those are now your two choices.

Trust your extremists

The only reason gun rights aren’t being swept away with everything else in the cultural wars is that the NRA did not give in to its moderates:

The moderates felt rejected by both the NRA hard-liners and the Washington elite. “Because of the political direction the NRA was taking, they weren’t being invited to parties and their wives were not happy,” says Jeff Knox, Neal’s son and director of the Firearms Coalition, which fights for the Second Amendment and against laws restricting guns or ammunition. “Dad was on the phone constantly with various people around the country. He had his copy of the NRA bylaws and Robert’s Rules, highlighted and marked. My father and a lot of local club leaders and state association guys organized their troops.”

Theirs was a grass-roots movement within the NRA. The solution was to use the membership to make changes. The bylaws of the NRA gave members power on the convention floor to vote for changes in the NRA governing structure.

“We were fighting the federal government on one hand and internal NRA on the other hand,” Aquilino says.

In Cincinnati, Knox read the group’s demands, 15 of them, including one that would give the members of the NRA the right to pick the executive vice president, rather than letting the NRA’s board decide. The coup took hours to accomplish. Joe Tartaro, a rebel, remembers the evening as “electric.” The hall’s vending machine ran out of sodas.

By 3:30 in the morning the NRA had a whole new look. Gone were the Old Guard officers, including Maxwell Rich, the ousted executive vice president. The members replaced him with an ideological soul mate of Knox’s named Harlon Carter.

Never, ever, permit a moderate in a position of influence, let alone leadership. They will ALWAYS bollix it up for one reason or another. Always. That is the fatal mistake the churches have made, and it is the reason the Republican Party is undergoing its present meltdown.

If you believe your role in the organization is to temper or restrain others in the organization, that’s fine, there is a need for that sort of advice, but understand that you CANNOT be a leader. You are not suited for it. You will make a hash of it.

That doesn’t mean that the most extreme individual will be the best leader. There will always be competing visions. But “making nice” and “finding common ground” are not strategic visions. They are nothing more than tactics that may or may not be relevant at the moment.

It’s a bit ironic, but most people understand that someone who always wants to surrender or to fight is not to be trusted in leadership. And yet, somehow, they readily fall for the idea that someone who always wants to split the difference is a reasonable person to follow.

Clinton ends Sanders in SC

The South simply doesn’t go in for socialists. And blacks really don’t like the creaky old man:

She has won South Carolina by a wide margin, most likely exceeding Mr. Obama’s own 29-point victory in 2008, based on early exit polls and results. She did it the same way that Mr. Obama did: with overwhelming support from black voters, who favored Mrs. Clinton over Bernie Sanders by a stunning margin of 87 to 13, according to updated exit polls — a tally that would be larger than Mr. Obama’s victory among black voters eight years earlier. They represented 62 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls, even higher than in 2008.

The result positions Mrs. Clinton for a sweep of the South in a few days on Super Tuesday and puts the burden on Mr. Sanders to post decisive victories elsewhere. If he does not — and the polls, at least so far, are not encouraging — Mrs. Clinton seems likely to amass a significant and possibly irreversible lead.

Sanders didn’t have to win, but he had to avoid getting curb-stomped. He didn’t. It’s all but over. And come Super Trumpsday, the Republican race should be over too.

I do wonder what blacks have against Sanders. I genuinely have no idea.

Moderate loyalty

Remember when it was the mostest importantest election ever and it was vital that disappointed conservatives and libertarians rally around the Republican nominee? Yeah, well, it seemed those who appealed to party loyalty to get the disaffected right to vote for Bush, Dole, Bush, McCain, and Romney are suddenly singing a very different tune now that it is becoming apparent that Donald Trump is going to be the nominee:

Conservative donors have engaged a major GOP consulting firm in Florida to research the feasibility of mounting a late, independent run for president amid growing fears that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination.

A memo prepared for the group zeroes in on ballot access as a looming obstacle for any independent candidate, along with actually identifying a viable, widely known contender and coalescing financial support for that person. The two states with the earliest deadlines for independent candidates, Texas and North Carolina, also have some of the highest hurdles for independents to get on the ballot, according to the research.

“All this research has to happen before March 16, when inevitably Trump is the nominee, so that we have a plan in place,” a source familiar with the discussions said. March 16 is the day after the GOP primary in Florida, a winner-take-all contest that Marco Rubio supporters have identified as a must-win to stop Trump’s early momentum.

I wish I could say that I’m even a little bit surprised. But I’m not. It is rather funny, though, that the rules the moderates installed to permit a Romney clone to keep out the Ronulans are going to seal Trump’s victory sooner rather than later.

Never trust a moderate. Never permit a moderate in a position of leadership. And the moment he snipes at you, treat him exactly like you would treat an enemy taking a shot at you.

Racial identity is dispositive

As I said, I always find Sarah Hoyt’s take on things both interesting and amusing. In this case, it’s because she completely fails to see how utterly predictable her response is, or how she is unwittingly providing observable support to the very argument she intellectually rejects:

One thesis I have seen a lot in recent months at The Blog Which Is A Misspelled Religious Latin Term is, to boil it down to its harshest formulation, “Shoot the Moderates”, because essentially the community there has given up on the idea that anything less than the extremism therein advocated will work, and that any attempt to restrain, control or suspend that extremism — for the sake of preserving future strategic alliances, for example — amounts to shooting your soldiers in the back when they look like they might be winning. From a certain point of view, I understand this reaction, but to me it is essentially saying, “We are sliding backwards so fast that we may as well disconnect the brakes,” without worrying about what will happen if you do successfully reverse the slide only to rocket back up the slope and go over the peak too fast. Reasonable men can argue in good faith over the difference in judgment required, but it strikes me as the stance of an unreasonable man to insist that even to ask to have the argument is sufficient grounds for rejecting it.

    accordingtohoyt | Reply   

THIS. and that’s why I said “they’re killing the republic I love and it feels like they’re killing me.” And when we respond we get told we’re insulting THEM. Oh, for heaven’s sake people, we’re just trying to understand why otherwise rational people would respond so irrationally. We would like you to leave us our republic. We’d like to keep it. And it’s not like I haven’t been fighting the progs all along. It’s not like I haven’t been in the trenches. What more could I do? Defend and imaginary “white race?” Screw that. any philosophy that enshrines your pasty white middle aged guy over Dr. Sowell is sick. I will not shut up. I will not submit.

The white race is not imaginary. America as an Anglo-Saxon nation is not imaginary. What is imaginary is the “proposition nation” version of America that she, the Portuguese immigrant, erroneously believes America to be. Red Eagle and I cover this in moderate detail in Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Destroyed America.

We’re not killing “the republic that she loves”. It never existed in the first place. Nations are not places, governments, or ideas. Nations are people. Nations are, as the Founding Fathers wrote, posterity.

Sarah may want to consider herself their posterity, but she is not and they would not regard her as such either. Her position requires denying both history and reality, and her postnationalism is as deluded as any progressives. And it’s hardly a surprise that the immigrant declares immigration, the very issue that is propelling Trump to the White House, isn’t a problem.

“Look, immigration is not even a real thing anymore.”

So the largest invasion in human history isn’t “a real thing anymore”? Sarah, with all due affection and respect, it’s not our opinion that is not reflective of reality. And Trump will not be Obama’s third term. I don’t know what he will be, but he won’t be that.

That being said, I do rather like the sound of “Shoot the Moderates”. They’re certainly not good for much else besides target practice. But here is the very important point so many people fail to understand: we’re not the extremists. We’re the only viable alternative to the extremists.

Finally, Sarah, when you “respond” by telling people they are “confused” and “crazy” and “monsters” and “buffoons” and irrational and insane, you are insulting them.

“Something big has happened”

A surprisingly astute article from a dyed-in-the-wool member of the US establishment, Robert Reich:

Something very big has happened, and it’s not due to Bernie Sanders’ magnetism or Donald Trump’s likeability.

It’s a rebellion against the establishment.

The question is why the establishment has been so slow to see this. A year ago – which now seems like an eternity – it proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoe-ins.

Both had all the advantages – deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisors, all the name recognition you could want.

But even now that Bush is out and Hillary is still leading but vulnerable, the establishment still doesn’t see what’s occurred. They explain everything by pointing to weaknesses: Bush, they now say, “never connected” and Hillary “has a trust problem.”

A respected political insider recently told me most Americans are largely content. “The economy is in good shape,” he said. “Most Americans are better off than they’ve been in years. The problem has been the major candidates themselves.”

I beg to differ.

Economic indicators may be up but they don’t reflect the economic insecurity most Americans still feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience.

Nor do the major indicators show the linkages Americans see between wealth and power, crony capitalism, declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and a billionaire class that’s turning our democracy into an oligarchy.

Median family income lower now than it was sixteen years ago, adjusted for inflation.

Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top.

These gains have translated into political power to rig the system with bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, trade deals, and increasing market power – all of which have further pushed down wages pulled up profits.

Those at the very top of the top have rigged the system even more thoroughly. Since 1995, the average income tax rate for the 400 top-earning Americans has plummeted from 30 percent to 17 percent.

Wealth, power, and crony capitalism fit together. So far in the 2016 election, the richest 400 Americans have accounted for over a third of all campaign contributions.

Americans know a takeover has occurred and they blame the establishment for it.

Damn straight it has. And damn straight they should. They’ve created a system that is every bit as centralized and bureaucratic as Soviet communism and they called it “capitalism” and “free trade”.

It isn’t. It’s financial rape and plunder.