Category Archives: Conservatism

Donald Trump’s ‘He Started It’ Argument Is Libertarian

Conservatism, Donald Trump, Feminism, Free Speech, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Logic, Reason

Donald Trump’s ‘He started it’ argument, whinged CNN’s Anderson Cooper, is a five-year-old’s argument. Maybe. But it’s also the skeleton of the libertarian, non-aggression axiom: aggression against aggressors only.

First, context via Gawker:

During last night’s CNN-hosted Republican town hall in Milwaukee there was a funny, and perhaps even cathartic, exchange between Anderson Cooper and Donald Trump over Trump’s hounding of Ted Cruz’s wife, which culminated with Cooper telling Trump he was acting like a child while Trump insisted that he wasn’t acting like a child. …

MORE.

It’s not enough to malign something as childish. You have to show that the maligned childish thought or act is wrong. Children can be right, on rare occasions. Besides, the liberal left worships The Children (as do their partners among new, feminized, Michelle-Fields conservatives). Adults are the dolts in every Hollywood film. In liberal lore, those founts of knowledge and wisdom spring from the effing kids, mostly.

In this case, The Donald aka The libertarians aka The Kids are correct. Aggression against aggressors is justifiable.

Of course, verbal aggression is not the aggression libertarians are referring to when we apply libertarian law. Speech is not aggression.

If Honest Abe Stole Elections, Then It Must Be OK, Right?

Conservatism, Elections, History, Republicans

Heroic Lincoln heretic Thomas DiLorenzo reminds us that stealing elections is a venerated GOP tradition:

Scott Walker has reminded his fellow neocons that Abe Lincoln was nominated in a “brokered convention.” (Scroll to the last paragraph of the linked article). This follows the 150-year tradition of the Grand Old Party of Thieves and Murderers: If Abe illegally suspended Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern-state political dissenters, it must be OK for us to do it. If Abe ran an empire of gulags for political dissenters imprisoned without due process, it must be OK for us to do it. If Abe shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers, it must be OK for us to do it. If Abe orchestrated the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of his own citizens in order to destroy the principles of a voluntary union and the notion that a government’s just powers rest upon the consent of the governed then, why, of course it is OK for us to just ignore the consent of the governed in the Republican primaries. Abe would be looking up at us from where he is now and smiling. (Thanks to Chris Rossini).

Links.

Trump Doesn’t Need To Talk Like A Conservative

Conservatism, Donald Trump, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, IMMIGRATION, Republicans

“Trump Doesn’t Need To Talk Like A Conservative” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

With his decisive victory on Super Tuesday II (March 15), Trump is already winning for America.

We’ve won a reprieve. There will be no 13th Republican debate. It was cancelled by the candidate. Megyn Kelly can save her new outfit and mink eyelashes for the next liberal shindig she attends.

Despite the best efforts of Scarlet Letter “E” Republicans and conservatives, Trump has 673 out of the 1237 delegates required, 263 more than runner-up Ted Cruz. The New York Times—it lies a little less than Fox News—has conceded that “Rubio’s exit leaves Trump with an open path to 1,237 delegates.”

Alas, bar the last debate, in Coral Gables, Miami, March 10, the other 11 debates have not showcased the best of Trump.

And it’s not that Trump doesn’t talk like a conservative. Talking like a conservative is meaningless.

The Marco Mattel Doll mouthed near-perfect conservative bulletin points. Pull a string, and Barbie’s beau would disgorge conservative words and phrases from a rotating repertoire. Look the other way, and the Cuban Ken was passing liberal legislation with Chucky Schumer (Dem).

Talking like a conservative doesn’t mean a politician will act like a conservative.

Come to think of it, Republican presidents who talk and act conservatively are as elusive as Big Foot. There hasn’t been a sighting in maybe a century. A purist would cite Democrat Grover Cleveland as America’s last conservative president. He preached and practiced the maxim that “the people must support the government, but the government must not support the people.”

True, too, is that conservatives, younger ones, it seems, have adopted much of the Left’s Orwellian, illiberal thinking, thankfully alien to The Donald.

While the Left controls the intellectual means of production—schools (primary, secondary, tertiary), media, foundations, think tanks, publishing prints—the “Respectable Right” is hardly on the outs with the liberal smart set.

Both factions are agreed:

Endless immigration is a net good, as long as it’s legal.

Source of immigration is insignificant, as long as it’s legal. At heart, every Afghani, Iraqi or Somali are just closeted Jeffersonians.

Racism: Whites have come a long way and have a long way to go, ad infinitum.

Michelle Fields: New Conservatives get as exercised as liberals about pursuing legal remedies for hysteria.

In such a national emergency as Fields caused, the advice of Humphrey Bogart, playing Rick Blaine in “Casablanca” (channeled by Woody Allen in “Play It Again Sam”), should be considered: “I never saw a dame yet that didn’t understand a good slap in the mouth …”

Fields, a reporter, claimed she was assaulted by the Republican front-runner’s surrogate. She offered iffy evidence for her allegations. Fields had scrummed Trump. She was too close for comfort to a candidate who’s the target of daily death threats. Solemnly, conservatives took to debating the “assault” endured by Fields and the merits of a legal remedy.

The law is an ass. But so are these conservatives. (The Fields matter has since been settled: Megyn Kelly will get Fields a spread in Vogue, Kelly’s alma mater.) …

… . Conservative talk is not all it’s cut out to be. When it comes to philosophical convictions (the stuff discussed above), most conservatives more closely resemble their beltway liberal friends than Republican Party voters. …

… Read the complete column. “Trump Doesn’t Need To Talk Like A Conservative” is now on WND.

NRO’s Charles Cooke Second Rate Effete

Britain, Conservatism, Donald Trump, Neoconservatism, Politics, Republicans, Uncategorized

If only Ann Coulter would take him on and finish him off. In mannerism and pomposity, the insipid effete Charles Cooke is National Review’s Piers Morgan of the Right. These newer, washed-out British imports are nothing like the brilliant Christopher Hitchens. In fact, a Hitchens witticism nicely encapsulates the enterprise of the Cooke Republicans: “What is original is not true and what is true is not original.”

The few essays of Cooke I’ve read sport a sort of crass pragmatism. Perhaps it has to do with the impetus of his expertise: “British liberty,” and “American exceptionalism,” the latter being the hobby horse—really the Trojan Horse—of neoconservatives. As to British liberties: Our learned friend, Paul Gottfried, intimated, in Conservatism in American, that English prescriptive liberties are not exactly an American thing.

Note below Cooke’s silly psychologizing, connoted in Kelly’s tweet. Silly, since it is quite possible that Donald Trump is a natural strongman. Trump seems as authentic in his macho man persona as Charles Cooke is in his girly mannerism.