Trump Should Triangulate

Business, Economy, Elections, Free Markets, Government, Politics

“Trump Should Triangulate” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

Working people warm to Donald Trump. He appeals to a good segment of real Americans. The circle jerk of power brokers that is American media, however, lacks the depth and understanding to grasp the fellow-feeling Trump engenders in his fans.

THE MEDIA STRUMPETS

Amid sneers about Trump’s “crazy, entertaining, simplistic talk,” the none-too bright Joan Walsh, Salon editor-in-chief, proclaimed (MSNBC): “I look at those people and I feel sad. That is really such a low common denominator. They’re all Republicans … they really don’t have a firm grasp on reality.”

For failing to foresee Trump’s staying power, smarmy Michael Smerconish (CNN) scolded himself adoringly. He was what “Mr. Trump would call ‘a loser.’” Smerconish’s admission was a way of copping to his superiority. From such vertiginous intellectual heights, Smerconish was incapable of fathoming the atavistic instincts elicited by the candidate. Nevertheless, the broadcaster “quadrupled down.” The country would be delivered from Donald by Mexican drug lord El Chapo, who’d scare Trump away.

Campbell Brown, another banal bloviator, ventured that Trump resonates with a fringe and was fast approaching a time when he would, like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann, “max-out the craziness” quotient.

Trump supporters were simply enamored of his vibe, said a dismissive Ellis Henican.

As derisive, another Fox News commentator spoke about the “meat and potatoes” for which Trump cheerleaders hanker. I suspect he meant “red meat.”

National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein divined his own taxonomy of the Republican Beast: the “upscale Republicans and the blue-collar Republicans.” The group of toothless rube-hicks Brownstein places in Trump’s camp.

Pollster Frank Luntz provides his own brand of asphyxiating agitprop: The little people want to elect someone they’d have a beer with.

A British late night anchor—a CNN hire!—offered this non sequitur: Trump painting himself as anti-establishment and, at the same time, owning hotels: this was a contradiction. In the mind of this asinine liberal, only a Smelly Rally like “Occupy Wall Street” instantiates the stuff of rebellion and individualism. (Never mind that the Occupy Crowds were walking ads for the bounty business provides. The clothes they wore, the devices they used to transmit their sub-intelligent message; the food they bought cheaply at the corner stand to sustain their efforts—these were all produced, or brought to market by the invisible hand of the despised John Galts and the derided working people.)

I know not what exactly the oracular Krauthammer said to anger Trump, but it was worth it: “Charles Krauthammer is a totally overrated person … I’ve never met him … He’s a totally overrated guy, doesn’t know what he’s doing. He was totally in favor of the war in Iraq. He wanted to go into Iraq and he wanted to stay there forever. These are totally overrated people.”

Even media mogul Rupert Murdoch moved in on Trump, calling him an embarrassment to his friends and to the country.

Inadvertently, one media strumpet came close to coming clean about the serial failures of analysis among her kind. Wonkette, or Wonkette Emerita, aka Ana Marie Cox, spoke of “the superfluousness of the media’s predictions and its inability to perform the service of making sense of events.” Like Smerconish, Cox is hoping against hope that the little people are having fun at her expense and “are in some way in on the joke” that is Trump. …

… Read the rest. “Trump Should Triangulate” is now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

UPDATE II: Things To Watch Out For In The Staged, Republican Match (The Matinée)

Elections, Media, Republicans

Come the big kiddie debate tonight—if one can call these ridiculously timed performances debates—there are a number of things to watch out for in the Orwellian newspeak deployed by our media strumpets, when putting forth the pontifications, predictions and pronouncements that never pan out:

When these strumpets use the refrain, “Donald Trump will have to do x and y in order to convince people he is a serious candidate,” what they mean is to lay down the conditions he must fulfill for them—media—to take him a wee bit seriously.

The GOP base already takes Trump seriously.

The other thing: Watch out for my new related essay on WND.

Right now the “GOP underdogs [have] hit [the] stage looking for big breakout in first debate.”

UPDATE I: The Matinée.

Unremarkable. My impressions:

Carly Fiorina: I’ve already commented on her high intelligence and wonderful facility with words. She’s very bright (and I say this without agreeing with a single words she says. Wow: I can chew gun and walk, too*).

Lindsey Graham: All roads lead to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and WAR. Who knew that the senator was 60 and unmarried? Hmm. A little journalistic shoe-leather here could prove delicious.

* To those robotic libertarains who will accuse me of daring to address the politics I reject and despise: I’m not lazy like you. I deal. With reality, that is.

UPDATE II: “How About Some LiveBlog?–Kid’s Table Edition.” Tom Knapp does a good job in providing much-needed text.

Wendy McElroy On The Invasion Of The Libertarian Body Snatchers

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism

Libertarian theorist Wendy McElroy worries that she might have to leave the movement she practically founded, because, to use a biblical quote, “there arose a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph.” A new generation of self-styled libertarians that doesn’t know the meaning of libertarianism has arisen, according to which Wendy, and certainly myself, are deemed “brutalists.”

I wrote “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fem, I Smell The Blood Of A Racist” about one of their luminaries, before I understood the extent of the revisionism in which the “humanitarians” were engaged.

So numerous are the libertarians who condemn me that I have long since stopped giving a damn. Most are like the proverbial (or metaphysical) tree falling in the woods. We know they say stuff, but nobody wants to stick around to hear them make the tedious sounds they make.

Over to Wendy, who is heartbroken over “the attempt to change the ground rules of libertarianism through introducing left-leaning attitudes and concepts”:

… the absurd and manufactured debates [is] about “”thin” and “thick” libertarianism – the “humanitarians” versus the “brutalists.” It is an attempt to introduce political correctness into libertarianism so that it is not enough to advocate nonviolence; you have to advocate it for the right reason, as defined by those who provide themselves as moral filters. They call me a brutalist. This means I will never violate your rights; your children, your property are safe in my presence because I respect your right to live in peace. But I don’t protect your children for the right reasons. For this, I am to be excoriated. This is the second approach to a new definition of libertarianism: People wish to analyze society not according to whether it is voluntary but in order to ferret out signs of power and privilege which they self-righteously condemn. Consider open source software. It has been castigated as a realm of privilege because it predominantly consists of white men. Open source software is source code that is thrown into the public realm so that anyone can modify and enhance it. It is a pure expression of free speech; the product is available to everyone for free; there are no entry barriers or requirements other than caring enough to learn code. Learning code is also available and free to all.

I think it was the condemnation of open source software that made me crack. Out of the goodness of his heart, my husband has devoted substantial time to what amounts to an intellectual charity. He pursues it for the same reason he repairs and gives computers for free to underprivileged children; he believes in the power of technology to lift people out of poverty. (BTW, I strongly suggest no one criticize my husband to my face on this point; I am likely to render the most Irish of all responses.)

Open source software is condemned for no other reason than it involves few women or minorities. This reflects nothing more than the choice of those women and minorities. It costs nothing to learn coding. Tutorials are available for free to all and everywhere. Correction: It does cost time and effort. The individual has to exert him or herself. I’m not willing to make the investment but neither do I blame the first white guy I see for my own inertia. If there is something in the culture of women and of specific minorities that prevents them from rising, then blame the culture. Don’t blame a white man like my husband who is falling over himself to provide a free service. (Correction: my husband is Hispanic … but that won’t give him a free pass. I mean, after all … the genitalia. And the grand critics of society don’t really care for accuracy.)

Last night, I contemplated my exit from a movement that considers me to be a “brutalist” after years of unpaid work promoting nonviolence. I found myself engaging in an emotional release that I’ve used for many years. I wrote a letter to my father. My dad died when I was ten years old. I loved him. …

Read “A Letter to My Father” By Wendy McElroy

To Make Cops Love Communities They Police, Communities Ought To Be Lovely.

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Race, Racism

“To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”—Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

A variation on Burke’s theme is what I get from the words of former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson: To make cops love the communities they police, the communities they police ought to be lovely. And indeed, Wilson seems to have found aspects of the rough community he policed lovely. But that’s not enough for his inquisitors.

CNN transcripts:

JOHN BERMAN: New this morning, former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson breaks his silence in a revealing new interview. The 29-year- old who shot and killed unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, tells “The New Yorker” he wanted to get back on the streets of Ferguson but was told he would be a liability. He says he can’t get another police job anywhere despite being cleared of any wrongdoing in Brown’s death.

KATE BOLDUAN: He also tells “The New Yorker” that he ended up working in Ferguson because policing black neighborhoods would be a good way to advance his career. He says this as well, “If you go there and do three to five years, get your experience, you can kind of write your own ticket.” And Wilson says he enjoyed his time on the force. He also is saying this, “I didn’t want to work in a white area. I like the black community. I had fun there. There’s people who will just crack you up.”

CNN’s Boris Sanchez is joining us, and Boris is taking a look at much more of this.

It’s a long and revealing interview.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Certainly. He says quite a bit in there. One of the things you find out is he says he doesn’t think about Michael Brown. He hasn’t even read the Department of Justice report about the systemic racism in Ferguson. It’s really interesting because he kind of — the piece is meant to humanize him but, in a lot of ways, some of what he says brings up questions about his perspectives and his relations with the African-American community. At one point, he asks a fellow officer who helped train him for help in relating to some of the people in the community because he said he felt culture shock.

We’ll take a look at what he said. He asked Mike McCarthy, “Mike, I don’t know what I’m doing. This is a culture shock. Would you help me because you obviously have that connection, and you can relate to them? You may be white, but they respect you, so why can they respect you and not me?”

[11:15:26] Another thing Wilson says, as you mentioned, Kate, that he enjoyed policing in the African-American community because people there cracked him up. So he tries to paint this picture that he’s not a racist. At the same time, he goes on to say other things that many, including Michael Brown’s family, say kind of show that he has some prejudice. We’ll go to the other full screen now. He’s describing a blind mom in Ferguson apparently whose kids were running amok. He says they were causing trouble in the neighborhood. He said, “They ran all over the mom. They didn’t respect her, so why would they respect me?” He then goes on to say, “They’re so wrapped up in a different culture than — what I’m trying to say is the right culture, the better one to pick from.”

Now, the reporter wanted to find out if this was coded language, if this was somehow referring to race in kind of a subtle way. So the reporter pressed him. He said that Wilson struggled with an answer, going on to say, “Pre-gang culture where you’re just running in the streets, not worried about working in the morning, just worried about your immediate gratification.” And then he goes on to say, “It is the same younger culture that’s everywhere in the inner cities.”

Obviously, these quotes, the article, meant to humanize him, kind of bringing up more questions about his perspectives.

[SNIP]

The presstitute are still gunning for Darren Wilson.