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#NeverIndifferent
From a conservative perspective Donald Trump delivered an outstanding acceptance speech. He focused on the major issues facing our country, issues that Democrats refuse to acknowledge, much less propose to solve. And while his message was duly harsh on Obama’s policies and Hillary’s actions and character, it was also incredibly nonpartisan and optimistic. His commonsense approach was certainly accessible to a very broad section of Americans. He demonstrated more humility than bombast.
It is time to put the ugly and divisive GOP primaries behind us and look at the objective choice before us. The choice is clear: Either the executive branch will be led by this man (with GOP backing and serious conservative leadership in Congress) or it will be led by Clinton, Inc. Consider that conservatives have an opportunity under a Trump administration to promote conservative policies in a Republican administration that will likely be no less conservative than any post-Reagan administration. Debating with a somewhat receptive administration would be an outstanding outcome for conservatives, particularly when considering where we find ourselves today.
Trump is still Trump. That may be too big an obstacle for some of us. But for many non-committed American voters, the choice before us became clearer and more promising after last night.
Published in General
Are you suggesting that Trump supported Ed Koch in that race? Do you have a source for that?
No, I’m providing a factual basis for my earlier post about my own voting history.
The point is that I supported the best possible choice when I lived in NYC even when it was a progressive, which is something you condemn Trump for doing in his time there.
(How he voted in the mayoral election of 1977 is an irrelevant mystery to me.)
What would you have done in that election? Take a stand.
I didn’t “condemn” anyone for supporting Ed Koch, that’s for sure. I think I would have voted for Koch. To be clear, you suggested that “progressives” ruined the “once great metropolis.”
But we are not talking about Ed Koch. You claimed that Donald Trump had some meaningful involvement in bringing that greatness back. Please enlighten me about what he did.
Where do I go to give this gig a likes or even taralikes? May I print this and pass it around?
I only speak for ALL conservatives when I say, yes Midge, you ARE allowed to have a champion. Even several champions if you wish.
A term for this: OY VEY
It is what all conservative people older than me certainly expect of me, so I have learned that if I do not both believe it and live up to it, I am a bad conservative. If this is not what I should believe, why are older conservatives at such pains to teach me to live up to this standard, and to be properly ashamed of myself if I do not?
You can do that right here in this thread by exploiting a bug. Likes must be administered as two very rapid taps, with pauses in between as the counter registers. But using that, you can drive the likes as far up as you have patience for.
I’ll keep trying until this penetrates.
You, @paulkingsbery, criticized Trump for supporting progressives.
I said that in the 1970s in NYC I had supported a progressive, Koch, because he was better than the other progressives, like Cuomo and Abzug, who had ruined the city.
The conclusion I wanted you to draw was that sometimes, when you live where progressives rule, you, me and Trump have no choice but to support a progressive.
Understand?
(There were other conclusions people could draw, but they were a bit more nuanced.)
As far as what Trump has done for NYC, you can easily look that up on the web. It’s easy to find.
http://ny.curbed.com/maps/donald-trump-ny-real-estate-development
So he put up a few buildings (several of which he no longer owns) and slapped his name on a few other buildings. That’s all you have?
I guess that’s better than some of the nonsense I have heard from other Trump partisans. But not much.
Your other arguments are really not at issue. Those arguments assume he was a principled conservative reluctantly giving support to the progressive leadership in his community. He was not.
I guess that I must be lower middle class, then. Pompous.
It’s not a team sport, Tom. We don’t need or want any more of his type. Great, he endorsed Trump. Too bad he was a miserable GOP failure for so many terms. He is emblematic of the jelly-spined conservatives that decided to not challenge Obama’s power grabs. And note that I specified that his statement was merely the initial indicator of the systemic problem. Ryan is worse, and McConnell is toast.
I don’t care about the GOP, but rather care about the USA, firstly. I’m Christian, family member, USA citizen, then Republican, in that order. Pace, Pence.
Midge, I don’t want to cheat. So I think it’s better, in retrospect, to just let Freesmith know all the cudos are from me. Thanks for that tip.
I liked Carly in the early going, switched to Rubio when she dropped out. I think I would have accepted any of the contestants as the party nominee except Trump (absolutely — insane and intentionally uniformed) and Ben Carson (probably — smart guy but out of his political league). As a conscientious #NeverTrumper I think there’s value (and not just a little value) in delivering the message “uh uh” to the major parties. We will inevitably end up with an abhorrent president for the next 4 years; at this point, I can do nothing more about that than send a no confidence vote to the two major parties. Their process is broken and needs to be repaired. In the aftermath of the election, I can work to pick up the pieces and attempt to produce a better result in the next go ’round.
“No confidence” votes don’t work in a two party system. One side or the other will win. He or she will have coat-tails. Only the most geeky political types will leave the top line blank and vote responsibly down the ticket. Everyone else you influence to the “pox on both houses” position will stay home.
Based on the last 150 years of presidential campaigns, the only actual strategy is to pick the lesser evil, tell everyone you are doing so, and try again in the next cycle.
In this instance, I perceive no lesser evil.
I strongly disagree. As I’ve tried to point out, you aren’t just picking the top of the ticket, but also all of the other representatives that influence the trend of the next four years. Coat-tails, people, coat-tails.
If you truly believe the entirety of Republicans in government are equally evil to the entirety of Democrats in government, I think you’re [expletive] crazy. Or a throwing a two-year-old’s temper tantrum.
This is an important point, which continues to sway me right at the 49-51% border of how I’ll vote in November. In time, I can see Trump pulling the R party further in his statist direction, at which point, the R mechanism for reigning in his bloated foolishness withers, but not in 2016.
I’m not throwing out the baby AND the bathwater, just the baby. :^) I will be contributing & voting GOP down ticket and will work hard locally in the interregnum to obtain a nominative process that is more deliberative and consensus-seeking. I will not (CAN not) support Trump (or Hillary, for that matter).
This is a vital and existential moment in the life of our dear nation, which is the world’s best hope for freedom, and a Judeo-Christian creation that has been watered by the blood of many patriots. Thus I’ll take this opportunity to present my case against the inherent fallacy of the Anti-Trump position.
I don’t really care what language is used, how irrelevant arguments are framed, or what alternate reality some may prefer, but there are some basic and immutable facts associated with the momentous decision in November.
The decision is now binary. The time for arguments about character and such is over; the primaries are over. There is no rationale for choosing Hillary in the general. None. Yet either she or Trump will be president. Choose or not, but take personal responsibility and own the consequences for voting Hillary, not voting Trump, wasting your vote on a non-viable candidate, or abstaining entirely. All choices except voting Trump aid Hillary. When NeverTrumpers can convince me that I’m wrong, in a logical fashion, then I’ll be surprised. No moral posturing, substitution of narrative for facts, obtuseness, snark, or logical fallacies are allowed, only coherent argument.
There are a lot of true and powerful statements that the NeverTrumpers should not ignore. Here’s mine, informed by my Christian learning and heritage: Hillary is a manifestation of Satan, and failing to oppose evil is immoral, not to mention suicidally stupid.
And what if both Trump and Hillary are “manifestation[s] of Satan”? Then what?
By symmetry, all choices except voting Hillary aid Trump. While speaking in terms of relative support is of course perfectly sensible, it is this symmetry that causes supporting neither lead candidate to be the most logical location of zero support for either lead candidate.
Can’t you at least respect that this is a genuine ethical dilemma for many of us?
Voting for Trump is an action. If that action is wrong, the fact that a majority of other voters seem likely to do something even worse doesn’t change that. I am bound to do anything morally acceptable to prevent evil. I am not bound to do anything to prevent evil.
You say it’s a binary choice, but you acknowledge another action is possible. It is a three-way choice: vote for one of those two, or abstain in some manner.
Voting for Clinton or Trump are tiny, futile efforts to sway the final result or to signal support for one side or the other. Voting Libertarian or writing in are tiny, futile efforts to tell future politicians they will not win my support by Trump or Clinton’s style of politics, and to signal that the next president takes office without my enabling support. In my state it seems likely that any vote but a vote for Clinton will be a protest vote. I will use my protest vote to send the message I actually want to send.
By refusing to vote for Trump, I’m giving up the one thing I can do to stop Hillary. (Except that my vote will actually do basically nothing to stop Hillary, so this bothers me less than it did when I thought I’d be voting in a more competitive state.)
Of course, by refusing to vote for Hillary I’m likewise giving up the one thing I can do to stop Trump. I consider Trump such a disastrous candidate that it’s my duty to stop him. Except that I can’t possibly under any circumstances vote for Clinton.
Yes, that refusing to vote Trump supports Hillary more than voting Trump does is what I meant by relative support. Zero degrees is five degrees more of support than negative five degrees of support is.
We could imagine some degree of Trump support, MT, that was the maximal amount of support for Trump you could give in your situation, and say that anything less than MT by X amount is giving X amount of relative support to Hillary. So, for example, if you could afford to donate many thousands of dollars to the Trump campaign and Trump-friendly PACs, if you could afford to quit your job to volunteer for the Trump campaign, or run on only four hours of sleep a night in order to work both your job and for the campaign, and you didn’t, you would be supporting Hillary by that amount relative to MT. It’s no surprise relative support makes for some slippery arguments, with no definite upper bound on what a body must do to avoid the suspicion of some residuum of relative support for the other party’s candidate.
Which is why I like the fact that symmetry suggests a convenient zero for absolute support: supporting neither candidate.
The various decisions that you take in order to arrive at zero support for either candidate net out to zero, but gross there are many decisions supporting each of them. Also, as a practical matter, it would be hard to talk about politics much without encouraging or discouraging othere’s and still harder to ensure that any support given was given equally to the two sides.