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Still Stunned
I hoped taking a day’s break from the debate would provide some much needed impetus for creative writing. It hasn’t. I’m disgusted, had enough and tired of it all. The debate offended everyone’s intellect, especially those who actually know things. Both candidates made profoundly idiotic and patently false statements. While each raced toward the bottom they jettisoned whatever dignity was left of the American electoral process. Furthermore, their sycophants continue to insult our intelligence by proclaiming what our lying ears and eyes didn’t hear and see.
Note to the travel weary, fast-food inhaling surrogates who have sold their souls to the devil who pays most: Who the hell do you think you are? Your candidate dishonored themselves and their party and appears to be preaching to their lowest hanging pliable demographics.
The Left’s perpetual shrillness, childish victicrat-ization, and incredulity for those who refuse to bow to their superiority makes me ill.
The Right has no soul, no courage, no idea who they are anymore, and is assured of internal infighting well beyond the election which makes me ill.
The first election where I paid attention was as a fresh-off-the-boat British kid in junior high. Four years from the bicentennial, Reagan/Carter/Anderson felt historic in the moment. There was excitement and overall honor. Of course there was bickering and sniping, as with every election going back 200 years. But there was dignity. Americans, no matter their politics, had a gleam in their eye knowing they were pulling the lever for a decent man.
Flash forward 36 years and we have a despicable and impulsive P.T. Barnum with thinner skin than the caviar dolloped atop his chalupa who’s running against a despicable and unlikable compulsive liar whose only public office achievement in three decades was legalizing corruption.
Embarrassed while watching this with my kids, I’m beginning to no longer care. So, instead of writing about who won or lost the debate, here’s all I can muster:
Hillary lost.
Trump lost.
America IS lost.
Published in General
One day, many moons from now, one of Hillary’s current campaign staffers will dish on the drugs, knee braces and adrenaline pumps administered 3 minutes before each debate.
I just posted this link on Claire’s thread. This was Romney’s October 7, 2011, foreign policy speech. (He had already asked John Bolton to be his secretary of state.) It is mind blowing in its prescience. I wish Romney had run because he could have debated Trump on the business and immigration issues–they are largely in agreement–but leveled him where Trump makes the least sense, on foreign policy.
Yes, because he can motivate and manage people. My contacts with people who work with and in his organization are positive.
Agreed, though it is a tad easier if you start out with $100 million or so.
Look, both Trump and Clinton have extensive, almost amazing histories of failing upwards. In each case it’s like watching Isaiah Thomas after his playing career ended, but worse.
The sine qua non to avoid ignorance is to listen to other people.
They may be right or wrong, but if one wants to know stuff one listens, reads, watches others and then considers what they have to say.
Dude doesn’t listen, read, or watch much except stuff about himself. That WAPO interview wasn’t some cheap hatchet job. Anyone who reads it honestly can see it.
They just handed Trump the rope; it’s all on him after that.
Me too. Watching Trump in the GOP debates gave me a strong, visceral dislike for him. But we still have to try to get the best President we can get. The primaries are over, so I want Trump to be better. I literally think that I could be a better President than Trump, but Trump would be better than Hillary. He wouldn’t betray the country like she has, or hasn’t yet anyway. Trump was getting a little better recently, but after the debate with Hillary, I’m back to thinking that Trump is an anchor dragging conservatism down, and the sooner we cut that anchor loose the better.
Personally, I was insulted by the shallowness and lack of basic historical knowledge that Trump exhibited during the debate. He never responded to Clinton’s obvious inaccuracies on many topics.
Well, I could pray that your house is struck by lightning an all your appliances are wiped out. But then you’d probably watch it on your smartphone, wouldn’t you. You do need help! ;-)
I was really sad when Romney lost. As mentioned elsewhere, it took me months to come back out from my cave after 2012. IMO he may have been the best nominee to run this country since Reagan. I didn’t agree with him on everything of course, but you know things would now be better around the world and domestically.
That speech nailed it.
That just may be my biggest concern about him. Clinical narcissism already inhabits the WH. Not sure we could imagine what Trump would be like unchained. At least we (still) have separation of powers.
I don’t know what the best outcome is here. They are both horrible for different reasons. I still come back to SCOTUS, Obamacare and the economy. Do we know what he will do? No one is certain. But we do know she will double down on Obama’s agenda which will continue this malaise.
Either way, I think whoever inhabits the WH in 2017 will be facing an imminent recession. They will likely be blamed (especially if Trump), so it’s probable the next President will be only for one term.
Another positive for Trump, though some would call it wishful thinking, is I really and truly do not believe he would subject his ego to the beating it would take if he were in the White House. Having won an election, presided at a couple of state dinners and entertained congress with a piece of his mind, it seems in character for him to bug out on a whim. She, on the other hand, will cling to the power with her dying breath and probably put the ventilator on a back up generator for good measure.
Are you saying he would leave the office because he won’t like the criticism? Besides Nixon, is there any other President who has just upped and quit?
William Henry Harrison did it. He had to fake his death, though. Afterwards, he moved to Hoboken.
I remember reading a Thomas Sowell article shortly after Obama was elected in 2008 where he outlined the danger our country would be in under his coming administration. And he concluded with something like, ‘If America survives the Obama administration, it will not survive the naïveté of the American public that elected him in the first place.’ That has come to mind many times during this election season. (I would’ve liked to quote him directly, but I couldn’t locate the article.)
Sowell, as usual, is right. We live among those who argue over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, yet offer zero value on solving the issues of the day. Today’s debates are controlled by those whose ‘naive’ outlooks offer no intellectual consequence. There’s never consequence as their soulless goal is the ultimate intangible: promoting the essence of enlightenment. Of course, we all know in reality this leads to nothing more than vacuous thought. A circle of mental self-stimulation when at the conclusion, they applaud each other for their well intended nothingness. But… good intentions, amirite?
I’ve wanted to know for four years now why Obama fired Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. I know, I know, the official statement was that she was running for president and she resigned to do that. But: Obama’s second inauguration was January 20, 2013. She left (quit or was fired) February 1, 2013.
It never has made any sense to me that she needed three or four years to run for president. One or two years I can see, but she risked rendering her State Department experience irrelevant and out of date by leaving in January 2013 for a campaign that would not reach its apex until 2016.
I guess I’ll never know. But I find it intriguing. Was the job too much for her, I wonder. Or was she incompetent, which would be suggested by the bathroom server she maintained in Chappaqua.
What does Obama know about her? :)
Don’t say you didn’t do any creative writing. What a wonderful phrase!
Dave, Don’t hold back – tell me what you Really think.
Well, except for the whole “how stupid are the people of Iowa?” comment. And the countless personal insults that he hurls at people. Not sure if the strongest pro-Trump argument is saying that he doesn’t insult voters.
Look at it this way – if some circumstance should befall the newly elected President, which of the VP candidates would you prefer to take over? Easy. That would be Mike Pence.
So, enough of the chest beating; regain your composure – go ahead , vote for Trump. Wherever you are, let’s all focus on electing Republicans to Congress.
I’m fascinated by this, because I find nothing on news sites but people who worked for him and hated him, think he was a terrible boss, etc. Are the people who are super positive just not speaking out, or are they not being heard?
I am feeling like you, Dave. It’s gone beyond disappointment into just not caring anymore, which is strange since I started hanging political posters in my room when I was 7.
Yet I also can’t keep my eyes from the car wreck with a weird, dispassionate sort of detachment.
I can’t imagine that this will be a high turn out election.
Fwiw, Ricochet member Franco worked for Trump and speaks very highly of him.
Maybe take some comfort in knowing that you’re sure as [that place] not shootin’ silver bullets!
I have run across several, but it is not like the media spreads the news.
Trump has not brought about the end of conservatism, at least in an ideological sense. He is an erratic cheeseball, but his agenda is more conservative than that of John McCain in 2008.
I just don’t understand when people make statements like this. I mean, I’m not even being super challenging here, BD. It’s just… I don’t understand this perspective. At all.
First, since he’s an “erratic cheeseball”, it is hard to pin down any core ideology for Trump. Second, McCain was much more moderate than many other Republicans in my lifetime, but this talking point, which I’ve seen over and over again in various forms on Ricochet, reminds me most of those people who say Romney would have been no different from President Obama in office.
I guess I get it when people say the Donald’s more “conservative” than Clinton, but I don’t get it at all when people argue he’s more “conservative” than McCain.
If he’s right and he caused Clinton to flip-flop on a free trade deal, then one could say he pushed her to the Left!!! Think about it. Trump is taking credit for moving Clinton to the same position as a socialist named Sanders. And Trump is “more conservative” than John McCain?
I just don’t get it.
Lois Lane: As president, McCain would have signed a Kyoto-type treaty and a a cap-and-trade bill. During W’s presidency, he worked with Democrats to block making tax cuts permanent, the elimination of the Estate Tax, and drilling in ANWR.
There’s more. It’s not even close.
This is what I thought about Trump’s performance in the debate, too—he didn’t actually listen to either Hillary or the moderator. If he had, he might have recognized the slow, easy, obvious pitches that could have been sent flying out of the park.
I don’t know enough about salesmanship to know—maybe excessive self-regard is an asset, but surely you have to be able to read the mark? I should think empathy was useful for a salesman the way it’s useful for a wolf; it’s what let’s you understand what the deer is experiencing, and exploit it.
I would never call John McCain a conservative, @bd. Completely fair play.
But I see no evidence that Donald Trump is more conservative. He speaks like Code Pink, dislikes free trade, wants to expand entitlements, was pro-choice for most of his 70 years on the planet, doesn’t give much to others, likes universal healthcare with individual mandates, wants to rebuild infrastructure in a “shovel ready” kind of way so government creates jobs, helped put many progressives in office, promotes punishing companies that move their businesses via jacked up tariffs, supports President Obama’s ideas about transgender bathrooms…
I don’t even know what he thinks on climate change. That it’s a hoax designed by China?
That’s a caricature of conservatives, not a conservative position.