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Lies: Big and Small
It’s well beyond whether or not [climate change] affects me personally, which it does, and it did my family, and still does. Just like your families. This is personal. Every one of you probably have a story that can talk about what’s happened to something you care greatly about, whether it’s a species or it’s your son or daughter coming down with cancer because of this.
— Joe Biden, 2019
President Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true. He exaggerates, boasts, and is sloppy with words. It seems to me that he lies in the service of ego and self-aggrandizement, as one might expect of a blowhard celebrity mogul.
In contrast, Mr. Biden is lying, here blaming cancer on climate change, for a much more consequential motive: he wants to impose draconian controls on our lives in the name of saving the planet. He, along with all the other green new dealers, wants to bleed the country poor as we dial back our standard of living in what (even the climate people would confess) is a pointless exercise in CO2 reduction, given that the newly developing nations of India and China are rapidly increasing their own CO2 emissions and will far outstrip ours.
It’s an exercise in self-inflicted impoverishment, but then, that’s pretty much the Democratic party platform these days.
Whether it’s blaming every warm day and personal health tragedy on carbon emissions, or promising that you can keep your health care while we know full well you can’t, or pretending that the nation is seething with ancient racial grievances, the left’s lies are big, and intended to fool us into embracing big changes that will make the state ever larger and more powerful.
I wish President Trump wouldn’t lie about the size of his audience or his skill as an amateur meteorologist. I wish he were a bit of a Boy Scout. But I prefer this stupid trivial ego-boosting stuff to the left’s efforts to take over my life under false pretenses.
Trump 2020.
Published in Elections
How can Trump be worse at it, given he actually won running against 16 other Republicans?
Then won the Presidency, which GOP stalwarts McCain and Romney failed to do even when running against an actual socialist?
I think you’re grading on your own curve. Trump would be even worse if he had actual policies. He knows enough not to even try. So, the Dems have a higher bar, since they have actual policies. Just imagine a world where Trump is selling a health care plan….and FOX is the only media source factchecking him. Yikes!
I think people do actually care about global warming. Its strong in Germany and elsewhere. The D’rats lack of quality control in the US killed it here though. Became completely partisan.
You’re asking me how Trump can be even worse than the Republican Party at large at selling conservative ideas.
President Trump is neither articulate nor ideologically coherent in defense of core conservative ideas. He’s patriotic, and I respect and admire that — and think it long overdue. But it’s extraordinarily difficult to imagine Trump making a competent argument in defense of the Constitution, for example, or a thoughtful immigration-control argument that discusses the need to encourage assimilation and yet doesn’t blow up in his face because of some off-the-cuff observation.
President Trump (for whom I voted, and for whom I will vote again) should have worked with conservative members of Congress when he had them, people with real insight into the nation’s budgetary problems. He should work with them now.
Sorry Drew, but, while President Trump is a lot of good things, the great communicator he is not. He generates so much distraction, generates so much heat, that the opportunity to champion a great economy by pointing to real conservative principles in action is lost, again and again, in the skirmish to troll the left and dominate the next news cycle — things he does quite well.
You’re not contradicting me, just offering a theory as to why I’m right. Trump does not lie in order to foist some secret agenda on us; you agree. (I’m not trying to make a moral comparison, merely pointing out that Trump’s misstatements, unlike those of his opponents, are inconsequential.)
People say they care. Very few people act as if they care. A simple measure of how much people care would be this: how enthusiastic are they to embrace the only technology, nuclear, that offers any plausible hope of significantly reducing carbon emissions? (Germany: nuclear has gone from about 20% to 10% of their electrical generation in the past decade, and is headed for complete phase-out in the next. If Germans care about global warming, they don’t do so competently.)
I think it’s a bogus issue, personally, and I really don’t care.
I would give Trump a “Half-Reagan” for communication skills. Trump is the only prominent Republican politician since Reagan to put Democrats on the defensive. But he’s not as good at selling the positive side of conservatism.
Most Republicans can do neither, and many seem to have a pathological resistance to the very idea of effective communication.
Okay, gentlemen! Pistols at 20 paces . . .
Finally, someone talking sense!
The issue of Trump’s communication skills begs the question as to what he should be communicating. For eight decades Democrats have kept it simple: “Free stuff. Guarantees and material security. Those who would deny you free stuff hate you, especially if you are not white, straight and male and also those people who hate you have more stuff than they should. Don’t vote for rich bad people who hate you. Vote for free stuff.”
Dems only got in trouble when the “free stuff” policies led to crime and chaos or tacit surrender to Communism, OPEC and/or economic stagnation. The GOP option was always just a reaction, a check, a brake. There was continued free stuff but no new or increased free stuff (well, except for Nixon’s huge boost in social spending. And Bush’s Rx subsidy for seniors….) There was never really a competing vision.
The GOP message is generally that the “free stuff” policies are expensive and stupid but the GOP does not offer a comprehensive counter-vision. Romney’s accolades for the noble entrepreneur would be boffo at an NFIB convention or an Ayn Rand book club but for the great majority who are and expect to continue to be employees of enterprises they do not own it’s not a vision to which they can relate.
Without the fecklessness of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale combined the existence of a decidedly menacing USSR would Reagan have won delivering variations of his GE stock speech? Granted, Reagan had more presence, more likeability and verbal mastery than every GOP nominee since but without the demonstrable failure of “free stuff” loser administrations and a significant foreign threat would he have won?
The old politics is breaking down and not just in the US. The irony and the danger is that even as it becomes ever more obvious that statist solutions don’t work, the growing sense of insecurity may cause voters to opt for the candidate who promises security they know he cannot deliver versus the guy who says we’re better off on our own, making our own way.
I think, for example, that a model/vision of security (savings, health and income insurance, investment) using private providers (but with government nudge and even some mandates and subsidies) and which gradually gets the government out of the entitlements racket can be a competing vision but it means some heavy lifting, long-term thinking and ideological impurity. Easier just to say the Dems are dangerously stupid.
I might be a little more willing than you to credit Reagan with delivering a positive conservative message, but I agree with the gist of your comment.
I think the most successful approach would be one that speaks frankly but optimistically to people, explaining that self-worth doesn’t come from a government program, but rather from being a free man working to support himself and his family; that the left’s vision is of a sad, desperate, helpless people struggling to survive in a harsh and hopeless country — when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.
When Reagan spoke of morning in America, I think he was striking the right chord. Above all, it requires an unapologetic and patriotic optimism. I think too many of our would-be leaders, even on the right, think that sounds embarrassingly naive or old-fashioned.
I agree with the substance of your statement but I don’t see it as a political winner versus “free stuff and the bad people who would deny it.” Can’t I still have self-worth and also tuition benefits and health care? (writes someone who went to college on the GI Bill and is now eligible for Medicare). A capable “free stuff” politician would say it is Morning in America precisely because of the “free stuff” he will provide. Young voters who actually take seriously the notion of ‘safe spaces’ on campus don’t comprise a big market for the gospel of self-reliance. And why should I vote for someone who says it’s all up to me. How is he gonna help me? Why do I need him in office? I probably won’t vote for that guy until after I accumulate enough stuff to worry about the idiot government taking it away and/or preventing me from accumulating more. Until then, what do I have to lose with the “free stuff” guy?
Just make sure they’re loaded with paintballs. Ricochet would miss you guys.
It’s possible that one can be a terrible communicator and still be better than most of the Republican Party, which can’t sell a life jacket to a drowning
manperson.