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The Ongoing, Bipartisan Effort to Make Democrats Look Stupid
The State of the Union address has been described as kabuki theater; an elaborate, carefully orchestrated, melodramatic spectacle heavy on showmanship and light on content. President Trump is good at this, he has built a very successful career in business and entertainment by excelling in theater, in one form or another. His production of, and performance in, yesterday’s State of the Union address was aptly masterful. Nothing that happened there was an accident. The whole show was carefully, and brilliantly, planned and executed. And I think that’s fine; play to your strengths. This is one of his strengths.
My problem was the other side of the show. The behavior of Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in attendance was absurd. What makes that absurdity particularly noteworthy is that it was just as carefully planned and executed as President Trump’s address. They had months to prepare for this. They knew exactly what President Trump was going to do. And the best they could come up with was wearing white, expressing disapproval at America’s successes, and tearing up his speech after he gave it. The Democrats were essentially filming Republican campaign ads for them, making themselves look ridiculous, clueless, and meanspirited, and this was after months of careful planning. This was exactly what they intended to do. I just don’t get it.
If I were a Democrat voter, I would really wonder about this. “Couldn’t they come up with something, anything, better than this? The Republicans are going to try to make us look stupid, petty, and vicious. Why are we helping them?”
To be fair, the Democrats really can’t campaign on results. By nearly any measure, Trump’s presidency has been a remarkable success. Domestic policy, economic policy, foreign policy, and so forth… it would be extremely difficult to portray his presidency as a failure. They could try, of course. But they don’t try. They rarely mention policies or results. Which is probably sensible.
And the Democrats don’t have any realistic alternatives. Their policies are either impractical (Medicare for all), detrimental (open borders), or completely insane (Green New Deal). They don’t have any promising candidates to run against Mr. Trump in the upcoming election. And whoever they do run will lose if s/he admits what they actually believe in. The leadership of their party is either unlikable (Chuck Schumer), criminal (Hillary Clinton), communist (Bernie Sanders), deluded (AOC), confused (Biden), or all of the above (Pelosi).
So Trump’s presidency has been an obvious positive for the United States, and they have no suggestions for how to improve on it. So what to do?
I’m not sure. But surely, not this.
Again, Trump is really good at this sort of thing. He makes his opponents look bad. It’s remarkable, really.
But the Democrats are helping him. With endless planning and coordination, they are helping him.
I just don’t get it.
Published in General
Trump has some kind of magic ability to make his opponents behave as the most extreme version of themselves. The Dems, the Media, the NeverTrumpers,… Those people have all lost their minds. It is like Capt. Ahab obsessed with Moby Dick.
But dear heavens, His Tone! His Tweets! His Ravenous Appetite For McDonald’s Burgers and Fries! His Lack Of Polished Wordsmithing And Ability To Recite The Iliad From Memory!
“We need to tear the speech up to see what’s in it.”
It’s hard to get outraged at your enemy when he’s shooting himself in the face.
But also seems a bit unsporting to laugh.
I think the only thing to “get” is that they actually are ridiculous, clueless and meanspirited.
Quite often, people are exactly what they appear to be. And so, when people act in ways that seem intent on convincing me that they are meanspirited, nasty, lying jerks, I read my own bumps for a moment to see if there’s any part of their appalling behavior that is, somehow, ascribable to me. If not, I do my best to write them off as the meanspirited, nasty, lying jerks they really are.
I think Rush Limbaugh was right: the Democrats are so used to having Republicans either ignore criticism, go on the defensive, or grovel in apology. They don’t know how to fight Trump because they’ve never had to fight someone like him.
To be fair, we’re not trying very hard.
Trump certainly knows how to get Nancy rattled. She was muttering throughout his speech.
To be fair, we don’t really need to.
To quote a lot of people: “All they had to do is not be insane.”
The reason that the Democrats go crazy over Trump is because they don’t know what they are for. They are against racism and sexism and homophobia but they cannot explain the good. Try imagining painting a beautiful picture, when all you know is ugliness. You can try to avoid painting what is ugly but without contemplating beauty, your picture will look plain and uninspiring. This is why leftist screeds are so petty and censorious. “Don’t say this.” “Don’t joke about that.” “You can’t use that word anymore.” Some comedians have even given up on jokes. The ugliness has overwhelmed them because they can’t look at the beautiful.
Trump is certainly no master painter but he is a master communicator. Make America Great Again is a clear message even if it lacks subtlety. He depicts America as being prosperous, secure and free. He wants people to have jobs and avoid wars. He wants homosexual Black-Americans to live free and well and he wants white Christian-Americans to be live free and well in equal measure. He also wants people of all colors and orientations to vote for him- but some narcissism is to be expected in a politician.
As combative as Trump is and as depressing as his American carnage inauguration speech was. There is something Falstaffian in him. Falstaff was a fat coward who rather than risk his neck fighting hid in a pile of corpses during an important battle. He wasn’t heroic or Truthful or a role model. But as vulgar as Falstaff was, there was always something in him that affirmed life. Trump’s populist patriotism could use some more poetry recitations and references to the Founding Fathers for my taste, but it is still congruent with the human heart’s desire for patriotism, tradition and the more animalistic spirits. I myself have never doubted that Trump loves America and he wants America to win. What Democrat gives off that emotion.
While Trump has a vision that is congruent with the human heart. The Democrats… have Scandinavia. Scandinavian countries are pleasant to live in but no one wants to martyr themselves for the working class by advocating for Scandinavian welfare statism. That’s why they have have to pretend that Scandinavia is socialist. In reality, Scandinavia is a super capitalist region with a welfare state on top. Try to inspire an antifa crowd with that.
In conclusion, you need to know what you stand for in order to inspire people. What does the left stand for besides more government and telling non-Asian minorities how victimized they are.
That’s because they always beat us to it.
The Democrats here are also captive of their own social media obsessives, which includes a large part of the bi-coastal news media types who are themselves addicted to Twitter and other online platforms.
It the same phenomena Clay Travis noted in the sports media world was killing ESPN three years ago, as the network came to believe the angry woke crowd on sports Twitter was actually the Wave of the Future, and that the mass of the coveted young adult viewer demo really did want to mix SJW politics with sports. It took a head-dive in TV and radio ratings and a change in leadership for the network to at least back off of that in their prime-time programming.
Same deal here, where the Democratic leadership has come to believe angry woke Twitter is a far bigger percentage of the electorate than it actually is, and has taken to pandering to that group, in part because they also get affirmation from the media for pandering to that group (which in turn includes a lot of people in the media). Pelosi’s staged ripping up of the speech was designed to excite the angry SJWs because they think there are more of them out there than there really are, and despite the fact that to the moderate swing voters the Democrats need, she came off as a deranged crazy lady ripping up what had been a pro-American State of the Union speech by Trump.
As long as they keep thinking woke Twitter is their target audience, the Democrats are going to keep doing things like this, and the more they do it the closer we get to election day, the more swing voters who in the past might have been worried about Trump’s mercurial behavior will start thinking of the two sides, he’s the far more normal one.
We don’t lob death threats at our political opponents but they do.
Our public schools haven’t taught poetry in decades and they’ve been decrying the Founders as base slavers for quite awhile as well; your examples should be standard for inspiring Americans, but we’re not making Americans like we used to.
Unless you’re manipulating the media through a barrage of provocative tweeting.
— Sun Tzu
A tee-totaling Falstaff: you’re on to something there. I’m a bit less charitable when it comes to his love of America – yes, yes, I’m sure he does, but it’s inseparable from is narcissism. I think everything gets fed through the prism of his hungry id, as opposed to Reagan’s intellectual and emotional comprehension of American distinctiveness. That said, I’ve no time for Obama’s remote and theoretical love of America as a thing to be transformed, as if we were rude lumps of Play-Doh waiting for the guiding hands of our progressive betters.
Moreover, they try to carry them out.
But they are too filled with soy to do it effectively.
They’re not manipulating the media. The media is 90% on-board.
I share your view, and this aspect of the Trump phenomenon has bothered me for some time.
But the result is very, very similar.
This is the whole point of capitalism & democracy. It tends to align the interests of the leaders with the interests of people.
Our political leaders, and our business leaders, spend their time and considerable resources trying to give the people what they want. No coercion. Just the pursuit of happiness. Which makes our relationships more collegial and less adversarial.
That is a simply wonderful sentence.
The effort to make the Democrats look stupid is bipartisan. I love it!
Oskar Schindler was a drunk, a philanderer, a high stakes con man and a major adrenaline junkie. He was also the right man in the right place at the right time.
What I can’t figure out is why Pelosi says that the speech was a tissue of lies, but makes no specific allegation about what is untruthful. It’s just conclusory. I certainly won’t suggest that everything Trump said was verifiable, because I don’t know, but nothing Pelosi and the Democrats have said have pointed me in the direction of the purported falsehoods.
I would help you out but most of the proper descriptive terminology for Madam Speaker would violate the CoC even more than I am generally comfortable with.
Pardon me, I speak Democrat.
In Democrat, accurately pointing out Democrat malfeasance is “a vicious partisan attack.” An enemy politician describing non-Democrat accomplishments is “a tissue of lies.”
No specific allegations needed because everyone just knows that everything Trump says is false. Same reason “comedians” can make conclusory statements about conservatives/Christians/Republicans/southern white people/etc. and get a laugh out of the audience because the audience just knows what bigots/idiots/rubes/hicks/etc. the target people are.
Two things amaze me.