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This week, some rumination on Trump’s tete a tete with Putin (along with a history lesson for Rob Long), we introduce you to Elizabeth Heng, who is running for Congress in California’s 16th District, we get some #MeToo education from our good pal Mona Charen, (stop whatever you’re doing and buy her book Sex Matters right now) and the city of Santa Barbara declares that if you use a straw in that fair city, you’ll do time. Which sucks. Also, the Word of The Day is spizzerinctum.
Music from this week’s podcast: Sex Bomb by Tom Jones
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It’s quite possible that, as popular as he might be in Wisconsin and nearby, Walker would not have won a national election.
And it’s also quite possible that, for all his flaws, Trumps has actually been more conservative than Walker would have been.
Occam’s razor, Gary. Kompromat is not needed to explain Trump’s behavior, nor is mental illness. Character, yes. His natural tendencies and preferences? Yes. His ideas on negotiations and relationships? Yes. Those three are all that is needed to explain his behavior.
True on both. We can look back in thirty years and figure it all out.
I do not think Trump is mentally ill. (Just like I don’t think all murderers are crazy.) Crummy, boorish, ego-fixated behaviors are just as frustratingly bad whether they come from mental issues or epic immaturity (my diagnosis). Yet, for me, Elizabeth Heng’s response to Rob’s trenchant question about how she’s going to handle the anti-Trump immigration question was the perfect response to those conservatives who crave a primary challenger. I cannot express how freeing it is to never having self-identified with a political party.
Great conversation on Mona’s book and research. I find it so sad, what feminism has become. Looking back over the past 50 years, I think I see how it was all baked in. How a desire for necessary social empowerment–e.g., that a husband is not entitled to “manage” his and his wife’s joint income without her okay–slowly morphed into the neurotic expectation of always feeling safe. … It’s also extremely odd how anti-male progressive women (I know lots) will not broach the incongruity of MeToo and the overtly gross sexual displays by young, female “artists” on stage. … Mona’s masher experience makes me wonder how many women her age and older did acquiesce to such proposals. Perhaps it says something about my personal view of feminism that while I applaud Mona for having such a strong sense of self at such a young age and in a situation fraught with professional possibilities, I do not judge harshly those who agreed to the deal.
I sometimes think that especially sexually-liberated liberals have some ‘splainin’ to do when it comes to this kind of thing. If women are supposed to have control of their own bodies to do as they please, including things like sex trades – prostitution, etc – how is it credible to criticize them if they choose to mix sexual transactions with other things? Such as Hollywood-type careers. If a producer has a choice of dozens or hundreds of aspiring actresses vying for a part, and if sexuality is supposed to be as free as anything else – according to THEM, that is – why is it somehow wrong if the producer decides to pick an actress who gives sex as well as acting? Can the left make a credible claim that sex trade has to be separate and ONLY about sex, and acting ONLY about acting, etc. Seems like nonsense. …
split because of the word limit…
Would the left somehow accept such things if it was only female producers getting sex from female actors, and male with male, etc? Because then it’s somehow an “equal” thing, and not based on “unequal power” or something? (Not because the producer would not then be in the power position, but because much of feminism argues that male/female – even if the female is the boss – is always unequal in favor of the male and hence detrimental to women.) Good luck.
The Left can appeal to traditional moral views, when it suits their purposes.
And it never seems to get called out for the crap it is.
Nobody says you have to like Trump. I would settle for not undermining Trump and denigrating his voters at every available opportunity, and oh, yeah, less whining about not getting your way. We had an election, Trump won, and it is over. Any thing you do to harm Trump and his voters helps the Democrats, and unless the Democrats are stopped, the United States of America will cease to exist. It will become the Socialist States of America, and any one who resists will be enslaved or murdered. The Democrats say so, right out loud and in print. There will be no habeas corpus, no due process, no trial by jury, no borders, no privacy, no religious liberty, no freedom of speech, no gun rights, no property rights, all the freedoms now in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution will be gone, and we will never get them back, ever. Your children will grow up in a system that will make East Germany look like a Sunday picnic, if they are allowed to live at all.
Do you not know that Stalin starved whole towns to death-every man, woman, and child? Mao Zedong killed 65 million of his own people to implement communism. Obama’s buddy Bill Ayres estimated that they would have to kill 25 million Americans to institute communism in the United States, and that was more than fifty years ago. It will probably take 50 million deaths now. Do you think that 50 million will be residents of Berkley and Silicon Valley? What on earth makes you think that the Democrats will be any kinder than Stalin and Mao? They hate us, like Hitler hated the Jews. Mrs. Clinton wasn’t kidding when she called us deplorables-in that same speech, she said the deplorables were irredeemable. What do you do with those who will not bend the knee? You kill them, and if you think she didn’t mean it you are living in dreamland.
It may happen any way, because the Dems and the never Trumpers are doing every thing they can to overthrow a free, fair, legal election. They are furious that the transformation initiated by Obama has been held up, and they will do any thing, including terrorism, to regain power.
You may not like the populists, but if you dump Trump and his voters, you hand the country to the Democrats forever, because there just aren’t enough non-populist Republicans to get to a majority.
I supported Scott before I changed to Rubio. But I think Petty’s point was, if we had gotten behind one or two candidates from the start, instead of splitting the vote, Trump never would have won.
Unless I am mistaken in my memory, Gov. Walker advised people to do that when he withdrew.
But he did. You need to quit living in the land of what-if. Donald Trump is President. You can undermine conservatism by continuing to attack him, or pressure him to stay on the conservative track he has been on, through constructive criticism. Continuing to try to deny his fair and free win, or trying to impeach him without basis is destroying the country. Not President Trump, but you, Rob and Gary and all who want to go back and undo 2016, are destroying the country.
That plus the ego trips of Cruz, Kasich and about a dozen of the other losing candidates who never should have been candidates. The decision to go primarily to winner take all primaries were instituted because the 2012 primaries drug out the process while Romney was getting hammered by Democrats and couldn’t respond because of campaign contribution rules. This was a significant factor in his subsequent defeat.
I’m sorry. I just don’t understand how criticism of Trump is criticism of his voters. The voters who elected Trump in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. What special electoral wisdom do they have? This is just another occasion of the classic debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Many of the Trump supporters are simply “mad as hell” and have signed up for the Paine burn it down philosophy. Personally I think Burke had it right and the American Revolution is far superior to the French Revolution that Paine supported.
No, we didn’t. The change was marginal, and most who voted for Trump were not voting for Obama. We held our noses and voted for whatever the Republican Party tossed up like the dog’s breakfast, since by the time our primaries came around, the decision had been made. So, here are the Michigan vote totals for the three elections:
2016: Dem (2,268,839) Rep (2,279,543)
2012: Dem (2,564,569) Rep (2,115,256)
2008: Dem (2,872,579) Rep (2,048,639)
Even if we say that all ~230K voters who increased the Republican totals from 2008 to 2016 had voted for Obama, that is only slightly more than 10%. But that is not true. Nor would Trump have gotten this state were someone like Obama on the Dem ticket. You can see that a lot of Democrats either stayed home from voting, died, or moved to make that eight-year difference.
A fourth option after character, kompromat and mental illness.
Demonic possession!
Just keep in mind that Trump is your mirror, brother.
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
We have three political traditions, liberal, conservative and populist. The populists have run under the liberal or democratic banner for years. They do not belong in the Party of Reagan.
I do not denigrate people who voted for Trump in November 2016; there were two horrible choices.
We had a primary election with too many candidates and a set of flawed “plurality wins all” rules. The third primary was South Carolina. Trump won 32% of the votes and won 100% of the delegates. Rubio and Cruz each won 22% of the vote and each got 0% of the delegates. When the race got down to 3 candidates, Trump was stopped in Utah and Wisconsin, only to have Trump carry New York. Indiana could have held the line, but failed the rest of the country.
I am a Christian, an American, a Conservative and a Republican in that order. Trump is not a conservative, and until he is defeated, the Conservative Party of Reagan is being snuffed out. It is my duty as a Conservative to oppose Trump and seek his defeat in the 2020 primaries, so that the Party of Reagan can re-emerge.
Trump was the legally nominated Republican candidate under the deeply flawed “plurality wins all delagates” rules. Trump legally won the election.
As I grew up, the Republican Party had a justiable suspicion of Russians. Have we all gone mad?
We do not today have grounds to impeach Trump, but given what appears to be strong circumstantial evidence of kompromat, we might have grounds after the Mueller Report.
Even if there are not grounds to impeach Trump, there are a mountain of reasons to primary him in 2020.
Rob and I are not destroying the country, we are trying to save the country and party from Trump. To paraphrase JTK, either we are going down, or he is.
Then what we need to is to go back to the system before the front-loading of primaries.
At least five, since there are also traditions of statism and socialism in this country. Also, I see liberal by the original definition, so the statists and socialists are not under that banner for me. In fact, some of the conservatives have been pretty statists at times.
The Party of Reagan never existed. It is a myth. Any winning party in the United States is a coalition. Richard Nixon built a successful coalition with a Southern Strategy for the Republican Party. Twelve years later, Reagan managed to put together a fractious coalition with the three-legged stool of conservatism, plus what were known as Reagan Democrats. Since then, the vultures within the Republican Party have been living off his leavings while demographic numbers were changing.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has also been trying to put together winning coalitions. It did so briefly with Obama, until they actually started acting on what they believed, and he lost Congress.
Trump put together a new winning coalition. Like Obama, his coattails are not as impressive, or at least have not seemed to be so far. We’ll see what comes of this next election. Part of the way he did that was attracting those blue-collar Reagan Democrats back into the coalition. It’s not a perfect coalition. It has alienated some folks. Some of his trade ideas certainly alienate traditional fiscal Republicans and fiscal conservatives. We can’t yet know how permanent the re-alignment is.
In some ways, Trump represents the old Law & Order Republican. His trade beefs are all about how we lose by following the rules while our trading partners cheat, so he will punish until they start following the rules.
You’re ignoring the Electoral College. Overall vote totals don’t disprove my point.
Your point made no reference to the electoral college. You said, “The voters.” Not, the electors, and you would still be wrong, since the electors “sent” to the electoral college were different people in 2008, 2012, and 2016. If one does not communicate clearly, it does not matter what one’s point is, since it is not being communicated.
Let’s go back to the whole:
I will agree with your first two sentences and last sentence. Because your third sentence is wrong, there is no answer to the question posed in the fourth. Your characterization in the fifth and sixth is also wrong. Are there some Trump voters who were in a Tom Paine/burn it all mood? Some, yes, but most were rule of law people. They saw all these “establishment” Republicans ignoring the rule of law, and Trump promised to enforce the law. That is not burn it down/Tom Paine. That is, “enforce the law.” It’s a very different outlook. Now, you can argue that your definition of “many” is more than you can count on your fingers and toes, but that does not make it anywhere near a majority of Trump voters or enough to characterize them that way.
I should report you for lying. Not one of three people you mentioned as called for the impeachment of Trump. Even Gary said only that it could be done if we have the evidence.
I’m afraid we are just going to have to agree that we disagree. 80,000 votes in four states that gave the presidency to Trump by electoral vote is not an overwhelming landslide victory. The people I hear on talk radio and Fox News in the evening want their voices to be heard but have not taken any civic action to affect local or national politics in the last decade. They rail against the “globalists” and the “elite” without defining or specifying what they would replace it with. They are the peasants with pitchforks assaulting the aristocracy. The Burke vs. Paine analogy is a perfect fit. Personally, I’m tired of the chaos and trying explain why Trump supporters have a point to Trump critics. The person you are trying to defend doesn’t care about you. He cares only about himself.
Trump is not in my mirror, brother. I am nothing like Trump. If it wasn’t you, Arahant, I’d be offended that anyone would say such a silly thing.
This is the Ricochet comment of the year.
OK, GR, I have to give you points for humor.
Report me if you wish. I apologize for attributing a political position to you that you do not hold. I do still maintain that the looking back and being upset about the results of the 2016 election is doing more to destroy this country, and the Republican Party, than President Trump.
The one great event as part of the Aquarennial is the milk carton boat race. Seeing most of the milk sold today comes in white plastic jugs, I’m not sure what today’s craft look like.
I’m sure you could Google it, but just picture one person crafts, some made for speed, some made for elegance, made of hundreds of half gallon milk jugs. From enthusiastic artistic kids to middle aged garage tinkerers, it’s quite the event.
I’ve been a St Paul guy now for 26 years and care less and less every year about the Aquatennial. I barely care about St Paul’s Winter Carnival either.
Where is the data that supports this assertion?