If you are a Trump supporter you learned nothing from this site, nothing from me, nothing from conservatism, nothing from Classical Liberalism, nothing from constitutionalism, nothing from the entrenched establishment dominance over our vote and our lives, nothing about federalism, nothing about a party system, and nothing about morality, ethics, or consistency. You missed every point about the necessity of retaking language and tethering meaning to its source.
Instead, you’ve embraced the most vulgar form of progressive populism and paranoid isolationism. You’ve embraced the very anti-foundationalism and Alinsky tactics that animate and enable the leftist epistemological paradigm, all in the service of a fraud. You have thrown in — whether you like it or not — with people who have repeatedly accused me of being a puppet of the establishment, a “kike,” a “cuck,” and a race traitor, despite my having worked for years to upend the GOP establishment, to fight the scourge of anti-assimilationist multiculturalism and immigration, to expose the fraud of the diversity project and academic leftism dressed up as pragmatism, to expose the political cynicism of racialism, and to detail the mechanisms behind identity politics’ infiltration into our political orthodoxies at the level of established “truths.”
I have fifteen years worth of archives to speak to my intellectual honesty and commitment to principle. I am proud of those efforts.
Yet now, per Geoff B, I am evidently part of a communist-like party organization in Colorado that “stole” delegates from a doddering old Viagra ad who couldn’t be bothered to show up to speak or put together a ground game in a caucus state which voted a number of times, including on March 1, when any registered R was able to attend and vote.
That’s right. I’m part of the GOP Colorado “establishment” — 40% of whom never participated in a caucus before and the overwhelming number of which went for Ted Cruz, who just a couple short years ago we all recognized as a principled opponent to the GOP ruling elite (before he became a Bushy globalist Canadian fake Christian, who loves amnesty and will likely, left unchecked, become the author of a New World Order run by transnational progressives from his perch atop the North American Union).
This charge against me and against other movement conservatives in my state comes despite the fact that as a pre-condition to ratification of the Constitution, states insisted they be allowed to maintain their own election rules, and despite how our CO state caucus system, which we’ve had since 1912 or thereabouts, requires commitment, work, a series of elections, and in the end, actually picked a real Republican in the GOP primaries. Colorado for a few years held a non-binding straw poll. But we are not and haven’t been a primary state. You are being lied to. And those doing the lying and hiding behind eagle pictures or pictures of Trump in armor ready to battle the Mexican hordes are, in a very real respect, advocating for a position that is (per the Framers) un-American.
Then there’s the irony of my having been booted from the company of the GOP’s online “opinion complex” for years thanks to my being a vocal detractor of the shit show that is GOP Congressional leadership, with its party protectionism for failed or dishonest incumbents.
Here’s the truth: Trump has received 45% of the delegates with 36% of the vote. He’s won several caucus states and didn’t complain then. I’ve heard not one of his supporters argue that winner-take-all races in Florida, or full delegate takes in South Carolina — in neither of which state did he get a majority — disenfranchised those who voted for someone other than Trump and who will have no representation on the first ballot at a contested GOP convention. The truth is, the “system” has helped him, as it does most front runners who aren’t total incompetents and phony Republicans.
You Trump backers are dishonest shills praying at the altar of a false god. You are fine with populist authoritarianism so long as you believe it is you who will benefit from the king’s beneficence. You are, in short, Obama voters with Rs attached to your names. You are the problem.
So. Here’s my message: Get the fuck out. I don’t want you around. You are my fault, in part — and for that I apologize to thinking people and actual Constitutionalists and TEA Party conservatives everywhere and forever.
But the truth is, I would never back Pat Buchanan and I’d never back Walter Mondale. And businessman Herbert Hoover was an unmitigated disaster for both the GOP and the US economy, and as a result, his regressive protectionist trade policy helped usher in 80 years of progressive New Deal rule and the institutional rot that has hollowed out our Constitutional system of protections.
I would back none of those candidates individually. So I’ll be damned if I sit back and watch putative “conservatives” back their whiny, orange, lawfare-happy love child and not call these assholes out.
Donald Trump backed John Kerry for President. He told us Hillary Clinton would make a wonderful SoS. He believes his bravery barebacking coeds is analogous to spending time in the Hanoi Hilton. His policy positions, if you can ever pin them down, are incoherent, shallow, and often times completely at odds with one another. He’s a conspiracy theorist whose progressive attitudes are running interference for a leftist movement to nationalize state party behavior and create the conditions for a rejection of the electoral college and state autonomy. He’s anti-federalist, and to him, the most heinous person on earth is the man who — having written the 31-state amicus in Heller; having crossed to the House to help defeat the Gang of 8 amnesty bill; having beaten President Bush’s DOJ in Medellin to protect US sovereignty; having stood up and called out Mitch McConnell for his lies and GOP establishment kabuki theater; having stood for his state (and for those of us whose state reps wouldn’t) in opposition to ObamaCare; and having won two cases preserving 1A religious liberty before SCOTUS — is running against him, a man whom he’s branded a liar, an adulterer, an establishment puppet, a Trojan Horse for a New World Order, a fake Christian, and a mean person nobody likes or can work with.
Donald Trump is everything I’ve spent years condemning.
Fuck him, and fuck every last one of you who would even consider casting a vote for this gauche, tin-plated con man — no matter how much gold leaf he deploys to elevate his needy, narcissistic facade among cultists, morons, and the easily taken.
Go.
The end.
[UPDATE I believe this needs to stay at the top of the page since so many of us have been looking for just the right words to counter the Embiggen America! candidate’s true believers … darleen]
[…] Camaros Pamela Geller: California Muslim Couple Accused Of Pimping Out Housekeeper Protein Wisdom: Hi. It’s Me, Jeff. It’s Time To Say This Out Loud And Without Any Equivocation Shot In The Dark: What Once Was Trayf Is Now Orthodox! STUMP: Public Pensions And Finance Roundup […]
Was I clear enough? Because I can elaborate.
Don’t mince words, Jeff, how do you really feel?
I think the way we have to deal with Trump is analogous to the way we should deal with ISIS: Punch them in the face* until they stop crapping in everybody else’s houses and act like decent human beings. Because there’s no indication to me that Trump (or ISIS) are persuaded by anything akin to sound reasoning or appeal to acknowledged moral and natural law.
*Of course, in Trump’s case when I say “punch” I mean verbal castigation and effective humiliation and denunciation. In ISIS’s case “punch” means “Drop a few hundred thousand large bombs, then bomb the debris into rubble, then scrape up the rubble and compact it and drop it on any ISIS scumbunnies who survived.”
Cool, your site, you don’t want me around, I’ll leave.
Bye.
Thank you, Jeff.
Bravo.
Yes, thank you, Jeff.
Dead solid perfect.
Enough is enough.
Yes, it is.
Faster, please, sellout.
Hi Jeff. Been a while since I posted a comment here, but I have been reading your twitter. I must say that I think Cruz is a no brainer. Trump is an angry loud moron who overpaid for a casino and it went bankrupt. He was anti 2nd amendment that he claims he is for now. If he is somehow nominated that gives the race to Hillery. I am not even that smart of a man and I can see that. I am on your side Jeff.
It’s not even a close call, Charles.
Watching Trump go after Carson, Cruz, Walker while accepting fawning endorsements from Christie, or Jim Webb, or whomever happens to treat Trump “fairly” — which evidently means agreeing with his abject nonsense and pretending he’s a serious political candidate and not a poll-watching narcissistic attention whore — has made me sick.
I defended the early attacks on him because they were unfair, he deserved to be heard out, and because the snobbery was likely to harden his support among a certain disaffected segment of the population.
But once he started playing WWE, he began disgusting me — eventually to the point where I wouldn’t vote for him were it in a race between he and Satan.
Because even tho Satan is the Prince of Lies, we still know who he is. Whereas Trump pretends to represent me. And I won’t ever give an authoritarian mob-enabler my explicit support.
Bravo, Jeff.
I knew you were keeping the faith, brother.
Rock on.
HMOG, that was epic.
I am not sure we agree on all points, or even on all points Trump-related. But it’s more a matter of focus. I think I have been a lot more focused on that Trump will just do whatever the fuck he wants to get what he desires; fuck the consequences.
It’s baffling as hell to me how anyone can have sat through 8 years of Obama and still think that it’s in the Chief Executive’s job description, or even within his power, to change how Washington does business. Or that if by some miracle that does happen, that it’ll be in a direction that you agree with.
As for the WWE, maybe he can challenge Putin to a cage match.
Or to put it more bluntly if Trump gets the nomination then there will be two Democrat presidential candidates on the ballot.
I mean, if people did some basic research on Trump’s past maybe they’d realize the things he’s been saying recently was pandering to the crowd. Worse, I think some others have noticed, what he says is the leftist caricature of conservative beliefs… and people are eating it up?!
I guess I can hope that if Trump somehow gets elected the Ghosts of the Founders will visit him one Christmas Eve and show him the true meaning of
Christmaslimited government, but I’m not going to bet on it.Trump didn’t just pay too much for a casino. He promised he’d not finance with junk bonds; promised the Casino Commission that he had low-interest bank financing as good as in hand, and then he went and junk-bonded it anyway because he’d lied about the bank financing.
There’s so much there that doesn’t belong in the White House.
Well I certainly picked a hell of a time to be away from the desk. . . .
Nah. It’ll be a Democrat and socialist on the ballot instead of a Republican and a socialist.
And who knows? The Socialist might still beat the socialist, after all.
I am sorry to hear about Geoff B though. I don’t do social media, so I have no idea what’s up there. Maybe for the best.
So you’re for Kasich then?
Geoff has been showing a little ankle for the dark side for a while now. I was hoping it was just a phase.
You care to take a shot at Sean Hannity? He’s very concerned about what happened in Colorado and the message you Coloradoans may have sent (without meaning to, of course) because it’s all so confusing –and we don’t want to create misperceptions.
Who knew concern trolls had such large heads?
It isn’t just Geoff B. Lee (see above; I was unaware of his Trump support, by the way) and serr8d are two others.
Sorry. But you know who I am and I don’t apologize for shooting straight. You want to start calling me a proto-communist and trying to Other my state? You can eat a bag of dicks.
He hasn’t felt the Bern, has he?
‘Cause that would be gross. And probably illegal in most states.
You should read your own blog more Jeff.
If you were on Twitter you’d know I’ve told Hannity to rename himself The Human Centipede and just sew his mouth to Trump’s anus already. FOXNews in general is a Trump SuperPac, as has been Breitbart, much to the chagrin of Andrew’s ghost.
Gatewaypundit, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage — these are all phonies. The masks have been lifted and the very clarity I’ve always called for has been happening. This primary has revealed who is with us and who is not.
Been very busy and have been trying to get some health concerns resolved.
I promised I’d return if I ever amassed 5K Twitter followers. Unsurprisingly, I’ve pissed off the majority of Twitter, too. So no luck.
It’s my gift.
At risk of sounding like a broken record (and realizing that using that expression dates me as hopelessly old)
Not only have I not seen anything to dissuade me from my opinion early-on that Trump is in this race to see Hillary elected, but the fact he has regressed into greater bombastic blather, irrationality, arrogance and bitterness … and now wrapping himself in victimhood … convinces me he may love to run but has no intention of winning the general.
Cruz is not ahead in CA, but gathering strength and I’m looking forward to our June primary.
Oh … and I have to say, I’m happy that as the election returns start coming in on Nov 1st, we’ll be on a non-stop flight to Tokyo …
Thanks for sharing that Jeff.
Maybe do a dinosaur (I’m on the cutting edge of the new millenium, technologically speaking –check out my flip phone!) a solid and throw up a post once in a while?
My sympathies on the health front. No idea what you’re going through, but, dealing with my own issues healthwise, I know what it’s like.
Regards and best wishes to you and your family.
I have to say it again: thank you, Jeff. Delivered as only the landlord can.
Thanks, Jeff, now I don’t have to say any of that.
“I don’t do social media, so I have no idea what’s up there.”
Imagine a world where dummies like me post silly gifs to avoid work, Ernst.
Sometimes smart people say stuff too though.
As it happens, I had the same conversation about Trump & Cruz at the barber shop today. General consensus: Trump would be a disaster and the end of any hope for a true conservative resurgence. His candidacy is nothing more than a year long publicity stunt and onanistic frenzy.
As for caucus versus primaries, my state has both with the primary being non-binding. I’ve said a thousand times, “read the rules” if you want to caucus. In my county, the Trump people showed up in force but had no clue how to get delegates selected. When they inevitably lost to Cruz, they bitched about “the establishment.” Extraordinarily wearisome.
Jeff,
It’s good to see you writing long form again, although I realize that in this case your were more or less driven to do so.
I’ve expended a fair amount of effort trying not to mock supporters of any candidates (except Hillary and Bernie because holy crap). However, my attempts to play nice have not been reciprocated, with a few notable exceptions. And this latest “COLORADO WAS STOLEN” bullshit has finally gotten me to the point where I think I should probably prune the number of people I follow. Facts, history, eye witness accounts from you and others who live in Colorado: none it matters. It’s not only irrelevant, it’s all LIES FROM LYING LIARS WHO LIE and seriously, fuck that noise. I’m sick of it.
I do know a few people who support Trump ONLY because they desire the complete and total destruction of the GOP. Based on the GOP’s treachery and malfeasance these last few decades, I can’t actually say I blame them. The rest, though? I can no longer tolerate their bullshit. It’s just too much.
Oh, and I’ll buy you a beer when I’m back in Denver, if you’ve got the time. Heck, this post has earned you a couple of extra.
Btw, seeing people linking and promoting the theory of Wisco fraud affected me in the exact same way, Jeff.
I was here on the ground observing it. Trump ran the worst state campaign imaginable. Even random volunteers knew what was going to happen. People were drinking to celebrate well before the polls closed.
Then you go online and see the Trump horde working non-stop to promote the lie that it was all about voter fraud and a million other bits of horseshit. No, we saw he was a fraud and worked our asses off to defeat him. (And Cruz’s campaign team is nothing short of amazing even if it wasn’t held in comparison to Trump’s utter incompetence.) Fuck ’em.
**stands and cheers**
Jeff, you have said exactly what I have been feeling for months now.
I, too, was willing to give Trump a fairly wide berth on the benefit of the doubt, but particularly since the debates began in August, it has become increasingly apparent that Trump is a megalomaniacal Leftist authoritarian. In the last couple of months, it has become abundantly clear that he is, in fact, a con man, and not even a very good one at that. In the last couple of weeks, it has become abundantly clear that, on top of everything else, he’s staggeringly incompetent, too.
NO WONDER he managed to have so many spectacular failures. Once one realizes that this is someone who honestly thought that there would be no need to do things like study the party rules of the states where he would be competing, that this is someone who couldn’t even be bothered to get his own children to register to vote in time to vote for him, it becomes amazingly clear how this same someone could manage to somehow GO BANKRUPT RUNNING A CASINO!!
I am most certainly quite upset with the fecklessness (at best) of the GOP in the last ten years or so, and I certainly share the anger that much of the electorate does, the frustration with the cronyism and unmitigated gall of the political elite. But above all else, I want the best for my country, and the best, by any actual objective standard, is actual Constituationism, which is, by definition, a strict adherence to conservatism and federalism.
So, kudos to you. You’ve said what needs to be said, and you’ve said it well.
“You care to take a shot at Sean Hannity”
Ernst, it may please you to know that Hannity got SO at odds with Twitter that Dana Perino deleted the Twitter app from his phone and ordered him off for a while.
Twitter has been urinating on Hannity non stop since he turned it into the “interview Trump every night so he can give his stump speech over and over” show.
He went way too far and assumed his “Cruz is also an outsider” schtick was going to hedge that for him.
Nope.
I think the dude may well have wrecked his career. Not sure if he did it for “Big Trump” ratings, NYC-brotherhood, or he just lost it.
“Imagine a world where dummies like me post silly gifs to avoid work, Ernst.
Sometimes smart people say stuff too though. ”
Yes, and Magic Jack can hire Tumblr a-holes to shut you up at any time.
It’s like paradise, a game of telephone, and a burning toilet made from human bones all somehow had a baby and that baby has a meth problem along with some attachment issues. Oh and there are annoying ads and they regularly change the interface just to piss the users off. And the stock is in the sewers.
I have some bad news for you. . . .
hey bh!
I thought for sure you’d be living large off of the franchisees by now.
(restaurant business, right? it’s been a while)
Jeff, are you holding anything back? You have to let it all hang out.
I don’t think you mentioned cock slapping or screwing any Trumpkins with a swordfish.
Can I be allowed to be amused by the idea of a president Trump?
If Trump gets the nomination he will lose, short of Hillary getting hit by a bus in October.
I hope we don’t have to even go there because it is over for Trump in Cleveland this summer.
Can I be allowed to be amused by the idea of Hillary getting hit by a bus?
I’m fully prepared to destroy the GOP if that’s what it takes to restore constitutional conservatism. But I am at a complete loss to see how supporting Trump(TM) brand nationalist populism does anything to advance the cause of constitutional conservatism. And I’m not too sure that the GOPe wouldn’t adapt and assimilate to it.
Can I be allowed to be amused . . . ?
Normally I’d make some kind of sarcastic remark involving sex toys and Texas.
But I’m at a loss to come up with one. And nobody’s around to feign outrage anyways.
A crank, a promiscuous trollop and a phony walk into a bar. . . .
Hey, Ernst. Hope all is well with you and yours!
Heh, not franchising yet. Turns out being being hyper-busy is good for my psyche but just one restaurant has created 20,000 unread emails and my forgetting the names and faces of friends, family.
Should that (or possible indictment) occur, you can be assured that Liz Warren will get tapped as an immediate replacement, probably winning over the Sanders camp in the process…
I’m expecting a Clinton/Warren ticket, myself.
Why do you hate buses?
Well wishes to you also.
You heartless exploiter of the working man.
WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO START PAYING YOUR WORKERS A LIVING WAGE?!?!!??
Is it too late to have Cuba join the Union and run Fidel?
School bus for added Hillarity.
Short buses got
No reason
[…] piece below is the definition of mic drop. Everything said by Jeff Goldstein at ProteinWisdom.com is the truth and EXACTLY how I feel about Trump and those who visit SavingtheRepublic.com but are […]
” Normally I’d make some kind of sarcastic remark involving sex toys and Texas.”
Colder n’ a Amraillo buttplug in January…
Thank you for this. Deliciously refreshing, like a cold glass of iced tea on a hot day. This race has become depressingly demoralizing so this helped a lot. Definitely a keeper!
Wow. I am impressed. You said exactly what I have been thinking and feeling ever since the Trump became a Republican so that he could destroy the Republican party and guarantee Hillary a win. Bravo!
Someone with guts should post this at Free, er TRumpRepublic. I got zotted awhile back because I wrote something like this a few months ago cause I was fed up with the Trump cult and the bashing of Cruz. They kept the post up cause they thought it would embarass me, but I wear it as a badge of honor. http://freerepublic.com/focus/news/3403311/posts?page=125#125
It is.
Thank you Jeff.
[Genuflects]
That certainly cleared the air.
To add Jeff,
On Monday I saw a tweet from Ron Nehring extolling the virtues of Ted Cruz at a meet & greet in Orange County, CA.
So one of two things are going on:
1. The GOPe is so damn afraid of Trump that they are holding their collective noses and backing Cruz.
2. The GOPe is still biding their time and going to stab Cruz in the back come convention time.
I chose 2.
As one of your social media followers, I commend you for keeping up the drumbeat. This post perfectly encapsulates my frustrations with the Trump cultists. I’m not sure it would be possible to pick a worse avatar to represent the genuine complaints they have with the establishment. Everything they say they’re against, he represents.
I learned I am a harmful jackass at best from this site.
I’ve donated to three politicians, Cruz being one, $10 each, but have tried to allow for other interpretations of Trump than an uninformed Hitler.
Please teach harder sir.
Just for fun, let’s think about things that would make our host consider casting the vote for Trump.
Would Jeff vote for Trump if Trump chose Jeff as V.P.?
Many many meetings would have had to have been taken for this scenario to be realistic.
Compare and contrast:
Buckley and Weicker/Goldstein and Trump.
http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Weicker-Donald-Trump-a-bigoted-con-artst-6449424.php
I keep trying to find words to add, but you pretty much said it all.
Thank you!
1 and 2 aren’t mutually exclusive, you know, John P. Squibob
NotquiteunBuckley.
Jeff’s version was so much more articulate.
Based upon Churchill’s words he felt differently, age alone was what he attributed this ambiguity of schema/mindset/ethos to clearly in some instances, being the same Winston.
And if your take away from this post is “Jeff thinks Trump is an uninformed Hitler,” there is no teaching harder, because you’re ineducable.
In fact, you’re probably riding that short bus McGehee and bgbear were talking about, your so ineducable.
At this point, the thing that makes the most sense is for Trump and Sanders to get together to run on a national resentment platform.
“Jeff’s version was so much more articulate.”
I don’t think you mean to insult the host, so let’s just go ahead and change your “was” to is.
I’ll just take what I know you meant to say, not what you actually said, and do what I do toxicaly.
The worst part of all this is people who once seemed to have a good head on their shoulders thinking this orange megalomaniac is going to burn it all down when the fact of the matter is that anyone with the lack of self-respect to caress his scrotum will get whatever they want out of him. The only principle this jackass has is that if you love him you’re fine and if you don’t you’re the enemy.
https://twitter.com/Pablo_1791/status/631098685699391488
[…] Here’s the truth: Trump has received 45% of the delegates with 36% of the vote. He’s won several caucus states and didn’t complain then. I’ve heard not one of his supporters argue that winner-take-all races in Florida, or full delegate takes in South Carolina — in neither of which state did he get a majority — disenfranchised those who voted for someone other than Trump and who will have no representation on the first ballot at a contested GOP convention. The truth is, the “system” has helped him, as it does most front runners who aren’t total incompetents and phony Republicans. […]
jeff g long form good time spent
I still think it’s likely Trump will get the nomination.
SMoD 2016. It’s time and past time for an extinction-level event.
[…] I’ve been vacillating on Trump. Most of the time, I think he’s a cult of personality candidate just like Obama, another blank slate. From Jeff G: […]
I wrote Mark Steyn Should be Fired from NRo because of a nasty column by a writer Steyn liked.
And I hate myself for it.
What an ass am I?
In my world, not getting dis-invited to my brother’s wedding is a kind of “success.” I ain’t joking.
Jeff. About frickin’ time you showed up. Yes, agreed. Cruz is the only choice, even though the whole shitshow is coming apart.
Hey, just saw that CO is voting to rescind its magazine ban. Yes!
I have, and will continue to, defend Trump against “Hitler” labels.
I honestly don’t believe Trump is a bigot/racist/xenophobe — he is way too narcissistic to classify others into different groups. You are either a supplicant or an enemy.
He’s quite egalitarian in his disdain.
>“I think the man is a total con artist,” Weicker, 84, told Hearst Connecticut Media. <
total rino speaks to proggtard media
>What an ass am I? <
go easy you're just a jerk.
I still think it’s likely Trump will get the nomination.
Yeah, but it becomes less and less likely the longer this goes on.
We’ll know on the second ballot. If there is a second ballot.
Why would an individual with the I.Q. of our host worry if voters have any say? The people that might vote in a primary are so activated that people make bank. Others are too devoted to all the obstacles missing the paths.
High I. Q. folks know High I,Q. folks, and damn isn’t Trump ready to beat his opposition, a position most foul to some.
If there’s a second ballot Trump will stomp away like the superannuated three-year-old he’s repeatedly demonstrated himself to be. He already knows he can’t win once the delegates are turned loose.
And if Trump is nominated, Hillary wins. As badly as the RNC has screwed the pooch in recent years, the party’s grassroots aren’t desperate enough to bend over for him.
Nor are they as scared of Hillary as certain loathsome individuals have wished.
What IQ does it take to understand Trump?*
Certainly the lower the better; you read a study proving you right whereas Trump failed to waste all Dad’s money.
John McCain’s sad incompetence cost lives, Donald understands this and courageously at the start said so.
If my dad were a former governor of Michigan, like Willard Romney’s I would not have run for office or governed like Mitt.
I voted for all of ’em. Gestalt baby.
You will do now likewise to avoid painful cognitive dissonance of dis.*
^Drunkenly stupidly at worst, aren’t I engagement-worth?
*I am smart and don’t make stupid/beastly/dumb plays when I fold every single hand dealt me save AA or KK or AK suited. By God I will in fact win some day too.
Hi. It’s me, Car in. And ditto everything Jeff just said.
aaaaaaahhhhhhhh
The worst part of all this is people who once seemed to have a good head on their shoulders thinking this orange megalomaniac is going to burn it all down when the fact of the matter is that anyone with the lack of self-respect to caress his scrotum will get whatever they want out of him. The only principle this jackass has is that if you love him you’re fine and if you don’t you’re the enemy.
My crush on Pablo resumes …
One of the funnier things I’ve been hearing lately is how 1) Trump is good because he will destroy the GOP and 2) you can’t deny him even without his hitting 1237 because… that will destroy the GOP.
The nice thing about going with door number 2? It might also destroy the carnie barkers we’ve allowed to infiltrate us. The Coulters, the Jim Hofts, the Drudges, the Fox shills, the infowars degenerates, Drudge, all of them. They are all in and I’ll greatly enjoy watching them eat shit.
Honestly, I’ve been sort of angered that people believe that Trump is “the one” to burn this muthafocker down. He’s the “F-U” candidate.
Sorry. He’s not. He’s played the game (from the other side) for decades.
Joy Division – Disorder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrzGpVOPcTI
“You are either a supplicant or an enemy.”
And since Trump can’t, magically, change this view of yours, you cannot be more justified.
Public Image Ltd – Rise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN-GGeNPQEg
>And since Trump can’t, magically, change this view of yours, you cannot be more justified.<
ruining class stupid
Of course we all understand nuance and the idea OUTLAW is not Donald.
In fact, we ALL understand it to an extent any dissent will easily be seen for the whorily-sophoristicness demanding elimination.
Many, many words need to explain Harvard Ted Cruise being the or an “outlaw.” Which is why I donated to Cruz. Easiest for my limited landscape is:
A) Iowa corn-growing brown-kid-killing fat rich white guys who just play the system to rape decency.
B) The 10th.
The veiness is the opposite of despair, hence my attaction.
Talking Heads – Talking Heads: 77
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2y77QjFnuk
Vaclav Havel
“The Power of the Powerless”
(1978)
http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html
>In fact, we ALL understand it to an extent any dissent will easily be seen for the whorily-sophoristicness demanding elimination.<
nah idiot move on
More like:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b6Bv887-JlM
George G.
One of the more annoying things I’ve been reading lately is the Cruz is pawn/tool/captive/bitch of the GOPe because he’s got the backing of Bush, Romney, etc. etc.
That strikes me as ass-backwards.
Which is why I’ve argued – both in 2012 and in 2016 – that a smarter GOP might be better off not running a presidential candidate at all (or providing the most token of support), focusing resources instead on House, Senate and gubernatorial races.
It is so transparently ass-backwards that I know I’m dealing with a moron or liar at that point, Ernst.
Add up the raw count of Clinton, Sanders, and Trump supporters/voters with an eye to revisiting the multi-thousand year old arguments against “democracy”.
“If you can keep it” was always rather more an epitaph than an encouragement.
Even if Cruz is the Savior, he’s too little way too late. And he’s just another pandering, manipulative pol, anyway.
You know the only person worthy of being voted lord over you is you. I call it self government.
Ah, whatever. You know, there may be a new Dark Age coming, but it probably won’t last as long as the last one, and it’ll be really beautiful after that.
that Mr. Trump can bring you back to the blogging just makes me belieber even more that he’s the disruptive force our sclerotic corrupt politics needs so terribly badly
the only way out is through i think
That’s a horrible visual, hap
these are the dark times Mr. Cookies
After getting drunk and voting for McCain, holding my nose and voting for Romney, and not even getting a reach-around from the “tea -partiers” last time around, I’ve divorced myself from politics. Honestly.
If I vote, and so far no one has purchased my vote, I’ll vote against Bernie. ’cause that’s the only way I can see it getting worse than it is. If Bernie gets a nod.
I’m probably part of the problem. I’ll admit that. But I’ve been fucked so often I whistle when the wind blows, and I don’t chafe any more.
THANK YOU JEFF! THANK YOU JEFF! THANK YOU JEFF! THANK YOU JEFF! THANK YOU JEFF!
We have bookmarked your site. I just read out loud to my wife this brilliant piece. She’s known all along what a complete joke – and now fraud – Trump is and it’s time to send this clown to the dustbin.
My ANTI-PROGRESSIVE and then TEA party ‘cred’ goes way back to 1994 when the DNC came out swinging against a then Independent Counsel investigating Clinton. They called the IC a “Nazi”. (It was at that moment in life I had concrete verification of what sinister, corrupt rat-bastard ALL Progressives are before I knew they fancied themselves as “Progressives.”) They called Mr. S****z a Nazi even though I knew this man had been married to a Jewish woman and the Key Man inside his law office was a black woman. That man had impeccable integrity and a laser-like legal mind.
And now these Trumpian Dystopian Eggheads have fostered an environment that condemns the first real candidate for POTUS since I’ve be legally able to vote. These Eggheads who are probably a collection of porn-addicted, fame-starved wanna-be Benedict Arnolds dressed in Paul Revere garb are THE WORST kind of PROGRESSIVE in America.
Not only do they believe their own bullshit but they stole our principles before they started believing their own bullshit. AND THAT IS WHERE THE PARTY ENDS.
hillary’s no good she’s corrupt and dorky and smells like pee
bernie i can’t take seriously
ted’s for other people not for me
so we shall see what we shall see
Mike Sojz wrote: Even if Cruz is the Savior, he’s too little way too late. And he’s just another pandering, manipulative pol, anyway.
Mr. Cruz has never – unlike a certain New York Megalomaniac or a particular Red Diaper Spoiled Brat – proclaimed himself to be The American Messiah. Mr. Cruz is not so shallow or Narcissistic to believe he can be Our Political Jesus.
He believes that he can put together a group of conservatives, backed by enough of the Sovereign People, to begin the Restoration of the national government.
Mr. Cruz is mistaken, because the central government is so corrupted by Leftism that it is terminal. It’s too far gone to fix; there’s not enough flesh left on it to restore to a Normal appearance.
I believe any hope we have of achieving a Restoration of our Freedom and Ordered Liberty lies in the Several States, if we can work together and take over a few of them and then stage a Rebellion against the National Despotism [and the attendant State Despotisms], with the ultimate goal of reconstituting The Constitution down the long road ahead.
However, I believe Mr. Cruz will be able – has what it takes – to reconstitute the effectiveness of our National Security, so that we can get about our business on the State Level with less concern for foreign invasions of all kinds. Also: while he will not be able to save the Federal Patient, he will be able to move it a bit out of the way of our efforts, domestically.
Throughout his public career, Edward Cruz has proven he is the opposite of a ‘pandering, manipulative pol’. If you honestly believe he is one, then you have either been imbibing the Leftist Kool-Aid or binge-eating Trump Steaks – or both – and you’ve rendered yourself philosophically Morbidly-Obese.
AND one additional follow up to aforementioned post.
Matt Drudge……..FUCK YOU TOO!!!!!!!!!!
“Fuck him, and fuck every last one of you who would even consider casting a vote for this gauche, tin-plated con man”
The media glee off camera must be wiggly giggly in its chortling…
“Those stupid fucking rubes! BWAHAHAHAHA!!”
Bob’s comment addresses most of this, but I’d add that any hope of holding Congress during an uncontested presidential election is sheer lunacy. It would make Paul Ryan and Mushy McTurtleface the de facto leaders of the opposition and the sole targets of Dem attacks.
“Smarter” isn’t the word I would use.
Unfortunately, I’m of the similar mind that this largest phase of the American experiment is wheezing and thrashing its way to a painful end. The most peaceful, least painful (and don’t kid yourselves, there will be lots of pain to go around) way for the dissolution to happen is along current State lines. Then, the States can form new alliances and unions among themselves, or even within themselves. Then perhaps these new unions would join together, more strongly or more loosely as needs serve.
It would be better if this eventual dissolution/re-solution happened peacefully and with the willing participation of the people. I don’t see this happening. Because, as the Founders knew, this kind of governance requires an a) educated and b) a moral population. We have neither.
There is a natural size for everything. When we try to make things too big or too small, they don’t work right. Representative republicanism is no different. One can’t represent people one never speaks with, or can never possibly meet. Right now, the “people’s house” has on average one rep for each 700,000 people. That’s not representation. It can’t possibly be. In this function, at minimum, government is not working at its natural size. I’m sure this blog’s readership can come up with a few others.
Just as there’s a natural size for everything, there’s a natural scope or environment for everything. Fish can’t survive in treetops, people can’t survive in volcanoes. Again, the readership doesn’t need me to point out any of the myriad examples where our government structures at the national (and state, and perhaps local) level are attempting to function well outside their natural scope. The US EPA doesn’t need to determine whether or not I can grow carrots in my backyard.
I would like to rant a bit more, but the people on the conference call will want me to talk to them in a minute, so I’ll sign off.
Damn well put, Objet d’Arth.
James Madison believed a large Constitutional Republic could work, but he also believed that the one Representative for every 30,000 citizens [Article I, Section 2, Clause 3] was the ration needed for effective, republican representation – and it did.
The current apportionment cap was set in 1929.
Late to the game, so I’ll just add…
And all God’s people said “AMEN!”
For what it’s worth, Jeff, your beautiful screed was linked this morning by Jim Geraghty in the Morning Jolt.
Oops…meant to write ‘ratio’, not ‘ration’.
A – fucking – MEN!
Thank you Jeff for writing what I’m incapable of pulling out of my head and heart.
Pablo – It truly has been an eye opening election season while watching, once respected, thought leaders descend into madness in their love of all things Trump. Palin should be added to that list of total sellouts.
So many, Gary, have outed themselves it’s tough to keep track of them all.
I’m tempted to start a list, so my aging Chemo Brain will never forget.
[…] Mr Goldstein takes care of business in “a scorching, profane response to the Trump fans spinning conspiracy theories about how […]
Typical badass punching right but will immediately fold to the Left when called a racist, sexist, or anti-Semite. Too bad the GOP and RNC don’t have the will to fight to Progressive Left. Win or not, Trump will mercifully destroy the Globalist Right and third party built around American interests first will arise. Cruz will not change our usurious economy. Calls himself a Christian, what a charlatan.
It’s a shame the old Trollhammer script doesn’t work anymore. Made it so easy to ignore the written flatulence that wafts in.
I have, and will continue to, defend Trump against “Hitler” labels. I honestly don’t believe Trump is a bigot/racist/xenophobe — he is way too narcissistic to classify others into different groups. You are either a supplicant or an enemy. He’s quite egalitarian in his disdain.
THIS.
Obviously, Ted Cruz is a better candidate than the mercurial, churlish, bloviating, and disingenuous Mr. Trump.
But have you all forgotten exactly *why* Mr. Trump had appeal to begin with?
Jeff,
I’ve never heard of you before today, this is the first post I’ve read, and all I can say is, Where have you been all my life? You’re awesome.
“Was I clear enough? Because I can elaborate.”
Oh, come on, Jeff. Stop being so shy. ;-)
I’ve never heard of you before today, this is the first post I’ve read, and all I can say is, Where have you been all my life? You’re awesome. – See more at: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=58377#comments
It’s a long story.
Those were good times. As for the punchbowl turds, it can be instructive to read what they believe to be their most effective arguments, only to demonstrate thereby that they have been marginalized cranks all their lives, and that their future re-marginalization will make not a ripple of difference to them or to anyone else.
Trump, they think, offers them a chance to smash the Grand Conspiracy that has prevented them from being known for the great thinkers and leaders they’ve always been told by their mothers they are — it would be sad if it weren’t so damned hilarious.
I for one have not — and that memory is precisely why I reject Trump with every fiber of my being. He is a hijacking of righteous anger, redirecting it into pointless mob ejaculations rather than productive subversion.
I thought the point of this post was to tell the Trump minions to leave.
So what’s the yellow pustule still doing here?
I for one have not — and that memory is precisely why I reject Trump with every fiber of my being. He is a hijacking of righteous anger, redirecting it into pointless mob ejaculations rather than productive subversion.
Seconded, in spades. I don’t want a demagogue. I don’t want a president who “inspires” me; who manipulates emotions to drive policy toward what the demos thinks it wants this particular instant.
I want someone dull, with fidelity to the Constitution, whose purpose is to leave me the fuck alone. I don’t need a government who believes its duty is to make my life “better,” where “better” is defined by a twenty-something sociology B.A. from Yale.
In short, I want Calvin Coolidge.
Anyway, the thought just occurred to me, as I listen to Rush try to explain yet again the difference between caucuses and primaries and how the establishment is going to do what the establishment is going to do to protect insiders from outsiders etc. etc. ad. nauseam, that the advantage of the caucus system is that there’s no such thing as a low-information caucus goer.
Something we should all think about.
i’m not a minion i just really can’t deal with that pee-stanky old lady being president
so i’m hoping Mr. Trump can help us with that
I would take it as a personal kindness
Exactly. I don’t care whether I like my president, and I sure don’t need for him to care about me.
All I want is to know that he will take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
Anything else people want to say about Ted Cruz — for or against — is just so much background noise.
Calvin Coolidge
Effin Ay Bubba
And speaking of marginalized cranks, I guess I own Mark Levin an apology about that whole Agrarian Populism Nationalism thing.
Anyway, the thought just occurred to me, as I listen to Rush try to explain yet again the difference between caucuses and primaries and how the establishment is going to do what the establishment is going to do to protect insiders from outsiders etc. etc. ad. nauseam, that the advantage of the caucus system is that there’s no such thing as a low-information caucus goer.
Something we should all think about.
And shall we make the rules uniform throughout all states, be they primary or caucuses?
Suggestions:
–Presidential Delegates are always proportional, Not “Winner take all”, since it is the national presidency, and not a state Senate seat?
–No “open primaries”, which only allow sabotage voters of the other party to go urinate into one party’s voting pool?
–No “jungle primaries” which are vulnerable to political chicanery? (See the story of Evin Edwards Vs. David Duke in Louisiana as an example)
“Cruz will not change [and NO1 appends false and useless blah blah blah here]”
Cruz will not change. That’s about right about the right things. Which right things are following the written text of the Constitution as close to the letter and spirit as is possible to do when governing. It’s not about a man, but about men keeping to the law as such, which law was written with the purpose of keeping “the Man” out of your life.
In 1996 Alaska Republicans added a straw poll of sorts to their caucus/convention delegate selection system. I took part in that and was a delegate to the district convention — but due to other conflicting plans couldn’t be a delegate at the state convention. I gather their process has changed in the last 20 years.
My wife and I have plans to retire to a state that, as it happens, also has a caucus/convention system — with no straw poll. If that system remains in place (assuming, I think correctly, that the state’s GOP is still around for the 202x presidential election) I can see myself getting active again in party politics, where I can push for the things I believe in, and actually be heard.
In a primary state, there’s no point. Which is, I’m sure, precisely the point.
. . . [T]here’s no such thing as a low-information caucus goer.
A minor quibble.
I’ve done ‘Pub caucuses for a number of election cycles and I’ve seen the same thing time and again. (See, e.g. Ron Paul people for one example) Too many of these people show up for the first time and haven’t a clue as to how a caucus is conducted. They support “Candidate X” but don’t know how to translate their support into a vote at the convention. These rules are not secret. Before I lost my “caucus virginity,” I read the rules and knew which “Peg A” went into which “Slot B.”
i’m not a minion i just really can’t deal with that pee-stanky old lady being president
so i’m hoping Mr. Trump can help us with that
I would take it as a personal kindness
And THIS too.
Obviously I prefer the Thinking Man Cruz over the Bloviating Man Trump, but if Trump somehow wins a fair delegate vote, then by gum, I will support him in the general.
After all, he will still have to deal with Congress. And watching Mr. Bloviator Hairpiece give a smackdown to Yertle The Turtle McConnell in the Senate would be amusing. Trump isn’t a Principled Classical Liberal, but he certainly isn’t the Establicans who told us all to eat our Amnesty Globalism Turd Sandwiches and smile.
And if the GOPee try to shaft either Cruz OR Trump in the convention backrooms and foist somebody like !Jeb! on us, well, they deserve to go the way of the Whigs and implode. Even a bad voter primary choice is better than a Party Elite choosing for them.
Let the Commiecrat Politboro rig their delegate votes to give it to Hillary the Bolshevik, no matter how well Bernie the Menshevik does in their Party primaries.
Curmudgeon, the fly in the ointment for your suggestion is that delegates are chosen by the state parties, which are regulated according to state law.
Federalism doesn’t exist to make things easier for the national body politic, but to protect states and their citizens from the whims of the national body politic.
In a primary state, there’s no point. Which is, I’m sure, precisely the point.
I agree. I need to flesh out my thinking on that, and undoubtedly, my thoughts would be too lengthy for a blog comment. That said, primaries subvert the system in my view, because the deification of “democracy” as opposed to the “republic” part of our system will ultimately destroy us in my view.
Trump is a globalist. His patriotic slogan hats are made in China.
“And watching Mr. Bloviator Hairpiece give a smackdown to Yertle The Turtle McConnell in the Senate would be amusing.”
What fucking fantasyland are you imagining here Curmudgeon? The imbecile Trump has explicitly denounced Ted Cruz for saying to McConnell’s face what is true about him, that McConnell is a bald-faced lair. And you expect Trump to have the gumption to smackdown McConnell?
“And shall we make the rules uniform throughout all states, be they primary or caucuses?”
Why should the state level parties comply? The national party is where the shit show is. You can’t credibly threaten throw someone out of the tent if they won’t come in. If RNC jerks the leash on local measures then they’ll have an empty leash to show for it.
And much of his campaign organization has ties to Vladimir Putin.
This.
Much this.
Repeatedly over the head until it gets through.
re: Sherm Law’s minor quibble.
The prime example of that (one I realized somebody was sure to point out right as I hit the “post” button) is the idiot Trump “delegate” who made much ado about burning his party registration card.
Anyway, in my defense I’m going with: people like that aren’t low-information, they’re just stupid.
Regarding uniform election rules:
It depends on whether we’re a national democracy or a federated republic of independent states, doesn’t it?
I think I’d prefer instead if the National Committee punished states with stupid rules (like open primaries) by severely curtailing their representation to the national nominating convention.
“He believes his bravery barebacking coeds is analogous to spending time in the Hanoi Hilton.”
“We live in the age of cooties. Don’t you know the risks you’re running?”
Trump is a globalist. His patriotic slogan hats are made in China.
I hate the game, not the players caught up in it. And frankly, the protectionists have something of a point. National security and sovereignty mean more than a quick buck.
Does it make sense to have “Free Trade” with Red China, when all it does is build up a war machine to be used against us, and props up North Korea and its goons? North Korea would have gone the way of East Germany save for Red China propping it up, and Red China does that with its “Free Trade” (for them, not us). Red China isn’t Japan, and it isn’t South Korea.
All that said, the impulsive and mercurial Mr. Trump pounced on this issue, and the immigration issue, first. He certainly didn’t do it thoughtfully; he did it on impulse. But after decades of the Bushyrovie Party elites telling us to eat our globalist open border turd sandwiches, that Mr. Trump would have appeal on this issue, at least until he began unfairly smearing Mr. Cruz and having tantrums, does not surprise me at all.
Why should the state level parties comply? The national party is where the shit show is.
Au contraire, all kinds of states have shit shows of their own. The once Golden State being the most recently prominent, as well as long established cesspools like LA and NJ.
First.
Oh please stop.
What fucking fantasyland are you imagining here Curmudgeon? The imbecile Trump has explicitly denounced Ted Cruz for saying to McConnell’s face what is true about him, that McConnell is a bald-faced lair. And you expect Trump to have the gumption to smackdown McConnell?
As soon as McConnell crosses Trump absolutely. Trump says whatever he says in the moment. You are assuming Trump actually *thinks things through* before he shoots his mouth off? Fantasyland, indeed!
I never assumed Trump thinks. How would I name him an imbecile if that were so. Again, stop.
I think I’d prefer instead if the National Committee punished states with stupid rules (like open primaries) by severely curtailing their representation to the national nominating convention.
I think I agree with this. As I said above, I need to flesh out my thinking more. The problem is that the “establishment elite” can manipulate the process at the national level. There has to be some balance between national rule-making which can give us more McCains and Romneys and a process which allows the next Coolidge to rise to the top.
I don’t know what the answer is, other than a diminution of federal power at any level and a return to the days when control was closer to home.
Bottom line: The farther you are away from me while making decisions about my life, the more you suck.
@ Jeff G.
How many comments to we have to post to get you back here more frequently?
Asking for a friend.
First.
Oh please stop.
Sorry, but he was the first in this 2016 presidential campaign. Even a loudmouth bloviator buffoon can get something right.
“On immigration policy, party elders were caught completely by surprise. Even canny operators like Ted Cruz didn’t fully appreciate the depth of voter anger on the subject. And why would they? If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it’s hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don’t go to public school. You don’t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It’s all good.”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-is-shocking-vulgar-and-right-213572
Curmudgeon, I’m not going to argue with you or anyone else about Trump. He is not better than Hillary. I suspect if nominated he would throw the election — even if his head-to-head numbers against her weren’t the worst of anyone seeking the GOP nomination.
I will not vote for him. I won’t bother trying to defend myself on that to anyone because it’s a matter of conscience.
Call me a cuck or a Trotskyite or whatever the Trumpkins are throwing around these days. The mob does not tell me how to vote and never will.
You fucking liar. Eat shit and die.
That’s the answer.
Call me a cuck or a Trotskyite or whatever the Trumpkins are throwing around these days. The mob does not tell me how to vote and never will.
I never called you, or any other #Nevertrump person, any of those smears. All I said was that (1) I understood what anger Mr. Trump tapped into, anger that everyone of Jeff Goldstein’s disciples, of all people, should understand! The GOPee kept snuffing out reasonable people who pointed out where the Globalist Amnesty Wall Street Journal bandwagon was heading, and so (2) an unreasonable loudmouth buffoon who the GOPee *couldn’t* snuff out stole the thunder on these issues.
I do hope a reasonable person like Ted Cruz, who had the good sense to co-opt the Trump anger and even tried to have a bromance with Mr. Trump at first, still prevails, and I will pull hard for him when the contest finally reaches me in CA.
You fucking liar. Eat shit and die.
Oh, GROW UP. Really.
Honestly, Trump did force these issues to the surface. He did. And no, that doesn’t make him the best candidate, not by a long shot. Cruz is.
I don’t know if he was first or not, but he was certainly the loudest, m0st obnoxious, and luckiest –in that an criminal illegal who never should have been on the streets murdered a nice young woman in San Francisco at precisely the time Trump was at his loudest and most obnoxious.
That said, Cruz had the best add about the issue –addressing precisely the job issue raised in the politico piece curmudgeon linked.
You probably forgot about it in all the fretting over soccer balls and teddy bears.
And it was Trump’s obnoxiousness on immigration that had me thinking he was shilling for Clinton.
I believe sucking the oxygen out of the room was the cliche I used.
That said (again) I wish Cruz had done a better job of getting to his right (e.g. “Trump talks about building a wall, I can get it done –without being a jerk about it” –that kind of thing).
But he did well enough to win Iowa, and he’s doing well enough to still have a shot at the nomination.
Even a loudmouth bloviator buffoon can get something right.
Yeah, sure he can, O self-outed mark.
Believe that if you like, but expect to be called a liar whenever you say it out loud — or just an idiot, if that offends you less. Those of us who have been paying attention from the start know who co-opted whom. When you claim otherwise here, you’re insulting the intelligence of nearly everyone you’re talking to.
As much effort as you’re putting into rehabilitating Trump in this thread of all places, it’s not hard to suspect your motives.
The Constitution is a dead letter.
I like Donald Trump.
it is what it is
Apparently somebody didn’t internalize the GTFO message.
The Constitution is a dead letter.
I like Donald Trump.
Kern-Gershwin
So persuasive.
Spoken like a necrophiliac.
After 8 years of Obama, you really want to watch Trump abuse the corpse?
Yeah, sure he can, O self-outed mark.
So the blog turns tinfoil hat conspiracy, no matter how often I make it clear that Cruz is a way better candidate. Grow up, again.
Believe that if you like, but expect to be called a liar whenever you say it out loud — or just an idiot, if that offends you less. Those of us who have been paying attention from the start know who co-opted whom.
And be prepared to be called an overgrown child. Ted Cruz started out his campaign in 2016 on Obamacare, while Trump started it out on building the wall. Even Ted underestimated the anger at the issues of immigration and globalism, preferring to talk about socialized medicine, which, while important, still ignores the importation of those who are bursting public medical assistance to the less affluent at the seams, and this importation imperils even private hospitals now.
As much effort as you’re putting into rehabilitating Trump in this thread of all places, it’s not hard to suspect your motives.
So pointing out why Trump took off, no matter how much I re-iterate over and over that Ted Cruz is much better, constitutes “rehabilitating” Trump. Again, grow up.
I like Donald Trump
Lime-Jell-O Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise
Grow up, again.
Stop Curmugeon, just stop. Yer not helping yourself here.
Like McGehee, I won’t vote for Trump. But that doesn’t make me a #neverTrump person.
I might vote against Hillary or Bernie, unlikely as that is.
If he’s elected, he might surprise me and then I’d vote for his reelection.
Unlikely as that is.
What we have heyah is failure to co-mune-i-cate.
If I’m understanding McGehee and sdferr correctly, they’re saying that the timing of Trump’s embrace of the issue is convenient, so the doubt the sincerity of his commitment to the issue.
Frankly, it’s hard to fault them. Trump’s not exactly known for honoring his ccommitments, either personally or professionally.
But for purposes of shooting the proverbial bull, Trump moved the Overton Window.
Or rather, it was the yawming response to the media’s attempt to fire up the outrage-o-meter yet again that moved the Overton Window.
Now all of you, eat your hard boiled eggs.
Mr. Trump is a plum lolly compared to the stanky old pee lady
It’s not simply Trump’s sincerity on the illegal immigration issue that’s the problem Ernst, it’s his lifelong and permanent commitment to bullshit that’s the trouble, along with Curmugeon’s apparent willingness to overlook what about that matters, and so to avoid the meat of the problem. Any apology for Trump (apology in the ancient’s sense of a defense) cannot proceed without stressing over and over again, just as Trump lies over and over again, what an awful con-artist Trump remains and will remain to his last day. See, Trump chooses that. He gives no-one a choice in the matter.
Change of subject:
Hey, did you hear that Corey Lewandowski won’t be prosecuted?
Turns out Michelle Fields was asking for it.
the bitch
not everything has to be a crimes
I understand Curmudgeon to be apologizing for Trump’s supporters, not Trump himself sdferr.
Trump’s supporters are marks, so why any apology for them?
I mean, is it “oh poor put upon marks that they’re so pitifully deceived by their great leader who only wishes the best for them”? Or what, it’s hard to imagine?
Oh poor put upons. Gack, they’re everywhere. Imma victim, bellows Trump! Us too, bleat his sheep.
Maybe because I have some sympathy for invincible ignorance?
Look, I’ve said as much as Curmudgeon has, in other words, in a different context. The marks, as you call them, don’t care that Trump “might” be lying to them. Because they know the politicians lie to them. And Ted Cruz is a politician. And Trump isn’t.
It’s fucked up. But it is what it is.
And Trump isn’t.
Ok, so now you too? No, surely not. You fucking well know what a politician is.
Trump needs a whambulance
Trump’s a demagogue. Your upset because he’s good at it.
(Well, that, and the fact that if the system was working the way the founders had intended, we’d be less susceptible to chronic demogogue-itis*.)
*An inflammatory disease of the body politic.
What Trump needs is the normal rectal examination that all Republicans recieve from the media.
I guess they’ve scheduled it for the fall.
There’s some vague but false notion that Trump’s good at it, certainly not true (just look what he’s done regarding fully half the population — no good demagogue would alienate women that way), though he stumbles along with the aid of many a sycophant whether in the media or outside it. Sure. A paltry success thus far, enough of a success to concern many an onlooker, for we onlookers have no knowledge what final numbers the sheep may add up to, and in what even tiny numbers they may have a terrible effect, as I pointed out to missfixit a few days ago. So yes, Trump is alarming and will continue to be until such time as he chooses to remove himself from the public concerns.
A politician is somebody holding an elective office.
From the p.o.v. of the disaffected “marks.”
I’m looking at this objectively. Or trying to. Please don’t mistake that for subjective approval. You know what Trump is. I know what Trump is. I’m pretty sure Curmudgeon knows what Trump is.
Out problem is convince Trump’s supporters of what Trump is. Or, failing that, how to make the best of it.
Curmudgeon’s coming from the make the best of it end of the problem. I think.
That’s different than being a yeah! yeah! Trump’s crapping on the establishment’s french-fried lobster! That’ll teach ’em. Power to the People! YEeaARGGGH!! burn it all down type a-hole.
Trump’s supporters are marks, so why any apology for them?
Wow, sdferr, if all else fails, you have a guaranteed job at the Wall Street Journal, or you can take over for Kevin Williamson at the National Review.
Keep on condescending to the voters! “Winning!” as Jeff himself would say.
At least Ernst Schreiber gets it and doesn’t impugn the motives of voters. (And the “Cool Hand Luke” reference was awesome).
The voters may be wrong (and with Trump, they are), but they voted the way they did for the right reasons.
I don’t believe I mistake Curmugeon for one he is not (and so thank you for the help you offer, but don’t believe you’ve picked up what I think about that). On the other hand, he isn’t helping himself here, as before mentioned.
Ha, Curmugeon, you tell first McG and then me, serially, to “grow up” and then reprimand me for insisting that voters (and their putative “leader”) cease making excuses for themselves as though they were children, on account that I’m condescending? Hilarious, I’m in stitches. Dimwit.
>>I’ll be damned if I sit back and watch putative “conservatives” back their whiny, orange, lawfare-happy love child and not call these assholes out.<<
I might have to render this in calligraphy and hang it on my wall.
Now we know what this month’s version of “So who are YOU voting for, cuck? JEB?!?” is.
Ha, Curmugeon, you tell first McG and then me, serially, to “grow up” and then reprimand me for insisting that voters (and their putative “leader”) cease making excuses for themselves as though they were children, on account that I’m condescending? Hilarious, I’m in stitches. Dimwit.
You are a blog follower. You are expected to understand more than the typical voter, who just heard what Trump said or did recently and votes accordingly. It’s really not hard to understand.
So you mean to say something like non-“blog follower[s]” are excused from ordinary self-interested calculations of their future political good, just as non-moral peer little children are excused from making life changing self-interested decisions, Curmugeon? That’s not an argument in your argument’s favor, I think. And no more is that difficult to understand.
Ernst Schreiber says April 13, 2016 at 7:24 pm
At this point, the thing that makes the most sense is for Trump and Sanders to get together to run on a national resentment platform.
Great! They can call themselves the Aggrieved Party.
“How many comments to we have to post to get you back here more frequently? Asking for a friend. ”
He wants 5000 Twitter followers, then he’ll come back. He’s about 200 away last time I looked.
ooh he’s at 4,944 now. The “something to say” had follower impact! ‘Grats Jeff.
Random thoughts while walking to school to collect my kids:
• Rush was talking about 2 main types of Trump supporters: 1) people who’ve been left out of the “recovery” (so, shrinking middle class, Codevilla’s “country/gentry class” Sowell’s “benighted” non-elite left-behinds I forget what Charles Murry called ’em) 2) people who fear and loathe the very thought of Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office, and who are convinced only Donald can beat her notwithstanding the poll evidence to the contrary.
• So it’s the Ruling Class versus the Country Class; the elite/establishment versus ” the little guy”; Tory paternalism versus whig liberalism; wall street versus, main street
• The historical analogy is Optimates versus Populares in the last century and one half of the Roman Republic
•The Optimates, like the Democrats, are the elites looking out for the elites.
•The Populares, like the GOP establishment, is the elites pretending to look out for the common man, because they’ve been frozen out by the other elites.
•Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think, how the Democrats keep winning elections by accusing the Republicans of doing what they’re doing, while pretending to do what the Republicans are trying to do? It’s like rain on your wedding day/a free ride when you’ve just had to pay
(•Oh wait, no it isn’t.)
• Our friend Bob Belvedere is wrong about Trump being Pompey the Great. Obama was Pompey the Great. Trump is Julius Caesar, man of the people.
•After Trump comes Augustus?
Also, based on what I’m hearing today, Cranky’s more right than I want him to be about Trump winning on the first ballot.
It’s likely that Trump won’t go into Cleveland assured of winning on the first ballot.
It’s also likely that Trump will be close enough that he can make up the shortfall among the unpledged delegates.
That assumes Trump figures out how this whole delegate thing works, which, so far, he doesn’t seem to be doing.
Respectfully, some of you’se guys are going after Curmudgeon like he’s some kind of rabid Tump supporter, when, so far as I can tell, all he’s done is be insufficiently enthusiastic about Ted Cruz, or insufficiently loathing of Trump.
Frankly, that’s identity politics, and your problem with Curmeudgeon is he’s not signalling the right tribal markers.
I’m just asking for a little benefit of the doubt.
(At least until Curmudgeon starts crapping on the thread. After which, you can all gang up and cock slap me. If you feel the need to.)
He wants 5000 Twitter followers, then he’ll come back. He’s about 200 away last time I looked.
Sadly, I do not Tweet. I’ve been afraid that I couldn’t keep up with the demand for photos of my–ahem–stuff. [Insert emoticon of jovial-approaching-senior citizen-status white dude here].
Bravo…Bravo…Bravo…Morning Jolt link sent me to this piece. Thanks for a GREAT read and…AMEN!
Yet another bravo. As I believe the young people say in approbation: dude!
Respectfully, some of you’se guys are going after Curmudgeon like he’s some kind of rabid Tump supporter, when, so far as I can tell, all he’s done is be insufficiently enthusiastic about Ted Cruz, or insufficiently loathing of Trump.
Frankly, that’s identity politics, and your problem with Curmeudgeon is he’s not signalling the right tribal markers.
For the record, again, Ted Cruz is a political rock star!!!
That “Ted Zeppelin” photoshop going around the internet, with Ted’s face superimposed over Messrs. Bonham, Jones, Page, and Plant, comes to mind.
And when Cruz did a last ditch effort to stop Obamunistcare in the Senate, that *was* an “Achilles Last Stand”.
Once upon a time, when Trump had yet to reveal just how much churlish petulance he could show and how much political poo he could fling, I hoped for a Trump / Cruz ticket. Or even, gasp, really daring to dream, the other way around. There really was a bromance at one time, before Trump revealed just how much of a churlish petulant egotist he was. Trump was in my mind the #2 major candidate (No, I don’t think Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina or anyone else possibly better was ever major).
Watching !Jeb! and Marco and all the other major and minor Establican candidates reveal just how out of touch they were was eye-opening.
And back then, at least in the minds of millions of voters, Trump was the first to yell out for a border wall, even if you want to split hairs and “prove” he really wasn’t, or that he wasn’t sincere about it.
And for the first time ever in my voting life, a Presidential GOP primary may go all the way to the Left Coast. I’m all in for Ted.
Ernst wrote: • Our friend Bob Belvedere is wrong about Trump being Pompey the Great. Obama was Pompey the Great. Trump is Julius Caesar, man of the people.
•After Trump comes Augustus?
Perhaps I just liked the sound of ‘Trump Magnus’? Also, one must remember that Pompey was quite the blowhard and not as great a military genius as he was made out to be, whereas Caesar was a truly great warrior general.
Trouble is: none of these analogies are ever going to match-up enough.
Trump is in possession of qualities found in Pompey, Caesar, Marius, and Sulla. He’s like shit: he’s everywhere.
But ‘Obama’ has a lot in common with Pompey, as well.
One thing is clear and matches-up: The American Republic is falling and a Despotism is rising.
I rather enjoyed Roger Kimball’s Roderick Spode comparison myself.
But Kimball where’s a bow tie. And nothing says cuckservative like a bow tie,
I’m sure.
Bob, Trump painted his face orange (yeah mars requires Red but there is red in orange) and paraded his captives at a Triumph. That’s pretty specific parallelism and imagery.
Admittedly Trump has not had an epileptic seizure rumor spread about him.
Nor have there been any rumors that he buggered his heir.
Ya know, I can’t think of a better reason than Trump, to dump this whole primary idea and go back to a brokered convention. That system gave our progenitors some great candidates (Lincoln) and some stinkers (Hoover) but at least it meant a much, much shorter election season. And it was less expensive to run for office, and K street was just another street.
“Even canny operators like Ted Cruz didn’t fully appreciate the depth of voter anger on the subject.”
Only if you hadn’t realized the extent to which Cruz has been no platformed and flat out lied about on the issue.
Ted Cruz in 2011 opposes pathway to citizenship.
Then there’s the question of whom to vote for in the general if it’s the lying and ignorant buffoon vs the lying and sinister criminal. If microscopists have determined that Trump is less evil than Hillary by some appreciable amount, then that’s all well and good. But I’m not going to vote for Trump in the general. I don’t eat sh*t sandwiches anymore. Instead I will make my peace with God and prepare for the end with equanimity and dignity, rather than desperately grasping at straws by voting for an ignoramus with BPD.
So, go ahead and nominate him, Trumpsters. But I am not going to vote for him. I will vote for conservatives on the ballot down ticket and then leave the booth. And there are plenty more like me. So many, in fact, that Hillary will beat him 56% to 39%. So, I suggest that you do not nominate him. But wait, there’s more. Many of us will not even show up to vote at all and conservatives in the Senate, House and state races will be beaten.
But how will I feel the day after she beats him? Other than being depressed that she will not be going before a firing squad, just fine. In fact, I will first say to myself, “Well, at least we will not have an ignoramus for POTUS for the next four years.”
And again, on Fox Latino.
I’ve been sending Cruz my money pretty much since he started running.
Hey, just in time! (ahem)
Every primary I say I can’t imagine the next primary could be any worse, and every time I’m wrong.
I have *got* to stop saying that.
Though I wish I had said a couple of years ago “I don’t know how the next primary will be fought, but the one after that will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Phuck yeah!
Is there a 1000 likes button, becuz i want to push it.
Keep up the good work, Mr Goldstein!
PS: there are certain turning points in this election, whether an event, or a blog post, or even a comment- that just beg to be bookmarked, for historical reference.
This is one for me. I’ll be passing it along.
I stopped worrying about the primary election after it became a Trump/ Cruz race.
Just as I stopped worrying about the state of Constitutional government after Obama care cleared the Supreme Court.
The trick now is to watch for the moment that everything does in fact
STOP
and then proceed to the next thing.
I voted Cruz in my neighborhood caucus. He won handily, though I suspect our State Republican establishment pushed absentee voters hard for Trump.
When you sit at the controls and there are no more buttons unpushed, wheels to spin, levers to pull, or valves to close, the only thing left to do is step into the hall and piss on the flames.
Glad to hear from you Jeff. Good luck with your family health. There is a bit of that going around.
I keep saying that at least 2/3 of the country has gone completely crazy. They can’t see the difference between screaming self-delusion (Bernie is here to make us free, and Trump is a conservative, anyone?) and reason. A yet-to-be-convicted felon, a spectacular reality-TV fraud, and an actual Marx-style Socialist are 3 of the 4 leading candidates for president of the United States? This country is headed for disaster, and may never find a way out.
Over the last 40 years or so, people have less centralized and more varied sources of information. The original, centralized versions were not very accurate. Individually, a lot of the new ones aren’t either. I’d like to think we’re better off but I’m not sure. People can pour references on a conversation for hours without getting within a mile of a fact, though, so I think it’s harder to *change* opinions now, and people on average seem to have less respect for differences in opinion.
The last bit may be a result of a certain amount of desperation as government becomes both more powerful and more bankrupt. More and more people view politics as less of an annoyance than an existential threat.
I can totally understand and sympathize with (even empathize with) anger, but if you’re so angry you’re bashing yourself in the head, A) it’s not going to help and B) I’m probably going to just get away as fast as I can.
I’ve been reading you for years, but as an early Rubio supporter I’m in a pickle. He flamed out (over rehearsed and lack of depth and experience), so where to go?
I can’t vote for Cruz because I know way too much about Article II from Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765), George Tucker’s Commentaries (1803), James Kent’s Commentaries (1794 to circa 1830), and statements from Madison and other Founders, along with the comments from Justice Joseph Story and a raft of court rulings and opinions from prior to the adoption of the Constitution up through 2015. I could argue the case before the Supreme Court for hours citing nothing but what the Supreme Court has already said.
So that leaves Trump and Kasich. Kasich is hanging in there because he knows he’s actually in second, not third. The GOP never had a “come to God” moment with him because they also have known all along that Cruz can’t be sworn in. I assume their plan was to let him mop up the strong conservative and evangelical lane so they could throw his delegates to Jeb, and then to Rubio, and now in the second or third round to Kasich, Romney, or Ryan. In for a penny, in for a pound. But if they do that, all the Trump people will be livid, and all the Cruz people will be livid, and pretty much the only happy people will be found in DC.
And the establishment, in theory chock full of strict constructionists and Constitutional scholars, won’t utter a peep about what they’ve tried to pull off, in effect disenfranchising conservatives by running what amounts to a fictional CGI candidate. And they don’t want to get caught, either. National Review will let anyone say absolutely anything about Cruz as long as they don’t quote a Founding Father or Supreme Court justice. It has become a no-Constitution zone.
So that makes me think nominating Trump is the only way to thwart them.
I appreciate the references/analogies to the Roman Republic and its demise. In my mind, however, I think the end of the Kingdom of Judah is more apropos. I pray for a return to a constitutional republic of laws, but I believe the best we can hope for is a “Josephus” who gives us a few years of respite before the inevitable collapse occurs.
The rot is too deep. The prophets have been ignored. The reckoning is coming and there is nothing a single man can do about it. Now, it’s about protecting one’s family and trying to preserve some knowledge of what once was in the hope that a hundred years from now, things will be better.
I’m guessing those of us who feel the same way Jim does are as incomprehensible to the Trump supporters as they are to us.
You know about them, or you’ve read them for yourself? Because I’m fairly sure they don’t say what you seem to think they say about natural born citizenship.
Thank you, Jeff. Nothing else to add.
Thank you.
Oh, I do have one more thing.
Thanks for reminding me why I donate here.
Trump ought to offer a million dollars to whomever can produce Cruz’s naturalization papers.
I mean, it’s not like the bureaucrats actually give a rip about privacy rights or anything.
What about his SSN? Anything fishy with that?
(Reward seekers take note: use WordPerfect instead of Word. That ought to fool ’em.)
Use Amipro 96
“I could argue the case before the Supreme Court for hours citing nothing but what the Supreme Court has already said. ”
This isn’t the same as proving natural born citizenship is a gray area that jumps when Trump whistles. The “case” against Cruz per his supposed lack of eligibility has already been thrown out as silly crap.
The hard part is going to be finding the right form.
Ernst,
I read them myself. Blackstone’s Commentaries chapter 10 (book 1) is less than 3,300 words. You can read it in 10 minutes. George Tucker’s discussion runs perhaps 8,000 words. US v Wong Kim Ark is about 70 pages, but it does meander a bit. It’s doubly handy in that the justices cite just about every prior Supreme Court case dealing with natural born citizenship, such as Murray v Charming Besty (1803).
And as you read them you’ll find out all kinds of interesting things. Blackstone said their are three kinds of people, alien, denizens, and natives. Naturalization is of course making aliens into natives. (“natural” meant native – cited in Zivotofsky v Kerry 2015). Denizens were in an in between state, forbidden from voting or holding office but allowed to do business, along with some inheritance rights. Parliament had the sole power over naturalization, and the king had the sole power of denization.
Tucker notes that the colonies and then the states under the Articles of Confederation used the power of denization to grant privileges to denizens, but that this privileges couldn’t be transferred to another state. He goes on to note that the states did not surrender this power to the federal government under the Constitution, and thus must retain it under the 10th Amendment.
If the states retained the power of denization, denization being the granting of special privileges (perhaps like a driver’s license and work permit) to someone who is otherwise an alien, then Obama’s immigration orders are usurping state powers not granted to the federal government, which is purely limited to writing laws for the naturalization of aliens. Since these illegals are in no way on a path to citizenship, they’re not being naturalized, they’re being made into denizens.
You can learn all sorts of things by reading the original sources.
For example, Winston Churchill’s wife was a US citizen yet Churchill, born abroad, was not eligible to be President. Someone said that his wife lost her US citizenship when she married Winston’s father, but that is not the case. The British assume that because when a British woman married an American she lost her British citizenship, which she could resume upon her husband’s death. But the US is different because nowhere did we give the federal government the right to do a thing about the citizenship of a natural born subject. We made the government and can remove it, and it can’t remove us. And sure enough, we had to tell the British that they were mistaken about the marriage issue, and that American women retained all their rights as US citizens at all times, and that the President was authorized to use all measures short of war to protect the rights of American women married to British subjects. Indeed, an American woman could have married Hitler and bombed New York and all the US government could do is plead with her to renounce her citizenship, because the power of unmaking a citizen is reserved to the citizen.
Naturalized citizens, made by Congress through legislation, such as the immigration laws granting citizenship to children born abroad to US parents, are of a different status. They can be stripped of their citizenship for refusing to testify before a Congressional committee investigating subversive activities.
2 things
1) I’m pretty sure (not positive, but pretty sure) that the Supreme Court’s holdings don;t support what the birthers are arguing because, back during the original birther panic, the only time somebody actually cited a court case here the proved (proved!) Obama was ineligible, the actualy opinion held the opposite. I assume the same is true here.
2) IF the Establishment could take out Cruz this way, don’t you think Trump would have done so back in January? That way, he might have finished first in Iowa instead of second.
And sewed this thing up back in March like he thought he was going to.
And Obama’s immigration Executive Orders have what exactly to do with Ted Cruz’s eligibility?
Then it’s a damn good thing for Ted Cruz that his mother was an “American woman retain[ing] all [her] rights as [a] US citizen at all times”*
*I don’t want to hear about Canadian voter rolls. I haven’t lived in California in a decade, and I bet I could vote (illegally) in Santa Clara county this June if I was of a mind to.
Immigration law and naturalization law are two different things. And, per your reasoning above, “nowhere did we give the federal government the right to do a thing about the citizenship of a natural born subject. We made the government and can remove it, and it can’t remove us,” Congress can’t tell an American woman that her children aren’t American citizens.
I assume. But, since I’m not a lawyer, nor do I stay at the Holiday Inn Express, feel free to enlighten my ignorance by citing Chapter and Statute (Or is it Statute and Chapter?)
In conclusion, it’s blood or soil, not blood and soil, that decides whether a person is a natural or a naturalized citizen.
Which, as far as I can tell, means you’re wrong about Churchill.
It occurs to me that it’s really a shame Ted Cruz renounced his Canadian Citizenship.
Because it seems to me that he could have been both President of the U.S. and Prime Minister of Canada.
Then he really would be sitting atop the North American Union!
What the birthers kept arguing was that Obama was secretly born in Kenya. There’s also a subset of them that believe a person has to be born to two US citizen parents and be born in the US to be a natural born citizen, citing some French works, but we didn’t go with French law at all. It’s alien to us. Under the common law (you should Google “Blackstone’s Commentaries chapter 10”, which is 3,300 words – 10 minutes to read) anyone born in Britain, of any parentage, is a natural born subject. Anyone born abroad, even to British parents, was an alien.
We’ve had birthers since Chester A. Arthur ran for Vice President (a New York attorney had it in for him), asserting that Arthur was secretly born in Canada on one of his father’s ministry trips from Vermont. Arthur, by the way, was born about eight years before James Madison died, so birthers have been around for quite a while. The reason they’ve always alleged that a candidate was secretly born in a foreign country is that all foreign born people, of any parentage, are disqualified from office.
That’s because Europe had a bad history with dynastic marriages where your natural born prince or princess went off an married into your rival state’s ruling family, producing babies that were citizens by blood but born and raised in the court of your country’s frequent enemy. Then that citizen by blood would come back with a claim to the throne, take over, and subordinate your country into the foreign empire. The British people were pretty pissed off about that kind of thing. No naturalization act (granting citizenship to children born abroad to British parents) could pass without a disabling clause that barred the people being naturalized from ever holding a seat in Parliament or on the Privy Council. The Founders just copied that, saying it cut off foreign intrigues.
The second part of your question is where it gets interesting.
Cruz’s claim that he’s eligible is novel. All the civics books printed for the last century or so, for students, have presented Article II’s requirements as thus: “At least 35 years old, lived here 14 years, born on US soil.” Everybody knows it. All the Supreme Court opinions read exactly that way regarding what “natural born” means (except I think for Dred Scott). There’s no way everyone in the RNC leadership, and everyone in Congress, didn’t know it. Barney Frank even proposed HR 88 in 2000 to propose a Constitutional amendment to remove the requirement that the President be “native born”.
Yet nobody spoke up about Cruz, though Trump, Santorum, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, and Mike Huckabee said he was ineligible. It was pretty much deafening silence.
Some months ago someone wrote about the establishment’s utter failure in this election cycle, along with the entire pundit class and political experts. One of the things the article noted was that the political consultants viewed the path to the nomination as a set of lanes, each one a particular subset of the party’s voters. Each candidate would try to dominate one lane early one, perhaps the strong conservative lane, or the evangelical lane, or the pro-business lane, or the lower deficit lane. Then as the campaign wore on a candidate would try to take over an adjacent lane, and so on, until finally one candidate controlled almost all the lanes and got the nomination.
But what if one of the more uncomfortable lanes, say strong right-wing conservatism and strong Christian values, a lane feared by establishment candidates because winning it means lots of uncomfortable video clips in the general election, was taken over by a candidate who was actually ineligible. The establishment candidate could get all those delegates by default without ever pandering to that segment. Sure, it’s a very cynical ploy to completely disenfranchise strong conservatives and evangelicals, but it’s also genius. All those delegates will have to vote for Jeb! But Jeb cratered (metaphores abound), so go with Rubio. Get Rubio to the convention, even if behind Trump, note Cruz’s foreign born problem, united the two sets of delegates, and Rubio is in. But Rubio went robot. But Kasich is still in! Note that he appears completely delusional until you realize he’s actually in second, and that the RNC knows this too, which is why he hasn’t been given a “come to God” talk. And of course there’s Romney and Ryan.
And the only way this will all work is if Republican voters don’t find out Cruz is ineligible until the proper time at the convention, after Trump is defeated on the first ballot. If they find out too soon it’s game over, not just for Kasich (or Romney, or Ryan), but for the establishment that tried this ploy, basically screwing their base in the butt to preserve their DC perks.
And thus, if you say anything remotely hinting that Cruz is ineligible at a place like NRO, your comment, and probably the entire subthread, will get deleted. It’s kind of spooky. That kind of confirms that there is a plan, and the plan is nefarious, and people are sweating bullets about it. Because if they’re actually knowledgeable Constitutional conservatives, they can’t have not known that Cruz was ineligible. People who’s careers are based on Conservative punditry, people like George Will, are in the position of having to admit they’re either ignorant of the Constitution and US law, or are willing to lie to the conservative base to keep the establishment in power and stop Trump – because Trump freaks them out.
There is no way to get clean.
I’m trying to do it by telling the truth, with quotes and citations, to anyone and everyone who will listen. The entire 2016 cycle is a disaster and a sham because people didn’t do due diligence, didn’t stand up for principles, didn’t provide readers with critically important information, and reacted emotionally because one candidate wasn’t behaving like a normal politician. They took what seemed like the easy and clever path, and it’s fraught with thorns and ends in a pool of fire.
The only power over citizenship granted to Congress in Article I is the power “to write uniform laws for the naturalization of aliens.”
It it’s not an alien, Congress can’t touch it, unless perhaps it was an alien and the touched it, so they own it. That’s probably the reasoning behind the law that allows them to strip a naturalized citizen of citizenship for things like refusing to testify before a congressional committee investigating subversive activities. Essentially its “You lied on your application.”
To be in any way affected by US naturalization or immigration laws, Ted Cruz had to have been an alien, and that is how the Supreme Court treats it. In Zivotofsky v Kerry (2015), which if you recall was the anger inducing case of a child born to two US citizens in Jerusalem who wanted to list his birthplace as “Israel” on his passport, which Obama denied. Justice Scalia said:
Before turning to Presidential power under Article II, I think it well to establish the statute’s basis in congressional power under Article I. Congress’s power to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” Art. I, §8, cl. 4, enables it to grant American citizenship to someone born abroad. United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U. S. 649, 702–703 (1898). The naturalization power also enables Congress to furnish the people it makes citizens with papers verifying their citizenship—say a consular report of birth abroad (which certifies citizenship of an American born outside the United States) or a passport (which certifies citizenship for purposes of international travel).
The key phrase is “enables it to grant American citizenship to someone born abroad.” That is not an inherent right. Citizenship is not naturally possessed, it is granted by Congress in a way that natural born citizenship is not. Congress isn’t allowed to legislate on natural born citizenship because it was only granted the power to naturalize aliens. If it’s not an alien, they can’t touch it.
Yes, they can, and for most of this country’s history they did just that. They can’t touch her natural born citizenship, but they can refuse to grant citizenship to her children born abroad. It was a long long time before they even allowed citizenship to pass through the mother. Ironically enough, they also gleefully disown children fathered by US citizens abroad if the father isn’t married to the mother. They make a man jump through hoops before they’ll grant such a child citizenship. After WW-II the army told German mothers to go away and stop bothering us, and to never contact the American father.
I assume. But, since I’m not a lawyer, nor do I stay at the Holiday Inn Express, feel free to enlighten my ignorance by citing Chapter and Statute (Or is it Statute and Chapter?)
In conclusion, it’s blood or soil, not blood and soil, that decides whether a person is a natural or a naturalized citizen.
When Churchill was born we didn’t grant citizenship through the mother unless the father was dead.
Duel citizenship was also anathema to the Founders. The Constitution is very uncomfortable with the concept, and one of the keys behind natural born citizenship is that it was put in so there can be no question of divided loyalty. As Blackstone held, a person’s primary loyalty will forever be to the country of their birth. Secondary loyalties formed later will always be secondary. The concepts go back to antiquity, when a subject really was more like a spear carrier on Game of Thrones
George, what you’re arguing is that a natural born American citizen is sovereign (or, in your words “[T]he US is different because nowhere did we give the federal government the right to do a thing about the citizenship of a natural born subject. We made the government and can remove it, and it can’t remove us.” If you read here, you’ll see that the child of a sovereign is always and everywhere a “natural born subject.”
So, and with respect, either show that Cruz’s mother renounced her U.S. citizenship prior to the birth of her son, or give it up.
And like I said, don’t waste my time with Canadian voter rolls. Especially not after arguing Hitler’s hypothetical American wife could have bombed New York and there was nothing we could do to strip her of her citizenship, thereby peremptorily denying her her constitutional rights (like, say, running for President).
You raise an interesting historical point that Blackstone mentioned. There was the common law, which is the law of the little people that kind of grew organically out of common sense and a judge deciding between two parties, and the imported French law of monarchs and nobles. The common law does not like the noble’s statutory law. It does not like it at all, as it’s strange, foreign, and flies in the face of reason. Such law was written by kings, for kings, to protect kings.
Long ago I read a fascinating book on a much neglected topic, US Colonial law, which when the book was written had been in force in America for longer than we’d lived under the Constitution. America was a backwards wilderness at the end of the world and proper and well established people didn’t come here. The people who did brought what the remembered of the law they knew, the common law of England. That law slowly diverged from English common law due to different circumstances, and there were certainly some amusing oddities in it. During the later Colonial period, as the US became much more “civilized”, more English lawyers and judges made the journey over and both adapted to Colonial law, and adapted Colonial law to later English precedents.
But rarely did anyone of real substance come over, and the English laws of kings and nobles didn’t get carried here. Among those laws, repulsive to the common law, was the way a king’s citizenship and rights passed through blood alone. That was part of the BS we were rebelling against.
And in contrast, we were a nation of immigrants who encouraged immigration and granted an Englishman more rights here than he had at home, even though here he was an alien and there he was a natural born subject. The Founders discussed how Congress and the Senate would include many immigrants, freshly arrived. People virtually Fresh off the Boat would be sitting in the House and Senate (note the Article I requirements for them). In most of Europe you couldn’t enter such a body unless you could show how your family were esteemed natives going back five generations.
But the Founders were also familiar with all the intrigues that plagued Europe because of blood citizenship and dynastic marriage, and decided to just nip that in the bud. Unlike more tribal Europe, everyone born here is one of us, regardless of parentage. Anyone not born here might be part of a scheme to gain complete control of all US defenses, misdirecting those defenses when the British armies sweep south out of Canada, knowing that the House wouldn’t have time to start impeachment hearings before the Union Jack is flying over New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
Who would possibly misdirect those defenses? The son of a US born British loyalist whose parents removed themselves to Canada after the Revolution, waiting for the patriots who’d won American independence to pass away, and then using their prominent family name, London connections, and the king’s money to win an election as US President, claiming citizenship by blood. That was the nightmare that would’ve seen the War of 1812 end in American defeat. To further preclude this possibility the Founders spend quite a bit of time writing laws and legal opinions to strip British Loyalists of all citizenship, especially addressing the children of those loyalists, and some of those cases are quite interesting because of the complexities of the different situations. James Madison, ironically, argued that the son of British Loyalists, born prior to the revolution, was a natural born US citizen endowed with all the rights thereof, whereas Madison himself was a natural born British subject, though born in exactly the same condition who couldn’t have been a natural born US citizen or the exception in Article II wouldn’t have been necessary.
It shows that James Madison was a damn good lawyer.
It’s like a really verbose form of gaslighting where someone tries to convince you that there’s a massive conspiracy including politicians, parties, blogs and who knows who else, and that unnamed “civics textbooks” are somehow more dispositive than the text of the Constitution.
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, threw it out. Huge waste of time.
I used to get in these huge, detailed internet arguments, but it’s nearly 100% futile, people just exhaust themselves and them change their nick or move on, doing *exactly* the same thing regardless of how the last discussion went.
Argument is dead, all discussion is boxing now, and it’s *boring*.
Everybody should stop quoting from memory and actually look at the source. “born on U..S. soil” is not listed as one of the qualifications for the office of President. “[N]atural born Citizen” is. Then Everybody should look to see how natural born has been defined in law. Otherwise, Everbody is just talking out of his ass. (see below)
And George Romney was born in Mexico, as I recall.
That sounds like one of those things that Everybody talks about, but never bothers to verify, because Everybody just knows it.
The proof that there’s a conspiracy is that there’s no evidence of the conspiracy.
The Truth Is Out There and I Want To Believe!
1) Ted Cruz isn’t an alien
2) Given current Equal Protection Juris Prudence, I wouldn’t count on the Court to uphold Congress’s “right.”
3) (2) is neither here nor there.
To know whether or not that’s the key phrase of Zivotofsky You’d first have to read U. S. v. Wong Kim Ark, wouldn’t you?
The rest of it is interesting, but I’ll refrain from commenting until I have an answer to the following question.
If the Obama administration denied listing the birth place of a child born in Jerusalem to two American Citizens as Israel, what did they list it as on the passport.
I’m going to guess either Palestine or Jerusalem. Which in turn suggests that the case isn’t about citizenship, per se, but about who gets to decide what goes onto an official government document.
I’ve seen one so far. Attributed citation that is. Two if you count Scalia’s cite in your Scalia quote from Zivotofsky. I haven’t bothered to count quotation marks.
You’ve referenced Blackstone a couple of times, along with a few other names. But you haven’t actually cited anything other than Zivotofsky.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of your opinion. I do question it’s validity though.
And now I have to go to bed. There’s a chance the Jehovah’s Witnesses are going to stop by tomorrow.
So thanks for the warm up.
(And I do mean that literally)
What it shows is that you can’t be a born citizen of a country that didn’t exist until you were 38 years old.
Which holds true for the son of the British Loyalist born prior to the revolution, ironically. So maybe you meant born after the Constitution was ratified.
And Merovign is right. You’ve grown wearisome.
I’m not the one being gaslighted, you are.
Actually go back and find an old civics book. You had one when you were in school. Maybe it’s bouncing around in your attic. Or think back to your sixth grade teacher. What did she tell you, knowing that children could not possibly know what “natural born citizen meant”? She said “born on US soil.”
She said that because that’s what it means. When steam ships evolved to make trans Atlantic tourism common all kinds of American parents asked newspapers if their children born in Paris on vacation could be President. Newspaper back then were actually diligent and would cite Justice Joseph Story, Madison, and others.
Believe it or not, in this age of semi-retarded journalists, this was an answer to a question, printed in a newspaper, during an age when journalists actually practiced journalism. Ted Cruz is betting those days are long over, and Americans are morons.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Feb. 26, 1888
To the Editor of the Brooklyn Eagle:
Would the child of an American Minister to the Court of St. James, London, born in London during the service of said Minister, be a citizen of the United States in the sense of being eligible to the Presidency? Signed Cox.
They then give the wrong answer and correct it with the following:
This reasoning would be successful if the laws of other nations governed in the United States, but they do not, and that is just the point where we discover that we must ???ad the solution of our problem not in any treatise or commentary upon international law or upon the laws of other nations, but must look to some of our own authorities for light. It will not hurt us therefore to look where Daniel Webster looked. Every time the question has come to the EAGLE we have decided that the son of an American citizen, whether official or not, born abroad, is not eligible to the Presidency.
In the EAGLE of November 27, 1887, the same ground was taken and we cited the statement made in the Journal of Commerce of May 28, 1883. In the same paper of October 17, 1886 we find that the editor cited as an authority one of Daniel Webster’s favorites, Paschal, the highest authority in the interpretation of the United States Constitution, who defines “a natural born citizen” as one “not made by law or otherwise but born.” “The Constitution does not make the citizens, it is in fact, made by them. It only intends and recognizes such of them as are natural borne born and provides by law for the naturalization of such as are foreign born. It should be observed here, says Mr. David M. Stone, that “every writer of any note who has undertaken to discuss the subject has divided all who are entitled to be called citizens into two classes – those who are homeborn and those who are made citizens by law.”
Bates on Citizenship, 10 op., 382, limits the “natural” members of the body politic to “the people born in the country,” and he repeats this, confining the meaning to “every person born in the country.” Kent says “nativity furnishes as the rule.” Story, on the Constitution, says: “Considering the ages of all such (i.e. those who are alien born and citizens when the Constitution was adopted), no person of foreign birth can now ever be President of the United States under this Constitution.”
The learning and the respectability of such authorities will not be challenged by lawyers at least. In what follows, the reader will have no difficulty in coming to the conclusion that, outside of the laws of other nations, and considerations of international ?comity, the Constitution of the United States has settled the question of who is eligible to the Presidency, and that the Statutes at Large have taken cognizance of the accident of birth abroad of the child of any American citizen and made him a citizen of the United States, and that if the statute failed to do so the aforesaid child would not be a citizen. This is admitted by those who affirm that a child so born is eligible to the Presidency, for they cite the law and give us the date of its enactment. Of course, any law of this sort would be superfluous, if the right by birth and parentage was paramount by the terms of the Constitution. We quote the following from the Journal of Commerce:
It may be asked by those who have not examined the subject if the children born abroad of American citizens are not themselves citizens by right of birth, and therefore within the meaning of “natural born?” We answer most positively that they are not citizens by right of birth, but are made citizens by the law. The existing law was passed April 14, 1892, and is entitled “An Act to establish a uniform rule of naturalization,” and this provided that “the children of persons duly naturalized under any of the laws of the United States, being under the age of 21 years, shall, if dwelling in the United States, be considered as citizens: and the children of persons who now are or have been citizens of the United States, shall, though born out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, be considered as citizens of the United States.” If the latter are natural born citizens, then allow children who are under age when their parents are naturalized, are also natural born citizens. Both are made citizens because their parents are citizens, but they are made by law in virtue of their birth, and are not natural born.
If anything further was necessary to confirm this view, it may be found in the fact that a child born in Europe of an American citizen who has never resided here is excluded by the very section which confers the title already quoted. All other children born abroad of American parents are citizens of the United States by virtue of the Naturalization law. It may not be out of place to add that an attempt was made in Congress to give to the Constitution the meaning insisted upon by some of our contemporaries or else the language was used by inadvertence. In the Act of March 26, 1790, it was provided that “the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens;“but this was coupled with the provision that “the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States,” showing that the phrase “considered as natural born citizens” meant merely” to be treated as such because of this law.”
Great exception was taken to the language as misleading, and on January 25, 1795, this was repealed in express terms and a new act adopted, which read, “Shall be considered as citizens of the United States,” thus making the proviso forbidding the privilege to the children of citizens who had not resided here consistent with it. For if a child of an American citizen born abroad is without any legislation a natural born citizen, then no provision of statute could deprive him of that birth-right as long as he is innocent of crime.
Enough has been brought forward to safely guide the reflective reader. We may regret that Mr. Evarts did not suggest some points or references but he has, doubtless, been over the ground to his own satisfaction. The Herald assumes to be oracular without affording any grounds for the faith. Do adhere to our former answers to the question. — that the child of an American citizen, born abroad, without regard to the station of his father, is not eligible to the Presidency of the United States, because he is not “a natural born citizen, but merely a citizen made so by the law. We close by stating that Paschal, and all other high authorities, are clear that only a citizen born in the allegiance of the United States, i.e., either on its soil, or on the high seas under its flag, is a natural born citizen.
*****
That’s from back in the day when Americans loved and respected the Constitution instead of twisting it to their own purposes.
You cannot read anything written about Article II in the past without concluding that no foreign-born citizen is eligible to assume the office of President. The solution Cruz supporters propose is to read nothing about Article II. I reject that proposal. I choose instead to immerse myself in the words of the Founding generation’s legal scholars who spoke the language and lived the law to understand what those words and laws mean.
I will accept no intermediary, not politician purporting to tell me what those words “really” mean, especially a politician who the original authors say is completely ineligible, but which the politician asserts, with nothing in support except his sycophants, that he his eligible. Perhaps he can also be the first President who is also Miss Universe. He has no limits, only held back by the limits of our gullibility and ignorance about that which we purport to hold dear.
It works with the Bible, why wouldn’t it work with the Constitution? The mass of Americans are too dumb to read or understand either, and why not exploit the fuck out of that?
The snag is people like me, who love and revere the Constitution in a way that Cruz never will. I cannot bend its words to fit my vanity. I cannot interpret “arms” to mean limbs attached to a person’s shoulders just because it’s convenient.
As Scalia said, you have to go back to the original authors and go where the text takes you, even if you don’t like what you find. He often found his own rulings went against his beliefs, but it’s printed there in black and white. It is what it is. You can’t reject their reality and substitute your own. The document is a contract that has meaning, not a social construct whose meaning is reached by consensus.
The trouble with Cruz supporters is that they’re either ignorant of the Constitution or all too willing to wipe their ass with it. Nothing in the Constitution says we can’t elect Trump or Kasich, but it does say we can’t elect Cruz. I’m not even all that opposed to Cruz as a person, as I have paid more attention to him than Jim Gilmore because I knew he was as ineligible as Justin Bieber and only in the race as some bizarre performance theater. Then I wondered why the establishment even let him run. Those answers aren’t pretty.
He is perhaps a fine Senator, other than the genital stimulation ban, but he can’t be President any more than Arnold can. The are foreign born. Need not apply. If he persists, we should probably take Toronto and Vancouver to teach the British not to ever even think about fucking up US elections by running Queen Elizabeth II’s natural born subjects.
As a #NeverTrump-I’ve been looking for a new blog home since Hot Air went to FB comments. HotGas.net is a Trump shill site.The heck with that! Ace’s is too crude and rude.
That was a righteous rant, Jeff!
Guess y’all are going to be stuck with the infamous ALT.
#NeverTrump #CruzJews *Twerp out.
“I’m not the one being gaslighted, you are.”
Yeah and our GDP was less than zero last year too if you squint and hold your head that the right angle in low light. Wall of on and on bullshit tells me who’s been gaslighted and it’s not us. Read the article you’re shitting up, and kindly realize it is not an invitation for you to hold court with BIG TRUMP TRUTH but a well lit exit that opens onto “No Thanks” Blvd.
I’m not the one being gaslighted, you are.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I’ve gone on record saying that I will vote for a syphilitic camel over Hillary.
So, where does Trump fall on that scale?
Would he be better or worse than such a camel?
Just another pseudoconservative, who hasn’t bothered to read the Constitution or learn the principles of constitutional construction, backing the natural-born Canadian. Such incompetents need to be deported south of the Trump Wall, where incompetence, illiteracy, and corruption are the norm.
Surprised you didn’t utter the sacred/magick word, ‘CUCK!’, Skookums.
Tokyov wrote:
Perhaps, Tokyov, you can take heart in the fact that the War For Independence was supported by only about thirty to thirty-three percent of the Colonists.
We will find a way out if we hold fast to our beliefs, keep seeking to perfect our Virtue, never forget that God is with us, and try to Never Despair.
Shermlaw wrote:
The single Man can only do as you say, but, if enough of them [us] join together, we can preserve, on a smaller scale, the institutions and Morals that animated The Founders.
Perhaps, we should consider ourselves like the monks in monasteries who, in the Dark Ages, preserved the fruits of the Roman and the Greek and the Early Christian and the Jewish Civilizations – except we’ll be able, unlike them, to resist being pillaged and destroyed because we will be armed.
A Grand Cleansing is occurring on the Right, the weeding out of the False Conservatives. Perhaps retreat to the American Monasteries [aka: The Several States] will also bring about another kind of Grand Cleansing that will benefit Mankind in the long run.
Been a while….
Bravo, Jeff.
When a Trump Camel contracts syphilis, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Nobody contracts syphilis like a Trump Camel. Believe Me. Trump Camels have the biggest and the best, the must luxurious open sores. They’re Yuge. All the other syphilitic camels are losers compared to me.
Ernst
You’re arguing with a birther. You need to go out into the garage and find your hammer and beat your head with it. Trust me, you get more out of that.
Twerp
Keep coming back. When/if Jeff comes back a starts writing again, you’ll enjoy the humor and enlightenment. Meanwhile Darleen will give you plenty of thought provoking articles and from time to time political cartoons. Word to the wise, bring a thesaurus. And do check in on Bob Belvederes site: https://thecampofthesaints.org/ to get some excellent commentary, history, and philosophy. If you want a good Cruz site, The Right Scoop will fill your needs.
The trouble with Cruz supporters is that they’re either ignorant of the Constitution or all too willing to wipe their ass with it. –
I’d say “fuck you” but this tired birther crap is SO DONE.
There are only two ways to American citizenship — you either acquire it at birth or you are naturalized. Period. There is no super secret double “both parents must be born on American soil; both parents must be American citizens; one must be born on American soil, et al” qualifications that make for an extra hunky dory citizenship.
Congress is in charge of setting immigration/naturalization laws (Art 1) and the 14A and subsequent US Law says if you are born outside the US & have one American parent, you acquire citizenship at birth.
Period. End of discussion.
You want to make an extra categorical American citizenship? Have Congress rewrite the statute or pass a Constitutional amendment. Knock yourself out, a**hole.
1) What Darleen wrote.
2) Thank you very much, Gary, for the kind words. [I may start blogging again, inspired by Jeff and the discussion here.]
Darleen
Engaging with a birther is a descent into madness. No amount of reason, facts and precedent will knock them off their position. The best thing to do is point and laugh.
You’re welcome Bob. Family, job, and time keep me from commenting much anymore, but I still pop in a couple of times a week.
A combination of family matters, work load, and a raging case of Black Dog have kept me from blogging and commenting more. I miss it.
Starting with Jeff,
Compare:
And contrast:
Then back to Jeff once more:
Donald Trump is Obama in white face.
And Nationalist Populism isn’t authentic conservatism.
“I’d say “fuck you” but this tired birther crap is SO DONE.”
I’ll say, because you’ve clearly proved it, that you are one hell of a dumb cunt pseudocon, along with Bob Belvidere and his transgendered apparatus.
“There are only two ways to American citizenship — you either acquire it at birth or you are naturalized. Period.”
Your interpretation is so obviously incorrect as to be treasonable. The principles of constitutional construction require each word be given full force and effect. Your interpretation illegally expunges “natural” from the natural-born citizen clause. A “natural born Citizen” must thus be a subset of born citizen; ie, not all persons born citizens are natural-born citizens.
Natural law tells us a natural born citizen is one who inherits his citizenship naturally from his parents. The proper originalist interpretation is the one naturally inherits the citizenship of his father at birth. Born-Near-the-USA Rafael’s father (and mother) were Canadian citizens when he was born. Thus, BusTed is a natural-born Canuck, and thus ineligible.
The Constitution acknowledges two types of citizens — those who are natural-born, and those who are naturalized. You admit to BusTed being (fraudulently) naturalized by pointing to a US statute that makes the foreign-born offspring of a US citizen mother a US citizen at birth. That statute is, by definition, a naturalization law, and such citizenship is conferred by naturalization, not naturally by natural law. The Constitution, Article II, Section 8, grants Congress authority over naturalization. Nowhere is Congress granted authority to amend natural law, which can’t be done anyway.
“There is no super secret double “both parents must be born on American soil; both parents must be American citizens; one must be born on American soil, et al” qualifications that make for an extra hunky dory citizenship. Congress is in charge of setting immigration/naturalization laws (Art 1) and the 14A and subsequent US Law says if you are born outside the US & have one American parent, you acquire citizenship at birth.”
The 14th Amendment says nothing about natural-born citizenship, you dumb cunt. Besides, amendments are man-made laws, not natural laws, and they have no power to alter natural laws.
“Period. End of discussion.”
Your corruption and incompetence end nothing, except your credibility.
“You want to make an extra categorical American citizenship? Have Congress rewrite the statute or pass a Constitutional amendment. Knock yourself out, a**hole.”
Spoken like the useful iduot you are. The natural-born Kenyan has done enough damage, we don’t need a natural-born Canadian to compound the damage.
Buy a package of Summer’s Eve and give your filthy cunt a good douching. Then try reading the Constitution while applying the principles of constitutional construction. By the way, what did you do with the word “natural” you wish to expunge from the NBC clause. Is it hiding in your expansive twat?
Shorter skookum:
Cuck cuck cuck cuckity cuck cuck cuck
GTFO
Yowza, preview?
Woot!
Even shorter sknookur:
Punctuated slewfoot.
Allow me to translate skookum
“I’m a cave man . . . Your world frightens and confuses me . . . But one thing I do know is . . .
this is Chewbacca.
Red Neck Lawyerese
If you were delivered via C-Section. . .
You just might be ineligble to be Pres’nit of the United States!
LW III said it best:
Dead Sknook
Shockingly, some of these Trumphumpers can’t take a fucking hint. They feel entitled to be heard! Special little snowflakes will stomp their feet and call people like me a pseudocon on a site where my archives are readily reviewable.
They are tired, preening, needy, scurrilous little Old Man-buggered scrunt progs who think their tri-cornered hats and rote raising of Blackwell disguise them from those of us who are actual constitutionalists.
I tried to be clear. They can all fuck off. If I’m a pseudocon, they’re the cheese under my pseudocon balls.
A reminder: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=29785
Could I get into Instanpundit’s comments I’d post the same damn thing, too.
Or, if’n yer mamma wasn’t squatting on a actual got! dang! patch of honest-to-God 100% USofA dirt when you was squeezed out, you wasn’t “born on U.S. soil”, now was ya?
Now Trump, he was pushed into the world onto a luxurious bed of the loamiest, most organically rich, completely American soil you’ve ever seen. Fertile!
Jeff, I’ve found Instapundit’s comments section and ad blockers do not play well together. Main reason I’ve never frequented them. Not worth it to me. Not sure if that’s your problem or not, just thought I’d mention it.
I can’t reset my password. This computer is a disaster and my site is mess of old code.
@ skookum
“Your interpretation is so obviously incorrect as to be treasonable.”
Curses, Achmed! Our Canadian jihad has been foiled!
“The principles of constitutional construction require each word be given full force and effect. Your interpretation illegally expunges ‘natural’ from the natural-born citizen clause. A ‘natural born Citizen’ must thus be a subset of born citizen; ie, not all persons born citizens are natural-born citizens.”
Ah, I see. And, by analogy, a four-foot table must thus be a subset of foot tables.
Compound adjectives. Look them up.
It’s at this point, by the way, that I completely tuned you out. So feel free to tell me that you had something really brilliant to say if I’d just gone a little farther. But unfortunately for you, and George Turner before you, I’ve read Blackstone’s commentaries. And if you read past the second paragraph of Chapter 10, where he makes the “natural-born means born on the land, while alien means born not on the land” distinction that Cruz birthers are coming to adore, he clearly states that the meaning of “natural-born” has been altered by British statute to include children born outside the allegiance of the king, as long as their fathers are British subjects.
THAT is the meaning of “natural-born” that was in effect at the time the Constitution was written. And since those Framers (and there were many) who sat in the First Congress saw fit to pass a law telling us that they considered as “natural-born citizens” children born outside the United States to at least one American citizen — provided their father had been previously resident in the country — American citizens, then that’s the operational definition I’m going with. And guess what? Under it, Ted Cruz qualifies…as did Barry Goldwater, George Romney, and John McCain before him.
Here endeth the lesson…that should never have needed to be taught…
“children born outside the United States to at least one American citizen — provided their father had been previously resident in the country — American citizens”
Ick. Well, that’s what I get for editing as I write.
This post has been brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
Red Neck Lawyerese:
Iff’n you were concieved in a test tube…
You jes might be ineligble to be Pres’nit of the United States!
Too much verbiage. Here is a simpler explanation of what’s going on…
http://www.anti-republicanculture.com/2016/03/the-stupid-party.html
Link to the relevant statute in which Congress actually exercised it’s Art 1. Sec 8 powers
n.b. the statue definess the persons who don’t need to be naturalized, and are thus, natural-born.
@ Ernst Schreiber
Oh, that’s just silly. How dare you cite the law to tell us what the law is?!
Err…that is…I mean…
Squirrel!
“Blackstone”
Oh! A guy who died before the Constitution was drafted! Although, yes, an authority in common law, he’s not, sadly, a reference that can be used to determine Constitutional requirements for being eligible as President. Because we used what we wanted to, and discarded the rest. Neither Blackstone nor Vattel can overrule the Constitution and its interpretation via SCOTUS rulings.
“Actually go back and find an old civics book.”
Civics books are even less relevant than Blackstone, aren’t they?
I’m going to let you Google that and find out yourself, because reading is fundamental.
I think what you meant to say Demosthenes was, “the law doesn’t say what it says it says because the law says “citizens at birth” not “natural born citizens”
Also, “frak off and frakking DIE! you frelling effing mother freller! NATURAL LAW!!1!11!1!!”
@ Howard Towt
So is that an invitation to hate Democrats back, or a plea for Republicans to stop hating each other long enough to start hating Democrats back?
Well, when you put it that way, again…it just sounds silly. ;)
I ask because what I’m hoping is you’re trying to point out how this Orwelllian WAR is PEACE double-thinking identity politics crap the Democrats have pounded since 1865 is creeping into the GOP.
As witnessed by the fear the Canadian born lying liar everybody hates can’t work with anybody Establican tool who collaborated with the evil establishment that hates him and won’t work with him to steal Wisconsin before he stole Colorado and the resent this unfair process that I’m winning it’s so unfair that I haven’t already won I’m a sore winner those losers are out to get.
shorter me:
Donald Trump is running on fear and resentment.
Justl Like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
And Barak Obama before.
Skookums, where I come from we do not address women as “cvnts”. I seriously doubt you would call her that to her face if you were discussing this in person.
The problem with the Internet is that it has lowered the level of discourse and, if you are truly trying to win an argument, you would not stoop to the use of that word.
[…] blog of the day is Protein Wisdom, with a post on having something to […]
“Skookums, where I come from we do not address women as “cvnts”. I seriously doubt you would call her that to her face if you were discussing this in person.
“The problem with the Internet is that it has lowered the level of discourse and, if you are truly trying to win an argument, you would not stoop to the use of that word.”
Any woman who starts a post with “fuck off,” ends it with “asshole,” and litters the body with illogic and lies has earned the title of cunt. And, only a spineless worm incapable of mating with an evolved human female would white knight for such trash.
To everyone else who replied with only ad hominems — those do not constitute valid arguments, so I shall regard them as signals of surrender to my logical interpretation.
To the doorknob citing Blackstone, he was speaking of natural-born subjects, and said nothing about citizenship in that passage, either natural-born or naturalized.
The number of Obamacons herein and within the GOPe is tragic. I look forward to the coming revolution, as you mindless sheep are easy to identify and deal with.
Demosthenes wrote:
No, I think Ernst was closer with “Chewbacca!” ;-)
So disagreeing with a Trumpster is giving aid an comfort to an enemy of the USA? Or did the Trumpster also neglect to look up the legal definition of treason and is instead screeching it with wild abandon?
Oooo… we have a comment preview system. Did that just get installed?! ;-)
Which one of you Obamacons forgot to close the door to the troll coop? You can’t leave everything to us mindless sheep, easy as we are to identify and all.
Skookum wrote in crayon: I look forward to the coming revolution, as you mindless sheep are easy to identify and deal with.
So…you say you want a Revolution, eh?
Thanks for outing yourself, Lefty.
Skooky bleated
Be careful what you wish for, Robespierre.
It rubs the natural law teaching on its skin, it puts the aquinas in the basket, or else it gets the hose again
Spineless worm here, skookums. Again, I doubt you’d say any of those things to me face-to-face.
It’s been fun playing; you can leave now.
Dammit. Darleen gets “cunt” and all I get is “doorknob”? I wanna be a cunt too.
Where do I apply? Is this a federal, state, or local issue? Do I have to file a form with the appropriate office? Does it have an official-sounding designation*, like Form THX 1138? How long should I wait for my paperwork to clear? Are there cunt-based tax breaks to which I would be entitled?
Or, given that gender is whatever we feel it is these days, is it my responsibility to make it happen? And if so, how? Can I just proclaim it, or click my heels together three times and say the magic words? Or is it more involved? Because a budding cunt only has so much time in the day, you know.
* (Please note, linguistic scholars, that via snooki [this thread’s resident constimatutional expert], “official-sounding designations” are a subset of “sounding designations.” Don’t get confused. It makes sense because it doesn’t make sense. For further reference, please see the cornerstone text “An Idiot’s Guide to Constitutional Interpretation” by Blackwhite.)
You can just email me snooky and I’ll send you my address and invite you to come deal with me.
Or are you waiting until you have a mob to do your bidding?
Fucktard.
Any woman who starts a post with “fuck off,” ends it with “asshole,” and litters the body with illogic and lies has earned the title of cunt. And, only a spineless worm incapable of mating with an evolved human female would white knight for such trash. – See more at: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=58377#comment-1274378
Bitch had it coming, right?
Ye gods.
Jeff: I’ve actually given people my city of residence (Houston, TX) and general location within Houston. Last time I checked I’m the only “Patrick Chester” in that area (or Houston for that matter) so they should be able to find me.
No one’s shown. I guess even over-the-hill geeks like me are too frightening for the likes of Snookum. ;-)
“I look forward to the coming revolution, as you mindless sheep are easy to identify and deal with.”
You’ll dangle by week two, assuming you don’t find your way into the shadow of a tense fellow with a broken bottle and no angel on his right shoulder first. People who stupidly look forward to chaos thinking they’ve got impunity or history on their side are addled sports beginning to succumb to the Darwinian selection pressures. The flame is right the fuck there little moth. No is stopping you but you.
It’s funny the things people type during commercial breaks of Ghost Hunters while waiting for Mom to pop the day’s third round of Hot Pockets down the basement stairs.
There are certainly Trump supporters who are not hysterical assholes, even plenty of them. BUT when I see a hysterical asshole over the last five months or so, odds are well in favor of them falling into this (apparent) category.
Honestly I have no idea how many of them are just the same lunatics who go for the loudest, angriest candidate in *any* race, or paid trolls sent to disrupt, or just people who have alienated themselves through constant obsession… but Here They Are, screaming and frothing at the mouth.
There seems to be a big influx when you point out that a *certain someone* is a semi-literate douchebag.
P.S. Every single one “looking forward to the revolution” is either mad as a hatter or has no concept of history *at all*.
You want revenge on your imaginary enemies (as opposed to your real ones)
You’d settle for a cleansing fire and rebuilding
You’ll get shot on your doorstep and your family’s freedom eliminated
Because *you* haven’t spent 80 years planning for social collapse, but someone else has!
How many people who “look[ed] forward to the revolution” ended their lives screaming,
“But I’m one of you!!!!“
cut and paste commentators, blech
Thank you, Jeff.
“Such incompetents need to be deported south of the Trump Wall, where incompetence, illiteracy, and corruption are the norm.”
Trump put Bush Bro.s meat on a table at a press conference to prove he’s still in the steak business, and he’s not. He hasn’t been for nine years. Trump knows EXACTLY how fucking stupid a Skookums is. But he’s not looking to life Skookums up. He wants to use the top of Skookum’s big fat head as a stepping stone to payolaville. Trump can’t profit from a revolution. He doesn’t give two shits about that. That’s the corn he throws out to attract the chicken heads. He wants a national Tammany Hall with him as the new Boss Laguardia. When he’s done with Sir Skookumsalot of 4chan Trump’ll broom his dumb ass off quick. With burly security guards who know how to take the trash out.
Any woman who starts a post with “fuck off,” ends it with “asshole,” and litters the body with illogic and lies has earned the title of cunt.
Well aren’t you just precious!
Hon, you aren’t worth the possible broken fingernail I might have to endure beating your ass into a weeping mass if I met you. Indeed, my 3 y/o granddaughter could easily defeat you.
Does mommy still nurse you?
It figures that Jeff would Go Epic during the time I’m recovering from a Catastrophic Workstation Failure.
Hope it’s not too late to register my delight with this post. Utah also told Trump where to stick it in no uncertain terms.
‘Twas my first caucus, as it was for most of us there, and when the tally for our district showed Cruz as the overwhelming fave (41 to 11) we all cheered.
Ahyup
[no link, just highlighting]
Fear
Resentment
The coming revolution. You know, we have the best revolutions, let me tell you. The blood in the streets, it’s going to be fantastic. Believe me.
Dirty old bag. You’re either a lying liar who lies, because Everybody knows how arcane, how byzantine the caucus procedures are so that no ordinary citizen could possibly ever master them;
or you’re an establishment tool because Everybody knows that the GOPe uses caucuses to steal votes from ordinary citizens.
(Damn is that Everybody smart. He must work for Donald Trump!)
And sdferr’s 12:00pm was laugh out loud funny.
“The principles of constitutional construction require each word be given full force and effect. Your interpretation illegally expunges “natural” from the natural-born citizen clause. A “natural born Citizen” must thus be a subset of born citizen; ie, not all persons born citizens are natural-born citizens.”
And his mom was a natural born citizen, which is all it takes to be one. So quit being an obtuse dumbfuck making idiotic, irrelevant arguments. You’re wrong and case law on the subject shows you are wrong.
And BTW, Jeff.
1. Good stuff and
2. About time, but next time, don’t sugar coat it, tell us what you really think, ok? I hate it when you equivocate.
“I look forward to the coming revolution, as you mindless sheep are easy to identify and deal with.”
Uh oh. I sense a large number of “down twinkles” coming our way.
And this was an outstanding missive by the proprietor of the joint.
If seems to me that if caucuses turned out just like regular ballot voting no party would bother having them. There must be a difference and the difference is desired.
IIRC, back in 2008 Obama always did really well in caucus states and was neck and neck with Hillary in states with regular ballot primaries (or whatever they are called). Hillary was already ran over by the Obama bus so, I guess she did not whine as much as Team trump.
“Everybody knows how arcane, how byzantine the caucus procedures are so that no ordinary citizen could possibly ever master them”
Hast thou they feather?
Nay master.
Then thou must wait in the feather line.
Hast thou they feather.
Ay master.
They feather is blue. Hast thou a red feather?
Nay master the red feather offendeth the eye of the wise. For the Cardinal is faithless and flutters from St. Louis to Phoenix and calls itself champion to the whole of Arizona. I shameth the feather that is of red.
Thy philosophy on sport does thee credit but what shall we do with a blue feather?
We shall place it in the clay pot by the name of the one it must lift.
Shall we put it in the clay pot marked Trump?
Nay master for that pot is shattered and thrown into a deep well, unlit.
And doth that make me a cuck?
I call you not a cuck o’ master. I smoocheth not the ring of indolent iniquity.
And the thirty pots marked Cruz are proud to receive thy blue feather…after though hast run the gauntlet of Heth Sa’an the ineffable serpent who haunteth the wide raw boroughs of the clean mind.
So?
Pick any fucking pot. It’s fixed. And watch out for the Kasich pot. It smells like a mail-man’s son, and it might chop at you. It’s gonna be Ryan anyway. Don’t watch the news?
GOPe be with you.
Dolla bills muh bro.
And we must burn Colorado down after the shadow caucus so there will be no evidence of SorosRoveBearPig’s involvement.
Fuck that. I’m no good with fire. It’s why my wives left me. Alone. In the cold yawning blackness. That and I played too much Fallout 4.
I heard that. Rough time to be a gansta. Nothing to look forward to but booton face and payola. Empty. Enjoy Arby’s bro.
Hey, come back here and put the damned blue feather in a pot. Are you ADD or something.
i love your comment about the feathers
And then someone will come along and say “that’s totally how it happened, man!”
(headdesk)
frankdn says April 14, 2016 at 8:25 pm
Ya know, I can’t think of a better reason than Trump, to dump this whole primary idea and go back to a brokered convention. That system gave our progenitors some great candidates (Lincoln) and some stinkers (Hoover) but at least it meant a much, much shorter election season. And it was less expensive to run for office, and K street was just another street.
Honestly? I have to disagree. Even a bad voter primary choice is better than a Party Elite choosing for them. Let the Commiecrat Politboro rig their delegate votes to give it to Hillary the Bolshevik, no matter how well Bernie the Menshevik does in their Party primaries. The sheer contrast in Party candidate selection process would then be a vote getter in itself.
And that is true even if a few too many voters still believe this “Birther” nonsense. It was bad enough that the Obamunist was able to get all too many otherwise well-meaning and patriotic people to chase after that will-o-wisp. Now the GOP is doing it to its own candidates? Blah.
What a circle-jerk this comments thread is. Three or four people goin’ at it for over 300 ‘ments, and no resolution in sight. You see more faces at the guinea pig exhibit at the Cochise county fair, and gets lots more satisfaction out the end.
Jeff, I’m going to say it: you’re ranting ineffectually here and you’re smart enough to know it. But it’s too little too late. Your cohort is too few to make a difference, the race is nearing its finale, and your guy just can’t make it over the line.
Seems the Anyone-but-Trump crowd is running out of breath, and they ought to be. Their guy cannot win the general election. Just wait ’till Salon, Mother Jones and the NYT begin to “Ann Barnhardt” your guy, Cruz. The libertarian center will peeeeeeeel right off the GOP ticket like Michael Jackson’s facial skin after a moisturizing sauna. New York Values….sheesh!
Don Surber’s already chronicling the Left’s initial digs at Cruz’ jugular: his vote to ban dildos in Texas! Suck on that one for a minute. Jeez – knowing this, what is it that still anchors you to this ecuminical albatross?!
Team Players? At this point I’ve realized that much of the so-called conservative commentariat will need to be dragged kicking and screaming to victory in November because they’re doing their level best to lose. That means people like me will just have to work that much harder.
Continue to be dead weight in this effort, Jeff. That’s OK – I’ve got your back. But know that we’ll look your way again later for help. Hopefully you’ll be better able to assist in our efforts after the election.
It’s easier for outsiders to overcome insiders within a caucus/convention system. Organization and enthusiasm count for more than deep pockets and media consultants.
That doesn’t mean that insiders don’t try to make it hard on outsiders.
vote to ban dildos in Texas!
And folks wonder why Trump’s people have so much trouble getting themselves credentialed.
“Jeff, I’m going to say it: you’re ranting ineffectually here and you’re smart enough to know it.”
Did someone ask you anything? I don’t think they did.
Ask him to say something? No. Ask him to do something? As a matter of fact Jeff did.
But so far only one Trumper’s had the good manners to actually do it.
Look Trumpers, it’s easy.
Pretend you just sang a dumb crazy song about how you wanted “a bean feast” and sat on a digital scale, which caused the scale’s meter to point to “bad egg”. The plate of the scale swiveled on a hinge like a trap door, and opened up into a trash chute, and you’re falling/sliding down that shoot while Oompa loompas (you’d like them they’re orange, preachy, and have bad hair) sing a lecture about how your parents screwed you up.
The chute has opened.
Go down it. Off with you.
You will not be inheriting the chocolate factory. Your golden ticket is gone. Testy Gene Wilder is not going to warn you anymore in his natty purple duds.. You are free. Thanks for playing. Buh-bye.
By the way, darleen, how does it feel to have spineless worm for a white knight?
Mark Levin was just wondering what Rupert Murdoch knows about Trump that the rest of us don’t. His New York Post endorsed Trump in the NY primary.
Murdoch is an open borders guy. Like, border? what border? we don’ need no steenkin’ borderz! open border.
Makes you wonder who’s going to end up on the wrong side of that wall meant to keep the idiots out, huh?
Who would want another one with no concept of property rights directly at one’s back? Such a juxtaposition would be highly imprudent. It’s been bad enough with IWonPenPhone at the reins these last seven plus years.
So not wanting sex toys visible in stores children frequent makes Ted an “ecumenical albatross”.
Although I suppose steveaz is correct; the Demunist Apparatchik Media will pull out any smear they can. Been there, done that with Bush the Younger and his long lost DUI.
And The Donald’s advantage here is what? That his negatives are beaten to death already? :-p
It’s not that Cruz is all that wonderful. It’s that even a dildo-denying Cruz is preferable to an incoherently bloviating, know-nothing political neophyte.
You know what else is incredibly hateful? Making humans born male use the men’s restroom, and humans born women use the women’s restroom.
“…phony Republicans.”
You don’t thing Trent Lott was a True Republican, do you?
Or Sen. Stevens? Do you remember what Republican stands for when in power? It stands for power alone.
Address the concerns of those whom understand what Republican means, which is the pursuit of power at any cost, of course including the desires of those who donate or vote, being secondary.
Address why conservatives, and define that label, not just for now but for all time I would hope you aspire to define that term as Churchill taught us we should, in such a way to relate positively to Mitch McConnel or Paul Ryan or John Boehnor’s ruling results.
Ah, the “you’re outnumbered and it’s all HOPELESS” claim… used by progressive trolls everywhere.
Holden Caulfield is a great guy to learn from in that you don’t want to be him, all that wasteful anxiety resulting in a need to elevate hate where respect for the efforts of others ought be.
> his vote to ban dildos in Texas! <
solicitor generals don't vote. they mostly represent the gov't in court.
I can’t vote … but, sure as hellfire, I’m going to hang around for the show.
By the way, darleen, how does it feel to have spineless worm for a white knight?
RI, anyone skoopumpummy takes to the fainting couch over is exactly the white knight I want!
No need for White Knights, Darleen’s got this.
Trumpistas sure seem to be a lot like the Ronulans.
I do have to admit that I was sometimes getting a schadenboner over the discomfort of the Establicans that Trump had wrought. But I sure don’t support him.
From The Sermon on the Mount:
So the “Strong Christian” dumbfuck’s favorite Bible verse is one that was specifically refuted by Jesus Christ Himself. And some 35% of supposed Republicans believe this fucking bozo. Yeah, Don, you can learn a lot from the Bible. You’d probably have to read it though, dipshit.
Yeah, Don, you can learn a lot from the Bible. You’d probably have to read it though, dipshit. –
and Palin was/is mocked unmercifully for her not having a ready list of the newspapers she reads.
(I’m still in mourning over her passing over to the Trumpside)
Jeff’s gonna be on an online radio show called “Getting Hammered” in ’bout 15 mins if ya’s wanna give it a listen.
“Amendments have no power to alter natural laws.”
As the Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land, yes, they do.
Unless you want to go through that whole “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government” thingy.
Of course, if the alteration to the natural law is with the consent of the governed, well, lotsa luck with that.
What’s more fun than being lectured by an ignoramus?
No such vote occurred. Political genius steveaz is confusing Cruz’s defense of a Texas State law with the legislative process. Pesky fact: As the Solicitor General of Texas, defending its laws was Cruz’s job, stupid.
Damn, Trumbo just homered for the second time in the same inning. 5 rbi! Nice.
Test.
Cool. Logged in finally.
Beautiful rant, Jeff.
The Insty link sure attracted some long-winded Birthers, didn’t it?
oh heck sdferr, wish I saw that earlier (I’m now listening but hoping they rerun this)
Darleen, it appears you can get a later recording here, so I think, no worries.
[waving at Spiny]
Hi there!!
>solicitor generals don’t vote. they mostly represent the gov’t in court.<
or order little debbies @ 7-11
what amazes me is how stupid the trump sound these days. on “the apprentice” he be fired for the stupid by now.
ahyup
(6th bullet for those with a social media attention span)
i will credit trump with this: national review is a bore and fox and et al “right” sites
i heard levin interview ed morrisey of hot air tonight on his new book. in my market levin is on SRN and mr ed is SRN and the SRN is mitch mcconnell. so, mr. ed’s book is that we need 2 x 10^6 votes is certain counties and then VICTORY!!11!!
i ax michelle fields about this and she pointed to her …. and her claim of allen west squeezing her boobs
>BREAKING, EXCLUSIVE: Allen West Has Sexually Harassed At Least Two Women
http://gotnews.com/breaking-exclusive-allen-west-has-sexually-harassed-at-least-two-women/
know the players in this “game”
Main Takeaway from the Show, Getting Hammered: #TrumpsADick
You can listen anytime to it here, as Sdferr mentioned:
http://www.spreaker.com/show/getting-hammered
In a base turnout election. Which is what this will be. He has no advantage.
salem radio network and ed morrisey’s “we be 2 x 10^6 more/book/whiteboard” is just karlroveinc. too bad for levin for signing up with gope clowns
Continue to be dead weight in this effort, Jeff. That’s OK – I’ve got your back. But know that we’ll look your way again later for help. Hopefully you’ll be better able to assist in our efforts after the election. –
Oh yea? F-u.
Seriously. Sideways. Swordfish.
>In a base turnout election. Which is what this will be<
sure if you play the karlroverncgopedncnprabccbsfox game
>In a base turnout election. <
please explain each party's "base" and why they would vote in Nov. '16?
ot concerning russian fly overs at low altitude: paint ball guns might be fun sailors?
The base is the people who show up to vote either because 1) they like the candidate and want to vote for him/her 2) they’re party loyalists who vote out of obligation despite the fact that they hate their party’s candidate.
Both Clinton and Trump are going to have trouble growing beyond their base. I think Clinton knows it. I’m not sure Trump does.
In any event, the fall campaign is going to be so negative that you’ll want to take a shower after you vote.
Assuming you don’t have enough self respect to stay home.
n.b. all the candidates want you to stay home.
Skookums, the last a$$hole we had here insulting women was a gentleman named thor. He finally irritated Jeff enough to post his IP address, and me enough that I started looking for his ISP and hit each link in the chain with a description of what their liability might look like under the Violence Against Women Act. That was usually enough to chase him one step further. I guess he found out I was doing it.
He was smart. He left. Are you smart?
Because I can do it again. All I need is Jeff to post the IP address from his logs.
Let me add that I think Rubio took himself out by getting into the pigsty with Trump. For the most part, Cruz has avoided making that mistake.
Both Clinton and Trump need to wrestle in the pigsty. More exactly, both Clinton and Trump need their opponent to get into the pigsty in order to wrestle.
Clinton because she can’t run on her record.
Trump because he has no record.
But, Ernst, wouldn’t you agree that Trump Magnus sounds like a broken record?
Deactivation of Hal 9000
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8N72t7aScY
Not sure what you’re getting at Bob. All stump speeches sound like broken records
make sumthimg better i’ll do a deal we were robbed i quote the bible….
Jeff,
You are essentially correct in every point you make. Except.
It is Trump or the oligarchy. And there is even a chance Trump is just a different faction of the oligarchy. The problem with the others is that they are Certainly bought and paid for. Trump might not be.
MSimon
With all due respect, what makes you believe Trump is not “bought”?
There is more to “bought” than just mere money.
Ermagherd! They’re all corrupted by the Oligarchy! We must instead vote for a member of the Board of Oligarchy Inc., because, um, er, POTATO!
Seriously, I’m done with detail, no one is listening. I have this deep need to argue facts that has just been made utterly unproductive by Slogan Culture.
Oh and I forgot “highly detailed lies and half-lies culture.”
With Trump you need only stroke his ego and he’s putty in your hands.
Point taken re stated ag. Question is what else can the Dems attack dogs mine out of Cruz’ too long a time in government?
-S
“gentleman named thor ”
Assumes facts not in evidence. Not in the least.
Well, they can find he’s a nasty Godbotherer regarding the 10 Commandments and the Pledge of Allegiance. They can find he’s a crazy gun nut regarding Heller. They can find him racist for believing that you should have the equal opportunity to have Texas kill you when you rape and kill its children, even though you’re Mexican. They can find he’s all sorts of ugly American, and a highly effective defender of same, which they hate because they prefer Communists.
Republicans have been trying to shut him up for 4 years now. If there were any significant skeletons in his closet, we’d have heard about them already. Who gives a fuck what the Dems are going to say? They’re running Hillary Clinton.
[…] I close with a bit of what Jeff Goldstein writes about his frustration with the Trumpers. Jeff sums up a lot of my feelings. […]
I don’t remember doing a radio show. Are you all sure it was me?
steveaz: Trump is a cowardly beta douchenozzle dipped in goldleaf and then spray tanned orange. He’s a prog, and he and his followers are reviving the Bull Moose progressivist infiltration of the GOP.
The treachery of the establicans have opened the door for this, and Trump and his prog pals are taking advantage of it. The fact that he’s trying to delegitimize state primary systems — and that Ben Carson was yesterday questioning the legitimacy of the Electoral College — are tells: they advocate for centralization, direct democracy, and mob rule, the very things the left wants as it collects more and more urban dwellers in population centers as “clients.”
There isn’t a chance in hell I’d ever give my one vote to a prog, and if you are supporting a guy like Trump you aren’t a constitutionalist nor a conservative. You are crying out for the French Revolution, not another American revolution. And you stupidly believe you’ll be spared the guillotine if you show up in your tacky red ball cap.
Michelle Fields was on the team, writing for Trumpbart. Alas, you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few 100# reporterette types.
Whoever it was hasn’t completely strangled the baltimorean dialect out of his pronunciation of “saw” and “foresaw”, so maybe an ultra-adept impersonator if anyone. Nice of Maggie Gyllenhaal to make an appearance on the show too.
You are crying out for the French Revolution, not another American revolution. And you stupidly believe you’ll be spared the guillotine if you show up in your tacky red ball cap.
there is a certain amount of schadenfreude to be had at watching the fall-down-and-weep histrionics on university campuses at “Trump2016” chalkings … but not worth burning down the country with either Trump or Hillary as Obama’s 3rd term.
Michelle Fields had a pen. America, if you have pens you might as well pree bruise your arms because Corey will find ya and make ya safe for Uncle Taffy.
Because they’ve given up and are trying to find a Good Man to care for them.
[…] Jeff Goldstein returns to Protein Wisdom! Hi. It’s me, Jeff. And I have something to say. […]
I’d like to know who in the oligarchy paid for Ted Cruz.
Because that guy or gal deserves a refund.
Less than they already have on Trump’s sordid personal and professional dealings.
The problem with the others is that they are Certainly bought and paid for. Trump might not be.
TRUMP IS THE BUYER AND THE PAYER.
HE is the guy who corrupts politicians. HE is the one who pulls the strings on his puppets.
If George Soros ran for office, you could also assert that he’s NOT bought and paid for, but that wouldn’t be a point in his favor.
Capiche?
Insisting that all of the other candidates are bought and paid for, simply because they’re not independently wealthy, is the worst kind of lazy thinking.
Don’t engage in lazy thinking. Don’t use shortcuts to make judgments. Rules of thumb are usually wrong.
Most important? Don’t base your decisions on assumptions that are so blasted easy to refute.
Because they’ve given up and are trying to find a Good Man to care for them.
Worst. Judgement. Ever.
I did say a long time ago that whereas Obama was President Boyfriend, Trump was becoming Candidate Boyfriend.
There are reasons I at least understand for supporting Trump, this is not one of them, because he is not the “take care of you” type.
They haven’t begun to scratch the surface of the ethical cesspool that is Trumpbama. Should he get the nomination, his squealing will be legendary while they flense him.
The hypocritical contradictions in Jeff’s rant are obvious to any who know the truth that is out there for any and all to read.
For example: While truth may be relative in some cases, anyone who claims to be a “constitutionalist” (Jeff) while ignoring a POTUS candidate (Cruz) who gave up his foreign Canadian citizenship as recently as 2014…a candidate (Cruz) who was born on foreign soil…a candidate (Cruz) whose Cuban father was a foreigner at the time of Rafael Edward Cruz’ birth on foreign soil…while ignoring the explicit, yet simple definition of “natural born citizen” in the book used by the Founding Fathers when they wrote the U.S. Constitution (Vattel’s “the Law of Nations” defines a “natural born citizen” as “those born in the country, of parents who are citizens”)…so anyone who ignores the definitive and precise facts available to all…is either seriously mistaken while misleading his lost flock of dimwits or is a disingenuous provocateur agent for unknown dark forces.
Despite the well-coordinated, but unsubstantiated, RepubliCON Party attack on Trump supporters as intellectual lightweights, the Cruz supporters either have a serious problem with reading comprehension…or their mantra is the same as the Dimocrats…”the end justifies the means.” Let me repeat the definition of “natural born citizen” as defined in “the Law of Nations” again for the slow Cruz readers…”those…born…in…the…country…of…parents…who…are…citizens”. If you don’t understand “singular” and “plural”, please reference back to your Special Educational materials that may define it for you.
Either way, Cruz supporters are “aiding and abetting” the treasonous attempt by Rafael Edward “Teddy” Cruz to subvert the U.S. Constitution and place another constitutionally-unqualified foreigner into the White House…to succeed the current foreign pretender, one Barry Soetoro…aka Barack Hussein Obama…a citizen of either Indonesia or Kenya…but, not “natural born” either. (People who can unequivocally prove their citizenship don’t spend over $1 million to hide their records and keep them from being released like Barry Soetoro has done.)
The above merely skims the surface of this subject. It takes quite a bit of effort to even marginally dismantle the “Big lie” as Hitler called it in his book, “Mein Kampf”…and the Cruz supporters are utilizing Hitler’s “Big Lie” with the support of the lame and owned U.S. media. Hence, it is generally useless to attempt to debate the facts with any and all who do not have the willingness, the desire, and/or the mental capacity to conduct their own due diligence in vetting a potential candidate for the one office in the once-Republic that requires a “natural born citizen” as a constitutional prerequisite.
Rafael Edward Cruz has refused to date to even prove that he is a regular old 14th Amendment citizen…which brings into doubt whether he is even qualified to be a U.S. Senator. Cruz has refused to release a Form FS-240, the “Consular Report of Birth Abroad of a Citizen of the United States of America (CRBA)” which his American mother was required to file when he was born on foreign soil if she wanted little Teddy to be an American citizen…not “natural born” since he didn’t and will never qualify…see above paragraphs). It is still the law today, oh ignorant Cruzites. If you can’t read and comprehend the English language, have someone explain it to you…in simple terms you can understand. Here is the U.S. State Dept. link for you…(just…click…the…link…focus…focus…you…can…do…it…)
https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/abroad/events-and-records/birth.html
If you bothered to read the information at the above link, you should know by now that merely being born to an American female on foreign soil does not automatically bestow American citizenship to her offspring…no matter how bad you wish it were so.
While it is generally impossible to debate with brainwashed folks who have their simple minds made up…and hard facts really confuse them…the above is merely the “tip of the iceberg” on a variety of topics related to this election.
Whoever “Jeff” is…his frustration is obvious when he resorts to gutter vulgarity as he is apparently unable to utilize polite and intelligent debate to explain the “Trump Phenomenon”. Please allow me to briefly explain it to Jeff and his koolaid-drinking followers.
An unknown percentage (but, quite a few I suspect) of Trump supporters don’t really care about hashing out the various and debatable Republican campaign issues bantered about in the media. Trump has had a few policy warts and campaign missteps. We don’t really care. Trump is a wrecking ball…a wrecking ball to break up the good old boys club in the RepubliCON Party…the same fascist RepubliCON Party that is the incestuous 1st cousin to the Socialist Dimocrat Party…the “Crips” and the “Bloods” as Jesse Ventura calls them…or “two wings of the same bird of prey” as Pat Buchanan opined.
And no matter how much you hate it…Rafael Edward Cruz will not be the winner in November, 2016. Trump may not make it either. But, I guarantee you that Ted Cruz won’t be POTUS…cause he can’t get in the Oval Office without the massive support of the Trump legions that you Cruz fascists are telling, “fuck every last one of you”. (For the record, I’ll pass. Did I happen to stumble onto a “Log Cabin Republicans” website?!? Geez…that gives me the creeps!! I prefer women not named “Jeff”.)
The RepubliCON Party has been tag-teaming with the Dimocrats for decades now as they bankrupt the nation financially, dilute the American population with millions of illegals, and otherwise destroy the nation within as Marcus Tullius Cicero famously warned over 2,000 years ago:
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”
Oh? “The Dimocrats will win” if we don’t back Cruz? Hillary? Bernie? Teddy Cruz? They’re all going to keep spending this socialist paradise into terminal bankruptcy while inviting in more and more throngs of foreign welfare recipients to speed up the process. So…just like the old Parkay commercial…”no deeference” in our book. “Let the b*tch burn.” Just remember, the simple-minded and treasonous Cruz supporters helped throw the matches on the brush pile smothered in gasoline.
So…”Jeff” can willingly back the arrogant RepubliCON Party apparatus when he tells us, “fuck every last one of you”. That’s nothing new, Jeff. We just wanna be kissed for a change. No big fan of Sarah Palin…but, she’ll do.
But, y’all keep on hatin’…Trump’s numbers just keep going higher…dated April 15, 2016…
POLITICAL PREDICTION MARKET: TRUMP OPENS UP 27-POINT LEAD OVER CRUZ
Washington (CNN) — Donald Trump has a crushing lead for the GOP nomination in CNN’s Political Prediction Market.
The billionaire GOP front-runner has his odds for the nomination at 62%, opening a 27-point lead on Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whose chances are at 35%.
Last week, Trump and Cruz were almost tied for the nomination, with Trump at 47% and Cruz at 46%.
FULL ARTICLE…
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/15/politics/donald-trump-republican-nomination-political-prediction-market/index.html
“The hypocritical contradictions in Jeff’s rant a”
Fuck, Trump, fuck you, fuck your birther nonsense, and fuck your whole copy pasta idiot ride.
Insert at least three angry wriggling sawfish in your Trump-choked chowhole then take the first short bus out.
>”those…born…in…the…country…of…parents…who…are…citizens”.<
so us diplomat's children who are born in foreign lands aren't "natural born citizens"? how about the children of military families serving oversees? how about american tourists in foreign lands such as say canada? your "definition" is stupid.
>Rafael Edward Cruz will not be the winner in November, 2016.<
maybe but a stark choice cruz vs clinton or sanders. young guy vs geezers.
Oh dear, someone took their time to copy’n’paste a screed.
Ah, another birther, this one from 73.166.254.166 resolves to Marietta, GA
one of Trumps alt-right neo-Nazis possibly?
. . . Trump was becoming Candidate Boyfriend.
Steeleye Span: Seventeen Come Sunday
and a pint o’ rum in the mornin’
ot
>David Burge
?@iowahawkblog
“Capitalism” isn’t a “system,” it’s a word made up by an 1860’s hipster dipshit to whine about people voluntarily buying & selling stuff.
<
https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/721078552645357568?refsrc=email&s=11
fundamentally transform news
can’t win at the state level create new states:
A New Map for America
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-for-america.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
hey jihadis these peeps are axing for it
Yup. Trump’s the proverbial bull in a china shop. Nobody doubts that. The question is, what’s he going to do for the Constitution? Or even to limit government excess?
Most of the rest of that is the conspiracy is so vast the the proof of it is there is no proof and if you don’t believe it then you’re of the conspiracy nonsense.
But I’ll look up Vattel’s “the Law of Nations,” whatever that is. Thanks for calling it to my attention. I’m surprised something that important to the Founder’s never made it into the Liberty Fund’s catalog.
Oh, by the way, has it ever occured to you that Trump is going to have as much trouble with Cruz supporters as you say Cruz is going to have Trump’s legions.
I mean, in between tut-tut-tutting about Jeff’s potty mouth, you’ve called Cruz supporter’s “dimwits” “fascists,” “traitors,” “simple-minded” and probably a few others that I missed. I’m sure cheater must be in there somewhere.
Turns out Vattel is in the Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty, so point to Brubaker55 there.
My mistake.
>cheaTED< is a favorite jim hoft thing that and the trumpbots like lionTED
“Fuck, Trump, fuck you, fuck your birther nonsense, and fuck your whole copy pasta idiot ride.”
I’m not gonna knock copy pasta in this one instance while I employ it.
Let us toss the morons from our ranks and maybe we can again discuss things in good faith amongst ourselves.
Oui
>Let us first remember that liberty of conscience is a natural right, and that there must be no constraint in this respect. There remain then but two methods to take,—either to permit this party of the citizens to exercise the religion they chuse to profess,— or to separate them from the society,—leaving them their property, and their share of the country that belonged to the nation in common,— and thus to form two new states instead of one. The latter method appears by no means proper:—it would weaken the nation, and thus would be inconsistent with that regard which she owes to her own preservation. It is therefore of more advantage to adopt the former method, and thus to establish two religions in the state. But if these religions are too incompatible,—if there be reason to fear that they will produce divisions among the citizens, and disorder in public affairs,—there is a third method, a wise medium between the two former, of which the Swiss have furnished examples. The cantons of Glaris and Appenzel were, in the sixteenth century, each divided into two parts: the one preserved the Romish religion, and the other embraced the reformation: each part has a distinct government of its own for domestic affairs; but on foreign affairs they unite, and form but one and the same republic, one and the same canton.<
american culture says eff the sharia. eff too the balkanization of the polity.
>Let us toss the morons from our ranks and maybe we can again discuss things in good faith amongst ourselves.<
dwindling number of folks. more fun is 2018 elections where art v convention is the topic at the state level. we win there.
heterodoxy
But the TRVTH is OUT THERE man!
Ted Cruz just has to be an establishment plant, you know? I mean… just look at the way they took his crap for six years! They’re gonna put a Canadian in the Oval Office! New World Order! black helicopter drones man! It’s insane!
Insane I tell you!
WHY DON’T YOU WANT TO BELIEVE?
NYtimevalues
Jeff has some insanely deep dives he can go into that he hasn’t yet. We just need to draw it out by back and forth in the comments. Some of his fiction is goddamn fucking dense.
sdferr knows more about Strauss and Mansfieldian classicism than you can currently buy as an undergrad. (This is literally a true statement. Literally. Email him once, it’ll make your head fucking spin.)
For some reason Ernst knows everything I know but better. Sorta like a terrible doppelolderbrother.
And, hey! We’ve had actual geniuses saying actual genius shit here like our friend who is now departed. And friends who haven’t yet departed like SBP.
So, I say: it is time to give up the childish things.
For the Brubaker55s and George Turners still lurking.
Ted Cruz is a natural born U.S. citizen, meaning he didn’t need to be naturalized because his mother was a U. S. Citizen. He’s a citizen by virtue of his birth, not because his parents took the time to fill out the appropriate paperwork. The paperwork is just proof that he’s a citizen. Form FS-240 (or whatever form you needed to fill out back then) doesn’t confer citizenship, it confirms it.
But . . . I’m sure I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Thank you for the kind words, BH. My secret is I read actual books, not just stuff I find online.
How close are you to Milwaukee? I have an actual brother, one whom I don’t particularly like, who curretnly resides in the Milwaukee area.
If you’re in the same general area, maybe I’ll pick a weekend he’s out of the country to come visit him. Then I’ll need something else to do.
Works, doesn’t it, Ernst?
I’m headed back up north for the season shortly, Ernst. About an hours drive east of Duluth/Superior. Hell, I own a restaurant. Bring the family. No one is walking away hungry.
unchildish thought
You’d think at least one state, just one, would be smart enough to insist on actual documentary proof in it’s filing paperwork that the person filing to run for the office he’s seeking had in fact met the requirements (age, residency, citizenship) to hold that office.
I guess they all must rely on the penalty of perjury warning above the signature line.
Would very much like to get that way bh.
When I get to make that happen, I’ll put out a broadcast.
[Didn’t Jeff tell you to take a fucking hike, dipshit?]
Oh no fellers…no cut-and-paste…just critical thinking ability coupled with superb writing skills. Not short, ad hominem jabs from idiots who can’t put more than two coherent thoughts together without getting confused.
[Yeah, and you’re here why again?]
Bottom line…Cruz will lose. Sucks for y’all.
[Thanks for the advice.]
“Hell knoweth no fury like the wrath of”…Log Cabin Republican Losers for Canuck Cruzers.
[“My mom puts yucky face stickers on the bad-tasting bottles in the cabinet.”]
Trump will take the nomination on the first round at the Repube Convention. And then you can cry in your Cheerios. Play the song, “Cry Baby”…it will give you some solace during your time of grieving.
[“Pay attention to me dammit! I matter!”]
I’ll keep an eye out, buddy.
(I use “buddy” in a non-ironic sense, btw. I was created in 70s Wisco.)
Ooh! Ooh! I know!
Let’s be the Nockian Remnant!
That’s like the AV Club of the blogosphere! Or maybe the Chess Club.
(Who got laid more in high school? AV Club or Chess Club?)
Oh, look, some snarky bastard still has admin privileges. Weird.
7 Variations on a familiar theme
I’d honestly like a show of hands on who else gets the Nockian Remnant joke.
What, maybe five people in the country?
You magnificent bastard.
6, on ruins
You give me too much credit. Jonah Goldberg mentioned Nock and his Remnant in his G-File yessterday, and I had an inspiration.
Junior year math teacher for me. Jesuit.
I’m going to name my next band “disingenuous provocateur agent for unknown dark forces”.
Other than that, the only thing I take from the pair of self-important text walls provided by our racial realist Trumpbot birther is that I suspect no one anywhere likes him — a fact he attributes to jealousy over his natural superiority but everyone else knows is a product of his being a giant dick.
Could it maybe be “… and family” like Sly and the Family Stone? Asking for a friend.
Then you knew who Nock was before I did, which was probably six or seven years ago.
The joke came about because I read the G-File after I read your comments regarding the need for important discussion about serious matters regarding big things.
(That too is a joking reference)
If I’m following… what you’re saying is that I’m the older brother now, Ernst.
Maybe try “the sinister right hand”?
[insert gif of Sean Connery saying “You’re the man now, dog!” here]
Maybe so, bh, maybe so.
Or we’re just unworldly wise in differnt worldly ways.
We are the Superfluous
by The Sinister Right Hand Band
we are the superfluous
we are the remnant
we are the ones who make our own way
so let’s show our indifference
(And now I really need to go to bed)
By the way, we’re going to have seven, maybe eight, maybe even nine or more chansons, and they’ll all be spectacular.
Also, conspiracy proof? “The President’s Own”
Need I say more?
(damn if the next line doesn’t work as originally written)
there’s a choice we’re making
we’re saving our own lives
Ernst wrote: Not sure what you’re getting at Bob. All stump speeches sound like broken records.
An [obviously] failed attempt at humor at 0130 [EST] on a Saturday Morning by me [it has been a long two weeks at Fort Belvedere].
So many lead paint screed bores my owl.
Bottom line…Cruz will lose. Sucks for y’all.
That’s a stupid bottom line: Argument from popularity? We outnumber you; ergo, we’re RIGHT?
Or worse: We outnumber you, so you better watch your back?
If that’s your bottom line, what does that say about your character?
Does it not say exactly what Jeff says it says, and therefore justifies his insistence that you vacate the premises?
If Cruz loses it will suck for everyone.
And if he wins, it will still suck because Statists.
Also, conspiracy proof? “The President’s Own”
Conspiracy proofing was establishment durty L’n Ted’s reason for keeping allothum Northers out of the Cup chase this season, jes like he’s doin’ to poor put upon Donald in Wyoming. He’ll lets ’em back in nex’year affer he’s safely ensconced in the Oval. Fer the transparency.
On a less serious note, I’ve seen linked a number of places — among those Jeff’s twitter page — a standard issue shock video of the apparent doings on campus, featuring young adults painting themselves into an inextricable corner. To my own mind the strangest most jarring thing about the whole video comes at the very end when, to my surprise, the interviewer asks “What does that say about our culture?”.
O mercy. And for fucks sake. “Culture“? Really?
No fucking wonder these young people doom themselves to a hopeless world. Evidently, no-one around them can think.
Just substitute contemporary popular American thought ethos for “culture”. Or whatever works.
I make play substitutions all the time, mostly just to amuse myself, I guess. And yet, I’m actually more interested in bringing to light the uselessness or perturbed effect of the term itself, rather than to let a sleeping dog lay.
And don’t get me started on variations, because, look, we’re going to have more variations, and they’ll be marvelous variations, than Carter’s got pills.
And I’m going to get Australia to foot the bill.
Just so. As a variation. On a theme. That’s much the way Protagoras would proclaim that Carter’s little liver pills [culture] are [is] the measure of all things. He too would make Australia [Athenian fathers] pay, and then run for his life when they found him out.
I guess I’m okay with ocasional rotten sloppy use of culture but even I get annoyed when people use it to mean selected supposedly collective outputs at a moment in time used to sample the character of the generation that produced them.
Oh them Renaissance kidz gave us the Mona Lisa, and Millenials gave us a Tumblr graphic about Intersectional Privilege formulae. Woe Woe! Such is culture. Wo-o-o-o-e!
Nobody ever does anything and has it stick to them. Culture happened.
Makes me want to get up and leave the petri dish sometimes.
Or Occasional even. Why switch to Spanish for just one word, a temporal adjective? Must be culture. Culture is the weather of the humanities.
We might attempt to imagine these schoolchildren placing themselves in their own imaginations (identifying with, even) in the sandals of Theaetetus the young mathematician — or for that matter, their mathematics professors placing themselves in the sandals of Theodorus — and then subjecting themselves to the mud-wrestling moves of Sokrates. Or no, we cannot, for a proper University education will not allow it, for there is no culture there.
[No one cares. Deleted. I told you to get the fuck out – Jeff]
yucky bunny needs a bath
yay!
Stop posting walls of dumb shit, you boring unwanted bucket of fuck. Thanks.
Unwanted, unread, wall of text poster, it’s sad but not surprising that you have no friends.
For every text wall one of these uninvited Trumpkins posts. I’m pledging $10 to La Raza in Trump’s name.
Or Stormfront. I haven’t decided yet.
Saw a Jewish woman pleading to stop Cruz. Because if he was elected he’d demand that Christian Bibles be put in schools, and Jews would be killed. Now, what do you do with someone that bloody silly/stupid? :O
Go, Ted!
Put them in the same room with the person from 4 years ago who was convinced that Romney would ban tampons.
Well, Romney did lead us to Harris-Perry wearing the damned things as earrings. ;)
“Stop posting walls of dumb shit, you boring unwanted bucket of fuck. Thanks.” – palaeomerus
Speechless, I am at that profundity! I love it! Wheee!
[See? You’re wasting your time advocating for Orange Julius here. You add nothing I haven’t heard before. You’re wanking here. Take it somewhere else – Jeff]
Are you a professional idiot or is this just a hobby?
I have a better idea. Why don’t you, instead, respect the private property of others and go away? You are not wanted here.
I don’t see how it could have been more clearly stated already.
sdferr
re “culture” … I know you come close to anaphylactic shock when that word comes up for many reasons; however, the interviewer’s use of it in this context may be right.
As a broad-brush painting of contemporary American society’s ethics, mores, principles and accepted traditions, it does speak to the shift (now decades in its glacial move) to demonstrate how “university education” is/has been fervently working to produce such people — paralyzed from actual thinking least they cross all the invisible lines of social-signaling that they belong.
Feature, not bug. Like Trump, rules/law/rationality/reason, are to give way to emotion and emoting. And feeling good is paramount even unto having the license to utterly destroy by any means necessary anyone that dare challenge one’s feelings.
“Feature not, bug” you use here to indicate the outcome the political institutes desire, I take it, Darleen? Leaving aside for the moment the basis of my surprise, it isn’t as though I’m unaware of these conditions, but remarked primarily on account that the fellow presenting the video himself doesn’t take this into his own reflections as he presents this alarming case of young adults incapable of distinguishing quite ordinary senses of the meaning of “same” and “other”. He doesn’t seem to understand the extent to which the very victory over our discourse achieved (whether deliberately or no, as for instance of a mere accumulation of decades of otherwise good people casually repeating a cliche they’ve heard or encountered spoken with approval) by this — may I term it “capture”? yes, I think I will — capture by a concept, even a presumptively high-ordered complex concept like “culture”, diminishes our ability to simply say what is what; and after all, saying what is what is precisely the issue at hand in the video.
diminishes our ability to simply say what is what; and after all, saying what is what is precisely the issue at hand in the video. –
Yes. We definitely should be able to identify & distinguish each tree … and maybe use the term “forest” more judiciously?
heh.
There are a good number of tree and forest metaphors, along with others of their near cousins, dancing in my head.
In media res, for instance, Quine suggested in his Word and Object intro, if I recall correctly, (and taking up someone else’s metaphor he said), we’re like men in a boat required to rebuild it plank by plank all while sailing upon the sea. Don’t let’s drown, was I think his concern. Or something like that.
If in a forest, then I’m thinking yep, for sure, we’re frightfully lost in that sumbitch.
I don’t think such a conclusion would have been as succinct.
He made his point and I don’t believe it was lost on anyone. But then again, maybe as a dark and nefarious outside force militating the takeover of the zeitgeist by Bilderbergers and their Rosacrucian army of secret adepts, I’m just playing y’all.
Eh, what?
>}The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
{10}Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system. <
http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html
Joy Division – Transmission
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnWPGSQjFUc
Public Image Ltd – Rise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN-GGeNPQEg
President Ronald Reagan – Liberty State Park [Pt. 1]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbroTjVm8Bw
Reagan election night victory speech in Los Angeles 1980 from NBC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYESE18B60M
eff you trumpsters
“Rosacrucian army”
Are the creepy folks I gave my blood to? They said it would save lives once they had de-burrito-ized it, whatever that means. Probably has to do with taking the orange grease out.
They can’t be too bad; they gave me orange juice much like I was a smoother more symmetrical Quasimodo on a very comfortable leather recliner version of a pillory, and I could hear, and no one was speaking in a Hollywook French accent. Also I could not act as well as Charles Laughton. But otherwise the similarities were overwhelming.
I earned points towards a coffee mug!
Slow clap ….. Aw, the hell with that. Standing O!
I’m a regular follower of Scott McKay and The Hayride, glad to see he shared this as a reference for where he stands.
Hi Jeff,
What you said. Dead nuts spot on. Twice.
We can haz new rant now yes?
Chess genius Gary Kasparov, who actually lived in the Soviet Union, agrees with Jeff: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/garry-kasparov-donald-trump-vile-new-york-values-article-1.2603281
I fear we may have to work up an error of our own sufficient to rouse the landlord before he’ll clomp down the stairs again.
Maybe we should play polka music at full volume on this sound system of his. That’ll tick him off something fierce, I’d bet.
He crossed the 5000 follower line on twitter yesterday-ish, so I’m sure in the fullness of time and season he’ll feel the pull of his prior words about blogging again when that happens, and come drop rant where’t needsa droppin’ most.
And I was going to reactivate my Twitter account to put Jeff over the top. Thank goodness other folks stepped up. I hate the twatter in general.
Come on, Jeff, we’re waiting. Darleen has done a great job keeping the power on, but it’s time for the prodigal son to return.
There’s a screed I’m either unwilling or unable to write about the defeat at the hands of the cultural Marxists and the Frankfurt School’s long game, but in the past I’ve been optimistic – amazed, even – about Americans’ ability to overcome the sort of idiocy that has plagued other nations in other times. We have overcome technical obstacles, governmental incompetence, foreign aggressors, etc. in ways that are unique in history.
That optimism is getting itself hammered in a metaphorical dive bar somewhere, staring out the window at the gathering storm and shaking its head.
The Trump phenomenon is, in my opinion (and at the risk of saying something that’s already been articulated, and better) , the end result of the modern Zeitgeist that says that everything bad that happens in America, and the world, is the fault of the white man. There are millions of impovershed white guys that know they don’t enjoy anything like the “privilege” they’re accused of having and Trump has tapped into this angst. The Trump supporters act just about how you’d expect marginalized, not too bright people to react at times when they’re (unjustly) vilified.
Trump is, of course, a ridiculous thin-skinned nitwit with no plan riding the worst sort of wave that can be manufactured by the sort of charlatanism he’s good at. I can’t believe anyone takes the guy seriously, and he will be a disaster as a candidate or a President.
And Jeff, let me just say it’s damn good to see you back. THis post is just another in a long line of epic posts, and they have been missed. And needed.
Love you too, Darleen.
And what scares me the most, I think (but I probably lack the imagination) is the fact that the next President will presumably decide the balance of the Supreme Court for a decade or more. I can only imagine the long-term damage a modern liberal SC will do to the country, but then again I might be agonizing over the potential desecration of a corpse.
Figuratively speaking, of course.
“Rosacrucians”
The spelling Nazi in me points out: Rosicrucians. The Kanigits of Thee Holy Crosse would rise and smite thee for thy error.
Hey, fellow ‘megalomaniacal control freaks’: our old friend Serr8d has a message for us, left over at my site:
We’ve gotten our freak on, it seems.
Party on, MCF’s, party on!
https://thecampofthesaints.org/2016/03/11/on-why-i-was-wrong-about-sarahpalinusa/#comment-181040
PS: My Mother’s ninety-year-old throat remains uncut at this time.
if Mr. Trump is a disaster as president then maybe people will start taking it more serious
this whole fraction of a term in the senate and bam you’re a presidential candidate is a deeply silly trend for Team R to be jumping on
it’s such a shame Scott Walker was such a disaster with absolutely zero ability to scale to the national level
sad face
and they demand…
A SHRUBBERY!!!
I think we have 2009-now as a counterpoint to that thesis.
good point
Oh they’ll get more serious all right.
No more of this soft despotism shit. We want a Real Tryrant!
(And it’s either ridiculously contemptible or contemptibly ridiculous to lament insuficiency of experience in political office while shilling for a political neophyte. But a concern troll’s gotta troll concernfully, right? So maybe take your handwringing act elsewhere. Because you’ve done worn out your welcome here. Again.)
The Trump phenomenon is, in my opinion (and at the risk of saying something that’s already been articulated, and better) , the end result of the modern Zeitgeist that says that everything bad that happens in America, and the world, is the fault of the white man. There are millions of impovershed white guys that know they don’t enjoy anything like the “privilege” they’re accused of having and Trump has tapped into this angst. The Trump supporters act just about how you’d expect marginalized, not too bright people to react at times when they’re (unjustly) vilified.
Trump is, of course, a ridiculous thin-skinned nitwit with no plan riding the worst sort of wave that can be manufactured by the sort of charlatanism he’s good at. I can’t believe anyone takes the guy seriously, and he will be a disaster as a candidate or a President.
Scooter has it spot on.
And once again, understanding where the Trump movement came from *doesn’t* mean I’m a Trumpkin or a Trump Fiend.
For starters, the lazy sod doesn’t do his political homework, from an obvious ambush bogus abortion question with Chris Matthews to not understanding state primary and caucus rules.
I still hope that Ted Cruz the Tortoise can beat Trump the Hare in a modern day Aesop fable.
But consider–the tea party movement was smeared as racist, denounced as fascist, harassed with impunity by the IRS and generally treated with contempt by the political establishment — and by “conservative” pundits like Prissy Preppy Mr. Brooks, who declared “I’m not a fan of this movement.” After handing the GOP big legislative victories in 2010 and 2014, it was largely betrayed by the Republican “leaders” in Congress, who broke their promises to shrink government and block Obama’s initiatives.
So now we have Trump instead, who tells people to punch counter-protesters instead of politely picking up their trash like the Tea Party did.
When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly.
Brooks closes his Trump column with Psalm 73, but a more appropriate verse is Hosea 8:7 “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Trump’s ascendance is a symptom of a colossal failure among America’s political leaders, of which Brooks’ mean-spirited insularity is only a tiny part. God help us all.
Trump’s caucus math is hard, waaahah! Unfair! waaahah! Undemocratic! waaahah! schtick is battle-space prep for the convention floor-fight everybody is anticipating.
The lazy sod part is not spending more time in Pennsylvania and California
Trump Magnus(tm), the product, is an item that hit the shelves, as it were, at just the right time.
If TM had come on the market in 2012, it wouldn’t have enjoyed the success it is enjoying now, because the situation in America had not grown as desperate. Men and Women were not so willing to compromise themselves for a Caesar.
As we all know, in desperate times, people look for a Savior, a White Knight to sweep-in and ‘save us!’. For many, Trump Magnus(tm) is that salve. So, many have made an emotional investment in the product, one so deeply felt that the restraining hand of Right Reason is ineffective on them. As I wrote a while back:
Friendly persuasion is rarely effective when dealing with such deeply emotionally invested people.
Vigorous persuasion can sometimes work, as can, figuratively, smacking them upside the head with The 2×4 Of Truth [as Jeff does on Twitter].
Sadly, most are a lost cause because they are lost in a Grand Derangement. They will not wake-up until it is too late. Time is running out. We don’t have the time to spend on them. Best to leave them by the side of the road in the self-made ditch of Wallowing Despair they’ve dug for themselves and move on with our fellow Outlaws.
I don’t think they’re looking to be saved. I think they’re looking for validation.
I feel your pain
dissent is patriotic and we have the right to dissent
punish your enemies/voting is the best revenge
So. What’s Trump’s version?
Oh they’ll get more serious all right.
No more of this soft despotism shit. We want a Real Tyrant!
Really, Ernst? As much as I still want Cruz to prevail, I have to ask: How could a President Trump *not* be better than the Executive Order tyrant we have now, and what the cunning Shill Witch or the Senile Stalinist will do even more of on steroids?
I’m find it hard to care about what Trump COULD do when I’m busy reading about what Young Pioneer Barry actually IS doing right now, and what Chairwoman Shrillary Spiteful would make worse and what Comrade Bernie would rubber stamp.
If Trump is so dangerous as to merit this response from some people for potential future acts, and he hasn’t even done anything yet, what do these Obamunist criminals merit for this 8 year long list of charges?
What could Trump do?
–Trade 5 terrorists for one deserter?
–Use the IRS to hound political opponents?
–Use the govt. to compel purchases of a product?
–Grab up definitional control of health insurance plans to the point of killing plans and doctor-patient relationships?
–Make “non-agreements” with Iran and box Congress out of it?
–Make Amnesty agreements for illegals and box Congress out of *that*?
–Gin up hatred between blacks and cops by siding with “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” liars over officers?
–Diminish our standing internationally, with “red line” after “red line”?
–Tank the progress made in Iraq?
–Crush military morale?
As we all know, in desperate times, people look for a Savior, a White Knight to sweep-in and ‘save us!’. For many, Trump Magnus(tm) is that salve. So, many have made an emotional investment in the product, one so deeply felt that the restraining hand of Right Reason is ineffective on them.
Honestly, Bob? I think for all too many well meaning if wrong Trump supporters, their slogan is really this: “Trump for President 2016 – Because he couldn’t make it any worse!” Not so much looking for a savior, as being so fed up they want to “let it burn”, for the GOP establishment as well as the Demunists.
Indeed, when I look back at the first presidential debates, I must admit I was pleased at verbal smackdowns Trump delivered to Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, with Ted Cruz offering tacit bromantic support back then I might add.
Established “Betters” like Bush and Rubio have enjoyed unearned credibility and gained way too much control for too long. And as a final proof, they couldn’t even discredit Donald Trump, a clear buffoon. It is so bad that honest and well meaning (if wrong) people actually are looking at Trump, yes, TRUMP, as a “viable” alternative to that Bushy-Rovie Amnesty rot, because, shudder, he actually is.
(Why they don’t understand that Ted is much better, actually thinks things through and does his homework is sad, but I chalk that up to celebrity star power and perhaps the media demonization of Ted all through the 2010 Obamunistcare standoff).
That’s how bad the condition of this nation is. And again, it didn’t happen overnight.
for thy error
THINE error.
Precedes a vowel sound, see.
yes yes Mr. Ernst I’m concerned i don’t see how Mr. Cruz gets elected
i look and look I do not see this *unless*
unless the timing of the indictment on that pee-stanky old woman is just perfect
Now that Trump has bested Cruz in NYC I think it’s time for all of us to seek common ground behind the GOP candidate with the best chances for winning in Nov. We at Jeff’s site have much more in common than you would gather from this comments thread.
Let’s seize on these shared concerns and forge a united front going forward.
So Steve: you’re saying we conservatives and Classical Liberals should find common ground with those of you who support a man who would do nothing to halt the hardening of this country into a Statist Regime?
You’re saying that we should make our peace with the inevitability of Statism? That we should seek to preserve those few Freedoms and Liberties we have left, while accepting the ‘Reality’ of the situation [ie: be Pragmatic]? That we should work with you to promote a would-be-Caesar because, unlike with Mzzz. Rodham, we have a chance of cutting little deals with Citizen Trump? That we should accept that the best we can hope for are scraps liberated from the Despotic Table?
‘Time to make peace with Caesar’, eh?
Samuel Adams and Company wouldn’t work with the Loyalists who, like the Trumpists, wanted to work within the Corrupt System to reform it. As noble as men like John Dickinson were, they were pathetically blind to the fact that working within the Corrupt System meant compromising and betraying their beliefs because that was the only way to effectively get anything done within a Debased, Depraved, and Immoral System.
When you allow your own Soul to be infected with Corruptions, you can never trust your motives or actions any longer. Corruption is a virulent Cancer.
The answer is ‘No’ – a resounding, unyielding ‘Nay!’
Correction accepted with my thanks.
“I think it’s time for all of us to seek common ground -”
Ha ha ha! Fuck no. Follow your idiot liar grotesque straight to hell.
You seem to have moved off of defending Trump’s supporters, to defending Trump himself. What is it you’re looking for? A President who respects the Constitution, or a President who’s going to gore somebody else’s ox for once, punish your enemies for a change? The truth is, we don’t know what Trump would do if elected. And I suspect neither does he.
As I’ve said before, Trump is Obama in white face.
And better than Clinton is a low low bar. Bernie Sanders can crawl over than one.
He gets elected the same way every other President gets elected: by having more Electors cast their ballot for him than for his opponent.
I agree. And that candidate is still Cruz, not Trump.
And you would have done better to open with that position instead of poisoning the well. So forgive me if I find your appeal for unity more than a tad self-serving. I think I’ll just wait and see how May and June play out.
Last summer, I said two things:
1) Trump was the odds on favorite to win the GOP nomination
2) I could see myself voting for someone I consider to be a dangerous clown
Nothing has occurred since then to make me change either position. I will say that this has been a clarifying election cycle. People who pretended that principle was important have been exposed as liars, hacks and hucksters. Others have been exposed as throne-sniffing bootlickers. The rest? We already knew about the disaster that the national GOP had become. Nothing they’ve said or done has surprised me.
Quick clarification about the people getting serious and wanting a real Tyrant instead of a soft-despot next time if Trump’s elected:
That was an observation about the decadence and degeneracy of the electorate, which I don’t forsee a Trump Presidency doing much to reverse, since he has no ideological commitment to limited, constitutional government that I can see.
Some may see that as better than having an ideological commitment to undermining and supplanting limited, constitutional government. I don’t.
What could possibly be worse than a Democrat like Hillary in the White House?
A Republican like Hillary in the White House.
It’s just that simple.
In support of which I offer Conquest’s Second Law.
Not for nothin’ is it called the Empire State.
Ah Mac.
Why’dya do it? Why you gotta go and get all
pithysuccinct like that?I know you Cruz people don’t care, but listen, let me tell you something, we’re going to have more “nowwhatllthatassholethinkofnext” moments, and they’ll be momentous moments, believe me, than a shitload of dimes.
working within the Corrupt System meant compromising and betraying their beliefs because that was the only way to effectively get anything done within a Debased, Depraved, and Immoral System.
You can compromise with people who operate in good faith (and merely differ in their priorities), but compromise with Evil results in Evil.
1 glass of sewage + 1 drop of clean water = undrinkable
1 glass of clean water + 1 drop of sewage = undrinkable
Unify behind corruption?
Not Even Once
What could possibly be worse than a Democrat like Hillary in the White House?
A Republican like Hillary in the White House.
Mac wins the thread.
Or, you can have what the lovely Marla Mambos has behind the sofa cushions!
Or would you rather dance?
Let’s dance. Plus, translation, please!
Donty suggests an interesting question with his Gov. Lepetomaine analogy. Will a President Trump surround himself with a bunch of harrumphing yes men lead by a Hedley Lamarr type?
Mac wins
[Kicks over the original post, scattering comments accross the floor. Picks up his own comments —the one’s he can find— and stomps off]
IOW, shut up and obey?
No.
Because I was reading hurriedly earlier, I missed this from Curmudgeon:
If your goal is “let it burn,” Trump’s your man.
Or Sanders.
Or Clinton (who’s arguably more of a man than Sanders)
So, what Mac said. Because a vote for Trump is, as an objective matter, a vote for things to either stay the way they are now, or to grow worse.
[n.b. I’ll concede here that Trump may surprise everybody —probably including even himself— and actually turn out to be a decent President. If that’s the case, I’ll happily admit I was wrong and vote for his reelection (which I’ve already indicated that I’d do, by the way). But I’m not holding my breath.]
Because after The Burning, comes the tyrant thing I was talking about earlier.
And besides, isn’t “He couldn’t do any worse” the kind of losing more slowly kind of rationale we’ve come to expect from the McCain/Romney/Bush wing of the GOP?
Not doing any worse isn’t good enough any more. We have the right and the responsibility to expect better of our elected officials.
Ernst wrote:
This. SO MUCH this.
Beat me to it, Patrick – SO MUCH THIS.
I would be curious to see what the Cruzers would be saying if the situation was reversed: Ted Cruz the outsider candidate, winning more votes and more states: Jeb! Bush, the establishment candidate, siphoning delegates away using insider tactics and non-participatory conventions in Wyoming and Colorado with the expressed intent of winning over enough inside support to deny Cruz the win on the first ballot. Second ballot, Jeb! is installed by delegates despite winning far fewer votes. I think we all know they’d be screaming bloody murder right now.
Well, for your premise to work, we’d either have to assume that Cruz is too stupid to play this game, or that he’s cynically playing the will of the voters card to forestall that 2nd ballot.
Wouldn’t we?
You mean if “Cruzers” were as childish and gullible as Trumpkins?
Cruz’s intelligence isn’t the issue. It’s that he’s suddenly benefiting from being the ‘establishment candidate’ because he’s going up against radical outsider Trump. If he were going against Jeb!, Jeb! would be getting that boost and no ‘intelligence’ on Cruz’s part could change that.
So the Donald is cynically playing the will of the voters? What a rough beast this man has become.
The second problem with your premise is that you think Cruz is siphoning delegates away. Nobody can stop Trump from winning on the first ballot except Trump (meaning he doesn’t have the 1237 delegates he needs to win). After the first ballot, they’re up for grabs. Cruz is grabbing them.
The third problem with your premise is that you think conventions are non participatory. That’s simply not so.
The fourth problem with your premise is that you think only insiders participate in conventions. That’s just insulting.
The fifth problem with your premise is that you think the grassroots work that goes into canvassing for supporters is an insider tactic.
The sixth problem with your premise is that you think the FoxNews superpac and all the other free media trump is exploiting is an outsider tactic.
The seventh problem with your premise is that you don’t think.
radical outsider
You mean, like a Democrat pretending to be a Republican? Like they do in New York City? (see: Bloomberg Michael, Mayor 2002-2013)
Cruz is the Establishment’s candidate because they don’t want Trump?
Tell me, if Trump wins the nomination and the Establishment endorses him because they don’t want the Hildebeaast, does that mean Trump is the Establishment’s candidate?
That’s half a step removed from saying Trump is David Duke’s/Vladimir Putin’s bitch, you know.
The fact that I didn’t call you on suggesting that Cruz was an insider just tells me that it’s past my bedtime.
In New York, Trump benefitted from the backing of the entire New York establishment, didn’t he? What do they know about this “radical outsider” that the rest of us don’t?
Food for thought.
Each of these three words has a well-defined and universally understood meaning.
Unfortunately when strung together in this order they become gibberish.
Not ordinary gibberish though. The finest, most luxurious, classiest gibberish money can buy. Let me tell you: Nobody, but nobody, can gibber like Trump. The other guys? Losers. Believe me.
On a side note: Mrs. Darth and I were in the lobby of an auto service shop waiting for work to get done. I was doing actual work, she was bearing up through CNN on the TV. I was distracted when she erupted at Ashley(?) Banfield, the purported legal reporter, for asking her guest about the R convention being goverened by “something called Robert’s Rules of Order.”
I believe the precise rant from the delicate flower I married was, “How the FUCK can you be a FUCKING LEGAL REPORTER for CNN and NOT know WHAT the FUCK ROBERT’S RULES OF ORDER ARE!!!!!!”
Brawndo’s got what plants crave. They crave Brawndo. It’s got electrolytes.
Researchers have long sought a frictionless substance, and now they’ve found it: Trumpanians, formerly known as Obamites.
Meh. Gabby Johnson’s Authentic Frontier Gibberish is better.
Gabby Johnson is right!
G’way! Batin’ !
“radical outsider”
You misspelled “bloviating, pompous, self-aggrandizing know-nothing”, there.
How much cleavage did purported legal reporterette Ashley Banfield have on display?
Obviously CNN didn’t hire her for her brains, so I want to know if she was making her other assets work for her.
perhaps ashley’s boobs are pointing to this :
Member of Republican National Rules Committee Wants Republican Convention to Use Robert’s Rules of Order
http://ballot-access.org/2016/04/15/member-of-republican-national-rules-committee-wants-republican-convention-to-use-roberts-rules-of-order/
>But Manafort’s former partner Charlie Black, now an adviser to rival Republican presidential candidate John Kasich, said that as far as the firm was concerned, the Kashmiri council was a domestic, not a foreign, client. “Nobody was more surprised than me that the guy was taking the money from Pakistan,” Black said in a telephone interview. “We didn’t know anything about it.”<
Top Trump aide lobbied for Pakistani spy front
https://www.yahoo.com/news/top-trump-aide-lobbied-for-1409744144007222.html
Ashley Banfield married her cleaves to a rich wall streeter she’s kind of a whore
(lil bit)
The more important takeaway from that nr, is that “radical outsider” Donald Trump has turned his campaign over to the former lobbying partner of buttoned-up insider John Kashich is relying on for political advise.
Take that together with Trump being down with men who think they look fabulous is a skirt using the lady’s room, and wanting to water the GOP’s stance against abortion, and you’be got the basis for a how do you bitches like me now? post from Jeff.
water down
shoulda jus’ written weaken, huh?
No, I get it. Like watered drinks.
Muddying the waters. Tell me with a straight face and in simple words what your honest reaction would be if Jeb! were in Cruz’s place “grabbing delegates” and Cruz was in Trump’s place. Don’t just internet-nitpick everything.
if Jeb! were in Cruz’s place “grabbing delegates” and Cruz was in Trump’s place…
By swapping out the players, you’re indicating that you think this is about personalities rather than principles.
My honest reaction would be no different than it is now, because when I look at situations like this I automatically swap out the players to see if my reaction changes: if it does, I recognize that I’m operating on personality rather than principle.
So I rethink my position until I’m operating on principle. Sometimes I hate doing it, because it’s nowhere near as emotionally satisfying as spiting my enemies and other people who annoy me.
But I do it, because I prefer the results I get by acting on principle. I’ve determined that principles are a better foundation than personalities, team jerseys, catching waves, or anything else that is transitory and unstable.
Such as the arm of flesh.
But what constitutes a good foundation depends on what you ultimately want out of life, and everyone’s mileage varies.
The locution “grabbing delegates” indicates that you think that something untoward, shady, or unethical is going on.
Or worse, that you think Trump can’t “grab” him some delegates right back, using the same tactics Cruz is using.
So what’s your foundation, Chief? Emotional gratification or rational stability?
because he’s going up against radical outsider Trump
Trump’s an outsider in the same way that George Soros would be if HE ran for office.
Because one thing you can say for sure about Soros: he’s NOT bought and paid for.
And he’s totally radical.
Huh.
Like the flu, “not listening” is spreading like wildfire.
Perhaps I did misspeak. Cruz isn’t “grabbing” delegates so much as he’s receiving the largesse of the establishment. They are gifting him with bonus points in order to screw Trump over. Cruz is now the critter of the Establishment; a replacement Bush; Bush 3.0; if by some miracle he were to win, Cruz would fall in line. Luckily, America will never elect a dough-faced goober who looks like a cross between Grampa Munster crossed with Howdy-Doody.
You didn’t misspeak. You simply don’t know what you’re talking about.
[…] as his numbers are, the man himself is arguably worse. As my friend Jeff Goldstein wrote last […]
First find out what percentage of the votes already cast each candidate who’s been awarded delegates has, then find out what percentage of the delegates awarded each candidate has.
Then we can talk about who’s been screwed over by establishment “largesse.”
I don’t know who the screwee is, Rubio probably, but it ain’t Trump.
I’m pretty sure I announced at the outset — like, before Trump’s name ever came up — that if Jeb were the nominee he would never receive my vote.
Jeb at least never lied about his stance on illegal immigration, adding it to the list of uninvited-entry crimes that has been called, wrongly, “an act of love.” Trump spent the first several months of his campaign lying about where he stands on immigration, and his supporters still think that’s his actual position.
Neither man is electable.
Look, hang on to your weathercocks, folks, because, believe me.
N: Norman?
N: Yes, mother?
– See more at: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=58377#comments
This is not axiomatically true and you know it. You’re talking about the guy who got into the system and immediately alienated everyone in it, to the extent that he has only recently gotten (lukewarm) endorsements from his fellow Senators, and then only because the alternative was so much worse.
You can say/believe whatever you want but that doesn’t make it true.
6-3
Woot!
Heh, woot, yes.
Even mega-woots far that matter, whereas for my part it’s much more like “phew!”. Say, wonder where my fingernails got to?
If Trump is the nominee, it’s likely he wouldn’t get much support from women or minorities; of the rest, there are a significant number who think he is an obtuse blowhard.
With apologies to the Obtuse Blowhards Anti-Defamation League.
No Mac, it’s the Obtuse Blowhard Anti-Mockery Association or O.B.A.M.A.
i’ll probably become a woman just to support Trump if he’s the nominee
not surgically just semi-notionally
this is cause i’m a goddamn patriot what wants to make america great again
yup
let’s do this
Look, let me tell you something, we’re going to have so much staunch, and it’ll be superb staunch, believe me, that even Hillary won’t be able to stanch the staunch.
i love how staunch it’s gonna be
i just effing love it
Well, some blowhards are obtuser than others, I suppose.
And I think the commenter formerly known as a motherless goldfish wins this week’s edition of the thread.
Listen, we’re going to grow more varieties of staunch… we’ll have so many varieties of staunch, and they’ll all be outstanding varieties, trust me, that they’ll be varieties coming out of our eyes… or wherever.
And I’m even going to get Hooterville to spring for the staunch.
@ rodneysmithxo
Luckily, America will never elect a dough-faced goober who looks like a cross between Grampa Munster crossed with Howdy-Doody.
If you really believe that, why are you supporting Trump, then?
*There’ll* be varieties coming out of the other place, too.
Materially off topic (apologies), sort of: Garry Kasparov talks about strategy and what he sees.
I tangled with a Trumpster called @SonsOfReagan who disparaged Kasparov’s NYPost article that disparaged Trump.
The idiot dismissed Kasparov’s opinion because Kasparov wasn’t American, because he was from the Soviet Bloc.
Because that’s exactly how Reagan would have called it, I guess.
Holy SNOT millennials are stupid.
Yep, figures. Tocqueville wasn’t born here either, so we should think his opinions worthless as well. The poor (brainless morons) you will have with you always.
The End of Democracy in America
Tocqueville foresaw how it would come
http://www.city-journal.org/html/end-democracy-america-14332.html
>the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
{10}Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system. <
http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html
Hi. My name is Steve and I have something to say: I await Jeff’s follow-up essay in which he calls on us to reject Hillary now that Trump has swept Cruz off the field.
Cold crow is best dipped in mayonnaise. The mayo’s in the fridge door, behind the soy sauce. Here. Let me dish you up a helping.
We won’t need to eat crow about Hillary getting elected. It’ll be the numbnuts jackwagon shitheads that nominated Trump who’ll be responsible for that.
No offense intended.
And if Jeff gives the word, I’ll be happy to delete comments like SteveAss’s in the future.
Non-sequitur much, steveaz?
Look, Mac, listen to me, if I didn’t have pancake shovers like steveaze on my flapjackwagon, and believe me, steveaze is a stupendous shover… by the way, I have to be honest with you, my flapjackwagon is fabulous, how’d I be able to peddle all these “Barack Obama : Now Available In White” ball-caps I had printed up?
Don’t y’all think the haste to (falsely) declare victory when victory has not been achieved reveals something in itself? That is, something better kept concealed? Not to say panic where presumably panic would be misplaced, but nevertheless something not precisely exhibiting confidence regarding the eventual outcome. Another fraud in what is by now a long list of frauds, in other words.
See @NolteNC’s tweets earlier today. He’s celebrating yesterday’s big Trump win by preemptively blaming #NeverTrump for what everyone knows will happen in November if Trump is the nominee.
heh, in a hierarchy of needs McG, seems to me that attending to Nolte’s tweets would have matters precisely backwards: it’s him that should be reading my comments.
Things I learned from listening to Rush Limbaugh (which is not to say that I learned them from Rush himself):
Trump is winning with lo-info voters, of whom there are more of than I ever dared to think possible.
Trump dominates states that Republicans won’t carry in November.
Trump is not only Obama in white face, he’s Holly Golightly in drag (stag?); a real phony.
A near majority, if not an actual one, of the people of this country want to be ruled, because self rule, like math for Barbie, is hard.
It’s looking like everybody in the Republican party is going to get what they want, and everybody is going to be very unhappy about it.
Thing I learned from Mark Levin:
About half of Trump’s delegates will commit to Cruz on the second ballot.
Never stop fighting ’til the fight is done.
Well said, Jeff.
As for the “cuckservative” contingent: they’re all beta-boy followers of a sometime “pickup artist” who ran away to Italy to live on his Daddy’s money, and who now spends his time trying to egg others on to take back his country for him. Or something. Think “Kuwaiti prince on the French Riviera during Gulf War I” and you won’t be too far off.
The “cuckservative” boys have (correctly) identified Trump as running a PUA-like game. What they’ve failed to do is to correctly identify who’s playing the role of “drunken, dimwitted bar slut with daddy issues” in this scenario.
Hint: that would be them.
P.S. steveaz! Ol’ buddy! How did that Oregon Obamacare exchange wind up working out for you? You get your dream coverage through that, did you? Wife and kids happy with it, are they?
(snicker)
/me crawls back in the spider hole at my undisclosed remote location.
Might be best if you take this down pretty soon; otherwise you’ll be remembered in a not terribly good way, after the election. And I do believe your personal integreity has been kept over the years. Lots of things I have agreed with, but this……
Good news everybody!
http://i63.tinypic.com/2wqrgqg.jpg
Jeff will be writing things for the Federalist!
http://thefederalist.com/
Fortunately, those of us who actually know Jeff already know he doesn’t give a shit about being “remembered in a not terribly good way.”
Integrity isn’t subject to election results.
>Jeff will be writing things for the Federalist!<
parenting for armidilloes?
trump vs hillarity: smod arrives
Concern troll is concerned. How sweet.
Personal integrity involves sticking to your beliefs, not playing windmill because you’re afraid you’ll “be remembered in a not terribly good way” by others.
If you wanted to be accurate, you could say Jeff’s reputation among the “cool” and “classy” people might suffer. Somehow, I doubt he cares.
He never has so far.
speaking of the federalist:
>The move exudes desperation, not fight. It doesn’t mean conservatism is dead. It just means Republicans will be stuck with a demagogic fraud for one election cycle, one conservatives should reject. Either way, the republic will survive.<
will it? this harsanyi character seems a little too cocksure about the future. that's why i had the little jab at "armadillo parenting" vis a vis mr g. because, while parenting is important topic, just read the federalist and pj media, it doesn't quite rank up there in these times. go read wretchard's latest on venezuela
The Death of a Nation
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2016/04/28/the-death-of-a-nation/
same path here.
Nice safe space you guys have here. Wouldn’t want to micro-agress. I might get banned or somethin.
Sheesh.
The irony is getting thick around here. For a blog that is supposedly devoted to the semiotic deconstruction of political narratives, its flock of resident comments-pigeons sure are tetchy about…semiotic deconstructions of political narratives.
Not to mention quick to scold and censor. Semiotics make a wicked whip when wielded by the scorned to scold or shame. To train that whip on Jeff’s diverse commenters for the sin of supporting Trump was a terrific waste of Jeff’s intellectual powers and reveals a disconcerting pliancy in the targets that he chooses to train his arts at.
I’ll check in after the inauguration and only expect the irony to compound here between now and then.
>I’ll check in after the inauguration and only expect the irony to compound here between now and then.<
do sir as at that point we will be doing art v to save the republic. best cheers: trump vs clinton = smod
>Nice safe space you guys have here.<
war, depression, famine, death,political apocalypses: i'm sure pal
Trump, the outsider.
**** “Lucifer in the flesh,” he said of Cruz at Stanford University. “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”
First reported by The Stanford Daily, the candid former speaker called the other Republican candidates for president “friends” and noted he could get behind front-runner Donald Trump as the nominee. He added that Trump is a “texting buddy” who he’s played golf with for years. *****
Don and Johnny sittin’ in a tree,
T-e-x-t-i-n-g.
First comes…
Ick.
Also, good to see SBP.
Trump, The Game.
@ steveaz:
For a blog that is supposedly devoted to the semiotic deconstruction of political narratives, its flock of resident comments-pigeons sure are tetchy about…semiotic deconstructions of political narratives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk
Not to mention quick to scold and censor.
This from a man whose first words on this thread were: “What a circle-jerk this comments thread is.” And don’t bother to take the line that, oh, you weren’t scolding anybody, you were just trying to blah blah bibbity blah.
Thread recap for latecomers and those of you scoring at home, edited for clarity.
Take a look at this loathsome twit: “. . . I await Jeff’s follow-up essay in which he calls on us to reject Hillary . . .”
Jeff rails against Hillary Clinton everyday, precisely at the same time and in the same respect as he rails against the grasping pig who found it useful to himself to fund her political life: Donald Trump. Donald Trump, who this moron steveaz supports for the highest political office in the land. I piss on his head, this dimwitted skunk.
Bingo!
Trump to his potential
bitchesmarks.Given whom it is that Former Speaker Orange-Glo Elbowbender is text-buddies with; and whom it is that Elbowbender calls a “miserable son of a bitch”, I don’t think Jeff has anything to worry about, were he to worry.
Which, as others have already said, everybody knows that he doesn’t.
And speaking of signs and narratives:
It’s my considered opinion that a not insignificant amount of Trump’s support comes from people who think Hillary Clinton is a a liar, a shrew, a ballbuster, a harpy, a harridan, and a bitch; and want to see her called as much to her face, regardless of the electoral consequences.
Now I’m going to go back and read through the comments to see if I can find those smart, political-narrative deconstructing Trump supporters whose thought-provoking insights were receieved so rudely that Steveaz had to take to his smelling salts. . . .
By the way, if this is your idea of deconstructing political narratives,
you’re doing it wrong.
(But at least you understand that the whole point of deconstruction is to impose your preferred narrative, so, “points for effort,” as they say.)
@sdferr: I suspect Trump, if elected, will likely say something like:
“You fucked up, you trusted me!”
He’s already saying it. And his zombie horde just keeps cheering.
HopenChange, v 2.0.
“HopenChange, v 2.0.”
Apropos of which, Michael Ledeen today.
“Nice safe space you guys have here. Wouldn’t want to micro-agress.”
You are posting comments in a threat about how you should fuck off.It’snot a town hall you were invited to. Your critique is already in the circular file. Your wit and a $1.89 might get you a cup of coffee. Go off and MAGA to yourself alone in the dark already. Adios. Don’t let the screen door pop you on your silly clown heinie as you effect your requested departure .
thread, not threat. Whatevs. Take the hike.
“I’ll check in after the inauguration”
No, you won’t be any more welcome then. Just fuck off. Take your marbles and leave only footprints.
the semiotic deconstruction of political narratives
What’s a “semiotic deconstruction”?
Doesn’t sound like you know what either term means.
Nice pose, though. Pity nobody here falls for that kinda thing.
Di, it’s the use of the science of semiotics to dissect or analyze an author’s intent. In Jeff’s case he focuses the science on rebutting leftist tropes.
Or he used to. Now he’s leveling his art at American populist narratives to drag a gel-haired career politician over the finish line.
If he was firing lead bullets we would call Jeff’s fusilades ‘friendly fire.’
Your a smart botanist Do. Why do you pretend that you don’t know this?
Science! Now there‘s a sign if ever anyone was in need of one. And perhaps an ancient Roman scholar would recognize such a usage, or, if translated into the Greek and written episteme, an ancient Greek speaker might recognize it too. Others, post-dating Galileo, might be a bit puzzled, however. What’s that modern usage? Oh yeah: “No-one told me there would be math involved”. It’s even possible the actual practitioners of the deconstructions would prefer to say metaphysics. And what of the lumpen-proletariat amidst those following the Oranje-mann, what would they say? Who knows? Super-duper-transcendent-branding, maybe? Our super-duper-transcendent-branding, then. They’ld be entitled, y’see, on mere account of the agency, to the extent there is some residual (if diminished) agency involved even in an absolutely egalitarian flock of sheep.
The science of “who’s going to win the nomination” isn’t settled, but the science of whether any of us here will vote for Trump if he does, pretty much is.
Mac shortened: if Tump is the nominee I’m taking my ball and going home. Wah!
Rosie Odonnel and Whoopi Goldburg need porters to carry their luggage thru Canadian customs for them. Could be a good opportunity for ya. If you’re going their way that is.
steveaz shortened: “I’m not wanted but I keep pretending I’m invited anyway because of my hubris. I can’t face my irrelevance and think I have a right to shit up private blogs that explicitly asked me to fuck off and I presume that there will be some valuable outcome if I keep yodeling on stupidly in the face of unambiguous rejection.”
“Your a smart botanist Do. Why do you pretend that you don’t know this?”
You use the words “semiotics”, “deconstruction”, and “your” ineptly hoping it will get your some intellectual cred. Then you whine when called on it.
Hell, you used the term “friendly fire” ineptly. Populists are not friends of the constitution.
Also, that was a pretty good demonstration of why “semiotic deconstruction” isn’t science.
Incoherence as chaos theory maybe, but not science.
Populism=Good,
like the People’s Republic of China.
Democratic Populism=Doubleplus Good,
like the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea.
Donald Trump, Republican, democrat (Democrat too, but nevermind), populist, nationalist:
Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest most wonderful human being I’ve ever known!
At least since the last one, anyway.
trump be your smooth ride that late night your walter white high
SteveAss shortened: “If you guys don’t help, our silent majority won’t have enough votes to beat an alcoholic felon in November! Waaaaaah!!!”
Even shorter SteveASS: “You’re stopping the unstoppable and it’s NOT FAAAAAIIIRRR!!!!!”
feel the bern
Venezuela Crisis’ Latest Victim: Beer
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/04/30/venezuela-crisis-latest-victim-beer/
My namesakes are at their peak: https://www.flickr.com/photos/36459782@N00/26101680533/in/datetaken/
MUST SHARE
Di, it’s the use of the science of semiotics to dissect or analyze an author’s intent.
Deconstruction is predicated on Derrida’s assertion that language doesn’t actually “point to” an objective reality but to the linguistic constructs that exist in our minds, we having acquired those constructs in the context of a language-using community.
The implications of deconstruction are that the meaning of written texts is unstable and self-contradictory, thereby delegitimizing any authoritative claim to what a text means.
For example, in the bumper sticker “Question Authority,” the word “question” is imperative tense: a command.
So it’s using the language of authority to supposedly undermine authority, which makes the meaning of the text INDETERMINATE.
Deconstruction explicitly states that the author’s intent has jack-all to do with a text’s meaning, whereas the controlling theme of proteinwisdom as that the locus of meaning is to be found exclusively in the author’s intent.
Jeff has demonstrated over and over that deconstruction and all its postmodern implications is a corrupt, pernicious concept of language that is used by the Left to destroy everything from the rule of
law to Curious George.
Jeff uses the language of semiotics (signifier, signified) to demonstrate why postmodernism is corrupt.
So it’s absurd to say that he deconstructs an author’s intent when he does EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT DECONSTRUCTION DICTATES.
Sorry you don’t get that, steveaz, but this is NOT my surprised face.
Of course you don’t get it.
Of course you don’t.
Sellout? Um, no. Patriot.
The reason I support Trump (and not the sellout Cruz) in two pictures.
#1- http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/04/29/california-gop-convention-chaos-protesters-block-donald-trumps-motorcade/
#2- https://theconservativetreehouse.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/ted-cruz-soccer-balls.jpg?w=640
OK, I’ll fuck off again, and this time I will even let you calling me a dishonest name be the last word. ‘Cuz I know that’s how you like to roll.
It’s amusing when a know-it-a-tiny-bit-and-maybe-not-even-that like little Stevie gets all condescending and then gets thoroughly owned.
Godspeed, Trump!
Because what America really wants and needs is a President who hands out
soccer ballsfavors toAmericanscronies and angry, irrational protesters blocking border crossings?By the way, I’d be curious to know to whom Cruz is supposed to have sold out.
Assuming that’s not just another empty piece of verbiage, like lyin’ Ted or Canadian Ted, that is.
“OK, I’ll fuck off again,”
Again!
Wait, is that Ted Cruz, the guy who is currently in his first term in elected office? Is the guy who is currently running his second campaign ever, 4 years after his first, the career politician you speak of? Do you ever tire of being factually incorrect or are you just in thrall to the joys of Trumpkin bullshit?
Ah, the sellout Cruz along with sellouts Louie Gohmert and Mike Lee. Those filthy church supporting bastards! America needs a “strong Christian” who occasionally has his little cracker and his little wine and never asks forgiveness. FOR PURITY!!!
Patriotism sure ain’t what it used to be.
Apparently you’re a patriot if you endorse whatever populist jackass comes down the road. So, the obama supporters were patriots as well.
trumpsters are obots with belly fat!!11!!
obots scared the super dels against hillarity in ’08
trumpsters threaten anti trumpsters in ’16
same coin 2 pieces of shit
Alison Krauss The Boxer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60vZ__-uJCQ
@ dicentra
That was a superb explanation. But it was also totally wasted on Steve. You should have just done what I did, and Inigo’d him. Shorter, for sure.
@LBascom
You said you were leaving two and a half weeks ago, no? A little late to be popping back in the door saying “And another thing…”
Wow, leave a thread alone to do IRL stuff and look what happens. Glad this morning’s meeting got cancelled and gave me time to catch up.
Good to hear about Jeff’s Federalist gig, that was great news.
So there are still some Brokeback Trumpkins that jes’ can’t quit you? Figures.
It’s so damn embarrassing to watch them, d’Arth.
You should have just done what I did, and Íñigo’d him.
Hola. Mi nombre es Íñigo Montoya. Mataste a mi padre. Prepárate a morir.
??
Like that?
On spec dicentra (taking your “??” as non-ironic), I’m guessing more the “I do not think that word means what you think it means” dismissal variety of Inigo, than his “prepare to die” varietal.
Things I learn from listening to Rush Limbaugh:
Trumpsters are as bat shit crazy as leftists.
See my comment from April 29 at 2:37 AM.
You did an admirable amount of heavy lifting, but given that Steve a) doesn’t know the difference between analysis and deconstruction and b) seems unlikely to listen to an explanation from people who have already proven to him that they hold the “wrong” sorts of views, it’s easier just to post a Youtube link to an on-point comment from The Princess Bride and let it go at that. IMO.
“But that’s not what he said! He distinctly said “To bla-a-ave” and as we all know, to blave means to bluff, yeah? So… you were probably playing cards.”
Howza bout we post a link to Ted Cruz and his mad TPB-quoting skillz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_mcie4Nasw
FOR THE WIN!
Inconceivable! :-)
Exactly. There’s a TPB quote for everything, I tells ya!
ot
lawyer pointing out bloat in a “profession”
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/05/why-is-health-care-so-much-more-expensive-than-it-used-to-be.php
I missed the news again today.. now Cruz has left the race, Trump is the for-sure nominee? :( and Jeff just told lots of people to fuck off – and it’s only Tuesday!
After getting drunk and voting for McCain, holding my nose and voting for Romney, and not even getting a reach-around from the “tea -partiers” last time around, I’ve divorced myself from politics.
yes me too (except I gave up before Romney). I’m totally not part of the “solution” either :(
I recommend not watching news because it really keeps the stress level down, even if it results in being a “low info voter”. I can’t afford the xanax to be educated anymore.
I’m hoping the Libertarian Party gives me somebody to vote for.
Who knows, maybe Deez Nuts will make a surprise write-in comeback.
Semiotics is a neutral tool. It doesn’t care if you use the science nobly to explicate an academic text or ignobly to deconstruct a partisan narrative for selfish reasons.
As such, those of you struggling to distinguish semiotics from
the more vulgar deconstructive tools in the polemicists tool box are foolishly obsessing over a false dichotomy.
Thought you would like to know. You can thank me later.
It’s cute when you try to sound intelligent, and then condescend from the lofty heights you have falsely elevated yourself to.
Semiotics isn’t a science. There’s no methodology, no statistical analysis, no measurements to take, nothing to investigate.
It’s just a way to talk about symbolic systems. That’s all: a paradigm and some terminology.
those of you struggling to distinguish semiotics from
the more vulgar deconstructive tools in the polemicists tool box are foolishly obsessing over a false dichotomy.
Once, another American and I walked down the street in a small Colombian town, speaking English. Some young boys followed along, listening to the strange sounds coming out of our mouths and trying to imitate what they heard.
“sSstTtsssTsSt”
They were hearing lots of sibilants and T’s, so that’s what they repeated back, and yet they weren’t speaking English at all: they were just making English-sounding noises.
I just thought I’d mention that. Interesting anecdote and all.
The giveaway was “vulgar deconstructive tools,” amirite? I mean, a real expert in Theoretical Political Semiotic Deconstructionism would have written “vulgar deconstructivist tools.”
Tell me I’m rite!
To be really hep to the jive, Ernst, you’d probably have to prefix something with a cis- or hetero-.
“a real expert in Theoretical Political Semiotic Deconstructionism would have written “vulgar deconstructivist tools.” ”
Or even called for the formation of a “New Post-Vulgarian Deconstructivationist’s Toolism Paradigm in Thematic Critique”
Meeee-owwwww.
Ernst is reight.
Maybe Ernst is Reich?…is he really, really short?
Can’t be him. Ernst is worth listening to when you haven’t used an icepick on both ears.
Awfully quiet here… Barely any sign of life at all.. Did everyone move to Canada when Trump took Indiana and became the presumptive Republican candidate or something ?
Nah. We’re just busy mixing up a giant poultice of we told you so compounded with now sit your ignorant ass down and shut the hell up to salve your reality bites.
Because it does.
And you will be.
I might do a Tim the Enchanter type rant.
“I warned ye! I warned ye! Everytime it’s the same!” etc., etc…
Cross-posted from Bob’s site. So he doesn’t have to.
Problems with @proteinwisdom’s (and his like-minded associates’) approach to tackling the real and growing dangers we face as a culture are their failures to acknowledge any solutions not perfectly ‘pure’ by their definition of ‘conservatism’ (marked tunnel vision), but also their embrace of the tactics of SJW leftists to attack those they deem impure. And there’s fewer and fewer who can pass his purity tests.
Look at @proteinwisdom’s vitriolic time line. There’s not a string of Tweets 10 deep where one can find substance without wading through attacks on others he considers too dimwitted to cheer his overzealous visions. It’s a shame I can’t help but recall Vox’s column on the smugness of the Liberal mind…
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism
Jeff continues to embrace leftist’s tactics of unsubstantiated name-calling, derisive guilt-by-association put-downs, and holier-than-thou smugness that sours his and his lock-step followers ever-narrowing vision.
Sure, it’s dark theater, but there comes a time when one must wise up.
“When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people;
as I grow older, I admire kind people.”
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
[…] ideas. Jeff Goldstein at his Protein Wisdom blogs tries to impress the importance of that point here (language […]
Comments from someone who supports a Hillary-supporting would-be caudillo don’t merit substantive response.
1. Rejecting a man who says Cruz is a Canadian GLobalist GOPe who works for Goldman Sachs, whose dad sorta kinda maybe killed JFK is purism? Since when? Narrow means paying attention to what your would be representative says and judging him by it? Meh. I’m not puh-ti-cu-lully ‘suaded.
2. MAGA MAGA MAGA RUBBLE-RUBBLE MAGA MAGA MAGA CUCK is not my political future. Sorry n’ shit. I can’t do that.
3. If Trump is better than Hillary, for certain values of better, then the case to be made for that should probably NOT look like “Conservatism has failed cuck” followed by a cartoon of a hook nosed grinning Jew stereotype and a repurposed Pepe frog from late 2013 era 4chan.
I’m thinking such a case should be composed of more than near constant & casual use of:
* racist supposedly ironic/humorous wink wink wink nudge wink terms & memes to show how not PC the speaker is.
* juvenile nihilist snark,
* 2nd rate alinskyite gas lighting,
* Bad identical astroturf “concerned citizen”or “”alpha male he-man parody” social media sites w/ near identical backgrounds, handles etc.
* Inept attempts at mob style “we know where you live” intimidation,
* attempts to create a near-apocalyptic frenzy relieved only by intervention of ‘the leader’,
* big-lie conspiracy stuff that defines allies as the worst of all scum with the thinnest of delusional piss (or a conpsiracy theory) for evidence
Here, let me unpack this nonsense, since Serr8d hoped to slip it into what he hoped was a dead thread. We’ll do it the old-fashioned way — with a fisking – which I likely invented anyway. So from an identitarian standpoint I’m the UR man, the singularity of blogging.
First, let’s point the obvious: “the real and growing dangers we face as a culture” aren’t identified by serr8d but rather assumed to be homogeneous to all who believe we’re moving in a bad direction. He gets this newfound appreciation for meaningless generic puffery from his new friends, I take it, which just illustrates the danger of moving from a forum of thinking people to a farm of drones with ready-made memes and superficial arguments.
For me, the “real and growing dangers” we face right now in this election cycle are the eagerness and alacrity with which certain people who long identified as conservatives and Constitutionalists are willing to dismiss their own supposed principles for a man who has spent his life backing the very establishment politicians who we’re all in agreement are a large part of the problem. In his pre-Trumper life, Serr8d was fond of quoting or RT me — including this post, which laid out what I believed were the real and growing dangers we faced as a political system. All of that is to be dismissed now that the Orange Mondale has deigned to lead us out of the wilderness of globalist Jew rule and reaffirm our whiteness and greatness.
Second, I find it curious that serr8d would accuse me of adopting SJW tactics when the entirety of the Trump movement and its nationalism base is itself one poorly disguised SJW beg. Trump is always a victim of something: Colorado’s caucus system, the media, Lyin’ Ted, local governments, the Justice Department looking into his “university” racket, et al. And people like serr8d reflexively spring to his defense.
In a string of Tweets this morning I laid it out how this SJW charade works — you can go find them if you wish to review the argument in its entirety, but the gist of it was that the charge of SJW has become, to Trumpers, akin to shouting “RACIST!” “SEXIST!” “HOMOPHOBIC!” — with the supposed affront of being targeted by “SJWs” designed (they hope) as an inoculation against the tribalism they themselves police and enforce with lists and threats.
It is not being a SJW to notice real patterns of behavior and the actual members of a coalition: that charge is meant to shame those addressing empirical fact that doesn’t show well on sellouts like serr8d so that they don’t have to answer for it.
Well, fuck that and fuck him. He’s backing a prog populist / anti-American (in the propositional sense) natinalist who has already announced he’s for a fed minimum wage increase, price controls on pharmaceutical companies, socialized medicine, feelz bathroom policies, race-based affirmative action, protectionism and capricious tariffs, a wealth tax, and continuing federal control over public lands. He’s spent his life backing career pols and funding leftist causes. That he was allowed to smear and try to destroy the reputation of a man like Cruz who has demonstrably defended my liberties is revolting to me. To succor such behavior is to reveal yourself as the very kind of “pragmatist” I’ve spent years here exposing as mere political opportunists.
How serr8d squares what and who he backs with his years online screaming about the ESTABLISHMENT is, to put it mildly, an unresolvable dilemma.
In short, is isn’t being a SJW to notice what is obvious; whereas it IS being a SJW to try to keep me from pointing out that the camouflage these pro tribalists rely on isn’t working — at least not on me.
Back back to my original point: Other dangers we face — and which I’ve laid out for 15 years — include surrendering to leftist notions of language and playing on their field under their rules. So when Serr8d writes,
…the gist of his indictment is that I continue to call out those who are too moronic to recognize how they are in fact helping leftist and the leftist project — only this time, because he falls on the dumb side of things, the attacks are “vitriolic”, “overzealous,” and smug. That is, right away, the complaint is how his honor has been victimized!
That sounds…familiar, somehow.
But let’s continue:
Firstly, for me to “continue to embrace leftist’s tactics” I’d have to have embraced them in the first place rather than having spent years shining a light on them so that we can readily locate them and combat them. Secondly, what serr8d does here — unexpectedly! And with all the agility of a Trump policy speech — is conflate attacks on very real morons with very real associations to the most unsavory of characters by a guy who clearly and unapologetically DOES consider himself “holier” than white nationalist, anti-Jew progressives disguised as Nationalist Warriors, with “unsubstantiated” attacks.
That of course begs the question, because if I didn’t believe the attacks were substantiated by the dangers they pose to a Constitutional representative republic and the liberty of me and mine, I wouldn’t waste time leveling them.
“Lock-step followers” is, I take it, code for readers who agree with me — which is an odd charge to level, given my demonstrative willingness over the years here to take on all comers (recall the Letterman threads?), and my reputation for being quite willing and able to engage with views not my own in order to argue the righteousness of the beliefs and principles I hold.
So, uh, sorry…? Not wanting to hang out and listen to your cultish excuses for backing a con man is not the same as demanding lock-step followers. It’s not wanting to become stupider for having to constantly read your programmatic apologias.
And as for the “ever-narrowing vision”– I’ve been a constitutionalist and a classical liberal as long as this site has been active. My vision hasn’t narrowed: it has stayed focused on what I believe is necessary to reclaim this country from scheming pols divorced from the Founders and Framers — and if anything, I’ve even expanded my vision to take on those who claim to be on “our side” but who back candidates and ideas that are anathema to liberty, classical liberalism, and representative republicanism.
Ted Cruz’s presidential assassin father could not be reached for comment.
Spit.
The Trumpkins should move on, leave we Conservatives alone, and focus all your rage on Clinton. At the very least you can make it an entertaining election season for us viewers who won’t be participating!
They can’t. They need “unity” after all. So they screech, project and generally act like the progs they claim to oppose, yet pretend they’re not progs.
…oh and Heaven forbid if someone gets a bit cross at the crap they spew. Why, that’s unkind.
*eyeroll*
YOOOOOO KNEEEEEE FIIIIIEE!
I’m thinking about 2020. If Trump were the incumbent, who seriously believes he wouldn’t seek re-election, with the blessing of the supine GOPe Vichy Republicans who’ve been embracing him?
Best hope for a decent nominee in 2020 is if Hillary wins in November.
Ironic how the people shrieking BURN IT DOWN the last several months are now making common cause with the likes of Boehner and McConnell, while shrieking TRAITOR!!! at those of us who now think burning it down (with the Trumpkins inside the tent along with their new GOPe allies) might not be such a bad idea after all.
Recent polls have suggested even Georgia might be in play this November. <evil, maniacal cackle>
his lock-step followers
“Lock-step” and “purity” have become the sure signs that someone is not operating according to principle and is profoundly unhappy at being called out for it.
as I grow older, I admire kind people
I have not engaged in name-calling, serr8d, nor have I been unkind to you, and yet I am every bit as opposed to a Trump presidency as Jeff is.
For all the same reasons.
And yet my milder tone hasn’t caused you a second’s worth of introspection.
Not that it has to, but still.
Also?
Jeff has not changed one whit in the years since I’ve haunted this blog — he takes the same stances and uses the same tactics in calling out people who are violating the principles he espouses, regardless of the team jersey they ostensibly wear.
Jeff’s trenchant critiques are “smug” or “brilliant” depending on whether the sharpened tip is pointed toward you or away from you.
serr8d, you’ve merely found yourself on the business end of criticism that, in times past, you would have cheered for. If you don’t like the fact that Jeff is goring your ox, either get off the ox or decide that Jeff’s opinion isn’t important to you anymore.
Don’t accuse him of changing, because he hasn’t.
You have.
Don’t you think serr8d’s comment and Jeff’s response ought to be movwed to the front page and made their own post?
You know, to
throw down a challenge to step into the thunderdome for a good old-fashioned steel cage deathmatch FLAMEWAR!invite further discussion.You know who oozes kindness? Literally (in a figurative sort of way) oozes it out of his pores like a flop sweat?
Why Donald Trump of course! Hillary too for that matter.
They’re both of them like Xerxes that way.
Sorry I haven’t been able to comment until now. You see, I’ve spent the whole of the day practicing my lock step.
Sorry to hear, Serr8d, about you getting Philosophical Lockjaw.
Meh. Maybe I’ll elevate it. Then you can go crazy w it.
[…] in the comments to my month-old post on the Trump phenomenon and those long-time site readers of pw who’ve somehow lemminged […]
Ok. Elevated. Go to it