“Because something
is happening here but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones
(Bush)?”
Bob Dylan, Ballad
Of A Thin Man
Every American needs to read, Victor Davis Hanson’s, September 20, 2016
essay, Never Never Trump (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440198/never-nevertrump-not-voting-trump-republican-suicide) It is simply brilliant!
If you still can’t decide
why you should support and vote for Trump in this 2016 Presidential Election,
this essay will leave you without doubt. For those who do not wish to read the
whole essay, here are some of the salient passages (the footnotes are mine):
"The media have devolved
into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is
necessary to release to arrive at correct views.
Republicans — were
reinvented, by the Media, as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of
a Frank Capra movie.
Then came along the Trump,
the seducer of the Right when the Republican establishment was busy early on
coronating Jeb Bush.
Hillary would rely on the
old Obama team of progressive hit men in the public-employee unions, the news
ministries, the pajama-boy bloggers, the race industry, and the open-borders
lobbies to brand Trump supporters as racist, sexist, misogynist, Islamophobic,
nativist, homophobic. The shades of Obama’s old white reprehensible “Clingers”
would spring back to life as “The Deplorables.”
Yet for all Hillary’s
hundreds of millions of corporate dollars[1]
and legions of Clinton Foundation strategists, she could never quite shake
Trump, who at 70 seemed more like a frenzied 55.
All that news buzz is
sandwiched by almost hourly reports of hacked e-mails, Clinton Foundation
scandals, and violations of federal protocols — drip, drip, drip disclosures
with more promised on the horizon. Some wondered, why did not Hillary just come
clean and end the psychodramas? But that
is like asking blue jays to become songbirds.
Ask the ambidextrous and once iconic Colin Powell.
Trump planned a simple
enough strategy of an outraged outsider not nibbling, but blasting away, at
political correctness, reminding audiences that he was not a traditional
conservative, but certainly more conservative than Hillary, and a roguish
celebrity billionaire with a propensity to talk with, not down to, the lower
middle classes. The more Trump grew unnaturally calmer, he became somewhat
presentable, and the more he did, the more a flummoxed Hillary returned to her
natural shrillness — and likewise became less viable.
But the proper question is
a reductionist “compared to what?” Never Trumpers assume that the latest
insincerely packaged Trump is less conservative than the latest incarnation of
an insincere Clinton on matters of border enforcement, military spending, tax
and regulation reform, abortion, school choice, and cabinet and Supreme Court
appointments. That is simply not a sustainable proposition.
Is Trump uncooked all that
much more odious than the sautéed orneriness of the present incumbent, who has
variously insulted the Special Olympics, racially stereotyped at will, resorted
to braggadocio laced with violent rhetoric, racially hyped ongoing criminal trials,
serially lied about ObamaCare and Benghazi, ridiculed the grandmother who
scrimped to send him to a private prep school, oversaw government corruption
from the IRS to the VA to the GSA, and has grown the national debt in a fashion
never before envisioned? Trump on occasion did not recognize the “nuclear
triad,” but then he probably does not say “corpse men” either or believe we
added 57 states.
Did the scandals and
divisiveness of the last eight years ever prompt in 2012 a Democratic
#NeverObama walkout or a 2016 progressive “not in my name” disowning of Obama?
Are there 50 former Democratic foreign-policy veterans who cannot stomach
Hillary’s prevarications and what she has done to national security, and
therefore will sign a letter of principled non-support? Did socialist idealist
and self-appointed ethicist Bernie Sanders play a Ted Cruz, John Kasich, or Jeb
Bush, and plead that Hillary’s Wall Street and pay-for-play grifting was so
antithetical to his share-the-wealth fantasies that he would stay home?
Replying in kind to a Gold
Star Muslim family or attacking a Mexican-American judge who is a member of a
La Raza legal group is, of course, stupid and crass, but perhaps not as stupid
as Hillary, before a Manhattan crowd of millionaires, writing off a quarter of
America as deplorable, not American, and reprobate racists and bigots.
As for Trump’s bombast, I
wish there was an accepted and consistent standard of political discourse by
which to censure his past insensitiveness and worse, but there has not been one
for some time. Examine, for example, the level of racial invective used in the
past by Hillary Clinton (“working, hard-working Americans, white Americans”),
Harry Reid (“light-skinned African American with no Negro dialect, unless he
wanted to have one”), Joe Biden (“first mainstream African American who is
articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”), or Barack Obama (his
own grandmother became a “typical white person”), and it’s hard to make the
argument that Trump’s vocabulary marks a new low, especially given that few if any liberals bothered much about the racist tripe of their own. Trump
so far has not appeared in linguistic blackface to patronize and mock the
intelligence of an African-American audience with a 30-second, manufactured,
and bad Southern accent in the manner of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
Outsourcing and off
shoring did not make the U.S more competitive, at least for most Americans
outside of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Boutique corporate multiculturalism
was always driven by profits while undermining the rare American idea of e
pluribus unum assimilation — as the canny multimillionaires like Colin
Kaepernick and Beyoncé grasped.
It may be discomforting for some conservatives to vote for the
Republican party’s duly nominated candidate ... but it is now becoming suicidal not to."
[1]
Reference
John Ellis “Jeb” Bush’s Republican presidential primary race, where he spent
130 Million and won 2% of the vote in his home state of Florida, 2.75% of the
total Republican primary votes cast, and 4 delegates. It would seem that it
will take more than $’s to buy an election in 2016.
[2] The basic tenets of a Jacksonian foreign policy are the
following: The US is different from the rest of the world, and therefore the
US should not try to remake the world in its own image; The US must
ensure its honor abroad by abiding by its commitments and maintaining its
standing with its allies; The US must take action to defend its
interests; The US must fight to win or not fight at all; And, the US
should only respect those foes that fight by the same rules as the US does.
