We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
The anointed and/or self-anointed political/intellectual elites have been getting a come-uppance lately. That is all for the good because our moral and intellectual superiors of both political parties have not done a very good job when they gain access to power. Enjoying power, they begin to apply their talents to keeping it and expanding it. Furthermore, these elites often ignore common sense.
In an act of determined denial, Washington Republicans and conservatives continue to see and describe Mr. Trump’s nomination as the triumph of a celebrity in a culture that worships celebrity, the victory of a vulgarian in a vulgar age, the living excrescence of our shallow values and lowered standards. Also, he’s tapped into the public’s rage.
He is all of those things. But he is more, and Washington is determined to ignore the more. He understood, either intuitively or after study, that the Republican base was changing or open to change, and would expand if the party changed some policies. He declared those policies changed. And he won. ..
I do not think Trump is a vulgarian. I think he plays one on TV. It is his shtick. He is a shock to the system, to same-old same-old in both parties. He will be elected decisively. The primary voters knew what they were doing.
Everybody has known for decades about the Clinton faux marriage. There is no marriage. She has her own house in DC, and she has Huma. BTW, is Huma raising her kid or is Wiener doing it? Strange people, the whole lot.
This is smart: Reform Week Part II/ Politics is the art of the possible. Trump should read that.
Trump has positioned himself brilliantly, as practical and mostly non-ideological. That's why he will win in November, for better or worse. Crazy like a fox.
Mayor Giuliani cleaned Times Square of the crime and a lot of the porn, but left the gritty, raucous, random parts intact. Good choice.
Times Square is the colorful, crowded, tacky, lively tourist center of the city and the heart of the Broadway theater district. NYC is not Florence - a small antique town. Times Square will never be the Piazza del Duomo, thank goodness.
John Tierny (with whom I often agree) has another vision: Reimagining Times Square. He is being a party-pooper.
George Will should have been left unemployed and starving ages ago. Newspapers are dying off and people despise the media more than they have ever despised the media—which is saying a lot—and yet here fucking George Will remains, along with the Noonans and Friedmans and Brookses of the world, gainfully employed despite being a worthless, fart-sniffing boob. Try as the world might, we can’t seem to rid ourselves of idiot columnists who make $300,000 just to sit down and invent political trends from looking out the fucking parlor window.....I don’t get how these people have retained any credibility.
Well, they do believe it but only Moynihan was willing to say it out loud. The real goal was achieved: Generations of Dem voters hooked on dependency, uselessness, and hopelessness. Of course, that applies not only to African-Americans. There are far more white than black people in that category.
However, there were no dysfunctional black urban ghettos before Johnson's Great Society eliminated poverty and hopelessness.
I think he is partly right, but I think he underestimates the amount of votes he will have across all sorts of demographics. I will vote for him despite his flaws. They always have flaws. One quote:
Trump supporters are tired of hearing that black lives matter, while no one mentions that all lives matter. They are sick of seeing protestors wave the flag of the country they do not wish illegal aliens to be sent back to and trash the country they under no circumstances want them to leave. They don’t like getting a letter from an IRS that employs Lois Lerner — a letter that would be ignored with impunity by those who are here illegally, or who run the Clinton Foundation. They are tired of wealthy minorities claiming they are perpetual victims of ill-treatment at the hands of people who are less well off than they. They don’t like hearing from elites that huge trade deficits have little to do with loss of jobs or that cheating by our trade partners is just a passing glitch in free trade. They cannot stand lectures from those who make more money in an hour than they do in a year about their own bad habits or slothfulness.
They don’t know what the on-screen savants mean by a leg-tingle or a perfectly pressed pant leg or a first-class temperament or a president as god — and they don’t care to find out. They do not hate political correctness so much as one-sided political correctness, which gives a pass to some to say things that would get others fired or ruined. They don’t want to be lectured that their own plight is part of a larger, healthy creative destruction or a leaner, meaner competitiveness or an overdue restructuring — by those who are never destroyed, rendered noncompetitive, or restructured. And they don’t like to be talked down to by the experts who ran up $10 trillion in debt, ruined the health-care system, dismantled the military, and screwed up the Secret Service, the IRS, NASA, and the VA. Trump is their megaphone, not their solution. The Trump supporters have seen plenty of politicians with important agendas, but few with the zeal to push them through; at this late date, they would apparently prefer zeal without agendas to agendas without zeal.
“In one year,” wrote Warren Meyer in 2015, “I literally spent more personal time on compliance with a single regulatory issue -- implementing increasingly detailed and draconian procedures so I could prove to the State of California that my employees were not working over their 30-minute lunch breaks -- than I did thinking about expanding the business or getting new contracts.”
It's been a while since we posted this sort of graph (this from The Fable of a Stable Climate). Facts do not necessarily calm the hysterical, but all you can do is to try.
"What the elites now consider normal and standard seems, to a growing minority of Americans, aberrant and unhinged — and they are looking for a remedy, even if it is mostly rhetorical and chimerical."
My current favorite. Give it a try.