Of all the Convention speakers, I think I caught about 30 seconds of some Democrat droning on about something as the TV channels switched between re-runs of some doctor soap opera and Fixer Upper on HGTV. In other words, I didn’t in the least care to hear what a bunch of people I repose no trust in had to say. On the other hand, following along on Twitter with the jokesters was hilarious. I am certain, however, that Hillary came out 2nd best in it and it was because of Obama’s assertion that Hillary is the best qualified person in history to run for President…if that’s the case, why didn’t the Democrats nominate her in 2008?. I think normal people who don’t follow politics will consider the whole thing a farce. But, we’ll see, shan’t we?
Along with following the jokes on Twitter I did notice plenty of highly educated, very experienced Conservative political pundits wailing and moaning and gnashing their teeth of the Democrats’ new-found respect for patriotic sentiments. Oh, my goodness, went the comments – because of the idiot GOP voters, the Democrats get to be the patriots! This pretty much finished many Conservative political pundits for me – for crying out loud, it’s not like the Democrats are being truthful here, guys! Give me a break! They are just lying – as they always do – in order to wow the suckers. Perhaps it will wow the suckers but if your definition of “love of country” is “make patriotic noises if it’ll help you win votes”, then I want no more to do with you. The bottom line is that we’ve lost and lost and lost and now got Trump because the GOP has played it’s own base for fools. We – the run-of-the-mill, average, everyday GOP/Conservative Americans – wanted certain things done. Certain fights to be had (even if we lost them); certain principals to be upheld; certain demands to be made and adhered to come heck or high water. The GOP leadership didn’t do this – they said they’d do it, and then as soon as they had garnered our votes, they went off and surrendered. And, so, Trump. Suck it up, sunshine – Trump isn’t our fault, he’s yours.
Who will win? Probably Hillary – she’s got the money and the political infrastructure. Both candidates are terribly unpopular and it may come down to a low turn-out election where Hillary’s superior resources can drag enough people to the polls. But, no one can really tell – it is notable that about 10 days ago, Rasmussen was the only pollster showing Trump ahead…now that almost all other polls show Trump ahead, Rasmussen has him behind. I’m putting this down to what I’ve expected all along with 2016 polling – no one can be sure who to poll. So many regular voters are disgusted and so many irregular voters are (at least in theory) excited that it is going to be very hard to detect who is really ahead. Some pollsters are very smart and they may be able to create an accurate model of the electorate…but we won’t know, for sure, if any of them have done that until after the election. To be sure, if polls show Hillary consistently up by 5 or 10 by late October, then it’d be safe to bet the she wins on November 8th…but even then, not 100% for sure. And ditto for vice-versa.
I’ve still no dog in this hunt – and I’m still unsure of what to do. I’ll probably remain unsure what to do until November 8th…after I’ve skipped past the Presidential contest to spend a great deal of time carefully going over the crucial city judge election contests and then stare blankly at the screen for a while, weeping softly… But as the co-author of The Worst President in History: the Legacy of Barack Obama, I will state firmly that neither of the two candidates will be as bad as Obama has been (and have you picked up a copy? I just re-read it a bit and it’s quite good…and selling fairly well for an independent publication with no advertising budget…just go on over to http://www.worstpresidentbook.com and buy it, today!). Part of this is because of the massive damage Obama has already done – hard to burn down a building a second time, ya dig? But mostly because Obama really has been a horror from day one…how in heck we elected someone out of the corrupt Chicago Democrat machine will always amaze me. If you haven’t read the book then you are likely unaware of the level of just sheer graft that has gone on – and while Hillary and Trump are not likely to be watchdogs against graft, it would take some spectacular efforts on their part to go beyond Obama’s cronyism. They can’t possibly be more un-Constitutional than Obama because there’s pretty much no provision of the Constitution that Obama hasn’t tried to violate (often with great success). Both of them are also quite old – we might luck out and find that either of them wind up a one term President. We can deal with four years of either of them – at all events, fixing this country is a generational thing and if we don’t get started until 2021, it won’t be that much harder a task.
And, so, off to the general election we go. Will there be debates? Not sure – some are saying Trump will shy away from them, fearful of Hillary’s razor sharp intellect (no, seriously; some people are saying that – stop laughing!). Some are saying Hillary will shy away from them because she doesn’t want Trump bringing up her rank corruption to a national audience (for a very large number of people, it would be the first time such things as the e mail scandal were really presented to them). It might make an interesting argument – what with Trump demanding that “unfair” MSMers be excluded and Hillary saying she can’t appear on stage with someone like Trump.
Trump will shoot his mouth off. Count on it. Each time he does, it will be announced that his most recent statement has finished him. File those with the 1,000 times his candidacy has already been declared dead because of his verbal monstrosities. It might be that his mouth eventually sinks him, but it hasn’t so far so don’t count on it doing so in the future. Hillary is going to run a “Rose Garden” campaign – pretty much acting like she’s already President, already has the election in the bag, giving carefully scripted interviews (but perhaps not a single press conference – too much risk that someone will ask a question not pre-vetted by the Hillary campaign)…and leaving it to surrogates to hammer Trump relentlessly. Trump will relentlessly bait Hillary (and Obama) hoping to make them lose their cool at some point – we’ll see how disciplined they are. Trump’s only hope is if several million people who don’t normally vote – or who normally vote Democrat – come his way. To really get them to the polls, he’ll have to build up some sort of good ground game…we’ll see if he’s disciplined enough to do that (or at least smart enough to let the pros do that for him).
I expect the House to remain Republican, and for the Senate to probably remain GOP, as well (looks like we might lose one or two, but will probably pick up Reid’s seat in NV…so, a net loss of one). If somehow Hillary pulls of a landslide, it might be different – but even then it might not. Nixon won in a blowout in 1972 with no significant change in Congress.
Blogs For Victory 
Any regular American who is planning to vote for Hillary because she will help the “little” guy needs to read this.
Also, anyone undecided or undecided but leaning toward Hillary needs to see Dinesh DeSousa’s new documentary, Hillary’s America.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/07/28/tucker-carlson-says-nancy-pelosis-remarks-on-white-males-show-dems-have-pulled-the-mask-off
Her comment about God being “a woman’s right to choose” makes me ponder, again, the Church allowing her to partake of the sacraments while promoting the atrocity of murdering unborn children and using her position to further it.
More and more Bishops are calling that sort of thing out – it is a massive wrench for the Conference of Catholic Bishops because the Democrat-Catholic alliance went back to the 1840’s and was just part of the natural order of things for so long. The Church always changes slowly – but I think it is ever more perceived that as we give a pass to Catholics who have fallen for the World, it brings discredit upon the Church, as a whole. Care still needs to be taken, of course – the Church never breaks with a government if there’s any possibility of some sort of accommodation and it is understood that once people like Pelosi are denied the Sacraments, then it will be open war between the left and the Church. This is something to be avoided if at all possible – but it is getting less and less possible all the time.
Is the Church a religious organization dedicated to certain religious principles, or it is a political organization beholden to various political entities? (I am not talking about the internal politics of the Church.)
In other words, the Church is faced with the same decisions we all are, as individuals—the weighing of principle against pragmatism. Yes, it might seem to the Church that it gains a lot by its association with the Democrat Party in the United States. But it also loses a lot. Ideally it would stand along, firm in its dogma and holding its members to that dogma. Don’t want to follow the rules? Then find another church.
Right now in the United States we have top government officials who are putative Catholics. We have Pelosi, and we can’t forget Kerry, who had a Catholic marriage of nearly 20 years, which had produced two children, suddenly “annulled” so he could marry a rich woman who refused to marry a divorcee, and who has always supported abortion. I don’t remember—does Reid claim to be Catholic? And what about Biden?
Just as you and I have said that conservative pundits have lost our confidence and respect because their recent actions don’t mesh with their stated political philosophy, the Church is facing the same kind of reaction to what is either hypocrisy or spinelessness. Or possibly both.
But let’s just say, for sake of discussion, that if the Church wants an affiliation with a U.S. political party, what would it lose by being closer to the Republicans? It is the Republican Party that wants to both protect and encourage faith-based charities, it is the Republican Party fighting for the right to worship, it is the Republican Party more likely to restrict abortions, it is the Republican Party which believes in the virtue of work and self sufficiency. As far as I can tell, the only attraction to the Left is its superficial lip service to wanting to “help the poor”.
The Church has made some serious errors in its shift to the Left, the most serious being its recruitment of homosexuals for the priesthood and then its protection of homosexual predation upon young post-pubescent boys by its priests. I don’t see a downside to the Church making a decisive move to the Right—to the true political philosophy of the Right, not the distorted South American version of the Right or the popular misconceptions about the Right but its true foundation in equality of all and opportunity for all and freedom for all.
“…war between the left and the Church. This is something to be avoided if at all possible..”
Why? Why would this be a bad thing, “to be avoided if at all possible”? If the Left is directly responsible for the atrocities we discuss here, ranging from genocide to the enslavement of millions by making them dependent on tyrants to the butchery of millions of innocent unborn, then why should the Church, or anyone else for that matter, cringe at open conflict with it?
How can you have an organization with a foundational premise of fighting evil fretting about upsetting the representation of evil acts? The history of the Church has been one of courage in taking on evil and vanquishing it, going back to the vanquishing of Lucifer. Funny, but I have never seen an artistic representation of Michael sitting at a desk going through a list of Pros and Cons for taking a stance.
The Church is very much hated – and not just by our Progressives. A full on war against the Church by a Progressive government, which is what we’d get if Hillary becomes President after the Church de-jure excommunicated all pro-abortion Democrats, would be applauded not just among Progressives, but among a great deal of American Protestants, as well. It’s not something to enter lightly into, especially as you and I don’t know what transpires between, say, Pelosi and her confessor.
I think the break is coming – the time when it will be officially declared from on high that any person who openly advocates from abortion is no longer a Catholic unless they give public repentance of their pro-abortion views…but, not yet.
“This pretty much finished many Conservative political pundits for me “
Many of them were toast as far as I am concerned for quite a while now. People I have respected for their intellect and acumen have made the most bizarre and utterly stupid comments I have ever seen, and many of the “conservative pundits” who used to have some credibility have lost it.
Take those who have defended Trump’s putative Christianity. He says he is a Christian, so shazaaam! he IS–never mind his entire life history, never mind his defining being a Christian as “eating that little cracker”, never mind him repeating that he has never felt the need to repent for anything (remarkable, given his past) all that these people needed to hear was a declaration from him that completely wiped the slate clean.
Not that I care if he is or isn’t—I’d vote for a Druid if his politics were sound—-but it is the determination to justify an indefensible position by making indefensible claims that bothers me, and makes me dismiss those people.
I’ve always thought of Newt Gingrich as a smart guy. I couldn’t figure out his love of Trump, but then I don’t know the details of his thought process. Or I didn’t, until he fatuously declared that Trump’s marriage to Melania PROVES that he is “not against immigration”. ?????? Huh? It proves that he likes compliant big-haired big-breasted women, even if one or two happen to be born in other countries. Newt instantly plummeted off my “credible” list. That insipid titter and fatuous look on his face when he said this screamed “bromance” to me, and was profoundly creepy.
I don’t agree that Hillary would not be worse than Obama. Yes, he has set the stage and he is a hard act to follow. She can’t redo what he has done, but she can and will build on it. The one thing that screams to me, over the noise of everything else, is THE SUPREME COURT. Put a couple of 40-year-old Liberals on the Court and our entire constitutional system is under constant erosion for the next 40 years or so.
That, and vetoing every bill sent up by a Republican Congress.
You’d be hard put to find a more vocal, more passionate anti-Trump person than I have been the past few months, but now that we are stuck with him as our nominee I truly don’t see that I have any choice at all regarding how to vote, much less whether or not to vote.
I am retaining my disdain for those who have put him where he is, including those mindless “conservative” pundits who have proven themselves to be no more than Identity Politics, issues leaves floating on the surface of serious politics.
Oh, yeah – the Conservatives who have gone full on for Trump are also heavily wrecked in my view. I can understand making an argument that Hillary is so bad that Trump is a necessity…but for the Conservatives who have suddenly discovered that Trump is what Conservatism always wanted? Bull…stuff.
It would appear that the best tactic to use against Hillary is to exploit her stunning ignorance. And not just about Wall Street, but her ignorance about identifying classification markings on classified emails, her ignorance that, when she generates an email that deals with classified topics, it’s classified whether she marks it or not, since, as SOS she had original classification authority.
You are so right. Trump needs to have a little paragraph he says over and over—she was in the White House for 8 years as “co-president” and in the Senate for 6, where she sat on committees dealing with classified information, yet after 14 years she still didn’t understand the rules for dealing with sensitive information. I would get the actual wording of everything she signed regarding the need for security, and quote it. And then finish with “And even after all this, she now says she just didn’t KNOW, or just didn’t UNDERSTAND, what she was required to do. And now she wants you to think she is smart enough to be president? She’s either not smart enough or she is lying about what she understood which means she is not honest enough.”
A better speaker than Trump could go back into the days when she was hounded by FOIA demands, and had to come up with stuff she had not wanted to have to reveal, hiding some of it till it was “found” later, and explain that her private server was a calculated effort to avoid ever having her correspondence examined again. Of course, not being very smart, she didn’t stop to think that its existence would ever be known, or that any decent hacker could get into it and acquire every single correspondence from the State Department, I would explain that the reason for having the server in the first place was to avoid examination of her anticipated shady dealings, proof she planned in advance to do things as Sec of State that were shady if not outright illegal, and she knew she couldn’t have these actions documented in official government records.
Most people don’t understand the significance of what she did. They think it was really no big deal, just a simple mistake, and the eeeevil Right are just making too much of it. Somehow it needs to be laid out, step by step, not just what she did but why she did it and what she wanted to hide.
I love this: when she generates an email that deals with classified topics, it’s classified whether she marks it or not, since, as SOS she had original classification authority. How could she not know this?