I got to use the word “jejune” today – not too often I get to use that word, but when considering all the punditry I’ve seen since the 2016 Presidential cycle got rolling, “jejune” seemed quite appropriate. I’ve never seen so many people – including people who are supposedly smart and informed – be so utterly childish and superficial in their views.
The thing which set me off has been the response to Trump’s statements on whether or not African-American and other minorities in the United States should roll the dice on him. In the end, all Trump said was that a lot of things are very bad, Hillary represents precisely the people who created the bad and, so, why not give something new a chance? That was it – all of it, actually, quite sensible, in a way. It’s not that anyone can be sure that Trump has any answers but that we can be sure that Hillary will merely continue the status quo…a status quo which has African-American youth unemployment at more than double the unemployment rate for white youth…31% against 14%. A status quo which also has African-American (and other minority) youth trapped in failing schools, forced to live in crime-ridden neighborhoods, enduring the long-term effects of family breakdown. If there’s something Trump could possibly do to make things worse in America’s minority communities, I’m all ears. Tell me. I’m listening.
And as I’ve been listening, most of what I’ve been hearing on the anti-Trump right is mere echoes of the Progressive critique – Trump’s words are racist, apparently because they point out what is wrong and assert that Hillary and the Progressives can’t (won’t) fix it. To give an idea of the silliness we’re getting into among some on the right, I pointed out that Trump is the first GOPer in a very long time to directly address the African-American community. I was immediately hit back with all the times GOP candidates for President have addressed the NAACP! As if that is to address the African-American community! Sorry, folks, but the NAACP is a mere arm of the DNC – the NAACP is an organization which provides a rubber stamp of approval for whatever Progressive notions the left has seized on at the moment. What is the NAACP? An organization which is now fighting tooth and nail against charter schools – the very charter schools which give, among others, African-American kids a chance to escape the failed public school system. The NAACP made a choice – black kids, or union bosses (and their donations): the NAACP choose the union bosses. To speak to the NAACP is to merely speak to the DNC. It is not a worthwhile activity for Republicans or Conservatives. To speak to the African-American or other minority groups what needs to be done is to speak to them, directly. Trump did that. Yes, it would have been vastly better to do it in Detroit – but various Progressive groups would have started a riot to prevent Trump from actually pointing out, at ground zero, just how lousy Progressive policies are.
It seems that we are not allowed to discuss certain things. Make certain points. Bring to light certain truths and falsehoods of modern, American life. For the longest time, we thought it was only Progressives who were proving gate-keepers preventing certain things from being discussed. Turns out, plenty on the right are, as well. I don’t know why. Perhaps they are afraid to – it is risky. As we can see, discussing it merely brings the charge of “racist”. But that doesn’t excuse childishness – nor cowardice. The people who live in the hell-holes the left has created in America are our fellow Americans. They are part of us – they are our fellow citizens; our brothers and sisters. We must go to their aid – and even if they reject us in scorn, we are still bound to try. But here’s the thing – I think that if we do go and try, out of every ten people, nine might reject us in scorn but one might be moved to listen…and that is one more person who can help us reform our nation. If we do nothing, we’ll still be called racists, but we’ll also not have any chance of getting any of their votes…any of their aid, that is, in saving our nation.
As I’ve said all along, Trump is no one’s answer – but I will credit him with this: his candidacy has exposed the massive hypocrisy at the center of American political life. A hypocrisy which is a sick bit of theater wherein we pretend to argue, but all eventually just go along to get along.
It is time to end our superficial politics. We have real problems. Real people are actually suffering – some of them unto death. It is time to attack what is wrong – all of it, every where. It is time to start doing what is right – even if it is difficult. More than likely, we’re going to have Hillary as President – that will have to be endured. But if all we do is dance around the real issues then come 2020, we’ll fail, again, to take a step to reform our nation. Some have said that Trump ensures that we won’t get another Trump – the truth of the matter is that Trump ensures we’ll get an endless parade of Trumps, on both sides, unless we actually start to deal with the real problems. You see, as long as we keep up this kabuki theater of pretending to argue and pretending to do things – while leaving a corrupt Ruling Class to just keep rolling along – then the anger which propelled Trump will not only remain, it will grow.
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I will happily give Trump credit where credit is due, and I am very pleased that he said what he said. I hope he continues in this vein. I thought it was very smart to simplify things so much—“What you’ve been doing hasn’t worked out for you, so what do you have to lose by trying something else”. This is where Trump excels—simple messages delivered in simple terms.
I would like him to take on the name-callers, laughing at them, pointing out that their name calling is only a very transparent effort to silence people. When he talks about Hillary they try to distract from the message by calling him a sexist. When he talks about the problems in black communities they call him a racist. The question people need to ask themselves is, what is so dangerous about what he is saying that they have to try to shut him up?
This is the kind of fight Trump would be good at. Just throwing everything back at them. It would drive them crazy. After an attack on him, all he has to do is laugh and say “That evidently struck a little too close to home—it only took them half an hour to react and try to distract people from what I said. Maybe we ought to take a closer look at what I said to see what about it was such a threat to them…” Or: “We don’t have to guess what scares the Left—they tell us. When they come at me with stupid accusations like “racist” or “sexist” what they are really doing is telling us that what I just said scares the pants off them, because it is true, and they have to try to shut me up. Let’s look at what I said and see if we can figure out why it scared them so much they had to bring out the torches and pitchforks.”
I would love to see him take away this weapon of theirs, by turning it against them, by citing every time the Left tries this and using it to identify what he said that made them so desperate, so frantic, to shut him up and divert attention away from what he said.
I don’t see much racism in every day life. It’s true, I live in a rural community in a state where racial discord is rare and tends to involve Latino unhappiness more than black anger. But I look at the culture in general, and what I see tells me that we are a pretty colorblind nation.
I see commercials, for example, with black people. Sometimes it is a black family, sometimes black and white people interacting, sometimes mixed-race couples. This is not because Hollywood and the artistic types feel this way—it is because they know that Americans in general are fine with this.
What I see is virulent black-to-white racism, openly escalating into violence as some black people are hunting down white to hurt or kill them just because of the color of their skin, and I see increasing culturism.
I am finding myself increasingly disgusted with what is called the “black community”. I used to think black racism and hatred were pretty much restricted to the poor and resentful, till members of Obama’s old church came out and sneered at white people for being so stupid we didn’t realize how affluent black people openly hate us. This has nothing to do with skin color. I don’t feel this way about the Africans I know, or the black people I come in contact with who openly hate the new racism. It is not racism, it is culturism, and I am a culturist.
If a “community” consistently acts with malice and hatred and violence and stupidity, I think of the people in that community as hateful and malicious and very very stupid. What I see happening in this country is the spreading of malignant behavior in black communities (and that includes black people who do not live in black communities but who identify with them) and concurrent with that is rising distrust, dislike and even disdain for these people in other communities. It’s not based on skin color, it’s based on words and actions and attitudes, but when those words and actions and attitudes are linked to a skin color, well, that’s the way it works out. Observers merely observe and draw conclusions: changes have to be made by the actors themselves.
Our entire culture is increasingly coarsened. But I have a bit of a different perspective. Of the 100-odd people I work directly with, three are white males (and I’m one of the three). The rest are everybody else – black, Latino, Asian, Muslim, Jewish, gay, female. And, so, I get a lot of different people in my life on a regular basis and people talk – so, I hear what they’re talking about. What I get is:
1. As anyone might suspect, it’s mostly trivial nonsense…whatever mind-fluff the entertainment industry is hyping at the moment.
2. A lot about kids and family, but with all the modern complications…divorced people, people who have shacked up, single moms and dads.
3. A gigantic and monumental contempt for the system.
It is that last bit which is most important to the political junkie – people really, really despise things as they are. I’ve seen a few people going for Trump, none who are willing to be vocal about going for Hillary…and this in a place where my guess is that better than 70% went for Obama, twice. This is why, in my view, that even with Trump being Trump, with the MSM being almost uniformly hostile to him and Hillary outspending him by zillions to one, Trump is still down just 5.5 points and we’re not even to Labor Day, yet. If Trump had been anyone other than Trump, I think Hillary’s political obituary would already be written.
We’ll probably still get Hillary – and maybe by a wide margin in the Electoral College (not so much in popular vote – could be wrong, but I don’t see her getting above 52 or 53% of the vote…but if Trump’s down at 45%, not much matter). But the anger and resentment is still there – “I’ll vote for Hillary because Trump is such an ass – but I’ll never vote for the Establishment, again” is how I see a Hillary victory playing out. That would make 2020 very interesting.
I also hear a lot about not trusting “the system” but, like “the Establishment”, no one seems to have a very good idea of what “the system” is. It’s kind of a cop-out, a way of kind of saying you are involved enough to have an opinion, but not really.
I’ve had some luck by saying something quick, not disagreeing but throwing something new out there, such as “I just don’t trust the system.” “Neither do I, but I think a lot of it is that all the power is concentrated in Washington, and all that power is like a magnet to corruption. I wish we could go back to the days when the states had most of the power and Washington didn’t do much but fight wars and collect taxes.” I tried that once, and the reaction was to ask why that would make a difference. My response was something along the lines of “Well, with the states running things and making their own decisions, power brokers would have to choose which states to concentrate on, and the power would be spread around the whole country. If it did get concentrated in one or two states, people could move. And it’s a lot easier to fire a bad governor than a bad president.” And then I changed the subject.
I think the idea is to get people to start realizing that they ARE “the system” and they CAN change it, but first they have to put some time into figuring out what is wrong with it.
There aren’t many things more dangerous than vague, unfocused, resentment, because it can latch onto any shiny thing that promises relief. It would not be popular, but it would be accurate, to respond to a complaint about illegal immigration with something like “But that’s what you get when you elect people who don’t believe we have the right to have borders or anything to say about who comes into the country.” The sad fact is, most people do not connect the vote they cast in November with anything that happens in the country after that.
““I’ll vote for Hillary because Trump is such an ass – but I’ll never vote for the Establishment, again”” is a perfect time to say something about a vote having consequences that last a lot longer than the term of a president, and it is easier to live with an ass for four years than permanent changes to the country that we might never be able to fix.
Ah, but the very success of Trump will damage the nation far into the future. If you loved the coarseness of this campaign, imagine how the campaigns that follow will be should this one succeed.
You laugh at the prospect of “Idiocracy” and yet merrily leap down that slippery slope.
So please detail this “far into the future” damage that Trump will wreak upon the country. I am curious. Are you honestly worried that he will coarsen the culture? Because if you haven’t noticed, that ship has sailed. That is unless you consider the multitude of personal attacks on the “alt right” from the progressive movement to be civil, or worse yet justified. And in re: to the damage done to the nation, please. $20 trillion debt, an historically low labor participation rate, racial relations at all time lows, a health care system in chaos, a weaker military, a marginalized role in the world, a stronger Iran, and an emboldened Russia, I am not sure how it could get worse. Also in re: to “idiocracy”, I always find it funny when people accuse Trump of being stupid. It’s as if those who critique him even have half the energy and talent required to run an organization like he does, and successfully.
The coarseness? Oh, I can see that – but as the co-author of http://www.worstpresidentbook.com (have you picked up your copy?), I can attest that the coarseness pre-dates Trump by quite a lot…it just, like all other things which cast Obama in a bad light, hasn’t been emphasized as Trump’s coarseness. My firm opinion is that neither Hillary nor Trump will be as destructive of American ideals as Obama has been.
So, no one on this blog consider Trump’s campaign to be an exponential increase in coarseness? There is no problem of this “new normal” should it succeed?
We’ve had debt and etc. before. There has been no Idiocracy-like campaign like Trump before.
Serious question: have you read the book? Matt and I did labor over it for quite a long time and it is massively sourced. There are no actual new revelations in it – all of it was reported (most of our sources are regular MSM reports, government reports, or highly respected political sites). But it just wasn’t reported as it would have been if Obama were a Republican – and therein lies the difference, and why Matt and I felt it important to write the book. Trump has said nothing which is worse than things Obama has said routinely over his term of office.
We have to remember that Bob sees things no one else sees, knows things no one else knows, and susses out the secrets hidden behind our words. Note his comment about us “loving” the coarseness of the Trump campaign. It is amazing that he figured that out.
It took Bob to realize what no one else had been able to figure out—that for nearly 25 years I have loved Ivanka Trump so much I wanted to BE her, and so came up with a name that is as close as I could get to hers. He saw through what I thought was so clever, in mixing up some of the letters to hide my passions, and realized that as “Ivanka” and “Amazona” each have two “a”s (OK, so Amazona has three “a”s but who’s counting) and an “n” they are really the same name. He also knew—-I have no idea how he figures this out, it borders on the weird—-that in my heart of hearts I think of my name as having “ka”at the end. I have never even spoken of this, so his awareness of it is just proof that he knows things no one else knows.
He also knows that when I am not pretending to be Ivanka Trump I want to be Queen of the Jungle.
So we can’t be surprised that he can see into the future, as well as the past, and know—just KNOW—that electing Donald Trump will be the end of America as we know it and mark the plunge into darkness that Trump represents.
I feel bad for Bob, having to live with the frustration of being the only person in the world to understand that getting 15% of the vote for the Libertarian Party (or maybe some other party, a real party or one that exists only in his mind) will change the course of history, save us from the degeneracy and disaster of a President Trump, make the world save for democracy, and be well worth the minor inconvenience of a Clinton presidency.
So cut him some slack and don’t expect him to explain things.
Mark, my opinion is that Hillary will build upon the disaster that has been the Obama presidency and increase and amplify everything he has done. He has laid the groundwork, and she will build upon it.
No doubt – and that is why, at the end of the day, we must at the very least do nothing which would tend to elect Hillary. I had my three valid reasons for voting for Hillary, but the more I think on it the more I believe that having Hillary in the White House would be more of a catastrophe than any other possible alternative in 2016.
wow. Guess you didn’t like the Amazonka joke. Must have struck a chord.
Still, you missed the joke re: loving Trump’s campaign because, uh, all you’ve talked about is hating the Trump campaign. OK, so by the transitive nature of language I said “if you loved the coarseness of Trump’s campaign” (which you didn’t) “you’ll love the ones that follow” (meaning you’ll hate them, too).
Language is a tool you know too well that play dumb, as if you didn’t understand the meaning of words.
I might be a little concerned about Trump’s coarseness had I not watched Dem. Rep Alan Grayson say on the House floor that the GOP just wants people to die, and quickly. Had I not heard Harry Reid call the GOP greased pigs, had I not been called a racist and homophobe for the last 8 years, had Obama not said that “if they bring a knife, we bring a gun”, or “typical white person”, or “clings to their guns and Bibles”, or demonstrate a healthy antipathy towards this country on a daily basis. The Democrats have set the bar extremely low.
And we have never had a debt that exceeds the GDP and with an economy growing at less than 2%, that is a big concern.
Hating Trump’s campaign? No. Hate that we’ve degenerated to the point where someone as bad as Obama will likely be followed by someone as bad as Hillary, while the alternative is someone as bad as Trump.
I just think you are unhinged and not a nice person
I see. So, after years of you calling every poster on this blog is “silly” or “a pissy little kitten” or whatnot, but after being labeled with a simple joking nickname and I am “not a nice person.”
And, just to make it a true Amazona post, is an insult (I’m unhinged) with the hurt sentiment. Always include an insult.
No, it’s your constant lying about what I and other people say.
It seems most of my “lying about what you say” seem to be like the above incident where you pretend words in Engllish mean other things, so I will continue putting quote marks around your direct statements to avoid such “lies.”
It is amazing how you – who is horrible to countless posters here – are so affected by a single posted nickname from a week or two ago. It speaks volumes about what that name, Amazonka, really means to you. I had no idea I struck so deep.
Just a couple of observations. There was a great mafia movie called Donnie Brasco back in the 90’s that starred Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. A true story based on the life of Joe Pistone. Anyway Al played a mob member and Johnny was the FBI guy (Joe Pistone) who infiltrated the mob. Al was telling Johnny how it worked, and said that he will introduce him as a “friend of mine”, which means he was connected. He said that if anyone was introduced as a “friend of ours”, that meant he was a made man, meaning a full fledged mafioso. I had to laugh when I saw the email from CGI exec Doug Bane to Huma Abedin saying that the crown prince of Bahrain was a “friend of ours” !!!!
Secondly, the Clinton apologists have been claiming for months that there is “no evidence” of pay for play at the State Dept, and you know what? That’s exactly the default position of the mafia too – that there is no evidence.
I think the mafia could learn a lot from the Clinton’s
“I think the mafia could learn a lot from the Clinton’s”
Actually, given the timeline of who came first, I think the Clintons learned a lot from the mafia.
We have to remember that the Left has its own dictionary, with its own definitions. When they use the term “evidence” related to Hillary wrongdoings they really mean “absolute incontrovertible proof in the form of fingerprints, bank statements, signed contracts detailing the terms of the agreements, witnesses, video of all transactions, documentation showing the contribution followed by a result that is absolutely linked to the contribution with no other possible explanation, and a confession from Hillary”. Lacking any aspect of this “evidence” translates into “no evidence at all”.
Exactly – and “evidence” as it relates to Republicans means “I heard it somewhere”.
“…“evidence” as it relates to Republicans means “I heard it somewhere”….” or “…wouldn’t it be cool if…”
LOL – yep, that is how it goes.
Cluster—here is more about the Clinton Death List
http://www.westernjournalism.com/thepoint/2016/08/23/fbi-reports-surrounding-hillarys-link-white-house-aides-death-disappear-national-archives
I read about the missing Vince Foster documents this morning and it is very disturbing. If you like third world corrupt regimes, you’ll love the Clinton’s. Here’s an even more disturbing story about the EFT of $1.3 billion tax payer money to Iran. Exposing Obama’s lies once again. America is in a really bad place right now.
Forgot the link – http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/08/obama_administration_blocking_congressional_inquiries_into_how_13_billion_was_sent_to_iran.html
As Obama isn’t running again—no, let me rephrase that—-as Obama isn’t running as himself again, but is running as Hillary Clinton, we need to constantly go back to the image of them holding hands in a victory salute as he anointed her his successor and the one to carry on his policies. It doesn’t do us much good to dwell on the many many MANY crimes of an outgoing administration, but it can help to point out, over and over, that there is an anointed successor who is publicly pledged to carry on what Obama has started.
The blocking of Congressional inquiries is another link between the two, another example of the fact that they are in many ways the same person with the same goals, same agendas, and same contempt for America and the American people.
Is it just me or does North Korean leader Kim Jung Un and Hillary Clinton shop at the same clothing stores?