Been seeing some discussions lately regarding that Supreme Court ruling saying, essentially, that you don’t have to bake the cake. The complaints – mostly from the Left but a lot of Righties have problems with it – revolve around a belief that a civil society cannot have people refusing to serve except for the most narrow (on the Left, none, really) exceptions. But I find it curious that none of the people saying we must bake the cake insist that we must carry our weight. It is rather a one way street – I have to bake the cake, but the lazy a** collecting bogus disability payments doesn’t have to get a job.
Chesterton pointed out that learning philosophy is important even though it can be a bit of a bore. The reason for this is because we’re either going to live by thought that has been thought out, or thought that hasn’t been thought out. For at least the past century, its been living by un-thought-out thought. How’s that been working for us?
The dichotomy of Bake the Cake/Sit on Your Butt is the result of simply not thinking about it. It seems like it is unfair to not bake the cake, just like it seems like it is unfair to force the lazy to work. But once you sit down and think about it for a bit, the opposite becomes clearly true.
The problem with slavery isn’t that you have to work. Heck, it doesn’t even require any great cruelty…and some of the largest slave owners of the past treated their slaves pretty well; so well that at times people were able to unfavorably contrast the treatment of free labor in the North with slave labor in the South. No; even if the slave is well treated and given every comfort that free labor would provide, it would still be wrong – and it is wrong because it is compelling someone to do for another. It is the refusal to acknowledge that the slave is a person who can choose to do or not do that is the problem with slavery. The fields do have to get plowed. The house does have to be cleaned. If anyone agrees to plow those fields and clean that house, great; but the moment you can tell a person they must plow your fields and clean your house, you have done evil no matter how nicely you otherwise treat the person. And, of course, treating them with brutality merely multiplies the basic evil of compulsion.
So, too, with any action where someone is doing something for another. You can plow your field. You can hire someone to plow your field. But you must not be able to force someone to plow your field. Or bake you a cake. Or so much as pass the salt. That a person may in some situations even have a moral obligation to do for you – such as sees you drowning and being fully capable of assisting, refuses – this does not entail any legal obligation to do. It must never involve a legal obligation to act.
We got this wrong because in our very understandable and morally correct desire to end and correct the injustices of racism, we fell into the trap of saying that discrimination is wrong rather than correctly identifying the problem as unjust discrimination. Words really do matter a lot! We ridicule the notion of our ancestors fighting whole wars over the definition of a word but they fought because it is important: what words mean and how you use them determine what sort of people you’re going to be. Because we’re lazy and rather ignorant – and don’t think out our thoughts – we fell into a trap: Discrimination is wrong! And so we went out to slay the dragon called Discrimination. Except we didn’t. And we can’t. But we did create a new tyranny to replace the old.
You see, we can’t end Discrimination. It would be impossible to live without Discrimination. For instance, we very much discriminate against blind people who want to be airline pilots. We also discriminate against 5’2″ men who want to play center for the Lakers. When you make out your Thanksgiving guest list and don’t include the wino who lives behind 7/11, you just discriminated. To discriminate is just to choose – and wisdom dictates that your choices be based in reality.
But we still gave it the old try, now didn’t we? And so, unable to end what is necessary for living, we got into the absurdity of saying that to end Discrimination, you must bake the cake. The person demanding the cake discriminates all day but the moment someone denies the cake: Bigot!!!! Off to court we go you homophobe! This is just wrong. Just as a person can decide who to have over for Thanksgiving, so they can decide who to do something for. It must be this way. To be free at the end of the day is the freedom to refuse. To say, “no” without let or hindrance. Doesn’t matter why – good reason, bad reason, no reason: if a person doesn’t want to do it then that’s the end of it: they don’t want to do it. No power on Earth should be able to compel a person to do anything for another.
But what about that bum, Mark? You said early on that we can’t allow people to sit on their butts: aren’t you saying that we can’t compel action? Huh? Explain that!
I will: here goes.
We do have our autonomy. Our ability to choose and our bedrock right to refuse. But we also do live in a society and doing so places certain obligations upon us. First is that we do no harm to the society. Obviously don’t break, steal or kill. We have no right to destroy or take what belongs to others – or to society collectively, like a bridge or a nature park – and we must not kill other people. But beyond these rather bare-bones requirements, we also have an obligation to not unduly burden our fellows. The difference can be illustrated by your neighbor asking you for a ride because his car broke down and your neighbor demanding you chauffeur him around. We, as a people, do carry a price of civilization around with us, and that price is to be reasonable. Someone needs a little help and you can provide it, it is morally incumbent upon you to do so. Not a legal obligation, but if you coldly refuse aid you could render at no significant cost to yourself, you have busted the societal deal. But it is all of us carrying the price of civilization. A man who does demand you chauffeur him around is breaking the deal as badly – maybe more badly – than the person refusing aid.
The pragmatic facts of life are that anyone who is physically fit refusing to work is breaking the deal. Anyone who is begging for money so they can get high or drunk is breaking the deal. Anyone working the system for unearned money (and this from welfare cheats to people using personal injury attorneys for bogus claims) is breaking the deal. Without getting into forcing these people to do for others, we are within our rights to force them to stop being a burden. That is, we can use compulsion to get the bum to go to work, to get the druggy to quit, to get the grifter to pay back what he’s stolen. I can’t order the bum to get a job, but I can set up a situation where he’s either going to get sober and get a job, or be sent some place where in return for being housed and fed – rather than living on the streets high – he will work. Of course even in such a place he can refuse to work…but we will adhered to the Biblical command of if a man will not work, let him not eat. We can and must enforce the deal – you can’t be a bum, you can’t be a drug addict, you can’t be a thief. We will give you every opportunity to become a responsible member of society but when push comes to shove you are either going to do your duty or you will find yourself without the means to live.
Now, this might seem a bit like a paradox but that is only because it is. You see, human life isn’t something that fits into neat, little boxes. Humanity isn’t a series of blocks of wood to be shaped and kept in line. The same society which diligently protects the right to refuse will refuse to allow people to take advantage of others in the name of a right to refuse. You don’t have to remain sober. You don’t have to work. But if you are a lazy drunk we won’t feed you after you spent a night sleeping on the streets in a puddle of your own urine. We will strike a balance, which is how all human society exists; the general rule and then one or more exceptions to it; applied with such wisdom as we can muster, but never allowing ourselves to be suckers.
Blogs For Victory 
“ Because to take away a man’s freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.”
— Madeleine L’Engle
A point I have made many times
Just look at all the people who think the disturbance on January 6 was an “insurrection”. The Left constantly redefines words to manipulate the emotions of people.
What’s funny, in a sad and rather tragic way, is how bad the lemmings of the Left are at tracking this. For two years we were told that January 6 was an insurrection, but now that attention is finally being paid to Ray Epps and the right questions are being asked the event is no longer an insurrection but a protest, or a demonstration.
“Collusion” was made out to be the worst, most awful, horrible criminal act of all time (though there is no such law). But now that we keep piling up proof of the FBI working hand in glove with Russia it will suddenly be no big deal to collude with Russia to influence the political direction of the nation, or its elections.
Last week, an all Muslim city council in Minnesota banned the Pride flag from all city properties. When two Democrats chose to ignore the ban and fly their flags anyway, they were immediately removed from their positions. And this is why those gay activists never went to a Muslim bakery. Christians need to have the resolve of Muslims when it comes to confronting Americas Left.
Been seeing some discussions lately regarding that Supreme Court ruling saying, essentially, that you don’t have to bake the cake.
Bottom line – no one should be forced to violate his or her conscience. If the First Amendment needs to be amended to reflect that, so be it.
I don’t think it has to be amended. I think the statement that the First Amendment protects the free exercise of religious belief is enough.
The Court covered it well enough, arguments in blogs have covered it well enough—that there is a difference between refusing to serve someone and refusing to participate in something—-and the narcissistic troublemakers will continue to howl and screech and try to be the center of attention. But I think their desperate ploys to be the center of attention are starting to wear thin. The Left created the issue and then sent out its cannon fodder to make trouble, because the Left thrives on discord and conflict, but when examined the whole thing is so contrived it starts to lose impact and looks more and more like what it is—-a huge politically motivated temper tantrum.
And maybe Americans are getting tired of huge politically motivated temper tantrums.
I’m currently reading the John Corey series of cop/spy thrillers by Nelson DeMille. The John Corey character (about as politically incorrect a character as I have ever come across) would handle the problem like this:
Gay couple comes into a bakery to force the owner to make a celebratory cake for their same sex wedding. John the baker orders them into the back room at gunpoint where he ties them up and tortures them until they give up who or what organization paid them to instigate the conflict, whereupon he hunts down and kills the source/s of the money. End of problem.
OK, a bit extreme, but the point is that the people and money behind these lawsuit-generating conflicts have to lose something — not just lose something, but lose over and over until no one is willing to fund future endeavors.
As the “torture” probably wouldn’t have to involve anything more painful than forcing them to watch “The Sound of Freedom” or listen to loops of the National Anthem, it’s not as if blood would be spilled.
I agree with your point that we need to get to the money behind the actors. Funny how the FBI can track down all sorts of people, but could never find out who paid for airplane tickets, rental cars or hotels for the professional rioters sent to cities all over the country. They could fly in, pick up rental cars, go to hotels, eat in restaurants, and find riot material conveniently left for them onsite, like the pallets of bricks delivered to some riot sites before the violence began, and it was all just like a big mystery. It all….just happened.
It’s a crime to finance interstate violence, yet our crackerjack crime fighters never even seemed interested in finding out who was paying for all this. There had to be enough paperwork associated with plane tickets, hotel reservations, rental car and restaurant charges, to provide a trail back to the money men. But I never even heard of an effort to do so.
BTW I’m going to check out that series. I’ve finished the Lucas Davenport series as well as several others and have been looking for new material. I just started listening to a series by Nick Pirog with a protagonist who is not necessarily politically incorrect, just crudely funny
Yep – and all of the activists. I’ve got a job. I can’t be out there activist-ing. Yet the Left always has ready-made victims and heroes for any Narrative they are pushing.
Someone is funding it.
Scott Morefield makes the same point many of us have been making. It might be a painful article for some, but I think he’s right. That is not the same as hoping he’s right, just looking at the facts. I think he echoes what a lot of us think, in the sentences I bolded.
I get that the memes and the Trump rallies are fun and the guy is entertaining as hell. I also understand the desire to vote for the guy who gave us 2016’s miracle win. I truly do. Yes, the former president has been his own worst enemy at times, but he also has been the target of an unprecedented level of lawfare from Democrats. The desire to see him not just vindicated but in a position to wreak sweet, sweet revenge on his – and our – persecutors is palpable. Hell, if I could wave a magic wand and make him president, I certainly would.
But I can’t, and you can’t, and for a variety of solid reasons, Trump can’t win the general election. So, it’s imperative that Republicans nominate someone who can. Our country, and our way of life, depend on it. There is a Door Number Two if we’re wise enough to open it.
I’m going to link this, but will also just paste it in as written because I think Schlichter makes such good points. (emphasis mine)
The Deserved Suffering of the Regime Media Hack
Kurt Schlichter
Jul 17, 2023
Imagine, if you dare, that you are a regime media reporter. It’s a horrible thought, I will grant you, but consider this part of understanding your enemy so that down the road you can defeat him. So, put yourself in their cheap suits and bad shoes and think about your position in the universe. Right now, entirely as a result of their own choices, regime journalists are about as respected as groin fungus, and their career prospects in this ever-changing media marketplace are significantly worse.
And at some level, the smarter ones understand that. Try hard to consider what some of them probably feel inside. Not all of them. Some are mindless, Marxist robots, but there are some who have a glimmer of understanding of what they truly are. Sure, they can tell themselves the lie that they are the good guys, or girls, or non-binary individuals, but the ones who are not totally gone know the truth.
Regime media journalists are trash.
Many of them live in denial, but they understand the reality. They see the lies they are part of, and they know the truth.
You know, if you grew up, thinking about “All the President’s Men” and Watergate and bringing down Nixon and that whole largely-bogus myth, you probably thought that as a young journalist you were entering into a field where you could crusade for truth and justice. You were going to find the truth, dammit, and tell it to the people because that’s what the Fourth Estate did. You despised the spinners, flacks, and spokesholes who tried to lie to you and throw you off the story.
Well, that’s all a lie. You are one of the spinners, flacks, and spokesholes.
You don’t report the news. You curate it. You don’t work for the people. You work for the Democrats and say whatever you have to say, or ignore whatever you have to ignore, to advance their narrative.
Look at the attacks on Donald Trump. Face it. He provided you with a great excuse to do what you wanted to do anyway, which was throw out all that objectivity and neutrality stuff that kept you from full-throated support for your communist favorites. Trump’s existence just created an excuse. You told yourself he was so much worse than other Republicans that he was an emergency threat that called for emergency rules. He was uniquely dangerous, so you didn’t have to be bound by norms or rules or fairness, or any other of those other concepts that kept you from saying what you really wanted to say and doing what you really wanted to do, which was influence policy rather than just tell people about it.
The Trump Exception is glorious, because now you aren’t limited to the mere regurgitation of facts. And now the Trump Exception is not limited either. Trump’s the very worst thing that ever happened, a second coming of Hitler, but he’s nothing compared to Ron DeSantis who I guess is the third coming of Hitler by now, and if Tim Scott suddenly takes off, against all odds, he’ll be the fourth coming of Hitler, and worse than all of them combined because you need him to be. If he wasn’t, you have to go back to the old rules and you can’t do that.
Now, a lot of regime media reporters are just plain evil, and a lot of them are pretty stupid. It’s not the geniuses who go into journalism. It’s the rich kids whose parents can afford to support them through their 20s while they scribble for petty cash. But most of the regime journalists understand exactly what’s happening. The Trump Exception is just one of many lies they tell themselves to let them pretend that they are the good guys.
You covered up for Hillary Clinton, who took classified material home, let it get exposed to our enemies, and then destroyed it when she got a subpoena. You have to tell yourself that’s OK, and you have to tell us that’s all right. You have to tell everyone that it doesn’t matter that she ignored the law.
And then, when Biden came in, you had to pretend he wasn’t a desiccated, senile, old pervert hiding out in his basement. But you knew he was a desiccated, senile, old pervert hiding out in his basement. All your friends knew it. You regime reporters talked about it with each other. But you didn’t tell us. You didn’t tell the people. You didn’t tell them because that would hurt the Democrats’ cause, and you’ve decided that your career depends on helping the Democrats win.
So, when Hunter Biden commits a bunch of acts that would’ve put any young black man in jail, even though you have one of those Black Lives Matter signs out in front of your condo so everybody knows you have assumed the required positions, you go along with him walking. You don’t go and find the statistics that show that if you were from inner-city Chicago instead of the president’s idiot son when you caught this beef, you’d be doing five years of hard time. You ignore that Methteeth McBurismaboy is gonna walk without even a felony conviction. You know that’s garbage. You know that’s bullSchiff. But you can’t possibly say it. If you did, your editors would just shut you down, and if they tried to let you, the others in your newsroom will scream that you’re helping the Republicans by telling the unvarnished truth and get the editors fired.
So you have to degrade yourself by putting out what you know are lies, whether of commission or omission, when everybody else knows they are lies. A bag of cocaine in the White House? The only people who don’t go through security are the family of the president. Gee, could it be the Cokehead-in-Chief? No, you ignore the prime suspect, the son of the president who lives in the White House and snorts more Peruvian party powder than Tony Montana, though when he says, “Say hello to my little friend!” a stripper gets impregnated.
You pretended his laptop was a Russian fake even though you knew it wasn’t. You publicized 51 lying foreign-policy scumbags, who also knew the laptop was real, even though you knew they were lying. Now, because it’s the Republicans coming out with the evidence that everybody in the Biden family except the mystery grandkid is getting huge checks from foreigners, the best you can come up with is “Republicans pounce.”
You know you’re trash. But what you don’t know, because you didn’t study history at the University of College, is what happens next. You majored in narcing out your friends for having views like that there are only two genders – and today you always insist on reporting castration as “gender affirming care” because of course you do – so you missed learning how people through the ages can tolerate injustice for a little while, how they can put up with lies for the time being, and how an unworthy elite can dominate for a bit, but then comes the backlash.
The backlash will come because the machine of which you are an insignificant cog cannot run forever. It’s built on lies, and it’s going to fall apart. Your problem is that you are one of the liars. You are one of the enablers. You are one of the bad guys. And you’re going to be held accountable. History, that thing you’ve ignored so far, will pay attention to you as you go in it as an eager accomplice to corruption.
As I read this, I realized it doesn’t just apply to media hacks, but to blog vandals who quite seriously regurgitate the same old crap, for the same old reasons. Though I believe that the blog writers and commenters don’t do it out of some pretense of wanting to “inform the public” but because the media hacks have created an environment in which pathology is validated as political discourse, and personality disorders of rage and hate and the need to attack people are now applauded if turned on the approved targets. Their motivation, whether they realize it or not, is not to discern fact and truth but to justify snarling hatred and narcissistic need to “prove” others wrong.
Check your email
To be a little fair with them, there never have been unbiased journalists. Everyone always has an agenda; a series of biases, life experiences that produce prejudices in this or that direction. A person fully trying to be honest sees this in themself and makes allowance for it – informing his audience of the biases ahead of time. But even when being honest, the plain fact of the matter is that for the most part, someone is going to talk about what they think important, or at least what their boss thinks important. A genuinely neutral look at the day’s events with them carefully arranged so that the actually most crucial get the most attention is impossible to achieve even in the best of circumstances.
But the old dishonest media still had something going for it – when something like the Profumo Affair cropped up, everyone covered it, even the press roughly friendly to the Tories. Sure, they still would try to limit the damage…but the story itself was just too danged juicy to pass up: sex, espionage, scion of the Upper Class; you just couldn’t ignore that and to gets eyes on product, you covered it in all its salacious glory. The modern dishonest media doesn’t do that. If Profumo was suddenly returned to us as a Democrat politician, the MSM would work overtime to ignore the story, failing that discredit the witnesses, failing that explaining it away as a nothing-burger. There was a switch after Watergate – picking up steam with Reagan and going nuclear under Trump – where the MSM simply stopped being other than Regime Propagandists. That is all they are now – and Kurt is right: when the time comes, they will be made to pay with the rest of Regime.
You have shit for brains. Name one thing in American life that’s improved in the last 3 years, since you threw your Covid hissy fit and wanted to enforce injections into your neighbors? I’ll wait
LOL, I see you got the life time membership to the Establishment Class Club. You know what’s also historic? Drug use at the White House, a President making more money from the Chinese than he does Americans, your friends dicks in girls bathrooms, dropping bombs on people to make you feel better,
People like you need to be dropped.
It’s really weird then that nearly 70% of those polled says the economy sucks. I guess they haven’t been told what to think yet, but keep running on these fantasies. They’ll do well for you.
Don’t you hate it when you get fact checked??
Twitter’s Community Notes was added context that said: “The tweet’s claim about real wages contains a factual error.’
‘On 3/15/20 when US COVID lockdowns began real wages adjusted for inflation (AFI) were $11.15. As of 7/16/23 real wages AFI are $11.05.
‘Real wages AFI remain lower (not higher) than before the pandemic.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12307427/Biden-fact-checked-Twitter-wrongly-boasting-real-wages-higher-pandemic-Bidenomics-LOWER.html
You are too stupid to have a conversation with, but really fun to mock.
Unemployment stats are the most manipulated economic numbers ever. And if you pay attention, those numbers are always revised before the next reporting, and it’s gotten to the point that intelligent people simply dismiss them … hence Fielding and Forty’s combined enthusiasm. Those two have some of the most dormant minds in America. The real measure is labor participation rate, and we have yet to reach 2019 levels
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm
Bottom line of all bottom lines is that Freedom of Association needs to a thing again. People won’t like it but if I don’t want to associate with any particular group of people, you just need to bug off. Go find someone who wants to associate with you.
This applies to everyone in the private sector. To the government sector, not at all.
Barring any self inflicted melt down, which is possible but unlikely, Trump is running away with the nomination …
The survey, taken among 1,144 Republican voters who have voted in at least three of the last four primary elections, found Trump with one of his biggest leads to date, dominating the GOP primary race in West Virginia with 78 percent support.
There is a lot of time left and a lot can happen, but I really think Americans, and not just conservatives, want to fight back. And I mean FIGHT. Bud Light and Disney are two good examples of Americans fighting back. Trump needs to dial back the personal rhetoric and ramp up the policy talk, and he will run away with this thing.
The one good thing the corrupt Biden regime is doing, is reminding everyone how great President Trump was ….
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fpolitics%2F2023%2F07%2F17%2Fwest-virginia-poll-shows-donald-trump-up-60-points%2F
So ten months before a ballot has been cast in the West Virginia primary, before DeSantis has even mounted a national campaign, 892 people in West Virginia would vote for Trump if the primary were held today. I wonder how many of them could recognize a photo of DeSantis or have the slightest idea of what he stands for or his qualifications for the presidency.
And this means Trump, arguably the most easily recognized person in the country, is “running away with the nomination ”
Uh-huh
there are currently two schools of thought regarding the state of the Republican primary. The first is that Donald Trump has the nomination wrapped up and that everyone else in the running should stop eating takeout meals and go home already.
The other says that polls are stupid, and we really haven’t gotten going yet.
I am fully on board with the latter. Political opinion polls have about as much validity as Hunter Biden’s claims of sobriety. Anyone who is still latching onto them should probably stop mixing Benadryl with box wine.
The article wonders how long DeSantis can continue taking the high road against Trump. This is a recognition that Trump is on the low road, and has the implication that this is because this is where Trump is most comfortable. He likes it there. I’m fine with a candidate who isn’t afraid of the gutter, but increasingly turned off by one who loves it there.
Whether DeSantis can effectively get in the mud while battling Trump remains to be seen. He doesn’t shy from confrontation, but his style is vastly different from Trump’s. He’s the boxer while Trump is the street brawler. Boxers can win a lot of fights, but they can also be dropped by one punch from a brawler.
One thing I’ve concluded is that insulting Trump – and, worse, insulting his supporters – is suicidal. It just rivets Trump to his people ever more solidly. I’m still of the view I’ve had since 2015: the only way to beat Trump is to out-Trump him. RDS of all the announced candidates has done the best at this, but he’s still not quite there. Still plenty of time for him to get it going and we’ll see how he does it.
But, that said, I think his best tactic right now is to start hammering on “I can do it better”. I can secure the border better. I can bring peace faster. I can rebuild American prosperity better. I can take even more revenge on the Ruling Class. The basic thrust is still positive, but the unstated or understated subtext is “Trump can’t do Trumpism as well as I can”.
I think those are very good points. And many of them can be made without the superlative suffix. “I can secure the border. I can bring peace. I can rebuild American prosperity.” And so on. I even think he should give Trump credit for what he got right. He could say “President Trump was the first president to recognize the dangers of the Deep State and start to do anything about it. I agree with him and I can do the same. With my legal background I even think I can do it better.” That kind of thing.
He could even start the messaging that as an ardent Constitutionalist with a legal background it sickens him to see Trump savaged by an unethical and illegal abuse of government power to crush him, and then springboard off that into what he would do about the weaponization of federal powers. He’s already come out against the IRS, wanting to strip it to bare bones by replacing the income tax with a consumption tax. He’s already taken the bold step of saying he would simply abolish some federal agencies.
We can see here that the slightest hint of criticism of Trump stirs immediate resentment and defensiveness. RDS needs to avoid the trap of pushing people into voting for Trump out of defensiveness instead of objective analysis of his weaknesses and issues.
Steve Berman writes NORMAL PLEASE: What We Really Want
Aside from him saying DeSantis “seems to be all veneer” which doesn’t make sense to me as he seems to come across as Everyman, the next door neighbor you would ask over for a burger on the grill, Berman makes some good points about the country yearning for normal, not melodrama.
Because how well he handled Covid, Ron is well known nationally so I don’t think that’s the issue. He has already shown weakness in his stance on Ukraine, having first come out against it, then waffling a bit on that stance. That didn’t help, and that leads me to believe, what else will he waffle on? His mega donors are starting to pull back too and that’s another thing that concerns me.
America needs someone who the Establishment is afraid of, and who our adversaries are afraid of, and that’s currently just one man.
If only “what America needs” and “who America will vote for” were the same person.
When is that first primary state vote, again? And who is ahead in those early states?
And who has barely even started campaigning yet, but coming out ahead where he has? And who has half the country willing to run into a burning building to vote against him even if his opponent is Satan?
Oh, and who already has the Agenda Media working overtime to try to destroy him the way they have been attacking Trump? Some guy they are not afraid of?
Are you really claiming that voters all across the country are aware of how Florida handled Covid? And know what DeSantis did there? How did they find out? On CNN? From watching Joey and the Bimbo? Are you really claiming that voters all across the country are concerned about the fact that some guy from Florida has had a couple of opinions on Ukraine?
Blinders force tunnel vision. Throw them away.
Aw yes. The blinders. That must be it
I’m saying GOP primary voters do in fact know Ron and how well he handled Covid and all of his other positives. And they’re not convinced he is as strong as Trump. At least not yet and that’s up to what Ron does from here on out. I am someone who would like to vote for him but he has to show me something. The strongest I’ve seen him is when he said what he would do to cartel members. That was clarity. And I want more of it. I’m tired of the woke speeches. We all know about that.
America needs people in charge who don’t almost lose the country to a bunch of unarmed 50 year olds, who don’t put barbed wire up to protect themselves, and who don’t use drugs. Just saying.
Good point. So now I won’t vote for a Democrat
DeSantis will not win without support
I beg your pardon, glitch in my system.
DeSantis will not win, the nomination or the general without support from Trump supporters such as myself.
This will not help him.
“Speaking in South Carolina today, presidential candidate Ron DeSantis blamed President Trump for the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington DC saying, “I think it was shown how he was in the White House and didn’t do anything while things were going on. Should he have come out more forcefully? Of course.” However, DeSantis affirmed he does not believe Trump’s transgressions amounted to criminal conduct. “But to try to criminalize that, that’s a different issue entirely,” the Florida governor noted.”
I see his support among the Conservative Treehouse type slipping very fast towards zero.
Seriously? You don’t think that millions of conservatives thought it was a massive mistake to have that rally in DC, when it was so obvious how easily it could be turned into a disaster with just a few infiltrators and false flag operators? Hell, out here in Wyoming we talked about what a stupid decision that was, before it even happened. He set himself up big time because of his ego tripping, his conviction that tens of thousands of Trump fans could sway a Congressional decision, even without the wholly predictable firestorm that was guaranteed to occur.
Do you seriously think conservatives don’t think he should have, once it all started to go to hell, immediately done anything and everything in his power to shut it down? He didn’t look ahead, he didn’t see the obvious dangers and pitfalls, and he didn’t have a plan for what could be done if it all went sideways. His big plan was to go to the Capitol, somehow, and I guess stand on the steps and raise his hands and calm the seas. AS IF the Secret Service would let him.
Even Trump fans realize he should have recognized the setup when it was happening. Once Pelosi refused to allow National Guard protection to avoid rioting, a Commander-in-Chief mentality should have seen the ambush and taken steps to avoid it, even by just keeping the rally as far from the Capitol as he could. You don’t have to be anti-Trump to realize this.
And take note of the editorial tone of your source, as it says DeSantis blamed Trump when an objective journalist would have said that he “commented”, perhaps. “Blamed” is not only a strong word, it is incendiary. Ask yourself why it was used, instead of being herded into a reaction.
DeSantis will not win without support
That looks like a Captain Obvious moment.
But seriously, he has been running a quiet campaign, refusing to roll in the gutter with Trump, picking and choosing his ways to gain exposure, and making corrections as he goes along. And the time to make mistakes and correct them is early, and in a low-key campaign. The first primaries are when—March?
I like horse racing, and I like trying to figure out the strategy of each rider, and a rider has to know his horse and how he runs best. Some horses do best if they are in front right out of the gate, but I’ve seen too many unable to maintain the lead and be overtaken by the guy who ran comfortably in the middle of the pack till he needed to hit turbo. So I am far less impressed by the bluster and braggadocio of some massive “lead” so early, and based on polling the base for the most part, when the real competition hasn’t even gotten warmed up.
I am also very skeptical of the two things that seem to be playing such a huge role in the predictions and enthusiasms of people. One is the media coverage. Perhaps you have not noticed that negative coverage of Trump has really fallen off, focusing instead on the acts by the State guaranteed to stir up emotional support for an underdog being unfairly set upon. And there is the attack strategy toward DeSantis. The media are very carefully trying to stack the deck and too many people are being sucked into their strategy. Stand back and look at it from a distance and you see efforts to generate sympathy for Trump while ridiculing and demeaning DeSantis. That makes me suspicious.
And so does the polling, which seems very obviously designed to herd opinion in a certain direction.
So I ignore it all and just look at the two men and my own determination of their strengths and weaknesses. The people who support DeSantis do so with as much enthusiasm as those who support Trump, but it is much less emotion-based, and furthermore DeSantis has the likelihood of gaining more support as people get more exposure to him, while I think Trump support has probably hit its ceiling unless he can figure out a way to overcome the pathological loathing for him that seems undiminished.
I’m not looking at July or even August and maybe not even September. I anticipate growth in DeSantis support, and don’t see where Trump can go to gain more support for him.
I anticipate Desantis to get almost the equal amount of support that your last choice, Senator Cruz, I do believe it was received in 2016.
It will be interesting to see who is correct.
I also believe I stated that I had a small glitch. The first comment posted before I was finished but , sick burn??
No, I just responded to your first post before reading the second. Sorry about that. The problem with communicating by text is that there is no context of mere teasing, which I thought I at least hinted at by starting my next comment with “But, seriously…”
We’ll see. In 2016 Trump was new, and exciting, and offered a very different approach.
This time, there is some Trump Fatigue. His name calling isn’t new, but a tired old schtick. His overweening egotism was kind of charming, in a way—now it’s just annoying.
The thing is, as I keep saying, if I could drop Trump into the Oval Office I would do it. I think he could be very effective and accomplish a lot of what I think is important.
But, and this is what Trumpists refuse to address, there is nothing to indicate that the hard-core anti-Trump, willing to crawl over broken glass to vote against him, element of the Left has diminished in size or intensity, and I just don’t see him able to shift that loathing. He still has most of his ardent supporters, but even many of them are saying they love him but think that as a candidate he is fatally flawed. He may have started to win over some Independents, but we won’t know how many for months.
And I’m not a gambler. To me, supporting Trump is rolling the dice, hoping to beat the odds. The single negative I see with DeSantis is that he hasn’t had much of a chance to make his pitch to the nation, so he is still pretty much an unknown, and that can be fixed. Trump’s negatives can’t be fixed, just ignored in the hope they won’t tip the scales. DeSantis seems to generate the typical level of political opposition, but that doesn’t shoot into the stratosphere of passionate, obdurate, white-hot loathing and the conviction he is totally vile and irredeemable, as it does with Trump.
Also, Cruz had a different background than DeSantis, and less charm. DeSantis is a small-town guy, a high school and college athlete, and a veteran whose military duties evidently included being a “shot caller” or the guy who had to review and approve military actions by Seal teams. He was a federal prosecutor, so between that and his JAG experience he has a background in the law, and when you add that to first-person experience in legislation, from the Florida statehouse to the US House of Representatives to the governorship of the third largest state, that is an impressive resume. It says “team player” as well as leader able to make very important decisions. And he married, and has stayed married, to a pretty hometown girl and has a lovely young family.
Contrast that to the loud, crude, often vulgar, abrasive New York businessman with zero experience in government till he got the top job, which he bungled repeatedly because he didn’t understand the system (and wouldn’t take advice from those who do) when he tried running his administration like he ran his business. His history of wives and girlfriends and affairs and crude comments about women should not disqualify him but it will all affect how Middle America sees him.
I’m just saying all of these things should be evaluated and analyzed when looking at which candidate is going to appeal to the most voters.