Book Review: Trump the Press

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Just how did Donald Trump manage to get so far? Think about it. He’s a businessman and reality TV star with no political experience whatsoever and yet he managed to beat what is arguably the strongest GOP primary field in history and is now, at worst, tied in the polls with Hillary with less than eight weeks to go. That is an astonishing achievement, no matter how you look at it. And, fortunately for us, someone with a great deal of insight did look at it.

Don Surber has written Trump the Press: Don Surber’s Take on How the Pundits Blew the 2016 Republican Race. What I found interesting is that Surber started out the 2016 so conventionally – and, honestly, exactly where I was:

I began 2015 by accepting the conventional wisdom about the deep bench of Republican governors in the race. But I liked Trump’s message. No one else was willing to say what he said: Build the wall. Challenge political correctness. Make America great again. My first choice, Scott Walker, faded, while Donald Trump blossomed. The napalm-vitriol used on Trump by conservative commentators intrigued me. The hotter their hate, the more I realized his prospects were rising.

I, too, got a bit of a boost at (some) of Trump’s rhetoric. Keeping in mind that I was and remain an amnesty shill (we really can’t deport 11 million – or whatever number it really is – people), I still saw the logic behind Build the Wall. After all, the fact that we don’t control our border doesn’t mean it is uncontrolled – it just means we’ve turned it over to criminal elements who ruthlessly exploit the people who illegally cross it. Mercy, if nothing else, requires us to build the wall – and, yes, if that means a twenty foot high, concrete wall from one end of the nation to the other, then that is what we’ll have to do. Build the wall – whatever sort of wall proves necessary to ensure that 99.9% of the time, no one crosses into the United States without our knowledge. But, still, as expressed here, I retained my doubts and shifted from Jindal to Walker to Rubio to Cruz. Anyone other than Trump. But while I – and so many others – were casting desperately about for any expedient to stop Trump, Trump was winning – and Surber has found out why.

One other assumption that drove the doomsayers to their demise was that this was an unusual election year full or surprises.

Well, Trump was unusual, but the path to his victory was pretty routine. Like Reagan, he won the debates and pilled up primary wins early and often. Trump succeeded because, like Reagan, he could speak through the media filters to get his message across. In Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, his critics, too, call Reagan racist and stupid and dismissed him as a celebrity and a joke…

…Those who wrote off Trump when he entered the race will write tomes to explain what happened. It boiled down to four words: Make America Great Again.

Ignore the press, find a way to get your message out, root for a strong America. Pretty simple, huh? But no Republican since Reagan has figured it out as well as Trump has. So far, of course! Surber is pretty convinced that Trump will win – I’m still not so sure. But if he loses it won’t be because of the reasons given by the MSM and the cohort of disappointed (and increasingly irritating) Never Trumpers. If he loses, it will because of the sheer political muscle that Team Clinton can bring to bear. Remember, almost all power centers in the United States are now pulling for Hillary – they are scared to death that someone they don’t own will get in. But once you’ve read Surber’s book, you’ll start to understand how much of a disadvantage they have against Trump; and like they had against Reagan, it is because they still refuse to take him seriously. I still don’t know how I’ll vote in November – but one thing that I have learned is that Trump is a formidable candidate. I’ve been saying for a long time that I suspect Trump is working from a strategic plan. I even suspect that at least some of his verbal gaffes were tactical. Don Surber’s book lays out just how wrong the experts have been so far in 2016 and are likely to remain wrong right up until, say, Colorado is called for Trump on election night.

The book is available in Kindle and Paperback at Amazon.

Out and About on a Tuesday

Mark Noonan38 Comments

Some are convinced that Basket of Deplorables will convince people to stay away from Trump. Others are convinced that Hillary’s physical collapse will push her out the race. Yet others are convinced that a lot of people don’t know what they are talking about. One thing 2016 has taught me is that the political experts are nothing of the kind – passing themselves off as dispassionate observers (left or right) of the political scene, what I’ve actually seen is a collection of ill-educated, petulant children who get really, really mad when reality doesn’t match up to their predictions.

I saw a Tweet today from one of our Thought Leaders who was saying we have to stop Trump in order to save our world. Oh, puhleeeese! It’s a Presidential election, folks, not the precursor to the End Times. In fairness, I have seen Trumpsters who are certain we have to elect Trump or Doom Awaits. To be sure, the election of either candidate brings a lot of doom-y thoughts to my mind, but that is mostly because of the overall situation, not anything specific to Trump or Clinton. We’re living in a world of lunacy, as I noted the other day – and what world are we trying to save? The one where we use fake money and debt to keep big banks afloat? Or is it the one where we allow a despotic regime like China’s to veto us in the UN? I get thoughts of doom because I’m certain that Hillary will continue the destruction and I’m not at all sure Trump even realizes what needs to be stopped.

On the plus side for a Trump Presidency is something that Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) points out – given that everyone (DNC, MSM, GOP regulars, bureaucracy) hates Trump, there will actually be a lot of checks to any unreasonable use of power by a President Trump. In order to get anything done, he’s going to have to battle through the unified opposition of the Ruling Class. Or, alternately, roll over for the Ruling Class and just do what they want, plus maybe a bit of border wall along the way. The flip side of that is voting Hillary – who will have the DNC, MSM and bureaucracy on her side and a GOP as frightened of offending her as they have been of offending Obama. In short, absolutely no check on her power.

Trump wants to do debates without moderators – smart move, and it would be an actual debate.

Yeah, there are some kooks floating around the edges of the Trump campaign – but no one seems to mind the kooks of BDS floating ever nearer the center of the American left.

They don’t call CNN Clinton News Network for nothing.

Sniper takes out an ISIS goon from a mile away.

On September 12th, 1683 a glorious victory – brought to us via a very brave Polish king and his army.

For some reason Christian refugees from Syria have a hard time getting into the United States.

9/11 Open Thread

Mark Noonan31 Comments

Hard to believe that it has been 15 years – I can still remember so much of it so clearly. Getting a call from the Mrs’ daughter asking if anyone had heard from the other daughter who worked in Manhattan. Turning on the TV just in time to see the second plane hit live. Calling my father and telling him to turn on the TV…and then just watching, watching, watching for hours as the disaster unfolded.

It was supposed to be a turning point, but it ended up not being anything of the sort. The national unity which instantly asserted itself was torn down by various actors for cynical political reasons. These days, we’re not even really supposed to say what we’re fighting – and instead of being red blooded American patriots, we’re debating whether or not we should even stand for our national anthem.

Still, this is a day to remember those who died – on that day, and in the battles since then. I only hope that we some how manage to get through this time without a repeat of that day – this will take more luck than anything else, but one can always pray, and hope.

Crazy is as Crazy Does

Mark Noonan14 Comments

If you ever read the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, you might recall a character names Wonko the Sane – a man who had built himself an inside-out house in order that when he was “outside” his house, he’d be “outside the asylum” – Earth, that is. He determined that the Earth was a dumping ground for lunatics when he noticed that there were instructions for use on a box of toothpicks. After all, no sane people would need such a thing. I’ve been feeling a bit like that – or, perhaps, like the scene in the original Planet of the Apes where Taylor, confronting Dr. Zaius, says, “I know who I am, but who are you? And how did this crazy, upside down world get started?”

I got going on this line of thought yesterday when I came across the 10,000th example of someone saying we have to stop Trump because Trump is insane – just this crazy lunatic who was going to destroy everything…or, at a minimum, start a war over some foreign leader’s disrespectful Tweet. Perhaps that is all true. Maybe Trump is completely ’round the bend. But it suddenly came to me in a flash that if he’s certifiable, then he’s no more crazy than everyone else out there. It came to my mind that I had read plenty of stories over the years of kids graduating high school while being unable to read. I looked it up – one source I found, which seemed a responsible source, claimed the number of illiterates getting diplomas each year is about 19%. That’s just on one in five – one in five people who can’t read are getting high school diplomas. But that isn’t the most insane aspect of it – in order for that to happen, at some point some reasonable, responsible people in positions of great authority had to decree that the logical, sane thing to do with someone who can’t read is to give him a diploma!

I know as well as anyone that there are all sorts of reasons why this happens but regardless of all the reasons – no matter what excuses you try to make for why it even must be that 1 in 5 can’t read – there is no way a sane, rational person allows an illiterate to get a high school diploma. Know what else a sane, rational person doesn’t do? He or she doesn’t allow an illiterate to move on from the 11th grade to the 12th grade. Nor from the 10th to the 11th – you don’t allow someone who can’t read to move on from the 1st to the 2nd grade for crying out loud. If you’ve got the kid through the first school year and the kid is incapable of reading, then you do that year over again…and you keep doing it over again until the kid can read or it is proven conclusively that the kid lacks the wit to ever learn how. You don’t move such a kid on to the next grade – there’s no point! It is a useless exercise. It doesn’t help the kid – it doesn’t help anyone. It is monumentally stupid. It is actually harmful to the kid being advanced without learning to read. IT IS INSANE.

But such stuff just slides easily right over us – the School Board members aren’t ejected from the jobs. Teachers and Administrators happily go about their business on their path to collecting their pensions. Parents just roll with it. But that is also a relatively small thing in the panorama of insanity which is our modern world. Remember, we’ve got legal abortion – on the theory that a woman in a bad way will best be helped if we kill her unborn child. Following on with this great and oh, so sane idea we’re now working up plans for infanticide and euthanasia…because death is definitely the answer to all of life’s little problems…except, of course, in the case of people who ruthlessly murder other people; same people saying we must have abortion, infanticide and euthanasia are largely the same people saying we must not kill even the most horrendous criminal…and, heck, not only not kill them, but make their prison experience air conditioned because it would be insane to have criminals being punished suffer a bit.

Sane, rational, responsible leaders – people purportedly unlike that foaming at the mouth lunatic, Trump – gave us such gems as the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Got to love that – nothing like sending young Americans to die in war, tying their hands a bit so they can’t hurt the enemy too badly, and then losing the wars after massive amounts of blood are spilled. The same sense of responsible rationality has now got about 4,500 US troops in the Iraq/Syria theater of operations even though we have no declaration of war, no authorization to use force…and the Democratic candidate for President swearing up and down that she won’t deploy US troops to fight the enemy in a war we aren’t fighting (except we are, and people are dying – but no sane, responsible leader would bring that up to the American people because it would be insane to disturb their viewing of the latest Dancing with the Nitwits on TV…).

It was, of course, just the most rational thing in the world for us to stand by while China moved military forces into the South China Sea; while Russia invaded the Crimea; while Iran deployed forces to Syria; while Saudi Arabia fights a bloody war in Yemen; while Libya disintegrated…thank goodness we didn’t have an insane person running the United States! Who knows what would have happened? We might have got…what? A zillion people forced to be refugees, tens of thousands dead and Jihadists roaming around murdering and enslaving people.

Also in the Sane People’s favor is that $19 trillion in US debt. Only an insane person wouldn’t pile up that much debt. Nor would an insane person ever have thought up the clever idea of having the US Federal Reserve print up money so it could buy US bonds…I mean, my goodness, you’d have to be some sort of drooling, straight-jacketed moron to refuse to see the wisdom in that!

Tickets for not wearing seatbelts. Fines for collecting rainwater. Licenses for nail salons. Pushing for birth control when our fertility rate is below replacement level. Sending billions of dollars to our enemies. Building windmills in the 21st century instead of nuclear power plants. Allowing 18 year olds to vote and serve in the military, but not have a drink or a smoke. Demanding people bake a cake. Student loans so that colleges can charge ever higher tuition. Health insurance to cover you when you’ve got a cold, but will put you on a waiting list if you need heart surgery. Requiring people to have auto insurance so trial lawyer’s always got someone to sue. $250,000.00 for a 20 minute speech. You can go to jail even if you didn’t intend to commit a crime, unless you’re the Democrat nominee for President. Police with armored personnel carriers. Refusing to offend Jihadis. Going out of your way to offend Christians. Libertarians who love ObamaCare.

I assert without fear that no matter what Trump does in office, it won’t increase the level of insanity. It might keep the insanity going. It might drop some bits of insanity and pick up others, but Trump cannot increase the lunacy because we’re collectively so far ’round the bend we can’t see it from here. This is all nuts.

Get back to me in 2017 – if Hillary wins, then I assure one and all that the insanity will just keep on going. If Trump wins, it might keep on going, as well. But I’d like it much better if we started to insist upon some sanity. Something small – just to let us know we can be sane. Perhaps we can pass a law banning the government from fining us for collecting rain water. It won’t come up as an issue too often, but it would be a start…it would be something we could point to and say, with pride, “see, we’re not complete nutters”.

Absolutely Stunning, if True

Mark Noonan5 Comments

From Huffington Post:

At a private meeting of conservatives in Cleveland this summer, Donald Trump’s senior economic adviser, Stephen Moore, said the candidate planned to pay for his costly proposals by eliminating the departments of Commerce, Energy and Education; lifting all restrictions on mining, drilling and fracking; ending Temporary Assistance for Needy Families programs, and offering rust-belt factory workers new jobs on oil rigs and steel mills.

Speaking at the private summer meeting of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive group of powerful conservatives, Moore, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, also described how Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions had “infiltrated” Trump’s campaign operation, and how Moore and other supply-side economists were working hard to get Trump to be more supportive of free trade…

Personally, I don’t see Trump as in opposition to free trade – I just see him as reasonably suspicious of trade deals which do always seem to work out to higher profits for American corporations and lower employment rates for American citizens. My views are long known on this – I believe in Freedom Trade…free trade with free, democratic nations which having a free press can ensure against cheating (not perfectly, of course, but much better than China’s tyrannical regime allows).

Also long known is my view that we must reduce the size of government and not so much because of government power, but because the way Big Government works out to be a gigantic subsidy machine for the left. The smaller the government, the less money the left has to pursue it’s Progressive goals (and, of course, less chance for Progressives to use government to oppress us). But I’m doubtful of fighting on the hill of the Department of Education right out the gate – that is too easily painted as being “against education”, even though it is nothing of the sort. Now, someone willing to vigorously attack on the issue can, correctly, make out the case that the Department of Education has been directly destructive of education in the United States, but I still wonder at the wisdom of picking that fight right away. On the other hand, picking a fight where you actually are trying to reduce the size of government is a fight worth having – and I note, with great care, that Trump would be the first Presidential candidate since Reagan arguing for a reduction in the size of government – and he’s already staked out a position of protecting Social Security come what may, so the Democrats can’t really use the charge of “Trump wants to starve seniors” with any great effect.

Now, I don’t know how true this all is, nor how committed Trump is to it…but if it is true, it is a political earthquake.

Barack Obama and the History Books

Mark Noonan59 Comments

Matt’s got a bit up at TownHall:

What will my son be taught about Barack Obama?

At two years old, he won’t remember the Obama years, but he’s most definitely going to be taught about them outside the home one day. Liberal bias in schools is well known, and one can only imagine just how slanted curricula will be about the 44th president.

When I was in school, I can remember being taught whoppers like: the Second Amendment only applies to militias and/or muskets, the Founders wanted to keep religion separate from the public square, southern Dixiecrats all became Republicans, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt ended the Great Depression….

Read the rest here.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan46 Comments

If you’re digging up dirt on Melania Trump then you are just being lousy. She’s the spouse, not the candidate.

The MSM is convinced that Trump did not have a good day yesterday. I’m not sure he had a good day or a bad day, mostly because it’s hard to tell what the heck is happening in 2016. But one thing I will say: he definitely ripped the lid off the hypocrisy of our immigration debate. Essentially, people are shocked and hurt that Trump said we should enforce U.S. law regarding immigration. The non-Trump position is now, “any desire to have any immigration or border laws is bad”…and I’ve seen some #NeverTrump people finally come out and admit that they are #ImWithHer over this. Trust me on this – any Conservative who now jumps on the Hillary bandwagon will be a full-blown Progressive within 6 months – partially because their new Progressive friends will insist (Progressives really, really hate dissent) and partially because a lot of Conservatives are turning out to have always been Progressives who merely want a low corporate tax rate. A lot of illusions are dying in 2016 – one of the main things to go down is the illusion that there ever was a Conservative movement. We genuine Conservatives will not be rebuilding, but building for the first time a Conservative movement in 2017.

Hint: it won’t look anything like the false-Conservative thing which has proved a barnacle on American politics for the last 20 years.

Zika is now in Miami Beach – because we all thought the 21st century was going to be about insect-borne disease, right?

I completely understand Jonah Goldberg’s call to purge the Alt Right – but I do wonder why the left never has to purge their extremists?

Nate Silver – proof that even among Progressives you can find a sensible person from time to time.

The thing about Hillary is that there appears to be no bottom to her corruption.

St. Thomas More was a Conservative:

Ignorant People are Unpatriotic People

Mark Noonan5 Comments

“My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober”. – G K Chesterton

Colin Kaepernick is just someone who doesn’t know history – which puts him right square in the middle of all too many of the American people. I saw a Facebook meme a couple days ago which asserted that Cecil Rhodes killed 60 million Africans compared to Hitler killing 6 million Jews. I did a bit of checking and found out the entire population of Africa was 133 million when Rhodes as doing this thing – how he managed to kill 40% of the continent’s population escapes me. This is especially perplexing as he didn’t have a “kill all Africans” plank in his political philosophy as Hitler had a “kill all Jews” in his. But that is the level of discourse these days – people are so ignorant of history that anyone who wants to grind an axe just has to make a statement and some people will believe it.

Columbus is made out to be this horrible person who set out to pillage and enslave – guys, he was just an intrepid sea captain who wanted to find a way to engage in the lucrative spice trade with Asia…as Muslim powers controlled the overland route and the Portuguese had got the route around Africa, pretty much the only other way was going west. Columbus, like everyone else, just had no idea an entire continent stood in the way. Every bad thing which happened afterwards was laid at Columbus’ feet – and it is all asserted as deliberate. Remember, people say that what happened to the Native people was a genocide – which means they are asserting it was a deliberate act. Of course, almost all the Native people who died were killed by disease, often before they even set eyes on an European. Isolated for a very long time in the Americas, the Native people had simply never encountered outside disease environments…as it turns out, the Europeans arrived with a concentrated disease environment from Europe, Africa and Asia. But this was going to happen eventually – someone, at some point, was going to sail from Europe or Africa or Asia and arrive in the Americas. The only way it could have been avoided is if the Americas remained untouched until modern medicine was invented and even then only if the first people to arrive were a bunch of doctors bearing vaccines.

We are told (endlessly) that if we don’t pay close attention to the bad then we are denying the bad ever happened. That is just a bit of nonsense. Does anyone sit around continually going over every last mistake they ever made? Of course not – when we idly think of our past, we like very much to think over the pleasant things we have done or experienced. A wise person does ponder the bad in order to learn the proper lesson from it – but to dwell on it is morose. But we’re not even so much dwelling on it as obsessing over it. It is an endless parade of evil and everyone who ever did a great thing in America is torn down because he or she also had some sins to account for. Because the Founders weren’t perfect, they are to be disparaged; as if any human being – even the most Progressive hero – hasn’t been heir to human folly. It is sufficient to know enough of the bad to ensure against repeating it – but once that is done, it is time to seek inspiration from the good that was done so it can be built upon. And even though George Washington engaged in the sin of holding slaves, it is far more important that we learn of his courage in adversity; his determination to succeed against all odds; his unwillingness to seize power for himself.

Colin Kaepernick probably has never heard of Prince Estabrook – he was a slave, and also the first African-American to fight in battle for American liberty. He was wounded during the Battle of Lexington and Concord. He continued to serve in the militia until the end of the Revolutionary War, after which he was granted freedom. It was a terrible crime that he was held as a slave by men who held themselves to be freemen. But that was the nature of the times – slavery existed everywhere on Earth in one form or another, and when Estabrook stood firm on Lexington Common, it was still about a decade before any voice would be raised asserting that slavery as a thing was inherently wrong. To remember the good and the bad is necessary – and thus remembering Prince Estabrook is important…because he was good and brave and fought for freedom even when he didn’t have it, because people wrongly believed that others could be held as slaves. But he still fought. Plenty of men – born free – would run away on the battlefields of the Revolutionary War. Estabrook didn’t run away – and because of men like him, we have freedom. But, also, because of men like Washington and Jefferson, who both owned slaves. It is said that the evil men do is interred with their bones while the good they do lives on – and this is completely true. We don’t know much about Estabrook – like most true heroes, he doesn’t seem to have gotten around to talking up his actions and making sure everyone knew about them. All we really know of him is that he lived and he fought…but he was also a man, and thus there were probably times when he didn’t rise to Christian perfection. But, no matter – if from time to time he wasn’t perfect, that is now interred with his bones. But the good he did lives on.

Right now, our nations teeters and rocks – we sway giddily on the path, reeling from disunion, bitterness and mutual recrimination. We hope, as Lincoln once did, that the mystic cords of memory which stretch from each Patriot’s grave will continue to bind us…but for that to happen, people have to know about it. Right now, all too many people don’t…and that is why you can find people saying America never was great. But America has been great from the beginning – it started out great, because it was started out by people willing to sacrifice all to strive for an ideal. We must recapture the past – the whole past, and most especially the past which showed us at our best. If we deny that – if we continue to harp upon evils done along the way with no mind to the greatness done by intent – then we will be doomed to failure.