Archive for the 'Politics' Category

TownHall.com:

So, you know Venezuela is on the verge of economic collapse. The price of oil has dropped precipitously over the past few years—that’s a budgetary nightmare for a nation dependent on its oil exports. As a result, basic necessities, like toilet paper, are being rationed. There’s limited access to television and long distance phone service. There are rolling blackouts due to energy shortages. And now the government is cutting back the workweek to just two days. This comes at a time when Venezuela’s citizens need government services the most. Supermarkets are not stocked regularly, so there’s a food shortage; people are starving. They’ve resorted to looting to survive. You would think that the government can’t really afford to print its own currency because it’s so broke would be the cherry on top of this socialist nightmare. Nope—the hunger games appear to have begun, as Venezuelans are now hunting stray dogs, cats, and pigeons for sustenance …

Do you think these poor folks would like to have a gun for protection, to prevent looting, and to kill animals (no, not dogs) for sustenance?  But Hispanic and Latino cultures are totalitarian and statist, and there are very few legal gun owners.  The government both failed the people in terms of providing the liberty to catalyze a well-functioning economy, thus ensuring its failure, and at the same time prevented the people from being prepared for that assured and certain failure by disarming them.

There’s a special place in hell for such rulers.

We all knew it would happen one day, this final divorce from the political scene.  It’s been building for a long time, but before I get ahead of myself, let me explain how I got into politics.

I’ve never really been in politics, per se.  I’ve never run for office, I’ve never been an active part of a party, but I have donated, worked hard to persuade others of my views, and diligently voted, as well as followed the political scene very closely.  It all began my final year at Clemson University.  I recall being in Johnston Hall in a small dormitory room (are there any other sizes?), along with about twenty other guys.  We were packed in, and all watching Jimmy Carter debate Ronald Reagan.  Reagan handed him a resounding defeat, and at that time we were all Reagan supporters.  The entire campus, it felt like, thought like we did.  There couldn’t be found a single student on campus who supported Jimmy Carter, or if there could, he didn’t say so out loud.

In addition to studying engineering into the late hours every night, we were carefully and diligently following every particular, every detail, of the political scene, and understood fairly well the theoretical and philosophical basis of the choices the candidates made.  Those were heady days – from Calculus and engineering mechanics to political theory and theology and the Bible and back again to physics and chemistry (Even then, the humanities department was infected with progressives, and if we wanted to learn we had to teach ourselves.  I’m reminded of a friend studying philosophy at another college who had to ignore his classes and read Frederick Copleston to learn philosophy, but that’s another story).  The Reagan revolution was strong at Clemson in those days, and we survived on caffeine and late night snacks.  More than a few pots of coffee were made in that horrible kitchen in Johnston Hall at midnight.

We won, and it wasn’t that we won, so much as our ideas held sway.  I do wish that Reagan had been a little more into the details of things, because I hold these four things against him: (1) the first amnesty, (2) Sandra Day O’Conner and Anthony Kennedy, (3) The Hughes Amendment, and (4) deploying the Marines to the barracks in Beirut, only to withdraw them after attack by Hezbollah.  Every one of these things have been shown to have deleterious effects on America (including the Hughes amendment which has caused a lack of investment and design engineering in weapons for our military).  Those are four big failures, but still, we knew that the unborn had a champion, small government had an advocate, and that the danger of “near peers” wouldn’t be underestimated.

Over the course of time, compromise began to occur.  Deals were made, and the mantra of electing the “conservative” who was most electable replaced principled conservatism.  As the democratic party moved more to the left, republicans moved with them in order to stay “relevant.”  The same disease afflicts the American church, leading to the defenestration of doctrine in favor of relevancy.  Whereas the church used to talk about the vicarious atonement, the sovereignty of God and the Council of Nicea, it now focuses on racial reconciliation, nuclear weapons, and gender identity.

We all knew this would happen one day.  By not stopping the diminution of the party, we fed the monster of big government, largesse, entitlements, debt, money printing, high stakes gambling on Wall Street, corporatism, open borders to feed low wage labor, hospital emergency rooms functioning as primary care clinics all paid for by the middle class (so that those low wage workers can work for the corporate masters), crony capitalism and its attendant involvement in the drafting of millions of pages of law, regulation and federal register notices to ensure that the corporations “get theirs.”

I wasn’t surprised at the revolution of the voters this election cycle.  I suspected that it would occur.  What did surprise me was the popularity of Donald Trump.  South Carolina broke my heart, and I knew it was over for Ted Cruz at that point.  Here was the perfect chance to elect someone who would come as close as possible to taking us back to the Reagan revolution, and perhaps even do better than that, in Ted Cruz.  He is a champion of the unborn, has an even stronger position on work visas than Donald Trump, is against the imperialistic military meddling in the affairs of other states and has said so quite clearly (the effect of this position in alienating him from the likes of George W. Bush, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and the rest of the neocons, has been underestimated and is ripe territory for study), has always been a strong supporter of the right to bear arms, has successfully argued before the Supreme Court and understands its machinations well enough to appoint reliably constitutionalist jurists, favors a flat tax, has tried his best to shut down funding for Obamacare (with no help from his senate colleagues), and has sworn to overthrow the single payer health care system.

I have relayed what I heard Louie Gohmert say regarding the meetings between Cruz, Lee, Brat, Gohmert and Duncan, among others, in Cruz’s office, to overturn support for the “gang of eight” bill.  Cruz was hated inside the beltway for very good reason.  While Jeff Sessions was telling us that only Trump would “bust up the Oligarchy” in Washington, Cruz was doing just that.  Busting up the Oligarchy is sure to make the Oligarchs mad.  It doesn’t bother me at all that Cruz was hated by others in Washington.  I would have been even more his supporter if Cruz had advocated an old fashioned lynching of most of the Senators and Representatives, or perhaps tar and feathering.  No one is angrier than I am over the devolution of things in Washington.

And yet the people have chosen Donald Trump.  A man who mocks the handicapped, who considers free speech a disgrace, who triangulated a position so nonsensical on North Carolina’s bathroom law that no one knows what he means, who is a proven hypocrite on foreign workers and immigration, who wants to increase the lands owned by federal government rather than decreasing federal power and turning over the lands to the states, who has never asked anyone for forgiveness, most especially God, who only recently triangulated his position on gun rights when previously supporting an “assault weapons” ban, who supports abortion, who believes that Maryanne Trump Barry (who supports infanticide) would make a fine supreme court justice, who criticizes women for their appearance, who calls people disgusting because of pictures taken of them while they eat, and who believes in a single payer health care system.

It’s like watching an awful reality show or perhaps an interstate wreck at high speed.  Donald Trump is an obscene, narcissistic, self serving, hateful, vengeful, grotesque, moral monster who hates anything that isn’t rewarding him for being him.  He is the post-modern man, evolved past Sartre and Camus and (I suppose, finding emptiness) circling back to the pinnacle of self indulgence, Marquis de Sade.  He is an awful man.  I’ve repeatedly heard that Ted Cruz was born in Canada or wherever, or that he took a loan from such-and-such bank.  The former issue never got any traction with me, and as for the later issue, so taking loans is now illegal or immoral?  I have a loan on my house.  So what?  And as for Trump’s bankruptcies?  That’s okay, because sadism is all about self indulgence at the expense of someone else.

I get the revolutionary flavor of the current political scene.  But instead of supporting the only real revolutionary, the GOP voters have collectively dropped their drawers and mooned God and everyone else in a protest of the preceding years.  It’s a sad thing to watch.  They chose the wrong symbol of protest, and will end up getting what they most loathe, as they become what disgusts and repels them.  The people have raised their fist to God and shouted, “give us a king like all the others.”  And the Lord has said, “very well.”  Suck it up folks, because you’re getting ready to reap the rewards of your choice.

Voting for the least bad candidate is partly what got us here.  Oh, I blame the GOPe, the establishment, 100% for this debacle.  This is a protest vote.  The voters are burning it all down because of your corruption, and the sad, sorry truth is that you still don’t get it.  But it doesn’t stop there for me.  I also blame the voters, 100%.  It isn’t either-or with me, it’s both-and.  No one held a gun to your head and forced you to vote this way in the booth.  You could have chosen to be thinking men and women, but you didn’t.  You became an unthinking mob.  So we are where we are.

And for me, that means that I’ve cast my last vote.  I am bidding farewell to voting.  I am now a disenfranchised conservative Christian, and if a third party opens up for me, I might decide to rejoin in the struggle, but I’ve won’t vote GOP again for the rest of my life.  The GOP has left me – establishment and voters.  It’s no longer my party.  I have no party.  But if I ever vote for an upstart party that is true to my conservative, constitutional ideals, I won’t cast my vote because I think politics will save us.  I don’t.  As John Adams has observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

If we are to be saved, no piece of paper or parchment will do it.  Thus, I sympathize with my friend Claire Wolfe on our sad state of affairs.

In part it’s because I see so many angry people putting so much hope in Trump — a man who, should he manage to buy his way into office (or tumble in by default after Hillary gets indicted) will betray them even worse than than the poltroons of 1994 betrayed We the Hopeful Fools.

But also because, horrible as the prospect of either President Trump or President Clinton the Second is, it’s a relief not to feel hope.

Or despair, for that matter. Horrible as the prospects are, it’s glorious to know how very little it really matters. For freedom. For anything that counts. Oh sure, either pretender to the throne has the potential to make a ghastly mess of things — up to and including World War III (unlikely, but someday somebody’s going to do it). Or building a wall to keep us all in. Or decreeing that all guns must Go Away Now, So There, I Have Spoken. More likely not much happens except the routine bad getting routinely worse. And millions ignoring whatever “the most important leader in the world” says, decrees, promises, etc.

And those poor hopeful fools losing hope. Been there. Done that. It hurts. It burns. It makes you want to go postal. (That was the state of mind I was in from about February 1995, when the betrayal became obvious, to late 1996 when I took my life back, laughed, sat down, and wrote 101 Things to do ‘Til the Revolution.)

Yeah, it hurts. But it hurts like growing up and learning that Santa didn’t really put those presents under the tree.

To be sure, while Cruz called out Senator Mitch McConnell for being the liar he is, I fully expect to see Trump rubbing shoulders with McConnell, Paul Ryan, and so on.  He will cut deals with them.  He said so.  Have you ever heard Trump attack McConnel, Ryan, Eric Cantor, or any of the other creeps that helped to get us here?  No, you’ve only heard him attack fellow candidates.

But unlike Claire, I never expected government to work right any more than I believe presents come from Santa Claus.  I’ve always treated my vote as a precious gift from God whether I effect change with it or not, a power over which I had stewardship and for which I will one day answer to the most high.  I have always voted based on principle rather than pragmatism, or at least I have tried to, and because of principle I am now out of the process until a third party develops that is true to my beliefs.

As for the voters, enjoy what you have created.  When you build you house on sand, don’t be surprised when the first heavy rain knocks it down.  I bid you farewell.  Oh, I’ll poke fun on occasion and remind you of your choices, and I’ll get a good chuckle out of all of this.  But I’m out of the political scene.  I won’t be voting for Donald Trump.  As for my mockery of the situation, I’ll see you over the transom.

CNN:

“Well look, North Carolina did something that was very strong, and they’re paying a big price, and there’s a lot of problems,” he said. But he then agreed with a commentator’s argument to “leave it the way it is.”

“You leave it the way it is,” Trump said. “There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate. There has been so little trouble, and the problem with what happened in North Carolina is the strife and the economic punishment that they’re taking. So I would say that’s probably the best way.”

What?  Really, what?

What?

North Carolina did something very strong.  Okay, was that good or bad, being strong?    We’re paying a big price, and there’s a lot of problems.  Okay, what are those problems, Donald?

Leave it the way it is.  What way is that, Donald?  The way it was before Charlotte made the decision to do gender neutral bathrooms, or the way it was after the state passed a law against cities doing that on their own?  Which way is it you like, Donald?

So people use the bathroom where they “feel” it’s appropriate.  Is that what you want, Donald?  So is it the Charlotte regulation you like, or something else?  You want gender neutral bathrooms, or not, Donald?

Oh, okay I see, it’s the strife you don’t like.  That means that you’re unwilling to cause strife by your actions, right?  Is that what it means, Donald?  What way is best, Donald?  What do you mean when you say “So I would say that’s probably the best way?”

Listen, I think your tendency to random-speak is causing confusion as to where you stand.  But that’s the way you want it, is it?  You could speak more clearly, but then people would actually know where you stand.  Hey, you know, now that I think about it, your transition from anti-PC to the non-strife candidate didn’t take very long.

It looks like Mike is coming down towards the end.  This is very sad news for me.  I have a deep regret, namely, not ever having personally met Mike.  But we will meet in the new heavens and the new earth.  Keep him in your prayers.

It looks like there is a change of command at SSI, and while it’s nice to see his son taking on his legacy, I’ll tell you what.  You’ve got big shoes to fill, son.  I’ll be watching.

David Codrea:

“[T]he documents reveal how senior Justice Department officials—including Attorney General Eric Holder—intensely followed and managed an effort to carefully limit and obstruct the information produced to Congress,” the memo notes, adding further cause for curiosity. “Justice Department officials in Washington impeded the congressional investigation in several ways…”

Well, he’s a criminal, but he worked for a criminal too.  So it all started at the top and worked its way down, one gigantic criminal enterprise.

Ben Carson: “You know, during the Jim Crow era, those were the rules, too,” Ben Carson told MSNBC today, while discussing the caucus rules of the Colorado Republican Party. “They were written. Everybody knew about them. Didn’t make them right.”

I like how he has begun to speak in pseudo-sentences just like Trump.  But hey, we did indeed learn something!  Who knew you could be so stupid and still be a neurosurgeon?

USA Today:

Donald Trump is taking on CIA Director John Brennan on torture, saying Brennan’s pledge not to allow waterboarding is “ridiculous.”

Brennan said on NBC News Sunday that he would not allow enhanced interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, even if a future president ordered it.

“I think his comments are ridiculous,” Trump said on Fox News Monday. “I mean, they chop off heads and they drown people in cages with 50 in a cage, in big, steel heavy cages, drop them right into the water drown people, and we can’t water-board and we can’t do anything,” Trump said.

“And you know we’re playing on different fields,’ he continued. “And we have a huge problem with ISIS, which we can’t beat, and the reason we can’t beat them is we won’t use strong tactics, whether it’s this or other things.”

So let me tell you how this really works, and this little note is to you, Trump, and any other presidential candidate who thinks he or she is going to bring back waterboarding.

It will never get to the level of having to have the director of the CIA tell anyone anything.  The president will give the order, and no one will carry it out.  It’s not that they won’t carry it out for reasons of morality, although some refusals will fall into that category.  It has to do with other, more pragmatic issues.

The things I am going to say to you can be found with research, so I’m not going to waste my time linking to things you should already know.  The original guys who did this for the CIA, working directly under the employ of the CIA or as contractors, are now retired, and some of them live in the Northern Virginia area.  Others live elsewhere, but the CIA knows where all of them are.  They want to be left alone, and some of them fear a knock at the door, with federal marshals waiting at the door to take them off to federal prison, never to be seen again.  I know these things because of my war and counterinsurgency coverage and commentary for so many years.  Again, go research it yourself if you want proof – I’m not going to waste my time proving this for you and your advisers should already know all of these things anyway.  For you to bring this up causes me to wonder about your advisers.

You see, even when a president tells them to do things, when another president comes into office and appoints his own attorney general, and the mood goes sour on what those men did, things change, and they can be held accountable not for what they did, but for what the people who came after them thought they should or shouldn’t have done.

This isn’t a commentary on waterboarding, per se.  I have no opinion since I’ve never been waterboarded.  The only man I know who has, a former Navy pilot who was waterboarded as part of his SERE training, says to me that it’s not torture.  I don’t know.  I don’t care.  That’s not the point.  The point is that in order for it to happen, you have to find people to make it happen.  And outsourcing this to other countries isn’t an option, because they can still retroactively charge you with war crimes for enabling it to happen.  So Mr. Trump, it isn’t ridiculous, and it isn’t going to happen, ever again.  Ever.  The only people Americans will ever waterboard from now on will be SERE training participants.

Wired: The Senate’s Draft Encryption Bill Is Ludicrous, Dangerous And Technically Illiterate.

As Apple battled the FBI for the last two months over the agency’s demands that Apple help crack its own encryption, both the tech community and law enforcement hoped that Congress would weigh in with some sort of compromise solution. Now Congress has spoken on crypto, and privacy advocates say its “solution” is the most extreme stance on encryption yet.

On Thursday evening, the draft text of a bill called the “Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016,” authored by offices of Senators Diane Feinstein and Richard Burr,  was published online by the Hill.¹ It’s a nine-page piece of legislation that would require people to comply with any authorized court order for data—and if that data is “unintelligible,” the legislation would demand that it be rendered “intelligible.” In other words, the bill would make illegal the sort of user-controlled encryption that’s in every modern iPhone, in all billion devices that run Whatsapp’s messaging service, and in dozens of other tech products. “This basically outlaws end-to-end encryption,” says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “It’s effectively the most anti-crypto bill of all anti-crypto bills.”

I just have a few comments.  First of all, it should be telling to you that a republican U.S. senator, Richard Burr, is aligned with a totalitarian like Feinstein.  That’s how desperate he is for a signature piece of legislation to go with his name.  He would sooner pick an awful piece of shit like this than simply turn government control on its head and give control back to the people in every way, something that would win him immediate loyalty by the voters.  Instead, he listens to his colleagues, that collection of gargoyles, demons, pit vipers and carnival barkers in Washington.

Second, remember what I said about the government’s desire for all of your information?

Soccer moms will do anything, give over any amount of privacy, give up virtually anything, in order to maintain a level of safety and security.  ISIS and nuclear power plants is the latest incarnation of the whole ISIS thing generically.  The government gets a chance to say, “Hey, listen to us, we’ll protect you if you’ll only give us access to your iPhone, all of your records, bank accounts, medical data, tell us whether you have any guns in the home, let us listen to and record your phone calls and all of your text messages, and in short be your protector.  We’ll take care of you, we promise!  We won’t let the mean bad men make the big bad thingy go BOOM and hurt your precious little babies!  Let me have the keys to your life, sweetie!”

Burr is taking advantage of ignorant soccer moms who believe that American national security will be better off if they give over their lives to the federal government and give up their constitutionally protected right to privacy.  Because Burr is just that kind of man.  Remember that he is the worm who said he would vote for Bernie Sanders before he would vote for Ted Cruz.  He is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad U.S. senator.

PJM:

Trump is a master of the nihilist style of the web. His competitors speak in political jargon and soaring generalities. He speaks in rant. He attacks, insults, condemns, doubles down on misstatements, never takes a step back, never apologizes. Everyone he dislikes is a liar, “a bimbo,” “bought and paid for.” Without batting an eyelash, he will compare an opponent to a child molester. Such rhetorical aggression is shocking in mainstream American politics but an everyday occurrence on the political web, where death threats and rape threats against a writer are a measure of the potency of the message.

The “angry voter” Trump supposedly has connected with is really an avatar of the mutinous public: and this is its language. It too speaks in rant, inchoate expression of a desire to remake the world by smashing at it, common parlance of the political war-bands that populate Tumblr, Gawker, reddit, and so many other online platforms. By embracing Trump in significant numbers, the public has signaled that it is willing to impose the untrammeled relations of social media on the U.S. electoral process.

To be fair, I think this is right but I think there is more at play than this.  There are legitimate grievances, but voting for Trump to fix those grievances is sort of like placing your penis on an anvil and beating it bloody, shouting “you won’t do it to us again,”  while a Fascist does it again to them as he sings, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”  Turning now to the other parent, pro wrestling.

He parlayed his appearances on Monday Night Raw into a prime-time WrestleMania 23 match. The mega event was billed as the “Battle of the Billionaires” and featured a showdown between a wrestler sponsored by Trump (Bobby Lashley) and a wrestler chosen by McMahon (Umaga) — and was refereed by none other than famous McMahon antagonist Stone Cold Steve Austin. Even the taunt-filled ringside contract-signing showcased Trump, prefiguring his insult-laced debate performances. At stake was a golden head of hair: The loser would be forcibly shorn of his famous locks in front of a record pay-per-view crowd.

I’ve been toying with the idea that Donald Trump isn’t a human, but an apparition of some sort, designed by evil forces to have an adverse impact on behavior.  My thoughts still need to be fully formed before laying that out there as a mature idea, but Trump is certainly having a bad affect on behavior.

The goal is to harden men.  It is to force them to bare their asses, pull their pants down in public, use foul language, discuss obscene things, hurl baseless insults towards other people, to be able to do or feel anything without shame, and manifest utterly narcissistic feelings in all things.

The target is to destroy all etiquette, kill the notion of love, grace and kindness towards others, and coarsen the discourse, both private and public.  Trump has no ideology beyond this, and the increase of Donald Trump.  His values are “without form and void.”  He is an empty vessel, into which anything can be poured that benefits Trump and humiliates, trashes, denigrates and dehumanizes others.

And America is enthralled with the shameless reality show that is Donald Trump.  It is a sick society, sick unto death.

I have said for a very long time to my family and others that the experience of parents having and raising children isn’t really about the children.  God will handle the children as He sees fit.  It’s about the parents, and there are two experiences that test your mettle more than any other: marriage and children.  It’s one of God’s way of sanctifying His own, but it has the opposite affect on others.

One reason I care about the election cycle isn’t because I think we can make a difference.  Oh, we can in some ways, we can’t in others.  We can make a difference in the medical care situation in the country, but we can’t in the global financial system.  This discussion is saved for another time.  But one thing the individual vote does at one and the same time is affect the soul and show the content of the soul of the voter.  It’s a deeply moral act that has eternal consequences for the one who is given stewardship of the vote.

Now let me turn for a moment to a recent commentary by Jonah Goldberg.  Sometimes I disagree vehemently with him, but other times he hits on all cylinders.  This day the engine was running to perfection on the dynamometer.

This week there have been some cracks in the façade. Trump’s attacks on Heidi Cruz unsettled even Ann Coulter. And his abortion remarks are still sending tremors through the granite foundations of Trump can-do-no-wrong-ism. Joe Scarborough and Breitbart’s John Nolte are talking about what a bad week he’s having and gravely warning Trump to get his act together. As Jim Geraghty has been writing, the problem with such second thoughts is the assumption that something is amiss with Trump or his campaign. This is Trump. This is his campaign. The Trump we see before us is the same Trump. It’s a bit like when Barack Obama said that the Jeremiah Wright he saw denouncing America wasn’t the man he knew. That was nonsense. Obama knew exactly who Wright was, having attended his church for 20 years. It was only when Wright’s act moved to a larger national stage that all of a sudden he became inconvenient to Obama.

The analogy isn’t perfect, of course. But the basic point is the same. The Donald Trump of the last week is the exact same Donald Trump many of us saw a year ago or five years ago. He’s always been full of sh*t. He’s always been a total ignoramus when it comes to public policy, lacking the simple sense of patriotic duty to do his homework on the issues. He’s always been a nasty and boorish cad. He’s always pretended to be a conservative while working on liberal assumptions of what conservatives want to hear.

His “punish the women” comments were of a piece with his refusal to condemn the Klan on CNN. It’s not that he wants to punish women who have abortions — I’d bet he’s paid more abortion bills than he will ever sign — it’s that he thinks that’s what pro-lifers want to hear. It’s not that he’s a Klansman or that the pillowcases at Mara Lago come with eyeholes cut out in advance. It’s that Trump thinks lots of his fans like the Klan and he wants to pander to them. I have heard first-hand stories from people who’ve worked with Trump about how he disparages women’s appearance routinely. That’s who he is. If you’re attacking him because he retweeted a bad picture of Heidi, that’s not you being principled, it’s you getting cold feet. Indeed, I am sure that the same opportunism that has caused so many supposedly principled conservatives to hitch their wagons to Trump is now causing some of them to question their choices, not because Trump has changed but because the climate might be changing around them. By all means, if Trump continues to unravel (a huge if), please abandon Trump. But don’t think for a moment that the rest of us will automatically take your word for it when you say this or that statement changed your mind about the man. He hasn’t changed, your calculations have.

[ … ]

Like all demagogues, he’s using his lies as a loyalty test for his followers. He’s exploiting his popularity and abusing the devotion of his fans to force them into going along with his fictions, until they are in so deep psychologically, they have no choice but to carry on. It’s an ancient psychological tactic of authoritarians, Mafia dons, and the like: Force your followers into sharing the blame for your misdeeds so that they can’t break ranks.

Jonah is right.  He thinks we want to see women who have gotten abortions in the town center in stocks and chains.  He’s pandering to the social right, but he missed on this, and he missed badly.  His other positions – support for the second amendment, advocacy for closed borders – can only be assumed to be pandering as well.

Not to worry, though.  Just about as soon as he said it, he triangulated his position again, to something like abortion laws are already set and we have to leave it that way.  Trumps views on abortion aren’t the topic here.  Trump is the topic.  He is a mirror in which everyone sees what he or she wants to see, its just that the mirror has to be adjusted based on the onlooker and Trump isn’t really as good a triangulator as he is made out to be.

And that brings me to the conservative voters who have already cast their votes for Trump in the primaries heretofore.  Do you remember when socialized medicine was the most important thing about the Obama administration, the holy grail of the progressives?  It still is.

And yet, you have jettisoned that most important piece of your world view to support a man who sees things far differently than you, who supports socialized medicine, and who has said that the only thing he would change about the current system is to allow it to cross state lines.

Trump has woven you into his deception, his lies, his evil.  And when socialized medicine is codified and solidified for you, your children, and your children’s children to the tenth generation of your progeny, when you see that your seed will hate you and this generation for what has been done to the country, it will be far too late.

Open wide, and suck it down.  This is what you voted for, whether in the end it’s Hillary or Trump, or some replacement for Hillary.  Own it.  It’s yours.  The Mafia don asked you to pull the trigger and do the deed.  It’s no longer about him.  Now it’s about you.

Says the jerk (via reader Mack):

Frankly, I don’t care if people call me an Establishment Republican. It used to bother me, but it doesn’t anymore. In fact, I’ve come to wear it as a badge of honor.

I’ve been working on my own definition of what it means to be an Establishment Republican. While my definition is still a work in progress, I would suggest that the following are some good factors to consider when deciding what kind of Republican you are:

First, an Establishment Republican is typically someone who was actively involved in the Republican Party prior to the advent of the Tea Party.

In my case, I have been a Republican since I worked on my first political campaign at the age of 15. I have been a member of the Republican Party of Virginia since 1987. And I held elected office as a Republican for more than 22 years.

Even though some of the GOP’s more recent members seem to think that they are the only ones who know what it means to be a Republican, I would remind them that there was a very successful Republican Party prior to the advent of the Tea Party. In fact, I would argue that the Republican Party was stronger, more cohesive, and more successful in days gone by than it is today.

Second, an Establishment Republican is someone who adheres to a conservative political philosophy, but understands that not everyone will agree with us on every issue; and we have respect for dissenting opinions, even if we don’t agree with them.

Or, as Ronald Reagan said, we understand that the person who agrees with us 80 percent of the time is an 80 percent friend, not a 20 percent traitor. This distinguishes us from those that take an ideologically rigid “my way or the highway” approach to politics and policy.

Third, an Establishment Republican is someone who understands that there is a difference between being conservative and being anti-government.

Okay, have you heard enough?  I’m sure Mr. Bolling and I aren’t going camping or shooting together.  I don’t think he’s my type.  Besides, I’ve grown weary of the whole tea party / establishment bifurcation and definition and advocate something much different.  Marco Rubio was a tea party candidate, and he’s a loser and liar.  In fact, Mark Levin and I think alike on this.

Mr. Bolling wants to know what you think about a “do something” republican.  I don’t think I like that idea very much.  You see, I think that the federal government has the right under the constitution to provide for the common defense, and that’s about it.  States only a little more, perhaps the construction of roads to enable commerce.  Gun control is evil in all of its forms, and I would much rather see the federal government completely shut down than anyone doing something about anything.

I want a constitutionalist, not an anti-establishment candidate.  Donald Trump is an anti-establishment candidate, and he’s blabbering about making all kinds of deals with just about everyone under the sun.  I don’t want that.  I don’t want the federal government to be empowered that way.  I don’t want somebody who pokes their thumb in the eye of the establishment, because that could very well be the devil, who happens to hate you and want to control you even more than the establishment.

I will not side with the establishment or the devil.  The Holy Scriptures contain examples of God using evil nations to judge Israel, and then turning on those evil nations and destroying them for what they did.  When God has two wicked enemies attacking each other, the best bet is to stay back rather than take sides in that dark war.  There will be no winners – only losers.

Politico:

If Republican establishment forces conspire to deny Donald Trump the party’s nomination, they will risk “absolute destruction” in November, Ben Carson said Monday.

“If there are shenanigans, if it’s not straightforward, all of those millions of people that Donald Trump has brought into the arena are not going to stay there, and the Republicans are going to lose and it’s going to be not only the presidency but it’s gonna be the Senate and it could even be the House,” the retired neurosurgeon who endorsed his former opponent earlier this month told “Fox and Friends,” adding, “It’s going to be absolute destruction.”

You pathetic whiner.  Is that supposed to scare me?  I’ve already pointed out that it isn’t just of Trump is not nominated.  It’s if Trump is in fact nominated too, or anything else happens, because the GOP is already dead.  So don’t come trying to engender the panic.  I’ve got a few gray hairs too.  Bring on the destruction.