I am a farm boy from Iowa. I am not a farmer, but I have a brother, several 1st cousins, and extended family who still till the earth. They want open markets, and deplore ethanol subsidies because it makes them bound by an economical reality that makes it difficult for them to diversify.

Until you have spent 20 hour days during planting and haresting, balancing budgets during the ups and downs of the commidity markets, or labored in100 degree heat and 80% humity to put hay in the barn, and until you have gone out on a cold February or early March morning to pull a lamb or a calf out during a troubled birth; you should STFU about we real conservatives in flyover country. And as an act of sincerity, fold it 5 ways, get a flashlight and a mirror, and stuff it where the sun never shines.

JurassiCon Rex — The H-1B program is for highly-skilled workers.

It doesn’t quite pan out that way.

It’s the highly-skilled schtick that does not stick.

A LOT of the H1b work is coding software — at the skill level of sophomores.

The law firms involved in these indentures boast about perverting the H1b program.

As applied it’s a mockery.

Kinch: A rather ridiculous statement about people you have never met. I know these people personally, and you are so far off base, well you’re not even in the ball park.

It all comes down to what you judge to be the state of the country and what you are willing to risk, and the person you best think can reverse things and/or change them for the better.

You assume that people here don’t think the situation is dire, but many people do. They merely have a very different solution than you, and think yours is at least as dangerous if not more so than the situation as it stands now, and worse than some possible alternative approaches. Insulting people here en masse is not really a great approach, nor is assuming things not in evidence about what they think of the state of the country and the world. Neither persuade in the least.

In addition, I have never called Trump unintelligent; in fact, if you have read much here, I repeatedly and explicitly say he is intelligent. As for “bombastic dick lacking introspection,” Trump is actually kind of the opposite of “bombastic” (see the definition of the word here. And Trump himself speaks of his dick although he didn’t use the word (nor did I). As for his lacking introspection, I don’t think I’ve ever made such an accusation either. However, now that you mention it, Trump has said the following in a Playboy interview from 1990:

Q:..are you ever satisfied with what you’ve accomplished?

A: I’m too superstitious to be satisfied. I don’t dwell on the past. People who do that go right down the tubes. I’m never self-satisfied. Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. You know, it is all a rather sad situation.

Q: Life? Or death?

A: Both. We’re here and we live our sixty, seventy or eighty years and we’re gone. You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot. But it is something to do-to keep you interested.

Whether that indicates introspection or not I leave to you to decide.

Trump’s remarks about “Citizen Kane” from 2002 have no bearing on anything I’ve said about him or his statements or possible intentions as president. Trump has many faces, and I have stated many times that he is intelligent. That he can speak intelligently about a film is no surprise.

As I’ve said before, if Trump is nominated and elected (I don’t think the latter will occur, but if it does) I hope that I’m wrong about Trump and that he’s much better than his words and behavior have so far led me to expect. On that, I think we can agree.

I bear you no ill will. You are clearly a person of good will.

I think you, and many of your fellow commenters are fixating on minor details like internal consistency and ‘character’ because to acknowledge fully that it’s no-longer even “business”, let alone business as usual is very frightening and depressing.

I like this new world no more than you do. It’s just bad luck that history has re-awakened in our time. I believe that Trump is very much the Lesser of the Two Weevils. You do not.

I’ll continue to read your blog (have done so since ca. 2005 and am grateful for all the insight you have provided into many things), but will refrain from commenting further. Pax out.

But try, try very hard to get your head around some simple ideas which you are apparently too well educated to understand.

Do you really believe that I’m a moron or a LIV or some kind of evil Nazi or mindless Trumpbot?

My idea of a charity is PizzaIDF.org — I’m interested in results, not in pretending I’m William Friggin Buckley. If you smite Arabs and write great software and make the desert bloom, well I’ll buy you a pizza even if you are rude and abrasive and ‘the wrong sort of people’ in the eyes of many. I’ll do it even if I’m not one of you and can never be. Just out of sheer bloody-mindedness and because I am still naive enough to believe in Good and Evil and that some battle lines are so clear cut that only an Intellectual could manage to fuzz them.

What I care about is saving what is good and can be saved and what might be recovered.

Here are some things I see with varying degrees of clarity after considerable rumination over the past several years:

(1) There is no more Republic. It’s dead and gone. I have a pretty good notion of the necessary pre-conditions for a well-functioning republic. And so should you. Very few or none of these conditions now pertain. Sad. Also true.

(2) Arguing finer points of decorum or logical consistency simply don’t matter. This election isn’t going to be won on logic. It’s going to be won by stimulating lower brain stems. Sad. Also true. Wasn’t me who debased the culture and the electorate. So why would you support candidates who are disembodied pre-frontal cortexes and expect them to stand a chance?

(3a) It’s not about what we would like. If the electorate consisted entirely of yeomen farmers, hard-working mechanics, and Boston Brahmins, plus a few pesky Transcendentalists, then sure… bring on the strict constitutionalists… none of this wanky Leaves of Grass stuff. Have you turned on the TV lately and looked at what the Great Unwashed are watching and doing and thinking? Let alone what passes for analysis amongst the Chattering Classes? Jaysus Wept!

(3b) Pick your Pied Piper and hang on for the ride. Best do it now, whilst some memories of the Old Ways still linger. Miss this bus and the next one in 8 or 16 or 32 years will be Juggernaut. Maybe, just maybe if the circuit breaker is flipped in 2016 it’ll all come good after a long hard slog.

(4) Electing a strict constitutionalist isn’t going to make one iota of difference down at (say) the DMV or (say) inside the Deep Security State which knows everything you have ever said online or in phone calls or within range of any phone for any individual likely to be elected to high office. Sorting this one out is going to take someone who simply doesn’t give a Rat’s Ass about his sexual peccadilloes becoming public. It will also require someone willing to fire and otherwise terrorise several million unelected Federal employees who lord it over the general public via Administrative Law into mending their ways.

(5) Browse over to American Digest and watch the video of Trump being interviewed about Citizen Kane and come back and tell me that his true nature is that of a bombastic dick lacking introspection.

(6) I don’t know where it will all end if Trump is elected President. I would like to live in a world where someone else stood a chance of defeating the Left. But we don’t. This is what we have.

And in the House of Kinch, the flurry of sarcastic words obfuscated and smoothed, while Trump-supporters danced in a ring, and the Vile Establishment was ritually cursed at the rising and the setting of the sun, and at times in-between. This would ward off the shadow of the Truth of what Trump is. Yes it would.

It’s such an obvious bill of goods that I’m embarrassed to be witness to it, and am flatly astonished that anyone with a mind above LIV level buys into it.