A NeverTrumper who wants Trump to win the election by a landslide
A lot of previously seemingly-sane people have lost their minds, or at least their reasoning power. Check this out from Bernard Goldberg:
I’m no fan of Donald Trump. And that’s putting it mildly.
I don’t like his chronic dishonesty. I don’t like narcissism. I don’t like his nastiness and his silly name-calling. I detest his need to constantly cause chaos, as he did with a recent tweet suggesting we should postpone the 2020 presidential election. There’s nothing about this man’s character that I like.
And I hope he wins re-election in a landslide.
No, that’s not the crazy part.
He goes on to list all the reasons he really really really doesn’t want the Democrats to win, including this:
As for free speech, it will be in serious jeopardy if Democrats win in November, especially if they make a clean sweep and take the Senate and keep control of the House. So-called hate speech could become a crime. And they’ll decide what’s hateful and what isn’t.
If Biden and his progressive puppet masters take over, the cancel culture will be in full bloom. You think it’s bad now? Just wait!
And if Biden wins and Democrats take over the Senate, there’s at least a 50-50 chance they’ll blow up the filibuster, which means all they’ll need is a simple majority to pass whatever they want. And that’ll include making Puerto Rico a state, packing the Supreme Court with liberal Justices, passing some version of a budget busting Green New Deal and who knows what else that’s on the progressive wish list.
And then he follows that up with this stunner:
But if Donald Trump is going to win – and that looks like a long shot – he’ll have to do it without me. I can’t bring myself to vote for such a defective human being.
I simply don’t understand how a thinking person can get from those earlier points to that last point. Is Trump really so incredibly defective? Is he that much more defective than most politicians? Than Joe Biden? Than Kamala Harris? It doesn’t make sense because Trump happens to be running against those two people and their party, which Goldberg has already indicated will wreak havoc on the country.
If a voter who reasons like Goldberg lives in a place like New York, I suppose his/her vote really doesn’t matter because Trump’s not going to be winning that state anyway. However, there’s also the popular vote, which needs to be shored up to avoid a repeat of at least a portion of the caterwauling in November of 2016.
Positions such as Goldberg’s are a bizarre sort of virtue-signaling that seems self-indulgent and illogical. And yet, those are rather common traits these days. The way I see such a stance is that people who hold it are treating an election not as a contest between two people and their parties’ policies but rather as a test of their own personal moral rectitude as reflected in the moral rectitude of the person for whom they vote. If the candidate isn’t up to standard, the vote cannot be tendered, and such voters can brag about their own uprightness while the country falls apart and they’ve done nothing to stop that from happening. But what’s most important to them is that they feel they can hold their heads high.
The way I see such a stance is that people who hold it are treating an election not as a contest between two people and their parties’ policies but rather as a test of their own personal moral rectitude as reflected in the moral rectitude of the person for whom they vote. – Neo
I wonder why the Dems didn’t hold the same standard when voting for Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton. They need to hold their nose and get over Trump or their lovely editorials will be history.
JHCorcoran:
I’m not talking about Democrats. Goldberg is not a Democrat. He considers himself a libertarian conservative:
Maybe he sees Trump as “a right-wing nut.” But Goldberg has made it clear that the Democratic Party left him.
Many Democrats still praise LBJ (in my opinion, the worst president of the last sixty years) for what they consider to be his domestic “accomplishments” (Vietnam notwithstanding), although, in comparison to the crass vulgarity (inviting the press into the men’s room) of the loud, obnoxious, and domineering Texan, Trump is a refined and cultivated gentleman.
And now Biden/Harris say that there MUST be a mandate for all of us to wear masks outdoors!! That’s the stupidity Goldberg wants?? Masks are of marginal value inside, outside they are useless as any aerosol is quickly dissipated. I barely tolerate having to wear a mask in any indoor business, there’s no way I’m wearing one every time I go outside.
I know fall sports are slowly being killed off, but this “mandate” would totally eliminate any outdoor activity. Funny, here in CT we’ve been playing golf without masks now for 3 months and the virus is for all intents and purposes non-existent in this state. So why haven’t all those golfers become superspreaders??
The world has truly gone insane. And people like Goldberg are leading the way. Is he related to Jonah Goldberg the NeverTrumper over at Nat. Review?
No, he’s related to Rube Goldberg.
(Philosophically, at least…. Or maybe that should be “values-wise”…)
Luckily voters in the non-blue states are more sane. And living in a blue state, it seems to me, that just like in 2016, many that will vote for Trump come election day are keeping their heads down and mouths shut.
I simply don’t understand how a thinking person can get from those earlier points to that last point. Is Trump really so incredibly defective?
Here’s a hypothesis. You don’t get it because you’re not particularly other-directed and you make arguments with bullet points. We’ve reached a point in time where people atop our institutions are hopelessly other-directed, and they don’t make arguments at all; they strike poses. Someone like Trump who isn’t other-directed fries their circuits. As for people in word-merchant occupations, you’d have to go back to my grand-parents generation to find a time when they weren’t hollow men.
physicsguy:
Goldberg doesn’t want Biden, as his column makes clear. He really really doesn’t want him. He just can’t bring himself to vote for Trump, although he dearly wants him to win. That’s the weirdness of his reasoning.
Goldberg is the guy who wrote this book as well as this one. A pretty good guy, most of the time, in my estimation. That’s why I find his reasoning so bizarre.
j e:
But for the most part the public saw next to nothing of LBJ’s crude behavior, and the media didn’t report on it till much later.
I certainly was unaware of it at the time, and I think I was fairly typical. LBJ was thought to be rather unsophisticated, but his vulgar and yet biting wit was not on public display at all, much less his somewhat idiosyncratic bathroom proclivities.
There were Germans who were willing to risk their own lives to resist Hitler…but not to kill him, because that would be ‘murder’, and also, for the military men, because it would violate their oaths.
Art Deco:
Thing is, Goldberg burned his bridges in that regard quite some time ago, I think. His Obama book was entitled A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media. I think that posing for the “others” wasn’t really what Goldberg’s been doing for the last decade or more, and that’s why his stance here really surprised me.
Oh now I can place him….he used to show up on O’Reilly’s show on a regular basis. Yep, he, at least back then, seemed relatively sane. Funny, how he can’t see that not voting for Trump helps Harris win the presidency. (I’m going to leave any reference to Biden off from now on..we know who’s going to be actually running the show.)
In the Holy Roman Empire (‘neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire’), there were people designated as the Electors. They, and only they, got to vote on who the next Emperor would be.
I think we have something kind of similar in America today. There is a class of people…academics, national journalists….who believe that it is up to them not necessarily to choose the final President, but to vet and approve those who can be seriously considered. A lot of the fury at Trump lies in the fact that he (and his supporters) reject their authority to do this.
@David Foster a lot of people wanted to kill him… a whole lot… No fewer than 42 plots have been uncovered by historians… the others which cant be known are at least that many… I once had the pleasure to watch a documentary that outlined HOW they prevented this from happening and allowed for the appearance of the openness. The structure of the soldiers creating zones in zones in zones… the population being spread out with no place to go and soldiers every few feet, and unknown soldiers in the crowd all over. the common knowledge of the brutal treatment of malcontents, and on and on…
and despite that, he still had a whole lot of people want and try…
here is a list
List of assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassination_attempts_on_Adolf_Hitler
David Foster:
They don’t understand “… and the horse they rode in on.”
This aversion to Trump made a tiny amount of sense before he got elected and you could imagine him doing all these world-endingly terrible things. But Trump has been President for almost four years now and literally NONE of those doom-fantasies have come anywhere close to reality.
The problem is plain and simple narcissism. David French is even worse on this than Goldberg but narcissism pretty much defines the non-rational Trump enmity out there. Trump’s election and success in office is proof positive that a whole bunch of people aren’t nearly and smart or as good as they think they are and that wound to their ego must be salved.
Mike
I recommend this website as a good place to follow the Covid story. The writer is an intelligent layman and surveys key material in 3 languages: English, Hebrew and German.
https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/
But in addition, the fellow has written a 3 volume fiction series with an alt-history theme where one of the Hitler assassination plots succeeds.
Operation Flash.
https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2020/07/19/july-20-21-book-promotion-operation-flash-episodes-1-3-all-free-on-amazon/
(Sorry, promotion has expired, no longer a free download LOL)
I have yet to see a convincing unified theory explaining the white hot hatred for Trump from so many. For every theory their is a ‘yeah, but’ answer for one group or another.
I think that this whole episode is further evidence of just how extraordinarily effective—and destructive to the country—the demonization of and lies about Donald Trump, by the Obama-Clinton-DOJ-MSCM consortium, have been.
And it doesn’t seem to matter, alas, how “intelligent”—or even “relatively sane”—a person is.
Significant swaths of the country—and much of the world—has essentially overdosed on the “drug” that’s been—and is still being—pushed relentlessly by the Clinton-Obama-MSCM syndicate….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49M10VIXPk4
Artfl…”a lot of people wanted to kill him… a whole lot… No fewer than 42 plots have been uncovered by historians”….yes, I know there were indeed a lot of attempts. Yet there were also people…people whose personal courage wasn’t lacking…who had moral qualms about doing so. It is an odd view of purity, to my way of thinking.
I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 because I feared if he won, he’d botch the job so badly, the price might be disastrous for the country and would bury the Republican Party for a generation. I know others voted otherwise, but that was my reasoning then and I stand by it.
However, four years later Trump is still obnoxious, yet I don’t see he has caused any disasters. One may disagree with Trump’s policies, but given his conservatism he has done a decent job. I will vote for Trump happily in November.
The curious thing I constantly notice with Trump-haters is that their hate is entirely personal. To the extent they try to be substantive, they are dishonest. They complain about things like Covid deaths and the post-Covid economy, as though those were purely a matter of Trump’s incompetence.
At the end of the day, though, Goldberg is being merely dishonest (and doing his best to rationalize his dishonesty. OK, he’s a human being…).
At the same time he may feel that were he to actually pull the lever for Trump he’d be totally ostracized by his family, friends and colleagues.
TOTALLY. IOW, his life would, in certain important ways, be adversely affected (basically end?).
(IOW, he’s no Dershowitz, but then how many are?…How many of us DO have the courage of our convictions?… To be sure, we still DO NOT KNOW how Dershowitz will vote come November, and he’s under no obligation to tell us….)
I still recall how my grandmother responded to my father when he admitted voting for Nixon in 1972….
I think that posing for the “others” wasn’t really what Goldberg’s been doing for the last decade or more,
Hypothesis: it’s one thing to say a plague on all your houses, and another thing to move into one of those houses and declare the occupants preferable. The one stance maintains a pose of exacting standards. The other declares some real-world options better than others.
NB, in declaring for Trump, he’d be declaring that for structural reasons, the Democratic Party cannot be trusted with political office – ie that people like him should accept various policy nostrums they don’t care for in order to avoid something worse. But, telling your relatives and professional colleagues and what not that they’re enablers of something worse requires a certain vigor. I haven’t managed it myself, as I try to avoid political topics with relatives. Luckily for me, the proximate relations are the one’s least likely to dump sh!t on Facebook.
It’s interesting to compare Goldberg to the NeverTrump crew, who are somewhat variable in their dispositions but now mostly engaged in making the case for Joseph Biden (after having spent five years huffing about muh principles). It’s just that none of them can articulate a clear argument as to why Trump is a threat to the constitution of liberty. The usual tactic of the NeverTrump crew is to take a snippet of something he’s said and whinge about it. The various investigations provided conversational red herrings, but it’s hard to keep up the effort when all the parties know it’s BS.
I read this the other day and I was reminded of it by Neo’s comments about Goldberg’s seeming inconsistency. I suggest that it is well worth reading the whole thing. Given the conversation of this thread it’s kind of an anti-Goldberg tract.
https://townhall.com/columnists/waynegrudem/2020/08/08/letter-to-an-antitrump-christian-friend-n2573909
Art Deco:
I get what you’re saying, but the thing about Bernard Goldberg in this essay is that he is declaring the occupant of one house preferable. He’s already said he’s a libertarian conservative. But in the essay he’s also saying quite clearly that he wants Trump to win in a landslide. And yet he won’t vote for him, although he clearly thinks he’s preferable.
“To be sure, we still DO NOT KNOW how Dershowitz will vote come November, and he’s under no obligation to tell us….)” [Barry Meislin @ 5:34 pm]
This is also true of Bernard Goldberg; regardless of what he says now we have no idea how he will vote then, and the ensuing ~10 weeks is a political eternity.
I have yet to see a convincing unified theory explaining the white hot hatred for Trump from so many. For every theory their is a ‘yeah, but’ answer for one group or another.
Trump disregards quite flagrantly the tastes and prejudices of a certain bourgeois type and displays his affection for the sort of person that type despises. These types have made Republican politicians dance a jig for a generation now (Reagan and Spiro Agnew notable exceptions). They’re in danger of losing control of the narrative as long as he prospers. They’ve been doubling-down with ever more blatant social-fiction spinning the last six years.
Add to that the reflexive hostility to Republican politicians you find in certain communal segments (blacks, Puerto Ricans, California Chicanos, secular Jews). Add to that the concatenation of pathologies in the political intelligence of the young.
not excusing the guy but this could just be cover. come election day he might just run to the polls to vote for trump. after all the ballot is still secret…for now…..
I like MBunge’s narcissism as explanation.
The Credentialed Classes know in their damaged, traumatized, teeny tiny arrested development blighted hearts that Trump is a Natural and this flips them out into the standard issue rage explosion one generally gets whenever a Narcissist has his/her false self defenses penetrated.
That’s the out and out Trump Haters.
The standard disclaimers a tiny cuckservative few hedge around their grudging approval of Trump are I guess only partly virtue signaling / pearl clutching; there’s also I think a lot of inward-directed shoring up of fragile narcissistic defenses happening as well.
So we could be looking at different sides of the same coin with these behaviors.
We live in a sick, corrupted society. Always have. We’re fallen creatures, after all. The increasingly hysterical pretending to ourselves that we’re not is a bit of a problem.
Neo says: “Positions such as Goldberg’s are a bizarre sort of virtue-signaling that seems self-indulgent and illogical. And yet, those are rather common traits these days.”
An article posted on City Journal yesterday makes this same point: “As our current political discourse shows, many people employ moral talk for self-promotion and status-seeking. Hoping to be viewed as morally impressive, they use self-righteous attacks to shame political opponents and earn praise from their own political tribe.”
See “The Art of the Grandstand” at https://www.city-journal.org/moral-grandstanding
“And yet he won’t vote for him, although he clearly thinks he’s preferable.”
Try this for an explanation.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/499612-trumps-needless-nastiness-and-cruelty-will-catch-up-with-him
For good or ill, Goldberg is “part of the club” or at least desperately wants to believe he is. Donald Trump is NOT a member. Therefore, Goldberg is perfectly content to see Trump maligned as a white supremacist and a traitor. That doesn’t count, you see. But when Trump dishes the invective back at other members of “the club”…well, that can’t be tolerated.
One of the things elites do is create a particular set of manners to distinguish themselves from their supposed inferiors. As elite classes degenerate and decay, they elevate those manners and social mores to laws of nature which can NEVER be flouted.
Mike
The French had to construct a semi-automated greedy algorithm hair salon in the centre of the Place de la Concorde in order to effect a revolution in decadent elite manners and mores.
Current trends point towards a more basic bespoke artisanal approach.
Curious. I would think a commentator willing to declare his sincere hope for a Trump landslide, would be willing to declare his intention to vote for Trump, with however many asterisks about how he would prefer not to.
Doesn’t Goldberg lose his elite credentials by siding overwhelmingly with Trump 2020? Is not voting for Trump a fig leaf by which Goldberg hopes to appease his class?
Why not “in for a penny, in for a pound”?
It does seem, as neo and others have suggested, that this is some sort of interior calculation of self-justification.
Art Deco,
Yes, but I know more than a few lower to middle class working people that hate Trump and it has nothing to do with taste. I think the reflexive hatred of Republicans plays a part across the board but nothing seems to explain it entirely.
I have a younger relative who seems to be obsessed with gay and trans issues and it was pointed out long ago to her that Trump was pro gay marriage long before the saintly Obama but never phased her. Decided he hated gays end story. I see a lot of that with tons of groups.
Griffin: And that’s the thing. Those who hate Trump, hate Trump, and they never really get to the substantive issues, they just hate Trump. Or at least think they are supposed to.
I reconnected with an old liberal friend a couple years ago and he declared after Trump was elected, he gave thought to assassinating Trump. It was probably melodrama, but nonetheless, he said it. The reason he gave was that Trump would sink climate change efforts and therefore doom humanity, but that’s kind of a thin reed to support such an immediate, murderous ambition.
He wasn’t the psychic Christopher Walken character in “Dead Zone” who had visions of Martin Sheen starting WW III.
Possibly, Pelosi’s (et al.) ace up her sleeve:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/coup-porn-resistance-sees-military-removing-trump-from-office
H/T Powerline blog
See also:
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2020/08/13/would-the-military-side-with-leftist-tyranny-or-with-america-n2574175
@Barry Meislin:
Top Brass have their eyes on the Brass Ring — Defense Industry Graft post retirement. Didn’t get where they are by rocking the establishment boat and are unlikely to think differently during a constitutional crisis. Can well imagine them intoning platitudes about their oaths to Muh Constitution and arresting Trump.
White Deplorable Rank and File would see things differently and might start fragging Generals. Too many Generals, anyway.
A virtue signal balancing a non vote is inferior to one leading to a vote for the better candidate. But both are preferable to votes for Biden-Harris, which some will cast wholly for virtue signal reasons. Imagine doing the later and then having to live with the horrific consequences Goldberg cites.
This is where the multiverse of theoretical physics and ones destiny beyond this life enter the picture. Standing before the abyss, Bernard will have a last chance to assess and decide differently.
At crunch time, we sometimes act for reasons we don’t fully understand because the presence of factors unseen is nevertheless felt. An abstract hypothetical decision is entirely different from one made in the presence of the reality matrix. Choosing wisely or unwisely is a learning process on the long journey of many lifetimes.
Moreover, Mr Goldberg, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.
You sense the consequences of a bad choice. What will you do?
Let’s dispassionately check back with him down the road.
A masterful summing up of the pitfalls and challenges ahead by Andrew McCarthy. (I’m also posting this at the “en banc” Flynn post as it’s also apropos):
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/08/24/barrs-dilemma-how-to-get-politics-out-of-the-justice-department/#slide-1
A must read.
“One of the things elites do is create a particular set of manners to distinguish themselves from their supposed inferiors.” [M Bunge @ 6:26 pm]
Shibboleths have been around since biblical times. There is nothing new under the sun.
“…Brass…”
Well, it’s crazy stuff…but we’re living in crazy times. Absolutely insane.
(And—if true—a further reason why Michael Flynn must not be freed to, potentially, clean up the morass.)
And the Democrats have shown us that they are as ruthless as they are insane.
Which is why I found McCarthy’s magnificent column on Barr (see above) so encouraging—solid and forthright, a breath of fresh air, a pin-prick of light in what seems like the ever darkening landscape.
I first began to take Trump seriously in the summer of 2015. My youngest sister was undergoing cancer treatment in northeastern Ohio, and another patient in the chemo clinic was very kind and encouraging to my sister. This patient’s name was Jackie.
Over the several hours of treatment one day, Jackie, then seventy-eight years old, talked about her several cancer diagnoses as well as that of her youngest grandson, who was two years old at the time and had been in the hospital for much of his short life. She also talked about her disgust and disillusionment with the Republicans she had voted for in 2010, 2012, and 2014, and she expressed her enthusiasm for Donald Trump to be elected president. I thought that Jackie’s was a silly and unrealistic hope, and that Trump himself was preposterous, but I noted her passionate sincerity as well as the depth of her good character.
As an independent, I had voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary, had abstained from voting in the 2008 presidential election, and had voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. By the summer of 2016, I was thoroughly turned off by Hillary Clinton, even before her infamous “deplorables” remark. And I was increasingly sympathetic to Trump and hoped he would win, but, like Bernard Goldberg, I did not intend to vote for Trump myself. He was just too outrageous, and all my liberal and leftist Democratic friends were horrified by his alleged racism, xenophobia, homophobia, ad infinitum.
On election day, I stood in the voting booth and chose all my down-ticket candidates. Then I hesitated. Vote for Hillary, whom I had once supported? Vote for Trump? Abstain again from voting for president? I was in California at the time, and my vote for president didn’t matter anyway.
But as I wavered, Hillary’s “deplorables” remark came back to me. I knew that Hillary had been talking about Jackie. And I decided that it would be morally and ethically despicable for me to hope that Jackie and other “deplorables” would vote for Trump but not to vote for him myself.
I have never regretted my vote for Trump and Pence, especially not on the afternoon of November 9, 2016, as crowds including schoolchildren marched down my street chanting “Not my president,” in one of the many “spontaneous” demonstrations that kicked off what is now almost four years of Democrats’ refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election.
I can’t wait to vote for Trump again.
More good news (I hope):
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/08/13/exclusive-trump-turns-the-tables-on-civil-rights-commission-with-appointment-of-j-christian-adams-n787758
It certainly looks (to me, at least) like Trump is revving up.
That is a good article on Barr. I wish there were more like him.
I read Goldberg’s column a few days ago. His cognitive dysfunction reminds me of Orwell’s observation of pacifist’s inability to accept the reality that their pacifism was only sustainable because others were willing to fight against those who see pacifism as weakness and an invitation to aggression.
MollyG:
What an interesting story.
Thanks, Neo. I forgot to mention that Jackie was also the full-time caregiver for her husband, who had Alzheimer’s. So deplorable of her, no?
There’s a whole lot of what Bernard Goldberg articulates in his essay present in today’s culture. I think the truth is, cognitive dissonance is something that rational people consciously try to avoid – and they avoid it by applying their ability to think critically and methodically until they resolve the elements that are causing the problem, articulating their thoughts to precision. In the distant ancestral path, this skill probably helped people to survive by noticing things that didn’t make sense and were thus potential existential threats.
But today it’s relatively easy to survive. And even easier in the highly-serviced metropolitan areas, mostly ‘blue’. So: Cognitive Dissonance: no problem!
The more perceptive modern writers note these problems – Mamet for example: ‘in order for democrats, liberals, progressives et al to continue their illogical belief systems they have to pretend not to know a lot of things’
But nobody seems to notice the corollary to this: Sheer moral laziness lets people entertain these inconsistencies and even come to relish them (as Goldberg does) without ever taking on the responsibility of resolving them. It’s not ‘pretending not to notice’; it’s active participation. People of all political stripes have their inconsistencies, but only Progressives seem to treasure them to the point of neuroses, nourish them and demand that others join in with them to share in the lunacy.
Just plain crazy.
Actually, conservatives/Republicans almost always have to be perfect to reduce the risk of criticism from the left, and, sadly, to get well-deserved acceptance from their fellow conservatives/Republicans.
Too bad people don’t keep in mind that perfect should not be made the enemy of the good. And, too bad people don’t remember what the late, great, HIZZONER Ed Koch said:
“If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.”
Barry Meislin,
No way will Barr be able to restore the DOJ. The political makeup of society will not allow it. The leftist cancer has metastasized too deeply, too widely for lesser measures.
Tragically, the radical left’s prescription of what effectively amounts to America’s dissolution but in reverse is the only remaining prescriptive for America’s renewal.
After our ‘disagreement’ is permanently settled, among other measures… outlawing ALL totalitarian ideologies will be a necessary preventative to future infections.
By definition, totalitarian ideologies are existential, mortal threats to liberty and anyone who embraces one cannot in good faith adhere to our Constitutional precepts.
They, of their own free will… in embracing totalitarian ideologies forfeit any claim to American citizenship. Revoking of their citizenship and deportation is the least proportionate consequence for their choice.
I had forgotten – probably because a handful of others were more vehement – that you were a never Trumper (in effect) who could not accept the “Flight 93” election analogy premise which so many of us who had been Cruz supporters saw as unfortunately apt.
As we all here know, there were several – particularly two or three – commenters who claimed to be convinced that Trump was so morally unfit and tainted, that even if he did do what he said he would do (which they rejected as a possibility) the social fabric of our precious polity would be so riven, and the thousand points of sensitive Republican conservatism light so befouled, that it would be better to lose our liberties for a while than allow such a man into the Executive Office.
Because you know, we can always get our freedoms back in 4 or 8 or 12 or however many years.
And where are these sensitive souls now? Why have they not returned to Neo’s blog in order to explain themselves, or defend their earlier decision to surrender to the left at that time rather than roll the dice on Trump and fight on?
They are effen nowhere to be seen.
So much for the courage and integrity of the sensitive conservative: who conserves nothing, and is sensitive only to his own insecurities and the opinions of others.
A commenter here just used the term “other directed”; which I have not heard used in some years. It is particularly apt in this regard, I think.
BG says this near the end of his column, “And if Joe Biden wins it won’t be because of me or a few million people like me. It will be because of Donald Trump.”
So it’s win win for Bernie Goldberg. If Trump wins, the country’s saved. Yay. If he loses, the loss of the country will be laid at Trump’s feet forever. The country will be gone but Bernie will be proven right. Yay.
Goldberg’s limp-wristed sputtering puts me in mind of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.
Goldberg sleeps comfortably under the blanket of freedom that others have provided & POTUS has defended from the anarchists all around us & that little yapper has the audacity to question that provision & defense.
My grandmother used to say “He can kiss where I can’t.”
I’m pretty sure she wasn’t thinking her own elbow.
I’m going to muff up my favorite Polish story (folktale?). It really needs the visual of the hand gesture and I did try to look it up to give you a better version but no such luck. Here goes:
An old married couple start a friendly discussion over which is the better cutting tool. The husband says it’s the razor. The wife says it’s scissors. The argument gets more and more heated. (Very funny if the narrator is a good story teller. I am not.) Finally the anger gets so intense that the husband drags his wife to a well? maybe a lake. He tells her he’s going to drown her if she doesn’t admit that a razor cuts better. She responds, “scissors, scissors, scissors.” He pulls her in, plunges her head under the water. “For the last time admit that the razor is better,” he says. With her last dying bit of strength she pushes her hand out of the water moving her index and middle finger back and forth – signifying scissors.
In our family we would make that scissor gesture when arguments moved into the realm of absurdity. (Although the husband was just as much at fault . . . and that would start another argument.)
There really is something in human nature (and Trump triggers it) that will push people to take a stand against their own interests in order to spite the other person. Even if that other person will never know and would never care. Trump won’t lose one second of sleep over Bernie Goldberg’s opinion of him. Yet Goldberg gets emotional satisfaction out of doing something that he acknowledges is damaging to himself but might also be damaging to Trump.
BG sounded OK much of the time when he was a guest on O’Reilly years ago but here he sounds more like another virtue signaling narcissist elitist. He doesn’t want Biden/Harris to win but can’t bring himself to vote for Trump because why? What a jerk.
Of course, Goldberg, and the Never-Trumpers, and other people who agree with his actions hate Trump. He’s so utterly bourgeois, so nouveau riche, such a parvenu, so ne-kulturny! He prefers Big Macs to kale salads. He boasts about himself so frequently. He doesn’t bow to the press. He’s comfortable with construction workers. He’s got it, and he flaunts it! Feh, feh, feh!
Molly, your story is touching. Mine wasn’t as human-interest, since it happened a couple of days before the election, not in the voting booth as such. It’s interesting that you got that personal effect from the female Clinton’s remarks, but not that you took it personally on your own behalf, but rather on that of someone else, so to speak. To me, that’s what makes your story unusual.
If everyone that is a NeverTrumper or a center-Left moderate Democrat thinks like Bernard Goldberg, Trump will win the Electoral College and the popular vote by 65M to 55M because a substantial portion of the moderate anti-Trump faction won’t show up.
I was one of the original NeverTrump letter signers. I have changed. Not because my view of Trump has changed but because I believe a free and critical press is essential to a successful functioning Democracy. If Biden is elected, the Press will assume the role of cheerleader and abandon its search for truth and corruption. I am certain, however, that if Trump is reelected they may abandon their ethics but they won’t abandon criticizing a sitting President.
I believe Goldberg is now a resident of Florida, so that his vote might count.
Pox on both their houses, leaves one with no option but to quarantine forever. So Goldie, hold your breath, till there ain’t no more.
Don’t know where Goldberg lives but probably some state like New York where him not voting for Trump won’t actually matter anyway.
Goldberg represents Washington D.C., nothing more. Folks there get paid by lobbyists and foreigners.
Trump and Reagan are the only guys in the last 40 years who have done or attempted to do exactly what they campaigned on which reduces the value of people like Goldberg.
“I don’t like his chronic dishonesty.”
As president, what exactly has he deliberately lied about? Goldberg never says.
Never Trump people are a waste of breath. Even in supporting Trump, Goldberg lies about his chronic dishonesty. Compared to the hideous past Presidents except Reagan, and alternatives on the wretched left, Trump is literally an angel in skin.
What we need are Republicans with a backbone, none of which are likely here. Certainly not in the Senate.
He made his public pose. It’s not personal, it’s business.
In the privacy of the voting booth he’ll vote for Trump.
If he lives in NY, he probably doesn’t want to get “cancelled” if he doesn’t have too. Might be socially permissible to lay out the case for Trump, but its social suicide to say you’ll vote for him.
Suspect Goldberg and lots of other Dems and Reps will be pulling the lever (or scroll wheel, etc.) for Trump in the privacy of the voting booth without ever telling a soul.
BTW, does NYC allow party line voting? Pull one lever for all GOP nominees without seeing their names? Suspect Trump will do way better where there’s party line voting – which I suspect is in Dem/union strongholds. Blows up the models.
Imho, the National Review became a bought and paid for shill for the CCP via Google’s money and likely other tech tyrants as well. How better to explain the slide?
Huxley. Far as I can tell, people who hate Trump start with a vicious adjective and then pretend, or pretend to themselves, that it represents objective truth. Facts, as has been said so often, don’t matter.
IOW, they don’t start with facts. For some reason, they hate first.
Can’t recall if I mentioned it here: Got a college friend–class of mid-Sixties–who’s been in big pharma all his professional career. Comes Trump and HCL and….”we need studies to find if it’s safe”…. This guy knows his employer’s been shipping it out by the supertanker load for half a century. For RA, lupus, and OTC in the tropics as an anti-malarial. No problems. But I can’t even be sure he’s actually lying. Given the way things go, he might actually believe himself. I can see people lying on purpose for their own goals. Happens all the time. But what goal can my friend have? Is it worth letting people die to make Trump look bad? (ed. of course, you silly) But would somebody make that decision consciously? A normal person? Or does my friend now have to believe that what he’s known for decades….never actually happened?
Molly G. Speaking of deplorable: I’m retired but I forgot about never answering the phone. So my wife and I are involved in various activities like Meals on Wheels. You see the other folks loading up in a blizzard, you go to a senior facility and there is a plumber fixing an intake pipe. Deliver to a homebound person and see the neighbor mowing his lawn.
Somebody takes a friend to a medical appointment. Neighbors arrange a schedule to provide meals to a family having a rough time.
Lots of guys working jobs to support families and the jobs are the kind where you shower after work, not before.
I took the “deplorables” remark not just as bad politics but as a vicious insult to an enormous class of very good people who didn’t deserve it. And I have relations who believe they do, and laugh scornfully at those folks.
Camille Paglia once suggested we could fix feminism by having all men stay home from work the same three days.
How about having all deplorables take three days off?
Chuba. They never say, except possibly to point to a metaphor as if it were meant to be literal truth. NOW WE GOT HIM!
Goldberg lists a litany of what can arguably be called facts, outlining the devastation a Biden / Camilla (oops, Kamala) victory will produce.
It means nothing to him; not a F’n thing.
When an individual is delusional, as well as simply stupid, the facts don’t matter. He is right in there with the moon landings took place in Hollywood or the jurors in the OJ trial or the Bush/Cheney/Halliburton/Mossad destruction of the twin towers.
Note that his entire objection to Trump is Trump’s objectionable personality (to some), braggadocio and overall presidential (or lack thereof) persona.
Goldberg makes NOT ONE mention of Trump’s policies and how, in the aggregate, they have been beneficial to the citizenry of this nation. To Goldberg this means nothing.
One need not be a historian to realize that there is ZERO correlation betwixt a president’s public persona and his competence as president. . I give you Barry HUSSEIN Obama, Jimmy Carter and Woodrow Wilson as examples.
Many (most?) folks can not see beyond the personality of a candidate, irrespective of their policies. They will vote depending upon their view of the candidates personality – whether they find it agreeable or not – and/or the candidates public speaking skills.
The superficial assessment of candidates – based mostly on the candidates personality and/or public speaking skills unfortunately exert a disproportionate influence on a voter’s decision.
It masks or renders secondary the policies the candidate intends to implement.
And this is how a constitutional republic can vote to literally destroy itself.
It is really unbelievable that any sentient human (not ANTIFA/BLM/CPUSA) can justify voting for BiteMe/Camilla.
The path into the abyss they will take this nation is clear for anyone to see.
By the way, anyone considering moving to Uruguay?? How is it there for US emigres??
How to reconcile the statements that he hopes Trump wins, yet he can’t vote for him?
Note: not that he WON’T vote for him. He CAN’T vote for him.
Sounds like he is acknowledging a power that’s taken over him, preventing him from exercising his free will.
In other words, right there he admitted he’s insane.
He’s a child.
With a child’s mind.
I basically agree with him. It’s not that Trump is such a great president, but the Democrats are just so bad that I’d prefer to see Trump win. In a vindictive sense, I would also love for the far left to have a resounding defeat and see that most Americans aren’t on their side. At the same time, I think people should vote for the person whose vision for the country is closest to theirs. You shouldn’t feel forced to vote for someone you fundamentally disagree with.
“Goldberg makes NOT ONE mention of Trump’s policies . . . .” [John Tyler @ 9:53 above]
This is precisely the point made by Wayne Grudem in his letter I referenced above:
https://townhall.com/columnists/waynegrudem/2020/08/08/letter-to-an-antitrump-christian-friend-n2573909
T–Thank you for that article. I’m a Catholic but I completely agree with the points made throughout. The theology doesn’t matter. Social-justice Catholics will side with this man’s friend for the same reasons. Policy or judgment of character? I apply the same premise to my vote as I would to choosing the best surgeon–qualification based on past results and positions/ability going forward. One would think Trump was a murderer based on the hatred and contempt that is prevalent among his detractors.
Sharon W,
You are welcome.
I found Grudem’s response to be a devastating takedown of the “I like what Trump has done, but I won’t vote for him anyway” philosophy that Bernard Goldberg purports to agree with. Grudem’s letter not only deals with policy matters, but also character issues. Admitting to a character red line that shouldn’t be crossed by a president, he argues that Trump has not crossed it.
Ultimately, my take is: 1) that we are voting for a president, not a rabbi, priest or saint; 2) that we have a record of both action and behavior in which the evidence of action overwhelmingly outweighs criticism of behavior; and 3) that we are voting against the ultimate dissolution of the United States by the progressive politics of the left.
Paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the candidate you have not the candidate you want.
On further thought, it seems to me that the philosophy that Goldberg and his ilk (Romney?) support is of the same school of thought that wants to destroy statues of Washington, Jefferson, etc.. “I like what Trump has done, but I won’t vote for him anyway,” is not unlike “I appreciate Washington but we shouldn’t have a statue to him because he was a slave owner.”
This attitude has almost become a Zeitgeist which has mesmerized the land and to which people in the public eye (sports figures, CEOs, politicians, etc.) have succumbed, and one can’t rationally argue with someone who has reached their point of view irrationally.
@T:
Re: “Ultimately, my take is: 1) that we are voting for a president, not a rabbi, priest or saint….”
Yes, I find that a lot of people seem unable to appreciate what voting is.
Voting just is a means by which a citizen can indirectly decrease the likelihood of bad changes happening to his country, and increase the likelihood of good changes. But these likelihoods are relative to one another. Consequently, voting is nearly always a calculated exercise of choosing the lesser evil.
In voting, the voter indirectly affects the future in several ways:
1. His vote increases the likelihood of the candidate he votes for being elected, but it doesn’t deterministically ensure it;
2. If elected, the candidate will become an officeholder who may choose to exercise the power of that office in the way the voter expects, but that isn’t certain;
3. If elected, the candidate may be able to achieve the policy gains the voter hopes for, but that isn’t certain;
4. By voting for that candidate, the voter also thereby indirectly empowers the party the candidate is associated with, his advisors and political allies, his various hired staff, his campaign donors, and any nominees/appointees the officeholder may nominate, appoint, or confirm: A whole loosely-connected entourage of other persons.
Those four items describe a whole package; you get all of it when you vote for a candidate. It is that package that you’re voting for. It is that package that you’re comparing against the competition, deciding which package is likely to produce lesser evils.
That’s what voting is; here are some things voting isn’t:
(a.) It isn’t a stamp of approval on all the candidate’s personal traits.
(b.) It doesn’t establish a personal connection or loyalty-tie between you and the candidate;
(c.) It doesn’t make you a member of a club or tribe for whom the candidate is established as the exemplary member.
If Goldberg really got that he wouldn’t worry about the fact that he was voting for Trump in preference to the current Prog/SJW Machine. He’d realize that, in doing so, he would merely be doing what voters always do: Altering ever-so-slightly the probabilities of good vs. bad things happening to the country. He’d be putting his tiny shoulder up to one end of the country, helping the rest of us to shove it infintessimally away from the dark and towards the light.
By refusing to vote for Trump, he refuses to put his shoulder to the load. By saying that, well, at least he isn’t voting for the Democrat, he’s offering to put his pinky there, instead. (Gee, thanks, pal.)
Trump is an excellent example of Krittika energies, which I also hold and use by extending the energy outwards. This burns people it contacts, so much that the automatic defense is to blame the originator of the energy as a troll or defective. I ntruth, these energies purify and expose the darkness of deception to the light, which many people’s ego identities cannot handle as it would kill them.
Sure you can relate to Goldberg’s dilemma, Neo. If the choice is to vote for a candidate who nominally represents your political views but who you think is intrinsically evil, and another candidate who represents political views you see as evil but who is now nothing but a benign and hollow shell, then it becomes no choice – none of the above.
A year ago when I left this forum after more than four years of regular comments, I said that Donald Trump had finally convinced me no matter the conservative policies he professed, the judges he appointed, and the actual accomplishments of his administration, I could no longer back him. I gave the reasons then and won’t rehash them. You answered and vehemently disputed everything.
What I will point out to your readers is that all during the lead up to Trump’s election in 2016, you were extremely critical of him. In fact you delved into his sordid personal and business past almost with a vengeance. But when it came time to vote in November 2016, after all this trashing of his character, but after he had become the Republican nominee, you bugged out! You left it up to your readers and contributors to decide.
You never personally admitted how you voted.
Maybe you left the space blank?
Maybe you voted for Hillary?
Maybe you voted for the Libertarian?
Maybe you didn’t vote at all?
We’ll never know, and neither will your many liberal friends and relatives. You play both sides of the fence Neo. There’s a word for that.
As to Goldberg, I’m exactly in his position in hoping that Trump wins, but he won’t do it with my vote.
Pingback:‘Tis Mere Piffle’ Says The Mindless One
The other Chuck,
Certainly, it is your right to decide how to use (or not) your vote. I may not agree, but I do defend that right. Goldberg’s too, of course. Just keep in mind: “As to Goldberg, I’m exactly in his position in hoping that Trump wins, but he won’t do it with my vote,” “You play both sides of the fence [Chuck]. There’s a word for that.”
Other Chuck:
I have never described Trump as “evil,” nor have I thought of him that way, even during the primaries when I did not support him at all because I thought he was a loose cannon who was unpredictable and might be untrustworthy (also a blowhard and a braggart, of course). I wouldn’t vote for someone I considered “evil” unless in some hideous dystopic scenario that person was running against someone even more evil. But as I said, I never thought Trump was evil.
And as I’ve written at great length since Trump has been president, I approve of most of the things he’s done as president, and although I still find him to be a blowhard and a braggart, these tendencies are very much overshadowed by his accomplishments.
But in terms of the principle involved in revealing how a person votes – I don’t owe it to anyone to say how I voted or how I will vote nor does anyone else. However, I believe most of my friends think they know; I don’t hide my politics from people in my private life. And most of the people on this blog almost certainly think they know. However, in contrast to this, Goldberg volunteered the information as to who he planned to vote for, and attempted to explain why. I think that in the year 2020 with the choices we are facing now – even more dire and urgent than in 2016, which was dire and urgent enough, and with a great deal more of a political track record for what Trump does and will do as president – no one should stand on the sort of niceties that Goldberg is describing.
Obviously, you have a right to vote however you wish. But I think both you and Goldberg are making a very poor choice and one that is 100% unjustified by the facts.
I also think that in his public life as a politician (that’s most of his adult life), Biden has been deeply flawed in character in ways that are at least as bad and I think actually worse than Trump. Nor do I think that Biden is so senile that those things don’t remain as part of his character and performance. However, what’s far worse than that are the far left positions he now embraces and the far leftists who will actually be the powers behind his throne. The entire picture is vile. So this description/hypothetical you offered of the supposed dilemma is very far off the mark:
But Trump is not intrinsically evil or evil at all. Nor is Goldberg saying that he’s intrinsically evil, unless your definition of “evil” is “flawed,” in which case all politicians would be evil. And Biden – or what’s left of him – is not benign, nor is he completely hollow although he is significantly hollow. What’s left of him is awful, as he always was. And those behind him, who will wield the real power, are not the least bit benign. They are the opposite of benign.