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On the Democrats’ dream of stopping Trump’s SCOTUS nominee — 21 Comments

1. There are two Trumps: the one who tweets /speaks at rallies and the one who governs. The former continues to irritate me, though less so. I like the latter better every month. My worry in 2016 was that his critics were at least partly right, and there was a chance he would do impulsive, dangerous things. I didn’t think that was certain or even likely, but I thought it possible.

   I no longer think so. He might turn out to be wrong about some of these decisions, such as tariffs or North Korea, but they aren’t crazy ideas.

   As for the tweeting Trump, he is not that different from what Democrats have done for years. I have long maintained that the inflamed and extreme comments of the Democratic mainstream (including Senators and Presidents) are about the same as those of the fire-breathing conservative fringe. Trump changes that, but not in the way liberals claim.

2. I have a theory that what Trump is doing is to nominate the least controversial person, even one who has some conservatives suspicious. The Democrats now have to decide if this is the hill they want to die on today. Red state Democrats are being told to fall on their swords now.

   Bart Stupak made that sacrifice for Obamacare and ended his career.

   Assuming they do so and lose five or six more seats, Trump will have a bigger majority for Amy Barrett when RBG goes to her reward,

3. “That’s how they justify those placards they had prepared protesting Trump’s SCOTUS appointee with a blank space left for the name to be filled in later. Any name.” [Neo]

   The other day Dennis Miller noted: “Trump could nominate Amy Coney Barrett or Vladimir Putin [for SCOTUS] and tomorrow’s headlines would be exactly the same.”

4. Dems have driven themselves nuts. ‘Tis a pity, but I pity them not.

5. The Yale law school alumni letter is the best example of this ridiculous hysteria.

   I bounce back and forth between thinking that this type of behavior is so exaggerated that it will never work to realizing that these are the people that will be our bureaucrats and often elected officials in just a few years.

6. Perhaps you know the old saying, Republicans think Democrats are stupid but Democrats think Republicans are evil? Well, it’s not exactly true; I know a lot of Republicans who think Democrats are evil.

   I suspect that has gone substantially up since 2001.

   Ann Coulter was it, probably.

7. I voted for Democrats for most of my life, but now I think the Democrat party is evil. What else could one call people like Senators Schumer, Durbin, and Harris, to name three?!?

   I don’t refer to myself as a Republican, however. They are too spineless.

   I guess I’m a constitutionalist, tea partying Trumpist.

8. Assistant Village Idiot:

   I have long had the same reaction as you, but a little while ago someone made what I think is a good observation.

   When we talk about Trump’s tweets, we are most likely talking about the ones that have been singled out by his enemies and spread across the mass media. That observer thought it highly likely there are a lot more tweets, ones we never hear about.

   Yes, some of his tweets make us shake our head. But others might well make a lot of sense, and we likely never hear about them.

9. Well, I think some on the left are evil. The masters, such as Chavez, Soros, Che, etc are surely evil by any definition of the word. But most are brainwashed dupes who believe in things they don’t understand. These are the people who do not understand the lessons of history or perhaps choose to ignore history, or believe it will be utopia if only the wiseman/woman comes along to make it a perfect world where the masses can be taught to believe in utopia. Those are the people who worshipped bho. The admirers of the crease in the pants.

10. Three of my five kids are leftists. Two are lawyers.

    They all think they know more than I do. The one conservative is the one I have given the least to. He is also the only who owns a nice home in California.

    The youngest I don’t hear from. She got mad at me because I did not buy her a new car. She is 28.

11. Mike K, right there with you. Both of my children are extreme liberals (I swear they were not raised that way!). We finally reached the point where it was nearly impossible to speak with each other unless politics was completely off limits. Usually unsatisfying but hey, it helps keep the peace. One lives in D.C. and the other in SanFran. Raised on a farm in Indiana. And I now live in west TN. They know in their hearts I am a gun toting, red neck Trump supporter and are ashamed. Wish I dared tell them the shame I feel over them sometimes! 🙂

12. The current “resistance” requires capitalization:The Resistance. That is how the Dems see themselves and call themselves. They coined the term for themselves, as being somehow similar to the French Resistance against the Nazis.

    I believe history is repeating itself. The French Resistance was idolized by US writers though it was far less than representative of French feelings, and really yielded precious little anti-Nazi effect.

    We are seeing history repeating itself as farce.

    The Resistance, my ass. They are babykillers (see Jason Riley’s WSJ piece today for the black abortion data) and favor all forms of sexual perversion. They will find no sanctuary in my church.

13. Republicans think Democrats are stupid but Democrats think Republicans are evil?

    Democrats do NOT think Republicans are evil. Democrats propagandize that Republicans are stupid and evil.

    I believe that Democrats are SMART and EVIL.

    A funny article on the place of conservatives and liberals (as those terms are used today) in history can be found here:
    http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2016/tle855-20160117-04.html

14. Ira,

    I can just imagine the exchange:

    Dem to Rep: You’re evil!

    Rep, in retort: Yeah, OK, but we’re also stupid! What’s your excuse?

15. The irony here for Democrats is that the “resistance” is fueled by their conviction that Trump has violated key norms and threatens the institutions of SOCIAL democracy

    Social democracy is a political, social and economic ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal democratic polity and capitalist economy. The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy; measures for income redistribution and regulation of the economy in the general interest; and welfare state provisions.

    Social democracy originated as a political ideology that advocated an evolutionary and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism using established political processes in contrast to the revolutionary approach to transition associated with orthodox Marxism.

    In the early post-war era in Western Europe, social democratic parties rejected the Stalinist political and economic model then current in the Soviet Union, committing themselves either to an alternative path to socialism or to a compromise between capitalism and socialism

    In this period, social democrats embraced a mixed economy based on the predominance of private property, with only a minority of essential utilities and public services under public ownership. As a result, social democracy became associated with Keynesian economics, state interventionism and the welfare state, while abandoning the prior goal of replacing the capitalist system (factor markets, private property and wage labor) with a qualitatively different socialist economic system.

    they believe they are and have the people behind the social transition from capitalism to communism and every time someone backs that up, it must be the classic fascists (like germany or more like bukharin) in wanting more economy and less direct control (preferring to use licensing, inspections, dikta of how to do business, etc. (sound familiar, it should)).

    so… they leave the word social out…

    by doing so, they paint exit on the entrancesigns and entrance on the exit signs and their charges work harder taking the place apart thinking they are making it stronger

    I have been explainging the process states use (from the 150-200 years of political papers no one reads but them!!) to do this for a decade..

    quite boring we never get past it trying to understand the processes…
    cant throw a wrench in a process you dont understand and chatting while everyone gets old and dies out is kind of a waste of good time even if its miserably entertaining for some

16. All news is lies and all propaganda is disguised as news. Willi Münzenberg

    below:
    The Technique of a Coup d’Etat
    http://www.idc-europe.org/en/The-Technique-of-a-Coup-d-Etat

    2a. Willi Münzenberg

    One of the modern masters of such media control was the German Communist from whom Joseph Goebbels learned his trade, Willi Münzenberg.

    Münzenberg was not only the inventor of spin, he was also the first person who perfected the art of creating a network of opinion-forming journalists who propagated views which were germane to the needs of the Communist Party in Germany and to the Soviet Union.

    oh, so everything you see and the process you see with the news and all that is just a constant extension of willis program, unblocked cause no one remembers willi, they only refer to goebels…

    but the student is not the master, are they?

    But why learn who the masters are?
    thats not very entertaining…

    WHY DONT YOU KNOW THE MAN WHO MOLDED YOUR THOUGHTS?

    He also made a huge fortune in the process, since he amassed a considerable media empire from which he creamed off the profits.

    Münzenberg was intimately involved with the Communist project from the very beginning. He belonged to Lenin’s circle in Zurich, and in 1917 accompanied the future leader of the Bolshevik revolution to the Zurich Hauptbahnhof, from whence Lenin was transported in a sealed train, and with the help of the German imperial authorities, to the Finland Station in St. Petersburg.

    The Latvian Rifle men held the country for the above to happen adn later were betrayed for it by stalin… why learn the history of other countries? because you might learn what happened to them happens to YOU…

    Lenin then called on Münzenberg to combat the appalling publicity generated in 1921 when 25 million peasants in the Volga region started to suffer from the famine which swept across the newly created Soviet state.

    Münzenberg, who had by then returned to Berlin, where he was later elected to the Reichstag as a Communist deputy, was charged with setting up a bogus workers’ charity, the Foreign Committee for the Organisation of Worker Relief for the Hungry in Soviet Russia, whose purpose was to pretend to the world that humanitarian relief was coming from sources other than Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration.

    want to bet that many of the organizations you will read about when reading his history, do not have any attribution to him on wikipedia? he is a ghost…

    put the whole name in, you get few links and know willi
    take out foreign, and you get all the media of how the US saved russia from starvation.

    How the U.S. saved a starving Soviet Russia: PBS film highlights Stanford scholar’s research on the 1921-23 famine

    Nothing prepared the ARA team for what they found in the largest nation in the world, Soviet Russia. The communist state had a transportation system in chaos, a hostile climate, a mistrustful Bolshevik government that spied on the U.S. relief workers and the horrifying magnitude of a catastrophic famine that threatened 16 million with starvation at its height in the winter of 1921.

    The famine, exacerbated by government mass requisitioning of grain in the previous years, was killing about 100,000 people a week. Soviet estimates from the 1920s claim 5 million died in the famine, although other estimates range up to 10 million.
    https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2011/pr-famine-040411.html

    Lenin feared not only that Hoover would use his humanitarian aid project to send spies into the USSR (which he did) but also, perhaps even more importantly, that the world’s first Communist state would be fatally damaged by the negative publicity of seeing capitalist America come to its aid within a few years of the revolution.

    After having cut his teeth on “selling” the death of millions of people at the hands of the Bolsheviks, Münzenberg turned his attention to more general propaganda activities.

    He amassed a large media empire, known as “the Münzenberg trust”, which owned two mass circulation dailies in Germany, a mass circulation weekly, and which had interests in scores of other publications around the world.

    His greatest coups were to mobilise world opinion against America over the Sacco-Vanzetti trial (that of two anarchist Italian immigrants who were sentenced to death for murder in Massachusetts in 1921) and to counteract the Nazis’ claim in 1933 that the Reichstag fire was the result of a Communist conspiracy.

    which facts do YOU think you know?

    The Nazis, it will be remembered, used the fire to justify mass arrests and executions against Communists, even though it now appears that the fire genuinely was started on his own by the man arrested in the building at the time, the lone arsonist Martinus van der Lubbe.

    Münzenberg actually managed to convince large sections of public opinion of the equal but opposite untruth to that peddled by the Nazis, namely that the Nazis had started the fire themselves in order to have a pretext for removing their main enemies.

    so good, you attribute all he did and taught to other people and dont even know half of what he did… (or evne worse what his succcessor did that you discuss today, almost every day!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

    The key relevance of Münzenberg for our own day is this: he understood the key importance of influencing opinion-formers.

    He targeted especially intellectuals, taking the view that intellectuals were especially easy to influence because they were so vain.

    His contacts included many of the great literary figures of the 1930s, a large number of whom were encouraged by him to support the Republicans in the Spanish civil war and to make that into a cause-célèbre of Communist anti-fascism.

    Münzenberg’s tactics are of primary importance to the manipulation of opinion in today’s New World Order. More then ever before, so-called ‘experts’ constantly pop up on our TV screens to explain what is happening, and they are always vehicles for the official party line. They are controlled in various ways, usually by money or by flattery.

17. @ F – a very fair point. I have said it myself before, thank you for reminding me.

18. They know in their hearts I am a gun toting, red neck Trump supporter and are ashamed.

    The oldest is married to a REALLY left wing Psychology professor who is busy messing up their kids. I think he is having some second thoughts.

    Two daughters, I don’t talk politics with but one of them senses that she might not be as smart as she thought. A couple of years ago she announced that “I want to make some money.”

    The other is an FBI agent/lawyer and has some conflicts.

19. Mike K

    One of my daughters is also an FBI agent/lawyer. I warned her, early on, that the FBI has often been used by politicians, but she seems largely apolitical. I’m sure she’s conflicted, but we don’t talk politics. She’s assigned to some pretty dangerous street duty, so I leave her alone. Seeing the underside tends to make people conservative.

20. I would say that the closest thing to an objective evil is trying to force others to treat subjective beliefs as objective facts, or objective facts as subjective beliefs.

    “Sometimes, two plus two makes five. Sometimes it makes three. Sometimes it makes all numbers. You must try harder, Winston. It is not easy to become sane.”

    – George Orwell, 1984

21. There’s a good article at Powerline about how the left is completely incoherent on the subject of Trump-Putin collusion. Somehow Trump is still doing Putin’s bidding because lecturing the Europeans in general that they’re not paying their fair share and Germany in particular about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline “damages” and might even “end” NATO. This is nonsensical since NATO nations have pledged to meet their treaty obligations of spending 2% of their GDP on defense shows that Trump’s “leadership” on the issue (NATO Secretary General’s word) has had that result. Rather than damaging NATO he’s strengthening it. And it was other NATO countries along with the Obama administration who complained about how Nord Stream 2 essentially makes Germany a vassal state of Putin. Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Georgia refuse to buy Russian oil and gas because they know that if Putin wants to extort them all he has to do is wait until winter and shut off the spigot. And their people freeze. It’s why they were the first to complain about it. Trump is simply continuing the Obama administration policy except (shocka!) strongly and effectively as opposed to the Obama doctrine of being meek and ineffective.

    I only mention this because Trump-Putin isn’t the only issue where the left is completely incoherent. Among many others is the Constitution. This is why they expect their appointees to act as unelected politicians in what they consider a superlegislature and rubber stamp their policy preference or simply impose it and then claim it’s in the Constitution when it’s not. And this is why the left is losing its mind over Kavanauigh. They know perfectly well the entire leftist agenda is unconstitutional and a Supreme Court with a majority of originalists scares their pants off.

    Where they become incoherent, and therefore give the game away, is that they despise the Constitution and the founders who wrote it. This is why the left, and mindless centrists who couldn’t be bothered to actually listen to what Obama was saying but wanted to prove they weren’t racist, voted for a “fundamental transformation” of this country. What does that mean? It means the very foundation of our country is illegitimate in their eyes. Leftists, including legislators at all levels of government, have openly said that the Constitution was written by a bunch of slave-holding patriarchal white men to uphold a system of white supremacy and and white privilege.

    Are we then to believe that they have all kinds of respect for the Constitution when they get on the Supreme Court and deem the leftist agenda Constitutional. And by the way I’m including Roberts and Kennedy as men of the left on certain issues. Roberts on Obamacare (although Scalia said in his dissent that after all the logical gymnastics Roberts had to engage in order to rewrite the law on several occasions while “shamelessly” and obviously falsely claiming he was only interpreting the law it should be called SCOTUScare) and Kennedy on abortion and SSM. Leftists are simply unconcerned about being absurd and incoherent when it comes to imposing their policy preferences. For instance Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote the dissent in both the Masterpiece bakery and Trump Travel Order cases.

    In the Trump Travel order case she wrote that this nation was founded on the principle of religious liberty and that Trump was displaying unconstitutional religious bias against Muslims. But the rationale that the majority (Thomas concurred in part in the 7-2 decision but not with the rationale) is that the Colorada Civil Rights Commission demonstrated unconstitutional bias against the baker Jack Philips all of a sudden RBG wasn’t concerned about religious liberty. So foreign nationals with no connection to the US other than perhaps applying for a visa have first amendment rights but American citizens do not, in RBG’s world.

    Leftists don’t care about displaying their hypocrisy to the world. They enjoy giving the American people the finger because they simply have the power to do so. And to the post-Modern left everything comes down to power. Judicial activists issue incoherent decisions simply because they can, they have lifetime appointments, and nobody can do anything about it.

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