Shhhh—don’t criticize Trump!

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Geoffrey Britain” raises an interesting point:

To exclusively focus upon Trump’s faults is to make voting for him less likely, which at least in swing states makes Hillary’s election more likely.

If Trump loses, that will be the time to focus upon his faults, as in reaction to his supporter’s distress it will provide a ”˜teaching moment’. That would also be the time to attempt to enlist Trump’s supporters in Eric’s conservative social activist movement.

If he wins, he should be given the traditional ”˜honeymoon period’ to see how he actually performs. If he goes “off the reservation” that will be the time for criticism, the purpose of which should not be to tear down but to rein in his excesses.

We all know Trump’s flaws, even those who make excuses for him. It does actual harm to dwell upon them because regardless of intent, it assists the Left. Rationalizing that criticism as simply objective observation, changes that assistance not in the least.

Were there an electable 3rd party alternative, that name would have emerged by now.

Let’s leave aside the question of whether anyone here is focusing “exclusively” on Trump’s flaws (answer: no), and just concede that we’ve talked a great deal about Trump’s flaws since last fall. And I won’t dismiss GB’s argument out-of-hand with some generalized reference to the need to have fair and free discussion of everything relevant to this campaign, although I also think that is true. I’d like to take his argument seriously, because I believe it originates in intense concern at the prospect of a Hillary Clinton candidacy, rather than the thought that Donald Trump is some sort of good guy. I share that intense concern, as do probably most of the commenters here and most people on the right who are nevertheless unsure about what they will do regarding Trump come November.

Nor is this post meant to be an attack on GB, and I hope he and everyone else realizes that. I think his suggestion comes from a feeling of desperation and frustration with how this election year has played out, a desperation and frustration a great many of us share (I certainly do). But we react to it in different ways.

GB’s argument rests on one principle, which is that Trump would be better than Hillary as president. Better for you, better for the conservative cause, better for the US, better for the world—different people may have different ways of parsing “better,” but “better” it would have to be in order to even begin to justify this idea of shutting up about all the dreadful things Trump has done and is doing.

But it’s not obvious to a lot of us that Trump would be better. I’m not going to go into the lengthy arguments we’ve had many times on this blog about that; suffice to say that reasonable men and women may differ, and Trump supporters’ assertions that it’s obvious that he’d be better are not the least bit convincing to the unconvinced.

GB’s argument also is less than compelling if you think there is a third-party possibility or possibilities, and that many names have emerged and in fact almost any reasonable Republican would have a decent chance not only of being “better” than both candidates, but of winning. Again, that’s a topic that has been discussed many times on this blog and I’m not going to get into it again here (after all, I don’t want to be chained to my computer for the entire afternoon).

And those problems are in addition to GB’s argument’s suppress-the-truth message, which in itself is troublesome. If Trump is good enough to win, and would be a better president than Hillary, wouldn’t airing of the truth about him have to support that? If the truth reveals that he really should not be president, don’t we need to know about it? And no, we don’t “all know Trump’s flaws,” and certainly not all of them. What’s more, we are in the middle of deciding something, and need more light on the topic, not less. Hillary’s flaws have also been thoroughly aired for many, many years, and we probably all know those even more thoroughly than we know Trump’s.

Looking back, I cannot recall that a single person, on this blog or elsewhere, chided “don’t criticize Romney because it will help elect Obama” back in 2012. Maybe people said it, but I certainly don’t remember it. People did say that voters on the right who didn’t like Romney should hold their noses and vote for Romney despite their disapproval—just as people are now suggesting the necessity of voting for Trump—and although I think the situation is not analogous (see this and this) I understand the argument and might even succumb to it in the end. But a suggestion that we not talk about what’s wrong with Romney? No, it didn’t happen, and Romney’s opponent Obama was also perceived as very dangerous to the world, the country, and to the right.

This “shut up about the flaws of our candidate” admonition seems to me to be new, and ominous. Why is it happening now? I believe it has something to do with the style of Trump himself, although that’s not the whole reason. I think it’s also that, if many of us thought 2012 was our last chance to reverse things, 2016 would have to have even more urgency for a lot of people.

But what I probably disagree with most vehemently in that comment of GB’s is this assertion:

If Trump loses, that will be the time to focus upon his faults, as in reaction to his supporter’s distress it will provide a ”˜teaching moment’. That would also be the time to attempt to enlist Trump’s supporters in Eric’s conservative social activist movement.

Sounds good, but I don’t think it’s at all relevant to the particular situation we face. There are two types of Trump supporters, the enthusiastic and the reluctant. The first group supported him in the primaries, when there were many alternatives. The second group only supports him now, under duress, because they see no alternative anymore. I don’t really consider the second group “Trump supporters”—not exactly, anyway—because they really didn’t like Trump in the first place and don’t like him now, so there will be no sharp disillusionment for them if he loses and therefore no real need for GB’s “teaching moment.’ It’s that first group, about a third of GOP voters (or perhaps even up to 40%), who GB thinks might have that “teaching moment” after a Trump loss, and become conservative activists.

I do not see that happening. Let me repeat: I DO NOT SEE THAT HAPPENING (and yes, I’m shouting). In fact, I think the opposite will happen.

I’ve watched these people, listened to them, read what they’ve written, for about a year now. Many have come to this blog and most have left again. I strongly suspect that, if Trump loses, they will blame his loss on the Republicans who did not vote for him or support him. They will explode in rage at those people, and develop a “stab in the back” theory of why it happened, and how every bad thing that happens thereafter during a Clinton presidency (and there will be plenty of bad things) could have been fixed or prevented by Trump if only, if only! The rage will increase rather than decrease.

I am convinced that the schism in the party is already permanent and that it predated Trump, who is acting as both lightening rod and amplifier for it.

Forensic Files: the Robards case

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve taken to watching the TV program “Forensic Files,” often as background while I’m writing or reading online. I used to use cable news stations for that purpose, but no more. I haven’t watched a single cable news program since many months ago, some time in February I believe. The constant Trump coverage turned me off.

“Forensic Files” may seem an odd escape. But escape it is, at least for me. It’s grim, very grim. Most of the time it exposes the heart of darkness in a sizeable proportion of human beings—those who kill, for pleasure or money or revenge or sex or who-knows-why. Many are sociopaths; I would say “most,” having watched many episodes of the program. Some are not. The “heartwarming” aspects of the stories, however (and there are some) concern the hard and painstaking work of the detectives and forensic specialists dedicated to the task of bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Most of the stories are far more amazing than those told on the series’ fictional counterpart, the CSI group of TV shows. They are quite short, as well (typically, 21-22 minutes). And they have the added advantage (to me, anyway) of being true.

Here’s one that I find especially fascinating, perhaps because of the literary angle:

So, was she a sociopath? Before you answer that question, you might want to read this article, which contains some background information that the TV show lacked.

[NOTE: Here’s a previous post I wrote on a related topic.]

The myths of history: Churchill’s defeat

The New Neo Posted on by

There are a lot of myths that people accept as true about historical events. Some of these myths are relatively minor, such as the one I’m going to write about today. Some of these myths concern events/facts about which we’ve only recently learned the truth. Sometimes the MSM has purposely misinformed us about them—that is, propaganda has overwhelmed the truth. And some are about events that happened long, long ago and have gotten lost in the mists of time.

But some are about more recent happenings. And some are about things that are easily verifiable, not difficult-to-ascertain at all, and about which there hasn’t been a whole lot of purposeful propaganda, although there certainly does seem to be a great deal of casual misinformation.

And I’m not just talking about myths believed by extremely-low-information folks who don’t know who the vice president is, or what any of the branches of government are. I’m talking about myths believed by people who, if not history buffs exactly, are at least conversant with the main events of history and even some of the lesser ones.

And of course everyone has some of these myths, because we don’t even know they are myths if we think they are true.

The myth I’m going to write about today, which is a sort of pet peeve of mine since I’m a big Churchill admirer, is that the British public was so ungrateful to Winston Churchill that they threw him out for good after the war. What’s wrong with that? Indeed, they did throw him out after the war, so we can’t really call it a “myth”:

With a general election looming (there had been none for almost a decade), and with the Labour Ministers refusing to continue the wartime coalition, Churchill resigned as Prime Minister on 23 May. Later that day, he accepted the King’s invitation to form a new government, known officially as the National Government, like the Conservative-dominated coalition of the 1930s, but in practice known as the Churchill caretaker ministry. The government contained Conservatives, National Liberals and a few non-party figures…

Although polling day was 5 July, the results of the 1945 election did not become known until 26 July, owing to the need to collect the votes of those serving overseas. Clementine…[met] her husband for lunch. To her suggestion that election defeat might be “a blessing in disguise” he retorted that “at the moment it seems very effectively disguised”. That afternoon Churchill’s doctor Lord Moran commiserated with him on the “ingratitude” of the British public, to which Churchill replied “I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time”. Having lost the election, despite enjoying much support amongst the British population, he resigned as Prime Minister that evening, this time handing over to a Labour Government. Many reasons for his defeat have been given, key among them being that a desire for post-war reform was widespread amongst the population and that the man who had led Britain in war was not seen as the man to lead the nation in peace. Although the Conservative Party was unpopular, many electors appear to have wanted Churchill to continue as Prime Minister whatever the outcome, or to have wrongly believed that this would be possible.

Now, that’s certainly interesting. The rejection may have been a sort of “Moses was a good leader for the years in the desert, but he can’t lead us to the promised land” syndrome. Or it may have been an artifact of the parliamentary system and not so much of a rejection of Churchill himself at all. At any rate, the reason I call this a “myth” (more rightly a half-myth or semi-myth) is that the rejection—whatever its reason—wasn’t permanent. Churchill did not leave politics at that point, as many people seem to think. He remained a visible and active leader of the opposition until the event occurred that so many people seem to forget (and certainly don’t usually mention), which was his re-election as Prime Minister in 1951.

That’s the part I find confusing and puzzling. Many people who seem to know about his 1945 loss seem to regard it as the end of his political career. It was not. He served again as PM from 1951 to 1955, and resigned at that point due to health reasons (he had had several strokes, and the one he had close to his resignation had been relatively severe). What’s more, he was 80 years old by the time of his resignation.

Doesn’t sound like much of a rejection of Churchill to me.

Well, why do so many people who are relatively knowledgeable get this wrong? I think it’s a question of the story and its relative drama. Doesn’t it make a much better story to have Churchill’s career end with his rejection by an ingrate public after his war years of heroism and strength? His later prime ministership was relatively anticlimactic (what wouldn’t be, after WWII?), and his final leave-taking was, sadly, due to infirmity. So it’s a much less dramatic story.

[NOTE: I plan to write about other myths of history in subsequent posts.]

Trump supporters as Osgood: “well, nobody’s perfect”

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump supporters remind me of the Osgood character in “Some Like It Hot.” You remember:

Point out Trump’s manifest and myriad flaws? Trump supporters always have an answer.

All the other candidates who have held public office have a political record to point to and complain about. Governors, senators, they’ve all had to compromise on policies that reflect on what they might have to do as president. Trump has no such baggage. His political record consists of two things: words and donations to candidates.

He’s got a plethora of words that would sink any other Republican candidate. Even at the outset, there was his previous praise for Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, and support for single payer health care. He had made statements that George W. Bush was the worst president ever and should have been impeached, and during one of the debates he spouted the “Bush lied” charge that is popular on the left. He has had enormous praise for unrestrained government power under eminent domain, and previous long-term membership in the Democratic Party.

It would be laughable in any other serious Republican candidate. But in Trump, his supporters shrug it off, like Osgood’s sanguine excuses at the end of that movie.

History of liberal positions? He’s changed; nobody’s perfect.

Present-day liberal positions? Doesn’t matter. He doesn’t really mean it—or, alternatively, he talks tough on illegal immigration, the others don’t, and that’s the only thing that matters. Talk is cheap, of course, and he’s walked back most or all of his talk. Doesn’t matter to his supporters. It’s the bluster that counts.

Polls suggested right along that Trump would do more poorly than the other major candidates against Hillary Clinton. Didn’t matter. His supporters kept asserting that either (a) the polls were lies (b) the polls will change over time and improve for him. Well, first they did (somewhat, that is), and now they’re sinking again. His supporters have disregarded his high disapproval ratings—which are not the function of the public not knowing him, because the public does know him quite well.

Trump’s use of juvenile mockery, and his self-aggrandizing narcissism? Doesn’t matter. Even though they hated it in Obama, and even though Trump makes Obama look like Emily Post and St. Francis of Assisi put together, they excuse him because, don’t you know, it’s all a pose. Or because it shows his boundless self-confidence and alpha-maleness.

Did someone on the right criticize Trump? Accuse that person of being a cuckservative or RINO or GOPe or “elite” or secretly wanting Hillary to win and use that to dismiss what the person is saying.

Trump shows ignorance of something very basic or fails to do his homework—for example, what the nuclear triad is, when he’s been asked the question before and failed to answer it? Doesn’t matter. Never fear. He’ll learn whatever he needs to learn when he needs to learn it. Or he’ll appoint the right people. They’ll figure it all out.

Above all, keep saying Trump can and will win. And, should he be nominated and lose the general election, blame his loss on the fact that the establishment didn’t help him enough. They sabotaged him, stabbed him in the back. Because everyone knows that Trump is actually a winner.

[NOTE: I think I wrote this post mainly so I could put up that clip. I love the movie “Some Like It Hot.”]

The rewrite: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Pierre Menard

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t remember why I was doing it, but the other night I was researching the life of Harriet Beecher Stowe and I discovered a few surprising things.

The first was that Stowe had seven children in addition to writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The second was that in her later years (Stowe lived to be 85), when she suffered from dementia, Stowe forgot she had written the book and set out to write it again:

The incurable mental malady of Harriet Beecher Stowe has progressed alarmingly. Mrs. Stowe’s vagaries, regarded as mere eccentricities, first amounted to actual aberration of mind about a month prior to the final attack. The interval was chiefly spent by her in writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” over again. She imagined that she was engaged in the original composition, and for several hours every day she industriously used pen and paper, inscribing long passages of the book almost exactly word for word.

This was done unconsciously from memory, the authoress imagining that she composed the matter as she went along. To her diseased mind the story was brand new, and she frequently exhausted herself with labor which she regarded as freshly created. The worldwide fame of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was now an anticipation to her, and she talked wildly of the popularity which the book was going to win. Even to the kind of pen, paper and ink used, Mrs. Stowe repeated the first composition, and if the manuscript could be compared with the corresponding portions of the original copy it is not likely that much difference of appearance would be discovered.

That is astounding, although sad. But it also sounded a bit familiar. It sounded like a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that appeared in his wonderful book Ficciones called “Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote”—a story which fortunately also can be found online.

Borges’ high-toned, somewhat ironic style takes a bit of getting used to if you haven’t read him before. But here’s an excerpt from the story (which is not so much a “story” as a spoof of academic literary criticism). It’s about a man named Pierre Menard who sets out to write Don Quixote:

He did not want to compose another Quixote ””which is easy”” but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide””word for word and line for line””with those of Miguel de Cervantes…

The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied this procedure (I know he attained a fairly accurate command of seventeenth-century Spanish) but discarded it as too easy. Rather as impossible! my reader will say. Granted, but the undertaking was impossible from the very beginning and of all the impossible ways of carrying it out, this was the least interesting. To be, in the twentieth century, a popular novelist of the seventeenth seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some way, Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him””and, consequently, less interesting””than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard…“My undertaking is not difficult, essentially,” I read in another part of his letter. “I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.”…

The rest of the rather brief story is a subtly humorous comparison of the two versions (Menard’s is presented as being fragmentary), such as this:

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor. Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases””exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor ””are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard””quite foreign, after all””suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.

So here’s my question: was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin informed by everything that had happened in her life since she wrote the first one, including the Civil War? I would love for Borges to explain.

“Unexplained” rise in city crimes

The New Neo Posted on by

When I first read this I thought it ludicrous that the authors pretty much dismiss the Ferguson effect as being a major cause of the recent crime rise in many major cities—because it seems so obviously part of it.

But the fact that some cities are doing well and some poorly indicates that the Ferguson effect is unlikely to be the explanation, and certainly not the full explanation. Why are Chicago and LA doing poorly, for example, whereas and Miami and Oakland are doing well? Are there policing differences among those places? Are some affected by the Ferguson effect more than others, and if so, why?

Or is it something else? For example, is some or even much of this not a real change in crime itself, but a difference in the way each city reports its crimes?

If you think the latter isn’t important, please see this.

Trump University, last February

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not as though the Trump University fraud trial was unknown till recently. It had just gotten lost in the shuffle of so many other things.

I went back to see what I had previously written about it, and I found that in February 2016 there was this:

Did you know that Trump is being sued for fraud in connection with Trump University? Why isn’t this a top headline?

Why, indeed.

I knew the answer, even then; my question was rhetorical. It wasn’t being pushed by the MSM because the MSM wanted Trump to be nominated, both for political reasons (they felt he was the weakest GOP candidate and by golly, I think they were correct) and selfish reasons (good for their ratings). They knew they would have plenty of opportunity to write about it when it would damage Trump the most—in the general.

At the time, I added:

Oh, and does this sound familiar?:

“On Dec. 10, 2015, during a day he was making international headlines over his pledge to ban Muslim immigrants from the United States, Trump managed to escape any press attention and give a closed-door pretrial deposition in the case, according to court filings reviewed by Yahoo News. Exactly what he said in the deposition remains under seal, but lawyers for Tarla Makaeff, a California yoga instructor who is the lead plaintiff in the case, cited portions of his testimony (blacked out in her pleadings) to support their contention that Trump has threatened to ruin her financially for bringing the lawsuit and that she needs protection from his ‘retaliation.’”

Trump “managed to escape any press attention”—oh, I doubt it was all that hard to escape. As I said, they didn’t want to give him a lot of attention for the case back then.

However, the pattern of his conduct towards Makaeff should be familiar to anyone with even a cursory familiarity with Trump’s actions in the past towards his opponents in civil lawsuits.

One more thing and then I’ll shut up about Trump University (at least for a little while, anyway), which is that Trump himself made advertisements in which he said the following about Trump U.:

“We’re going to have professors and adjunct professors that are absolutely terrific people, terrific brains, successful. We are going to have the best of the best… and these are people that are handpicked by me.”

Doesn’t that sound strangely familiar, too?

But in court proceedings he admitted he had little to nothing to do with hiring or “picking” (hand or otherwise) the people who taught at Trump University:

In Trump’s own deposition this past December, Trump failed to recognize the name of a single presenter or teacher at his real estate seminars. He also confirmed he had nothing to do with the selection process of instructors who taught at the school’s events or mentors for the school’s “Gold Elite” programs.

A review of Trump University presenters and so-called real estate experts found many with questionable credentials and inflated resumes. Court documents show background-checks conducted during the hiring process could not determine whether some instructors even graduated high school.

There’s also this:

Though he did not know a single instructor when a list of names was read to him during the deposition, Trump said in December he saw the resumes of some instructors but did not review them and instead left the hiring decisions to Sexton.

And in a telling exchange about Trump’s lack of involvement with the school, Trump, as a witness in the case, admitted he knew little about the background and qualifications of Sexton himself.

Attorney: “And Mr. Sexton, he had no background in terms of buying and selling real estate for profit, did he?”

Trump: “He was more of an educational person”

Records show Michael Sexton, the president of Trump University, has spent almost his entire career in business and consulting, not education.

Even Trump’s attorney didn’t try to allege that Trump’s promises about how he had “hand-picked” the teachers at Trump U. were true. The attorney said was that “Mr. Trump not only met with the instructors and professors who designed the course, but also contributed to the curriculum.” Met with them. For how long? And “meeting with them” is a lot different from being involved in the process of choosing them.

Ballet coaching: Ulanova and Maximova

The New Neo Posted on by

Ballet roles can be learned through video, but it’s insufficient. Most leading ballet dancers are taught their roles by coaches, ordinarily well-known retired dancers. It’s not usually a question of teaching technique; that is already firmly in place. It’s expression, meaning, emphasis, phrasing, acting, mime, all those little things that have the potential to transform a good dancer into a great one.

Things that mostly cannot be taught, but must be sensed and absorbed if the younger dancer is going to turn into an artist.

Here are some photos of famous Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova preparing protégé Ekaterina Maximova for her debut in “Giselle.” Long ago I possessed a copy of the book in which I recall them appearing (Days with Ulanova) and always loved these two photos in particular.

They show the older Ulanova as a powerful yet gentle presence, coaxing a performance from her young pupil by casting a seeming spell:

ulanovacoach1

ulanovacoach2

[NOTE: I’ve written about Ulanova before, here. She was a dancer with the remarkable and unique quality of not seeming other-wordly, but of seeming to express something both realistic and spiritual at the same time. I saw her when I was a child, in what I believe may have been the only trip she made to this country before her retirement.

They are both gone now. Tempus fugit. RIP.]

Hugh Hewitt calls for Trump to be replaced as nominee

The New Neo Posted on by

Hmmmm.

Sign of something brewing? Or just blah-blah-blah?

Allahpundit at Hot Air says that no such candidate could win. I’ve heard that before, but I don’t see that it’s true. Yes, this move would alienate Trump’s supporters. But most of them are already lost to any GOP candidate but Trump anyway, and I believe a lot of them are ordinarily non-voters rather than the usual Republican base (I don’t have time at the moment to find the stats on that, but I have come across some in months past).

Allahpundit writes:

Dumping Trump means declaring war on his supporters, which means a schism that guarantees Clinton’s election.

But that schism is already the size of the Grand Canyon, and IMHO Clinton’s election is already guaranteed unless Trump is replaced.

Analogies to third-party candidates losing in the past are inappropriate. This year really is very different—never before have there been two candidates so profoundly unpopular that the voters of both parties are experiencing a sense of regret, depression, and horror. This article crunches the numbers and shows how much support there could be for an alternative candidate, and how a win actually is possible. Although not at all probable, it may be our only chance at this point.

The candidate would have to be conservative enough to appeal to conservatives but still moderate enough to appeal to the many many independents (and some moderate Democrats) who are desperately searching for a way out. A tall order. That is the niche I originally thought that Walker or Fiorina could fill, but neither caught on. Maybe now they’d look better to the voters, in retrospect?

Everything you always wanted to know about Trump University…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and were too weary to ask.

Well, maybe not everything. But plenty. Please take a look. Excerpts (this was written in 2014):

The supreme court of New York ruled earlier that Trump University, now renamed Trump Entrepreneur Initiative, LLC, is liable for its violation of state education laws in its illegally calling the program a “university” without the appropriate licensure or accreditation and for allegedly defrauding students of $40 million…

Using a $6 million advertising campaign, Trump University was marketed to a database of more than one million potential students, including many senior citizens, as an “ivy league quality” university. The sales pitch claimed that Donald Trump was so “integrally involved” that student-victims would have an opportunity similar to his TV show “The Apprentice,” effectively gaining real estate secrets from Trump and his handpicked “faculty of professors and adjunct professors.”

However, Trump has already admitted in court that:

—His involvement was “completely absent.”
—He did not participate in events, teaching, content of the program.
—He did “not even know if students received a degree.”…

When the New York State Education Department (NYSED) informed Trump in 2005 that it was illegal to use the name “university” without a license, Trump did not change the name, but instead opened a sham office in Delaware, which was used as the address on all marketing material, but maintained his main place of operation at the original New York location.

Con, con, con. I mean that literally: Trump is a con man. This is the sort of thing you’d think the MSM would have harped on right along. And yet it didn’t. Funny thing, that; they knew it would come up sooner or later in the courts, preferably once Trump had the nomination sewn up.

Why am I bringing this up now? First, in the interests of truth. Second, because there is still time to replace Trump, although I have little faith that the Republican Party leaders (those supposedly powerful puppet-masters who haven’t seemed to be pulling strings very well this time around) can manage to get their act and their courage together to do it.

Another good article on Trump University and Trump’s role in it is by Leon H. Wolf at RedState. He makes the following excellent point at the outset:

However, in this case, Trump may be using the racism angle as a distraction, and the other stuff he is saying about Trump University might be the real point he is trying to lodge in the voters’ minds. After all, last week the story was on the incredibly damaging documents that were released as part of the Washington Post’s public interest request. Now, the stories of Trump University swindling vulnerable people have gone completely by the wayside while everyone obsesses over whether Trump’s comments were racist or not.

Well, they were racist, but I think Trump is gambling that everyone has more or less made up their minds on that score, and that rubbing it in a little more won’t hurt him that badly. What he really wants people to believe, as they come away from all this, is that this lawsuit is a sham and they shouldn’t take any of the revelations contained in it seriously.

Hear, hear; yes, yes!

Wolf goes on to list six big lies Trump has told about the suit. The entire article is well worth reading, and cannot be easily summarized. Here’s a little excerpt, however, about one of the things Trump did and then lied about:

“[Trump alleges that the] original lead plaintiff withdrew because “she was a disaster” and “she couldn’t win.” This is one of the more galling lies that Trump has repeatedly told throughout his sob story about this case, and he has never once been challenged to his face about it, that I’ve seen. The truth is that Trump’s legal team made this woman – whose name is Tarla Makaeff – go through living hell as part of scorched earth tactics. They countersued her individually and dragged her through separate litigation that was so extensive that at the end of it – which she won – the judge awarded her an astounding $800,000 in legal fees.

She also alleged (and who does not believe her?) that both Trump and his attorneys have repeatedly threatened to ruin her financially for pursuing the suit, regardless of how long it takes. Given that this suit was started five years ago, and that Trump is now running for President, while followed by a bunch of slobbering hate-filled lunatics who harass everyone who dares to disagree with Trump, Makaeff furthermore says (and who does not believe her?) that she does not wish to continue being harassed by Trump, his lawyers, and his fans for the duration of this awful Presidential campaign.

For five years, Makaeff has been the face of the Trump University plaintiffs, and Donald Trump tried to destroy her life for it. He shows every indication of continuing to do so for all eternity. Ordinary people cannot deal with this kind of perpetual pressure in their lives. That is why she withdrew from the case.

Anyone who has followed Trump’s life—his actions for the decades before this campaign season and his actions during this campaign season—recognizes his m.o.. This is pure and classic Trump.

[NOTE: By the way, in addition to those NY rulings described above, Judge Curiel’s rulings in the other section of the Trump U. fraud case apparently also began long before Trump was a candidate (see this). And here’s a previous post of mine about Trump as a con man.]

The IRS and the Tea Party: worse than you might think, and does anyone care anymore?

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the IRS scandal?

It seems so long ago; so many outrageous things have happened since then. But this was one of the most outrageous, and remains so. It’s just that we’ve been playing so much whack-a-mole for so long that each fresh outrage gets stale and starts to fade from consciousness, to be immediately superseded by the new one.

Here is some news about it, however:

More than three years after it admitted to targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny, the IRS has finally released a near-complete list of the organizations it snagged in a political dragnet.

The tax agency filed the list last month as part of a court case after a series of federal judges, fed up with what they said was the agency’s stonewalling, ordered it to get a move on. The case is a class-action lawsuit…

But even as it answers some questions, the list raises others, including exactly when the targeting stopped, and how broadly the tax agency drew its net when it went after nonprofits for unusual scrutiny.

The government released names of 426 organizations. Another 40 were not released as part of the list because they had already opted out of being part of the class-action suit.

That’s a lot more than most people would have guessed, I think. And remember those liberal groups who supposedly were also targeted? Well, there’s this:

Edward D. Greim, the lawyer who’s pursuing the case on behalf of NorCal Tea Party Patriots and other members of the class, said the list also could have ballooned toward the end of the targeting as the IRS, once it knew it was being investigated, snagged more liberal groups in its operations to try to soften perceptions of political bias.

So that was their cover.

Hey, the whole thing worked, didn’t it, to help the Democrats win in 2012? This event should have been a scandal that drew ire from both sides. It is a mark of our tremendous decline that it has not.

[NOTE: See also this.]

Could either Trump or Hillary be denied the nomination?

The New Neo Posted on by

I wish.

But despite rumblings that there’s still time to choose someone other than Trump, I don’t think it will happen. If the RNC had the guts to engineer this, they would have done it a long time ago. And, as we discussed the other day, who would be the alternative?

As for Hillary, it should come as no surprise that only 33% of Democrats think Hillary should be booted as the Democratic nominee even if she were to be indicted over the email controversy. Remember, that’s not some civil suit like Trump University, that would be an indictment over misbehavior in public office.

What a dreadful election year. What two dreadful prospects. I know I write about this a lot, but it’s because the news keeps getting worse rather than better.