Limbaugh and Levin, and campaign 2016

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh—or to any talk shows, actually—often. But I’ve listened now and then, often enough—to Limbaugh and also to Mark Levin—to get a basic feel for both of them. For example, I’ve noticed that for about a decade (that’s probably the first time I’d ever listened) Limbaugh has talked with growing rancor about the GOP establishment and how bad it is. I’ve only heard Levin for a few years, but he’s been even more vociferous on that topic.

I’m not saying there isn’t a reason to talk about the GOP’s failures and perceived betrayals—there is—but what I’ve heard has had the effect of fanning the flames of anti-GOP hatred higher and higher. It’s fun for listeners, it draws an audience and fits their mood, and gets the juices flowing. It seems a lot more exciting than talking about dry policy or law or the limitations of what Congress can actually do and all that jazz (which are certainly sometimes talked about as well on these shows). Such discussions feed into an already-existing discontent as well as giving it focus and growing it.

I believe that both Limbaugh and Levin are conservatives. I believe they both thought and still think they were creating a groundswell of popular demand for small government conservatism and respect for the Constitution. I believe they were and are sincere in the desire to do that. But the phenomenon they were instrumental in helping create, or at least to grow, has gone in a very different direction than they probably expected with the Trump phenomenon, and lately they’ve shown signs that they’re not sure how to handle it.

Neither Limbaugh nor Levin is in the habit—it’s against their policy—to formally endorse a candidate. Besides, since their listeners support a variety of candidates, it would alienate some of their listeners and shrink their audience were they to do so. So they won’t say “Yes” or “No” to one or the other candidates; what they do is more subtle. But I think that recently both of them (Levin much more than Limbaugh at this point) have become somewhat frightened by what they see happening, and its threat to the small government they hold dear. The situation is like some famous lines from Goethe, “Die ich rief, die Geister,/Werd ich nun nicht los.” “The spirits which I have summoned/I now cannot banish.”

Levin, who dissed Trump in 2011 but was very genial for a while towards him in 2015, began to get angry recently when Trump started attacking Cruz in Iowa, and then even angrier after Saturday’s debate. Limbaugh seems to be more newly upset about Trump’s anti-Bush remarks last Saturday. But unlike Levin, who is very clear in his disapproval of Trump at this point, Limbaugh tiptoes very gently around the subject.

But the spirits they have summoned they now cannot banish.

Is free speech dead in Scotland? And what about privacy here?

The New Neo Posted on by

This is potentially disturbing:

Following a report of a series of alleged offensive online posts relating to Syrian refugees living in Rothesay on Bute, Police Scotland confirmed on Tuesday that a 40-year-old man, understood to be from the Inverclyde area, had been arrested under the Communications Act…

Following the arrest, Insp Ewan Wilson from Dunoon police office said: “I hope that the arrest of this individual sends a clear message that Police Scotland will not tolerate any form of activity which could incite hatred and provoke offensive comments on social media.”

The only—and I mean the only—way this sort of arrest might be justified is if the social media postings were used to specifically plan an imminent act of violence against refugees. That would be tantamount to enforcing our own very limited “incitement to riot” exceptions to our free speech laws.

But until I learn that’s what was involved here, I’m going to assume that the man was committing acts that were much less actionable than that. After all, the police officer is quoted as saying that authorities [emphasis mine] “will not tolerate any form of activity which could incite hatred and provoke offensive comments on social media.” Sounds like he’s talking about language that might invoke a feeling (hatred) and incite more speech.

I first learned about a decade ago that Europe’s protections for freedom of speech are far less strong than our own. Back then, I was studying libel laws in France and Britain. This recent incident is not about libel, it’s about something called the “Communications Act,” which has the following provisions:

Section 127 of the act makes it an offence to send a message that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character over a public electronic communications network. The section replaced section 43 of the Telecommunications Act 1984 and is drafted as widely as its predecessor.

That’s awfully broad. But later there were interim guidelines which tempered it (however, they’re only “interim” and “guidelines”; the statute itself appears to have remained broad):

On 19 December 2012, to strike a balance between freedom of speech and criminality, the Director of Public Prosecutions issued interim guidelines, clarifying when social messaging is eligible for criminal prosecution under UK law. Only communications that are credible threats of violence, harassment, or stalking (such as aggressive Internet trolling) which specifically targets an individual or individuals, or breaches a court order designed to protect someone (such as those protecting the identity of a victim of a sexual offence) will be prosecuted. Communications that express an “unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, or banter or humor, even if distasteful to some and painful to those subjected to it” will not.

Better. But wait:

Communications that are merely “grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false” will be prosecuted only when it can be shown to be necessary and proportionate.

Leaves an opening for prosecuting almost anyone, doesn’t it? What’s more:

Revisions to the interim guidelines were issued on 20 June 2013 following a public consultation. The revisions specified that prosecutors should consider:

—whether messages were aggravated by references to race, religion or other minorities…

So there you have it. A bunch of unclear guidelines that can be used to prosecute real incitements or to prosecute whatever you think is “hate speech,” if that prosecution is “necessary and proportionate.”

Again, it’s possible that this particular arrest was a proper one for something very egregious that amounts to incitement to riot. But I doubt it.

Meanwhile, in the US, Apple is resisting the FBI’s request that it help in the de-encryption of San Bernadino mass murderer terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone. But the situation is even more complicated than that makes it sound:

At issue is a court order issued Tuesday by Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the District of Central California ordering Apple to, in the words of The Associated Press, “supply highly specialized software the FBI can load onto the phone to cripple a security encryption feature that erases data after too many unsuccessful unlocking attempts.” Wired adds that Apple’s compliance would allow the FBI to attempt to unlock the phone using multiple password attempts””a method known as bruteforcing. But Apple declined, calling for a public discussion, so its customers and citizens “understand what is at stake.”…

“Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software ”” which does not exist today ”” would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.

“The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.”

Is the issue that no such technology exists at the moment? Because really, unless that’s the basis of the argument, couldn’t the same argument be made against any cooperation with authorities that compromised privacy, because anything could be demanded and misused by a tyrannical government? If the government has become that tyrannical, iPhone de-encryption may be the least of our worries (perhaps that’s already true). Likewise, if iPhone has created a technology that’s impervious even to police investigation in a case as clear-cut as this, isn’t that very dangerous as well, and should they be allowed to protect it when it was in the possession of a confirmed terrorist jihadi (now deceased) who had murdered fourteen people in cold blood?

It is still another case of needing to strike the proper balance between individual liberty and societal protection, between government as helper and as enemy.

The Ratcatcher

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m going to keep posting this now and then, just as a reminder. This is not about Trump-fever in particular—it’s about what’s led to it, and where such feelings can lead in the very worst-case scenario. Trump, Sanders, or a person unknown can channel the feeling described here and ride it to power.

The following is an excerpt from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free. The book, first published in 1955, is an exploration of Germans’ attitudes in the period leading up to WWII and including the war and its immediate aftermath. It features interviews with ten “typical” Germans, conducted a couple of years after the war’s end, and offers extraordinary and often relevant insights into how it was that Hitler came to power and stayed there so long.

Here is my general discussion of the book and its author, who was a man of the left. To understand the following excerpt, it is helpful to know that for the purposes of the book, Mayer refers to the ten interviewees as his “friends”:

National Socialism was a repulsion of my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government—against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man’s repudiation of “the rascals.” Its motif was “throw them all out.” My friends, in the 1920’s, were like spectators at a wrestling match who suspect that beneath all the grunts and groans, the struggle and the sweat, the match is “fixed,” that the performers are only pretending to put on a fight. The scandals that rocked the country, as one party or cabal “exposed” another, dismayed and then disgusted my friends…

My friends wanted Germany purified. They wanted it purified of the politicians, of all the politicians. They wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives. And Hitler, the pure man, the antipolitician, was the man, untainted by “politics,” which was only a cloak for corruption…Against “the whole pack,” “the whole kaboodle,” “the whole business,” against all the parliamentary parties, my friends evoked Hitlerism, and Hitlerism overthrew them all…

This was the Bewegung, the movement, that restored my friends and bewitched them. Those Germans who saw it all at the beginning—there were not very many; there never are, I suppose, anywhere—called Hitler the Rattenfé¤nger, the “ratcatcher.” Every American child has read The Pied-Piper of Hamlin. Every German child has read it, too. In German its title is Der Rattenfé¤nger von Hameln

That’s why for me the single most important attribute in a candidate is his/her devotion to the principle of preserving individual liberty, the foundation on which this country was built.

Taking advantage of the twisted primary design

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I asked this question in an earlier post, but I’m going to highlight it and expand on it here.]

I wonder what’s to prevent a candidate who is against a party—and possibly out to destroy it—from using that party’s primary process to harm it? And what makes any political outsider who’s never held office, and switched back and forth between parties many times, a member of a certain party? Is it just because that person says he/she is at the moment, and gets enough signatures to enter the race? I don’t think the situation I’ve described in this paragraph has ever come up before, so I don’t think party leaders ever envisioned it.

Then there are the primaries themselves. For example, South Carolina is a state (one of many) with a completely open primary, which has always seemed insane to me. Why allow Democrats to choose the Republican nominee, and vice versa? Makes no sense. It’s somewhat difficult to think of a good remedy for that, though, because you want people to be able to switch if they really are independents. Or do you? Should only the party regulars be allowed to vote in their party’s primaries?

Usually the official candidates in a primary have been fairly conventional, although different from each other in terms of policies and political leanings. The ones who are not tend to be members of fringe parties with very little following. I cannot recall ever having had a candidate who was out to destroy a party run for office within that party. But many people are thinking that might be the case with Trump—although I don’t really think so; I think his main motivation is narcissism combined with the drive for power. However, there is no doubt in my mind that many (perhaps even a majority) of his supporters are determined to back him in order to destroy the GOP. Some of them are from the left, and some from the right, but they have that in common, and in open primary states they all can vote in the GOP primary for him.

The only thing I can think of stopping the ones on the left is their possible desire to vote in the contested Democratic primary—because you can’t vote in both, at least not legally. I find it astounding, however, that there is no protection from voters using either party’s own primary to destroy it, and that the parties seem to have no way of dealing with this.

And the Grammy Awards fashion winner is…

The New Neo Posted on by

I looked at a lot of fashions from last night’s Grammy Awards in order to choose either the most beautiful and/or the most bizarre. I decided to go with the latter, and although I usually focus on the female fashion, this time I could not resist the following mesmerizingly dreadful male outfit sported by someone named Shawn Everett (apparently it was to promote something called “Save the Arctic”). Feast your eyes:

shawneverett

Looking at those worst-dressed photos from last night, I have come to the conclusion that Fellini was merely fashion-forward. Who knew?:

Picking a single image to represent Satyricon is like trying to single out one scene that captures the essence of a sprawling carnival. The film is a nonstop parade of extreme imagery, grotesque tableaux and freakish costuming. No one scene sticks out as more bizarre than another, and nothing is supposed to; everything inside the borders of the known world of Satyricon is as weird as everything else, from the whorehouse at the center of the empire to the blank spot at the edge of the map where monsters be. Forced to select something, we went with the image appearing five minutes into the film of the actor Vernaccio, dressed in a porcine pink helmet with a fin on top, carefully placing a tiny pill-like object on his outstretched tongue.

fellini_satyricon

I wonder if Trump is feeling insecure about SC, because he’s threatening to sue Cruz AND perhaps to go 3rd party

The New Neo Posted on by

What a guy, what a guy. In a press release, Trump writes:

One of the ways I can fight back is to bring a lawsuit against [Cruz] relative to the fact that he was born in Canada and therefore cannot be President. If he doesn’t take down his false ads and retract his lies, I will do so immediately. Additionally, the RNC should intervene and if they don’t they are in default of their pledge to me.

Lawsuit as retaliation for campaign ads. And say, if Trump is so great at making deals, why is his deal with the RNC falling through? And why hasn’t he sued Cruz already, if he can (I don’t believe he can, as I wrote about a month ago here)?

The answer to the first question is that if the deal with the RNC does fall through it’s because Trump decided that he doesn’t need or want them anymore, not because they failed to fulfill their side of the bargain. The answer to the second is that Trump’s lawyers have probably told him he doesn’t have standing, but he wants to continue the charade that he does have standing in order to whip his supporters up against Cruz and make people think Cruz isn’t eligible to be president. Trump sees Cruz as his biggest threat.

Allahpundit writes:

It sure does seem suddenly like Trump is eager to make the case that he’s no longer bound by his promise not to run third-party…

Trump’s image depends on him being seen as the consummate winner; if he loses to Cruz, he’ll need to explain how that possibly could have happened. The only tolerable excuse is that he was cheated ”” Cruz is ineligible, Cruz is lying about his record, Cruz gamed the vote in Iowa with dirty tricks, and so on. Maybe Trump’s even reached the point where, if it’s too late to go third-party, he can at least advise his supporters to stay home in November rather than support dirty cheater Ted Cruz as nominee. I remember Trump (or maybe one of his advisors) saying somewhere many months ago, maybe as earlier as last summer, that if he was destined to lose the nomination, he was going to take Jeb Bush down with him. The same logic may apply now to Cruz. That’s a bad deal for Trumpism in that Trump will have more leverage over the nominee if his endorsement is in play than if he’s rejected the GOP, but maybe Trump’s ego is now sufficiently bruised that revenge is the only option.

It occur to me that what we really need in a president is someone who constantly threatens but doesn’t back up his threats with action. That’s a person you can really trust.

I would like to give the topic of Trump a rest, but the temptations keep presenting themselves, don’t they?

[ADDENDUM: Here’s an interesting comment at Legal Insurrection:

Trump is exactly where he wants to be. He has a rabid base built that will vote for him even if he shoots someone. If he wins the nomination he loses the general to the Democrats and if he loses the nomination he runs third party, splits the Republican vote and the Democrats win. If Trump wants a Clinton presidency he is well placed to deliver.

And here’s a relevant comment from “The Other Chuck” on an earlier thread at this blog:

If Trump supporters are convinced that he is genuine in his now stated beliefs, and further that he has only the best interests of America at heart, then they MUST also know that he cannot fulfill that vision and win the nomination let alone the general election without the 2/3 of the Republican Party electorate currently aligned against him. Why would he consistently alienate them if he truly intends to go on to win? Why wouldn’t he be trying his best to bring them around so that his vision of restoring American greatness gets a national hearing?

The only answer and one that his followers refuse to consider, is that he has no intention of compromising with the right because his purpose is to disrupt and destroy it. This position is openly stated on many websites as reason to support his candidacy. One of those websites is ConservativeTreeHouse, but there are several others with the same goal. Trumps credentials with these people is the fact that he is challenging not just the Republican Party establishment, but also conservatism itself through his populist ideas of trade protectionism and his living example of crony capitalism.

He blackmailed the Republican Party to gain access to the primary process at the start by threatening a 3rd party run. Now he openly attacks its nominal leader, the last sitting Republican president, as a lying warmonger directly responsible for 4,000 plus dead and thousands more wounded American heroes. Please tell me you avid Trump supporters what he would be doing differently if he were a Michael Moore Democrat?

I wonder what’s to prevent a candidate who is against a party and out to destroy it from using that party’s primary process to harm it? What makes Trump a Republican eligible to run in the primary? Because he says he is? I don’t think the situation has ever come up before, so I don’t think party leaders ever envisioned it.]

How Justice Scalia’s death is likely to affect pending Court decisions

The New Neo Posted on by

From William Jacobson.

Oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas and even more more so Friedrichs v. California Teachers’ Association suggested the Court would decide for the conservative position in both.

Now those cases are thrown into turmoil. The traditional response when a Justice dies after oral arguments but before a written decision has been to either affirm the lower court without setting precedent, or to order. Either option is at least a temporary setback for conservatives…

…Justice Scalia…was not merely a member of the conservative wing, he was its intellectual champion, and we will only be able to assess the implications of his death for the Court and country when we know who will replace him. A liberal taking Scalia’s seat could be transformative in a way President Obama only dreams of. A conservative replacement would maintain the status quo.

The Senate leadership has accordingly already asserted that it would not confirm any Obama nominee. If the Senate perseveres, this puts Scalia’s replacement and the fate of the Court in the hands of the 2016 presidential election winner. The Senate should not confirm any nominee that would change the balance of the Court, and GOP voters should nominate a candidate with deep and reliable conservative bona fides.

How many of these most lied-about books have you read?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the list of the 20 books that people most often think they should have read, say they have read, but often haven’t read.

For me the grand total of books on that list actually read is eleven:

(1) Both Alice books. Annotated version. Loved them.

(2) 1984 I read when I was eleven or twelve. It gave me nightmares, but boy, did I read it. Read it many times since. The other evening I was talking to a friend and I referred to something as “doubleplusungood.” My friend had no idea what I was talking about, but for me a word like that has become part of the everyday English language.

(3) Lord of the Rings. Tried and tried and tried but couldn’t get past the first few pages. This happens to me with most novels of the fantasy genre (or whatever you call it).

(4) War and Peace. Had to read it for school. Liked the people (peace?) parts, hated the war parts.

(5) Anna Karenina. In high school—yep! Was lukewarm about it; I don’t think I understood it.

(6) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Do the Basil Rathbone movies count? No? Then no. But I loved those movies. And I love the name “Basil Rathbone.”

(7) To Kill a Mockingbird. Read it a long time ago, and just didn’t care for it. I know that makes me some sort of pariah, but although I finished it in order to find out what was going on with Boo Radley, otherwise it seemed sort of like the Movie of the Week.

(8) David Copperfield. Yes, and am very fond of it—maybe because although it’s fiction, it’s a bit autobiographical (Dickens, that is, not me), and I think that comes through. I was introduced to it in the wonderful Classic Comics version. Don’t laugh; those things were great.

(9) Crime and Punishment. Also read in high school. Very much taken with it. I thought, wow, here’s someone who’s thinking about the big stuff.

(10) Pride and Prejudice. Tried and failed. I have no Jane Austen receptors. And yet I am a woman. Go figure.

(11) Bleak House. Never even tried.

(12) Harry Potter. My son wanted me to read them, so I read numbers one and two and a third of the way through number 3 I gave up. They’re clever and lively, but my patience with them had run out. I just didn’t care anymore.

(13) Great Expectations. Saw the movie, but no to the book.

(14) The Diary of Anne Frank. As a child and again as an adult. I also wrote about Anne here.

(15) Oliver Twist. Now, that’s an interesting question. Did I read it? It’s the first one I have to think about. I saw the incredibly excellent David Lean movie. I saw the more sanitized musical version “Oliver.” But did I read the book? I must confess I don’t know, but if I had to guess I’d say no.

(16) Fifty Shades trilogy: seems a bit anomalous in the company of the others on the list, but no.

(17) And Then There Were None. I don’t like mystery or detective stories. Haven’t read it; have no urge to.

(18) The Great Gatsby. Oh, yes, many times. And therein lies a tale.

(19) Catch-22. Of course, when it first came out. I was a teenager, and it seemed really different—funny, dark humor, wild and crazy timeline.

(20) The Catcher in the Rye. Yes, at 13, a good age to read it.

I’m also wondering why two of my favorite classics, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, aren’t on there. I think it’s because people actually do read—and love—Jane Eyre. I also read and loved Wuthering Heights, but it’s a far more difficult book and I have a hunch it’s much less commonly read. Plowing through all that Yorkshire-accented dialogue from some of the characters doesn’t make it any easier, either. .

And by the way, I don’t think I’ve ever lied about reading a book.

A plea to the all but three candidates: Drop out. NOW.

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m totally on board with this:

There are three candidates. Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. No one else has a path to the nomination. The rest are in the way.

Dr. Carson, you are a good guy who has zero chance of winning the nomination. Zero. You are locking up a set of votes that need to gravitate to the three real candidates. Your campaign’s chaos and your regrettable whimpering over Ted Cruz’s tactics is driving down your stock…

John Kasich, you did well in New Hampshire, and as goes New Hampshire goes so goes absolutely nowhere else. You’ve made your point about why the nominee should consider you for the veep slot. Time to walk away.

And Jeb. Time to choose, Jeb. Your dad was a patriot. Your brother was a patriot. Are you a patriot? If Trump is so awful that you are compelled to put up vaguely critical billboards about him, then you need to sacrifice yourself and get out of the race so someone else can beat him…

This is truly it, conservatives.

I’ve seen these sentiments elsewhere today, too. Will the candidates heed it? I really, really don’t think so, not yet anyway (and for Bush maybe never). Of course, the voters could heed it, and just not vote for those three people. But I don’t think that will happen at this point, either.

Lie, mistake—whatever

The New Neo Posted on by

For many years, the question of whether the Iraq War was an error or not was discussed on this blog very regularly, and a lively discussion it was. There is no question that people on the right differed and still differ about that. My opinion remains that knowing what we knew then, it was not a mistake, and it could have ended up far better than it has had it not been for the presidency of Barack Obama.

But in all that time, the “Bush lied!!” meme had pretty much remained the province of the left. The charge has long infuriated me, not only because the evidence is against it, but because it posits an evil George Bush rather than a bumbling one. What’s more, in those who spout it, the moral difference is blurred between an honest mistake and a deliberate lie, a lack of distinction which seems both pernicious and illogical.

Which brings us to today, when I saw this statement in the comments section:

I wouldn’t have described the pre-invasion runup as a bunch of lies, but rather as a bunch of self-delusions—but, in the end, you wind up in the same place.

The rest of the comment had to do with the prosecution of the war, but the issue I’m concerned with now is: do you wind up “in the same place”?

Well, you do wind up in the same place if you fail to make a distinction between error, “self-delusion” (a form of error, after all), and a deliberate lie. I would have thought that distinction was fairly clear, at least in the conceptual and moral sense if not in the blurry buzz of real life. But perhaps that’s just another example of my dinosaur nature.

One of those “same places” that you end up in is on the side of the left. If this sort of reasoning becomes the prevailing “logic” on both sides, then it really will be all the same, and all that will matter is who can yell “liar!” the loudest.

Hmmm—then again, haven’t I just described last Saturday night’s GOP debate?

The pro-Trump defense of his attack on George Bush last night: brilliant strategic move to appeal to the middle

The New Neo Posted on by

I wondered how Trump fans would explain and justify his behavior last night. I had no doubt they would do it, and it didn’t take long for the preferred defense to emerge. Basically, it went something like this: Trump knows he’s got the GOP nomination sewed up, so he’s smartly and strategically appealing to Democrats and the middle.

Only problem is—well, there are several problems with that theory. The first is that Trump still has to win states such as South Carolina, where this debate was held, prior to their primary. And in the GOP in South Carolina and pretty much everywhere, his view is a highly unpopular one. Although he has been leading in the polls there (just as he was in Iowa) he knows from Iowa that a debate performance can help or hurt. So there’s a timing problem; this is no time to pivot to the middle. There’s plenty of time for that later, once he really had tied up the nomination.

Then there’s the fact that ideas such as blaming 9/11 on Bush because it happened during his “reign” (Trump’s phrase) is not a middle or a moderate position. It appeals to leftists, but a leftist won’t vote for Trump in the general based on that alone, even if the leftist agrees with that particular position of his. Most voters who believe that also don’t believe in the rest of Trump’s platform.

In addition, Trump said these things about George Bush (Bush lied!!!) with a demeanor that looked somewhat unhinged. So there were two messages in his statements—content and process, as it were. The content was pretty far out (and leftist) to begin with, especially for a GOP primary in SC, and the process was also pretty far out, too: his emotional state, and his interpersonal behavior, which came across as childish.

Lastly—and this may be most important of all—this was not something Trump came up with for last night or even for this election. He has been stating these beliefs since 2007 or 2008 at least. He has been extremely consistent in this point of view, and I’m surprised more people didn’t know that before. If they didn’t, it’s certainly not for lack of trying to get the word out on my part. I’ve been writing about the topic for many months. Here are just two examples: this and this (that latter post is one of the earliest I ever wrote about Trump). These thoughts are not new for Trump; they’re very very old. This is a deeply entrenched part of his belief system, and I’m glad it’s finally coming out.

Now Trump is trying to walk it back a little, as I suspected he might. He must have heard it didn’t play all that well with the folks in Peoria. Hey, the walkback might even work, because he’s a good con artist and people are gullible. But if you look at his history, last night’s attack on George Bush was mild compared to some in the past.

I hope it all comes out.

Debate afterthoughts

The New Neo Posted on by

A few random thoughts—

I refuse to predict what will happen in the polls as a result of last night’s debate. Trump’s supporters have so far been completely faithful to him, no matter what. So it’s very much a possibility that they will remain faithful. But if ever they should desert him, it should be after last night’s impersonation of a leftist demonstrator, channeling his inner Michael Moore.

Was this a Howard Dean moment for Trump? Darned if I know. On the debate thread at Ace’s, I noticed a commenter saying something like, “Coming next to a theater near you: Perot, Act II” (a reference to the fact that as the season wore on in 1992, Perot came to be seen by some as unbalanced). I did notice, however, that quite a few of Ace’s pro-Trump commenters were not pleased with Trump’s performance, although they were not about to reject him. Their criticism was just that he didn’t look good, wasn’t being smart, but that his anti-Bushisms should help him in the general.

I wonder why they think that a lot of Republican voters won’t desert him for those comments, though. And I wonder why they would continue to trust him after those comments. As another Ace commenter wrote, “I don’t recall any of the Democrats running for President in ’04 or ’08 blaming bush for the Twin Towers.” Trump placed himself to the left of a lot of Democrats last night, and it can only underline the criticism that he’s really a liberal, and can’t be trusted to not betray the right.

I think that the rest of the candidates looked good in comparison, even Kasich and Carson, who I’d love to see drop out. Jeb sprang to more life when defending his family, and seems to have figured out a way to fight Trump and not look completely silly. Cruz was Cruz: smartest guy in this room or any other, composed and organized, although not quite as “likable” as you’d want to see (I, for one, don’t mind, because I don’t need to get the warm fuzzies from a candidate, but I guess it matters to a lot of people). Rubio—who had by far the most pressure on him, after last week—did very very well, and in particular didn’t sound scripted or repetitious. He defended George Bush against Trump better than Jeb did, which was interesting to see.

Why did Trump look like he’d come off his meds tonight? Well, assuming he really didn’t come off his meds, I think there were two reasons. The first is that finally a moderator actually asked him a good question about the awful things he’d previously said about George Bush, and he had the choice of either agreeing with his former self or disagreeing. Trump being Trump and not really into saying he’s been wrong about anything, chose to double down in a most peculiar way.

The second reason was the size of the group. In a bigger group, it was easier to ignore Trump and harder for him to get up a really good head of steam, simply due to lack of air time. Last night he was given enough rope. In a much smaller group (say, one on one), it might look like Trump simply fighting with that particular opponent. But with five others, it became crystal clear that Trump has one repetitious defense, and that’s to attack (liar! liar!) and to say he shouldn’t be attacked. In line with yesterday’s content/process post of mine, Trump is almost pure process and very little content at all.