Trump on de Blasio, circa 2013

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m just curious.

Calling all Trump supporters. Please read this article about the things Trump said about de Blasio when Bill was running for mayor of New York.

For those who don’t feel like clicking, here:

I think pretty strongly that he’ll end up being a good mayor, maybe a very good mayor and I don’t think he’s going to want to kill the golden goose.

I think he’s a smart guy that knows what’s going on really big league and I think he is not going to want to destroy New York,” Trump said. “I think he is going to want to make New York great.”

So, what do you think? Is it this?

“It’s okay because he has to say that stuff to do business in New York.”

So, he’s a whore for money? Do you care? Is money all he cares about? How do you know what his principles are? This is no isolated incident, either; this is the way he rolls, praising whoever he thinks will gain power, no matter how pernicious or destructive, and he’s been doing it for decades. Can you trust him? Do you actually think his money insulates him from corruption? If so, why did his money cause him to say this? Or do you think he really thought this, and now he’s changed his mind? Can you imagine supporting anyone else on earth who said this sort of thing? Do you support him no matter what because “WALL!” and DESTROY GOP!”? If he’s your battering ram, do you really think you know what he would do once he’s gained the most powerful position in the world?

NOTE: By the way, those of you who say that Trump’s the only one who’s been talking about a wall, see this from 2011:

Ted Cruz was fighting illegal immigration (and his own party) when Donald Trump was not even a candidate. For example, see this (datelined 10/29/2013):

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has shaped the view of Republican leaders on immigration reform, and his sway with grassroots conservatives will make passing comprehensive legislation significantly more difficult.

Cruz scored a victory in the battle for the hearts and minds of his party over the weekend when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) backed away from the Senate’s overhaul of immigration laws.

GOP leaders, after President Obama’s reelection last year, sounded more open to moving broad legislation on immigration, but their interest in doing so has waned as Cruz’s power has grown.

“There are going to be a lot of Republicans who don’t want to be on the other side of Ted Cruz,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations at NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for reduced immigration flows.

See also this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and there are lots more, too.

[ADDENDUM: After reading some of the comments, it occurs to me that I need to highlight something, which is that those statements of Trump’s were made while de Blasio was running for mayor, not after he was elected. If it had been after the election, at least you could say Trump was accepting it and trying to make the best of it and to ingratiate himself with him because it was a fait accompli. Before the election, it amounts to an endorsement.

The article says:

Trump’s enthusiasm might seem unlikely amid reports that the business and finance sectors of the city worry what a de Blasio tenure might mean for their industries.

So, other business people didn’t seem to feel the need to prostitute themselves at that point and endorse de Blasio. Just that great old truthteller, Donald Trump, who said before the election that de Blasio was “a smart guy that knows what’s going on really big league.”

What politician wouldn’t Donald Trump praise, if it could get him some money and advantage? These sorts of comments from Trump are exactly the sort of thing that in anyone else would draw the wrath of any conservative. But Trump gets a pass on them from a lot of people because he does it for money?

Okay, here’s a little more analysis of Palin’s endorsement of Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I was being a bit cute when I wrote an entire post that went like this: “‘Palin endorses Trump’….well, naturally.”

Today I’m going to say a bit more about it, but only a bit more. It doesn’t interest me all that much, perhaps because that “naturally” is what I truly think. I wouldn’t have expected anything else, despite the fact that Trump’s opponent Cruz would be the person most in line with Palin in terms of conservative principles—at least, it would seem that way.

But just think about it. Palin has lost a lot of support from the rank and file right over the years. Her stint as a reality star, her increasing family chaos, but perhaps most of all her initial resignation from the governorship—all have taken a toll on her reputation for seriousness in the political realm. Despite that, she has many many die-hard supporters, and they are, for the most part, the very same people who support Trump.

Not all Trump-supporters are Palin-supporters, but I would guess that nearly all of Palin’s recent supporters are Trump-supporters. And in endorsing Trump she was not just playing to her own base, or even riding on the coattails of a popular media figure and he on hers. It’s that Palin was always a populist and Trump is a populist, and she’s supporting her fellow-populist. That’s their bond, and it’s a strong one.

Populism transcends political philosophy for both of them. Populism, and that “maverick-y” quality. Both enjoy saying things that shock and jar, and which their followers consider brave. Both have followers rather than supporters, although they have supporters too. Both thrive on celebrity. Cruz is too wonky and could never be considered a populist, and although he’s a maverick of sorts he’s a very controlled and cerebral maverick with a very different style. Palin could support him as senator, but in a national race that Trump had entered and was seeming to dominate, for Palin it was no contest.

Those of you who have read this blog for many years know that I’ve defended Palin from the start, despite the fact that she’s hardly my favorite politician and I’m never been a big fan. But you could look long and hard on this blog if you wanted to find criticism of her, much less a hit piece. And this post isn’t a hit piece either, although I completely disagree with Palin’s choice. But the choice doesn’t surprise me, and it makes sense for her, despite the fact that Trump goes against many of the conservative principles she espouses. For whatever reason, a lot of people who support Trump are able to ignore his liberal qualities because they think he will do One Big Thing, something no one else can do. It doesn’t even matter what that one thing is—for some, it’s ending immigration. For others, it’s ending PC speech. For still others, it’s causing the demise of the Republican Party (okay, maybe three big things). I’m not sure which is foremost for Palin, or maybe all three, but they are things she wants, and things she may believe Trump can do. At the very least, she wants to hitch her wagon to him, and maybe there’s something in it for her in the future.

I don’t happen to think Trump would accomplish any of those things if he were elected, and certainly not in the way his followers think he will or with the benefits they think will come. I’m not going to turn this post into one about Trump, though—do a search and you can find plenty of those on this blog (notice, though, that I’ve still resisted making a separate category for him, although I realize I should).

So in closing I’ll just repeat—Palin endorses Trump, naturally.

Hitler the racial anarchist

The New Neo Posted on by

I think there’s something to this theory about Hitler, as described in an interview with Timothy Snyder, author of a recent book on Hitler, the Holocaust, and WWII (I haven’t read the book, by the way). I don’t completely buy Snyder’s ideas as expressed in the interview, but they’re certainly of interest.

What Snyder’s theory suggests is that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was even more weird than “ordinary” virulent anti-Semitism, and that Hitler had a full-fledged theory of history and its trajectory—a very very dark one, as one might expect:

Snyder: So what Hitler does is he inverts; he reverses the whole way we think about ethics, and for that matter the whole way we think about science. What Hitler says is that abstract thought””whether it’s normative or whether it’s scientific””is inherently Jewish. There is in fact no way of thinking about the world, says Hitler, which allows us to see human beings as human beings. Any idea which allows us to see each other as human beings””whether it’s a social contract; whether it’s a legal contract; whether it’s working-class solidarity; whether it’s Christianity””all these ideas come from Jews. And so for people to be people, for people to return to their essence, for them to represent their race, as Hitler sees things, you have to strip away all those ideas. And the only way to strip away all those ideas is to eradicate the Jews. And if you eradicate the Jews, then the world snaps back into what Hitler sees as its primeval, correct state: Races struggles against each other, kill each other, starve each other to death, and try and take land…

…So as I see it, it’s not so much that Hitler built up the German state in a conventional sense. He built up this new capacity to impose a racial worldview on other countries. And the paradox is that he couldn’t really do it in Germany. I mean, what happened to German Jews was dreadful, but German Jews were not actually killed in significant numbers in prewar Germany. The total is a couple hundred. Jews could only really be killed once Hitler got himself out of the box of Germany and used this German racial power that he created over the six years to wipe out other states. It’s at that point that all kinds of things are possible in those other states. But also, you can then send German Jews east, to places like Minsk or Riga where you’ve wiped out the political order, and have them be killed there. That’s one of these things that I think Holocaust historians have to explain. Sure, there was lots of anti-Semitism in, for example, Vienna, but the Jews of Vienna were murdered in Belarus. Why is that? And the answer is that the German state couldn’t actually murder them inside Germany””not in very large numbers. To carry out mass killing, it had to first create this zone of anarchy out in the east and then physically take the Jews and send them out there. ”¦

Actually, I think it’s somewhat simpler than that. Hitler needed the cooperation of the German people (at least for a while) in order to wage war. He didn’t want Germans to revolt against him or refuse to cooperate with him. He used fear to induce obedience, but he needed the death camps and the killings there to be far away for the most part, under subject slave peoples, because real knowledge of them might cause unrest even among Germans, who had not signed up for this. Snyder sort of alludes to that here, but doesn’t tie the two together:

Hitler’s goal is to spread anti-Semitism within the German population, and he succeeds in doing that, but he comes to power much more radical than the population, and he comes to power in part by concealing just how anti-Semitic he is.

Locating the death camps far away was an effort to conceal them from the German people, or at least to not rub their noses in them so much.

Also, Snyder’s theory is in accordance with the fact that Hitler did not seem to care what happened to the German people once they had been found wanting by losing the war and going down to defeat. Death was preferable, if the Germans had been found wanting by losing. Hitler’s political last will—a vile document he wrote shortly before his suicide, in which he repeatedly blames the Jews for everything, and calls on the German people to continue the war and fight for the Nazi cause unto death—seems to both support and contradict Snyder’s theory somewhat. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews is certainly paramount, and you can tell that from the document. But even if he does support the obliteration of nations, it seems that he makes an exception for Germany, which will go on to triumph, even if it takes centuries—although come to think of it, in the will Hitler writes about the German people more than about the nation of Germany itself.

SCOTUS will be ruling on whether Obama overreached on immigration

The New Neo Posted on by

This promises to be very interesting:

The Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it will take up a case challenging the legality of President Barack Obama’s executive actions aimed at granting quasi-legal status and work permits to up to five million people who entered the U.S. illegally as children or who have children who are American citizens…

The justices are expected to hear arguments on the issue in April and to hand down a ruling by the end of June. Illegal immigration has already been a hot topic in the presidential contest, but the high-profile attention brought on by the Supreme Court fight could amp up the debate even further as the campaign plays out this spring and summer.

In their order Tuesday, the justices added one question to the case: whether Obama’s actions violated the Constitutional provision requiring him to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed” ”” in essence, whether existing law bars the president from making the kinds of enforcement changes he sought to make.

That issue will be added to three laid out by the Justice Department in the petition asking the justices to take up the case: whether states have legal standing to challenge the deferred actions grants by providing benefits to such immigrants, whether the actions Obama ordered in 2014 were arbitrary and capricious under federal law, and whether the administration was obliged to go through a formal notice-and-comment period before proceeding with its plan.

This is an important case, not just because it’s a test of Obama’s immigration policies and the methods by which he has arrived at them, but because it is a test of the chief executive’s ability to override Congress and the will of the people. That has repercussions way beyond Obama, and is of the utmost importance to those who are interested in liberty and the future of the republic.

I wish the decision would be 9-0 for liberty, but I fear it will be only 5-4, either way.

The hype about how Trump could win: what are the facts?

The New Neo Posted on by

Now, don’t get me wrong. Maybe Trump could win the election against Hillary. In fact, maybe any of the candidates could, if she gets weak enough.

So I’m not doubting the possibility of it. But I doubt the motives of the NY Times or Politico or other left-leaning periodicals when they continue to say he will do well against Clinton, in the absence of evidence that he would do any better against her than other Republican candidates, and the presence of evidence that he would actually do worse against her than they would.

It’s also curious to me that none of these articles seem to actually analyze the polls to come to their conclusions. I have looked at the polls, and continue to do so, and have come to the conclusion that, at least so far, they indicate that Trump would be the weakest candidate of the GOP frontrunners in a head-to-head against Clinton.

That doesn’t mean it couldn’t change—it most definitely could. But so far it hasn’t. Everything else is speculation.

So here’s the latest from Politico on the subject. The author asserts that Trump would do well with blacks; I’ve seen that said before, but I’ve never seen a poll that indicates Trump does better than the other GOP candidates with black voters in a one-on-one contest with Hillary. Wouldn’t you want to see that evidence in order to believe that it’s true? I would. After all, there’s no reason it couldn’t be true. If I had to guess, without looking at any polls, I’d say it certainly might be true.

But what’s true is that, although I’ve looked at many polls, I’ve not found one that supports it. Notice also that the Politico article on how Trump could win (entitled “How Trump Defeats Hillary Clinton”) talks about how Trump might or could defeat Clinton, according to his supporters and to “Republican pollsters,” but doesn’t link to any polls that show it or that show his support from blacks. The most you read there about it is that Frank Luntz says he’s talked to some black people who voted for Obama and who say they would consider voting for Trump. How many? What percentage? How many of them said they would consider voting for the other Republicans? Crickets.

And despite the fact that opinions are all the article cites to support the idea, the article’s lede goes like this:

If Donald Trump becomes the next president of the United States, there will be plenty of surprises along the way. One of the biggest will be the help he gets from black voters.

According to Republican pollsters and Trump’s allies, the GOP poll-leader ”” who has been dogged by accusations of racism, most recently for tweeting out a chart that exaggerated the share of murders committed by blacks ”” is poised to out-perform with this demographic group in a general-election matchup with Hillary Clinton.

I can’t escape the idea that the liberal/left press is pushing a Donald Trump candidacy because they feel he’s actually the weakest candidate.

As far as polls that actually attempt to measure the amount of black support for the various candidates go, I recently analyzed the numbers here:

If you look closely at questions 22-25 in that poll, which was taken January 4-7 and involved a sample of 1006 respondents queried by telephone (cell and landline), you will see that Trump does slightly worse against Hillary among Democrats and among black voters than the other leading GOP candidates do. Take a look if you don’t believe me””and these are typical of results I’ve seen in earlier polls.

In a matchup against Hillary, Cruz gets 11% of those identifying as Democrats, whereas Hillary gets 6% of people who say they are Republicans. Rubio gets 12% of Democrats against Hillary’s 5% of Republicans, a trifle better. Bush (remember him?) gets 10% of Democrats to Hillary’s 7% of Republicans, a tiny bit worse. And Trump gets 9% of Democrats to Hillary’s 8% of Republicans, which is a bit worse, although they all cluster rather closely together and the differences are not so very significant.

Against Hillary, Cruz gets 5% of the black vote, but Rubio gets 9% of the black vote. Could be significant, I suppose. Bush gets 6% of the black vote against her. And Trump? 4% of the black vote. Again””except perhaps for Rubio””they all are very similar, but Trump does slightly worse.

Most polls don’t break the support of each candidate down by race, which is what enables people to speculate airily on the subject. But some polls do, and that’s what they say.

The most recent national poll available doesn’t have a breakdown that measures black support for each GOP candidate, either. But it does have head-to-head numbers for the GOP lead candidates against Clinton. The news for Trump there certainly contradicts the Politico piece and all the hype—because once again Trump does very poorly against her (the questions were asked by NBC/WSJ between January 9-13).

In a matchup against Clinton, here’s how the candidates do. I’ve reported the Clinton figure first in each case:

Clinton/Trump 51/41
Clinton/Rubio 47/46
Clinton/Cruz 49/45

This is consistent with every single poll I’ve seen during the last few months. Sometimes all the Republicans win, sometimes they all lose (except Rubio, who consistently beats her). But Trump always does the worst. Now it’s possible there’s some poll I haven’t seen, but I’ve been following this fairly closely for a long, long time, and the trends are extremely clear. One poll or another tends not to tell the whole story, but the average tells you a lot more, although nothing’s infallible.

That NBC/WSJ poll had some other interesting figures, too. In the same poll, Sanders beats Trump 54/39 (the pollsters didn’t ask about Sanders versus the other candidates; at least, I didn’t see any questions about it.). Also, respondents who were likely to vote in the GOP primary were asked about 2-person battles within the primary. If the only choice were Trump vs. Rubio, Trump would win the primary 52 to Rubio’s 45. That seems to reflect the conservative distaste for Rubio, although Rubio polls best against Clinton. But if the two-person primary race were Trump versus Cruz, Cruz would beat Trump 51 to Trump’s 43. That indicate that, if people were to drop out of the race (if they ever manage to do so), Cruz would probably get the nomination, if this poll is accurate and trends remained the same.

I haven’t noticed any newspaper highlighting that finding. I wonder why (that’s sarcasm, by the way).

I’ve got a question for you

The New Neo Posted on by

I experimented today with having a long post be split into segments with a “continued” button that the reader can click to go to the second page of the post (scroll down on this page to see what I mean; it’s the post entitled “Would courts actually ‘settle’ the birther issue?”). This makes for a cleaner home page with less scrolling down, although it means the reader has to take an extra step to finish the longer posts.

What do you think? Should I continue this practice? Does it make it easier to see what’s what and to read it, or harder?

I just want to say…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that my love for jazz apples has advanced to the point where I have trouble eating any other type of apple. So far, they all seem inferior to me compared to the fabulous jazz, for which I am willing to pay a slight premium. Green apples are beautiful, and they make for a nice logo and face-covering. But it’s jazz that I love.

Jazz and I just celebrated our four-year anniversary recently. Still going strong.

At least it’s a love that’s good for me. Until they discover that apples are bad. Actually, the low-carb contingent probably already thinks apples are bad.

But only bad apples are bad.

Will the Marines lower standards to accommodate women?

The New Neo Posted on by

The NY Post editorial board wonders:

Gen. John Kelly, USMC, is retiring after more than four decades as an active-duty Marine. His “greatest fear,” he says, is that the vast “equal opportunity” pressure for women in combat roles will lead the Pentagon to water down standards…

Defense Secretary Ash Carter last month announced that women will soon be eligible for all combat positions. (They had been blocked from about 10 percent of those posts.)

Yes, Carter also warned that equal opportunity wouldn’t bring “equal participation by men and women in all specialties.”

The reasons are obvious: On average, the two sexes simply have different physical virtues. Men will dominate when it comes to upper-body strength, which is generally vital in combat roles. And Carter has vowed not to alter the high standards for those roles.

But Kelly doubts that will last: “Whether it’s 12 months from now, four years from now ”¦ the question will be asked whether we’ve [truly] let women into these other roles.” Ideologues who don’t see the results they want will ask, “Why aren’t [women] staying in those roles? Why aren’t they advancing as infantry people?”

I think that past experience indicates this is a very valid worry.

Most people would have no objection to women in combat, if there were some assurance that standards would never be lowered (although some people would still have objections, based on such things as special problems for women captured by the enemy, and/or sexual fraternization between men and women—and resultant pregnancies—at the front). But even those who accept women in combat if it can be done without lowering standards should have observed that those promises have not been met in other fields—such as firefighting, as the editorial points out.

Why would the Marines be any different, and standards remain the same? I don’t see that they would. The way the argument usually goes is like this: men and women are equally capable in almost everything, and there is an inherent positive in allowing women to do everything men can do. If standards exist that exclude women (or nearly all women), there must be something sexist and even arbitrary about the standards. So they need to be relaxed and changed to accommodate women, in the name of fairness and diversity, and the losses will be minimal compared to the gains.

Would courts actually “settle” the birther issue?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I mentioned the other day that I’d be tackling this hypothetical furnished by commenter “Ira.” This is that post. But I’m going to go about it in a somewhat roundabout way, by talking about the law around the Cruz birther controversy first. Don’t worry; I’ll get to that hypothetical a bit later in this post.]

I’ve already written why it is that it’s Trump (and/or the other Republican candidates running against Cruz) who might have standing to sue to settle the birther issue at this point, not Cruz or anyone else. George Stephanopoulos seems to have done his homework on this, because he brought it up yesterday during his interview with Trump on ABC:

Stephanopoulos then said, “But you know, the person who sued [Cruz] probably doesn’t have standing, a lot of legal scholars”“.” Trump interrupted, saying, “That’s all right. There will be a lot of people who sue him who do have standing.”

“Say you have standing, why don’t you file the case,” Stephanopoulos asked. Trump responded, “Oh that’s an interesting case. Wow that sounds like a very good case. I’d do the public a big favor.”

Continue reading →

Disturbing news from the Trump front

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s like a failed diet.

Each day I take a vow (although I must admit, not a solemn one) to just push away from the Trump table. Stop writing about the guy for a while. But way too many days he pulls me back in, either by his behavior, or by someone’s reaction to that behavior, or sometimes by substantive issues that have been raised in relation to him—such as, for example, who would have standing in a birther suit, or what does the GOP and the general electorate want in a candidate.

This time, though, it’s Trump’s own behavior that’s got me writing about him: he seems to have had something of a meltdown over the weekend.

Read the examples at the link. I’m not going to list them; Leon H. Wolf has done a good job. Whether you like Trump and support him or don’t support him and disagree with him or even dislike him, you should be alarmed.

This is how Trump responds to threat or criticism. It’s not just that he’s not “nice.” It’s not about niceness or meanness, it’s that he sounds like a narcissistic megalomaniac whose skin is way too thin for someone suggesting that we should elect him to a public office of great responsibility.

Most of Trump’s supporters almost certainly will not care, however, unless I read them wrong. Just as Trump cannot admit error or flaws, so they—in the glow of their admiration—see his every move as the clever tactic of a real alpha male. Now, I’m familiar with the alpha male concept, and I think that presidents should be strong and should be able to convey strength (and “male” is a metaphoric term in this case, because Margaret Thatcher was an “alpha male” if ever I saw one).

But alpha male Trump is not. Not every powerful rich guy with a beautiful young wife (or a series of them) is an alpha male, at least not in the sense I’m talking about. When I think “alpha male,” I think of the strength of the John Wayne characters in the movies, or of Ronald Reagan outside the movies, or of many of the heroes in the armed forces or other service professions (firefighter, for example). No braggadocio, no below-the-belt attacks. Integrity, and the power that comes from internal strength rather than narcissistic weakness masquerading as strength.

I don’t expect to convince anyone. But Donald Trump—for all his money, power, and real-world accomplishments, of which he definitely has many—is talking (and tweeting) like a man in deep trouble of one kind or other, whether it be trouble in the polls, or trouble within himself, or both.

I’ve described how Mark Levin has recently given Trump a warning about his tactics. Today, Rush Limbaugh has added the following:

I think Trump going after Cruz is quite normal; it’s understandable. But I think [Trump’s] making a tactical error the way he’s doing it. Whatever you want to say, Cruz is not a “nasty” guy. When you get into criticism, it better be believable. But Trump is looking at Cruz, and I’m sure is hearing about the negatives that Cruz has, and I’m not gonna sit here and pretend to you that they don’t exist…

I think Trump is free to criticize Cruz all he wants as far as I’m concerned, but going after him as a “nasty” guy and on this birther business, he’s gotta worry that it’s gonna create more negatives within his own support base rather than turn people off to Cruz. And he’s gotta consider the opportunity that it’s providing Cruz in responding.

So Trump has given Cruz the opportunity to make his point over and over again and to show that he’s not cowering in fear in the corner and running away from it. And in the midst of all this, Cruz, in responding to this, is not even mentioning Trump’s name, which is… That’s lesson number one. You don’t mention the opponent.

It seems to me that in this Trump/Cruz exchange, it’s Cruz who’s coming across as the alpha male, if anyone—and as the more stable human being, not to mention the less nasty one.

Truly, Madly, Deeply

The New Neo Posted on by

Since it’s the weekend, I want to put something non-political up here at the top of the blog.

After the death of Alan Rickman (and yes, I know about his politics; if I boycotted every artist whose politics I disagreed with, I’d have almost no one left), I started looking around for some my favorite scenes that featured him, and I found this one from “Truly, Madly, Deeply.” Here, Rickman plays the returned ghost of the dead husband of a grieving wife played by Juliet Stevenson, both of them musicians. This scene appears somewhat towards the end of the movie. The people you see briefly at the beginning of the scene are some fellow-ghosts he has brought and who have been hanging around her apartment. They’ve been starting to annoy her, although she originally had been overjoyed at the return of her husband: