The intrepid Cornhead files another of his campaign dispatches, this one on Carly Fiorina, with an aside about Donald Trump.
He makes one particularly interesting observation, which is that he heard a report that 30% of Iowa voters are still undecided. If true, that’s an awful lot of voters.
…An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Janey Cutler died two years later at 82:
Her son Drew, 43, of Newarthill, Lanarkshire said: “Mum was the light of our lives.
“She was a brilliant mum, granny and great-granny who lived for her family, friends and her dog Tara, who was with her when she died.
“We were all devastated because we weren’t expecting it. She was always very happy and healthy and very rarely got ill.”…
Drew said: “She didn’t get into singing till later in life but she loved it. She could light up a room and bring tears to eyes.
“She didn’t want to be famous, she just wanted to sing.
“She loved life and just like she used to sing – she had no regrets.”
Cutler died in her sleep.
And in case you’re wondering about the origins of the song, it’s this:
I used to think there was zero chance of Hillary being indicted. Now I think there’s a 10% chance.
Yeah, yeah; Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump.
But I found this the other day, and I need to highlight it and try to give it as much exposure as possible. If you agree, please spread it around, and if you know anyone connected with any of the campaigns or PACs of his opponents, please call it to their attention.
The video tells us a lot about Trump, and I have no idea why his opponents have not highlighted this story and his behavior around it. I will probably write a lot more about the topic, but right now I wanted to get the video up.
It concerns a golf course that Trump built in Scotland. Now, he’s a real estate developer, and a project of that sort virtually always involves a lot of ugly things; that’s just the way it goes. And a person who does that for a living has to be somewhat ruthless in thinking that what he’s creating is worth displacing people. A developer can’t waste a lot of tears on the little people being displaced.
But I’ve never seen anything quite like what Trump tried to do to those little people who stood in his way. He ultimately lost this battle with them, although his golf course was built. Just to give you a little background, these people were not on his land at all, so the building of the project was not in question. He wanted to buy their property, however—despite their refusing to sell—and the reason he wanted these properties was that they were near his golf course and he felt they were spoiling the view.
But it’s the form his fight took that reveal the character of the man. I’m not talking about legal battles, I’m talking about a Trump fusillade of personal insults of a very low nature, and—well, just take a look for yourselves. I can’t imagine how any of the angry blue-collar people who support Trump can watch this and not be at least a bit disturbed. Maybe very disturbed. Actually, I’m not limiting it to blue-collar workers—I think anyone who watches it should be disturbed. I happen to think he looks like a snotty, spoiled child—but hey, that’s just me.
I realize that many many Trump supporters will not be disturbed by the video, however. I believe that they might see this as just an example of how hard he’ll fight for them. Yeah, maybe, if that’s what you think he’s really all about (until you get in his way, that is). Personally, I see him as being about money and power and attempting to crush anyone who gets in his way, as well as lying in order to do the same. That may be a good way to become a successful real estate developer, but it’s a very very dangerous set of traits to have in a president to the degree that Trump exhibits them—it’s a setup for a tyrant.
There are many many videos about this incident on YouTube, nearly all of them taken from a documentary entitled “You’ve Been Trumped” that was made in 2011. The entire film is available at YouTube, as well as much shorter videos. Here, I’ve posted the movie’s trailer first, which is very short (and it’s actually seconds 10-23 that contain the insults from Trump that I find most objectionable), followed by a somewhat longer video that I’ve chosen in order to give you more background. You might want to use the caption function when you watch; the accents can be hard to understand (and I don’t mean Trump’s accent). Even the closed caption function is sometimes a bit confused by them. :
[ADDENDUM: I meant to mention another important thing about this video—in some ways, the most important thing of all. It’s the sort of ammunition the Democrats are saving up to use against Trump in the general if he’s the Republican nominee.There’s tons more where that came from, all of it making him look very bad in the eyes of Independents and Democrats. The video is extremely unlikely to sway his devotees, but that’s not the point.]
Good insight here by David Harsanyi:
American politics has become a giant appeal to the base emotions of envy and/or anger””depending on what party you happen to be in.
That’s not to say that every member of the respective parties responds to those particular appeals, but a huge percentage do, and it seems much worse than it used to be. Let’s not even get into whether the emotions are justified or not; it doesn’t really matter, the point is that this is what we’ve come to, and the appeals are blatant rather than hidden. No one’s ashamed of what used to be considered base emotions that one ought to rise above (and yes, some anger is definitely justified, but it’s not enough of a foundation on which to choose a president). Now we can use the words “base emotions” in a different way, as well—to mean “emotions motivating a party’s base.”
Harsanyi says a lot more about the choice of Donald Trump as a receptacle for anger. Of course, the majority of Republicans have not chosen Trump. A third of them have—at least, so far, in answer to poll questions. But it’s still a sizable number:
There are many rational people on the right who either justify or are sympathetic to this movement for understandable reasons: They’re sick of corruption. Sick of the frauds and the failed promises. Sick of the abuses of the other party. Republicans want their own Obama.
But all of that is somewhat of a non sequitur. If the average Republican, who incessantly grumbles about establishment politicians with no principles, ends up supporting a demagogue with none, what can constitutional conservative and small”“l libertarians do but oppose him? It’s not as if we’re not constantly making idealistic arguments about liberty and principle, about free markets and the value of life, about the importance of mitigating the excesses of state power. They don’t care. At all.
The ugly reality of the right-wing electorate might be that a majority (this includes the Trumpkins, rent-seeking donor class, those who rarely pay attention, etc.) doesn’t give one whit about Buckley-ite conservatism anymore. The other day, Rush Limbaugh pondered whether “nationalism and populism have overtaken conservatism in terms of appeal.”
But I think that last sentence is operating on an incorrect premise. I don’t know whether that’s what Limbaugh actually said, or whether it’s Harsanyi’s interpretation of what Limbaugh said, but I don’t think that it’s true that “nationalism and populism have overtaken conservatism in terms of appeal.” Actually, they have always had more appeal than conservatism—that is, they have always appealed to more people. Why else use the word ““populism”?:
Populism is a doctrine that appeals to the interests and conceptions (such as hopes and fears) of the general population, especially when contrasting any new collective consciousness push against the prevailing status quo interests of any predominant political sector….
…Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell define populism as an ideology that “pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ”˜others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice”.
Populism is old as the hills, and it appeals to the people, and it’s long been “popular” in every sense of the word.
There’s this old quip from H.L. Mencken about democracy—implying pessimistically that democracy is at the mercy of a sort of mindless populism. I’ll let the old curmudgeon have the last word on it for today, or maybe the next-to-last word. By the way, not all populists, and not all populist candidates, are mindless. The best and most winning candidates combine thoughtfulness and even wisdom with some sort of strong populist appeal:
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Conservatism is not the same as populism, of course, and one of conservatism’s problems has long been that it doesn’t appeal to what the left might call “the masses.” In my observations of conservatives on blogs and elsewhere, a lot of them think their philosophy is so obviously superior that the populace should have seen the light long ago and elected more conservatives—in other words, that conservatism should have become even more popular. But now a significant percentage of “the people” on the right are supporting the decidedly populist and non-conservative Donald Trump, and conservatives see disaster. The most fanatical (and most angry) Trump supporters see anti-Trump conservatives as just being elites whining about their own loss of power.
I’m with the conservatives on this one—and I’m not whining about my loss of power, because I’m pretty sure I don’t have much. This blog reaches quite a few people, and I love you all (well, most of you), but it’s still just a few thousand, a drop in the proverbial bucket.
Watch:
I assume that Trump supporters won’t care what’s in the video. They will excuse it and say he’s changed; or explain that he’s just a vehicle to destroy the hated Republican Party that didn’t fight hard enough against many of the things he supports in the video; or say he didn’t really mean this stuff in the first place and was just being strategic, or making money, or whatever excuse happens to pop into their heads today.
This blog has yet to be infested by the cadres of Trump-shills who have infested other blogs and come to dominate the comments section. I am not describing the regular commenters here who support Trump. I disagree with them, and we argue, but for the most part it’s civil and substantive, or mostly substantive. But if you’ve been reading the comments sections of many other blogs on the right (Breitbart is a good example) you’ll see what I mean. Those Trump-supporters act exactly like leftist trolls—mockery, crowing, ad hominen insults, accusations, everything in the book—perhaps because some of them are leftist trolls, or perhaps because they have merely adopted the tactics of leftist trolls because they have seen how well these tactics work to silence and intimidate people.
This is where extremists of left and right resemble each other, although it’s not the only way. So far it’s been under control here, and I tend to keep it that way.
As for Trump himself, I’d love to not have to talk about him. But he goes on, and on, and I could probably write ten posts a day about the pernicious things he’s said and done. I won’t be doing that, but I plan to continue to cover him as long as he’s a factor in American political life. And right now he most certainly is a factor.
In closing, I’ll add a famous German saying written by Goethe. I’d like those support Trump and believe they can predict what he will do, and who trust him and want to give him power, to mull it over: Die ich rief, die Geister,/Werd ich nun nicht los.” (“The spirits which I have summoned/I now cannot banish.”)
[NOTE: I’ve bumped this post up.]
No surprise here, but still very chilling:
[ISIS] has reportedly issued a chilling threat to launch terror attacks in Spain, declaring: ‘We will recover our land from the invaders.’
The jihadists have long made it their goal to expand their boundaries beyond Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East.
As well as plans to expand the caliphate in Iraq, Syria, North Africa and large parts of western Asia, they have previously released a map marking out plans to seize parts of Europe.
Spain, which was ruled by Muslims for 700 years until 1492, is marked out as a territory the caliphate plans to have under its control by 2020.
You can say this is just trash talk, but I believe that ISIS believes it can, must, and will do it. Whether they are correct remains to be seen. Right now, the West has the tools to stop them. But the West can’t even seem to muster the resolve to halt its own demographic slide towards Islam.
[NOTE: For those unfamiliar with the term “Reconquista,” please see this.]
I have an article at American Thinker today, entitled “Donald Trump and freedom of speech: he’s no champion.”
It discusses the recent attempt by some members of the British Parliament to ban Trump for “hate speech,” and compares it with Trump’s reaction to the attempted terrorist attack on Pam Geller at her free speech event last May in Garland, Texas. Then I compare that with the reaction of Ted Cruz and Obama to the same event in Garland.
The results may surprise you, if you think of Trump as a champion of non-PC speech.
Why, it’s our hero: Donald Trump (video is at the link; it happened Wednesday the 20th of January).
You can find more on Trump’s rhetoric and the substantive issues (or supposedly substantive issues) he discussed here:
What a strange soundbite for a Republican frontrunner, suggesting that his famously crooked would-be Democratic opponent has more integrity than the most conservative candidate in the race. Gosh, I don’t think even Mitch McConnell would say that. Not publicly, anyway.
This is a smear, by the way. [Trump’s] seizing on the revelation last week that Cruz never disclosed a margin loan from Goldman Sachs, where his wife works, during his first Senate run. That’s true, sort of ”” he never disclosed it to the FEC, which Cruz blamed on a “filing error.” But it’s not true that he never disclosed the loan publicly. Phil Kerpen dug up this form from Cruz’s filing with the Secretary of the Senate before the runoff with David Dewhurst in 2012.
The Goldman Sachs loan was noted by the media no later than June 2013, in a story by Roll Call. Trump wants you to believe that Cruz deliberately tried to withhold information about it from the public, but if that were true then obviously he would have omitted it from the Senate filing as well. It’s a smear…
He’s saying this, by the way, at a moment when Clintonworld is under FBI investigation for possibly having traded government favors for donations to the Clinton Foundation. The Democratic frontrunner is being scrutinized by federal law enforcement for public corruption and Trump wants you to believe that Cruz is arguably the shadier operator of the two. Here’s a question to ask yourself the next time Trump accuses one of his opponents of being “owned” by special interests: Who would own Trump the politician if he hadn’t inherited many millions of dollars from his father to build a business that made him financially independent today? Between the two of them, Trump and Cruz, who’s the self-made man? Independence from donors is no trick when you started your career with a pile of money and then eagerly handed cash to crony politicians in both parties to make it grow. When Trump fans say he has balls, they’re right. It takes brass balls for this guy to accuse anyone else of cronyism.
So, let’s recap:
Trump is lying about the substantive issue of Cruz’s disclosure.
Trump is insinuating that getting a bank loan puts a person in the pocket of banks? Has Trump the real estate developer never gotten a bank loan or been otherwise involved with a bank? It’s an utterly bizarre accusation against Cruz, and in fact:
A poster on twitter has pointed out that Donald Trump is “owned” by almost literally everyone according to his most recent financial disclosures. He has billions (with a “B”) of dollars of outstanding loans from virtually every major Wall Street bank, including Capital One, Deutsche Bank, ISB, UBS, and Merrill Lynch.
Citibank, in particular, played a major role in one of the Trump’s organization’s more notorious bankruptcies, when the Trump Plaza Hotel in Atlantic City was underwater and Trump owed over $550 million on it to various creditors, with Citibank at the head. In order to restructure his debt, Trump gave Citibank and other creditors a 49% ownership interest in the hotel.
As for Goldman Sachs, Trump is himself a shareholder in Goldman Sachs, which means he has a direct financial interest in its success…
There is essentially not a major Wall Street entity that Donald Trump or his companies have not taken out loans from or received financing from. In fact, that’s more or less his entire business model. This lengthy ABC piece details how each and every one of them has at one time been circling Trump or his companies as they have been left holding the bag for all or part of loans he took out from them.
I am beginning to think—I am really beginning to think—that Trump is out of his mind in some major way. Oh, he’s not out of touch with reality; not that. But his success in this campaign has fed his narcissism in a way that has untethered him from whatever devotion he ever may have had to the truth, and has made him feel beyond good and evil. He believes he can literally say anything and get away with it. And perhaps he can; how many people do you think have heard this story, or understand it?
I don’t know which is more frightening, Trump’s megalomania or the legions who defend it.
In addition—Trump’s insulting Cruz, of course, but it’s the form of the insult that’s both so low and so revealing at the same time. Trump is saying that Hillary Clinton is more honest and above-board with the American people than Ted Cruz. He’s saying that his Republican opponent Cruz is worse than his possible Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, one of the most corrupt and least honest people who has ever run for president. Well, Trump’s been a friend of hers for a long time, so I guess it makes sense that he’d say that.
I severely take pleasure in your posts. Thank you.
Mitt, honey? Is that you?
Now that I’ve caught your attention–
The title of this NY Magazine article: “No Pill? No Prob. Meet the Pullout Generation” certainly caught mine. Reading it was one of the most bizarre experiences I’ve had in a long time. The gist of it is that many modern women are so dissatisfied with all the many contraceptive choices available to them that they are opting for what used to quaintly be called coitus interruptus.
That is, they’re opting that their male partners opt for it, because unless things have changed an awful lot since I was young, it’s more a man thing.
Hormonal contraception is much simpler, and more effective, as well as esthetically and emotionally pleasing, but not when it makes you feel sick or makes you fear you’re risking your life. The IUD comes with its own health problems, and condoms are a drag.
But they’ve all got to be a darn sight better than the somewhat exquisite timing, control, and renunciation involved in “pulling out,” don’t they? I understand using the latter technique once in a while as a stopgap measure in a pinch. But regularly, as part of a committed relationship, as these women say they (or rather, their partners) do? Not to mention the fact that it’s a notoriously unreliable and ineffective method, more likely to result in a pregnancy than condoms regularly used?
But the most puzzling thing of all about the article was the complete absence of any discussion of the diaphragm. The diaphragm is a far-from-great method of birth control (I say that as a person who used one for many many years). But surely it’s better than the method they’re choosing instead?
Which made me wonder—has the diaphragm, that rite of passage of my mother’s generation (and which featured heavily in fiction such as Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus)—gone the way of the dodo?
That in turn led me to Google “Whatever happened to the diaphragm?” Sure enough, there it was, an article in a 2010 issue of Ms. Magazine that said that the diaphragm had become nearly non-existent as a birth control method:
Nevertheless, diaphragm use declined after the Pill was introduced, from 25 percent of married women in 1955 to 10 percent in 1965, and kept dropping thereafter, to just 4.5 percent of all women in 1982 and 0.2 percent today, according to the CDC…
Although diaphragms must be accurately fitted by a health care professional and re-assessed every few years, they remain cheaper than hormonal methods and require less frequent physician visits. A diaphragm can be inserted hours or moments before intercourse, and it is a fully reversible, female-controlled method of birth control.
From the comments to the article I gathered that many gynecologists today don’t even seem to know how to fit a diaphragm, and women are often actively discouraged from getting them. I wondered whether most young women and men today even know what a diaphragm is, or how it works.
What’s going on here? Shouldn’t contraception be about choice? Why are choices shrinking rather than expanding? It can’t be because the diaphragm is a barrier method; after all, so is the condom. Clearly, there’s a demand for non-hormonal methods of birth control; the diaphragm fills that need. Yes, it has the drawback of needing to be used with each act of sex, but so do condoms and certainly so does withdrawal. And although its track record isn’t perfect in terms of preventing pregnancy, it compares favorably with most other non-hormonal methods (if “used properly”). It’s somewhat messy, but not all that messy, and many women would gladly trade a bit of messiness for freedom from the health fears inherent in pill and IUD use.
It seems, rather, that the ignoring of the diaphragm has been a choice of the medical profession and/or the manufacturer. And it seems to be in the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less it’s mentioned to women, the fewer know about it, the less demand there is for it. The less demand there is for it, the less it’s mentioned, the fewer use it—in an ever-decreasing spiral.
And then, and then, I saw this:
…[T]he Caya, a new, one-size-fits-most diaphragm, looks like something Polly Pocket might be into: It’s lilac, squishy, and comes in its own little case. The look is part of its appeal. It’s an attempt to break down the stigma that diaphragms are your grandma’s birth control and to make them relevant again.
It’s made of a material and is a shape that’s easier to insert and remove. It’s smaller and more flexible, and sports a lavender color that apparently appeals to modern women although it wouldn’t do a thing for me. I applaud the makers, who may have built the diaphragmatic equivalent of a better mousetrap.
[NOTE: More about the diaphragm’s near-disappearance here and here. The comments to the latter article indicate that at the time the comments were written, doctors couldn’t even find a set of rings (used to properly fit diaphragms on patients) any more. One women said her family practice physician’s assistant asked her if she was still “taking” her diaphragm. Another commenter said she couldn’t find a drugstore that carried one.]
This should sink her, but IMHO it probably won’t.