My view is that over the past 40 years, all MSM pundits (George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Rich Lowry, etc) have been revealed as useless (except Ann Coulter in the past 18 months). Steve Sailer is worth more than every MSM pundit put together.
* I wish personally that Donald Trump had named Victor Orban as the world leader that he admired most. But it’s not a flip-flop or inconsistent to say that one might admire a leader or a person in general, but contend that a particular policy call (Merkel’s Boner) was a huge mistake. Sometimes even leaders themselves admit this. Ulysses Grant, generally regarded as a highly competent military commander, admitted in his memoirs that the 1864 attack at Cold Harbor, Virginia was a poor decision on his part. Merkel herself seems to be ambivalent about her own decision and the German people are definitely showing their dissatisfaction at the polls. But the MSM have simply abandoned even the pretense of objectivity and are now doing everything in their power to get Hillary Clinton elected. It’s sickening.
* I haven’t been following Frum closely. I am aware he seems to have come around on immigration. But is he a Trump supporter or a #nevertrumper?
PS. Rush Limbaugh was discussing the idea you tweeted a couple days ago that if Trump thinks he won the debate, he won’t prepare for the next one. He was asking who on Trump’s staff would have both the courage and standing with Trump to tell him he really lost, and that he really needs to bear down on the second one
* Frum’s been one of the strongest immigration restrictionists in the MSM for years, but he’s #NeverTrump, unfortunately.
Glad to hear that about Rush. Along those lines, it sounds like reality might have seeped in a bit since the debate…
* Trump is obsessed with media coverage about himself & watches cables news religiously. He knows the debate didn’t go well that’s why he’s been blaming the moderator.
In a downturn, and I’m not convinced this is one, he seems to acknowledge and makes some shifts. Nothing has fundamentally shifted since the debate. He appears to be in solid command in OH & IA. It’s close in FL, NC & NV if he wins all of the 5 he still needs another state. The remaining states seem to be difficult to win but aren’t slipping away from him.
He needs to listen to Coulter, ignore the personal stuff and focus on the issues. If he can do that he’ll be fine. If not, it’ll be President Clinton.
* Trump is both a) a proud (part) German-American and b) not particularly well-read. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that he’s said his favorite book is Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet On The Western Front (I’m guessing he was assigned read it in high school, like I was) and his favorite foreign leader was Merkel. Both seemed like safe, non-stupid answers.
Trump may not have heard of Viktor Orban, but there is another foreign leader who’s known for being strong on borders, and Trump just met with him recently: Benjamin Netanyahu. If Trump had thought to say Netanyahu, he could have launched right into a discussion of Israel’s border fence and how it stopped 99% of Israel’s illegal immigration and tie it in to his proposed wall. A missed opportunity.
* I thought #nevertrumpers were propositional nation type guys. I thought #nevertrumpers were OK with invade-invite the world.
Seems like if immigration is big for you, there is no choice but Trump. Hillary is for moar immigration. The Greens won’t touch it even if it wrecks the environment due to their fearing the ‘Greening of Hate’ more than their fear of environmental degradation. And Gary Johnson is a textbook, batshit crazy Libertarian when it comes to borders.
So how could Frum be #nevertrump if immigration is his thing? By process of elimination, there is no other choice.
* Soothsayer Aaron Blake was one of the first to realize the inevitability of the 2016 Carly Fiorina campaign. He nailed it.
But she’s been talking to a lot of very important people. Almost all of them had very nice things to say about her.
This kid is going places.
Am I the only one that thinks Carly Fiorina’s “momentum” among the Pundit Class during the Summer of 2015 was some sort of failed intelligence psy-op? This all seems so staged.
* Most establishment Republicans are “cucks”. They really believe, or believed, that jumping on the feminist bandwagon would help them. Witness Ted Cruz’s comical Hail Mary picking Fiorina as his “VP”.
* He could have named Nigel Farage, who showed how to humiliate the leftist media.
* Remember when it comes to Trump the MSM has a hard time with rhetorical devices like sarcasm, irony, etc.
Recall when he asked the Russians to find Hillary’s 30K missing emails, he added this punchline, “I am sure the media will give you an award, NOT.” This was supposed to be sarcastic in the sense that everyone knows that the media doesn’t want those emails found, and thus would not give an award like the Pulitzer to the Russians if they did find them. But the MSM said he was inviting Russia to hack American servers. The fact that those servers where offline for years was also too hard for them to comprehend.
Later Trump was trying to show how hypocritical Hillary was in regards to guns. While pointing out that she wants to limit our rights have guns, he suggested she instead have her security detail give up theirs. Most native English speakers understood Trump was highlighting her hypocrisy. But the MSM said he was calling for her assassination.
So despite Trump’s poor grammar, it is not surprising the MSM cannot understand how someone can think somebody is good until that somebody does something that is bad.
The surprising thing is that as professional journalists one would think these people scored near lawyers on their SAT verbal section, and thus, should be able to understand things more complex than “Jack goes up the hill.”
* Frum’s not the only one. Michael Dougherty seems to oppose unskilled immigration at least and he’s a NeverTrumper too. Douthat’s a NeverTrumper as well, and I don’t think he’s an open borders guy.
Their logic seems to be:
1) Trump is a bad person/untrustworthy/unqualified for the office.
2) Hillary will be unpopular, and Republicans can come back with a better champion in 4 or 8 years.
See Dougherty below.
It takes unusual cleverness to convince yourself a septuagenarian lecher with no discernible virtues or attention span will MAGA.
— Michael B Dougherty
* I really like praising Israeli policy as a model for the USA. Americans love Israel, and it is a nice appeal to Jews in Florida and Pennsylvania, now a swing state and with plenty of Jews around Philadelphia.
How about some nice words for Slovak president Robert “Not One Single Muslim Refugee” Fico too? While pretty thin on the ground in most of the USA, Slovak-Americans are all over the rust belt swing states.
* Frum has matured from those days, and is a rare anti-mass-migration voice in the respectable MSM and Beltway GOP crowd. There are plenty of unrepentant invade/invite the worlders out there better to attack.
* This again reminds me of 2008, specifically how the media treated Palin’s speaking. The media attacked her answers at press conferences not as if they were unprepared oral statements, but as if they were written on a teleprompter.
In other words, when she would pause or stutter mid-answer or have some irony or wit in her response or slur a syllable or two, or her sentence would run on—as all people answering press queries do—the media would pounce as if her words were those she’d labored for days on using multiple dictionaries and formatted for a formal speech.
And then they went after her accent and folksy-metaphors, claiming that they’d “never” heard anything like it, and speculating about her being brain damaged. When, in fact, they always heard that crap—from lefties when they spoke to blacks (droppin’ their g’s) and to rural whites. It was just that Palin didn’t change her accent or style when talking to the corporate news crowd.
Palin was a fine speaker. Too folksy for my taste-it seemed a bit put on–but strong.
It’s the same thing with Trump: the media pretends it can’t understand sarcasm, irony, or nuance; and that his way of speaking is “bizarre” (when it was good enough to have a hit TV show) and they pretend he’s horrible at speaking when it’s one of his best assets.
I tell you, the soros bought-and-paid-for media is trying some 1984-style rewriting of reality.
* Frum presumably is one of those people who doesn’t prioritize immigration correctly. They’ll place the dignity of the office or the short-term interests of the Republican Party ahead of it. I can understand their position, except I think we’re probably out of time already. Certainly waiting out four years of Clinton is too risky, especially considering the awesome power of SCOTUS.
Along with the debt, empire, and the money issue, it’s the thing that might very well destroy our civilization. Avoiding an uncouth president is in about one billionth place on my list of priorities.
* Charles Murray is another unfortunate example of realist who doesn’t like Trump.
I don’t follow him close enough to know for sure, but Frum seems to be anti-Trump in his MSM long form work but more mixed on Twitter. On one hand he keeps retweeting various conservative anti-Trumpers. On the other, he also keeps hitting Hillary and Gary Johnson, and at the moment he seems aware of and wants to promote the alt-right counter-story about Fatty Miss Universe, snarking about “gettaway-car-shaming” her and retweeting this:
Funny CNN exchange w former Miss Universe “Did you threaten to kill a judge?” “What matters is my self-esteem.”
I’d say Frum’s anti-Trumpism is a combination of Charles Murray type intellectual snobbery, wanting to stay respectable in the beltway, and his strong Jewish identification and dislike of Trump’s playing nice with right wing anti-Semites.
I feel him a little bit on the snobbery and Jewish thing, but those are such minor and insignificant things compared to the question of whether or not we elect in 5 weeks someone who will cause heavy and permanent damage to the American ethnie and put us on the road to speech codes and gun confiscations and someone who at worst will hold the line and at best may even reverse these processes.
If you are about the American middle class, our future demographics, or the protection of our Constitutional liberties, the logic breaks down.
I think Trump will lose and Hillary will either be reelected in 2020 or will pass the miter over to Kaine who will win. I have some hope that Kris Kobach will run and be elected governor of Kansas in 2018 and then run of president in 2020, but I don’t think he’s even taken that initial step of running in 2018, and I can’t think of anyone else with unquestionable opposition to mass migration who could plausibly run and win in 2020. I’ve looked at the Senate roster and list of governors, and I just don’t see anyone else.
It is easy to forget is that Trump’s primary win was hardly resounding. All the prior races ended up being a divided hard right and single center rightest using those divisions and big financial advantage to win. This time it was the GOPe that was divided and a hard right that was increasingly woke to the demographic issues more than distractions like the details of their hopeless plans for national abortion bans. We could easily revert to form in 2020, with a bunch of craven Ted Cruz types faking concern about our borders and talking about fetuses and a great moderate hope winning the nomination. Or maybe Ryan will run and win, the GOPe’s depraved lust for that man knows no bounds.
* Snobbery seems to be the main reason for most NeverTrumpers. Career concern is probably a factor for some (e.g., Dougherty), but Frum I think is independently wealthy. I don’t know if right wing anti-Semites come into play much on this.
* Cernovich was somehow allowed to appeared once on Red Eye, Fox’s 3 am comedy panel discussion show. The next day the Daily Beast ran a hit piece on him and Fox said they wouldn’t have him on again.
* I think the first step, as the demographic disaster nears the point of no return, is accepting we’re in a corrupt oligarchy and figuring out which oligarchs we can deal with.
There are six men I am aware of who have spent more than $20 million of their own money on a single presidential election. (Please correct me if I’ve missed any)
2000 Steve Forbes spends $37 million to lose the GOP nomination
2004 George Soros spends $24 million funding America Coming Together, a pro-Kerry group
2008 Sheldon Adelson spends $30 million supporting McCain and GOP senators
2012 Sheldon Adelson spends $92 million, roughly split between supporting Gingrich in the primaries and Romney in the general
2016 Trump loans his campaign $50 million, then forgives the loan
The Kochs are in a class by themselves. They’ve spend about as much as all these guys put together, but they generally avoid the most direct campaign spending in favor of building up local parties or shadow parties.
* Maybe Frum prioritizes his niche at The Atlantic over his concerns about immigration. Kind words for Trump might jeopardize that.
* Trump isn’t popular because he was a TV personality that pushed a refreshingly populist platform. He became a popular TV personality because was well known for decades and was the epitome of success. A flashy billionaire with his name on the skyline of cities around the world. Coulter hasn’t really done anything but talk and write books. Trump’s a business guy, a billionaire titan who doesn’t sit and BS but gets thing done. This is why he is an enemy of the pundits and writers, even those who claim to be conservative, because their whole life, their world, is based on bullshitting.
* I can appreciate what Cernovich is doing- though he kind of lost me when he tweeted a screencap of the pollen count in Cleveland when Clinton had a coughing fit earlier this month.
“Pollen count in Cleveland is low today, allergies do not explain coughing fit. Media lied!” You look at the actual image and it says: “Moderate.” Okay, Mike.
Anyway, there’s something about his personality that makes it difficult for me to listen to him for more than five minutes. Clinton is probably like that for a lot of people, but I’ve been listening her my whole life, so I’m mostly immune to it.
That being said, given a few lucky breaks, I could see Cernovich beating lazy-eyed Kaine. Surely there must be more viable candidates out there…
* “Americans love Israel.”
No. Jewish Americans and some evangelical Christians love Israel. The rest of us are just told that we do.
* All of these people that are NeverTrump aren’t really opposed to open borders to any significant degree. There are only two choices: Trump or Hillary. One of those two will be the next president.
If you are NeverTrump, you are for Hillary. Even if you believe that Trump can’t be trusted, he is the only one of the two options that gives you any chance to restrict immigration. If Hillary is elected, she will continue Obama’s policy of open borders and importing so-called refugees. The opposition of a Republican Congress will continue to be totally ineffective. You can’t logically be anti-open borders and NeverTrump.
Anything is possible. But based on all of the information that we have, if Trump is not elected, how is a “better” Republican candidate going to win in four or eight years when the U.S. is even less white? Assuming Trump loses, that means that neither McCain, Romney, nor Trump was able to turn out enough white voters to win. It gets harder every election. I’m not a fan of the GOP establishment but they should realize that a Trump loss makes their chances of getting an acceptable establishment candidate elected in following elections that much more difficult. Of course, to think about this rationally is heresy because you have to acknowledge that Republicans get their votes mostly from white people and immigration is making the county less white.
* In an interview on the NPR program “On Point,” Frum claimed that Trump’s accusations of bias from that Mexican-American judge in the Trump University case, could lead to similar accusations against Jewish judges and people from other ethnic backgrounds in American society. In contrast, I would have thought that the “all white jury” argument and the assignment of people like Judge Ito to the OJ trial would have been proof that such considerations were already acceptable, at least in certain cases.
Angela Merkel’s measured response to Russia during the beginning of the Ukrainian Crisis probably made a favorable impression on Trump, especially considering the language coming from other Western leaders and politicians like Hillary. It’s pretty likely that Trump doesn’t speak German and doesn’t spend a lot of time following German politics beyond what he reads in places like the WSJ or sees on cable news. Merkel is probably the most important leader in the EU and one of the most important in the world; she now has pretty good name recognition in the US, she’s highly intelligent (or so we thought), and it’s pretty clear she didn’t get to where she is thanks to her performance in swimsuit competitions (at least not lately). Merkel was not a bad choice for Trump to name.
