* Since he entered the race, I’ve heard people talk about The Donald as a bumbler, a clown, a fool, an idiot. Well, he’s no idiot, and that should have been obvious from the start. As to the rest, for some reason I’m reminded a bit of Casablanca where Strosser and Renault are discussing the blundering Americans.
Major Strasser: You give him credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he’s just another blundering American.
Captain Renault: We musn’t underestimate “American blundering”. I was with them when they “blundered” into Berlin in 1918.
* Hey iSteve, doesn’t the whole migrant invasion sound like a Gremlins movie? A few Gremlins show up and the Chancellor adopts them, but then they start mysteriously growing in numbers.
* I wonder why the communist Pope Francis didn’t take the opportunity when he was in Mexico, a country that is nominally 80+% Roman Catholic, to criticize Mexico for its restrictive immigration laws, which I understand are much more restrictive than those of the U.S. His words might have had much more effect in a country which is more than 3X Catholic than the U.S. (percentage-wise) and thus more inclined to follow the wisdom of their Holy Pontiff and more likely to accept his criticism that such restrictive immigration policies are not “Christian.” Where did the Church find this left-wing buffoon who insists in intruding into political matters that have little connection to the Church’s mission?
* An old line in politics is that some candidates are blessed to have great enemies. Clinton was the last guy who fit this role. Newt Gingrich was a great foil for Clinton and probably saved his presidency. A Speaker who was smart and restrained could have made Clinton’s life hell. Instead, the ridiculous Newt made Clinton look like Churchill and reminded everyone that you could do worse than the soft-core Caligula.
Trump has also been blessed with some useful enemies. Jeb was a great a foil. Cruz, surprisingly, has been a great enemy of Trump because Cruz is the one guy everyone agrees is a s-bag, even if you like him. His friends say he is a d-bag. When the charge against Trump is that he is aesthetically unacceptable, having that charge made by a guy who reminds everyone of a young Montgomery Burns is manna from heaven.
Of course, big personalities attract a lot of crazies so maybe the the law of averages just kicks in for guys like Trump.
* FNC is claiming that a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows Cruz leading Trump in SC.
Funny how a poll commissioned by both the Globalist Sociopaths at the WSJ and the Cultural Marxists at NBC could be so wrong.
Trump keeps gaining momentum not to mention millions in free advertising with these bogus polls. FNC not to mention CNN and the rest of the dinosaur news networks have no other choice but to quote Trump telling the world that they are full of it.
In response to Pope’s latest idiocy I would love to have Trump sit down for a one on one with Bill Warner the retired college professor who runs the website Political Islam. Almost single handedly Warner has stopped the construction of several Saudi financed mega mosques across middle America.
The Cultural Marxist Media would have the vapors over the lastest antics of our soon to be “President Sh*tlord”.
* Pope Francis is warning of a surge of drug trafficking in Argentina, saying he hoped his native country could stave off “Mexicanization,” in a letter he sent to an Argentine lawmaker.
“Hopefully we are in time to avoid Mexicanization. I was speaking to some Mexican bishops, and it is a thing of terror,” the pope wrote in an email to lawmaker Gustavo Vera, in response to a letter Vera had written to him expressing concern about drug trafficking in Argentina.
* Maybe this is good that we can have a discussion on the history of Arabs/muslims and Europeans. Too many people think it is about the French colonizing North Africa. Too few realize that for the past 1300 years the muslims have had the upper hand over the Europeans more often than not. I am surprised at how many people I know who didn’t realize the long occupations of Spain or Eastern Europe, or the millions of Europeans taken into slavery.
* Donald Trump may not regard Muslim immigrants as invaders but I sure do. That opening of minds and hearts you refer to is a very one-way business. The penalty for apostasy to Islam, to the best of my knowledge, remains death. “Extremist” Muslims are the Muslims most faithful to the dictates of their religion. They’re free to practice it in Islamic countries, and I wish them the best, but it is increasingly obvious that they cannot mix peacefully in Western countries.
Insofar as the division of authority between popes, kings and emperors, this was a constant struggle in the Middle Ages (e.g., the Investiture Controversy). Early popes acknowledged the spiritual as well as the secular authority of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor. The Church was a huge landowner and bishops had considerable secular authority.
* It’s not so much Trump’s Luck, it’s that he picks his enemies so well.
During his initial entry, he made Jeb his #1 enemy, and had a battle plan laid out on how to attack him. He could have spent his time taking on Cruz (the presumptive intellectual candidate), Christie (the former lobbyist with the quick tongue) or Rubio (the minority with the mostest—sorry Ben), but instead concentrated his fire on Jeb, the awkward, inept, weak beta male next to whom Trump looked golden. Then he hammered Jeb with hilarious lines and got big by beating him up. He could have ignored Jeb and concentrated on clearing the field, but he picked Jeb to highlight his own strengths and make himself look strong.
Similarly, Trump could have ignored this sally by Pope Francis (the “pope’s opinion is religious, not political” or some other meaningless pablum) but realized (1) the pope isn’t popular amongst traditionalist and conservative Catholics, as he’s basically a liberation theologist; (2) the pope is setting himself up for YUGE hypocrisy (both with the Vatican walls and the Mexican wall between it and Guatemala) that Trump’s own followers would notice; (3) the pope was inadvertently propping up the old American Protestant fears of Catholics being less loyal to the U.S than Protestants—which carries more weight in evangelical states like, say, SOUTH CAROLINA WHERE THE PRIMARY IS.
And, most importantly, just like with !Jeb!, Trump knew he could win this battle.
So he pounced and made Francis his enemy-of-the-moment, and slaughtered him politically.
Make no mistake that Trump picks his battles to make himself look like a winner. He ignores others that are losers. He picked it with Megyn Kelly to make himself look independent of Fox News and prop himself up with male, anti-pc voters. He picked it with Jeb to make himself look tall, strong, and alpha. And he picked it with Francis to make himself seem loyal, American, and consistent, while the pope looks hypocritical.
* Scott Adams has this amusing take on the Francis-Donald dispute on his dilbert blog:
“I could write a long essay about this Pope versus Trump situation, but I think it will be funnier to summarize it instead. What follows is – as far as I can tell – an accurate description of what happened.
1. The Pope criticized Donald Trump.
2. The Pope’s credibility declined.
If this were fiction, no one would believe it.
I predict that the Pope will issue a public apology to Trump for questioning his faith, as opposed to his policies. [Update: And here it is, sort of.]”
* Brilliant headline in the Telegraph today: “Trump forces pope to climb down”. Turns out it was just an opinion piece, but good God! Donald Trump is Victory!
* It is of course the height of hypocrisy for the pope to go to Mexico and criticize Trump’s proposed immigration policies, when Mexico’s actual policies are many times more racist, xenophobic, brutal, and harsh. And of course, the Pope himself allows zero muslim refugees to wander into the Vatican.
However, buffoon? Perhaps not. How about whore. Remember, the Catholic church needs donations from reach people. And rich people love cheap labor. If the pope was not carrying water for the people making all that money from cheap foreign labor (I hear that Merkel is proposing to force the refugees to work for big German companies for a euro an hour!!!! How profitable is that!), then donations to the Catholic church would like decrease significantly.
It’s hard to go too wrong in analyzing politics, than by following the money.
* British America dates back to around 1607. That’s 400 years of history of which we’ve only been a nation for 240 of those years. There were parts of Spain that were occupied for 700 years! Parts of Greece and the Balkans for 450 years! That’s longer than the entire English experience in the New World. Throw in a couple million European slaves and suddenly the narrative loses its power to all who are not already insane.
* Good thing His Holiness is protected by infallibility in regard to faith and morals. That allows him to be right about something.
* To my knowledge the instructions contained in Deuteronomy haven’t been enforced recently. Donald Trump’s daughter converted to Judaism–I haven’t noted his call for her execution for apostasy. I have read of sentences of death for apostasy in Afghanistan. Yes Muslims are a continuum, but enough of them are at the extreme end to constitute a genuine menace. Even “moderate” Muslims support the ultimate goals of Islam: the Ummah of the One True Faith, in which non-believers are tolerated only so long as they remain in dhimmi status. Moderate Muslims just disagree with more energetic Muslims about how to get there. I can see why moderate Muslims are frustrated; in a few generations they will be so numerous in the west that they can use the existing political process to impose the sharia–the more energetic faction alerts the dhimmis to their eventual fate.
You distinguish the United States from Western countries–upon what basis? The U.S., it is true is slipping into Latin America status, but the tradition of the United States is rooted firmly in the West–representative government, the common law, etc. As for terrorist incidents in the U.S., you should check with the relatives of the almost 3,000 people killed on September 11. Or how about Major Hassan, Soldier of Allah, gunning down fellow soldiers while shouting “Allahu Ahkbar?” Or that business in San Bernardino? Or the recent attack by a machete-wielding Somali in Ohio? What does it take to convince you these people are a threat, As Kipling put it, you just never know “When the gods of his far-off land, shall repossess his blood.” We have a colossal surveillance state and are stripped of our dignity every time we board a commercial aircraft, largely to avoid terrorism by Muslims.
And what do they bring us? How many couscous cooks and rug merchants do we need? They come from a culture that peaked around 900 A.D. and hasn’t amounted to much since. If we really need immigrants (which I very much doubt) there are better choices than the results of recurring counsin marriages since the Bronze Age.
There are numerous Muslim majority countries. If you find these people so noble and interesting, by all means go and live with them. You have my sincere best wishes. But they are little but trouble when they try to mix in Western (and I include the U.S.) countries.
* And if anyone doubts the power of “game”, the dark arts, learned charisma, etc., or still thinks of it as some gimmick for socially awkward losers, watch and learn from Senor Trump, the true MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD. After blows and controversies that would have folded most candidacies, Trump looks like he actually will wrap-up the GOP nomination.
And in true Trump alpha fashion I hope he uses this little dust-up with His Holiness to keep pushing farther, harder, deeper. Don’t apologize. Don’t back-down. Reframe. OWN IT.
CNN Anchor Erin POZette: “How do you feel about being hated by the leader of the world’s largest religion?”
TRUMP: “I’m not hated. And look, I’m doing so well in the polls, and I have such a good message, that all the world’s leaders are talking about me. President Obama talks about me. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in their debates talk about me. The British Parliament holds a special session to talk about me. And now the Pope talks about me. When was the last time you had all the leaders of the world talking about someone who isn’t even out the primaries yet? They talk about me imore than the guy currently in the White House [tin laugh].”
Yeah, like a lot of you and our gentilious host I too would prefer a Presidential style less down the road to Idiocracy, but that horse has long left the barn. If Trump is a blowhard or buffoon what does that make the other candidates?:
Yeb: Invasion is an act of love.
Kasich: Single moms are the real heroes of our society.
Rubio: And Obama knows exactly what he’s doing…
Christie: Since we can’t not let Muslims in, let’s pretend to do something by attacking Russia so we can start pretending we’re doing something by attacking Syria.
Clinton & Sanders: Mmmm… refugees good, smugglers BAD!
Sanders: My first act as President will be to smash the Syrian refugee for-profit smuggler industry and then organize the refugees into employee-owned, LGBT-friendly, migration co-ops so that these poor Syrian families can get to Europe and America in a carbon-neutral manner…
Clinton: My first act as President will be to send Navy ships into the Mediterranean. My second act will be to give the State Dept. nuclear weapons to destroy those Navy ships, so that State Dept. personnel can unimpeded begin issuing green cards.
* Massive European immigration was a disaster for the first natives. Massive African immigration was a disaster for the recent European immigrants. And even the newer waves of European immigration had major negative consequences (introduction of ethnic voting blocks and continental preferences for leftist politics, flooded industries with massive supply of labor to kill wages and set off union/capital wars, gave us the Mafia, etc.) despite a shared Western heritage.
* Muslims deserve to have their own countries, where they ought to remain, or who ought to help there fellow religionists.
Western countries should refrain from dropping bombs on them. They need to be contained in those nations.
* We agree that:
1) There can be substantial negative consequences to large-scale immigration,
2) Kosovo is an example of very negative consequences natives from large-scale immigration, and immigration by Europeans to the New World is another,
3) It is sometimes possible to assimilate small numbers of Muslim immigrants without large negative consequences,
4) It is difficult or impossible to come up with examples of non-harmful large-scale Muslim immigration.
