* Twitter is a fantastic equalizer and game-changer. The old mass media setup allowed pundits to comfortably sit in their seats on cable news shows and pound away at us like naval guns firing from offshore. The rest of us just had to hunker down and take it. Twitter forces them to come fight us on land in an even match. They lose their invulnerability and everyone learns how thoroughly second-rate they always were. “Never get off the boat man!” as Chef said in Apocalypse Now. Wise advice indeed.
* [James] Fallows, who loves strongmen government, is basically pissed he created a system where a strongman from the opposite side can take power?
Cry me a river.
Also, look for more and more wild and direct threats against Trump by the left as the election marches on. They will be openly encouraging assassination—-most especially those lefties who claimed that the right’s “culture of fear” some how lead to Gabby Giffords being shot up by a schizophrenic.
All I can say is I hope Trump: (1) stays safe; and (2) gathers the names of people like Fallows encouraging assassination. He should arrest them immediately after being sworn in, and try them for incitement of murder.
* Fallows was on Fareed Zakaria last Sunday. His leg was tingling about Sudanese and Somali women working in the pork meatpacking industry in Sioux Falls, SD. Fallows from the transcript:
For example, a place like Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It’s a largely white city, largely upper Midwest, plains, Protestant city, Lutherans and German. German and Norwegian residents there. They became one of the main places for absorbing refugees. Along the streets in Sioux Falls you see Somali and Sudanese people walking along to their jobs to the gas stations or the malls, in a beef, in a pork packing house in downtown Sioux Falls. They worked tens of thousands of pigs and meet their maker every day. Most of the people doing the dispatching, a large number of them are Muslim women refugees from the rest of the world, who are there sometimes wearing their head gear and working in this pig slaughter house so their kids can go to high school and college, join ROTC, do all these other things.
* Hillary is a false favorite. She had the same machine in 2008 when she lost to a novice, this time she’s struggling to beat an obscure old man from Vermont. Even though Democrats have a hard time liking her supposedly voters who aren’t Democrats will rush to back her in the general election.
* All the “Establishment” types who are so afraid of Hillary are idiots. NOBODY likes Hillary, even her own party. But the talking heads and Establishment fools insist on taking her seriously. Trump is the only candidate who will stand up to her and call her a liar and a fraud to her face. Like him or not, Trump is the ONLY guy who can beat her. The Establishment has it totally backwards. They actually think Rubio can beat her? I’d like to know what kind of drugs they’re on…
* I know Trump asked Obama for it in 2015 and Obama granted it.
Now, I mentioned this a while ago, but Trump must have a lot of expertise in security. He’s got major celebrities living on his property as well as foreign dignitaries, and he himself has been a major media celebrity for 40 years. He’s probably as well versed and expert on security as anyone not in the SS, CIA, or running Blackwater would be. And he’s got the coin to pay for the best for himself—meaning ex-special forces type dudes and Blackwater types.
And then add to that how abysmally awful the Secret Service has been in the last eight years in protecting the president (Obama Inauguration gate crashers, hooker scandal in Colombia, letting a schizophrenic nutcase fake “sign language interpreter” on stage next to Obama during the Nelson Mandela, the dude who climbed into the white house and ran over the affirmative action Secret Service chick….) —
and I’ll bet Trump’s personal security force is still around—both providing security jointly with the SS and watching the SS closely. Trump’s no fool when it comes to dirty tricks, either.
* With Fallows, his intellectual bias is showing.
People like him prefer politicians who are urbane and ‘thoughtful’. Such politicians lend an ear to thinkers, and intellectuals feel flattered. Philosopher-kings who seek the advice of philosophers.
If such politicians are absent, intellectuals prefer the empty suits. While empty suits like Rubio are total zeroes, they still go through the motion of listening to experts and deferring to them. Empty suits are bogus but they do as experts advise them. So, think-tankers win. At the bare minimum, empty suits maintain the decorum and outward appearance of ‘thoughtful leader who listens to the best advice’.
But Trump? His style is, “I know what’s right, and I don’t need know egghead telling me what’s what.” You gotta break some eggheads to make America great again.
People like Fallows feel left out when a man like Trump comes along.
I like the idea of intellectuals giving advice, but given the total takeover of think-tanks by lobbyists, special interest groups, the GLOB, and Zionist interests, most ‘experts’ are shills and gangsters of globo-supremacism.
Fallows ought to know that.
It is not Trump who’s pushing for policy that will drag the world to war. People who are doing it are the ‘thinkers’ and ‘experts’ who advised other GOP candidates to call for more tensions in Middle East and with Russia.
* If we just look at the turnout in the primaries, all the Republican primaries are showing record turnouts, and the Dems are lackluster at best. Neither of their candidates are energizing anyone. Particularly if Hillary wins a squeaker based on her superdelegate pledges, half of the Dem voters will sit out the general. Obama barely managed to get by Romney (Romney!) with a near lock on the black vote. The black and hispanic vote is going to see a massive reversion to the mean in 2016, I wager.
* I don’t doubt there is a Deep State, but it’s either not that powerful or is unbelievably good at covering its tracks. No, even in the freewheeling CIA you have to get your drones from somewhere, and they aren’t trained and indoctrinated by old men in back rooms with cigars.
The real power in this country isn’t elected officials, either. Nixon was brought down by the frickin press. Presidents don’t run the White House, let alone the executive branch. There is some power in committee chairmanship in Congress, and certain congressmen have sinecures, with 98% probability of reelection. Administrative law outweighs congressional law by a billion to one (not a precise ratio), and congressmen don’t write or read laws anyway.
No, the real power is the part of government that never leaves. This is the Permanent Government, or so-called Civil Service. It includes some appointed positions, like SCOTUS. Mostly it’s drones. They make actual law, they carry actual, ultimate decisions. They’re where policy meets reality.
The real power behind this power are the bodies that tell the civil service what to think. They also tell us what to think by telling educators and journalists what to think. These are universities and NGOs.
I don’t care who gets elected president, with how big a mandate. Even if they could replace the civil service with their own people, which isn’t possible anymore, they couldn’t control the outcome. Because they wouldn’t have trained the new people what to think. Eventually they would regress to the level set by the educational system, the MSM, etc.
* If he’s outside their frame if reference it’s partly because he’s on their side. He’s on both sides, or all sides. This is so because we’re stuck in am Age of Ideology and Trump lives in the World of Action.
The left has this idea that he’s on the far right, but he’s not. He’s got a couple of “extremist” positions–on immigration and trade–that’s all. Establishment conservatives think he’s not A True Conservative. First of all, that doesn’t mean much considering how muddied is that term. But they’re correct, in a way. Trump is more conservative than he is anything else, which is to say he’s to the right of the mainstream . I believe that. But he’s to the left of establishment conservatives on enough things to see where they’re coming from.
Point is, he straddles ideological lines because he’s not an ideologue. He’s not an idea man. He’s a doer. Lots of presidents aren’t idea men, I assume. Did Bush the Younger ever think for himself, I wonder? They have people to think for them. Trump doesn’t, at least not so far as I know. Or else his idea men are an eclectic bunch.
He will have people thinking for him eventually. I wonder how much and to what extent he’ll be controlled. Doesn’t matter all that much because presidents don’t matter all that much. But I’m curious. In the meantime Trump is beyond or above or below ideas. None of that sissy stuff for him.
* If you watch tv shows like ‘COPS’ or ‘The First 48″ you’ll see another side to the Somali immigrant. The one who strangles woman in the laundry mat raving that that he is lion or the one who guns a white teenager down in an alley during a drive by shooting. I suspect there are more young Somali men in the Minnesota Department of Corrections than in ROTC programs.
* You can defund NGOs and universities to a certain degree. No power is permanent. By its very nature, it’s fickle. The whole cathedral or hive, as you choose to call it, can come crumbling down in months. Look at the old USSR for an example.
There are many measures that can be taken to slaughter the beast. And civil servants aren’t particularly reputed to be brave. They’ll follow orders, no matter who gives them.
Having said that, Trump if elected can only take some small steps in this direction. I hope he has a good team behind him. Younger guys who’ll do the long and dirty work ahead.
