Monday, November 7, 2016

Politically Correct RINO in the NYT attacks the Trump candidacy and his supporters.

I saw this post at EvC this morning quoting from an opinion piece in the NYT, Is There Life After Trump? about the terrible condition of the Republican Party as embodied in the Trump candidacy, and feel I must try to answer it.  The author was misidentified in the post as Paul Krugman, though in reality he's Peter Wehner*, a self-identified Republican who thinks
The 2016 presidential campaign has revealed dark and disturbing things about not only Donald J. Trump but also the party that nominated him.
and
The forces that propelled Mr. Trump’s rise need to be confronted and defeated. It won’t be easy, given that tens of millions of Americans will vote for him and believe deeply in him. But if these forces are not defeated, what happened this year will be replicated in one form or another, and the Republican Party will continue to inflict great harm on our republic.
And what are those forces?  He lists three, the first being  "anti-intellectualism," which he sees as embodied in the party's embrace of Sarah Palin; then "political recklessness," or "unceasing combativeness, intemperance and a deep hostility toward compromise and temperamental moderation," exemplified by the government shutdown of a few years ago, and by the belief that Barack Obama was not born in America, which he calls a"crazed, racist, conspiracy theory."  .  And the third is "appealing to nativism and xenophobia" which is how he characterizes Trump's presentation of the problem of illegal immigration"-- "Demonizing people of other races, cultures and faiths..."
Republicans need to wrestle with more fundamental questions first: Will their party choose as its leaders people who respect democratic institutions and traditions, or not; who conceive of America as a welcoming society or as one that is racially and religiously closed; who are committed to helping or exploiting the weak and vulnerable; who admire or oppose tyrants; who respect truth or view it in purely utilitarian ways; who abhor ignorance or embrace it? Will Republicans gravitate toward leaders who have authoritarian tendencies, who incite violence in their followers, and whose personalities are vindictive, cruel and disordered?
By the time I got through the piece my head was swimming with the familiar terms of Political Correctness.  What does "respect democratic institutions and traditions" mean?  Unfortunately it is likely to be a euphemism for PC business as usual.  What does being a "welcoming society" mean?  Obviously in this context it means allowing America to be overrun by people who include some who would like to destroy us.  Authoritarian?  Violence?  Vindictive, cruel and disordered?  Wow what a litany of PC accusations.  If there's one thing a Republican should not be, it's Politically Correct.  A Republican should be a critic of Political Correctness.  But instead this writer indicts Trump and his followers for all the bogus attitudes invented by Cultural Marxism to discredit anyone who has a traditional view of America.  How is this man a Republican?  He slings around the terminology of he Leftist/ Marxist hatred of traditional America:  Racist, xenophobic, authoritarian. 

His attitudes are exactly "the forces that propelled Trump to his candidacy" and if only he recognized this I'd agree that these forces do indeed need to be "confronted and defeated."  The forces HE identifies are most likely best explained as the effects of the leftist manipulations and propaganda that have left conservative Republicans without a meaningful voice.  Trump for better or worse is our answer to the Leftist forces that have sought for decades to destroy traditional America and largely succeeded.  This RINO seems to be blind to all that, to the crying need for such a voice, flawed though the package be in which it has come to us. 

Trump's crudeness makes me cringe.  It's even led me to consider not voting for him.  But when I read a piece like this I know why it is important to defend him.  He's the ONLY one, among what at first looked like a pretty good array of conservative Republicans running for the Presidency, who spoke our own thoughts about what America is supposed to be and spoke against the political correctness that has been killing us for decades.  The others waffled and compromised where Trump told it like it is.  His personality is far from what we'd like to see in the Presidency, but his political views are exactly what we, at least half of the population, have been hoping for increasingly over all those decades.  I'd pretty much given up, accepting that we are on the downward spiral to the transformation by corruption and subterfuge and propaganda into a Marxist entity that can fit right in to the global vision being engineered behind the scenes, and then Trump came along echoing our own very thoughts, an amazing reversal to the downward trend.  And "Republicans" want to shut him up. 

This RINO even accuses the Trump faction of "violence."  WHAT violence?  Does he mean the leftist plants that have infiltrated Trump rallies and provoked retaliation?  And birtherism.  I have not seen evidence that proves it wrong, but there's plenty that supports the view that Obama was born in Kenya.  All I've seen against the idea is the kind of ridicule this writer heaps on it, along with some highly questionable bits of supposed evidence, but not real evidence. Obama was a "foreign student" in America when the mailman talked to him about how he was going to become President of the US some day.  Has that been discredited?  Not that I know of.  Have his Kenyan grandmother's words about seeing him when he was born there been discredited?  Not that I know of.  We've all just capitulated to the nasty accusations of "conspiracy theory" and "crazed racism" and shut up about it, we haven't abandoned the idea because it has never been truly shown to be wrong.  NOT because we're "crazed racists" but because IT HASN'T BEEN TRULY SHOWN TO BE WRONG.

 What are the forces that propelled Trump to his current position?  LEFTIST MARXIST PROPAGANDA AGAINST AMERICA.  Leftist Marxist accusations of racism and the like against anybody who wants to protect America against cultural influences that would permanently change its character.  Europe has been just about brought to its knees by political correctness that allows the barbarian Muslim "refugees" to rape its women and wreak destruction of its once-civilized societies, which eventually will make Europe just as barbarian and Muslim as the countries they came from.  Oh but this is just racism and xenophobia, isn't it? 

Again, a Christian ought to know why, and it's because they abandoned the God that made them civilized in the first place;  and that's the case in America too.  If we get Hillary that will be the reason why. 

Trump doesn't have the personality we'd like to see in the role of savior of the nation, but he has the vision of America we want to prevail.  I for one have to vote for that vision, and pray that strong advisers will rise to keep him on track.

===================
*I looked up Peter Wehner and find him described as a solid conservative and Christian, which makes his denunciations of Republicans who support Trump especially puzzling.  How can he be so blind to the actual reasons for Trump's popularity, I mean the LEGITIMATE IMPORTANT reasons?  How can he lob so many PC accusations against him and his followers?  He sounds like a leftist in this article no matter what his credentials and associations that should suggest otherwise. 
===================

I have one more comment I want to make on an opinion I saw at EvC today about how Christians who are supporting Trump have no genuinely Christian reasons for doing so.
When you look at some of their core beliefs:
- Being anti-tax
- Being pro death penalty
- Being pro-war
- Being anti-gay
- Being pro-gun
How precisely are these Christian values in any way? The answer is they are not. Most of these knuckle-draggers don't even understand their own bible or have read it. They are just Pavlovian dogs salivating when someone says something they like. The 'ditto-heads' that make up Rush Limbaugh's audience is a great example.
The death penalty for murder is prescribed in the Bible, by God as He instructed Noah.
"Anti-gay" is a propaganda term.  The Bible defines homosexuality as sin along with all kinds of other sins, and it's same-sex marriage we particularly oppose because the Bible prescribes marriage only for a man and a woman.  These are definitely Christian concerns.

I don't know what the "anti-tax" accusation refers to.  Christians aren't anti-tax that I know of -- anti-EXCESSIVE tax perhaps, or anti taxes that are just stealing from some to give to others.  And I don't know what "pro-war" is supposed to hint at, but as for being "pro gun," Christian conservatives are strong defenders of the Second Amendment which isn't a specifically Christian concern but isn't a violation either.  I think it was Chris Pinto who recently pointed out that it was when the UK took away the people's guns back in the 90s that  Muslim gangs almost immediately started terrorizing the nation.  Oh, you didn't know that?