Red States: GOP Strong

I live in the Deep South and for years I have been trying to explain why this region and others are so hard core GOP.

I have approached it from many different angles and as of yet I have not found a good excuse for their voting habits or their political attitudes.

Then recently I came upon an article written for the Daily Beast about this phenom…..the explanations are valid and thought provoking…..

In my neck of the woods, even two gay men in 2004 didn’t want to be Democrats. We can change this stigma—but we need to learn how to speak Republican.

You have known her for 30 years. She was in your wedding. She is smart and has a big heart. The day you realized she voted for Trump you were thunderstruck. “Who is this stranger?” you thought. Literally, your entire understanding of her crumbles. She feels your judgment and resents it. The dynamic of this relationship changes. It may evolve, but it will not be the same.

I may be able to help explain this communication and understanding gap and how to bridge it. I am a Democrat who speaks fluent Republican.

Source: Why the Republican Brand Is So Strong Where I Live

And at times it seems as if Repubs are living in some alternate political universe and it has become more likely with the election of Trump…..

A new SurveyMonkey poll shows shocking data that reveals President Donald Trump’s Republican supporters are living in a totally different reality than everyday Americans.

According to an Axios report, one-third of Republicans only get their news from Fox News and 89 percent of Republicans trust news coming from Trump before they see it on CNN.

Over the weekend, Trump tweeted a video showing him literally attacking CNN and leaving it flattened. Many took issue with the graphic as journalists are increasingly being attacked and threatened.

Source: Poll Reveals Republicans Really Do Live in an Alternative Universe | Alternet

What say you? Do our Repub brethren live in an alternative universe?

The Republican Brain

No that is not an oxymoron! (Although if it were it would be a damn good one)

These days the actual conservs do not think for themselves instead they out source that function to a think tank, the Heritage Foundation.

Most of my regulars know that I do not think much of so-called think tanks…..the reason is that most of them have a conclusion and then set about making stats and such fit what they want to report to say.

The worst among these fake intellectual endeavors is the Heritage Foundation……this group decides what the GOP will offer as way of policy and they, the politicians, do as they are told…..but to get a better grip on how this “foundation” works…….

The mood was jubilant two days after the November 2016 election at a Washington, D.C., panel co-hosted by two powerhouse conservative thinktanks—the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

In his opening remarks, Heritage president Jim DeMint rejoiced that Donald Trump’s election had “preserved our constitutional republic.” Panelist John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor best known as the architect of George W. Bush’s justification for torture, drew laughs with feigned surprise at the audience size. “I thought everyone at Heritage was working over at transition head quarters,” Yoo quipped. “I asked the taxi cab driver to take me to Trump transition headquarters, and he dropped me off here.”

Source: The Right-Wing Machine Behind the Curtain

The radical conservative Heritage Foundation has spent 40 years trying to gut the federal budget. Now Trump is proving to be the perfect tool.

Many of its proposals are lifted straight from the recommendations of an elite ultra-conservative D.C. think tank: the Heritage Foundation.

Trump’s Budget proposal, released on Thursday, echoes none of the populist, anti-establishment themes of candidate Trump’s campaign for higher office. Instead, it calls for a large increase in defense spending while reducing spending for a variety of popular domestic programs.

That’s not surprising considering where those ideas came from. Rather than bringing in new ideas from outside of the Beltway, many of its proposals are lifted straight from the recommendations of an elite ultra-conservative D.C. think tank: the Heritage Foundation.

Source: Trump the Outsider Outsources His Budget to Insider Think Tank

It is disgusting to out source your policies, policies that are not anything promised while luring idiots to his cause, but that is how you do it when a bunch of screaming amateurs are running the Greatest country on the planet.

All the American people can do now is bend over and wait for the insertion….sans Vaseline.

Restoring Responsible ‘Conservatism’

For years the conservatives in this country were known to be a responsible form of governance. The platform of the 1956 GOP platform illustrates the meaning of the term “responsible conservatism”…..

Back in those days they were as close as the US has had as a liberal since the turn of the 20th century.

As much as “liberal” has become a dirty word in U.S. politics, the word “conservative” has been ripped from all its honorable traditions and redefined as a dangerous form of radicalism,

What is it about the U.S. that makes it virtually the only country in the world where a political Left scarcely exists? We have a center Right — the Democratic Party. And we have a far Right — the Republican Party. In fact, just invoking the L-word “Liberal” can inflict quick political death. Yes, we’re safe from the Left here in America.

Having such a stunted political spectrum is bad enough in itself. Still worse is the utter corruption of the word conservative. U.S. society has allowed the Republican Party to hijack the word, distort it and redefine it to its own ends, against its real meaning.

Source: Restoring a Responsible ‘Conservatism’ – Consortiumnews

The day of a responsible Republican has long gone never to return.

What say you?

Trump’s New Theory?

CPAC is going on as I type…the meeting of the minds (HA) of the conservative movement…..and so far the big story is something that the WH Chief of Staff said during his moment in the spotlight……at least they showed a racist the door…..but now more on Bannon’s rhetoric…..

Steve Bannon made his first public appearance since Donald Trump became president Thursday at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the Washington Post reports. The president’s chief strategist said Trump’s goal is the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” meaning dismantling systems of taxation, regulation, and trade. Bannon said Trump picked his Cabinet nominees with that deconstruction in mind. Here’s what else is making headlines at CPAC:

Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who spoke alongside Bannon, says they aren’t rivals, as characterized by the media. Instead he says they work alongside each other and share a connection through Trump, Politico reports.

White nationalist Richard Spencer was kicked out of CPAC after being spotted in the lobby of the hotel where it’s taking place. “His views are repugnant and have absolutely nothing to do with conservatism,” a CPAC spokesperson tells NPR.

The Hill reports Bannon also reserved some of his time to bash reporters and the media, who he repeatedly called the “opposition party.” He warned that every day will be a fight against the “corporatist, globalist media.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz predicted—without explanation—that Trump will have a second Supreme Court seat to fill by the summer, Time reports. He also called the Democratic base “bat crap crazy.”

Speaking of Cruz, a lot has changed since last year’s CPAC, where he was the headliner and Trump canceled his speech, according to US News. Kellyanne Conway, who was working for Cruz this time last year, says CPAC is now “TPAC,” in reference to Trump.

Despite earlier reports that she clashed with the attorney general and Trump on protecting the bathroom rights of transgender students, at CPAC Betsy DeVos said she supported the removal of Obama’s guidelines, calling them “overreach,” the Huffington Post reports

Sounds like Mr. Bannon has a theory in mind……it is called…..Transnationalism

Interactions and coalitions across state boundaries that involve such diverse nongovernmental actors as multinational corporations and banks, church groups, and terrorist networks. In some usages, transnationalism includes both nongovernmental as well as transgovernmental links. The term transnational is used both to label the actor (for example, a transnational actor) or a pattern of behavior (for example, an international organisation that acts transnationally – operates across state borders). Theorists focusing on transnationalism often deemphasise the state as primary and unitary actor.

The last line says it all….deemphasize the state…does that mean “deconstructed”…….?

The American Conservative has had some thoughts on “Transnational Nationalism”……..

Linker’s main point — and it’s a trenchant one — is to note the belatedness of the effort: National Review and Public Interest took years or even decades to bring the fusionist New Right and neoconservatism respectively to a position of political dominance, whereas American Affairs was only founded after Trump’s unexpected triumph. But I want to comment on something Linker says at the end of the piece about our nationalist moment:

Source: The “Paradox” of Transnational Nationalism | The American Conservative

Is this Trump’s plan? Or is it Bannon’s?

Someone needs to ask Trump for clarification…….

A Conservative Take On Terrorism

In doing my research for a terrorism class I look at many different opinions…I like a balanced look at major issues of our day…..and this one comes from an unlikely source (at least for me).

I have been a bleeding heart (derogatory term used by some mental midgets) most of my life…..I always fought for liberal issues in any way that I felt would help….seldom did I appreciate anything a conservative had to say….that is until the big wasteland that the ultra-Right turned the political landscape into…..conservative thought (as it was) ceased to exist and was replace with the tacky thinking of neoliberalism (if you do not know the difference then f*cking look it up).

I have been encouraged lately that the conservatives may yet prove to be a real force in our political system…I have even taken to read sources like The American Conservative…..I admit that there is much that I do not agree with but they actually have thinking people writing for them not the mindless drones that regurgitate crap from Talk Radio.

Take the subject of Terrorism….It is a subject that makes me want to scream and throw a brick at the idiots that pretend to be “experts”…….I have read a couple of good articles on the subject published in TAC…….(no bricks were thrown)

The murderous attack earlier this month in Nice, France, prompted Jay Nordlinger, senior editor at the ostensibly conservative National Review, to propose a new approach to dealing with terrorism. His strategy is simplicity itself: “you have to kill these jihadists, and kill them, and kill them, until they simply tire of being killed and leave civilization alone.”

If by “civilization” Nordlinger is referring to Europe and the United States, then his proposal comes a couple of centuries too late. In their relations with the non-West—the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—Western powers have rarely demonstrated a desire to be left alone. They have instead sought to subjugate and exploit populations classified as inferior. In pursuit of their objectives, they have relied not on suasion but on violence and intimidation.

Source: Kill All the Terrorists? | The American Conservative

That is the only answer to an ever growing problem in the world…..KILL THEM ALL.

The problem is it is oversimplified response to the horrendous attacks….and then there is the chance that the whole phenom is overestimated……

As the investigation of the massacre in Nice continues, authorities continue to find no evidence that killer Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel had any ties to terrorist networks. So why have so many so quick to invoke ISIS? And more importantly, why do so many continue to conflate “ordered or planned by ISIS” with “ISIS-inspired”?

For all the speculation of real connections—and ISIS’ own attempt to claim “credit”—the evidence has pointed the other way from the start. Compare the awful expertise and professionalism shown by the ISIS killers in Paris the night of November 17 with Bouhlel’s awful wild ride. The Paris attack involved three coordinated attacks, suicide belts, shooting prowess, and slipping past security guards. In Nice, the perpetrator simply rented the biggest truck he could a couple of days beforehand and cased the location. Bouhlel didn’t even wear easily obtainable body armor that might have allowed him to kill far more people before being shot himself. The reports of the truck being packed with weapons including grenades proved false, although he did have one working gun.

Source: Don’t Overstate the Terrorist Threat | The American Conservative

What point does it make to thump the chest and demand the impossible?

The American Conservative makes some valid points…..it is an education if one decides to read and understand.

What About Trump And Democracy

Today is the day we vote in Indiana….or is it Idaho….or maybe…..the Hell with it……somebody is voting somewhere.

The 2016 election has brought a lot of opinions especially when it comes to one Donald Trump…..it depends where you stand on the political spectrum on which of those opinions you will embrace…..

Never let it be said that I am not fair in my condemnation of ALL candidates……

But I think that some are missing the concept of democracy…..or “the will of the People”….right or wrong……

I read an interesting op-ed about Mr. Trump and democracy…..

The “conservative intelligentsia” is anything but intelligent when it comes to Donald Trump, writes John Feehery at the Hill. Among those he calls out is David Brooks of the New York Times, who last week called Trump’s candidacy a “Joe McCarthy moment” for the party. But Feehery also cites comments of a similar nature from the likes of George Will (see here), Michael Gerson (here), and Ross Douthat (here), all of whom seem to think that Trump is the personification of evil who will do long-term damage to the GOP unless stopped. “To these so-called smart people, I say: Stop being so stupid,” writes Feehery.

This opposition to Trump reveals “their biases against democracy and the will of the people,” he argues. Instead of knocking him down, they should pay more attention to why Trump is so popular, writes Feehery, who provides some theories of his own: Trump is a “real outsider who represents real change,” he has explicitly denounced the Iraq War as a mistake, and his economic message (“the middle class is getting screwed by the political class”) is resonating. Most Trump supporters “are by no means stupid, irrational, racist or anti-democratic,” writes Feehery. They’re just tired of the status quo and see Trump as the only candidate who can destroy it. Click for his full column. (Or for Andrew Sullivan’s opposing view.)

This is by NO means my endorsement of Trump in this election…..I found the article a good one and bit of a thought making piece…..

Plato thought democracies were especially susceptible to “tyranny” the longer they lasted and the more democratic they became, and the US seems to be in exactly the kind of “late-stage democracy” ripe for such a thing.

In conclusion, it should be noted that, in modern times, a democracy is considered one of the more ideal forms of government, considering the value many people tend to place on individual liberty and the freedom to choose one’s own path in life. However, Plato’s criticisms should be kept in mind when determining the merit of a democratic government. Oh, would it not be great to have a democracy of philosophers, who would pursue truth and wisdom! Alas, we are only human, and susceptible to many evils and lies. The trick is to prevent such ignorant people from becoming the majority. At times, it seems nigh impossible to do so; curse our stupidity!

(Matt Brazil)

In Saner Thought

"It is the duty of every man, as far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error"..Thomas Paine

Tag: Conservatives