Donald Trump

[Roger Bissell]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Roger,

Two comments:

1. I never thought about the President Ford connection when evaluating Rand's harsh judgment of Reagan. That makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. Kewell...

2. President Ford did not appoint Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. President Reagan did that in 1987, five years after Rand died. Ford appointed Greenspan to the Council of Economic Advisers.

Michael

 

Yeah, (1), not much has been said (that I've heard) about the Ford-Greenspan connection in re Rand's animosity toward Reagan. I always thought there was something a bit odd in her next-to-last Ayn Rand Letter, where she said she opposed Reagan because he was not only a conservative in the "worst" sense of the term (favoring government controls slanted toward business, rather than labor), but also didn't uphold individual rights, specifically in re abortion. What seemed odd was, she acknowledged the claim that Reagan took a pro-life stand not because he deeply believed it, but only in order to get support from a key constituency on the right (religious conservatives) - but she said, if that's true, it's even worse. By which she meant: being a pragmatic opponent of individual (women's) rights is even worse than being a principled one. She had a point, I guess, but in practical terms (i.e., what would he have done, once elected, as opposed to promise or suggest as a candidate), nothing would have been done to Roe v. Wade, so it seems more of a quibble than a realistic objection to Reagan.

Thanks for the correction, (2), about Ford's appointing Greenspan. So, AG was even more a member of the Inner Circle for Ford than I thought. Rand really did have a foot in the door of the White House for a brief while.

REB

[MereMortal]

46 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

The Facebook embed is acting funny above. If it is for you, too, here is the article:

Horowitz: How Not To Fight Our Enemies
Some Republicans seem more intent on destroying their allies.
by David Horowitz
3.13.2016
Truth Revolt

Michael

 

Excellent piece.  I've always liked David Horowitz.  

[Roger Bissell]

36 minutes ago, KorbenDallas said:

Donald Trump is not a bully.  He respects one the most important things about Objectivist ethics, likely THE most important: that each man has the right to his own life, that his life is the ultimate standard of value.  This is a right to freedom.  Freedom to think.  Free to act.  Free to be.  Free to become.  And freedom from the initiation of force.  Free from those "bullies" who are offensively contemptuous to others.  As said before, given enough opportunity a "bully" can wear nearly anyone down.  But the word bully isn't strong enough, psychological criminal is more like it.  Introduce that into the conversation and we're getting somewhere.

Donald Trump is not a bully.  He might use the tools of a bully to protect the rights of others.  Responding to force WITH force doesn't make you a bully, it makes you an American.  Where has THAT mentality gone?  "Don't tread on me" works.  Peace before force.  Thought before action.

This thread has gotten uuge, but there is something else that can be said about Trump:

He wants to protect your rights, namely, the right to your own life.

2

But not your right to your own house, as he himself has repeatedly said and demonstrated in action.

Nor does he support your right to sell what you have produced wherever you may have produced it, without extracting a huge chunk to punish you for not producing it in America. It's OK if a foreign company wants to locate here (though, why would they in the present corporate tax environment. Nor does he support your right to buy what you want for the cheapest price you can get it, without paying a huge tax for that item if it wasn't produced in America. (Or else you have to buy more expensive American-made goods. Either way, because Trump doesn't like people relocating their production out of the country, he wants to stick it to the American consumers and our standard of living.

Trump has the ideal solution to these very anti-liberty, very unwise policy positions right in his own arsenal of proposals. Check out his website. He talks of lowering the corporate tax rates. Well, yeah, do that. Make it a HUGE reduction, and guarantee it will stay at that level for 20 years. That should stop the outward migration just fine. All the other benefits from such a policy should be obvious, so I won't belabor them, except to say that it would greatly grow the economy and make America great, which is what Trump says he wants. His trade-war policies would shrink the economy, hit our standard of living hard, and make all but a very few of us worse off.

Trump needs to get serious about defending property rights and the right to free enterprise, which includes the rights of consumers to purchase goods without having their savings taxed away by someone pandering to the labor lobby. (What if Boeing and their customers had been punished by the federal government preventing their relocation from Seattle in order to lower labor costs? This was within America, but it's the same principle. Atlas Shrugged has examples of this, remember? Freezing everybody in place, so they couldn't try to improve their own situation. "For the common good." Not!)

REB

[Jonathan]

21 hours ago, Ellen Stuttle said:

So you assert.

I'm mixed on how I speculate Rand would react to Trump, but I'm more inclined than not to suspect that she'd be negative because of his blustering style and lack of philosophical heft.

Ellen

She loved bluster. Philosophical heft wasn't important to her. Everything was "sense of life," and Trump's got the type of arrogant, optimistic, pro American "sense of life" that she loved. And something she loved even more was standing up for an arrogant individual who was being attacked and smeared by the ugly, envious masses. She loved to piss on grubby collectivist nobodies, and snarl at them by siding with the object of their derision, regardless of that object's "philosophical heft." She would have eviscerated Trump's attackers, and then Trump would praise her and her novels, and then she'd be totally in love with him and loyal to him forever and ever.

J

[Jonathan]

3 hours ago, Roger Bissell said:

Rational thinking is the last thing that these mayors and our President - and your favorite candidate for POTUS #46 - are interested in promoting.   

Trump's repeated careless (or calculated?) invocations of physical violence...

How anti-Objectivist of you to oppose the idea of retaliatory force against those who initiate it!

J

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On 3/11/2016 at 1:43 AM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

It's funny. I was just reviewing some videos of pundits talking about the canceled Trump rally in Chicago. I had been doing this for a couple of hours.

My soul was burning out with profound irritation at all the bickering and accusations that Trump was this and denials that Trump was not that and the tones of people yelling at each other and the constant self-righteousness and goons being shipped into the rally and faces flashing on the screen distorted with angry challenge and twisted words flying here and there and here and there and bah bah bah bah bah bah bah...

Suddenly, without signal, in the tiniest instant, in a sliver of time, I elevated inside. I shut off the video's sound and experienced a feeling of Nirvanic transcendence.

The little nonstop voice in my head lowered its tone, then whispered: Who gives a shit?

And the most delicious calm came over my entire being.

I became singular with the universe.

All in eternal peace, dude.

I'm still on that high...

It's good...

 

On 3/11/2016 at 5:37 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

To get back to the positive, here's something for my inner groupie.

You guys think this stuff is funny?

You don't know what living is...

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Roger,

Here's a guy who agrees with you about some people shouldn't vote and has enough snobbism integrity to say so on TV.

@AnnCoulter @AJDelgado13 Watch a Senior Rubio hack tell Trump supporters they aren't welcome in the GOP. So smart... pic.twitter.com/YxADp5w7PF

— Shane Banks (@SBanks89)

March 13, 2016

btw - He's helping Rubio lose his campaign.

Whatever this guy is doing, working on winning an election is not it.

Human nature is part of reality. Do you remember that line Rand was fond of, that nature to be commanded must be obeyed? That goes for human nature, too. On another point, all citizens are free to vote in America. All. And that's as it should be.

So reality and freedom are part of American elective politics, not just as abstract ideas, but as... er... reality and freedom.

You don't like what you are seeing in this election? That's what reality and freedom look like. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.

 

Those who refuse to obey nature will never command it.

But they will manage to lose elections, time after time after time like clockwork...

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Very interesting post with a 2008 video.

The lone Duke student who bravely defended falsely-accused Duke students was Stephen Miller, Trump advisor.

Posted by

Ann Coulter

on 

Sunday, March 13, 2016

Michael

[KorbenDallas]

3 hours ago, Roger Bissell said:

But not your right to your own house, as he himself has repeatedly said and demonstrated in action.

That's a bit of a stretch, though.  Most of those were dilapidated, condemned, or part of city planning.  Trump did more good than harm here.  I'm sure if one looks hard enough they would find some questionable cases, but saying eminent domain automatically equals tyranny isn't a principle I subscribe to.  If some stubborn old lady won't let go of her dilapidated house, while she can be relocated to a nicer place, and something nicer built there, then she has no case except irrationality.  The cases I've seen hit the news of Trump's have been ignorant people that don't know a good deal when they see one.

 

3 hours ago, Roger Bissell said:

Nor does he support your right to sell what you have produced wherever you may have produced it, without extracting a huge chunk to punish you for not producing it in America. It's OK if a foreign company wants to locate here (though, why would they in the present corporate tax environment. Nor does he support your right to buy what you want for the cheapest price you can get it, without paying a huge tax for that item if it wasn't produced in America. (Or else you have to buy more expensive American-made goods. Either way, because Trump doesn't like people relocating their production out of the country, he wants to stick it to the American consumers and our standard of living.

I do not think that Trump's 45% tariff threat is a future trade embargo.  Here is a link to Trump's trade reform with China: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/posiions/us-china-trade-reform.  Nowhere in the goals section does it list a tariff.  What's listed first, however, is "Bring China to the bargaining table by immediately declaring it a currency manipulator."  This has been long overdue, Obama should have went to the table with China long ago, instead he allowed the Empire State Building to commemorate China's communist revolution.  Negotiating trade deals used to be common practice many years ago for America to make sure we aren't getting the shaft.  Threatening higher tariffs was a common tactic to bring the other country to terms.  Trump is repeating that here, repeating what works.  Many of these countries are brutish, and only respond to consequence.  Will Trump have to impose the Tariff?  Likely not.  Likely what will happen is China will be held accountable for its currency manipulation and their prices will go up--but it's important here that China does not have a monopoly on imported goods.  There are other countries waiting for China to be held accountable so they can export their goods to us, countries that have factories and resources at the ready.  Prices would still go up but it wouldn't be dramatic--and this is where a domestic tax policy would immediately put more cash into American's pockets to make up for this rise.  Trump's tax plan does this.  The corporate tax rate would help job growth, albeit slower, and still slower is building American factories and bringing back labor jobs, but it can be done and Trump's plans lay the fundamentals.  (At this stage, I'd be more worried with labor unions being a threshold guardian to bringing back labor jobs, but maybe that will be a conversation we'll have in a few years into Trump's presidency.)

This is how I see it happening: the engine of America still working, our individual lives becoming better, the concept of America being brought back to the people, more jobs, more national pride, more happiness.

And I'm serious.  I'm thinking of the Reagan years here.

 

[KorbenDallas]

U.S. labor powerhouse to launch anti-Trump ad campaign

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-unions-exclusive-idUSMTZSAPEC3BVV3QJO

Quote

The initial ads will be modeled after a text message blast that began Thursday featuring an image of Trump with a statement he made supporting "right-to-work" laws, which weaken organized labor by limiting their ability to collect membership dues. Several states have passed such laws, and the U.S. Congress has considered a similar measure.

"I like right to work. My position on right to work is 100 percent," Trump said in a radio interview in South Carolina last month.

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

For OL readers in Ohio, if this should mean anything to you:

Just received from @PeteRose_14.
Thank you Pete! #VoteTrump on
Tuesday Ohio! #Trump2016#MakeAmericaGreatAgain pic.twitter.com/UvP03n7dQq

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)

March 14, 2016

Michael

[KorbenDallas]

Continuing the bully theme, who is the bully in this video?  (vid from 2011)

I think it's a good thing DT changed his strategy.

Bill actually asked DT at the end if he knew where Iowa was?  Pathetic.  No wonder BIll was crying for milkshakes recently, eating crow is tough.  Maybe milkshakes help it go down.

 

[merjet]

8 hours ago, Jonathan said:

She loved bluster.

Check your premises. Mussolini was full of bluster.

[merjet]

5 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

For OL readers in Ohio, if this should mean anything to you:

I live in Ohio. Pete Rose's "endorsement" means nothing to you. I'm not a Pete Rose fan. He was a good baseball player, but far below the caliber of, say, Hank Aaron. Rose had minimal power at the plate.

 Player   BA      HR      RBI       R
Aaron    .305    755    2297    2174
Rose     .303    160    1314    2165

If LeBron James, Jim Brown, John Havlicek or Oscar Robertson, all also from Ohio, endorsed Trump, or anybody else, it wouldn't phase me. One man, one vote.

[Brant Gaede]

Nothing? Ever hear of something from nothing?

[Brant Gaede]

 

[Brant Gaede]

3 hours ago, merjet said:

Check your premises. Mussolini was full of bluster.

She loved Mussolini?

--Brant

maybe you shoulda asked me to check yours, not mine

[Peter]

Today, March 14, 2016, John Daniel Davidson in the Federalist wrote: Last month marked the 25th anniversary of the liberation of Kuwait and American victory in the Gulf War. Many Americans remember Desert Storm as our “good war,” when a global superpower led a coalition of 34 countries to expel an invader from a small and defenseless state. It was an internationalist war, waged “for the rights and liberties of small nations,” as President Woodrow Wilson said of America’s entry into World War I, and in some ways it represented the apogee of what then-President George H.W. Bush called the new world order: a post-Cold War era of international cooperation and global stability underwritten by American military strength.

But the internationalist system is slowly coming apart, largely as a result of President Obama’s foreign policy. Although he professes, as most world leaders do, to be a liberal internationalist, President Obama has spent his time in office dismantling a post-Cold War system sustained by American hegemony. He has done this under the guise of correcting what he considers to be George W. Bush’s disastrous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has enabled him to go about revising the post-Cold War international order using the language of liberal internationalism.

Although they would never admit it, Obama and Donald Trump agree that America should not guarantee a rules-based global international system. The difference between them is that Obama wants to pull back because he doubts American strength, but Trump wants to pull back because he thinks we’re so strong we don’t need an international system at all.

Trump’s Dangerous Isolationism

Also unlike Obama, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump is honest about his disdain for the international system; he rejects it outright. As Thomas Wright noted recently in Politico, “Trump believes that America gets a raw deal from the liberal international order it helped to create and has led since World War II.” That’s what Trump means when he says, as he often does, that “America doesn’t win anymore,” that we get beat by China and Mexico on trade, we cut a terrible nuclear deal with Iran, we’re not winning against ISIS.

Trump’s views might be simplistic, but they represent a conscious rejection of the existing international order and at least a partial return to pre-WWII American foreign policy.

Under President Trump, he says, we’ll start winning again. He’ll “cut the head off ISIS and take their oil,” start a trade war with China, negotiate a great deal with Russia, and build a wall along the southern U.S. border. At the GOP debate last week, he even floated the idea of unilaterally deploying 30,000 troops to Syria and Iraq to defeat ISIS.

But there’s a reason you never hear Trump talk about multilateral action or international coalitions. He believes these things hamper the United States, that we “get beat” when we work with other countries.

It’s easy to scoff at this stuff. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said he’s concerned about the GOP campaigns because when it comes to foreign policy, “the solutions being offered are so simplistic and so at odds with the way the world really works.” Trump’s views might be simplistic, but they represent a conscious rejection of the existing international order and at least a partial return to pre-WWII (or even nineteenth-century) American foreign policy, in which America pursues its national interests and leaves other powers more leeway to pursue theirs.

And it’s not just Trump. Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have cast aspersions on internationalist foreign policy, arguing America shouldn’t engage in “nation-building” or go around toppling dictators. Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, an staunch liberal internationalist, wants to pass more of the burden of fighting terrorism to other countries, like Russia, and although he doesn’t say so openly, he would likely reduce America’s military to something resembling a well-equipped home guard in order to pay for his expansive domestic welfare agenda.

The Bush Wars Shook American Confidence

That such views are moving toward the mainstream of American politics is only possible now because the Republican Party has not adjudicated the Bush years. No GOP candidate has admitted what Bush got wrong, affirmed what he got right, and laid out a vision for the future of American global leadership.

No GOP candidate has admitted what Bush got wrong, affirmed what he got right, and laid out a vision for the future of American global leadership.

The reason the candidates haven’t done this is because there is little incentive to do so. Outsiders like Trump and Cruz (and Sanders) are appealing to a vague but widespread dissatisfaction among all voters with the state of American foreign policy. Many Americans are frustrated with Obama’s lack of leadership in dealing with the rise of ISIS and the European migrant crisis. At the same time, they believe the Bush wars were a mistake.

Hence the lack of public support for putting troops on the ground in Syria when Assad used chemical weapons against his own people in 2013. Obama responded to this by disastrously backing off his “red line” ultimatum. Jeffrey Goldberg’s long essay in the latest issue of The Atlantic chronicles that process in great detail, and one comes away from the article with a strong sense that Obama doesn’t quite grasp the consequences of American abdication under the pretext of multilateral action.

On the GOP side, foreign policy debates have devolved into “isolationist” versus “interventionist”—an oversimplification that masks deep and longstanding divisions in the party and the country at large. The debate stretches back more than a century, at least to Theodore Roosevelt, who believed that global peace and stability secured by an international system was beyond the purview of American foreign policy. He thought we could expect to do no more than secure peace for America by vigorously protecting narrowly defined national interests—or, in his famous words, “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

America’s Founding Tradition of Restraint

This view has a long pedigree. George Washington famously warned against “foreign entanglements” and believed the new republic should maintain a posture of neutrality abroad, especially as the French Revolution was roiling Europe. Peaceful commercial relations, not political ones, were to be the overarching goal of American foreign policy. We should have “as little political connection as possible,” to foreign nations, Washington said in his farewell address. “So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.”

The idea was to mind our own business, but to mind it hard.

In 1821, John Quincy Adams invoked Washington’s rule with the famous lines that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” The idea was to mind our own business, but to mind it hard.

Roosevelt interpreted that principle in a way that looked a lot like the aggressive foreign policy of the major imperial powers. When Cuba revolted from Spain in 1895, he supported going to war to keep European gunboats out of the Caribbean. Afterwards, he supported occupying the Philippines as a kind of western outpost in the Pacific, with an eye on securing American interests in China. Roosevelt believed that “decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis” was the only way to preserve peace and a place of prestige for America in a world teeming with competing empires.

The GOP’s New ‘Jacksonian’ Streak

But Roosevelt’s seemingly muscular foreign policy stemmed from the twin belief that America should not take on international responsibilities it is unable or unwilling to back up with military force, and that there are serious limits to the use of American power abroad. One could arguably say the same about Obama. The notion made sense because America wasn’t a superpower, but it also resonated with Americans’ sense that their country was a peaceful republic, not a marauding empire. The notion made sense at the turn of the last century because America wasn’t a superpower, but it also resonated with Americans’ sense that their country was a peaceful republic, not a marauding empire. As we’re now seeing, it retains a certain appeal today.

Max Boot has suggested that a new populist or “Jacksonian” foreign policy is emerging in the GOP that rejects regime change and nation-building but isn’t afraid to use the military to “kill the terrorists and then come home,” as Cruz said in December. Boot, quoting a 1999 essay by Walter Russell Mead, argues this is a foreign policy characterized by low regard for international law and institutions, opposition to humanitarian inventions or interventions designed to promote democracy, and a willingness to fight all-out if America is attacked.

By adopting such views, writes Boot, Trump and Cruz “have turned their backs on decades of Republican foreign policy, which has been internationalist, pro-free trade, pro-immigration, pro-democracy, and pro-human rights.” GOP primary voters, Boot claims, must choose whether “to continue the traditional, Reaganesque foreign policy that has been championed by every Republican presidential nominee for decades or to opt for a Jacksonian outlook that is as crude and ugly as it is beguiling.”

We Need A Vision for America’s Future Foreign Policy

Indeed, Jackson’s world—and Teddy Roosevelt’s—is gone and will never come back. An international order guaranteed by American hegemony is both our reward and burden for winning two world wars and the Cold War. It’s a bell that can’t be un-rung. Today, America faces more varied and complex foreign policy threats than at any time since the end of World War II. We desperately need a president with a strategic vision for American foreign policy in the twenty-first century that embraces strong American leadership abroad.

But no GOP candidate—not even Sen. Marco Rubio, the GOP’s foreign policy whiz kid—will be able to do that in a way that allays voters’ fear of American adventurism until Republicans can come to terms with our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, explain what went wrong, and make a compelling case that an America-led international order is good for us and good for the rest of the world.

Until conservatives can do that, candidates in both parties will continue to argue, without saying so outright, that America should step back from its place in the post-Cold War order, just as Obama has done. Trump just does it with a lot more bluster.

John is a senior correspondent at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

[merjet]

38 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

She loved Mussolini?

--Brant

Earth to Brant.  Duh!!

 

[MereMortal]

4 hours ago, merjet said:

Check your premises. Mussolini was full of bluster.

Out of all the traits Rand likes in her heroes, you choose to focus on this one because some vicious dictator had the same trait?  Why does this always happen?  Why does Mussolini's bluster matter??  It isn't JUST a person's bluster Rand likes.  It's part of the package.  If some blustering idiot is a destructive collectivist, I'm sure Rand would despise such a person  

[merjet]

14 minutes ago, MereMortal said:

Out of all the traits Rand likes in her heroes, you choose to focus on this one because some vicious dictator had the same trait?   

Earth to MereMortal.  Duh!

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Merlin,

What's making you a sourpuss all of a sudden?

It wouldn't be the latest polls in Ohio and a little trouble in Pennsylvania, would it?

Michael

[Jon Letendre]

David Horowitz:

The mob that came to disrupt the Trump rally in Chicago was neither spontaneous nor innocent, nor new. It was a mob that has been forming ever since the Seattle riots against the World Trade Organization in 1999, whose target was global capitalism. The Seattle rioters repeated their outrages for the next two years and then transformed itself into the so-called “anti-war” movement to save the Saddam dictatorship in Iraq. Same leaders, funders and troops. The enemy was always America and its Republican defenders. When Obama invaded countries and blew up families in Muslim countries, there was no anti-war movement because Obama was one of them, and they didn’t want to divide their support. In 2012 the so-called “anti-war” movement reformed as “Occupy Wall Street.” They went on a rampage creating cross-country riots to protesting the One Percent and provided a whipping boy for Obama’s re-election campaign. Same leaders, same funders and troops. In 2015 the same leftwing forces created and funded Black Lives Matter and lynch mobs in Ferguson and Baltimore who targeted “white supremacists” and police.

Behind all the mobs was the organized left – MoveOn.org, the public sector unions run by Sixties leftovers,  and the cabal of anti-American billionaires led by George Soros. The mobs themselves were composed of the hate-filled foot soldiers of the political left. Now these forces have gathered in the campaign to elect the Vermont communist and are focusing their venom on Donald Trump. The obvious plan is to make Republicans toxic while driving a wedge through the Republican Party. The plan is defeat Republicans in November so that the destructive forces they have set in motion in the Democratic Party can finish the wrecking job that Obama started.

One of the professionally produced signs at the Chicago mob scene proclaimed, “This is what democracy looks like.” Actually it is exactly what fascism looks like. As every student of the Thirties knows, the breakup of democratic forums by Nazi and Communist thugs paved the way for Hitler’s election. Just like the mobs of the Thirties, today’s left is driven by racial and class hate, and is utterly contemptuous of the democratic process – hence the effort to hang the Ferguson cop before the trial and to prevent Trump from expounding his views in Chicago.

And what has been the reaction of the presidential candidates, particularly those who propose to save the country? It is to blame Trump as though he and not the left had instigated the riot. If you play with matches like Trump did, opined Hillary Clinton, you’re likely to start a fire. This is the same Hillary Clinton who has compared Republicans to terrorists and called them racists, and who once accused a “vast right-wing conspiracy” of inventing her husband’s paramour. The Democratic Party has officially endorsed the Black Lives Matter racists and rioters. But it is not only the left who is attempting to blame Trump for the Chicago debacle. 

According to the proudly positive John Kasich, it was Trump who created the “toxic environment” that led to the riot – not the fascist movement that has been metastasizing in our universities and streets for more than a decade. In other words, when you finally go on the attack, attack a Republican rather than a Democrat. That way you get a pass.

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and their spokespeople piled on Trump as well. “Ted Cruz Claims Trump Is To Blame For Violence At His Rallies,” ran a headline in the leftwing New York Times. His Republican attackers attempted to shame Trump for speaking to the anger of his conservative supporters instead of bringing everyone together – those who claim we live in a white supremacist society and the whites they are attacking, those who claim that Republicans are terrorists and racists and the victims of this abuse. As though you can create unity with people who hate you because you are white or rich, or believe that America is a nation worth saving. The fact is that Trump’s anger is pretty controlled, considering the hate-filled environment of Islamic terrorists, illegal immigrants, event disrupters and rival candidates openly smearing him.

He is often guilty of over-reach – “punch him in the nose” directed at one disrupter, but this is hardly the sin his detractors suggest in comparing him to Mussolini. That is a much great violence to the man who is its target. Aside from Trump’s compulsive over-reach what is wrong with anger in the current political context? Is it wrong to be angry at what Obama and the Democrats and the progressive mobs are doing to our country? How is this dissociation from Trump mob attack not the same surrender to political correctness that conservatives like Rubio and Cruz claim to reject? Aren’t Cruz and Rubio angry at what is being done to our country? Why are they willing to validate the hypocritical slanders of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, two architects of our disasters?

This is the reality we must never forget: There is an anti-American radical in the White House who – with the support of his party – has delivered nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and a hundred billion dollars to our mortal enemies in Teheran who have declared their intentions to kill us. This suicidal deal was not an oversight, as Rubio has correctly observed, but the result of decades of thinking that America and Israel are adversaries, and our enemies are their victims. The extremists of #Never Trump exemplify the malaise Republicans have been prisoners of for years, which is what the primary revolt is about. Why was there no #Never Obama movement in 2012? For Republicans such a movement would be unthinkable. It would be too angry. It would be called racist. On the other hand, no one will call us racist for attacking a fellow Republican. So let’s join the left in smearing one of our own and hope that we can scrub off the stigmas that Democrats have tarred us with in the process. We’re not racists. Let’s not fight Obama, which will prove that we are. Let’s have respectful words for the lynch mob left.  If we capitulate the disaster unfolding before us, maybe it will go away. That is what the Trump crowd is angry about and mainstream Republicans should be too.

At the outset of the presidential debates all the Republican candidates pledged to support the party’s choice in November. Extra pressure was put on Trump to do so and he did. But now that millions of Republicans have cast their ballots for Trump, Rubio and Kasich are threatening to renege on their pledge, and destroy both the party and the country in the process. And Cruz, while sniping at Trump’s alleged role in inciting the leftists is notably non-committal about whether he will support a Trump primary victory. None of them explain how you can fight fascist leftists without actually fighting them and opening yourself to the charge of anger. 

Perhaps it is money from the #Never Trump crowd – the extremists who want to thwart the popular vote and fatally split the party - that is behind this perfidy. But as someone who until very recently held high opinions of Rubio and Cruz, I am hoping that it is not too late for somebody to wake them up. I am hoping that somebody says: Cut it out. Come to your senses. Your scorched earth warfare is threatening the very existence of the right. Trump isn’t the enemy. Like you he is opposed to the Iran deal, supports a secure border, recognizes the Islamist threat, wants to reduce taxes and make the country solvent, and is greatly expanding the Republican base. Attempt to beat him at the polls if you think he shouldn’t be president but let the voters decide the result, and respect their decision. The alternative is a fratricidal war that could drive large numbers of conservatives away from the polls, and whose beneficiaries will only be America’s enemies at home and abroad.

David Horowitz is the founder of the Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of, among many others, The Black Book of the American Left, a multi-volume collection of his conservative writings. His next book, Progressive Racism, will be published by Encounter Books in March, 2016.

The Freedom Center is a 501c3 non-profit organization. Therefore we do not endorse political candidates either in primary or general elections. However, as defenders of America’s social contract, we insist that the rules laid down by both parties at the outset of campaigns be respected, and that the results be decided by free elections. We will oppose any attempt to rig the system and deny voters of either party their constitutional right to elect candidates of their choice.

http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/horowitz-how-not-fight-our-enemies

Edited March 14, 2016 by Jon Letendre
edited to insert "David Horowitz:" at top

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Let's see where this goes, if anywhere.

I bet it goes somewhere, though.

***SOURCES INSIDE CHICAGO POLICE DEPT: RAHM ORDERED COPS TO MAKE NO ARRESTS AT CHICAGO TRUMP RALLY.***

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter)

March 14, 2016

Maybe it will go to Trump victories tomorrow.

I know from my own surfing around the Internet, it's not just Trump supporters who are hopping mad about the Chicago rally. I keep seeing media coverage of celebrities tut-tut-tutting about "Trump violence," but I also keep seeing more and more people who are not celebrities say they are not really Trump supporters, but they are going to vote for him anyway, and this last is usually accompanied by a comment about being really pissed about the organized violence against Trump.

Michael

[merjet]

2 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Merlin,

What's making you a sourpuss all of a sudden?

It wouldn't be the latest polls in Ohio and a little trouble in Pennsylvania, would it?

Michael

You are a prolific expert at making false presumptions.