Monday, January 21, 2019

Notes on the orange man (Season 1, Ep. 3)

(1) There are times when the orange man's negligent if not reckless imbecility is beyond question, and this is one of them.

(2) In the necessary and unavoidable "but have you seen his opposition?" department: Say that Trump is found to have obstructed justice and/or committed perjury.  The Democrats gave President Clinton a pass for that.  Why are they so concerned about such things now?  They've blown their credibility on this.  (Many of these nitwits, including Ocasio-Cortez, hold that Trump ought to be impeached for being a lousy president, rather than by the standard clearly set forth in the Constitution.) They have themselves to blame for nominating a key enabler of President Clinton's criminality, Crooked Hillary, who for her own part set up a private server on which to conduct government business without seeking State Dept. approval -- while fellow Democrats looked the other way and/or made a serious effort to miss the point.  HRC is the arrogant and cynical D.C. Swamp personified, as wikileaks helped further to illustrate, and it best explains how "the most qualified candidate in recent memory" went down to defeat.  (Her subsequent book and public appearances where she "explains" her defeat -- e.g., blaming sexism, just as a fucking loser would do -- have only served to remind us why she was defeated.)

To address the whole Trump phenomenon in its proper and full context, and hence to make duly thorough notes on the orange man, you have to understand what an intellectual and moral failure the D.C.-Big Government-Democrat complex is.  If D.C. weren't such an intellectually and morally dysfunctional swampy arena made possible in great part by Democrat/Big-Govt, grab-others'-wealth policies and mentality over the decades, we'd have had better presidential candidates than the stream of mediocrities we have nowadays.  Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were presidents of the American Philosophical Society.  What we are witness to is a debased posterity, the Enlightenment legacy bastardized and squandered.  And the Democrats -- Demon Rats -- can't have it both ways: they can't in justice point to all the evidence of Trump's imbecility and shabbiness, while then turning a blind eye to, or making up all kinds of laughably piss-poor excuses for, all of their own.  (Here's just one very recent, absolutely pathetic performance from a freshman Demon Rat Congress-critter when challenged to support an opinion in a TV interview.  [The big grain of truth in the context of the link: Trump is definitely an Islamophobe, although you would need to possess Demon Rat-level reasoning skills to equate that with racism.])

Trump's imbecility/shabbiness and his opposition's are, in essence, mutually supporting phenomena.  Assuredly this is the best explanation for the current clown show.  Or, more precisely, it's assuredly the best description (in a nutshell) of the current clown show.  The explanation rests on the intellectual state of the nation, and that in turn rests on the quality of its educational institutions -- run mostly by the pseudo-progressive Demon Rats -- which are all too short on the most crucial feature of sound educational practice and cultural progress (as Franklin and Jefferson recognized): philosophy.  Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, Adams.  The recent crop of political "leaders" pales in comparison; if they know more than jackshit about philosophy, you couldn't tell from the way they operate.  "Sad!"

[Addendum: Okay, okay, one notable promising exception on this, but it ain't no Demon Rat.  What say Little Donny about that?]

[Addendum #2: The imbecility of the Demon Rats notwithstanding, Republicans shoulder the responsibility for having nominated the orange man to begin with.  On the merits, his debate performances sucked; there were at least half a dozen other candidates who talked more sense, with more policy knowledge, etc.  His main qualification seems to have been, "He's the only one who can defeat Clinton in the general."  I guess you can't fault his supporters for inaccuracy there.  But it comes at a cost: a philistine in the White House.  The party had already embarrassed itself when it added an obvious philistine to its '08 presidential ticket.  The one main advantage of having the orange man as president is the one that Sen. Cruz mentioned as reason to support him over HRC: restoring judicial balance after 8 years of Obama appointments.  So the balance is at least partly restored; does he have to remain the party's nominee in '20?  Or is the philistine faction of the party base -- the 'dialectical' counterweight to the Demon Rat shit-for-brains faction -- too strong for a viable alternative?]