Now that the presidential primaries are over, things are coming into focus –at least on the Republican side. On the Democrat side of the ledger things are still somewhat muddy. Bernie has refused to concede, promising to take the fight to the bitter end in Philadelphia. I imagine that Party luminaries will read him the riot act behind closed doors but that still doesn’t solve the problem of his millions of energized Millennial voters. For what it’s worth, Trump has made sincere overtures to them and given that his and Bernie’s positions on trade are virtually identical, it’s not unreasonable to think that he’s going to get a significant slice of them in November.
We’ll see.
As for the Republicans, Trump continues to roil the waters. The latest brouhaha is over the judge assigned to hear the case against Trump University, a class-action lawsuit brought against Trump some six years ago.
By bringing up Judge Gonzalo Coriel’s Mexican heritage, suggesting that he may be biased against Trump, we are told that Trump stepped into it big time. That this was one insult, one gaffe if you will, too far. The screaming has yet to stop.
Nonsense. Like all Trump outrages, this was calculated to the fourth or fifth iteration. It was planned and kept alive by Trump and his surrogates purposefully. Unlike most Trump outrages which tend to have a half-life of 48 hours before dying out in less than a week (and always to the benefit of Trump at least as reflected in the poll numbers), this one will last two weeks I believe. Again, by calculation. In the case of the “Biased Mexican Judge” that’s how long it’s going to take for the people realize that Trump has a point: how in this era of leftist grievance-mongering can we expect otherwise?
Consider: during this very same news cycle, the Supreme Court vacated the death penalty of a black man in Georgia was was convicted by an all-white jury. That was the reason that SCOTUS gave. Not whether he was innocent, just that this was Georgia and the jury was lily-white. That’s all. Then someone brought Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said that because she was a “wise Latina” she could bring perspectives to the Court that say, Antonin Scalia couldn’t. Her very ethnic/sexual being trumped all other considerations. There is nothing “color-blind” about our society. Never has been, never will be. Only this time it will redound to the benefit of a white man.
Repeat after me the first, holiest tenet of Modern Liberalism: “diversity is strength.”
This is nothing but cognitive dissonance on steroids. Eventually, the mind cannot contain two such contradictory thoughts without succumbing to madness. We are probably at that point in our national consciousness as well.
Like all of Trump’s traps, this was carefully laid out. It serves both a political as well as personal purpose. Let’s talk about the personal. In bringing up Coriel’s Mexican heritage, Trump is poisoning the legal well in his favor. If he get’s Coriel to recuse himself, that’s a win for Trump. If he doesn’t recuse himself, then Coriel can rule of two ways: for Trump (a win) or against Trump (another win). Remember: the judge is “biased.”
Politically this will soften the blow; personally, it will give Trump’s legal team ammunition for an appeal (another win). See what I mean? In the meantime Trump will run ads featuring alumni from Trump U talking about what a great experience it was for them.
Trump’s traps are now legendary. They became obvious to me back in November (I believe it was) when he said that Hillary “got schlonged” by Obama back in 2008. This curious Yiddishism didn’t make sense to me. It seemed clunky to me (but then again so did “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary”). The punditocracy likewise took him to task.
Until a day later when we found out that he was mimicking a political scientist who was being interviewed on NPR back in 2008. You guess it: he said that Hillary was being “schlonged” by Obama.
This is what I mean by asymetric warfare. Trump isn’t playing by the rules. What we are seeing is nothing less than a full-blown guerrilla operation, complete with oppo research, carefully placed leaks and who knows what else. The ability with which he has been able to secure the nomination with spending a pittance is nothing less than masterful. By some estimates, Trump has earned $2 billion dollars worth in so-called earned media. Jeb! Bush on the other hand blew threw a whole stack of $120 million to get 2.3 percent of the Iowa vote.
We saw an example of Trump’s disdain for the traditional rule book last night when he rained all over Hillary’s parade. The traditional way of doing things is for the Cuckservative to graciously cede the day for the Democrat winner. Instead, he did nothing of the sort. Not only did he give an eloquent speech but he announced that he was going to blow up one of her ammunition dumps on Monday. (I’m sticking to the military metaphor for the time being.)
In my estimation, that put Hillary off her game. Her victory speech was strangely subdued. What should have been a magnificent party, celebrating the first time a woman has gained a major party nomination seemed like it was given by Robohillary. I guess that’s better than Screeching Hillary, or as I like to call her “America’s ex-wife from hell.” Those are her only two personnae. That’s another thing that Trump knows. He knows which buttons to push.
Like Obama last week, who could barely utter a syllable without going into a prolonged stutter, Trump is inside Hillary’s head. Like Obama, she knows that while the political landscape should favor anybody with a “D” after their name, America is anything but that Shining City Upon the Hill which Reagan talked about. Obama’s stutter was indication to me that he knows the economic news is nothing less than horrible. But like Baghdad Bob he had to at least try to go through the motions. Hillary has another problem in addition to being Obama’s third term, she want’s to be a centrist but Bernie won’t let her. That’s an untenable position going into a campaign with a nationalist who won’t give any quarter.
To this extent, she is at least cognizant that the Democratic happy talk is nonsensical. Like a warlord who has captured the countryside, Trump now knows that she knows and he’s making her play by his rules. The question at this point is whether Hillary can hold out long enough in the citadel.
As for the Biased Mexican Judge meme, there was another gambit involved. Trump suspected that the GOP establishment was planning to ambush him after the convention. By laying this trap now, he threw the dice and decided to smoke them out sooner, rather than later. Like the true cucks that they are, they jumped at the chance to do their masters’ bidding. Now the establishment has to decide what they’re going to do. Either get behind him or try to dump him. Either way, he has them boxed in a corner. If they don’t cry uncle then he’s going to paint them as Hillary’s agents.
This of course will look bad for the GOP. Their plan was to sabotage Trump and come back and pick up the pieces in 2020. What they don’t realize that if they succeed in derailing Trump, there won’t be a GOP on the national level. Trump knows this, they don’t.
Unlike them, Trump is playing for all the marbles. If he wins, he’s going to win big. And if he loses, then he will pick up the shards of a justifiably shattered GOP and reconstitute it as a nationalist party. As for the cucks they will be shoved onto the dustbin of history.
They think he is stupid and uninformed. That is what he wants them to think. THIS is what real chess looks like Obamaites.
Peter
If George Michalopulos were trying to convince the world he gets all his news filtered through the prism of white supremacist websites, he really couldn’t do a better job than from his summary of Foster v. Chatman:
The reason the Court gave for vacating the death penalty sentence was due to their ruling that the Georgia prosecution intentionally targeted prospective qualified jurors from elimination on the explicit basis of their race: in other words, it was an all white jury because the prosecution used their veto powers to block any potential black jurors.
As we all know, George Michalopulos has a rather bipolar love/hate relationship with the Constitution of the United States, depending on the subject matter, and if the Confederacy or Civil War is in the mix. But at the end of the day, it is a jury of the defendant’s peers. Not a jury of George Michalopulos’s peers.
Now of course, George Michalopulos would probably offer some weak rejoinder about how that all really shouldn’t matter. But we all know the fire and brimstone he’d be spitting from his blog if say, a white policeman were being prosecuted for the shooting of an unarmed black teenager, and the prosecution used similar wrangling to eliminate all prospective qualified whites from the jury booth.
And for all practical intents and purposes you admit to having a racial double standard with these words of yours.
Hint: everybody can hear the (as it should be) whispered at the end of that sentence.
But do keep writing about how Trump is a master strategist by attacking a judge on the basis of race to distract from a court case that is a perfect metaphor for his campaign: promising hard-working Americans a better tomorrow from an enterprise built on a giant bed of fraudulent lies.
And, we all know the type of people who can’t help but throw ‘cuck’ into their essays at every opportunity! Sad!
Trump is very intelligent. He is running against a white woman. Recently, I have started to hear blacks in favor of Trump. It startled me the first time I heard it. But it makes sense. Many blacks resent the Latino presence in America. Latinos are more numerous than blacks in America at this point. Illegal Latino immigrants most certainly take jobs that blacks would otherwise get. Trump is perceived as opposed to a kind of Latino onslaught of the La Raza variety. Moreover, if you recall the OJ trial, most blacks polled did not think highly at all of Marcia Clark, one of the white prosecutors involved. Some black women outside of the courtroom actually had signs saying, “Even if you did it, OJ, we love you anyway.” The “it” being killing his white ex-wife and her lover.
Far from ruining the Republican party for Latinos, the legal variety of which actually support controlling immigration, he is appealing to blacks. Unless the media finds some smoking gun to take him down, he may very well win this thing. I hear people say, “How can he win if he says such outrageous things.” Well, who’s going to stop him: The little old man who wants to sell us solar powered cars that escaped from the nursing home, or, that crazy lady from Arkansas that the FBI is looking for?
See my point?
In any case, I have no dog in the fight and will not be voting. It only encourages them.
Scott Adams much?
A little actually. I just discovered his blog about a month ago. It’s amazing to me that we’ve been on the same parallel for about 9 months now.
Brilliant essay. The pundits love to point to Justice Roberts, a Catholic, being able to rule impartially on the Little Sisters of the Poor. But Trump wants to deport (some) Mexicans, with whom the judge clearly identifies (La Raza, etc). And the Little Sisters don’t want to deport anybody! The comparison between Trump and the Little Sisters is plain stupid.
Donald Trump’s cowardly, unfounded attack on the ethnicity of Judge Curiel is a diversionary tactic. What right does this obnoxious, narcissistic egomaniac have to impugn the integrity, and malign the character of a sober, respectable judge? The unvarnished truth is that Trump University was a scam following in the footsteps of his good friend Robert Kiyosaki, Russ Whitney, and other hucksters. To be honest, the ‘Smart One’ should never have gotten in involved with these disreputable lowlifes. Why did he do it? Simple, pure greed. The next thing he would have been promoting would have been network marketing. Trump’s campaign is just like his modus operandi in other matters- overpromising and underperforming. Read the book he co- authored with his fellow fraudster Robert Kiyosaki- Why We Want You To Be Rich. The man is an unstable, incompetent, thin skinned, bigoted fraud. By the way, Hillary is no better.
Mr Millman, it’s neither cowardly nor unfounded for Trump to attack Judge Coriel’s ethnicity. After all, the identity politics that have been practiced now for 50 or so years by the left justifies it being used by whites as well. Don’t you think? Anyway, that was one of the points of my critique.
Legally, Trump was also in his rights to question Coriel’s bona fides given that the chief plaintiff in the Trump U case is in favor of Mr Trump. It certainly seems hasty of the judge to allow this case to go forward given that the overwhelming evidence would point to a summary judgment in favor of the defendant.
Regardless –and this is where it gets sticky for the Left–the fact that the judge is a member of a legal group titled “La Raza” is a political blunder of the first order. Supposing a law firm of all white men had in their title “The White Aryan Resistance Council,” or an Irish law firm had in their title “IRA Council”. We can go down the list: Arab-American law firm with a “Hama Fellowship,” etc.
Do not forget what La Raza stands for: the secession of the Southwest from these United States and the superiority of “la raza cosmica.” This is a mestizo-supremacist organization with odious origins. The longer this controversy drags out, the more it will redound to Trump’s benefit. (It has already in that it has steeled the resolve of the white working/middle class who sees Trump as their champion.)
On second thought –secession? Maybe I was too hasty in condemning them. Just sayin’.
Via Snopes:
Well, “White,” “Aryan,” and “Resistance” can have other meanings as well. White is merely the racial designation of the majority of Americans, Aryan can be substituted for “Indo-European” and signify the family of languages that half the world’s people speak, and Resistance can indicate intellectual hostility to a regime.
As for Vasconcelos, [Godwin’s Law alert:] he was a devotee of Hitler and National Socialism and like Hitler, he preached a message of racial superiority. Although his vision was one of the mixing of four races producing a new, superior “cosmic” race, the fact of the matter is that in Vasconcelos’ eyes this new race would look remarkably un-African and un-Mestizo. Something rather more like him, i.e. European.
And as I pointed out, La Raza preaches secession from these United States.
I mean, if y’all are fine with that then I guess we owe a big, fat apology to Jefferson Davis and we can stop stripping the names of Confederate generals from all those public buildings. It’s the least we can do.
Reminder that snopes is a diehard left-wing hippie man and his wife who run their website out of their living room. Not exactly a neutral thing.
Your “urban legend.” Total nonsense. See: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2012-09-28/story/fact-check-so-whos-checking-fact-finders-we-are#
Per the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association, via Snopes:
“‘Hispanic” is an ethnicity, not a race. As anyone who has ever met a Dominican American, Mexican American, or Spanish American can attest, Hispanics can be and are members of any and all races.”
On the other side of that coin, someone needs to point out that “white” is not an ethnicity but a race–and more specifically a subgroup of a race–consisting of people who may share some genetic and physical characteristics but are far different in terms of culture, language, and yes, appearance. Let’s start being even-handed and accurate with our application of these labels, or do away with them altogether.
They are all false categories that have always been used by demagogues and idealogs to promote agendas that are usually totalitarian in substance. The words, no matter how they are used promote separation, anger and hatred.
In my parish we have people of all races and many ethnicities who all share the same cup joyfully every Divine Liturgy.
No accuracy can be achieved because the words are meant to be amoeba like.
The Judge has ties to organizations that are directly tied to La Raza. I think Trump is neither cowardly or thin-skinned in making his criticisms. As for Trump University what guarantees did Trump U make or any University make that opens them up to a charge of Fraud? Were these people forced into it? No their own Greed incited them. Trump U offered what every other Real Estate organization offered back in the day. What you make of the knowledge and learning in any given market is up to each individual not Trump, or anyone else.
What is really going on is that the party elite the GOPe is finally and RIGHTLY losing power. The GOPe lied about ending abortion, lied about sealing the border, lied about stopping SS Marriage, lied about bring middle-class jobs back to America even when they were shipping them over seas to China and India, lied about giving tax breaks to the small business owner and working man and woman, and have engaged in one treaty after another (NAFTA, GAT, TAP, TPP), selling American jobs, wealth and American sovereignty down the river.
As for Trump I know for sure one thing, he is not the answer, but the START of the answer. The rest is up to us to fix what the GOPe and DEMS have royally screwed up in their quest for Globalization and bringing about their NWO. Good for the 1% bad for the rest of us.
The 1% sold us Contraception, Abortion, Euthanasia, Homosexuality, war, the death penalty, and all other forms of anti-life programs so there are less of us and more of them and more FOR Them!
All I have to say to all that is: Go Trump GO!.
Peter
I noticed that all Trump people are mad at illegal immirgration but dislike NAFTA. Its true that NAFTA made it hard for the Mexican corn farmer and they came to the States but NAFTA has expanded foreign companies in Mexico. Many of these companies are not American. Mexico not only has Ford but also has Nissan, Toyota, Audi, Mercades Bentz and other foreign car companies. The wages in the car factories are between 1.5 to 6 an hour depending upon if you are in a rural state or urban state in Mexico or a very low skilled jobs or higher skilled job. Without the car factories and some of the aerospace firms immigration from Mexico would be worst. NAFTA encourage foreign companies to locate to Mexico since their is no duty to shipped to the US or eventually Europe or Asia.
George,
Don’t you mean “Asymmetric Warfare,” not “Assymetric”?
I don’t know, but ass-y-metric sounds pretty correct to me.
Well, Mr. Michalopulos,
Donald Trump has the distinction of being the least qualified Republican to run for the Presidency- even more unqualified than Abraham Lincoln. You know Mr. Lincoln, the worst President in US history- the man who presided over the deaths of 620,000 Americans- almost as many as all other US wars combined. We have a terrible choice in this election. I can’t vote for either candidate.
Oh, by the way, as a Greek, I’ve always considered the Greeks to be superior to everyone else- still do.
“Qualified” really doesn’t mean anything. Was Reagan “qualified” to be governor of California?
As for your comparison of Trump to Lincoln there is a major difference: Trump is clearly the anti-war candidate and his America First ideology mitigates against military adventurism. Even Arb Lazar Puhalo recently commented on this fact. Like many who are skeptical of neoconservatism, it’s obvious to him that Hillary is a captive of the military-industrial complex (MIC). He’s certainly far more realistic about Russia and Putin than any of the other talking heads you see on TV.
Trump, for all his personal moral failings, is his own man and not a creature of the MIC. And, given the positive things he’s said about Putin, I can hardly expect him to go around needlessly provoking the Russian bear.
Reagan had been involved in politics for years, and when he was governor of California he would now be considered liberal since he legalized abortion and did some tax increases. I lived in California during that time period. Reagan moved more to the right when he became president since he convinced moderate Dems to lower the tax rates and even Jimmy Carter had somewhat lowered the corporate rates. People had more of a middle class existence since the housing was cheaper then and now and aerospace spending made it possible for Reagan to win California.
The only qualifications for the presidency is being a natural-born citizen over the age of 35.
To be eligible for president, a person is also required to have resided in the United States for fourteen years. If someone is disqualified from holding federal office, that includes the presidency. Someone who has already been elected to the presidency twice is disqualified by the 22nd Amendment.
I don’t know, but ass-y-metric sounds pretty correct to me.
Two chuckles, thank you!
The last qualified person we had as President was John Quincy Adams.
“I can’t vote for either candidate.”
You’re right: there are really no important issues at stake.
Abortion: Hilary an avid predator and destroyer of babies, families, the souls of men and women. Donald possibly workable. It is enough.
Nichole:
I was being sarcastic.
But isn’t this at the heart of the moral dilemma of our time in summary? My US Congresswoman is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and the wife of a psychiatrist who I worked with in the hospital, in the clinic for the homeless and indigent, and in the state prison at the border with with Mexico. They are religious Jews, moral & ethical people, and he is one of the most compassionate physicians I have ever known. Before he finally moved to Washington, DC, we would meet once a month for breakfast on Saturday mornings just to talk. And it was in a “post-re-election” breakfast that we argued over “reproductive rights,” his point being that she was sworn to “uphold and defend the Constitution,” including the duly enacted laws, and I said I would have to reconsider voting for her again. It obviously became a contentious discussion, and I do not believe me met again before he left. In my judgement, however, – after reading the statements provided by her opponents to voter’s guides – we are significantly better off with her than her historical opponents, morally & otherwise. So, the question becomes, should I vote for no one and risk, as Fr. Georges Florovsky noted, “The Church which separates herself from the world, in feeling her own radical “otherworldliness,” is exposed to an opposite danger, to the danger of excessive detachment,” or pick the “least compromised?” Obviously, we must have a government and elected officials. Yet, for as much as the negative comments regarding not participating in the election process were passionate about “duty” and “responsibility,” there is a fundamental lack of commentary regarding the lending of tacit support to officials who, even among supportable positions, hold unconscionable moral and ethical opinions. And in consideration of Nicole’s comment, increasingly in our society, it will only become more difficult to find candidates who are “workable”; able to separate the moral/ethical dimension of marriage, reproduction, and so on from the socio-political dimension, if only because they will realize they are unelectable without capitulation. I must again say that this is the type of issue that Priest Robert Arida attempts to raise in the best way, but is lost in his silence and the sea of rhetoric. It is also lost to the fact that schools no longer teach ethics as a matter of course for several generations, and apparently the inherent ability to determine right from wrong wains, voter participation falls, and perhaps all for the better.
Michael S. The dilemma you identify is nothing new but by voting for the lesser of two evils for almost a generation we have arrived at a point when all we have at the federal level is the choice between two evils.
That is why, if I vote, I will write in: None of the above.
At the local and state level still might be some actual candidates.
BTW your candidates squishy view if the Constitution is a big part of the problem. Roe v Wade was decided on “the penumbra” of the Constitution and even many supports of abortion rights acknowledge there was little legal basis for the decision.
Her duty is to defend the actual Constitution not some ideology of the meaning.
For my part, I’m tending to believe that the dangers posed by “going along to get along” are worse than those posed by opting out. I’d rather be compared to the Amish than to a lukewarm spring.
There is a third candidate, although the mainstream media tend not to cover him. Right now he’s hoping to be included in the “Who are you voting for?” polls and then in the presidential debates.
He was governor of New Mexico for two full terms as a Republican.
He now supports the Libertarian Party and, based on what I can find on-line, looks like a more rational choice than either Trump or Hillary (either of which would, I fear, lead our country to ruin, just different types depending on the candidate).
His name is Gary Johnson.
Libertarianism is untenable in a society that has scattered morality to the breeze. People have to be kept in line, and if they won’t be checked voluntarily by religion, the state unfortunately has to step in.
That is why Washington said freedom could only persist among a moral and religious people.
I went to Gary Johnson’s website and his top platform item is same as mine. Sadly he did the same old bs line and said he would balance the budget without any change to taxation. This is fallacy and capitulation. It is hard to read the first paragraph of a candidate you agree with and then realize he capitulates in the third sentence.
Ages, out country IS in ruins. Vote Trump to save what we can because Hillary, evil incarnate, will continue the destroy and sell us out even more than anyone else.
Peter
Apologia pro Vita Sewera?
There are two “m’s” in asymmetrical. You need a skilled proofreader or editor for your blog.