Are you really worse off?
The word “insurance” has lost all meaning when it comes to health care, and the continual confusion and conflation of the two lies at the root of much of the problem. Crazy idea: I want a health savings account to deal with normal medical expenses, and insurance for catastrophes. You know, the way insurance used to be until it got screwed up by wage controls during the war and union negotiators.
It’s the end of the world for them:
The fear and panic on the left are palpable. Network programs that once, long ago, were respected news outlets are now little more than vicious rants declaimed in raised voices. News anchors have become mindless megaphones of victimhood and defeatism, totally absorbed by the idea of stopping Trump because Trump threatens the end of their world.
Why is it that Trump poses such an existential threat to progressivism? How does that threat operate? Why is Trump so much more dangerous than Christie, Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich would have been? It is because unlike those who merely oppose the left, Trump dissolves the opposition by holding it up to ridicule. With his laser-like tweets and incisive wit, with his very presence, Trump brings the preposterousness of the left’s positions into the light.
I hope so. But Stop. Calling. Them. Liberals. They are exactly the opposite, and always have been.
Ace has a timeline of the current insanity in Sacramento which, as he notes, is the swamp of the West Coast that badly needs draining.
She predicted the rise of Trump:
Paglia was not surprised by the election results. “I felt the Trump victory coming for a long time,” she told me. Writing last spring, she’d called Trump “raw, crude and uninformed” but also “smart, intuitive and a quick study”; she praised his “bumptious exuberance and slashing humor” (and took some pleasure in watching him fluster the GOP). Speaking two weeks into his administration, she sounded altogether less troubled by the president than any other self-declared feminist I’d encountered since Inauguration Day: “He is supported by half the country, hello! And also, this ethically indefensible excuse that all Trump voters are racist, sexist, misogynistic, and all that — American democracy cannot proceed like this, with this reviling half the country.”
In fact, she has had to restrain herself from agreeing with the president, at least on certain matters. “I have been on an anti–Meryl Streep campaign for about 30 years,” she said. When Trump called the actress “overrated” in a January tweet, “I wanted to leap into print and take that line but I couldn’t, because Trump said it.”
I found this (by the interviewer) revealing, though:
The past few years have felt like a return to the identity-politics wars of the 1990s, another period in which liberals (especially those inside the academy) began to draw bright lines dictating the boundaries of acceptable discourse. [Emphasis mine]
She keeps using that word “liberal.” I don’t think it means what she thinks it means.
I have no idea how I will face my impending end (and I’m doing everything reasonable to put it off as long as possible), but I get meaning from my goal of moving humanity into space, and I’ll continue to do so as long as I’m alive. When I see people who win the lottery have their lives ruined over it, I suspect it’s because they don’t have any real purpose in life other than material pleasure, and have never given any serious thought to what they’d do with the winnings. I’d have no problems at all; if I had a billion dollars, I’d start a serious space venture.
“Transgender” “girl” complains that straight men reject her because of her “male body parts.”
Well, yes. You can get some us to pretend along with you that you’re a guy, but we’re going to draw the line when it comes to having sex with a dude.
Are they really elite?
No:
Elitism sometimes seems predicated on being branded with the proper degrees. But when universities embrace a therapeutic curriculum and politically correct indoctrination, how can a costly university degree guarantee knowledge or inductive thinking?
Is elitism defined by an array of brilliant and proven theories?
Not really. University-sired identity politics has not led to racial and ethnic harmony.
Is there free speech or diversity of thought on campuses? Did progressive government save the inner cities? Are elites at least better-spoken and more knowledgeable than the rest of us?
Long before Trump’s monotonous repetition of “tremendous” and “great,” Barack Obama thought “corpsmen” was pronounced “corpse-men,” and that Austrians spoke “Austrian” rather than German.
Not long ago, Representative Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) warned that if Guam became too populated it might just tip over and sink.
They’re just credentialed. Elite people are actually educated, knowledgable and competent.
…and the revolt of the unseen:
one day, the Deplorables, standing athwart history, yelled “Stop!” They saw their taxes given to crony capitalists, welfare recipients, and government employees; they saw their plants close and their jobs go overseas due to government regulations and taxes; they saw veterans used and abused by a dysfunctional Veteran’s Administration; they saw their cities erupt in protests and violence based on “Hands up, don’t shoot” lies; they saw their police officers assaulted and murdered by ideological thugs; they saw Islamic jihadists commit mass murder; and they saw the government schools force their kids to read Heather Has Two Mommies but otherwise leaving them uneducated.
The Deplorables had been neglected, forgotten, and abused for so long that the Ruling Elite just assumed they would fall in line as they always do. The Ruling Elite didn’t notice that the Deplorables had been pushed to the brink of despair. They were humiliated by unemployment and the foreclosure of their homes; they were sick and tired of twentysomethings defining marriage and bathroom policy for them; they felt threatened that their guns would be taken from them; they cried at the sight of their neighbors’ sons coming home in body bags; they were fed up with being called racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes, and Islamaphobes.
What can’t go on forever, won’t. One day, about two years ago, the Forgotten Man, the faceless American, finally awoke from his slumbers. He looked around and saw the devastation, and he knew the promise of American life was no longer open to him. And so he screamed, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” The cry went unheard by the Ruling Elite. One man did hear it, however. That man was, of course, Donald J. Trump.
For better or worse, Trump did get people to the polls who don’t normally vote.
Kurt Schichter is afraid it’s about to get hot. But there is this difference:
Sally Kohn, a CNN commentator perfectly personifies the left’s combination of utter cluelessness and utter certainty in its own moral superiority. Drawing from her bottomless well of stupidity, she recently became infamous for wishcasting about what happens “[s]traight forward from here.” Her scenario starts with Step 1 (“Impeach Trump & Pence”) and ends with Step 6 (“President Hillary”), thanks to a Constitutional process she created herself by blending ignorance, fascism, and wanting.
Sally, however, overlooked Step 2.5, where several dozen million Americans defend the Constitution by taking out their black rifles and saying, “Oh, hell no.” I assume the patriots determined to protect the Union would be confronted, for a short and awkward time, by a pro-coup hipster army locked and loaded with vinyl LPs, participation trophies and unearned self-regard.
There’s no reason not to believe that for these seditious Democrats, the second time will be the charm.
Democrats always get angry and violent when Republicans threaten to emancipate their slaves.
Trump is beating it at its own game.
I’m glad someone finally is, but I wish it were someone both more knowledgable and less childish. It’s possible to play that game without being him. I could certainly do it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Trump haters: Do these two thought experiments. I can easily imagine the latter, and would vastly prefer it. Though I’d prefer him with policies less economically ignorant.