Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Donald Trump as "Republican" Front-runner Would be Like Kanye West as Democratic Frontrunner.
Republicans, please take back your party!
The Republican Party has, historically, been a party of actual governance.
The Tea Party, by contrast, is a party against government.
The alliance with the Tea Party has caused more harm to the Republican Party than good.
It has opened the door for Donald Trump to be the "Republican" front runner, though he is even farther removed from any kind of governance than the Tea Party is.
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14 comments:
I don't know what I'll do if Trump is the nominee. I have never skipped a presedential election before, but I may if he is the nominee.
I'ma let you finish, but Beyonce would be the best frontrunner of all time... I hope you get that reference. Your comparison is a bit of an insult to Kanye: sure, he's a megalomaniac with a God complex, but he actually has real talent and doesn't seem to hate women. I can't come up with a better comparison, though, because everyone I consider to be on equal ground with Trump in terms of blowhardishness (not a word) would be in his party: O'Rielly, Coulter, Limbaugh. Maybe a better comparison would be Dr. Oz for Surgeon General.
I just can't take Trump seriously, and I don't understand how anyone else could. It has to be a joke, right? Are people supporting him in polls ironically, like the 9% that supported Deez Nutz? I'm just not willing to accept that any significant number of people in my country actually think he'd make a good president.
What bothers me the most, though, and really scares me, is that there is so little outrage from the GOP leaders, the other candidates, and especially from his supporters, over how he speaks about women. He was offensive years ago when he fought with Rosie O'Donnell, calling her a fat ugly slob whose girlfriend was just waiting for someone better looking to come save her, and has continued on misogynistic rants against any woman who dares to do anything short of flatter him, or who doesn't look or act like he thinks a woman should. He's called a lawyer disgusting in court when she asked for a break to breastfeed, implied that Bill Clinton cheated because Hillary couldn't keep him satisfied, referred to sexual assault as a natural consequence of having women in the military, referred to his girlfriend a "piece of ass" and seems to think the only possible way to deal with a woman who doesn't flirt with him is to denigrate her looks. And that was all before Megyn Kelly.
I like Megyn Kelly, and regardless of her politics, I think she's obviously very smart. She's also objectivly beautiful, so when she asked Trump some very valid questions about his track record of insulting women in the press, he couldn't use his go to comeback and call her fat, ugly, a dog, a pig, or any of his other usual insults. Rather than answering her questions (because, really, how could he even justify his behavior) he whined that it wasn't fair to question him since the polls showed he was ahead after the debate. He tweeted or re-tweeted remarks that she is a bimbo, that she came back from vacation looking like Nancy Grace (so while attacking Kelly on her looks, he manages to attack another woman's looks as well) and repeatedly insulted her journalism. Worst, of course, was his implication that Kelly's "ridiculous" and "off-base" questions about his insulting comments toward women must have been caused by her "bleeding out of her wherever."
His other comments make him a jerk who doesn't think women are anything more than their looks, but this is really terrifying. We don't need a man in power who thinks menstruation makes women crazy, hysterical, unreasonable, irrational, unable to function, or any of the other outdated notions Trump seems to hold true. How can anyone have any faith that he will ever be able to respect any woman's opinion or thoughts on policy, especially if he disagrees with them? I don't want a president who would discount my worth because of my looks, but we should all be disgusted by the thought of a president who holds such antiquated ideas about menstruation. Next he'll be telling us to stay away from farms since our magical poisonous blood will kill all the crops.
Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with me (we all know the world would be a better place if everyone would just get on board the "Kelly is always right train," but I've come to terms with that not happening.) The women quoted in this article make me so sad: on.msnbc.com/1i1lUQV
One quote did stand out, and I agree with it to an extent, but it also seems like a logical person trying to apply any possible reason to an illogical situation. The speaker suggests that republican women might feel like they're choosing between the lesser of many evils, since “the records of other Republican candidates are just as half-full on women’s interests." Again, this just makes me sad.
Wow, sorry for the rant. Apparently there's a character limit for comments, so I had to break mine up! I didn't even know I had such strong feelings about Trump, at least not just based on this issue. My only consolation is that we have almost a full year before the RNC, which gives Trump plenty of time to do (no, to say, since I don't think he actually does anything but talk) something egregious on such a level that any supporters he has who aren't completely brainwashed will abandon ship. One can hope, anyway.
(Kelly, your former student Nate C's cousin)
A couple of comments:
1. Trump is a blowhard and not in any way reflective of real Republicans (including thoughtful Tea Party proponents) or their political philosophies. If the media would turn to valid candidates (Bush, Cruz, Paul, Fiorina) and ignore Trump, he would disappear--at least from the political stage. But he generates advertising dollars. Can you imagine Edward R. Murrow taking Trump seriously--other than in the same fashion with which he dealt with McCarthy?
2. That being said, Trump is speaking to a broad swath of the American electorate which is tired to death with the Democrat Party's love affair with criminal immigrants, political correctness, buying votes through a bread and circuses social welfare system, redistribution of wealth from people who worked hard to earn it to people who could work but prefer to suckle at the public teat, and infatuation with their perception that they are smarter and kinder and better qualified to govern the ignorant masses. Trump speaks to those concerns and can do because he doesn't need to placate the intelligentsia.
3. Miss Leassner: Trump is a boor and the father of every woman he has demeaned ought to horsewhip him. But he is just a louder, more public misognyst than other rich men in American politics such as John and Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Bob Packwood, and John Ensign. I’m an old man, but if Trump said about my intelligent, beautiful daughter what he has said about other women, I would become a Harry Truman disciple in a heartbeat! (You are young—check the historical record.) Nothing will make a man a feminist faster than to have someone tell his beloved daughter that she cannot do something "just because" she is a girl/woman. It happened for me when my daughter was three--and she climbed the tree faster and higher than the boy who challenged her!
That being said, try to put some sort of filter on your outrage. You do your cause no good when you automatically include thoughtful, reasonable journalists such as Bill O'Reilly with the Coulter's and the Limbaugh's (and from the other side of the fence, the Maddow's) of the world. O'Reilly (whether you agree with him politically or not) listens to and studies both sides of an issue. Coulter, Limbaugh and Maddow are so one-dimensional that many reasonable people just shut them out. Please don't let that happen to you, because you obviously have the concern and insight and potential to be a valuable commentator in our civic discourse.
A couple of other thoughts (I was distracted by Miss Leassner’s long, but interesting and thought-provoking comment):
1. Gruntled wrote “The Tea Party, by contrast, is a party against government.” I’m not sure that that is totally correct. Many conservatives, some of whom are Tea Party members, are concerned by and opposed to out of control government--government that has become exactly the thing from which the Constitution was designed and meant to protect us. It is opposed to the idea that a central government in Washington, DC can fashion a “one-size fits all” fix for problems better suited to fixes at the State and local level.
Let us take the broad social programs topic as an example, i.e. health insurance, education, poverty. A program created by professional bureaucrats in DC that may work for New York City and Los Angeles will not necessarily be of any benefit to, and may act to the detriment of, the rest of California and New York or to small cities in the “irrelevant” parts of those States.
The usual Liberal comment is that, if left to the States, the responses, if any, will be different and thus, “unequal.” As one of my law school profs used to say when discussing how to respond to a vague argument, so what? If Mississippi wants to get rid of Medicaid, but California wants to expand it, so be it. And if Mississippians who “lose” the hand out decide that they want it, they are free—the last time I read the Constitution (about three minutes ago)— to move to California. US Const art IV, § 2, cl 1. (Liberals often say that that cannot happen. Really? Read your US history. Cf, the southern diaspora to the North in the 1930s and 40s or the Okies of the dust bowl era who fled to California.)
Education? Historically, that was a local matter. See, e.g., the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Local school boards raised taxes (usually property taxes) and used those to fund education. The citizens who were being taxed had easy access to determine how effectively the money was being used. If it perceived a need for greater spending, it had the means of ensuring that the local school board was responsive to those needs. If it saw waste or misplaced priorities (e.g., ineffective teaching, unnecessary programs, refusal to buy necessary equipment), it elected new school board members to respond to those defects.
Then came the Feds. They created a Department that, at is largest employed some 4300 employees, not a single one of whom taught a single student. (It now employs 4,000 employees, but has asked to return to 4,300 in FY2016. None of the current or proposed employees will teach a single student.)
As a result, school districts were forced to hire additional non-teaching personnel to respond to the voracious demands and requirements of the bureaucracy. To justify their existence, the bureaucrats created reams of regulations and requirements, none of which taught a single student. As of 2014, the US Department of Education took $141 billion from taxpayers and spread it around to satisfy favored constituencies such as the NEA and AFT. Think what each state could do with an additional $2.8 BILLION dollars targeted to real needs, or, better yet, what the 100,000 schools the US Department of Education recognizes could do with $1.5 million PER SCHOOL per year? (In my local district, that would be an additional $22, 500,000 per year. That would go a long way to reducing the tax burden on citizens who fund a $207 million a year school budget and also transfer huge sums to the bureaucrats in Harrisburg and Washington.)
2. Professor: Is there any way you can add an “edit” option for posters such as myself who convinced Mom that taking slide rule was a better idea and would be significantly more useful to me in the future than taking typing?
Mac
Mac,
I'm probably not as young as you think, and I didn't need to look up your Truman reference. While I appreciate the powerful bond between fathers and their daughters, it shouldn't take fathering a daughter for grown men to be disgusted by Trump's consistently insulting comments about women; you should find his comments equally offensive whether they are aimed at your daughter or at a stranger.
As for Bill O'Reilly, I included him on my list because I personally find him to be arrogant and pompous. I don't watch Maddow's show, so I can't comment on her.
I'm so glad you think I have potential, though.
I am afraid Blogger has no separate "edit" function. However, if you write your comments in a word processing program first you can edit them there, then post the finished result into the blog. that is what I often do when I write my posts in the first place.
Thanks, Professor. That's what I do with posts on my blog--when I have the time to blog any more. I thought Blogspot had an edit function for comments--maybe that was in an iteration back in the Dark Ages of 2007 and 2008.
Kelly: Bet I'm a lot older! Thanks for the response. You are right, and as the father of sons, I have tried to teach my boys exactly what you and I both want--a civil world.
The fact that Trump is leading in the polls of potential republican voters makes my point that my republican party has been hyjacked by people that I do not recognize. It certainly in not the party of John Sherman Cooper
Barry: have you urged Sen. McConnell and Rep. Boehner to repudiate Mr. Trump and the Tea Party? If enough rank and file Republicans try to take their party back, it will eventually work.
Conservative columnist George Will is very heated about Trump but pretty clear thinking as well. He sees truly that Trump has no place in the party of Lincoln, limited government, or the facilitation of growth (since he apparently believes that the economy will not grow as a direct result of immigration). Trump is not a real Republican.
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