Monday, July 27, 2015

Codevilla on Trump, McCain, and the Brahmin (R)/(D) Caste

Prof. Angelo Codevilla has a few damning words for McCain and a lot more damning words for the (R) "Upper Class" surrounding that Senator.  (Codevilla was a staffer on the Senate Intel Committee.  He knows whereof he speaks.)

...Trump remarked, off the cuff, that “Mexico does not send us its best.” The public had long since decided that our ruling class’s handling of immigration (not just from Mexico) has done us harm. The ruling class – officials, corporations, etc.- booed with generalities but did not try to argue that they had improved America by their handling of immigration. The more they would argue that, the more they would lose....

Yah, well, we knew all about Mexico.  So what about McCain?  Turns out that Rove had his number a long time ago.

...Because Americans are sick of celebrating victims of defeats, and naturally eager to enjoy the kind of peace that only victories can bring, Trump’s expressed preference for heroes who “don’t get captured” resonated. Trump may or may not know any of the unsavory details about McCain’s actions as a POW and, as a public official, in regard to POWs and MIAs. But it does not take much research to find out why nobody will defend him other than by trying to prevent discussion those details. Surely Republican “architect” Karl Rove, who organized South Carolina’s military vote against McCain in the 2000 primary, knows them. The families of Vietnam POWs-MIAs pour onto anyone who will listen to their bitterness at McCain’s role in denying the existence of abandoned POWs and sealing information about them....

Oh.  Well, that makes all that High Dudgeon about McCain considerably less honorable, ain'a?

...The point here is simple: our ruling class has succeeded in ruling not by reason or persuasion, never mind integrity, but by occupying society’s commanding heights, by imposing itself and its ever-changing appetites on the rest of us. It has co-opted or intimidated potential opponents by denying the legitimacy of opposition. Donald Trump, haplessness and clownishness notwithstanding, has shown how easily this regime may be threatened just by refusing to be intimidated....

"Refusing to be intimidated" plays no small part in the massive arming-up of the US citizenry over the last several years, by the way.  This is not just about "criminals," although that plays the largest part.  It's also about the natural American resistance to Statist ambitions.  Yes, the IRS (and dozens of other agencies, Fed, State, and local), can obliterate one's cash and savings with the flip of a switch, and yes (as proven locally by D.A. Chisholm) they can rip through one's personal effects with impunity.  So far, anyway....but even local turds like Chisholm have to be thinking "what if?" one of their actions leads to real conflict.  The term '4th-generation warfare' exists for a reason.

And there are topics about which even Trump will not speak, but which are more important than illegals and
McCain.

...Justice Kennedy’s majority opinions in Windsor and Obergefell preemptively accused anyone who opposed redefining marriage to include homosexuals of being “offensive,” “hateful.” Refusal to honor homosexual unions, he wrote, is not “explicable by anything except animus.” What if a statesman, speaking for the American people, were to ask what, precisely, is so honorable about anal intercourse that those who refuse to honor it should be so stigmatized? Before 1961, all 50 states criminalized anal intercourse, heterosexual as well as homosexual. Why precisely were they wrong in doing so? By what right does anyone place such questions “out of bounds”?...

Were Trump interested in this, he might declare Kennedy to be both full of s&^% and a slanderous slut.  (That would be accurate, but not PC, of course.)

...After a video showing officials of federally-funded Planned Parenthood taking orders for body parts of babies to be custom-slaughtered for that purpose, House Speaker John Boehner deflected demands for legislation to stop this by saying he needed more information....

...oh, yah.  Boehner's hung-over feckless spine-deprived crap is Biblical-proportioned.  This "need for information" comes from a "Catholic" who regularly campaigns on his anti-abortion creds???

...Republicans and Democrats profit personally and through their corporate cronies by a welter of legislation and regulation by which they command what we must eat, how to shower, what medical care is proper and what is not: mandating that a third of the U.S. corn crop be turned into ethanol, restricting the use of coal, how we may use our land, etc.  They justify these predatory intrusions into our lives by claiming that peculiar knowledge of science unavailable to others. They refuse to justify their scientific conclusions with the likes of us....

Oh, yes,  Our Leaders are Smart, Informed, and Better.  And even when they are criminals (viz. Hillary and Lerner, inter alia) they are well-fed and pensioned courtesy of the taxpayer.

Trump is not the answer.  But he has a lot of the right questions.


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