On the Election

Well, we’re boned. It’s going to be huckster fraud democrat against lying criminal democrat.

Half the GOP hates the jackass. Question now is what percentage of us stay home or make a 3rd party protest vote. All those crossover democrats who voted for that orange half wit in the primaries will go back to voting democrat in the general election. He thinks young Bernie voters are going to vote for him? Fool.

I’ve voted republican in every election of my adult life. I’ve volunteered and donated money. I can’t in good conscience vote for this vile populist demagogue. If even a few percentage points of the GOP feels the same way, that’s it. He’s toast in the general.

So he energizes the democrats, so they’ll feel like they are fighting tyranny (now comes the great part where all the fawning media coverage turns on him) and he demotivates the republican base.

All the kid glove BS from this season is over. Every vile nasty stupid thing he has ever done will be covered 24/7. By November he will be the most laughed at and despised candidate in history. Because he makes it too easy.

So the classless boor probably loses to the sea hag. Not that it matters too much, since they’d both govern as authoritarian democrats, only one has more nationalist rah rah thrown in.

Spare me the nonsense about lesser evils and SCOTUS judges. He won’t make it that far. And by some miracle, like Hillary has a stroke, this rambling ignoramus wins, he would still screw that up somehow in his one term. Big question is does he suck enough to take the GOP with him?

And if you think he is going to actually build a wall, you are a sucker.

Did I love Cruz? No. Because I was hiring an employee, not a god. He was the least likely to rape the Constitution. Instead we get an authoritarian, who is either lying, or made it to 70 before understanding basic American principles about liberty.

You ignorant low information bastards. Motivated by fear and anger, you overlooked every gain made over the last few cycles, and traded it in to a lying huckster democrat for some magic beans. So you could stick it to the establishment, by electing the shit bird who funded them.

Edit to add, don’t bother posting to argue. We are past that. Now we batten down the hatches and get ready for the suck. If you want to gloat, you are an idiot who doesn’t realize what you have wrought. If you feel disrespected, good. You should.

##

I wrote that in a few minutes and posted it on Facebook last night. It had 700 shares a couple thousand comments by morning, and I was holding twenty simultaneous arguments. You can check it out for yourself. It is pretty enlightening. https://www.facebook.com/larry.correia/posts/1230830983594495?notif_t=comment_mention&notif_id=1462327074688692

 

The posters fell into a few categories.

Republicans who hate the guy, but who will vote for him against Hillary, because he will only probably suck, and she will obviously suck. The real question for most of them is how much is he lying lately?

Then Republicans who hate the guy enough that they will vote 3rd party for president because they don’t want him on their conscience, and yes, they are fully aware that it is a futile gesture.

And finally Trumpkins gloating. Those are especially fun because they give you a great look into the mindset of our enthusiastic standard bearers from now until November. Most of them were obviously low information types, very impassioned, but without even a School House Rock level of understanding how our government functions. Any criticism of Trump was “butt hurt” or “whining” and everybody needed to fall in line or else. I was told four or five times that I needed to leave America (make me, fuckers) and that I must be a welfare check cashing Obama lover.

Now picture the rest of the year. These are the new champions of the national debate. You think the articulate people with a clue are going to spend time trying to explain our candidate’s bizarre ramblings?  Nope. It’s going to be the folks like in the thread above. And after Build A Wall and Make America Great, they’re all out of steam. When asked about any of Trump’s many prior liberal stances, they brush that off as being decades ago (2014) and people change!

The important thing now is that they normally feel like losers, but for one bright shining moment, they get to be on the winning team. I’m sure the useful idiots and suckers who elected every populist, tyrant, and despot in history felt the same way. Briefly. Get in line, my ass.

He’s already got the highest negatives of any republican candidate ever. Factor in months of media ridicule and fear mongering, by the time November rolls around the democrats will be super motivated and the regular GOP will be meh.

Hillary is awful. She’s an awful human being and a worse candidate. Her biggest hindrance to winning was apathy among her base. Trump is the best thing that has ever happened to her. Fifteen candidates and you assholes picked the one she was most likely to beat. You picked the one that funded and praised her.

Personally, I’ll still vote, but for the republican candidates downstream. For president, Unicorn Cavalry all the way. I hated John McCain, but I still voted for him because he was pro big government, but still nominally a republican. I thought Romney was a decent man, but a squishy moderate, who sucked on key issues, but I held my nose and voted for him. Trump, lacking in all decency, dignity, intellect, and being a populist demagogue completely without principles is over my line. Can’t do it. Don’t want that stain on my soul.

For the people voting for the lesser of the two evils, fine. I can’t fault your stance and I understand why you’re doing it. Do what you’ve got to do.

In trying to think of a bright side this year, Trump’s antics might not tarnish the entire conservative movement and result in democrats winning everything for a generation… Maybe. Besides that? Well, Hillary and Trump are both really old, so hopefully their VP picks won’t be complete garbage.

Like I said last night, get ready for the suck.

The Endless Facebook Trump Whaa Post
Europe Trip Recap

286 thoughts on “On the Election”

  1. i will choke back the bile and vote trump. at least our countries slide into third world crapholeism will be entertaining with him in charge.

    i will also get personally involved in politics for the first time since college. i’ve donated to a few candidates, but really haven’t gotten off my ass for twenty years. building a life took precedence.

    almost no one wants to do the basic non election year grunt work at the precinct/town/county level. but this is where the power is. a dedicated person can be running things in a few years. it’s going to take decades to clean up the mess caused by this election. the time to start fixing it is now.

  2. I’m protest voting 3rd party, but I will also be voting for my congressmen and women and be on the heavy lookout for those who stand on principles and not just follow the leader, in general though I’m prepared for more suck and terrified for the rest of my lifetime what a court full of liberal justices could do.

    1. That’s exactly where I’m sitting, too. I can’t in good conscience vote Der Donald or Dowager Empress Hillary, so I’m faced with three options: Vote 3rd party, leave it blank (violating my sense of civic duty as well as my conscience), or give this Presidential election ALL the dignity and respect it deserves by writing in Homer Simpson (with Peter Griffin as the VP pick).

      Still rooting for some of our down-ballot candidates, but I’m not overly hopeful.

      1. I’m seriously tempted to write in Kermit the Frog. Sure, he’s a lifeless puppet, and you have to shove your arm a long way up his @$$ to get him to do a song and dance routine, but I still consider that better than either candidate.

        1. I was thinking you guys should write in Earl Harbinger. Even as a fictional character he couldn’t do worse than what Barry’s done the last seven years.

          I have to say though, if you guys think you’re boned, you should look North and see what our idiocracy elected. Justin Trudeau, the Shiny Pony. Aka a substitute drama teacher with really good hair and a famous daddy.

          1. For 2020, we’ll probably be limited to a single candidate: Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. Sponsored by Brawndo, The Thirst Mutilator

          2. He’d be a damn sight better president than Hillary or Trump. Maybe not the smartest guy around, but when he FOUND the smartest guy around, he knew enough to hire him…

          3. Hell, write in Andrew Jackson. Dig up his corpse and let it rot in the Oval Office for the next four years. It’ll still to a better job then either candidate, and will probably smell better to boot.

          4. In California, we call him Jerry Brown. Without the really good hair however.

      2. General Zod is the only real choice. Unlike the current two candidates. At least he would be honest with his attempt at tyranny.

        1. What, not Vandal Savage?

          (He was born before the US was founded so the ‘natural-born citizen’ requirements are waived for that, IIRC.)

          1. If that works, I’m writing in Optimus Prime. He was resident in the Pacific Northwest long before that was incorporated into the United States.

          2. “He was born before the US was founded so the ‘natural-born citizen’ requirements are waived for that, IIRC”

            That would require him to have become a citizen of the US at the time of its foundation. I’m not familiar enough with the comics to know for sure if he did, but I doubt it.

      3. Oct 2008, I concluded that Alucard from Hellsing would not be so horrible a President as Obama. I still consider that estimate sound.

      4. As I said above, if you’re going to write in a candidate, I suggest writing in Cruz. That sends the clearest possible message to the GOP that they could have won it if they’d actually picked the principled constitutionalist. Writing in Kermit the Frog, or Earl Harbinger, or any other fictional character will not send the same message.

        1. A valid point. I think most of us are simply irritated right now and using this as a way to blow-off some steam. That said I think if we vote R down ticket (excluding Trump) and write in Cruz maybe a good idea. Personally I think voting for the Libertarian candidate would also be effective at sending a message to the GOP.

          1. Personally I think voting for the Libertarian candidate would also be effective at sending a message to the GOP.

            People have been voting for the Libertarian candidate for years, and has the GOP learned anything from it? Not that I’ve seen.

            And honestly, I’m not sure they’d learn anything from a massive write-in vote for Cruz either. But the best way I can think of to send a message they’re LEAST LIKELY to ignore (which is not the same as “guaranteed not to ignore”) is to vote for the principled Constitutionalist who ALMOST got nominated.

      5. Whatever you do, vote your downticket as though your life depended on it. It will be the only defense against these two mutants.

    2. I’d like to suggest that if you’re going to protest vote, a write-in vote for Cruz will be a more effective protest vote than third party. That’s a way to say, unambiguously, “Hey, GOP leadership idiots*! You could have had my vote, but you threw it away!” A third-party vote they might dismiss as “Ehhh, he was never going to vote GOP anyway.” But a write-in vote for Cruz they can’t dismiss like that.

      * But I repeat myself.

      1. Thanks Larry, I’ve been wondering if the whole friggin’ world has gone insane. After Trump starting ranting about how Cruz’s dad was paling around Lee Harvey Oswald and they still voted for this nutcase I’ve been wanting to crawl into a hole.
        I still don’t know if I’ll write in Cruz, vote Libertarian, stay home, or suck it up and vote for Chump. (sigh).

        1. I’ve mentioned elsewhere I keep feeling reminded of the glasses from They Live but I’m not a tough guy like Roddy Piper so I probably can’t brawl with someone for a ridiculously long time to make them put the glasses on. 😮

      2. That assumes that your write in vote will be counted in any way. In plenty of areas write-ins are treated as spoiled ballots and trashed without being tabulated. In some ceases even when the candidates is actually valid and eligible.

        Not that it’ll make a difference, but if Gary Johnson takes the Libertarian Party nomination I’ll be voting for him. If not, then I’ll be left with a NOTA write-in that will be thrown away uncounted by one of our illustrious local volunteers.

        1. The last election I worked in Los Angeles, our GOP Congressman lost by a margin of error identical to the “Libertarian” vote, who ran an undocumented illegal immigration lawyer as their candidate. Not a lot of love for the Libertarians here.

    3. I really hope enough people do this to make an impact. I doubt there will be enough of this for the libertarian candidate to win but if he can get 10-15% and keep the winner below 50% it will at least send a message.

    4. I hate to encourage a third party but for you Republicans trying to salvage your party, that might be the way to do it. You will need someone that can turn out the vote. You are not looking to win but just looking to get the total anti – Hillary vote over 50%. Then the election goes the house and the house picks the President.

      I think that is the only way that Hillary loses.

  3. >’Trump, lacking in all decency, intellect, and being a populist demagogue is way over my line’.

    We haven’t had a President grown-ups could respect since Eisenhower. Nobody since has come into office with experience running a big organization, the respect of world leaders, and winning at least one battle (I don’t demand anything the size of D-Day, but just win at SOMETHING before you run).
    I don’t see Trump as a step down from the other empty suits.

    >’If you think he is really going to build that wall you are a sucker.’

    Every other candidate supports a big glob of illegals in America- establishment R likes them holding wages down, establishment D likes clients for welfare, honorable R likes open borders on principle, believing D wants to damage American capitalism. Thanks to the rest of you, Trump is our only hope. Congratulations.

    1. You are a blithering twit.
      First, you deliberately set up your criteria so as to exclude every president since Eisenhower–and not a few beforehand, either. Abraham Lincoln comes to mind.
      Second, you really think Reagan and H.W. were empty suits? Really? Trump makes Reagan look like William Safire in intellectual terms, and H.W. look like Ted Cruz in ideological terms.
      Third, immigrants aren’t the problem. Lefties who are pushing multiculti garbage are the problem.

      1. [Third, immigrants aren’t the problem. Lefties who are pushing multiculti garbage are the problem.]

        Now who’s the blithering twit? Do you honestly believe that you can separate the two? You always get one with the other.

        And yes, immigrants are the problem. There are too many of them with worldviews that diverge too far from the American ideal. Even if Lefties pushing multiculti garbage ceased to exist tomorrow, it would still be a very bad idea to import millions upon millions of socialists from socialists nations.

        WATYF

          1. [Actually, yes, seeing as we managed to pull it off between 1800 and 1970.]

            Do you really think the type and scope of immigration we had before 1965 is the same as we’ve had since then?

            Sorry man, but there’s simply no getting around this simple fact: Import millions of socialists/statists and you will eventually no longer have a free republic. Make all the appeals you want to how you think immigration worked in the past. Reality is what it is.

            WATYF

          2. The answer, as it happens, is yes. The socialists made massive inroads among the immigrants who came here after 1890.
            Importing socialists is only a problem if you don’t convince them otherwise, which isn’t that hard if you let them share in capitalism’s bounty.

        1. We don’t have socialists because of illegal immigration, we have illegal immigration because of socialists.

          The socialists have driven a lot of labor regulation, to include minimum wage. This drives up the employer’s cost for getting stuff done. Where it drives the cost higher than the value, the employer has four choices.

          1. Eat the cost of leaving the job undone.
          2. Cover the loss with money made off other areas.
          3. Spend money to repeal the laws.
          4. Fill the job illegally.

          Three is expensive. Driving the cost of labor sky high insulates the unions, ensuring they have money to spend keeping the price of labor high.

          The cost to pay enforcement to overlook illegal employment is lower, because the left discounts it using their own efforts to stop enforcement in other areas.

          If an employer wants to engage in a criminal conspiracy of this sort, who would be the best co conspirators for them? Not entirely law abiding sorts, as they can go to police, and have too much ability to black mail the employer. Not someone who has committed a lot of murders, as it would be too easy for the employer to blackmail them. (Barring involvement in a large criminal organization which takes it back to too risky for the employer.) Illegal immigrants are at about the right level of law breaking.

          1. [We don’t have socialists because of illegal immigration, we have illegal immigration because of socialists.]

            Who’s talking about “illegal” immigration? I’m talking about all immigration.

            And yes, we have socialists because of immigration because the people who are immigrating are socialists. Do you think Mexico is filled with free-market capitalists or something? Most of their major political parties are openly Socialist.

            WATYF

      2. Abe Lincoln and Reagan and HW did good once elected, but if I’d voted in 1860 or 1980 I’d have been embarrassed to have no candidate who’d achieved something already. As I am now. I voted for HW- long resume, and getting shot down five times over Japan was a sign of tenacity, but I was voting for Reagan’s VP.

        >’you really think Reagan and HW were empty suits?’
        No. I think this years candidates were an empty suit with a cooter, an empty suit as far right as establishment Republicans would allow, an empty suit left national socialist, and a wild card with casino money. Casino money is dirty money, but Hillary’s career was founded on a half-billion in bribes taken by her husband from Microsoft’s competitors, and Bill sold the Justice Department and broke the dot-com boom for that money. That’s dirtier than Marcos or Duvalier would dare to get more than once every ten years or so. If elected, Hillary has had ten years or so.

        >’Trump makes Reagan look like William Safire in intellectual terms-‘

        Trump is on US TV, which is at a fourth grade level. If he’s as dumb as he talks, his business career in New York Real Estate has been the stuff of dreams and parables, the Platonic Ideal of raw coincidence.

        >’and HW look like Cruz in ideological terms.’

        HW was well left of Trump. I’d rather Cruz had won, sure.

    2. Reagan spent over a decade delivering speeches educating people about conservatism and anti-communism. He was the successful governer of the largest state in the Union (population-wise). And yet you don’t think that he was someone that “grown-ups” would respect?

      What else exactly could he have done? Did he need to have 500 people turn up to a book signing? Would that have pushed him over the edge into “respect territory”?

    3. “Trump is our only hope. Congratulations.”

      Trump is a former salesman who’s now a demagoguing politician. In other words, a trained liar.

      The fact that he’s got so many chumps lined up behind him merely shows that he’s a good trained liar.

      You stopped being useful to him the moment he got you to sign on the line that is dotted. No coffee, new Cadillac, or even a set of steak knives will be forthcoming for you.

      If Trump a) is elected and b) actually manages to build some sort of wall, I will certainly eat crow, but let’s just say I’m not in a hurry to look up stewed corvid in my Fannie Farmer.

      1. Why does “Trump is our only hope” sound like “Jar Jar Binks is our only hope”? I get the same sinking feeling when I read both, at least.

  4. I’m a registered Libertarian, despite them being a bit too big government for my taste. I hope the combination of Trump and Clinton give us boost this year.

    What I really hope is that Clinton is indicted just after winning the nomination, but that’s probably too much to hope for.

    1. Libertarians a bit too “big government” for you?

      I like the cut of your jib, sir.

      1. “Governments should be small enough to only be theorized by physicists.” Dunno off hand where I am stealing that from, but it fits.

  5. I’ll join you on the Unicorn Cavalry for President and voting down ticket. I think the Supreme Court will be the worst part of the coming wretchedness. And I for one, am sick of the media (may they reap what they’ve sown) picking the Republican candidates for us.

    1. The Supremes really is what makes it difficult for me. If Scalia hadn’t died, I’d certainly avoid Trump; as it is, I have to ask myself if it’s worth the small chance that a President Trump might nominate someone like Cruz to Scalia’s seat, or if he actually would put forth his idiot of a sister.

      I haven’t answered that question yet. This is the first time in my adult life that I am a genuine undecided.

  6. You read my thoughts and wrote them out far better than I could have. Not surprising, you’re a professional writer. Thing is, I know a few people who supported or are at least sympathetic to Trump, and none of them are idiots, or immoral, or crazy. These are decent, upstanding, level-headed people who have voted Republican all their lives. My mind is boggled.

    1. Same. I’m still not sure I’m not in a fever dream, but if I’m not…I know several people who support Trump (certainly over Hillary) and not one of them qualifies as “low information” in any sense of the term. Hell, Newt Gingrich has expressed a belief that Trump wouldn’t necessarily be a terrible president, and while I can’t pretend to like the guy, I also can’t deny that he’s damned smart. Not to mention Jerry Pournelle. I was holding out hope for Cruz to win a contested convention…now I’m still reeling. But I do know that I’d vote for a brain-damaged turnip before I allowed Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders to gain the levers of power because of my inaction (no offense intended to anyone…I’m just describing my own mindset), and at least Trump…well, he isn’t Hillary or Bernie. God I need a frigging drink!

      1. The “guy” I was describing as “damned smart” was Gingrich btw. I realize my sentence structure didn’t make that clear. Sorry.

  7. The leaders of both D’s and R’s have been driving the country toward a cliff for some time now. The only difference between them is how hard to push the gas pedal. I say just sit back and enjoy the comedy because studies show that it doesn’t matter what the people actually want anyway – the big money corporations actually run the show.

  8. I can’t source the quote but someone smarter than me said that while it’s true the Republican Party created Trump as their Frankenstein Monster it was the media that gave him life. In March the number floating around was two billion dollars in free advertising. Add to that my side of the aisle is ecstatic about your convention and your nominee clearly some social engineering went into your selection of Trump as your nominee.

    Like it or not we are only as free as law allows, all of choices we make are either legal or illegal and the law governs all that is written by politician. I know politics has always been shady but we are on the verge of giving our present and future to reality TV stars. As a liberal I may benefit from a Trump nomination in the short run but if this is the start of a trend in the long run we’re all boned as Larry so eloquently put it.

    1. The media wanted Trump as the Republican candidate. And they got what they wanted. Way to stick it to the elites, guys.

  9. If 2008 and 2012 taught us anything, it’s that a majority of our citizens do not take their responsibilities seriously.

    My take on this election cycle was that we were having a referendum on whether or not our country would continue as a Republic under restored Rule of Law. The Democrats were in lockstep opposition to the proposition, and now a plurality of Republicans have joined them.

    I’m in category one. Trump will suck, but at least he’s unlikely to continue the effort to declare my driveway and yard “federally protected wetlands”. And for the most part, he’s likely to leave me alone.
    I’ll vote for the bastard.
    But my yard sign will campaign for Cthuhlu.

    1. There is a cruical difference between the Donald and Hillary! inside. Trump has no real principles other than himself. Hillary!, on the other hand, is a Leftist who has sold out to big money interest, and she hates that. That Liberal guilt will drive her to Virtue Signaling via the Executive Branch- by way of using the government to take over more of our lives.
      Trump is in it for himself- you can sorta trust that. Hillary is in it to pretend she’s making the world a better place- that’s always bad.

      1. Hillary!, on the other hand, is a Leftist who has sold out to big money interest, and she hates that.

        Why do you say that ? I get the impression that she gleefully enjoys every single minute of it.

        1. She strikes conservatives as more dedicated to leftwing principles than would be the case if she were just pretending. Certainly something must be driving her to run. If that is greed alone, it is exceptional greed.

          The conventional wisdom is that Hillary’s steadfastness with William’s womanizing is because she is extremely driven by ambition.

          One alternative explanation is that she is a sexual deviant who prefers other women being raped by a man, particularly her man. If this is true, it would explain her looking left in conservative eyes.

      2. There was a good article written that pointed out when the “Donald” stopped funding Democrats, started funding Republicans and switched registration: The day after Obama made fun of him at one of those media dinner parties he goes to. Obama made fun of his tan, hair and basically everything about him and the “Donald” didn’t like it. That is what caused him to run, so when you say the Trump is in it for himself that is true, but you have to keep going and find out who trump is: A Liberal Democrat who ran as a Republican because Obama made fun of him. He never gave up his liberal ideas, just see his 60 minutes interview where he promised us Single Payer Health Care…VA style healthcare for everyone and his sister the judge nominated for SCOTUS.

      3. ‘in it for himself’, and ‘in it to collect payoffs’ looks potentially reassuring on the surface. (Which is itself alarming.) Trump and Clinton are both quite old for the office, and could easily become terminal in the next four years.

        If someone has not made peace with death, the specter of mortality can inspire significant changes in behavior.

        It isn’t at all clear that they have planned beyond their own deaths, or how that would alter their goals.

    2. I think the issue is the majority of our citizens have given up trying to understand politics or even attempt to find out the truth of what is going on, and they let political parties and the news media tell them who to vote for. The problem with Trump is that distrust of the media has gotten to the point where the media says ‘Trump is a horrible person’ and a large number of people have got to the point where ‘if the media hates him, he must not be a bad guy…’.

      1. An unfortunate truth. I got into a slightly heated debate regarding Citizen United earlier today. The cause? They thought that was a bloody law that lets businesses buy politicians. I have no idea where he got that information. But dear God did that anger me. That was not the first time I had to clear that up either. Where are people getting the idea that is a law?

        1. Where are people getting the idea that is a law?

          From the public schools that aren’t teaching them civics, that’s where.

          The most effective act of rebellion you can carry out is to teach your children well. Depending on where you live, that probably means either keeping them out of public schooling entirely, or at least spending lots of time undoing the damage the public school is doing to their knowledge.

          1. Personally, I think it’s ‘public schools aren’t teaching them critical thinking’. Ironically enough, the last civics teacher I had in High School was a conservative Mormon (and this was in a blue tribe heavy top tier suburban school district), and while she was overall a pretty good teacher, we did have one period devoted to some nutritional BS pet theory of hers that we were able to debunk by the end of class (which she was a bit annoyed with), but the fact that we could spot the flaws in the argument and cite evidence to rationally refute her kept her from getting too angry.

            We have has the deciding factor in many elections an apathetic citizenry that’s willing to uncritically accept what they are told, and it’s just as bad when it’s talk radio and Fox News doing the telling as when it’s the rest of the major media. Unless we can make the public care enough to do their own research, we need to have the conservative/libertarian arguments out there in a place where they can be found so people can see there is another side.

            I managed to partially convert someone on Citizen’s United, someone who was even reasonably aware of what the case entails, by citing the Pentagon Papers case. She’d never seen that line of reasoning applied to ‘the first amendment shouldn’t apply to corporations’, and seeing an example where it was important that a corporation have first amendment rights actually had an impact. The failure of the Republican party establishment to even try advocating for its values has been its biggest flaw for the past 20 years, because it leaves the liberal worldview unquestioned in the eyes of the people that only get their info from the news. Trump’s power is in his ability to get media coverage to make his arguments.

          2. Ya I actually followed up on where my friend got that information regarding Citizen’s United. Secondhand and he did not bother to do his own research before stating that as fact. He is also a hardcore Sanders supporter…. which brings up other issues that I have difficulty discussing calmly. Dear God I am happy Clinton beat him and that I was wrong about him winning.

          3. That doesn’t explain the people my age that went to the same high school as me and took the same classes. My school actually required a ‘B’ or higher in government, economics, and history classes before you could graduate. For other people your post is a little too accurate. My generation is filled with idiots.

            If I have kids, private school….. a vetted private school. One like mine that required a good grade in civics classes to pass. A lot of good that did for some of my former classmates.

          4. I never had to take any “Civics” or “American Government” classes in high school. I *think* there was an optional “American Government” 9-week course, but I don’t remember anyone who took it.

            “American History” was required by the school board. I got to take pre-Soviet Russian history to fulfill that requirement. (stone truth)

          5. I went to a private school that stressed those courses as much as Math, English, and Science. They felt that people needed to know that stuff in order to make sound decisions later in life. The sad part is that those courses were not even that hard they just expected you to study and pay attention… I am starting to understand why some people who I took the class with are not

            History, I know they had a required history course for each year aside from seniors who could take an optional course devoted to the Vietnam war. World, American, Ancient, Modern, European, and Jewish history were required along with the various Math, English, and Science courses.

          6. oops typo *are not knowledgeable in with the government. They tuned things out and studied with my friend who got perfect scores.”

    3. ‘Trump will suck, but at least he’s unlikely to continue the effort to declare my driveway and yard “federally protected wetlands”. ‘

      No, he’s just likely to have the government take your yard and give it to a developer crony, “for the public good”.

      Trump loves him some Kelo.

      1. And the bureaucrats will run rings around him; he has neither the education, the temperment or the interest in paying attention to the minutia of the job.

        And we already know what his staff and cabinet picks are going to look like when his campaign finance chairman is a former employee of George Soros. Goldman Sachs, and a lifetime Democrat donor.

        Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

  10. Hmm, I respect you sticking to your guns but I think you’re thinking about it the wrong way entirely. Trump (or someone like him) was the inevitable response to the last 30 years. The left was making constant inroads to everything that mattered, and the right was helping them the whole way making only token effort to oppose them.

    Trump is to America what Julius Caesar was to the corrupt Roman Senate. Caesar was bad in his own right, but tge Senate neglected and abused the plebs too much and for too long and they got their just desserts. That said I don’t think Trump is anywhere as bad as you fear he will be, and I think he’s going to dominate Hillary in the election. I predict NY State will go red.

    In any case democracy was doomed to die at some point anyways, so if Trump ends up being the one to do it I won’t be shocked. If something hasn’t existed since the foundation of the world there’s no reason to believe it will continue to exist forever. I’m convinced only a small fraction of humanity truly cares about freedom and limited government, so I’m ready and willing to make do in whatever system I find myself in.

    FWIW I voted Gary Johnson in 2012 and Rand was my initial pick.

      1. Ya I believe Clinton got more votes in the NY primary than the entire Republican party combined. Trump would need a lot of crossover voters. That is not probable.

  11. Been involved in the LP for a few years and have to say we won’t win, but coming in second in some states? I could see that.

    1. I’m hoping that LP might even come in first in Utah. That’s a long shot, but it’s an interesting possibility…

  12. Internationally, vis a vis foreign affairs, I’d rather have Trump than the former secretary of state, who I would love to see indicted, but I won’t hold my breath. Admittedly, I would prefer to be loved by other countries, but if they don’t love us, I think I would rather them fear us.

    And open primaries are dumb. Trump is about to get the nomination. QED.

  13. Haven’t ever seen a Republican presidential candidate that I was excited for as anything other than a vote against the Democrats’ worse candidate. Trump follows that tradition. Cruz followed that tradition. And both of them are of the “we’re not really conserving anything” mold. Might be nice to have a candidate worth voting for, for a change. The Church of the Temporary Mortal Condition better be summoning Cthulhu soon…

  14. Perhaps a bright-side: Betrayal tends to stick in the craw. It’s a large part of what created Trump (GOP fecklessness going back decades). If Trump *somehow* is seen to betray his “base,” perhaps by a combination of ineptitude and losing, some few will be inoculated against populist demagoguery for a few years.

    Maybe.

    More likely though, we lose the Congress. The Presidency, we’re boned six ways from Sunday, but we lose Congress, and SCOTUS, which will hurt more than the former. Economy, of course, tanks and takes the dollar with it (“spend more $$ on free stuff, but don’t raise my taxes,” is a recipe for massive inflation). Our foreign policy gets even more schizo. Troops abroad take losses because of stupid sh*t up the chain (EEO, ROE, EIEIO-f*ck-me).

    Figure race riots uptick, social unrest deepens. If Kratman is right (as he often is), this would be a ripe time to start a grab for the SW states. Terrorists would think the time’s right for another hit inside the U.S. (of course, when don’t they).

    Shrillary gets the office, corruption entrenched even more than usual around Washington. The intelligence apparatus will be a shambles (that court case will go nowhere), and won’t *that* happen at the best time for our national security. Probably will quash at least one attempted impeachment by the end of year three at the very latest.

    *sigh*

    Prove me wrong. I seriously hope I’m wrong. It’s not the end of the world. But, like the man said, “civilization is on the ropes.” We’ll do what we can to keep things together, locally if that’s the best we manage. Y’all keep a weather eye out- and help each other where ya can.

    1. I’d be surprised if Trump’s followers recognize a backstab from him. Trump himself even bragged at one point that he could shoot someone on 5th Ave., and his support would only go up. Too many of his followers appear eager to rationalize anything that might dissuade them from their faith in him.

      1. The Trumpzis will throw away every single value they possess rather than admit they were wrong.

    1. Same here. If we’re stuck with a choice between a corrupt felonious warmonger and a vulgar psychotic clown, I’ll cast my vote for the vulgar psychotic clown (thinking that there’s maybe a 30% chance he won’t screw me over) over the corrupt felonious warmonger (0% chance she won’t screw me over). And then I’ll go home and weep in the shower.

  15. I spent 20 years in the military, most of it involved in nuclear weapons one way or the other.

    I don’t trust Trump or Hillary with the launch codes.

    1. A number of sources have claimed that some years , the bunker code was “00000000”.

      Being eight digits, I guess it is exponentially more difficult than King Roland’s password to the air shield; “12345.”

      Spaceballs Uber Alles!

  16. I’m voting third party, Gary Johnson — the man I consider best in the first place. The only difference between doing so this year and in most election years is that this time it doesn’t matter if it throws the election to Hillary, because the only practical difference between her and Trump is that she probably won’t provoke a needless war with Mexico, and Trump might.

    Johnson was governor of New Mexico for 8 years, lowered the state’s budget every year, AND vetoed over 750 bills. And he wants to end the War on Drugs. That’s someone who would make a truly great President.

    1. I am not entirely in tune with Johnson’s positions on national security, but other than that he’s great.

  17. I can’t say I disagree with your assessment of Trump but it’s ridiculous to pin this all on ‘low information voters’ for choosing the wrong guy.

    It wasn’t ‘low information voters’ who put up Jeb ‘Wet Noodle’ Bush–the worst candidate for president I have ever see–and it wasn’t ‘low information voters’ who conceived his disastrous “Step Over Everyone In Order to Appeal To Mexicans” strategy. That all came from the GOP and, incidentally, Jeb was the #1 most approved GOP candidate by democrats.

    There’s a saying “don’t ask fish how to catch fish” and you don’t ask Democrats how Republicans should win elections.

    You may be right about everything you feel about Trump but he’s your punishment for ignoring your own base, calling them ‘low information voters,’ and demanding they just shut up and do whatever you tell them to do.

    1. Despite claims to the contrary, Jeb was never going anywhere. Unlike his brother, Jeb never mastered the trick of getting people who disagree with you (i.e. The majority of the Republican base) to like you. He always came off as condescending in his responses to disagreements with his policies. His candidacy was dead with or without Trump.

  18. Trump is an inevitable backlash against the alleged party of personal rights and freedoms that only tolerates certain freedoms and absolutely loathes other freedoms and makes them illegal.

    Now read that last clause again. If you’re careful, you’ll see that last clause could be said of either party, Republicans or Democrats. Republicans want to legislate what you do with your genitals and with whom. Democrats want to legislate how much you can have in your wallet and how it gets spend on their projects along with what words you can and cannot use, what protections you can use for yourself and your family, and how you will live your life and allocate your risks with insurance. Sizeable chunks of America flat-out hate all of these positions.

    The American Fundamentalists on the far right haven’t gotten that message for twenty years, so you get this result. The American Socialists on the far left haven’t gotten the message either, so you get this result.

    It is particularly amusing to note that the Republicans caused much of their own current fiasco in their attempts to sandbag Ron Paul back in 2008. He committed the cardinal sin of saying he actually wanted to make government smaller, wanted America to take care of Americans first, and wanted to limit entanglements on the world stage. No politician could stomach the thought that their endless meetings and jaunts to five-star hotels might be curtailed in any way, so he got the kibosh. Again, this leads to the current situation.

    Cruz made several catastrophic errors in judgment in the last ten to twelve days of his campaign and tried to do a Stalingrad-like stand in Indiana and got butchered. It was a strategic and tactical blunder, but his immediate suspension of the campaign on the night of the results only confirmed the unsuitability of his candidacy.

    America, it would seem, wants moderates who aren’t beholden to the Religious Right or the Tax-and-Spenders of the left. Who knew? Everyone who wasn’t a politician.

    1. Yeah, I’m calling nonsense on that one. Romney was a squishy moderate on abortion (Also, your genitals? No cares given about what you do with those, so long as it’s consensual) and he got slammed with the “The Social Conservatives are Teh Evulz.”
      Furthermore, Ron Paul? Ron “I don’t understand how the international system works and it doesn’t matter because I’ll withdraw us from it” Paul? He didn’t need to be sandbagged, all they had to do was let him talk.

      1. Oh, really? Then why does anyone care about gay marriage or transgender bathrooms? Who, exactly, is it making such a fuss about these things?

        1. The Religious Right doesn’t like being forced to nod and play along when told that these are good things. North Carolina’s law isn’t ‘criminalize transgenderism and gay marriage’ but ‘allow people that think this is bad to not have to endorse it and allow them to have a weapon against people that exploit the law to be pervs.’ Any other description is the media ‘simplifying’ things to get independent voters to vote Democratic, and like the suckers they are, people bite the tasty bait

          Sure, 20 years ago there was probably enough people that wanted to criminalize homosexual behavior your statement would have been accurate (although it was more like they wanted to keep unenforced laws on the books because they considered removing them endorsement of the behaviors they prohibited). Even then, though, the most visible of them, the Westboro Baptist Church, is properly the Religious Left, given their anti-war stance and connection to Democratic politics.

          It’s like this established meme that the right is a bunch of puritans when one of the biggest crusaders against depravity in pop music was Tipper Gore, something that the media whitewashed away when her husband ran for president.

          1. One thing that I personally find extremely distasteful about modern politics is that the Left and the Right have basically converged on the Puritan issue.

            The Right wants to limit sexual expression, restrict free speech, and reduce the rights of women (as well as some rights of men), because this is what they think God wants them to do.

            The Left want to limit sexual expression, restrict free speech, and reduce the rights of men (as well as some rights of women), because this is what they think Marx/Tumblr/The Universal Consciousness wants them to do.

            Meanwhile, I want people to be free to do and say whatever they want, as long as they’re not actively hurting others. Too bad, looks like there’s no place on either side for me…

        2. Let’s see, could it possibly be that neither one of those things is actually about what you do with your genitals, but is instead about forcing a very particular vision of society onto people who do not share it?

          1. @60guilders:
            Yes, mostly. I have no problem with people trying to convince me to embrace their ideology — even that ideology happens to be something that I perceive to be completely silly, like Communism or Anarcho-Capitalism or Evangelical Christianity or, I don’t know, Singularitarianism or something.

            But neither side is interested in convincing people, they are both out for total ideological control.

          2. But neither side is interested in convincing people, they are both out for total ideological control.

            In order to cut to the chase, can you provide me with an example of the right trying to limit ‘sexual expression, free speech, and the rights of women’?

            If your example is abortion, which is about the only thing I can think of at anything above a really low, isolated level (ie, some state legislator proposes a stupid law that gets blocked by his own party) that an opponent can call one of the three, we’ll have to agree to disagree. I can see someone on the left characterizing it as ‘limiting the rights of women’, but it’s one that looked at from the other side is honestly different. Anything to do with the rights of children is going to be a place where there is no perfect solution and somebody is going to end up screwed due to the very imperfect nature of humans.

          3. Well, for example, Kim Davis was lauded by the right-wing administration of her state for refusing to execute the law of the land (as was her job). Republican governors in multiple states have recently put in a lot of effort to make abortion effectively unavailable, though technically legal — by mandating absurdly strict requirements for abortion facilities, forced sonograms, etc. Somewhat paradoxically, the same people also campaign against contraception (the push to shut down Planned Parenthood is a big part of that), despite the fact that contraception is the leading factor in reducing abortion rates.

            In terms of sexual expression, Republicans used to always be at the forefront of the movement to censor sex on TV, ban violent (or sexy) video games, stop the sale of Satanic paraphernalia such as D&D, etc. As I said, though, recently they have been joined by Democrats who are proclaiming largely the same things for largely the same reasons. Religious conservatives are also quite vocal about censoring the expression of any religion other than their own, while enshrining their own brand of religion into law — prayers during government meetings, Ten Commandments in the courtroom, stuff like that. Modern Leftists are tirelessly campaigning to integrate Tumblr language into government policy, though whether or not this constitutes a religious obsession is debatable.

            I forgot to mention this before, but both sides are also possessed of a pretty strong anti-science bias. Republicans, of course, want to ban the teaching of evolution, stem-cell research, and climate science; in addition, they subscribe to a rather revisionist view of history. Recently, Leftists have joined them in opposing the study of human biology (just different portions of it) and an emphasis on a different kind of totally revisionist history. Both sides essentially see science as a propaganda tool, first and foremost.

          4. I already covered abortion; it’s a case of clashing civil rights. As for contraception, there’s a difference between removing federal funding for Planned Parenthood and banning it. Further, Republicans have been the ones pushing for making contraception OTC, which is an odd position for a party supposedly opposed to contraception. Above all, there is a difference between trying to outlaw something and trying to remove federal support for something. As someone with libertarian leanings, the government has no need to pay for this stuff.

            As far as banning video games, satanic stuff, etc, when is the last time you actually saw any of that? I think a Utah state senator tried to push something against pornography recently and it got voted down. A couple of decades ago, sure, but look how much the landscape has changed. It’s like the ‘Bush wants to kill all gays’ meme that went around; is a guy that has a lesbian couple (the VPs daughter and her girlfriend, specifically) at his state dinner secretly planning to kill all gays? Yet people believed this.

            Anti-science bias. A couple of local politicians on the right want labels in high school biology textbooks. The right has no problem with private funding for evolution or stem cell research; the debate has been, again, over federal funding. Meanwhile, prominent politicians on the left are supporters of BS organic food laws, anti nuclear power, anti biotech, anti vaccine, anti medical research. Further, the left is willing to use the power of the government to criminalize disagreement with their view of science, which as far as a supporter of science goes should be the one thing you’d oppose the most. One of these sides is not like the other.

            Again, look at how you’ve characterized a lot of these things ‘the right wants to ban X’ with how the laws actually play out ‘the right doesn’t want to spend tax dollars to pay for X’. Why is there such a disconnect? Could it be because you’re seeing a simplistic picture of what’s actually going on from someone with an agenda, one that’s crafted to make you think the right is more extreme than it is?

            (On contraception: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/15/why-republicans-are-pushing-for-over-the-counter-birth-control/)

          5. @Civilis:
            I understand the distinction between “Ban X” and “Defund X”; a ban is obviously a much stronger measure. However, if the end result of defunding X is that X disappears, I believe it is likely that a person who is campaigning to defund X wants X to disappear. Furthermore, if you compare Carly Fiorina to someone like Scott Walker, you will see that Republicans are far from united on the issue of contraception.

            I agree with you that the support for / opposition of abortion is essentially a religious issue, and, as such, will probably never be settled decisively (at least, not until the success of the next Jihad/Crusade/whatever).

            On the anti-science issue, I completely agree with everything you said about the Left; as you remember, the convergence of Left and Right is what I was complaining about to begin with.

            In general, though, I appreciate your Libertarian position: you want to stop spending tax dollars on various social and scientific endeavours, but you are not opposed to them in principle. I disagree with you, of course, but we are not going to settle such a fundamental disagreement here, and I’m ok with that.

            However, I would argue that most right-wingers are not like yourself (or at least the most prominent ones aren’t). They either apply the Libertarian principles completely inconsistently (e.g., campaigning for spending tax dollars on the teaching of Creationism while defunding or outright banning the teaching of evolutionary biology); or reject such principles outright and proclaim that, yes, their moral values demand that federal dollars be spent on teaching Creationism / erecting Biblical monuments / funding faith-based programs / etc.

          6. Bugmeister, your original contention was “the Right wants to limit sexual expression, restrict free speech, and reduce the rights of women”. Defunding something, even if it’s something you want to go away, does not do that. It’s important that we make sure we have an accurate description of what is actually going on. I go out and look for evidence to back up my claims, and make sure my claims are specific, not exaggerated. Since you’ve changed what you’re opposed to, I now have to go research your new claims, but it’s very possible that non-libertarian conservatives can believe that private nonprofits that deserve federal support should do so regardless of whether or not they are religious in nature, especially if funding is for non-religious services. Keep in mind that the 1st amendment is intentionally somewhat vague, and other interpretations may exist.

            Abortion is a values issue, not a religious issue, just as capital punishment or immigration are values issues. I know a lot of people on the left that oppose capital punishment and support illegal immigration for religious reasons, but not all do, and the reason they do is immaterial to whether or not those policies are good ideas. Their arguments stand or fall regardless of why they make them.

            The fundamental point I’m trying to make is that you’re not seeing an accurate picture. It could be that because you are on the left and hostile to religion that you consider ‘wants a disclaimer label in high school biology textbooks’ or ‘has a statue of the 10 commandments on the courthouse somewhere’ to be as bad as ‘attempts to criminally prosecute those that disagree with politicized scientific theories’ or ‘issues a federal directive cancelling all chance of building a safe repository for nuclear waste’, but realistically one has a lot more impact than the other. Equating the acts of a couple of local legislators with the actions of prominent members of the national Democratic party doesn’t make for a strong argument.

            Politicians on the left want you to believe most Republicans are ignorant back-water Bible thumpers, but what you’re seeing is their propaganda campaign. I provided evidence that the right isn’t against contraception. Can you, to back up your argument, find a story in the last 5 years where the right wants to ban teaching evolutionary biology? If I were willing to bet, you can probably find a state legislator somewhere that tried to do so, but please take this as an example.

          7. @Civilis:

            Defunding something, even if it’s something you want to go away, does not do that.

            I understand your point, but I disagree. Republican Governors have been pretty vocal in their opposition to abortion as well as contraception (which, again, sounds contradictory to me), as well as their strategy to get rid of those things by defunding the associated institutions or regulating them out of existence — in lieu of an outright ban, which would be prohibited by federal law.

            I don’t think that I have changed my position at all (other than including the bit about science, but that’s an addition, not a change). I think you may be confused, because I am opposed to two orthogonal things. Firstly, I am absolutely opposed to authoritarianism, on either side. But secondly, I am also opposed to many policies on the Right. My original complain was regarding the fact that the Left has not only begun to implement the same exact policies, but that it is also increasingly employing authoritarian tactics to do so.

            By the way, I fully admit that I am opposed to religious faith in general (since it’s an epistemological dead end), and organized religion in particular (since it’s faith + authoritarianism). But just because I am opposed to the institution, doesn’t mean that I’m hostile against the people who practice it. As long as you aren’t trying to force me to follow you (or harm me in other ways), you must be free to worship whomever or whatever you want.

            Can you, to back up your argument, find a story in the last 5 years where the right wants to ban teaching evolutionary biology?This article may be a little old, but it’s a nice summary. Basically, the opposition to evolutionary biology takes the following forms:
            * Warning stickers (etc.) saying that “evolution is only a theory”: technically true, but meaningless, since so is gravity. The idea here is to send a message to the students, “this stuff isn’t important, forget about it”.
            * Teaching Creationism alongside evolution: sort of like teaching flat-earth cosmology alongside modern astronomy. The message now is, “here’s what the evil atheists forced us to put in the book, but now, we can also teach you the truth”.
            * Removing evolution completely. Again, similar to removing any mention of gravity. Not an outright ban, but close.
            * Total ban on evolution: Usually fails in courts, but is still attempted from time to time.

            The main problem with all of this is that our modern economy does not depend on muscle power anymore. It depends on science and technology, and anything that hurts our ability to advance those disciplines in the long run, is hurting our country on the global economic stage.

            By the way, the Republican attitude toward biology and climate change has, once again, converged with the attitude on the Left toward… well, pretty much the same topics. Both sides are treating these issues as political litmus tests, or statements of virtue. They have both embraced some version of post-modernism as their worldview, where the truth about the world is either unknown or unknowable, so we might as well believe whatever makes us feel good / is moral / sounds un-problematic / etc.

            Politicians on the left want you to believe most Republicans are ignorant back-water Bible thumpers

            Not all Republicans are ignorant back-water Bible thumpers — not by a long shot. However, the overwhelming majority of ignorant back-water Bible thumpers are Republican.

          8. Oops, I messed up my quote tags; the phrase “Can you, to back up your argument, find a story in the last 5 years where the right wants to ban teaching evolutionary biology?” should be a quote.

          9. By change your position, I meant that your first argument was “The Right wants to limit sexual expression, restrict free speech, and reduce the rights of women (as well as some rights of men), because this is what they think God wants them to do”, then, when asked for examples, you switched the argument you were making to something else, which I will paraphrase as “the right is anti-science and too pro-religion”. You made a specific allegation, then when asked about it, it looks to me like you dropped the subject for something else. It’s fine that you’re against the policies of the right. I think you’re mistaken, but I understand we have different values.

            The problem is that nobody is going to listen to you here that doesn’t already agree with you if your arguments aren’t backed up by evidence. You made a set of very specific allegations, with terms which have defined meanings. Personally, I take free speech very seriously (one of the reasons I’m so adamantly opposed to the current left), so when you say ‘the right wants to restrict […] free speech’, I immediately pay attention, and if you have actual evidence I want to know, so I can start persuading people not to do whatever they are doing. I don’t know why you made that allegation, but it’s out there, and you haven’t supported it, so I don’t know if you actually know something I don’t, you have a very different definition of ‘free speech’ than the law, you made the allegation by passing on someone elses’s claim, or what.

            As far as the rest of it, if you won’t read my arguments and look for actual evidence, there’s not much else I can say that will convince you. Doing a search and posting links is better than a lot of people seem to be able to manage, so I think you’re being sincere, but you just don’t seem to be able to grasp the point that (for example) ‘ban the teaching of evolution’ is a very specific charge, and that demands specific evidence.

          10. “However, if the end result of defunding X is that X disappears, I believe it is likely that a person who is campaigning to defund X wants X to disappear.”

            So you support government subsidizing of my purchase of a Cazador .308 on the grounds that I cannot otherwise fully exercise my 2nd Amendment rights out of my own pocket?

          11. Abortion is not actually legal in most states. Rulings by the Supreme Court prohibit investigation and prosecution of what is legally murder when the victim is below a certain gestational age and the person hired to do the killing is an MD.

        3. Quite obviously, the people foisting them onto an unwilling public.

          Very few of those people are Republicans.

        4. Mostly, the left. It was the leftists in Charlotte who *required* businesses to allow Transgender in the bathrooms of their choice.

          The right in the state gov’t said, “Leave us out of it, it’s none of the .gov’s business. The owner’s can do whatever they like.”

          It’s leftist who are pushing “Yes means Yes” and are peaking into bedrooms to make sure you’re only having sex the way they approve of (No consensual drunken sex for you, that’s rape).

          1. @Yu-Ain Gonnano:
            Yeah, I am completely opposed to “Yes means Yes”. As I said, I am against any policy that allows government officials to “peek into bedrooms”, as you say — regardless of which specific sexual position they are trying to eliminate this time.

            As for transgender bathrooms, I don’t even understand the issue. From either side. I understand that Leftists wants A-to-B transgender people to use B bathrooms exclusively, and those on the Right want them to use A bathrooms exclusively, but I just don’t care either way.

          2. Except that’s not what’s going on. The apparent difference between a pre-op transsexual and a regular person is, say it with me now–nothing. Zip, zilch, nada. Much like the apparent difference between a post-op transsexual and a regular person.
            This, by the way, was the purpose of the NC bill.

    2. Republicans want to legislate what you do with your genitals and with whom.

      I’m sorry, this hasn’t been true for quite some time now. There’s a lot of things a libertarian can fault the Republicans for on the Civil Rights front (admittedly, most of them also apply to Democrats as well), but this isn’t one. At this point, the Religious Right is mostly concerned with things like the government forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to by abortion coverage and fining bakers out of business for not wanting to provide cakes to gay weddings.

      One of the major reasons the GOP establishment doesn’t do anything actually conservative is that the liberal media magnifies the small number of very visible progressive activists to convince the gullible middle of the electorate that libertarians are going to cause the poor to starve in the street and that the religious right is going to institute a Christian Sharia. So, to attempt to hold on to that middle, the establishment does nothing that will cost them votes. Falling victim to this false balkanization of identity politics gives the Democrats and the media more power.

      At this point, I’m waffling on whether or not I’ll vote for Trump to stop Hillary or not, and if I do so it will be holding my nose and I’ll be certain to regret it later. However, it’s a mistake to pretend that Trump represents a libertarian revolt by conservatives against the Republican party establishment, as his signature positions are a decidedly non-libertarian immigration and trade stance coupled with a distinctly Jacksonian foreign policy (as opposed to Paul’s Jeffersonian, the Bush Hamiltonian, or Obama’s Wilsonian policies).

    3. “Republicans want to legislate what you do with your genitals and with whom.”

      Twenty years ago, you might have had a point. These days, what little is left of the social conservative wing of the Republican Party would be happy to be able to refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding without having their lives ruined.

  19. This year, we’re seeing the reality the quote credited to Winston Churchill:

    “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”

    I fully expect this year’s campaign to have all the gravitas of a dung-flinging contest between chimpanzees. With their supporters jumping up and down and hooting on the sidelines.

  20. Here in Oregon, we haven’t even had our primary yet. Cruz opted not to campaign here, leaving it for Kasich, who released a stupidly idiotic and hypocritical ad attacking Cruz (“Ted Cruz failed at math” referring to the delegate count and how Cruz can’t win the nomination outside of a convention … as if Kasich was doing any better or had any other game plan) and who didn’t file in time to be included in the informational voter pamphlet (though they’re both on the ballot). “Botched” is the nicest word that comes to mind. I figured this might be the one time in my life that Oregon’s late primary might mean something, but now it doesn’t even matter; once again, the contest is decided well before we cast our ballots.

    We’re hosed.

    As to the VP picks … expect both to choose fellow “true believers”. Trump will choose a pro-Trump sycophant (he’s as big a narcissist as Obama; would you expect anything different?), and Hillary will choose an even more extreme big-government Leftist than herself.

    The only remaining question is, Will the Constitution be fed into the paper shredder top- or bottom-first?

  21. Unfortunately since I still live in Kommiefornia unless I vote for the Democraps’ nominee my vote still won’t count.
    Between the Bay Area and Los Angeles County the “Dims” sweep the delegates in this state!

    1. Steve Coolie’s poll numbers back when he ran for State AG suggest that Los Angeles isn’t as monolithlically prog as people might think. Coolie ran on the Republican ticket after serving as LA County DA (another elected position), and got significantly better numbers than any of the other Republicans running for state-wide office (incidentally, one of those other Republicans was Carly Fiorina) in that election. If you can get someone that the locals recognize as competent on the ballot, then Los Angelinos will vote for the individual regardless of which party they’re from.

      The real issue in California appears to be that the Bay Area *is* as monolithically prog as people think – or perhaps even more so.

  22. My favorite comment so far, from Facebook:

    “Can’t we just no-award all the candidates?”

  23. By November he will be the most laughed at and despised candidate in history. Because he makes it too easy.

    That was exactly my reasoning when I confidently predicted that Trump won’t get anywhere close to winning the nomination. Hmm.

    FWIW, I am basically one of those evil liberal commie-demons that you guys fight against, and I feel about Hillary exactly the same way that LC feels about Trump. I was hoping that, in the 2016 election, the Democrats would either field an activist candidate who shares at least a few of my basic principles; or, barring that, some slowpoke who would be apathetic enough to at least avoid making things worse. Instead, they’ve unleashed some sort of a reptilian alien whose every decision is up for sale to the highest bidder. Now there’s no one for me to vote for.

      1. Sadly, I live in California, so my vote doesn’t matter anyway… It’s more about the principle of the thing.

    1. I never said those who believe socialism, communism, or any other variation of collectivism were evil, just stubbornly misguided, and willfully blind to past failures.

      1. Funny, that’s how I feel about the modern Conservatives and the Religious Right most of the time 🙂

  24. Out of curiosity, are you going to retract all of this when Trump not only wins (and all of your predictions about his demise don’t come to pass) but he also ends up being a relatively decent president (not Constitutional, by any means, but at the very least one that puts American interests ahead of some kind of global ideology)?

    I honestly can’t decide what I’m going to find more entertaining. The collective head explosions that will occur when he wins, or the collective rationalizations that will occur throughout his presidency when all of the Chicken Little predictions don’t end up coming true.

    WATYF

    1. I don’t think that, in order to be a decent President, a candidate merely has to “put American interests ahead of some kind of global ideology”. He also needs to implement real policies, that are going to lead to tangible results; and those results have to actually be positive. Wanting something is not the same thing as being able to achieve it.

      1. [I don’t think that, in order to be a decent President, a candidate merely has to “put American interests ahead of some kind of global ideology”. ]

        “Merely”? No. Of course not. But “necessarily”? Yes. And we haven’t had that in 4 Presidential election cycles. Bush put his nation-building ideology ahead of America’s best interests and Obama put his nanny-state ideology ahead of America’s best interests. So Trump having that quality alone puts him a notch above what we’ve had for 20 years.

        As for the details, who knows how that will shake out.

        WATYF

    2. Now, see, here’s the thing.
      First, this phrase here: “not Constitutional, by any means, but at the very least one that puts American interests ahead of some kind of global ideology” is sort of like saying that he’s going to use circular rectangles as wheels.
      Second, while I understand that Donald Trump defying my expectations is a possibility, I’m putting it somewhere below “Hillary Clinton bows out and gives the nomination to Sanders” on the “Things likely to happen” list.

      1. [First, this phrase here: “not Constitutional, by any means, but at the very least one that puts American interests ahead of some kind of global ideology” is sort of like saying that he’s going to use circular rectangles as wheels.]

        No, it’s not. One can fail to understand all of the philosophies of the Constitution and still strive to put American interests first. Trump is a perfect example of this, actually. He’s probably one of the worst recent Republican candidates *philosophically* and one of the best ones *pragmatically*. The conservatives talk a good game and then accomplish none of their ideals. The liberals talk a bad game and accomplish many of their (terrible) ideals. The current gamble is that Trump will be the best of both worlds: someone who talks pro-American interests and who can actually follow through on them.

        Whether this gamble will pay off remains to be seen. As we can see, people are rather harshly divided in their views of which way they think it will go.

        [Second, while I understand that Donald Trump defying my expectations is a possibility, I’m putting it somewhere below “Hillary Clinton bows out and gives the nomination to Sanders” on the “Things likely to happen” list.]

        Then you aren’t looking at all of the facts.

        Yes, Trump is outrageous. He says silly shit. Blah blah blah. Let’s loudly and emotionally complain about that some more and get outraged and then whine that he’s not even a “conservative”.

        OR…… or we can look at the facts. Trump has, for as long as he’s been on record on such topics, been a nationalist. A pro-American, put-our-country-first, nationalist. His views on foreign policy and trade have been the same since the 80’s. So we very much have reason to think that he will at least try to deliver on the concept of putting American interests first instead of just selling us out to the global market.

        Don’t believe me?

        Read his foreign policy speech from last month: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-foreign-policy-speech

        Then watch this interview from 1988: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZpMJeynBeg

        Literally the same exact thing.

        WATYF

      2. Well, I wrote up a long reply to this yesterday, but apparently the comment system swallowed it, so here’s the Cliff’s Notes:

        [is sort of like saying that he’s going to use circular rectangles as wheels.]

        No, it’s not. It’s possible to be a staunch nationalist and put American interests first while still not understanding all of the underlying philosophies of the Constitution and abiding by them.

        [Second, while I understand that Donald Trump defying my expectations is a possibility, I’m putting it somewhere below “Hillary Clinton bows out and gives the nomination to Sanders” on the “Things likely to happen” list.]

        Then you’re not paying attention. Trump has wavered on a lot of shit, but there’s one thing he hasn’t wavered on: his nationalism.

        Go Google his recent foreign policy speech. Then Google “Trump Oprah Interview”. The former happened last month. The latter happened in 1988. They are both the same. His position on the US government putting American interests first ahead of other nations has not changed in decades.

        WATYF

        1. “It’s possible to be a staunch nationalist and put American interests first while still not understanding all of the underlying philosophies of the Constitution and abiding by them.”

          Excuse me, but you’re still speaking crazy talk. The rule of law is integral to American interests, and the Constitution is the embodiment thereof.

          “Then you’re not paying attention. Trump has wavered on a lot of shit, but there’s one thing he hasn’t wavered on: his nationalism.”

          I literally give no cares about his nationalism. If I wanted a nationalist I’d vote for Buchanan. Ideology is not a substitute for competence.

    3. Not Constitutional? Sorry, can’t be a decent President if you don’t respect the Constitution. Trump is a buffoon who has no idea what it takes to be President, nor does he have anyone on his close staff that does.

      1. [Not Constitutional? Sorry, can’t be a decent President if you don’t respect the Constitution.]

        That’s not what I meant. When I say “Constitutional” I’m referring to strict American Constitutionalism, which no President in a long, long time has been. Lots of people say they “respect the Constitution” and then go and do something that is diametrically opposed to its original intent.

        WATYF

    4. To my mind, these guys aren’t thinking this through. If you care about restoring the Constitution, you should want Trump as president. It’s counterintuitive, but the key is: reprisals.

      Basically, Obama et al ignored Constitutional limits to do what he wanted to do. Democrats let him do it because he’s a Democrat; Republicans let him do it because they fought each other instead. How do you take those methods off the table? President Hillary wouldn’t do it–Democrats would block any restriction in lockstep because same team. President Cruz wouldn’t use those methods out of principle, and other candidates wouldn’t have either (out of principle or weakness.)

      But a President Trump would. Let him come in, use the same tools Obama used to reverse Obama’s harm plus add a few more to rub the salt in. Then, if you want to stop the tool from being used again, your support comes from Democrats (who grudgingly lose the power but are the other team), principled Republicans who want restoration, and squishes who won’t buck a trend. The tool/weapon won’t be retired until it’s clear that both sides will use it against the other.

      As for Larry railing against Trump supporters, think of it this way: the Tea Party is to Donald Trump as Sad Puppies is to Rabid Puppies. You IRS the Tea Party, you get Trump. You wooden asterisk the Hugos, you get Space Raptor Butt Invasion. The question at this stage is who you train your fire on (or whether you sit it out.)

      1. “As for Larry railing against Trump supporters, think of it this way: the Tea Party is to Donald Trump as Sad Puppies is to Rabid Puppies. ”

        That analogy only works if the “rabid puppies” were long-standing proponents of same people voting for “no award” who are spouting whatever rhetoric will make them popular in order to spoil any chance the “sad puppies” had of getting anywhere.

        1. Your response makes absolutely no sense, so let’s try again. Both Sad Puppies and the Tea Party were good-faith efforts to address certain problems, and they worked within the system according to the letter and spirit of the rules. The hope (perhaps not expectation, but hope) was that doing so would change things for the better or at least highlight the problem. Surely there must be some people involved in the system who would give these concerns a fair shake?

          But the response was damn near suicidal. It is insane to make the IRS a partisan weapon in a system that requires voluntary honest contributions to run properly each year. It was enormously stupid and short-sighted to take legislative victories in 2010 and 2014 and do nothing with them while fighting to undermine and shut out the new blood. It was idiotic to no-award and hand out “coasters” like the CHORFs did. Yet this all happened.

          So when the other side has made it clear that the rules are really there to restrict you and empower them, then you don’t have to abide by their spirit anymore. Hence Trump. Hence Rabid Puppies. And the more you double down on the bad faith, the stronger you make Trump and VD. (Both of which I’m fine with, by the way.) It might be nice if the other approach had worked, but it just shows that it’s later than you think.

          1. The difference I was attempting to point out is that it is pretty clear that the guy calling himself Vox Day believes what he is saying,. Trump’s past comments, when he was not running, make it clear he believes what he is saying now about as much as Colbert did when he was playing his fictional version of the right

      2. [To my mind, these guys aren’t thinking this through.]

        Indeed. All of the Trump hatred I see written by prominent conservatives is just emotional bluster with no substance. They’re too busy bristling at the very *thought* of a Trump presidency to think through the actual facts on the ground. All of the facts, that is. Not just the ones that they use to pejoratively define Trump and his supporters.

        WATYF

        1. Like Milton Friedman said: it’s a mistake to focus on electing the right people. It is better to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

          Talk of third party and sitting things out is all very well and good, but it’s hardly a way to generate any leverage.

          1. Good point.

            I’m much more ready to believe that politicians will do good because it will somehow profit them than I am to believe they’ll do good when it might actually cost them something.

            Even if they’re vile self-serving apparatchiks, they’re capable of performing good actions if they know that they’ll get rewarded for doing them and punished if not.

    5. In formal logic, when an antecedent of a conditional is false, the entire conditional evaluates to true, regardless of the truth value of the consequent. This is known as a vacuous truth. If I may be forgiven for putting words in the mouth of our esteemed host, the answer is “Vacuously, yes”.

    6. No chance. I’d be surprised if he even finishes his first term without quitting in a huff.

    7. Sure. In the unlikely event he wins and turns out to be a fantastic president, I’ll sing his praises, and vote for hie reelection. Accent on unlikely. On the flip side, when he acts like the amoral statist progressive that he is, I’m sure you guys will be all about eating crow, and admitting you screwed up and elected a moron.

      1. On the flip side, when he acts like the amoral statist progressive that he is, I’m sure you guys will be all about eating crow, and admitting you screwed up and elected a moron.

        No, I’m sure they’ll find someone else to bla-oh, you were being sarcastic? 😉

        1. In all seriousness, I would place my bets on his supporters saying the establishment manipulated him or something, so that is why he did not fulfill his promises. At least his more vocal supporters probably would.

  25. “For the people voting for the lesser of the two evils, fine. I can’t fault your stance and I understand why you’re doing it. Do what you’ve got to do.”

    This time around Cthulu is the lesser evil; but I’m not quire sure how voting for him instead of Trump or Hilary is supposed to help.

    1. Don’t worry. In the end, the Great Old Ones will always win.

      Then you’ll have the Orange Baboon and the Indo-Paki Licking Cankle kneeling at their feet .. tentacles .. pseudopods .. whatever, while chanting “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!” in unison.

  26. I wonder how many hard red states will go blue. This is going to be horrible, especially if they get Dem Governors. We know for a fact the reverse will not happen to blue states like NY. That was a pipe dream that Trump’s supporters seemed to have (thank you family members). I live in a swing state. You know that will turn blue and we will get a lot of Dem politicians that will cause who knows what amount of damage.

    I cannot in good conscience vote for Trump, it would an affront to too many of my values, and that is ignoring the fact he and Clinton are effectively the same anyway. I will vote for someone else. Either third party or a joke vote for General Zod.

    Side note: coincidentally I went to the supervisor of elections to change my party affiliation. Go Libertarians. Also, thanks Kasich, without you this would not be possible.

    1. I don’t think that Trump and Clinton are the same. Trump’s policies are basically based on whatever gets him the most lulz. Clinton’s policies are based on whatever the highest bidder said they should be based on. This makes a difference, because once they are elected, Trump and Hillary would govern in very different ways. Unfortunately, both of their approaches are going to be terrible, so it’s a lose/lose situation for the rest of us…

      1. Ya the results will be terrible regardless, but hey at least we don’t have Sanders (I hope). That is one silver lining, right?

  27. I’ve got just one quibble with Larry’s post, and that’s the whole “energize the Democrats” argument. The Democrats are ALWAYS in “tyranny”-fighting mode; they see “tyranny” everywhere they look. Life to your average social-justice-bully Democrat is an endless loop of Inglourious Basterds, and it’s always time to take the gloves off.

    So if the Democrats keep on throwing tantrums and rioting and no-platforming and burning and in general continue to act like the savages and brownshirts they are, by September Trump will be looking pretty good in comparison. For certain values of “good” or at least “less bad than the Sea Hag.” Unless the Donks are smart enough to throttle back until November and/or or replace Hillary with somebody borderline sane, in which case we’re still boned, but even harder.

  28. I’ve made a note to get to the range as much as possible to enjoy these waning days of gun rights as much as possible.

  29. Should be interesting to see how the Puppy-kickers try to process the fact that Larry, Sarah, Amanda and Brad are all strongly anti-Trump.

    “You see what those Bad Puppies said? They said Trump wasn’t conservative enough! They want someone literally worse than Hitler!”

    1. It isn’t news for those of us who pay attention Chris. I’ve been pointing out the political divide for sometime.

      1. How many angry stings did the hive-mind give you for that bit of news? Careful, they might unperson you and white out your comments using their clever angry bee Java script. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!

        “Youuuuuuuuu haaaaaaaave beeeeeeeeeen thruuuuuuust frooooooom theeeeee hiiiiiiive!”

        1. I’ve no idea Chris. In terms of people I know online and talk about things with, I think probably most of them. In terms of the whole set of people cheesed off with Rabid antics – I’ve no idea. That is a big a very varied group of people.

      2. Dooooooooo noooooot atteeeeeeeeeeempt tooooooo reeeeeeeeenter theeeee hiiiiiive! Weeeeeee wiiiiiiiill thrussssssssssst aaaaaat youuuuuuuuuuuu wiiiiiiiiiiiith ouuuuuuuuur miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiighy stiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings!

  30. Glad I don’t buy authors by their politics. Will continue enjoying your awesome work, Larry. But what freaking arrogance! A bright shining moment, my ass. Truly a Torling attitude.

  31. At least you’re going to vote, unlike a bunch of asshats (If they are to be believed). Voting is a right and a responsibility we all have, like it or not.

    1. If you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain. I dearly love my right to say “I didn’t vote for the bastard- I voted against him.” And the down-ticket offices aren’t any less of a responsibility.

      1. actualy, I vehemently disagree with that. by voting I’m supporting this ridiculous rigged system of trying to figure out what the hell the lesser evil is. by choosing not to vote, I am protesting our current setup instead of being complicit to it.

        1. And a better system is…? Not Communism. Not Socialism- been tried, both of them, and they suck. Monarchy? Won’t work, not for America, we fought a war to escape one. Aristocratic, Oligarchic, Authoritarian? Dressed up strong-man types. Screw that.

          Actually, our system of selecting political leaders *does* suck, too. It just sucks less than all the others. I’m not any smarter, or even smart as, the men who founded our nation. If it’s the primary system that sucks, go third party and start a better one, or work within the party system to change it. There are people right now trying to do that. Some of them are, or were, even running for office.

          If we don’t vote, as things go right now, we don’t matter. Period. No voices are heard *outside* of that vote. If you voted, you have a stake. The ones elected, they got there because of you. Now I won’t be voting for any of the two-party twits that are at the top of the ballot- as Larry said, so am I (stain on my soul, not gonna do it).

          “Protesting” by not voting won’t work. There’s a hundred thousand other “protesters” who are too sod lazy to get off their molding easy-chairs and pull the lever, too brain dead to care that the rights men fought and died for are being traded in for a gilded cage, too stupid to see that the road they and we are all on ends in the gulag.

          Going all revolutionary and picking a hill or a tower with a load of bullets and a thermos of soup won’t work either. For one, that’s killing fellow Americans trying to hold things together and I am morally, vehemently against that. For another, even if by some miracle we win (and it would take the hand of Himself, no lie), we lose. We lose friends, neighbors, family members, we lose infrastructure…

          Moreover we lose that immensely precious but ill defined tradition of peaceful change of power. That’s one thing that keeps us from being a Third World nation- we don’t change leaders like other people change the toilet paper roll, with a bullet, a riot, and a military junta. So, no haring off to the hills to overthrow the grabbermint.

          What we will do, folks like me, what we *should* do is get involved. Pick a local candidate, know the issues, back him, campaign to get him elected, and hold his bloody feet to the fire and make him keep those campaign promises. Stage a recall election if the bastard flinches from his duty. Hell, run against him if nothing less, and *you* do your duty. Always keep your word, and remember the money you are playing with is *not* yours to give.

          Folks, you might not care about politics, or be sick to death of the whole dirty mess, but politics cares about YOU. It affects YOUR taxes, YOUR freedoms, and YOUR simple ability to live your life unmolested. Mine, too. If we aren’t involved, they get to do what they want. They get to *rule* us, instead of representing us.

          Be the inconvenient man, or woman. Know your facts. Use them ruthlessly. Get off the couch, get involved, and VOTE. It is your civic duty, not just to you, but to all the rest of us and your children, and your children’s children.

          *puts soapbox away before somebody else trips and faceplants on it, too*

  32. A couple of thoughts here. The way I see it we gots the choice is between a crook and a crooked- thug. Now a crook probably won’t bother the average person unless said person sticks his head(and goods) up too high, whereas a crooked-thug maybe just had a bad day and will kick the ass of any and all who happens to step in front of him/her.
    And those who think Trump is too stupid for the job, think about the fact that he took a couple of mil and turned it into big bucks not just once but several times; and the fact that he’s the last man standing… jist sayin’.

    1. He says he took a little money and turned it into a lot. That statement seems to be as true as anything else he has ever said. His father signed for the financing on his early deals. His father used his connections to get the projects set up.

      1. “His father signed for the financing on his early deals. His father used his connections to get the projects set up.”

        Yes, and???? How do you think it works, since you think this isn’t the way the world works?

        The only difference is scale between what any parent does for their children. Cosign a loan. Talk to your friends to see if anyone knows where there might be a job, or an opportunity. Smooth the way.

        And did you object at all when the left make the same argument about Bush?

        This is the way the world works. Money, family lines, connections. Especially in a mobbed up, machine run town like NYC.

        Saying that Trump is somehow deficient because he didn’t somehow accomplish everything on his own from some isolated hole in the ground is foolish. How did you react to Obama’s “You didn’t build this”?

        Arguing about what should have happened is a waste of time. This is what DID happen. This is the world we live in. Trump will be the nominee. How on earth could he be worse than Obama, Sanders, or Hillary?

        Hold your nose, think about england, do whatever it takes, but VOTE against the Democrats.

        nick

      2. It’s kind of hard to vote against the Democrat when the Republican nominee is a Democrat.

  33. I understand Mad Mike is running for World Dictator this November. Since it’s not the president, doesn’t matter that he’s only an naturalized citizen. I’ll sure as hell support him.

    And in case anyone wants to read up on his seriously awesome policies:
    http://www.madmikein2016.com/
    Larry, I think there’s probably a cabinet position there if you want it. Maybe Minister of the Buckets of Money considering your experience as an accountant.

    1. I don’t know if I can support him. I’ll wait to see his selection of “hot redhead in leather” before I can offer my vote.

  34. Why WOULDN’T people gloat at someone who was contemptuous of them from the very start, and just penned a caustic, bitter rant directed at them and their candidate, before declaring essentially that the sky was falling and the world was now ruined forever because of them? There is literally no other response that even makes sense (ignoring maybe, but…why? If it was shared publicly, it seems like fair game to me). What kind of a debate are you going to get against someone still using buzzwords from 6 months ago? When someone is in ‘taking ball, going home’ phase, there is a pretty limited set of responses.

  35. Larry I am a huge fan of you as a writer, both in terms of fiction and in terms of your more political posts. However in this case I disagree with you, respectfully. I am by no means a “low information voter”, I am under no illusion that Trump is in any way a “true conservative” or in fact even a “conservative” under any traditional definition. But like yourself I have also been a registered republican my entire adult life. I vote enthusiastically for Bush in 2000, and voted for him again in 04, though less enthusiastically. I Held my nose to vote for McCain in 08. I respected him as a man and for the sacrifices he made in the war, but as a politician I held him in little regard. However I viewed him as superior to Obama so I “held my nose and voted McCain. In 12 I voted for Romney despite what I saw as seriously liberal leanings and a near complete lack of charisma. And despite supporting the republican party and republican candidates for state and federal offices, despite donations to the party and individual republicans, I can only think of a single issue on which the party has not betrayed its base. Gun rights, and to be honest I don’t think that had anything to do with the party’s leadership. IMHO I beleive the only reason that the republicans have not caved in on gun rights is due to two factors, 1) the absolutely central place gun ownership and gun rights have in american culture and 2) the changing demographics of gun owners, specifically the fact that women are the fastest growing demographic among gun owners. On every other single issue the republican party has surrendered, betrayed its base, or completely ignored what its base want. Name an issue and they have either dropped or spiked the ball. Over regulation? How many new regulations did W add? Government spending? It has increased under every single president since before I was born regardless of party. Entitlement reform? Need I mention Medicare part d? Crony capitalism? Can anyone honestly say the reps are any better on this issue than dems? Even a man I consider to be one of if not the greatest president of the 20th century, Ronald Reagan, legalized over 3 million illegals, which we now know for a fact only spurred further illegal immigration. In fact the only time I can think of when the republican party even attempted to keep its promises were in the 90’s when I was too young to vote. Now don’t get me wrong, Trump was not, by any means, my first choice (personally I was rooting for walker but he never gained any traction) but I do like his style, I do like his focus on immigration and I love his attacks on PC culture. Do I think I’ll agree with his views on Eminent Domain? Hell no. Did I like the comment he made about McCain? Not in the least. Did his little stunt with Jenner annoy me? Yeah quite a bit. But he is unabashedly pro american, more willing to take the fight to the other side than any other candidate I have seen recently, and more importantly he seems to understand the frustrations I and others have with the party which is more than I can say for any other republican. So Come November I will be voting for Trump.

    As to your vote, its not my place to tell any other man how to vote. That’s between you and your conscious. I would suggest however, to you and everyone else who is considering voting third party, or write in, or just staying home to ask yourself this. Do you really think that Trump would be worse for our country than Hillary? If so then by all means go galt this election, vote for the libertarian party candidate, or write in your preferred candidate. But as Perot’s campaign demonstrated any vote for a third party candidate is in effect a vote for the opposition. Is Trump the perfect candidate? Not by a long shot, but why make perfection the enemy of the acceptable or even the slightly less odious?? Trump may well be a bad president, he might even be, as some feel he will be, disastrous. But I can not see any scenario, any situation in which a Trump presidency would not be preferable to having Hillary in the oval office.

    On a final note, regarding electabillity, again I have to disagree. Clinton is not, in any way shape or form a strong candidate IMO. Yes the “Clinton machine” is powerful especially when it was backing up a charming, charismatic candidate like Bill; but Hillary is not her husband. She has won exactly two elections, both in New York in a seat in which she was both preceded and succeeded by fellow democrats, and both times her basic campaign message was “vote for me because I’m bills wife”. Her unfavorable’s with women are nearly as high as Trump’s, she has huge weakness in her background that Trump has already shown himself willing to exploit, and there is, from what I can see a massive enthusiasm gap between her and Trump. In short, I don’t think she has a snowballs chance in hell of winning, but then again I thought the same thing about Obama in 2012, so take my opinion on who the stronger candidate is with a large helping of sodium chloride.

    In any case Larry whether you agree with me or not, I hope that at the very least I have been able to show that not all of Mr Trump’s supporters are unthinking, ignorant, or low information.

    1. Well said.

      Here’s what I’ve concluded much of this comes down to:

      People hate Trump because he is offensive. He offends.

      People love Trump because he is offensive. He is on offense.

      1. Not really
        Those who would vote trump i put them in two categories

        Dump people that finally have a candidate to vote for that speak their unintellectual speech and can understand him, take offense as much as they do and hold his ground offensively as they wouls

        And

        Smart people who have been lied their whole lfe from smooth-talking politicians and they finally have a candidade that doesn’t have the capacity to make elaborate destructive plans (just easer managable blunt ones)

        Those who will not vote for him have measured his idiocy and it was enough

        For those who are still thinking it comes down to the everlasting question: What is ultimatelly better.. An idiot or a crook/

    2. You say that Trump is “pro-American”. However, I’m pretty sure that when Trump says “American”, Clinton says “American” and I say “American”, we’re using the same word for three very different things. Unfortunately, I strongly suspect the first two are closer to each other than to the third.

      1. Thats possible, I cant pretend to see within the mans mind. However I would think based on my knowledge of her history that Clinton, like many modern dems only pays lip service to the idea of being pro-america.

        Furthermore I think that Trumps narcissism is going to end up forcing the man to keep more of his promises or at least attempting to do so, that others might expect. The entire theme of his campaign has in many ways tied Trump’s identity to the health and strength of America going forward. If he fails to “make america great again” it isn’t just an indictment of his policies, but an indictment of him as a man. Personally I think he is far too self centered not to put his full weight behind attempting to do so. BTW, I read an article recently suggesting that Newt Gingrich may be campaigning to become Trumps veep. Im curious if he did indeed pick newt as his running mate, would the inclusion of one of the most effective republicans in the last 20 years (my opinion of the man) on Trumps ticket convince any of you who are considering going galt or voting third party to reconsider?

        1. “Make America great again” is about as firm a policy promise as “Hope and Change”. A fig leaf is enough to keep the promise. More fundamentally, for those voting for the man, if he claims succes, it must be so. That is where their faith is. If you oppose this ideas it is because you’re establishment, anti-American, bought by Goldman Sachs, or if we”re feeling lazy racist or sexist.
          Even if he doesn’t get the wall built, it’s easy enough to blame “them”, because the standard is Trump rather than principles.

  36. I don’t know which one of them is a LESSER evil. I honestly don’t know. one of my friends posted an image on facebook of a child with a fork, about to plug that fork into a double socket with caption of trump vs clinton – top vs bottom socket. and that is pretty much how I feel about our current choices. I’m not voting. i can’t. just… can’t.

    1. The presidency is not the only thing that matters. You can leave that box blank and still vote for the Senators and Congressmen who might be our only chance to rein in whichever Leftist ends up in the big chair.

  37. I have a queston? Theoretically Can rand paul or someone else to unsuspend his campaign for the rest of the primaries? And potentially manage a win at contested convention?

    Clearly social conservatism failed as exected since its idiotic.. Maybe a libertarian might

  38. Republicans seem unable to grasp an obvious fact: cultural consensus precedes law and it’s application towards policy on every level of the American landscape. If there had never been a consensus that free speech had a very high value there never would’ve been a law protecting it. Take away that consensus today and free speech as law will eventually disappear. The same is true of equal protection and due process.

    Control culture, cultural consensus, cultural custom and practice, and you control law. You can even ignore law until law catches up or backs off, as in the case of Prohibition, smoking weed and illegal immigration. When enough people want to do a thing, they just will. The question becomes why they want to do a thing. Is it a true worthy consensus, or is it hate speech mainstreamed into our awareness as “justice.” People have been fooled before. So says Dresden, so warns Orwell 3 years after Dresden.

    The war for law is a culture war. Sometimes these shifts in culture are random perfect storms which emerge by accident, like rock music. Sometimes they are socially engineered by a well-organized activist minority on a crusade, like racial-sexual politics.

    That is a school of identity politics which states “We don’t like where success comes from or what it looks like.” What if you don’t like P-51 Mustangs made by a cisheteropatriarchy and instead insist on noble bi-planes. Failure follows. Identity politics is supremacist dogma disguised as “justice.” Does anyone question the moral right of congressional black, Asian-Pacific and Hispanic caucuses to exist? No. Can a white caucus be allowed to exist, and more importantly, do whites even identify as “whites” and want such a thing? No. That is an upside-down world called “lying.” It is dealing aces from the bottom of the deck.

    The Puppies campaigns have been a microcosm of the last 30 years of American politics. Reason, logic, appeals to fair play, free speech, equal protection, due process; all have failed. This is partially due to fighting old wars against a non-existent “Alinsky” or Marxists and partially due to trying to influence an opposition culture by using facts which never motivated that culture in the first place. You cannot fundamentally use debate tactics against hate; hate doesn’t care about rules. Just ask Europe’s pre-WW II Jews and Poles.

    How can you fundamentally appeal to fair play with a culture happy with an all-female nomination category and unhappy with an all-male category? You cannot play poker against cheaters. There are no equally diverse neighborhoods to the KKK because the KKK has no principles; there are only bad majority black neighborhoods and good majority white neighborhoods. One must be cleansed, the other ignored, just as male SFF must be cleansed and female romance fiction must be ignored. You are dealing with supremacists both in SFF and the Democratic Party, not rule of law and principle. America must face diversity, Latin America and Africa – never. Just yesterday N.K. Jemisin was re-tweeting the vile racist MedievalPoC blog which Tweeted “Wanna draw Asian elves? DO IT!” Just make damn sure you don’t draw a white genii. That would be “cultural appropriation” and “racism.” I defy anyone to tell me what moral ethos can embrace that con game.

    In the case of the Puppies and the Presidential campaign, who finally made the most impact? A trickster and a prankster, both well aware that politics and law follow culture, not the other way round. If you decide you don’t like where this success comes from, you are joining the bi-plane party and are indistinguishable from it, and that’s the point. Do you want the bi-plane or success? Good stuff is where you find it, not where you want it to be or expect it to be. If this is going to be a flat out war devoid of rules of fair play, I’ll take the Mustang.

    The U of Mizzou shows signs of being our first university analogy to Detroit. Eventually, so will all of America when we have double our population, mostly from the Third World, and your grandchildren are pissing on your graves and bi-planes and wishing they’d said “no” while they still could. What did the GOP ever do to “sanctuary cities”? Where was the posturing and influence and blog posts of George Martin when the president of the SFWA was openly promoting racial incitement and incitement to hate men and calling it “justice” and “SFF”? The Rabid Puppies appear and suddenly GRRM understands “group defamation” just fine, but not when vicious racists who publicly call GRRM a racial “xenophobe” at Salon win Nebula and Hugo nominations. Too late to say “no,” George. Way too late. If your career started today you’d be white cisheteropatriarchy dead meat. It’s amazing how much GRRM and Mike Glyer admire Jack Vance and Ray Bradbury even while they provide covering fire for others to piss on them.

    Don’t be a GRRM.

  39. The authoritarian who was the only one between him, Hilary, Kasich, and Cruz not to solicit delegates and instead actually listen to the will of the people.

    The “He didn’t have to” line didn’t work. Neither did Hilary. She did.

    Have you ever stopped and wondered if the people voting for Trump were not, in fact morons? Did you wonder “Why?” Why did they do it? I know why I did: The supposed “party outsider”, Cruz, proved that he was just as much of an insider as everybody else.

    Gotta disagree with you on this one, Larry.

    1. The supposed “party outsider”, Cruz, proved that he was just as much of an insider as everybody else.

      People KEEP on saying that, but they never produce any evidence. Would you please be an exception? Because I’ve heard “Oh, Cruz isn’t really an outsider” from several people now, and I STILL don’t know why the heck they think that.

      1. Cruz is generally despised in Texas even among Republicans. He barely won the general election for the Senate against someone that had basically no funding. Not to mention his appearing to be a smart ass TV preacher/carpetbagger from Canada…

        The Trump vote comes from 2 decades of frustration with the Repubi-crats and the lack of any effective national leadership. There’s a large number of angry middle class that wouldn’t mind if DC and that ilk got wiped out overnight by an asteroid. There’s a reason gun sales are at an all time high.

      2. He did what Clinton did and what Kasich did: Tried to solicit delegates despite the people voting against it.

        Meanwhile the Republican party, in a desperate bid to stop Trump, went all in behind him.

        You’d have to be blind not to see it.

        He also went straight to the SJW talking points when he thought it could get him political points. He’s no different than everybody else.

        1. I’ve seen a lot of people suggesting that the Republican party establishment would rather have Trump than Cruz, and to that end sabotaged Cruz. Certainly there is a view that Kasich, the establishment candidate that held out the longest, sabotaged Cruz to get a shot at being Trump’s VP. Likewise, I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that Trump starts aping the SJW talking points when it can gain him political points, such as his waffling on the NC law.

          There are strong arguments to be made for both cases; acting like your view is obviously correct does nobody any good. Also, keep in mind you’re still getting your news through a liberal-dominated media; we all need to keep in mind that our perspectives on both Cruz and Trump are likely warped by that distortion.

          I’ve actually started seeing some good arguments that Trump truly is a lesser evil than letting Hillary take office. That’s better than having the most persuasive arguments against Trump being the arguments of his supporters uncritically looking at him through rose-colored glasses that don’t address his flaws.

          1. Likewise, I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that Trump starts aping the SJW talking points when it can gain him political points, such as his waffling on the NC law.

            Trump didn’t come into this with a reputation as a conservative hardliner. Cruz did.

            Yes, Trump has some non-conservative opinions. I don’t agree with anybody about everything. But Trump is a party outsider. Cruz is not. He proved that the day he stopped caring what the people thought and started soliciting delegates.

            There are strong arguments to be made for both cases; acting like your view is obviously correct does nobody any good.

            Then tell Larry to take his post down. If he does not, I don’t see any grounds to complain because of one line I wrote in a casually tossed off blog comment.

            I didn’t say there were no good reasons to support Cruz. I said one would need to be blind not to notice that the Republican party threw their weight behind him when it became clear the alternative was Trump. I stand by that.

            That’s better than having the most persuasive arguments against Trump being the arguments of his supporters uncritically looking at him through rose-colored glasses that don’t address his flaws.

            Well, you’re clearly not addressing me here.

            For me, the proof can’t get any simpler. When push came to shove, just like Hilary, just like Kasich, Cruz went under the noses of the validly obtained votes of the people and tried to steal delegates. I don’t care if that is technically in the rules. The whole point of the system is to listen to the people’s votes and act accordingly. But Cruz tried to game it. Trump did not.

            More than that, Cruz’s whole plan was to force a brokered convention. His battle strategy eventually turned into a plan where he depended on becoming the candidate against the express wishes of the people. I am not supporting somebody who does that.

            To answer the inevitable question: No, if Trump won via brokered convention, I would not support him. I would not vote. It’s a mockery of our political system.

          2. “one would need to be blind not to notice that the Republican party threw their weight behind him”
            Really. When, exactly, did they do that? He got only a handful of endorsements, and Kasich stayed in the race. Peter King, establishment New York Republican, publicly slammed him. Boehner, the epitome of the establishment, slammed Cruz and spoke in favor of Trump right before the Indiana primary.
            You are inventing a fantasy with no connection to what really happened. Or, more bluntly: you are lying.

            “Cruz went under the noses of the validly obtained votes of the people and tried to steal delegates”
            So, just like the other Trumpkins, you don’t actually understand how our electoral system works and simply throw out false claims of “stealing delegates.” Another tired, contemptible lie.

            A brokered convention is not a “mockery of our political system.” It is something that has occurred many times throughout our history. In fact, it is far more normal than our modern trend of candidates being chosen before the convention ever arrives. So, in addition to being a liar, you’re also a historical illiterate.

            And I love all this ranting about “the wishes of the people.” Cultural Marxist language at its finest. Our political system is actually set up to _thwart_ populist mass-movements, because the Founders (in their great wisdom) recognized the danger of mob rule. And of course claiming that Trump was “the wish of the people” is fundamentally dishonest given that a majority of Republicans opposed him and voted for other candidates.

            So, in sum, you’re a liar and a fool who uses Marxist/SJW rhetoric to excuse your rejection of a real conservative in favor of a progressive authoritarian con-man.

          1. Translation: I’m still butthurt Cruz lost. Boo-hoo.

            Sorry, the pretend moral high ground thing failed to impress me a long time ago. Nice try, though.

            When Cruz started playing the “Well Trump is more racist and sexist than me, and also women shouldn’t ever be punished for abortions ever” cards, that would have been it for me even after he started courting delegates.

            Grow up. Using “Sir” when you accuse somebody of being a liar doesn’t make you polite. It makes you pretentious. At least own it.

          2. It’s both funny and disturbing that Trumpkins exactly replicate the behavior of SJWs: Lying, projecting, and doubling down.
            Just more proof that Trumpkinism, like SJWism, is a cult.

          3. Also, with regard to this: “Well Trump is more racist and sexist than me, and also women shouldn’t ever be punished for abortions ever”

            Please, cite specific quotes? I’m betting they don’t say what you claim they say. But rather inconveniently for you, in fact Trump _is_ a sexist pig who treats women contemptibly, as he’s demonstrated many times during this campaign. And he _is_ supported by the KKK, other white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and alt-right racialist cranks — we’ve seen them show up in Larry’s Facebook and they’ve outright swarmed the National Review comment boards many times.

            As for women not being legally punished for abortions… that is the default position of the conservative pro-life movement and has been for many, many decades. Trump, who is not actually pro-life, did not know that. Do you not know it either?

      3. “I STILL don’t know why the heck they think that”
        That would be because it is a nonsensical lie they tell themselves in order to justify their betrayal of their own principles. There’s no reality behind it.

    2. *sigh*
      The usual tired anti-Cruz nonsense that always gets trotted out. Wholly disconnected from reality, and nothing more than a desperate ploy to dodge responsibility for failing to support the one true Constitutional conservative in the race.

      1. Cruz lobbied for delegates, and he planned to take the nomination via brokered convention rather than listen to the will of the people.

        This is undeniably true. That you’re an extremely rude fanboy doesn’t change that.

        1. Will of the People?

          Even now, Trump only has a plurality of the vote, and not a majority of it. Claiming that Trump’s ascension was the “will of the people” is worse than the press with its usual “mandate” nonsense whenever a Dem is narrowly elected president.

        2. The “will of the people” is Marxist claptrap. And also a lie, since Trump won only a minority of the vote.
          Not to mention that contested conventions are a normal part of our political process, not some scandalous aberration.

        3. Oh, and I also love the “fanboy” put-down, another standard Leftist/SJW arguing trick where you try to deny the validity of your opponent’s viewpoints. We can’t possibly be principled conservatives who supported the most conservative candidate in the race… no, we must be mere “fanboys.”
          And here again, the Trumpkin projects. For it is the pro-Trump side that from the beginning (long before any recent nonsense about delegates) has followed its leader with the slavish loyalty of a cult, disregarding all evidence, argument, and logic.

    3. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I grew up in New York State. My father was involved in the construction industry, and my first jobs were in construction. Unless you were talking to union or mafia thugs, both of which you could find sniffing around non-union jobs & shops that wanted nothing to do with them, Trump was already synonymous with scum back in the early 80s. He hasn’t changed. He’s just a much of a piece of shit as Killary, and anyone ignoring his past because he’s pandering to them now is a blinkered fool.

  40. I am becoming increasingly convinced that Trump and Clinton have been replaced by Kang and Kodos.

  41. A good sign that many have now moved from denial to anger. Bargaining is next. Acceptance will eventually come, and well before November.

    The Republican Party has grown accustomed to holding its nose to vote for the bland moderate to liberal career politician chosen by the party leadership. Is it really so shocking that the voters have finally overridden the will of the leadership to choose a charismatic businessman who legitimately made billions in the real estate industry over a failed CEO, a brain surgeon, and 14 typical politicians?

  42. I would note that voting “against” someone is not as motivating as some might think. If they don’t like someone, the average Joe will just stay home, since he is not excited to go vote. A pox on both their houses and all. Only super hard-core people would likely go to the polls to stop Trump. And there are far fewer of those types than advertised. You see how well the “against” strategy worked for National Review. If anything, it seems to have motivated folks to vote for Trump t stick it to the self-righteous elites.

  43. Whoever is President will have a chance to place upwards of 5 Supreme Court justices. That could skew rulings for a generation. Given that possibility, does that change anyone’s decision about voting or not voting?

    1. Lets see there is Hillary a life long Liberal and Trump a life long Liberal, both support gun bans (Trump did until March 2016 when Brett Baier called him on it), both support Single Payer (Trumped believed in it until July 2015 when he got called on it after a nationally televised interview in Jun 2015), Both believe in Amnesty for illegal aliens, both support Liberal Activist Judges (Remember he thinks his far left Federal Judge sister will be great on SCOTUS), Both believe in higher taxes (Trump would raise the corporate tax rate to pay for Single Payer Healthcare)… I’m not seeing where the difference comes from to change my mind. Also please don’t insult my intelligence and try the tired “Well he changed his position” crap, he didn’t, he just lied to you and some of those lies he has already flipped back to the liberal position. Donald J. Trump is a life long Liberal that has funded liberal politicians and supported liberal policies his whole life. He gave $100,000 to Hilary’s foundation, thought she was a “great” Senator (Look it up, research his past) and Bill Clinton has stated that Trump has been good for the Clinton’s. Trump didn’t start giving money to Republicans until Obama insulted him back in 2011 at the White House Correspondents diner: http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/02/10/populist-tide-sweeps-trump-and-sanders-to-win-in-new-hampshire/ , however Trump never gave up his Liberal ideals, he is just conning us to get revenge for the blow he ttok to his giant ego from another giant ego.

    2. It’s certainly a factor in my thinking.

      If Trump picks somebody with a solid Republican background that hasn’t been a Trump sycophant as his VP, I think it’s a good sign that he’s willing to work with the Republican party enough that I’d be willing to wager his Supreme Court picks will be as good as those of any other Republican (which is to say, marginally more likely to be conservative than liberal). If he wins and Republicans hold Congress, Trump’s immunity from media attacks seems likely to carry over to any SC nominee, so, if anything, if he’s willing to work with the Republicans he may be better than an establishment Republican at picking SC justices. I think media pressure is why so many Republican Supreme Court nominees have been so bad.

      If Trump picks a RINO or a Trump sycophant as VP, then I’ll wager his nominees would be as bad as Clinton’s, which will depend on who controls Congress.

      1. I suspect that Trump, not having a firm political ideology, would use SCOTUS noms as bargaining chips to make deals. This seems to be in keeping with his past actions and apparent priorities. Trading his first nom for something that can be claimed as a victory on “The Wall” strikes me as a relatively likely action.

    3. It’s really the same argument. Do I pick the dedicated leftist, or spin the wheel? The evidence indicates that, at best, Trump is a populist, with few long standing committed political principles. I’ve no reason to believe the views he espouses today won’t have changed by the time he’s dealing with SCOTUS.

      Even then, I’ve no faith that a judge who appears to be acceptable at time of nomination won’t go around inventing new rights and retroactively rewriting laws. At best we get “spin the wheel” anyway.

  44. I think I’m going to go Feel the Johnson this fall. Gary Johnson 2016!

    I dislike Hillary, but… I can’t vote for Trump. I just can’t. I predict Trump Republicans will rue the day he ever became the nominee.

    1. I think the #NeverTrump-ers will rue it more if he doesn’t, in a cycle or two, when the next rebellion candidate who comes down the pipe is ten times worse. Ron Paul was amazing, there was basically nothing at all wrong with him, and the establishment sank the guy. But the public’s feelings didn’t disappear with his campaign hopes. They won’t disappear if you sink Trump either. They will only escalate, the more frustrated they become. On a blog that probably contains a disproportionately high population of Tea Party supporters, I would think this would be a place that understood that better than anything.

      I don’t blame people for voting their conscience. You can’t really ask anyone to do anything more. But I do worry that some people’s ‘conscience’ is far too wrapped up in egoism or spite, or even the Republican equivalent of virtue signaling. Obviously, it’s not easy to make this distinction (though there are generally a few tells). I don’t really judge anyone right now, because Larry and Co. are just angry that their dude dude lost, and are blogging the pain out. We have probably all done that at some point. I do hope that people will come to their senses over the coming months though.

      And just to note, I’m not even a huge fan of Trump. He was number FOUR on my list of hopefuls in the beginning (Cruz > Paul > Walker > Trump). I don’t think he’s a ‘conservative,’ in the modern definition, but to be honest, we don’t even really have a good idea what that word means anymore. I don’t agree with him on everything (although most of the policies I disagree with him on at least are — comparatively — trifles), but I just don’t think he’s as bad as people insist.

      1. I don’t have serious disagreements with the policies posted on Trumps page. Just don’t see any evidence he’ll hold to them.

      2. People keep saying “Oh, you’re just angry that your guy lost.” While I would confess anger and disappointment that Cruz didn’t make it through, my determination to never vote for Trump came well before Cruz losing. It came because of how often Trump would back off of any conservative position he would take during his campaign. Sometimes it would take weeks, such as with Trump’s willingness to set up “touchback amnesty” after he builds the wall: anyone here illegally will be welcome back with a path to citizenship if they go home first. But oftentimes, he would back off his statement within *minutes* of stating his position.

        He’s clearly leftist to his core. I cannot trust him. And I decided early on that I CANNOT support him, even if (which, at the time, I believed to be unlikely) Trump somehow squeaked through the nomination process.

        Well, here we are. Trump has squeaked through the nomination process. Yes, I’m angry about it. But am I supposed to change my mind now, just because I’m angry about Cruz losing?

        Oh, heck! Why didn’t I realize this before?!? Trump’s entire campaign is fueled by the premise that the Republican Establishment and the Delegate System is screwing us over, and we’re angry, so we’re going to burn it down! How many people voted for Trump because they are angry? Yet their voices are supposed to be heard, because they are angry, DARN IT!

        Yet, if we’re angry because Cruz lost, we should be ignored, because we’re just crybabies who want to take our ball and go home. Isn’t this a bit of a contradiction?

        Of course, it SHOULDN’T matter: Trump has already said he could become President, even if he can’t unite the Republican party behind him. If this is the case–if Trump isn’t lying–then why should anyone care what we #NeverTrump people think? He doesn’t need us! Yet we’re nonetheless supposed to get behind him, because…well…he’s the nominee now, and if we don’t get in line, insults will surely come our way, I guess.

  45. Never underestimate Hillary Clinton’s ability to blow an election. 08 should have been a cake walk for her but she blew it big time. Trump’s an asshole but he’s a likeable asshole. Hillary just comes off as fake and phoney. I think her appeal to women is grossly overestimated and I question her appeal in a general election to minorities. She’s old news. Trump is and shiny and new.

  46. First time poster here but long time lurker. Enjoyed your first two MH books and the first two Grimnoir books but haven’t read much new SF/Fantasy for several years now.

    Brief background so you may understand where I am coming from. Don’t much like arguments based on authority but I have the graduate degrees in pol. science (undergrad is economics), work and teach in the field including pubs, and have worked on elections at the local, state, and federal levels in the past before going to graduate school. My hobby is watching and reading about politics—some people watch birds while I watch politicians and I have read dry tomes like the Almanac of American Politics for fun and research. My current research is focusing more on political history at the moment. I supported Cruz but may vote for Trump. I also am agnostic about whether Trump can win or whether other candidates would have been better. BTW, those head to head matchups during nomination races are largely worthless polling–they tend to reflect the grass is always greener phenomenon. Right now a generic Republican versus a generic Dem will be right at whatever the populace feels about those parties, not the individuals in them.

    With Hillary and Trump as presumptive nominees, we should see better head to head polling. Second, ignore those that do not screen for registered voters (all people polls skew several percent Dem) other than to measure trends for that pollster only. Mixing voter screens is a cardinal sin when prediction other than trends. A critical special sauce in polling is determining who is going to vote in Nov. –widespread trends toward early and absentee balloting complicates matters. Events, domestic and worldwide, will also play a part. For those worrying about wipeout, don’t. Ironically, if Hillary appears unbeatable, it may strengthen Rep voting in Senate and House races. Contrawise, it may be worse for Rep. Senate and House candidates if Trump appears winning. Wipeouts with strong coattails in the past have only occurred when the incumbent WH party is viewed poorly–1896, 1920, 1932, 1980, 2008. Pres. year gubernatorial races are basically idiosyncratic with weak party influence. Hillary will be treated more or less as the incumbent in this race and will receive blame or credit accordingly.

    Now, on to my main point in this word wall posting. please recognize that most of your posters and you, Mr. Correia, represent what political scientists call ideological voters. BTW, I also include myself as ideological. That is not meant as an insult. It varies a bit depending on definitional differences but roughly 10-15 percent of the electorate view politics and policy according to a deductive policy framework about how the world works. Thus, an axiom might be a smaller government produces better outcomes than a larger one. Thus, an rightist ideologue expects that lower government spending will produce a better outcome with more individual liberty and greater societal wealth over time. Now, an opposite empirical result causes cognitive dissonance–rarely will ideologues reexamine basic principles for truth and thus usually the blame is on the policy implementors (they screwed it up), the citizenry (they are idiots and messed up our wonderful plans), or double down on a particular policy (if they had gotten rid of all government then everything would be fine). To blame one’s principle as wrong threatens one’s whole worldview about how the world works and risks undermining one’s own identity. Note apostates among ideologues are the ones that denounce their former comrade-in-arms most vociferously. Comments such as “I did not leave them, they left me” or “I realized that I was the only honest one in the group”, or “they are traitors to the cause” and so on. Most of that is simply post hoc editorializing because people hate to be wrong or be on the “wrong” side including political campaigns, sports teams, etc.

    Most voters in society, roughly 85-90 percent, view politics as contextual. They have outcome preferences and may acquire policy preferences if forced to because it affects them. Example, most people prefer peace to violence. But, they may not understand that a given policy such as gun confiscation may lead to more violence and not less. However, like in Germany and Austria, events where the new “refugees” are causing mayhem, native Germans and Austrians react first by trying to acquire firearms. Later, their ideas of whether disarmament of the civilian population is an optimal policy for their government to pursue becomes grist for the political arenas. Now, ideologues might insist that the problem is not enough gun control, or that security forces need even more power to disarm citizens, or that violence really is not up due to refugees, etc. These individuals would rather society collapse around them then than commit bad think by embracing reality. Ordinary Joes and Josephines don’t have such a vested interest and if the right politician chooses to be a policy entrepreneur supporting a change in policy to reflect reality for the populace better and the Joes and Josephines buy it then govt. policy changes. Note, this is a democracy, the problem with dictatorships in general is they cannot admit failure else it literally shakes the foundations of the regime itself (see the long history of Soviet agriculture policy for example). BTW, you also see this behavior in bureaucracies (see TSA security theater for example).

    Thus, low information voters as they are called may not have a candidate preference but they do have outcome preferences and will choose to pick the candidates that seemingly have policies that will follow their outcome preferences.
    Now, the ideologues converse with each other in dialectic (if the truth one is seeking does not truly threaten their personal axioms) or in pseudo-dialectic (if they cannot permit central tenets of their philosophy to be challenged). Losing either an argument or in describing an event often causes the ideologue to lose their “stuff” and devolve into rhetoric such as name calling. Rhetoric and sometimes pseudo dialectic, on the other hand, best reflects what the non-ideologues use to determine political candidates. A skilled master of rhetoric thus can become a demagogue by swaying the masses (btw a demagogue is not always bad just like rhetoric or guns–it depends on the person wielding the tool for what purpose). I believe personally that is why most very high IQ politicians struggle as they try to use dialectic arguments when their opponent uses rhetoric.

    The best rhetoric is that which reflects a truth unearthed through dialectic arguments. For example, small government is rhetorical shorthand for a pseudo dialectic of less government means less cost to taxpayers and more liberty as government is too small and weak to force leader preferences on others apart from the popular will. However, the dialectic argument becomes very complex. For example, is it true that then no government is the best of all worlds (anarchists or extreme libertarians) or that in the absence of government you will beg for even a cruel master (Hobbes). A dialectic conversation will then have axioms about how people behave in differing conditions, etc. This is why few people find theory interesting–done correctly it attempts to address all possible conditions and variables in an attempt to be a comprehensive description of how the world works. Political empiricists, which is what I am, use theory to test whether these predictions are valid and if exceptions exist. Now, apart from my specialty, even I as an ideologue (or Hayek, or Adam Smith, etc.) know that no one has the time to dialectically examine every single assumption in their life even in politics. E.g. I assume that no one would be elected to the Presidency today without spending any money and I assume, ceterus paribus, that spending more money for ads and organization to run for the Presidency produces better results than spending less aka common wisdom. I have not bothered in presidential races to examine this ( I have in congressional primary elections though–at least in those races that I examined, it appears that the spending function is cubic in orientation rather than exponential, linear, etc.).

    Thus, even ideologues are low information about much of how the world actually works outside of their specialty–journalists are probably the most public of these. We all are limited in our time, our tolerance for detailed examination of how stuff works, our intelligence, our tools to examine reality, etc. So, temper your reaction to those holding different opinions–they may well be correct.

    I part with this quote,
    “I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.”

    Benjamin Franklin about the new Constitution at the convention.

    Sorry about the long post but just like Mr. Correia finds a lot of posting about firearms ridiculous based on his knowledge, I find the same on politics.

    1. Dialectics = the worst of Hegel married to the worst of Merx. Your university “education” done brainwashed you good.

  47. So… once again, the forces of conservatism are being shit on. Nothing new there. So what do we do about it over the next four years, just roll over and take it?

    1. It’s time we fight back! But we’ll only succeed if we have superior firepower, and we’re only going to have that if I could get my Robot Army put together….

      Unfortunately, due to lack of funds and a lack of time, my Robot Army currently consists of a single analog robot made from the case of a fried Gameboy Color that once sort-of walked in a lopsided way.

      Yeah, it’s going to be a LOOOONG four years! 🙁

  48. One thing that I think gets overlooked here is that we’re still a couple of months out from November. A lot can change in that time. I’ve cited Trump’s VP pick as a signal he will have to send that the media can’t do much to distort and he can’t waffle on. There’s also the potential Hillary indictment and the continuing Sanders rebellion.

    Never is a very strong word. Most if not all of us here are Science Fiction fans. If you can’t come up with a scenario where voting for Trump (to make sure Hillary loses) is morally acceptable, you’re not trying, though I will admit I live in a swing state and realize it is a lot harder for residents of an always-Republican or always-Democratic state. If you want a starting place, take ‘Hillary announces Elizabeth Warren as VP, and she accepts while wearing a Che t-shirt, while Trump announces Scott Walker as VP and that he will appoint Cruz to the Supreme Court and Larry Correia as head of the BATFE while donating a billion dollars towards the election of Tea Party approved down-ballot congressional candidates’.

    In fact, I can come up with a scenario where I vote for Hillary, though it requires space aliens, the zombie corpse of Joseph Stalin, and the Anti-Christ on team Trump, and SMOD and Cthulhu being disqualified for not being US citizens.

    1. If you are looking for signs then how about hiring a George Soros guy to be his financial manger for his campaign today? Or how about stating he his tax plan is nothing more than his starting point for when he works a deal with Democrats? Or how about stating he is open to reneging on his campaign promise of not raising the minimum wage even before he gets elected? He has done all that since wining in Indiana and at least Obama kept his campaign promises until after he got elected, not like Trump who is doing it after just securing the his nomination.

      1. Let’s look at the first story you mentioned, which I found for you at http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-05/trump-picks-former-goldman-partner-and-soros-employee-finance-chairman

        On the one hand, Trump’s been critical of Goldman Sachs, so it’s somewhat hypocritical of him to hire a former employee of theirs. Then again, there are a lot of ways this can still be justifiable. Apparently he’s a long time associate of Trump’s, so Trump obviously knows and trusts him.

        On the other hand, saying ‘George Soros guy’ is a bit disingenuous; George may very well hire people of different political leanings. The article I found says nothing about Mnuchin’s politics, and he’s not being hired for a policy position, he’s being hired to help with the campaign’s finances. It also says nothing about when Mnuchin worked for Soros, and nothing about what capacity. At this point, evidence might be ‘who has Mnuchin donated to, and when did he donate? Is he on record with any political statements?’ I don’t have time to research that, and most people don’t. If you’re going to make the accusation, spend the time to do the research so you can make a specific accusation, don’t just throw vague smears, because even when you are right people won’t pay attention to you.

        This is up there with the ‘Ted Cruz’s wife worked for Goldman Sachs’ argument. Can you demonstrate where the actual conflict of interest is? Is Cruz in a committee that oversees Goldman Sachs? Has he taken any actions as Senator which would benefit Goldman Sachs? (On the other hand, we know that Clinton made judgements as Secretary of State which benefited parties which had recently donated to the Clinton Foundation, so the conflict of interest is obvious.)

        1. Before I get called on it, the article has a line “Where it gets even more bizarre is that Mnuchin has donated frequently to Democrats, including to Clinton and Barack Obama.” The line includes a link to the OpenSecrets.org page listing his donations. Without following the link, based on that line, what do you expect to find?

          Now follow the link and take a look through the donation record. The last time he donated to Hillary was 2007, and the only donation to Obama was 2004. Meanwhile, since 2010, the only Democrat he’s donated to is Michael Wildes, who’s listed as the mayor of Englewood, NJ. In the same period, he’s donated to Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee.

          The statement “Mnuchin has donated frequently to Democrats, including to Clinton and Barack Obama” is true, but misleading. His donation record looks like that of someone that shifted from Democrat to Republican over time. (I’m not dedicated enough to look into why he donates to the Mayor of Inglewood, NJ, while living in CA, but it doesn’t concern me, and it doesn’t seem as good an indicator of national political leanings as a donation to the RNC.)

          I’ve been very open about my concern that the media manipulates politics without lying, and I think this provides a good example of what I’m talking about.

          1. You do realize that Trump made a promise to self fund? That the point of hiring this guy is to in the words of Donald J. Trump be bribed by these donors to be a shill? You know Obama at least didn’t have the gall to break 4 campaign promises within 24 hours of securing the nomination, he at least waited until he was in office. If you want to place your head in the sand and hope that the magic beans Trump has been selling is real go ahead, I done my part and warned you, then when you cry later well I will be the one to say I told you so. http://www.dailywire.com/news/5486/4-signs-last-24-hours-trump-suckered-conservatives-ben-shapiro

          2. As I’ve said, I’m not sure whether or not I’ll vote for Trump. I want people to make smart decisions. That requires looking at actual evidence.

            I’ve already looked at the whole ‘Soros guy’ claim, and from what I can tell, neither you, nor the article you linked to, provides anything to contradict what I published on that count. In fact, it all fits in with what I said about the media twisting facts. That count tells me nothing about Trump, but it does tell me the author of the piece is either lazy or deceitful.

            As for the others, you’ll note the article provides no dates and no way to get the full quotes with context. I don’t have the time to do your work for you and look those up. People change opinions all the time. Is somebody who changes his mind all the time necessarily trustworthy? No, and that’s a strike against Trump. But it’s not automatically hypocrisy. More importantly, the person making the argument in the article doesn’t give us the full picture.

          3. I think my original point is being lost in the noise.

            Yes, Trump is a horrible candidate. Yes, he’s demonstrated no loyalty to Republican, conservative, or libertarian principles. Still, we Republicans / Conservatives / Libertarians need to look at this from a long-term perspective with the knowledge that there’s no good options at this point, but we still have opportunities to make the bad options better. Trump is running for president for a reason, and is willing to spend time, effort, and money to that end.

            There’s a saying from the Art of War, “When you surround the enemy, always allow them an escape route. They must see that there is an alternative to death.” Saying ‘Never Trump’ is cutting that escape route off. If there’s absolutely nothing Trump could do (not say, do, we’ll get to this in a second) to persuade you he’s no worse a candidate than even establishment Republican squishes like Romney or McCain, there’s no point to him even trying, and we end up with nothing. Even if you hate Trump and have no intention of actually voting for him once you get to that anonymous November ballot, moving him in a more conservative or libertarian direction is a good thing, because he might win, and the only way we’re going to get him to shift right is to give him a reason to do so.

            To the Trump supporters (enthusiastic or reluctant) out there: rightly or wrongly, nobody that’s not already going to vote for Trump believes that Trump is being honest, so anything he says is not going to persuade anyone (that’s not to say he won’t pick up more voters, the Hate Clinton campaign is strong). Whatever Trump says, he can (and has) changed his mind (or ‘clarified his position’) in the past. The difference in doing things is things which are done have a cost and can’t be taken back or changed (for example, Trump donating a bunch of money to Republican congressional campaigns would indicate he recognizes there are other Republican candidates). Trump supporters need to come up with things the Trump campaign can do to indicate to the rest of us that he’s at least recognizing the people that he wants to vote for him, then make sure those requests are vocalized because if they are vocalized enough, the campaign itself will notice. If you want Trump to win or Hillary to lose, throwing away potential votes because nobody believes your candidate is a bad thing, and at this point, only concrete actions are believable.

            Just because there’s almost certainly a train wreck coming doesn’t mean we can’t take heroic (and, admittedly, likely futile) actions to try to minimize the damage.

  49. Been an off and on again lurker for a while. I concur completely with this post.

    We are hosed. It will take an Act of God to stop the train wreck I see coming. I can’t believe so many idiots bought this guys BS. I’ll hold my nose and vote for him just as I held my nose and voted for McCain and Romney, both big government RINOs. I cannot not vote. Too many men, and not a few women, paid the price for me to have that right. I will not dishonor their memory by not voting. Don’t know what good it will do, though …

    I don’t know if we can survive four years Trump, but I’m certain we won’t if Clinton wins. Hopefully, the evidence the FBI finds will be so overwhelming that she is indicted and prosecuted.

  50. My philosophy is that there are no good options this year. Or inoffensive options. Or respectable ones. So it makes no sense to beat anyone over the head for not picking my particular no-good, offensive, disrespectful option.

    That said, I’m voting for Gasoline. Not because Gasoline is necessarily my favorite, but because his running-mate, Matches, has some really good ideas. Although I am open to being convinced by the Smith/Wesson 2016 campaign.

  51. I loathe Trump, but, that said, if there is no viable (and by that, I mean actually capable of winning) third party candidate, and at this point it doesn’t look like there is, I will have to vote for him. I understand Larry’s belief that his conscience won’t let him vote Trump. But mine won’t let me do what I take to be the voting equivalent of sticking my fingers in my ears and going “La La La La”. Being an adult, at least to me, means taking to heart the phrase, “Suck It Up, Cupcake!” In life, you can only choose from the available options and sometimes the choice isn’t between what’s good and what’s bad, it’s between what’s bad and what’s worse. And it doesn’t get much worse than someone who has already committed multiple acts within kissing distance of treason. Say what you will about Trump, and I do, at least he hasn’t left four men – including a “friend” – to die and then lied to cover up his own incompetence. He hasn’t deliberately set up an extra-governmental intelligence network comprised of people so corrupt even Obama wouldn’t hire them. He hasn’t sold access to State and trafficked in confidential, secret, top secret, and above top secret information on a secret, unsecured, private server in exchange for cash. It isn’t just that Clinton is corrupt – we’ve known that for ages. It’s that she’s compromised. Foreign governments’ intelligence agencies (unlike our own, apparently) were not asleep at the switch. If Guccifer got her emails, so did the Russians, Norks, Chinese and Iranians. Any and all of them will attempt to blackmail her with what they know and she, unlike Trump, will fold like one of her ugly, overpriced pantsuits. She at least has pretensions of being respectable. As unlikeable as she is, she has to. Trump has no such problem, as we have daily proof. While Trump may have many things in his past most normal people would be embarrassed by, he is quite unabashedly shameless. Blackmail him for committing adultery? Hell, he’ll brag to his wife and the woman’s husband about it, and on national TV to boot. Catch him in the Oval Office with an intern? He’ll brag about how she found his alpha male charisma irresistible and all the other men in Washington are just losers – Sad! He’d have a grand old laugh. You can’t shame the shameless and, therefore, you can’t blackmail them either. And as detestable a man as he is, I absolutely will not “stand on principle” knowing that, by failing to look at a hideous choice straight on and CHOOSE, I help put a woman like Hillary in office. What wouldn’t she do to keep power? What wouldn’t she either give or allow to stop the inevitable blackmail? What secrets wouldn’t she sell after she leaves office?

    1. Sigh another person that bought the magic beans. Trump is a Liberal, he has been one all his life and everything you abhor in Hillary, Trump will or would do himself. A vote for Trump is a vote to ban Assault weapons, a vote to raise taxes, a vote to nominate Liberal judges to the Supreme Court and a vote for Single Payer healthcare. Every promise he has made during the campaign he will break, hell he didn’t even wait 24 hours after securing the nomination before breaking 4 of them. The whole vote for Trump so Hillary won’t be President is a garbage one. http://www.dailywire.com/news/5474/5-arguments-voting-trump-and-why-they-fail-ben-shapiro

      1. I suspect the argument isn’t that Trump would be better than Hillary, but that Hillary is known to be committed to a set of strongly left leaning policies, while Trump is known to be committed to Trump and everything else is a question mark.

      2. I didn’t “buy the magic beans”. You are obviously replying to a post you either didn’t read or didn’t comprehend. I have no doubt that Trump is a lifelong liberal Democrat who will make all the same bad policy decisions as Clinton. The post was not about what Trump might do but about what Hillary has already done. If a third party candidate 1) shared my views and 2) was actually competitive in the race, I’d vote for him. But, there isn’t. So the choice we are actually facing right now is, on a practical level, one between Trump and Hillary. And I am absolutely not going to vote for a woman who, as a matter of absolute historical fact, deliberately jeopardized national security so she could make some easy money. Not to mention that she did this when she was already stinking rich. It wasn’t like she was selling secrets to scrounge up money for her kid’s cancer treatments or anything. Nor will I waste a potential vote against her by voting for an unelectable third party candidate if that vote could instead go towards a candidate who might actually beat her. It is a tactical vote, not an endorsement, a fact you should have been able to glean if you possessed even a minimal degree of reading comprehension.

        1. Yeah, that’s not a tactical vote–except, possibly, in the sense that charging directly into the cannon’s mouth is a tactical decision.
          Furthermore, you’re mistaking tactics for strategy.

          1. “Charging directly into the canon’s mouth”
            …ignoring what a useless and ludicrous analogy that is, I’d like to ask you a question. What is your alternative? Jump to the side? How? No, you seem to think that (again, assuming your ridiculous analogy is reasonable) it’s a better idea to simply stand still in front of the cannon as it fires. At least if we use your analogy, that’s what a third party vote or a refusal to vote amounts to. Thankfully the analogy *isn’t* valid, and you were just spewing bile to score Internet points by mocking a person who made a perfectly polite, reasonable statement of opinion that you happen to find irritating. Next time try addressing the reason you disagree rather than “summarizing” the post with a silly analogy. Cheers! 😉

          2. Not to mention the fact that he’s also completely wrong about the difference between a strategy and a tactic. “A strategy is a larger, overall plan that can comprise several tactics, which are smaller, focused, less impactful plans that are part of the overall plan. ” The strategy is to ensure that a woman doesn’t get elected President when she just so happens to be a kissing cousin of Benedict Arnold. The tactics employed would be to 1) vote for a VIABLE third party candidate who represented my beliefs or, failing that, 2) vote for Trump. Not because I support him or think he would be a good president – I absolutely loathe the man and I’m pretty sure only Hillary Clinton herself would make me cast a vote for him. If we were talking Trump v Sanders or even Trump v Fauxcahontas, I’d happily vote third party whether the candidate was viable or not. Between those three losers there’s not a dime’s worth of difference. But there IS a difference between any of them and Hillary – and that difference is that she was – at a minimum – selling access to the power of the US State Department. And she was doing so with the full intent of avoiding federal oversight. Again, that’s the absolute best case scenario. What we all suspect she was really doing was illegally trafficking in confidential, secret, top secret, and above top secret info, using any and all of it for financial gain or to enhance her own personal power. And she did so with malice aforethought. That server was set up before she even took office. She knew what she was going to do, how she was going to do it, who she was going to get to help her do it, and how to set things up to (hopefully) avoid getting caught doing it. Hillary is simply greedy. Liberals think: “If you want to keep your own money and spend it how you please, you’re greedy. But if I want to take it from you and spend it how I want, I’m not”. I mean greedy in the old school sense of the word: A desire for money so overwhelming that too much is never enough – that you will knowingly destroy others, and even yourself, to get more of it. The “Midas Touch” was a curse, not a blessing. Hillary is greedy in just such a way. She was already sitting on piles of money, but she just couldn’t stop herself from doing this. It honestly didn’t matter to her that her emails, if hacked, had the potential to get people killed (and, in fact, may have done exactly that. Her emails included Ambassador Stevens’ travel and security plans. They also included the names of human assets. And that’s just what she DIDN’T delete illegally in direct defiance of a subpoena).The intent of my original post was not to endorse Trump, but to say that I absolutely oppose any act that would either actively help or even just fail to hurt HRC. Let me put it another way: this is what she did when she wasn’t untouchable – when she wasn’t the HBIC. Think what she would do when she owned the DOJ, CIA and NSA or had the power to personally pardon any crony who stayed loyal (to her personally instead of to the USA) and did her bidding. I have all the respect in the world for Larry, and others like him, who say that they can’t vote for Trump because who he is and what he represents is a direct betrayal of all their conservative principals. I agree with them on that point wholeheartedly. I hope Larry and others like him would extend to me the same courtesy and acknowledge that I have a right to say that my priority is in keeping someone who so easily flirts with treason out of the White House. God knows, Obama has done enough damage. I still wonder what secrets he’ll sell after he leaves his current office in exchange for securing a new one as SecGen of the UN.

          3. Lady, if you think THAT was bile, I’d look in the mirror before I said anything else.
            Voting for Trump “because he’s not Hillary” is an option, but it is one I will not take. But I will not, under any circumstances, vote for one big government authoritarian identitarian just because he isn’t another big government authoritarian identitarian. That’s charging into the cannon’s mouth–if you’re standing still, at least you can duck.
            Strategically speaking, a Clinton presidency isn’t nearly as bad, over the long term, as a Trump presidency. With the first one, the idiot gets to experience all the delayed consequences of the Obama presidency, and it gets blamed on her. The other way, it gets blamed on Republicans, with the added bonus we lose any legitimacy when we claim to back the rule of law instead of identity politics.
            Also, in the grand scheme of things, presidential campaigns are a purely tactical issue. Sorry, but it’s so. However, sometimes tactics can ruin strategies, and there is no viable strategy for holding things together while reversing the Long March of the Left that involves a Trump presidency.
            So, yeah. There’s your longer post. Hope it was bilious enough for you.

          4. Sorry, I’d had a bad day and I probably shouldn’t have been reading about politics. I still think the cannon analogy is silly though, inasmuch as it refers to voting. Regardless of what you do, you get “hit” by the result, y’know? Also, I don’t know if Hillary really will get the blame for everything that goes wrong…republicans seem to automatically get blamed for all that goes wrong, regardless of who’s actually in control at the time. Not that that’s an argument for voting for Trump, far from it …it’s just a depressed observation. Again, sorry (really) for the snark, you didn’t deserve it, and you seem like a lovely person. God bless.

            PS: where’d you get the idea I was a lady? My mother is going to be shocked!
            😛

  52. Personally, I’ll still vote, but for the republican candidates downstream.
    Spread the word. Vote libertarian if you have to (don’t spoil the ballot).

    We’ve got Boss Twede vs. Dilma this go-round. Our best hope is to elect the resistance.

  53. Yup,

    The real risk is the long term damage Trump does to the conservative image. I suspect one of the most frustrating things for people on the right is the face that when you say “I’m right wing” people hear “I’m racist”. Lots of enegry has been spent by non-racist conservatives to fight that. Now Trump is the nominee….that fight has to be fought all over again.

    Over 80% of non-whites are against Trump on oh boy are they motivated to get out and vote this year. How the hell is the G.O.P. going to get any of them back? And by extension, how the hell is the G.O.P. going to win an election when that 80+% remember that Trump was once their candidate?

    Voting for a third party is not a wasted vote. Its a way of saying “not in my name”

      1. Depends what you mean by “those folks”

        I’m not talking about the “rusted on” leftwing voter. I’m talking about the majority of voters. If the majority hears KKK when someone says GOP, then the GOP is in a lot of trouble. Thats the issue here, branding. There are plenty of people who equated the right with racism. But there were also plenty who recognised that there are plenty of non-racist right wingers. However Trump is changing the right wing “brand” in such a damaging way that not just the hard left but the actual majority is seeing the GOP brand as a racist brand.

        The folks who saw the GOP as inherently racist in the past were not electorally significant because the GOP could still win without their vote. The risk is that Trump makes the majority of voters see the GOP in this way….making electoral success impossible.

        1. Trump isn’t changing anything in regard to race. The Left called Romney a racist and now they’re doing the same to Trump. The difference is Trump is trolling the Left at their own game. He’s gonna be called a racist just for waking up in the morning so why not make hay?

          95% of blacks voted for Obama so I’m not sure who you’re talking about getting back.

          As for the GOP being racist, that’s a failure of perception from morons. I’ve addressed this elsewhere. If you’re so stupid you can’t see there are 19 zillion racial organizations on the Left vs. zero on the Right I’m not sure what I can do about that.

          Let’s look at SFF as a microcosm of that. Have you ever seen an anthology called “Men in SFF”? How many are there of women? Are you seeing “Whites Rebuild SFF” anthologies? What about “Heterosexual SFF”?

          Let me know when whites have an organization which advocates for them called “The Race.” When Latinos or blacks do that it’s noble social justice. If whites do that (and they don’t) it’s straight to Hermann fucking Goering. People are only going to put up with that double standard for so long. Call a man a dog long enough and he’ll bark. So… people are barking. It’s not like we haven’t warned the Left about this for 30 years. We said knock it off with the black websites and Asian-Pacific Caucuses and they wouldn’t, so… reap the whirlwind. Listen, I’ll stand up for equal protection as long as it stands up for me. But start chipping away at that with this white privilege, rape culture and blacks, women and gays can’t be racists, sexist, heterophobes bullshit and they can just fuck off. So… fuck off.

          1. Pragmatically…the actions you advocate = permanent democrat presidency. Though I’m getting the impression that you care more about making a point than success.

          2. If Trump is trolling the left, he is trolling the right too.

            He makes seemingly unnecessary statements that endorse what many conservative activists have spent the past fifteen years fighting against.

            Conservative activists had been working towards this election for years. This election was projected to be a gimme once the 2014 elections stripped the Democrat bench of anyone better than Hillary. The plans for all this year’s elections assumed certain flavors of messaging.

            Trump has not matched the planned messaging. This probably hurts downticket races. The people who think his messaging will be substantially better for the downticket races probably also believe he will win NY, CA et al. in the general.

            As for long term branding a) polls are rubbish this year b) cultural values may change c) I dunno.

  54. Haven’t decided if I can bring myself to vote Trump. I have no doubt that every year of his thieving, draft-dodging, racist, misogynist shit-stained public life is going to be rolled out in one long informercial, so there’s probably still crap about him I don’t know yet, and I lived in New York for 30 years.

    In the unlikely event he DOES get elected, I expect all the righteous little Trumpzis will be lining up for his version of Wilson’s American Protective League and FDR’s New Deal enforcers, to fare forth and wreak his intimated will like good little gauleiters.

    1. If Trump picks Scott Walker for VP, I’d vote for him almost with enthusiasm. Jerry Pournelle already thinks Trump is tolerable. So I think Trump is tolerable.

      D party house media will sniff out all sorts of crimethink, yes.

      1. Yes, I suppose I might be persuaded to vote for Trump if he picks someone I like for VP, but I don’t have high hopes that will happen.

      2. I’m not as confident as I would be with Obama’s tastes, but if Trump VP nomination is someone I had previously considered a solid conservative Republican, I would reexamine the evidence I have for that.

    1. Yeah, no. I’m still a republican. Why? Because I’ve still got guys like Mike Lee. Thanks though. But please, do enjoy my free complimentary protest vote to Gary Johnson. 🙂

  55. Well. On the bright side, let us assume that Trump loses in a landslide. The good news is that Republicans can see the price of inviting in a bunch of low information racists.

    Then the Republican party gets a chance to renegotiate between its factions. Or maybe add in some new ones. There’s small government conservatives, crony capitalists, social conservatives, populists, and racists, probably in roughly equal numbers.

    Thing is – every one of those factions alienates someone.

    Small government purists tend to push out technical people and pragmatists by insisting that global warming is impossible because it would require government intervention. (no, none of the technical arguments against global warming are particularly persuasive. ) (that said, the pragmatic argument of ‘really expensive and harmful to many people’ of cutting coal is valid)

    Crony capitalists push out people who don’t want to be ripped off.

    Social conservatives push out people who are gay,…or pro-abortion. Or, in the guise of law and order, minorities.

    Populists, oddly, push out mostly crony capitalists. And people who believe that free trade has no negative consequences. (it does, for poor people.)

    Racists, naturally, push out minorities. And decent people.

    So, assume you build a party around small government. Let’s accept that the racist vote is shrinking, as are social conservatives. Then, personally, I’d prefer an alliance with pragmatists (ie people who tolerate big government where it works reasonably well) but would rather minimize waste.

    Stuff that would go:
    1. Basically the whole social conservative plank
    2. Voter ID laws
    3. Welfare reduction, social security and medicare elimination
    4. Most drug-related criminalization
    5. Fighting anti-discrimination laws (cause, really, Trump has established that they are needed…)
    Stuff that would start:
    1. Free-trade agreements would also fund infrastructure investments, so displaced workers got something.
    2. Immmigration reform: which basically means that people paying legal or illegal immigrants less than the prevailing rate are liable for back wages and penalties. Combined with also having a path to naturalization for anyone with a reasonably long employment history with wages at the prevailing rate.
    3. Reforming regulation of the financial sector
    4. Welfare reform
    5. Transparency, and privacy rights and accountability, which starts with accurate measurements of effectiveness. Admittedly, hard.
    6. Healthcare reform
    7. Permitting reform (possibly a stateside thing, really)
    8. An agreement to work with the other party for the good of the nation
    9. Fact-checking
    10. Healthcare reform (hint, the cost of giving Medicare to everyone is probably less than the cost of our current healthcare system, even before Obamacare, and would probably give better results. Is different possible and better, almost certainly…)
    11. And yes, probably a carbon tax. And investment in nuclear. Maybe a wealth tax. And serious loophole cutting. Actually work at it. (ie, I know that congress directs most IRS enforcement activity towards poor people and away from prosecuting trusts. If it is profitable, fund the trustbusters. Hint, it is very profitable.)
    12. Notice an emphasis on reform? Well, most of these programs weren’t created for no reason. Cut the fat, but stop, eg, trying to bankrupt the government to force cuts. Or, make a real case for cutting something.

    Would this really be a small government party? No. More pragmatic. Would it result in a smaller government than the current path? (which is…piss off growing minorities for the next 10 generations along with the socially liberal and drive them to vote democratic? And also, the people who think that monopoly laws, et cetera, are usually better than the alternative?) Well…probably. Would it be better for the nation than catering to the mob with a bunch of BS hearings and talk about death panels? Definitely. The Republican party has spent too much time paying lip service to evil to push a small government agenda. And, maybe it was justified. I’d just argue that, at the present moment, there are probably more minority voters who’d vote Republican under the above planks than racist’s you’d lose. And socially liberal libertarian techies.

    Problem is, it’d be really disruptive. Because – well – you’d lose half of 2.5 factions. And a lot of funding. It might really kill the party. In exchange, you’d get, over 10-20 years, a commanding majority. I can’t imagine the transition actually works.

    So, what I suspect is that the Republican Party will lurch towards protectionism and populism and more racism and the small government agenda will die a protracted death over the next few decades. Kind of unfortunate. I genuinely distrust a big government future.

    1. Did you just use the words “low information” and “racists” in the same sentence without your nose growing to the Moon? Have you been living on the Moon?

      Let me ask you something, buddy: who has racial congressional caucuses, beauty pageants, anthologies, awards and grants of all types, TV channels, websites with mainstream ads, campus unions, safe-spaces, organizations of all sorts, symposiums, college studies programs, literary movements, societies for police chiefs, mayors, and even fucking fruit market vendors and too much more for me to even mention? There’s even a black fucking scuba diving club. Have you even heard of a white scuba diving club? Who the fuck even thinks like that? Have you ever heard of the Association of Fucking White Fruit Market Vendors?

      Maybe I’m nuts but wouldn’t a political movement with a hefty proportion of racists have at least some mainstream racial institutions centered around a fascination with their own skin? That shit doesn’t exist in Conservatism, it exists in huge numbers on the Left. Please go inform yourself before writing such ignorant trash.

      You’re right that racism pushes out decent people, which is why the Dem Party is so full of freakish fucks.

      1. “Mary Robinette Kowal @MaryRobinette Study shows ‘racial essentialism can also hamper creativity.’ Seriously. Racism makes you less creative.”

        Yeah, we know. The highly original Jane Austen Meets Magic books are self-explanatory

    2. Yes Trump probably loses. But I am not sure the Republican party can reconstitute itself. You still have hate radio blasting out 24/7. Remember, the reconstituted Republican party was supposed to happen last time. The Republican party was going to be more accommodating to minorities and Rubio was going to lead the charge. We saw where that went.

      If liberals can control the next two election cycles at the national level, I think the battle lines might be between the more liberal Democratic Party and the more centrist Democratic Party. That’s at the national level. At the local level pockets of conservative Republicans will rise up in defiance.

      No matter who is in charge, we still have this fake battle over the national debt. Most Democrats have this irrational fear of the national debt that the Republicans have.

      1. (Looks at Greece now)
        (Looks at France in the 1780s)
        (Looks at Spain in the 1500s)
        (Looks at the fact that the only reason that spending on the national debt is only 6% of the budget is QE)
        Irrational fear of the national debt. Right…
        (Doesn’t even mention than Rush Limbaugh has nothing on BLM in the hatred department)

      2. Sure, it’s only a few trillion and growing exponentially. Nothing to worry about . . .

        Moron.

        1. It’s only fiat money. The only thing to worry about is if we got value. That is worrisome because a lot of the military spending doesn’t really have a lot of utility. All that money in Iraq was a poor use of resources.

          1. (Eye twitches)
            (Looks at Zimbabwe)
            What are you on, and can I have some of it?

          2. I am on “Modern Monetary Theory” and you can have it if you want but I wonder if you can digest it. It’s not something that comes easily to one.

          3. “Modern Monetary Theory”? That rather smacks of “New Coke” or “The New Soviet Man.”

          4. …and he was crowing at how “reality is biased towards liberalism” or similar on the next thread?

            Reality is biased towards reality. Trying to say it’s biased towards your particular political view can make one delusional and start ignoring reality when it goes against that view.

            Exhibit A: Xenu/Kirby

  56. I am looking forward to going to the State Convention and wearing my Hillary pin. Trump was my pick for the other side. This should be a great deal of fun and my advice to my content is to keep it light. Just make fun of the Trumpeters and Strumpets’.

    Will Trump debate Hillary? Probably not. But maybe. If so that will be worth a bag of popcorn.

    People are the same all over and all peoples are pretty much the same. But there are some demographics that bode well for the future. The county is becoming more rational and less churched. Minorities are increasing in number. That should help make this country more liberal and allow for more participation in its fruits.

    It isn’t a cure all. To properly govern people have to educate themselves. More so now, because the media thanks it has to balance everything. If they do an article on climate change they think they should balance the article with a hack. They shouldn’t. But by putting the point of view of the hack in the article they fail to educate.

    Anyway, I am looking forward to the election cycle. I am hoping that Hillary’s VP might be Julian Castro. A good pick for Trump would be Howard Stern. This is a guy that Trump works well with and Howard is the King of All Media. They can continue their discussion on the toilet habits of their wives.

      1. It’s a special rationality.

        (Don’t forget TrigglyPuff, whose public tantrum when faced with a view she didn’t like has made her rather infamous.)

      1. No I mean hack. Anthropogenic climate change is a fact. Adding a “science” skeptic for balance is adding a hack. It is like the scientist the tobacco industry use to hire to dispute the link between smoking and cancer. By more rational I mean more rational and less churched.

        1. No such thing as a fact in the scientific world, only theories with evidence supporting them or disproving them. Anything that is a supposed fact in a scientific field is open to questioning and deserves to be questioned so that it can either be refuted, refined, or modified. Just because you do not believe the other side does not mean their points should not be spoken or does not have merit to them.

          With my age group at least, those who claim the scientific theory they believe as fact often become irritable, cant defend their theory, or are unable to argue for it without getting emotional. Or in short they act in a way you probably stereotype a religious person to act.

  57. I like and admire you a lot Larry, and I hate taking a different position, but I’ve been fussing with folks on Facebook about this for awhile. I wrote a small paragraph kind of summing up our reasons. You can tell I’m slightly aggravated, but it’s not because of reading your blog, it’s just from aforementioned fussing.
    Anyway, I love your books which is what matters. This election stuff will be over soon anyway. So this is just my view.

    I’m having a little difficulty processing something. I appreciate people saying that Donald Trump should be gracious in victory, but I would add to that, that he doesn’t need to kiss anybody’s ring to get their vote. See, he won the primaries.
    Threatening not to vote for him is perfectly within their rights, as this is is still a free country, and will remain so possibly for another decade. 🙂
    The reason so many republicans voted for Trump is because they felt cornered by the Democrats, and the current Republican establishment who said all the right things, but could only get really get passionate when it came to giving amnesty to millions of ILLEGAL immigrants who were soaking up all of the blue collar jobs, and were being granted benefits exceeding those of the blue collar down and out American citizens.
    Do the blue blood Republicans really believe they can help things by making these folks feel even more cornered?
    What’s also kind of odd is that the leadership says they will reject Trump and try to save the down ballot Republicans. I hope they realize that the down balloters will lose a yuuuge amount of down ballot votes. Despite the establishment stereotypes of Trump voters, some of us do have IQ’s that tic just a little bit above 80. We’re able to just barely wrap our minds around the concept of why vote for theirs if they don’t vote for ours? It will result in a disaster for everyone.
    But see, the Trumps supporters are already living the disaster that the Democrats have wrought, and the Republicans have allowed.
    So if you want in welcome! If you don’t, well okay, but we really don’t have the time or the inclination to beg you to come on board. We got us a Hillary to beat. 😀

    1. I don’t disagree with most of that and I can respect your reasoning about how we got here. The problem is you are pinning your hopes for a solution on a guy who says whatever he needs to say to get by. Today he tells you what you want to hear, and then tomorrow tells your opposition what they want to hear.

  58. I also can’t have Trump on my conscience. I’ll most likely be voting for the Libertarian candidate.

    I see some people are talking about what kind of protest vote will send the clearest message to the GOP. Personally, I think that’s a hopeless cause. If they’ve gotten to this point, I don’t think they’re in a mindset to learn any lessons.

  59. Larry, I’ve tried three computers and cannot get the social media connects on the comments to work. Every time I get dumped out to a WordPress error on your site. You might want to test to see if you can replicate.

  60. Figured this would be the most appropriate place to post this.

    While this may be touchy, Mr. Correia, what is your take on the GOP convention? I mean what the RNC did was not exactly the best unifying tactic.

    1. I think it was shifty BS. It should put that whole Trump is against the establishment narrative to bed, if anybody actually paid attention.

      The fake voice vote was far bigger news than if Trophy Wife 3.0 plagiarized a puff speech or not, but I don’t know how much coverage it got.

      1. At this point, I don’t expect a large number of new people to come to that realization. Honestly, the whole thing made my blood boil, and I left the party months ago.

        I know the voice vote made news on sites that note Trump’s establishment ties, but I think it got next to nothing everywhere else. Mrs. Trump ( I don’t remember her name) speech seemed to drown that out so to speak.

        The only thing I am interested in now is Cruz’s speech (if he gives one).

  61. I’m wondering what everyone’s take is on the past rather surreal week.

    Hillary, who may or may not have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, is no longer running against Donald Trump. No, she’s running against a cartoon frog now.

    It appears that 4chan and a fellow calling himself “Jared Taylor Smith” have successfully pulled off an absolutely moby act of Internet Performance Art. They have trolled the Clinton campaign masterfully, and in the process made Hillary look slightly more like America’s crazy aunt who lives in the basement.

    I shudder for the future of the Republic, but I’ve got to say this election is a lot more entertaining than the last one.

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