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Samizdata quote of the day Seriously? You’re going to cite a WEF RINO?
We have sometimes cited Mao Tse-tung on this blog, so why would we not cite Dan Crenshaw? If someone says something true, it is worth noting, regardless of who they are and whether or not they are wrong about other things. Hell, yesterday I found myself in furious agreement with the ghastly Guy Verhofstadt when he was having one of his twice-a-day-stopped-clock moments, so we live strange times.
– Perry de Havilland
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@Perry Clearly you don’t understand modern debate. The aim is to classify people into good and bad. Then you know what actions and opinions are good and bad and you know who must win any debate. It saves so much time.
Clearly you don’t understand modern debate. The aim is to classify people into good and bad. Then you know what actions and opinions are good and bad and you know who must win any debate. It saves so much time.
Clovis’s observation is a Quote of the Day perhaps?
Crenshaw is a Republican who thinks for himself and does not blow smoke up the rear ends of the Trumpaloompas. Apparently, this makes him a RINO. Funny, because he is doing a lot to highlight the crap state of things such as US energy policy (or I should say, anti-energy policy), the nonsense of wokery in the military (he is an ex-Navy SEAL), tax, and much else.
To this sort of thinking, a Reagan or Goldwater would be a WEF RINO because they supported laissez faire capitalism, global trade, deterrence against the Sovs, etc.
The state of the Republican Party today is sad. A few weeks ago, when I wrote my thoughts about the late PJ O’Rourke, I got heat from the usual Trumpies who cannot forgive him for having been wary of Trump. One person even described Trump as the greatest POTUS since Ike, which left out the Gipper. There is no reasoning with these people. Put on your red hats.
The aim is to classify people into good and bad.
A refinement, if I may – the classification is not only to define who must win the debate, it’s to identify the “bad” – who are by-definition Beyond the Pale, utterly contemptible and beneath your notice in the first place – so you may haughtily dismiss them, and need not waste your precious time and intellectual capacity debating them. You know, “racists”, “misogynists”, “deplorables”, “deniers”, “wypipo”, etc etc ad nauseam.
Nice painting there. I don’t consider myself a Trumpaloompa, and don’t really want anyone blowing smoke up my ass. Crenshaw’s voting record seems to be problematic and doesn’t generally follow his rhetoric. Therefore he has been labelled a RINO.
Crenshaw is a mixed bag for sure, but I do like his bluntness and he is very much on-target here.
In days of yore, they had pipes and tobacco along the Thames in London to revive drowning folk dragged out of the river. The idea was to rectally infuse the poor sod with nicotine. Think of it as a steampunk defibrilator.
I am not making this up.
How about with yourself, Johnathan? Mine was the last comment in that thread. It reasoned with your immediately-prior comment in that thread, mainly by linking to Natalie’s post “Come to think of it, Comrades, I do want Jones back”.
My limited knowledge of Dan Crenshaw has me (with that caveat) echoing Perry’s (April 7, 2022 at 12:27 pm) assessment: a mixed bag who can be admirably blunt when on-target as he sometimes very much is – so I resist any temptation to indulge Crenshaw Derangement Syndrome.
Getting a politico who is sometimes on target is better than 95% of them.
If we shoot everyone who isn’t 100% just like us, there’ll eventually be just me. The alternative to Crenshaw in that seat was not good. I’ll take him any day.
On the Liz Harrington show a few weeks ago, just days before VP ordered the invasion, Trump called Putin a “peacekeeper”.
I have a report of the transcript. It’s an eye-opener. I’ll add the link.
The remark is as foolish as Biden’s “minor incursion” classic.
When trying to stop my boys from fighting, I’d frequently say something like “you’re better than this.” Sometimes, it worked.
I imagine that Trump is one of the few American pols to whom Putin might actually pay attention. Their interactions support this. No harm in Trump trying to defuse things by working Putin’s ego. “He won’t invade. He’s better than that.”
Sadly, he isn’t better than that. But it was worth a try.
The amusing thing is that when I said that I conceded that Trump had flaws and was far from perfect. I’ll gladly concede that, but still maintain that Trump was the best president still Eisenhower because flaws and all, he was more impressive than Reagan. I don’t think Reagan was a bad president, but I think older conservative movement types mythologise him and his actual record was more mixed. Given the contexts Trump had to govern within compared to Reagan, the former comes across as more impressive. Trump had no major media support outside Fox and the NY Post. Trump had almost all the deep state and apparatchik class against him. Most of the banks and major corporations opposed him. Nearly all the cultural elites despised him.The democrats of now are a thousand times more crazy than those of the 1980s. Although Reagan had a lot of opposition he never had to face what was stacked against Trump. What Trump accomplished in that context was pretty impressive.
Bobby, it’s ni e to imagine that Mr Trump was trying to flatter Putin’s fragile ego, but who knows? The flipside of this argument is that it emboldened President Putin into to thinking the US wasn’t really bothered.
Russian foreign military interventions during recent US presidencies:
Bush: Georgia (2008)
Obama: Ukraine (2014), Syria (2015)
Trump: –
Biden: Ukraine (2022)
Read into that what you will….
JP, can’t argue with that. It’s all just tea-leaf reading when it comes to us mortals trying to figure out what the gods “really meant.”
. . .
I doubt we should be comparing Trumps’ and Reagan’s accomplishments. Actual accomplishments weren’t their strong points. It was the attitude and philosophy that they brought back into acceptable mainstream thought that made them so important, each in their own time and responding to the needs of that time. Reagan made it ok to be a small-government person again. Trump made it ok to push back against crowd mania. They both championed things that we here all strive for. They each had their place, and they were each great in it. I would simply call them the best two presidents we’ve had for some time.
Trumpaloozas are a figment of the morbid imagination of Johnathan Pierce and his fellow travelers (NeverTrumpers and “progressives”). That should be evident from JP being focused on what Trump said recently, ignoring what he actually DID.
Actually, there are a few deranged Trump fanatics out there. They are easy to recognize: they are under the same delusion as JP, that Trump and Putin are ideologically close.
The difference is that the deranged Trump fans think that that makes Putin good, while people like JP think that that makes Trump bad.
I feel that bobby’s assessment of the relative merits of Reagan and Trump under-rates both of them. It is true that a major achievement for both of them was to shift the terms of the debate; but a list of achievements for Reagan should include the fall of European communism (although the credit does not go entirely to him). As for Trump, it is too early to say.
As for Martin’s assessment, it seems to me that he highlights what Trump had to fight against*; but neglects that Reagan had to fight against an evil empire — which had lots of sympathizers in the West; not in the Democratic Party, but in the universities and the media.
* although neglecting the Deep State, more entrenched now than in the 1980s.
Donald Trump, interviewed in late February:
“I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius,’ ” Trump continued. “Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine. Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. So, Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’ And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s strongest peace force … We could use that on our southern border.”
“We could use that on our southern border”. What, bomb the crap out of San Antonio?
The difference is that the deranged Trump fans think that that makes Putin good, while people like JP think that that makes Trump bad. Snorri: I can distinguish between words and deeds, thanks. But I am old-fashioned in thinking that rhetoric, tone and style matters. Too many defenders of this or that politician make excuses. They are doing the same right now about Biden and his various comments that have to be “walked back”.
Reagan had far greater achievements to his credit. Yes, superficially, he was sneered at like Trump (“B Movie Actor”) by the usual suspects, but he was a free trader; he was more liberal (in the old use of that word) on immigration; and he was more clear-cut on the need for a mix of hard-cop/soft-cop approach on foreign affairs, whereas DT was too unpredictable for me to make a realistic assessment.
The best thing about DT was his clarity about support for Israel, and that helped, interestingly, to solve some long-standing emnities. His energy policy is also generally good, as was his approach of culling two regulations for every new one. The problem was that he lacked a sort of principled commitment to small government, so when he got out of the Oval Office, there wasn’t continuity on policy. Reagan liked to mock Big Government, even if his record wasn’t always great. Narratives matter. And he had a good sense of humour – it is a lot easier to sell a message if you make people smile. (That was part of O’Rourke’s genius, as well.)
bobby b (April 7, 2022 at 7:56 pm), that is a very reasonable interpretation (and was mine). Trump’s style with Kim – “I have a bigger button on my desk”, when Kim was launching rockets, contrasted with flattery, not mockery, when Kim reacted by going quiet – had an air of ‘stick and carrot’ to me (or, if you like, ‘building golden bridges for your enemy’s ego to retreat along’).
When Trump was in the white house, he wielded the stick on Putin by his energy policy, by private threats of consequences, by killing some of Putin’s disavowed soldiers, etc. This time, Trump told Putin that his relationship with the US would never be normal again, and that he’d have a new president to deal with in 2024, but obviously these could hardly provide a stick-effect of the same magnitude.
It is said of Trump that his enemies take him literally but not seriously whereas his voters take him seriously but not literally.
Jonathan’s response to my P.J. 0’Rourke-thread comment I spoke of above could be read as an example of taking someone literally but not seriously. (It could also be read as echoing my own humour, but let me develop my thought.) Johnathan reminds me that he does indeed know of and contribute to the Samizdata blog. I of course was very well aware of that when I wrote my comment, having often benefited from and commented on Johnathan’s comments and posts, including his post that we were both then commenting on. So I suggest that (like Trump above, I also suggest), my serious point was not exactly my literal words. I offer the analogy for whatever insight anyone finds in it.
This is true, however Reagan didn’t have to deal with an officer corps and security state that were trying to actively get rid of him. Although the Soviet Union was a formidable threat for sure, the ‘evil empire’ Trump had to confront – the deep state, the woke left, big business, media and the professional class – is more insidious and harder to combat, at least in America.
JP, if you define “accomplishments” as lasting legislation or programs or . . . anything, really, that can survive longer than an executive order . . . then I think, having read your lists of what the two men did in their terms, that you and I are in furious agreement.
Your lists for each man fall into the area of tone and attitude and philosophy. Even the fall of the Berlin Wall was prompted more by Reagan’s tone and attitude then by his actions. As for concrete programs and legislation, little survives either. But “the Reagan Era” and “the Trump Era” do survive well, in their awakening of the more conservative side of the continuum. I won’t argue that one was better – too much of that depends on personal likes and dislikes of personalities. But we are all better off that both were elected.
And if I could vote tomorrow for a Trump/DeSantis ticket, I would.
It is said of Trump that his enemies take him literally but not seriously whereas his voters take him seriously but not literally.
I don’t know about that. Some of his enemies might know he was a threat to them, not just a clown with a fluctuating business career and a penchant for bragging about his wonderfulness.
It is an easy riposte (we are way off topic now but what the hell) to say “he did not mean it” after the latest verbal horror. I imagine the press corps and some of the saner officials in Washington DC have to say that every time Mr Biden opens his mouth. But to repeat: I think it does actually matter if one can have a POTUS, Prime Minister or whoever where what comes out of his or her mouth is roughly congruent with what they do. All this making excuses for someone saying outrageous or appalling/stupid things gets a bit tiring. One’s patience runs out. And the message gets muffled. There’s only so much “but look at what he actually did” stuff that a Trump defender can shout when the lout is firing out tweets, interviews and the like saying that Putin is a “peacekeeper” or whatever. At some point the slack that one cuts has to stop.
Take what is the case with Boris Johnson. For months or years, the defence has been that “he’s a winner” and can “get things done”, and so he got a remarkable level of tolerance for his affairs, lies and antics. But as the crud accumulates during his time in office, this tolerance runs dry. Whatever achievements he has (big 2019 majority, Brexit – with caveats) fade into the distance. What we now have is a nagging, Net Zero, regulating, taxing, “bread-and-circuses” jumble of a shitshow.
If course, Niall, if you want to write or speak in riddles, that’s marvelous, but be aware that there’s a law of diminishing returns to that.
No, I pretty well always write to be understood, and certainly was in all of this. (Trump too, I think.) I suggest we let this rest, agreeing to disagree over for whom the penny is refusing to drop.
Whereas Trump was cheated out of his victory, Boris managed to prevent a similar nullification of voting here; to the fury of the remoaners, the Brexit vote was respected. The not-in-every-way-delightful result is that our current government has the legitimacy of not having (by its own rules) stolen the power it exercises over us. Overall, I am glad of this, but it does deprive us of the ability to blame a good many things it has done on outright anti-constitutional crime. I’m sure US readers could observe that, so far, that has proved cold comfort for them.
Johnathan: just wanted to say that, if you wanted to convince me that you prize form over substance, and look at Trump (and others, no doubt) only to find support for your prejudices, then you have done a fairly good job (at 9:49pm yesterday).
I am being quite glib, i admit. The fact is, i do not feel like fisking your comment. I think it more appropriate to invite you to re-read Martin’s comment at 8:37pm yesterday.
Oh, i forgot to mention a tenuous grasp of reality.
For instance, the American establishment’s view of immigration in this century is proof positive that the American diet causes brain damage 🙁 That was not the case at the time of Reagan.