No...
* * * * * * * *
At the declaration by Donald Trump that he is a candidate
for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, media elites of left
and right reacted with amusement, anger and disgust.
* YEP. BEING HONEST... THAT'S HOW IT STRUCK ME TOO.
Though he has been a hugely successful
builder-businessman, far more successful than, say, Carly Fiorina, who has been
received respectfully, our resident elites resolutely refuse to take Trump
seriously.
* EXCEPT FOR ALL THE BANKRUPTCIES...
* BUT THEN AGAIN HE KNOWS HOW TO "PLAY THE
GAME." (HE'S STILL INCREDIBLY RICH, ISN'T HE?!)
Our resident elites should take Trump seriously.
Not because he will be nominated...
...but because the Trump constituency will represent a
vote of no confidence in the Beltway ruling class of politicians and press.
* NOW THAT'S TRUE!
Votes for Trump will be votes to repudiate that class,
whole and entire, and dump it onto the ash heap of history.
* YEP...
Votes for Trump will be votes to reject a regime run by
Bushes and Clintons that plunged us into unnecessary wars, [will] not secure
our borders, and negotiates trade deals that [so far have] produced the largest
trade deficits known to man and gutted a manufacturing base that was once “the
great arsenal of democracy” and envy of mankind.
(*NOD*)
A vote for Trump is a vote to say that both parties have
failed America and none of the current crop of candidates offers real hope of a
better future.
* I BELIEVE RAND PAUL DOES. I BELIEVE TED CRUZ DOES.
(*SHRUG*)
The first book in Arthur Schlesinger’s trilogy about
FDR’s ascent to power was “The Crisis of the Old Order.” That title is relevant
to our time. For there is today a crisis of the regime in America — a crisis of
confidence, a crisis of competence, a crisis of legitimacy.
People are agitating for the overthrow of the old order
and a new deal for America.
* SOME ARE. MORE RHETORICALLY "TALK THE TALK."
BUT BY AND LARGE... WE'RE NOW A NATION OF SHEEPLE BEING LED TO THE SLAUGHTER.
There is a palpable sense that the game is rigged against
Middle America and for the benefit of insiders who grow rich and fat not by
making things or building things, but by manipulating money.
* WELL... "DUH!"
Americans differentiate the wealth of a Henry Ford and a
Bill Gates from that of the undeserving rich whose hedge fund fortunes can
exceed the GDP of nations.
* DOERS vs. MANIPULATORS.
(*SHRUG*)
Trump says America is becoming a “dumping ground” for
mass immigration from the failed states of the Third World, that Mexico is not
“sending us her best and finest,” that China is stealing American jobs, that
invading Iraq was a blunder.
Politically incorrect and socially insensitive certainly,
but is he ... wrong?
* NO! NO HE'S NOT!
Was not the Iraq war a disaster for which our foreign
policy priesthood and journalist-acolytes never paid the price that would be
exacted in other societies were thousands of soldiers to die and tens of
thousands to be wounded and maimed in so predictable a blunder?
Is it not true that among the millions of illegal
immigrants who have broken into our country the great majority has illegitimacy
rates, delinquency rates, dropout rates, drug use rates, crime rates, and
incarceration rates far higher than those of native-born Americans?
Is Trump wrong on this, or simply wrong to bring it up?
Has not mass immigration brought to America old diseases
we once stamped out and new diseases we had never heard of?
Do Americans not have the right to decide who shall come
to our country, how many, and whence they shall come?
Is there no correlation between a decrepit Maoist China
rising to become the greatest manufacturing power Asia has ever seen — and the
$3 trillion to $4 trillion in trade deficits we have run with Beijing — and the
disappearance of a third of all American manufacturing jobs?
Who negotiated those deals?
* THE INSIDERS. THE OLIGARCHS. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF BOTH
PARTIES.
Who paid a price for the misery they brought to Rust Belt
America?
* WE THE PEOPLE.
(*SIGH*)
There are precedents in U.S. history for outsiders —
Norman Thomas and Henry Wallace on the left, George Wallace and Ross Perot on
the right — to enter the presidential lists. And across the pond a similar
crisis of the old order is calling forth new people and new parties.
As in America, dominant parties like the Tories and
Labour in Britain are losing loyalists to the “a-plague-on-both-your-houses”
dissident parties.
Millions in Europe now want out of the EU. Old nations
are coming apart. Leftist parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain
have arisen to defy Brussels and Berlin.
The Scottish National Party is of the Left while the
Independence Party in the U.K. is of the populist Right. In Southeastern
Europe, there have arisen parties of the extreme Right.
This endless proliferation of parties, like the welcome
being given to Trump, testifies to the new reality: Everywhere, including here,
old parties are losing the people in whose name they presume to speak.
And the specter of Republicans, who just won an historic
victory by promising to do battle against President Obama...
(*GNASHING MY TEETH*)
...[now] colluding with Obama to surrender Congress’
right to amend trade treaties and sign on to a Trans-Pacific Partnership pact
that looks like another transfer of jobs and factories to Asia...
(*PUNCHING THE WALL*)
...has re-enforced these sentiments.
* I PRAY FOR BOEHNER'S DEATH; MCCONNELL'S TOO!
If Trump wants to stake his claim as a different kind of
Republican, he will go to Washington and pound the Boehner-McConnell Congress
until it gives up on ObamaTrade and fast track.
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