doubleplusundead

Before I start, I’d like to ask a question about Victor Davis Hanson. Why doesn’t anybody link this page or comment there? Am I going to get in trouble for breaking some Internet-wide, “Pretend that site doesn’t exist because it makes us look bad.” rule?

 

As I’ve watched Trump I’ve become more and more optimistic. In foreign policy,  Sec State, he has a guy who was in charge of what has been one of the biggest, most geographically diverse, politically powerful corporations in the world for many decades. Hell, in the recent past, they’ve basically owned countries. They probably still pretty much run a bunch of oil producer countries while buying Rolls Royces, palaces and Swiss bank accounts for their putative rulers.

Mattis as Sec Def is far more awesome than I even hoped. Seriously, Chuck Norris wears Mattis pajamas. That’s making the world worried. Rather, all the right people worried. Tsar Putin I cannot stare down Mattis. Let him ride a grizzly to the meetings, Mattis gets kinda hungry at long meetings and he loves him some grizzly liver. Still warm and dripping.

Flynn as NSA is hugely embonering too.

I figure after a few times of Flyinn saying, “Sic ’em!” to Mattis, people will be far more willing to listen to Tillerson when he tells them to sit down and shut up. We don’t need Congress to send troops to half the world since they’re already in most of the places we need them. SoKo, Iraq, Syria, South China Sea, Taiwan, the Arabian peninsula and Kuwait.

Am I missing some places that need an application of Marines and A-10s, followed by them leaving and saying, “You really don’t want us to come back”?

I was actually more confident in him for domestic policy cuz he’s a business man, he’s watched what happened to screw our nation up over the last 3+ decades, I figured he’d have an idea on how to fix it. Because he fix it he wants. I’m sure of that. I was worried about furrin policy. Now, I think I’ll be able to sit back and just enjoy the continuation of our civilization instead of trying to laugh as it ended.

So anyway, VDH has a post on Trumpism. It’s pretty darn good and mostly what I’ve been starting to think. (Hope?)

Note the common denominator to the all these hostile groups: It is Trump the man, not Trump the avatar of some political movement that they detest. After all, there are no Trump political philosophers. There is no slate of down-ballot Trump ideologues. If Trump were to start a third party, what would be its chief tenets? There is as yet neither a Trump “Contract for America” nor a Trump “First Principles” manifesto.

Now normally I’m agin the Knight In Shining Armor, but right now we need the knight or a whole shitload of pitchforks and barrels of tar.

Besides, there’s no political movement that has any coherence that wants to fix things, most of the settled ones want their piece.

Trumpism promotes traditionalism. Trump showcases “Merry Christmas!” because his parents did. He believes in dressing formally and being addressed as Mr. Trump. And he insists that his children be well-behaved and polite….

Perhaps Trump is like many Baby Boomers as they enter their final decades: …Similarly, Trump is a non-practicing moralist who believes traditional morality can restore structure and guidance to society.

To quote Bill Cosby (can I still do that?), “That’s an old person trying to get into Heaven!”

The billionaire Trump won by going after elites of both parties

And it was bee-you-tee-full! These are people he’d bribed and wined and dined for decades and he smeared mud in their faces and made them sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider song.

I’ve tried not to quote too long a bit, but this encapsulates Trump (IMIO)

By “elites,” Trump certainly did not mean plutocrats like himself or the various grandees he has appointed to his cabinet.

How does he square that circle? For Trump, there are apparently good elites like himself and then the rest, the bad elites. The dividing line is not income, status, or lifestyle per se, but whether one advocates one thing for others and quite another for oneself. Trump is rich and unabashedly likes what riches can bring, and he claims that he wants average Americans to have their own version of a Trump Tower existence.

He is not Al Gore urging Middle Americans to drive less while he flies on his Gulfstream private jets, or Barack Obama who loves exclusive, expensive Sidwell Friends prep school for his own children but opposes charter-school choices for the less fortunate, or a Senator Barbara Boxer who lives in an irrigated desert oasis but seeks to stop contracted water transfers for those who grow food rather than lawn turf.

Perzactly. In every respect. Trump wants everybody with the gumption to be stinking rich. Oh, and emphasis, underlining and coloring by me.

If true (and I think it is), this next bit is going to be the most entertaining thing in decades.

In the next four years, expect a continual war on intellectuals and academics …

So it is not privilege that Trumpism targets, but rather the hypocrisies of privilege,

That’s going to be fucking hilarious. Not the “war on intellectuals” that our fine media betters will trumpet, but war on the hypocrisy of these not-so-intelligent intellectuals.

 

In other words, expect Trumpism to champion fracking, logging, Keystone, “clean” coal, highway construction, the return of contracted irrigation water to its farmers, the retention of federal grazing lands for cattlemen…

Imagine a POTUS who tried to do things that created jobs? If he does even some of the things Obama has stopped to retard economic growth, we’re going to be in boom times in a fucking year. It’s gonna be fucking hilarious watching Minitrue try to explain how Obama’s Recovery Summer kicked in!!!!!!!

Trump admires people who make money. He doesn’t buy that those, to take one example, with Ph.D.s and academic titles could have made money if only they had wished—but for lots of reasons (most of them supposedly noble) chose not to. For Trump, credentialed academic expertise in anything is in no way comparable to achievement in the jungle of business…

He might not quite say that a Greek professor is inherently useless,…

 

I’m gonna need a lot of saltpeter to treat my simple, chronic, boner for the next few years.