Three common arguments against Trump still being made

Three common arguments against Trump still being made

http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/im-a-coastal-elite-from-the-midwest-the-real-bubble-is-rural-america#sthash.fqVO5KUr.gbpl

 

This article prompted me to write this argument against three common charges against Donald Trump. These are dated arguments, but still make the rounds. They are being clung to by Democrats still reeling from the election of Donald J. Trump.

It is not the fault of the COastal Elite, rather the people from the Midwest

"To pin this election on the coastal elite is a cop-out. " Not the elite per se, The Clinton campaign was ignoring the issues and people of the Midwest. Bill Clinton apparently pointed this out but was over ridden. Obama recently said that Hillary did not get to this area enough.

The article repeats the standard false and outdated talking points regarding Donald J. Trump. Here I try to knock them down.

He makes three claims saying that these rubes from the Midwest voted for a man who...

 

CLAIMS

(1) violating the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent apartments to black people. If we pin this election on coastal elites, we are excusing white working-class and rural Americans for voting for a man who called

(2) Mexicans rapists, drug dealers and criminals. If we pin this election on coastal elites, we are excusing white working-class and rural Americans for voting for a man who called for a

(3) complete ban on Muslim immigration."

RESPONSES

(1) The government sued Trump. Trump sued the government. "Trump vehemently denied the claims, which he called "absolutely ridiculous," according to a 1973 New York Times article. Trump and his company filed a counter-suit the following December, claiming the government made baseless charges and asking for $100 million in damages. The court dismissed the counter-suit."

Trump agreed to stipulations but did not admit guilt. Hardly "violated."

Source: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/27/hillary-clinton/true-hillary-clinton-says-federal-government-sued-/

1973 was different time and place. This was two years before the TV show The Jeffersons came on the air to explore this issue. The Jeffersons went off the air in 1985 when the show was no longer provocative.(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072519/) This is very old news.

(2) Liberals always eliminate this crucial sentence/ "And some, I assume, are good people."

Source 6/16/2015: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/06/16/trump_mexico_not_sending_us_their_best_criminals_drug_dealers_and_rapists_are_crossing_border.html

Current position: Strengthen border security and reform immigration. The people illegally here in our country who are guilty of a crime will be deported or incarcerated. No different than Obama's position.

(3) Liberals ALWAYS stop the quoted sentence BEFORE this "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."

Source 12/7/2015: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-statement-on-preventing-muslim-immigration

Current position is "Extreme vetting." and probably country based.

We are in a race with the radical Islamic terrorists and cannot lose. It will only take one to destroy a city.

So in conclusion, it does not help to make the same old tired arguments. Let's see how he does and go about our business until there is something NEW to talk about.

"Donald Trump is going to be our president, We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” Hillary Rodham Clinton 11/09/2016

Is Bannon as bad as they say?

Is Stephen K. Bannon as bad as they say?

I did my own research so you can just click on the links

The links are exposed so, if you want, you can click with some confidence

Since the Election and the character assassination started

Main Stream media at it again saying Bannon is an anti-semite and a racist
Mostly based on a story written on Breitbart by, wait for it, a jew. Article here
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/15/bill-kristol-republican-spoiler-renegade-jew/
Refuted by these posts on Breitbart, with sources

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/11/14/stephen-k-bannon-friend-jewish-people-defender-israel/

and a live interview with the writer, Joel Pollack, on CNN
15:00 - 16:00 Challenge to these guys from Pollack
https://youtu.be/TMViDn_XKOk

And a link to an article mentioned in the interview
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/

Wikipedia definition of Alt Right
The alt-right has no formal ideology, with the Associated Press stating that there is "no one way to define its ideology."
Curious that the left has no problem defining the Alt Right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/11/14/ben-carsons-former-press-secretary-bannon-allegations-no-patience/

Megan Kelly asking Newt Gingrich about Bannon on Fox News
https://youtu.be/BbQhbG_AFYU

Another CNN interview
1:00 Randy Evans of the RNC "Not surprised that Democrats would be overly critical of the chief strategist that beat them in the election" and neither should you be.
https://youtu.be/OIFPdpggXF0

 Zionist Organization of America defending Steve Bannon
http://zoa.org/2016/11/10342353-zoa-criticizes-adl-for-falsely-alleging-trump-advisor-bannon-is-anti-semitic/

Letter in the Hill by Boteach against the ADL By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, contributor - 11/15/16 09:48 AM EST
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/306035-letter-to-anti-defamation-leagues-jonathan

Historical Posts

Bannon appearing on Bill Mahers Show August 5, 2011 with a great panel including
Anthony Bourdain and Neil deGrasse Tyson
https://youtu.be/2HWGihz0UGg

• Highlights (for the time constrained) at 1:20
• 3:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson calls for a Businessman to help the US out of it's troubles. Be careful what you wish for.
• 5:50 Anthony Bourdain

Bannon in 2011 at the Tea Party Conference in South Carolina January 2016
https://youtu.be/-36PDP-2Fyw

Stephen K. Bannon at The Liberty Restoration Foundation in 2011 - explaining Financial Situation and trade deficit and how to fight and organize
We had then, 200 trillion in liabilities and 50 trillion in assets.

"Barrack Obama is not the problem, he is a symptom of a problem."
9:54 "Guys I respect tremendously, William Crystal, Dr. Krauthammer..."
19:00 Historical perspective
20:00 Listen to Occupy Wall Street
22:00 "We are not nativist, homophobic racists"

 https://youtu.be/0BSrJv0IpH

Bannon Interview on Hannity discussing the Movie he made called Undefeated in 2011
4:20 - Is where he defines the 2016 race
https://youtu.be/o3aa9D1Ar2Q


Bannon and Dinesh D'Souza on Patriot radio
https://youtu.be/EhaZn5sN4is

Quote from Politico on his radio show starting
“We’re particularly interested in Sanders since we think at least some of the issues driving [his surge] are very relevant to our audience,” Bannon said to Politico.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/10/26/siriusxm-announces-daily-breitbart-news-radio/

August 2016 after he was brought into the Trump campaign. He appears with the president of Citizens United.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueRI3T7Pis

October 2016 interview with Mark Cuban before the MSNBC debate
2:50 Steve Bannon is a lot smarter than Donal Trump
https://youtu.be/_FSM7KhlBjc

Stephen K. Bannon on Breitbart News Daily (11/9/2016) 
https://youtu.be/57n2KFc_350

Trump, Clinton and the Culture of Deference

Political correctness functions like a despotic regime. We resent it but we tolerate it.

 

Photo: Getty Images

By

Shelby Steele

Nov. 7, 2016 7:23 p.m. ET 

 

The current election—regardless of its outcome—reveals something tragic in the way modern conservatism sits in American life. As an ideology—and certainly as a political identity—conservatism is less popular than the very principles and values it stands for. There is a presumption in the culture that heartlessness and bigotry are somehow endemic to conservatism, that the rigors of freedom and capitalism literally require exploitation and inequality—this despite the fact that so many liberal policies since the 1960s have only worsened the inequalities they sought to overcome.
In the broader American culture—the mainstream media, the world of the arts and entertainment, the high-tech world, and the entire enterprise of public and private education—conservatism suffers a decided ill repute. Why?
The answer begins in a certain fact of American life. As the late writer William Styron once put it, slavery was “the great transforming circumstance of American history.” Slavery, and also the diminishment of women and all minorities, was especially tragic because America was otherwise the most enlightened nation in the world. Here, in this instance of profound hypocrisy, began the idea of America as a victimizing nation. And then came the inevitable corollary: the nation’s moral indebtedness to its former victims: blacks especially but all other put-upon peoples as well.
This indebtedness became a cultural imperative, what Styron might call a “transforming circumstance.” Today America must honor this indebtedness or lose much of its moral authority and legitimacy as a democracy. America must show itself redeemed of its oppressive past.
How to do this? In a word: deference. Since the 1960s, when America finally became fully accountable for its past, deference toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization became mandatory. The Great Society and the War on Poverty were some of the first truly deferential policies. Since then deference has become an almost universal marker of simple human decency that asserts one’s innocence of the American past. Deference is, above all else, an apology.
One thing this means is that deference toward victimization has evolved into a means to power. As deference acknowledges America’s indebtedness, it seems to redeem the nation and to validate its exceptional status in the world. This brings real power—the kind of power that puts people into office and that gives a special shine to commercial ventures it attaches to.
Since the ’60s the Democratic Party, and liberalism generally, have thrived on the power of deference. When Hillary Clinton speaks of a “basket of deplorables,“ she follows with a basket of isms and phobias—racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and Islamaphobia. Each ism and phobia is an opportunity for her to show deference toward a victimized group and to cast herself as America’s redeemer. And, by implication, conservatism is bereft of deference. Donald Trump supporters are cast as small grudging people, as haters who blindly love America and long for its exclusionary past. Against this she is the very archetype of American redemption. The term “progressive” is code for redemption from a hate-driven America.
So deference is a power to muscle with. And it works by stigmatization, by threatening to label people as regressive bigots. Mrs. Clinton, Democrats and liberals generally practice combat by stigma. And they have been fairly successful in this so that many conservatives are at least a little embarrassed to “come out” as it were. Conservatism is an insurgent point of view, while liberalism is mainstream. And this is oppressive for conservatives because it puts them in the position of being a bit embarrassed by who they really are and what they really believe.
Deference has been codified in American life as political correctness. And political correctness functions like a despotic regime. It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further into the crevices of everyday life. We resent it, yet for the most part we at least tolerate its demands. But it means that we live in a society that is ever willing to cast judgment on us, to shame us in the name of a politics we don’t really believe in. It means our decency requires a degree of self-betrayal.
And into all this steps Mr. Trump, a fundamentally limited man but a man with overwhelming charisma, a man impossible to ignore. The moment he entered the presidential contest America’s long simmering culture war rose to full boil. Mr. Trump was a non-deferential candidate. He seemed at odds with every code of decency. He invoked every possible stigma, and screechingly argued against them all. He did much of the dirty work that millions of Americans wanted to do but lacked the platform to do.
Thus Mr. Trump’s extraordinary charisma has been far more about what he represents than what he might actually do as the president. He stands to alter the culture of deference itself. After all, the problem with deference is that it is never more than superficial. We are polite. We don’t offend. But we don’t ever transform people either. Out of deference we refuse to ask those we seek to help to be primarily responsible for their own advancement. Yet only this level of responsibility transforms people, no matter past or even present injustice. Some 3,000 shootings in Chicago this year alone is the result of deference camouflaging a lapse of personal responsibility with empty claims of systemic racism.
As a society we are so captive to our historical shame that we thoughtlessly rush to deference simply to relieve the pressure. And yet every deferential gesture—the war on poverty, affirmative action, ObamaCare, every kind of “diversity” scheme—only weakens those who still suffer the legacy of our shameful history. Deference is now the great enemy of those toward whom it gushes compassion.
Societies, like individuals, have intuitions. Donald Trump is an intuition. At least on the level of symbol, maybe he would push back against the hegemony of deference—if not as a liberator then possibly as a reformer. Possibly he could lift the word responsibility out of its somnambulant stigmatization as a judgmental and bigoted request to make of people. This, added to a fundamental respect for the capacity of people to lift themselves up, could go a long way toward a fairer and better America.
Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author of “Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country” (Basic Books, 2015).

Copyright ©2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

The Costs of Clinton

Her policies are further left than Obama’s, and you know her ethics.

 Original Article here

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-costs-of-clinton-1478213912?emailToken=JRr8fvp4YnSSgNEwZ8wg1FBtZa4TF/TMQV2SJ3TLPFTLsjmM/b3xnfxu1oLt

Americans go to the polls next week facing what millions believe is the worst presidential choice of their lifetimes. As we wrote after Donald Trump won the Indiana primary in May, the New Yorker and Hillary Clinton are both deeply flawed. But one of them will be the next President, so in the next two days we’ll try to summarize the risks—and the fainter hopes—of each candidacy in turn.

***

Start with Mrs. Clinton because the costs of her Presidency are easier to see in advance. To wit, she would continue President Obama’s progressive march to a French-style welfare and regulatory state. On nearly every domestic issue, she has embraced Mr. Obama’s agenda and moved left from there.
She wants higher taxes, more spending on entitlements that are already unaffordable, more subsidies and price controls in ObamaCare, more regulations on businesses of all kinds, more limits on political speech, more enforcement of liberal cultural values on schools and churches.
The greatest cost of this would be more lost years of slow economic growth. The U.S. economy hasn’t grown by 3% in any year since 2005, and the explanation from Mrs. Clinton’s economic advisers is that America can’t grow faster and inequality is a bigger problem in any case. More income redistribution is their patent medicine.
But as we’ve seen with the rise of nativism and protectionism, the costs of slow growth are corrosive. Flat incomes lead to more social tension and political enmity. The fight to divide a smaller pie would get uglier in a country that was once accustomed to rising possibilities. Imagine the 2020 election after four more years of 1% growth.
Some Republicans say Mrs. Clinton would be more willing to negotiate with them than Mr. Obama has been. That’s a low bar, and during the 2016 campaign she hasn’t thrown a single policy olive branch to Republicans. None. Her current agenda may reflect her real beliefs going back to her activist days before the failure of HillaryCare caused her to adopt some New Democratic coloration. In 2017 she would also have Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders pulling her to the left.
Mrs. Clinton would also be less restrained by the courts. Mr. Obama has remade most of the federal appellate bench, and the Supreme Court is on the cusp. A Hillary victory means progressive judicial domination for a generation or more. This would mean more green lights for the abusive rule by regulation that has characterized Mr. Obama’s second term—and little chance to block the likes of his immigration order or Clean Power Plan.
Mrs. Clinton’s clearest advantage over Mr. Trump is on foreign policy, where she has shown more respect for America’s role in maintaining global order. She has sometimes shown more hawkish instincts than Mr. Obama, but then she also embraced his worst mistakes: the reset with Russia that badly misjudged Vladimir Putin, the nuclear deal with Iran, the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, and the abandonment of Libya after Europe and the U.S. toppled Moammar Gadhafi.
Even if she wants to revive U.S. leadership abroad, however, there is the question of means. Her entitlement expansions and higher taxes would squeeze the economic growth and budget space needed to finance more defense spending. This is Western Europe on the installment plan.
Lurking behind all this, as we’ve seen these past two weeks, is the familiar pattern of scandal fed by her penchant for secrecy and political paranoia. As journalist Carl Bernstein has noted, she shares Richard Nixon’s “obsession with enemies.” She surrounds herself with henchmen like Sidney Blumenthal and David Brock, who feed her instinct to stonewall and attack.
The most astonishing revelation of the 2016 campaign has been that neither she nor her husband learned anything from the ethical traumas of the 1990s. You would have thought they’d want to shed the legacy of the Lippo Group and the Lincoln-Bedroom-for-rent, but instead they built the same pay-to-play structure via the Clinton Foundation.
Mrs. Clinton made the astounding decision to use a private email server for official business so she could duck federal records laws. But when that was discovered, rather than admit the mistake and release everything, she and her retinue continued to resist and deflect and deceive. By her behavior in the past year, Mrs. Clinton has ratified the worst things her critics say about her.
Some of our friends argue that Mrs. Clinton’s corruption is tolerable because it is merely about gaining and maintaining political power. This understates how much the Clinton blending of public office with private gain erodes confidence in honest government. It feeds the leftist narrative that business is merely another arm of the state and thus reduces support for free markets.

***

All of which means that if she does win on Tuesday, the manner of her victory would damage her ability to govern. Rather than win a policy mandate, she has chosen to destroy Mr. Trump personally. She would face a Congress that wants to investigate her from the first day and an electorate that is polarized and doesn’t trust her. Her instinct would be to lean even more on the left for political support, making compromise with Republicans in Congress even more difficult.
We’re as optimistic as anyone about the resilience of American democracy, but four more years of aggressive progressive rule would more deeply entrench the federal Leviathan across ever more of the economy and civic life. The space for private business and nonpolitical mediating social institutions would shrink.
The case for Mrs. Clinton over Donald Trump is that she is a familiar member of the elite and thus less of a jump into the unknown, especially on foreign policy. The case against her is everything we know about her political history.

Copyright ©2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Credited to the WSJ

The Gamble of Trump

The hope of better policies comes with his manifest personal flaws.

Wall Street Journal 11/6/2016 - original link below

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-gamble-of-trump-1478299393?emailToken=JRr8fvp4Yn6Vi9Izb8wg1FBtYaANAeuEA1TZaWzQJ03U8SWJ/rL7lvRu1oA%3D

 

The case for Donald Trump is political disruption. A broken Washington needs to be shaken up and refocused on the public good, and who better to do it than an outsider beholden to neither political party? If only that reform possibility didn’t arrive as a flawed personality who has few convictions and knows little about the world.

***

The best hope for a Trump Presidency is that he has aligned himself with enough sound policy impulses that he could liberate the U.S. economy to grow faster again. He would stop the crush of new regulation, restore a freer market for health insurance, unleash U.S. energy production, and reform the tax code. His default priority would be growth, which the U.S. desperately needs after a decade of progressive focus on income redistribution and the worst economic recovery in 70 years.
Assuming Republicans hold Congress, the House GOP has already put many of these reforms in legislative language. Mr. Trump could adopt them as his own reform agenda and get a fast start on governing. With a GOP Senate he could fill Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court with someone from the fine list of candidates he has publicly released. For many voters, the future of the Court is by itself enough reason to support Mr. Trump.
Yet while this could be a 1980-like moment of economic renewal, Mr. Trump is no Ronald Reagan. The Gipper came to office with a coherent and firmly held world view formed by decades of reading and experience as a Governor. It isn’t obvious that Mr. Trump reads anything at all. He absorbs what he knows through conversation and watching TV, and he has no consistent philosophy.
This makes it hard to predict how he would respond to the shocks and surprises that buffet any President. His firmest policy conviction seems to be that trade is a zero-sum game and that America is losing from global commerce. But if he follows through on his vow to withdraw from trade pacts, impose tariffs on imports and punish U.S. companies that invest abroad, he could cause a recession. The main economic battle in a Trump Administration would be between his pro-growth domestic reforms and his anti-growth trade policy.

***

The strongest argument against Mr. Trump, as Hillary Clinton has recognized, concerns his temperament and political character. His politics is almost entirely personal, not ideological. He overreacts to criticism and luxuriates in personal feuds.
President Obama’s greatest failure has been to govern in a deliberately polarizing fashion, and Mr. Trump’s response has been to campaign the same way. If the businessman loses a race that Republicans should win this year, one reason will be that his often harsh rhetoric has repelled women, minorities and younger voters. He ignores or twists inconvenient facts, and even when he has a good point his exaggerations make it harder to persuade the public. Yet a President needs the power to persuade.
The least convincing Never Trump argument is that he would rampage through government as an authoritarian. That ignores the checks and balances in Washington that constrain GOP Presidents in particular. If Mr. Trump wins, the media would awaken from their Obama-era slumbers and dog his Administration with a vengeance. The permanent bureaucracy would resist his political appointees, working with the media to build public opposition.
The more realistic concern, especially for conservatives, is that Mr. Trump would be as haphazard in office as he has been as a candidate and thus fail to change Washington as he has promised. Mr. Trump would start out with more than half the country disliking him, and most of his advisers lack government experience. Too many blunders or an early recession could cause voters to sweep out the GOP Congress in 2018, setting up a return to an all-progressive government in 2020.
Another risk comes from the negative impulses on the political right that Mr. Trump’s meanest rhetoric has awakened. Populism has its uses, and the media stereotypes of Mr. Trump’s supporters don’t capture their variety and general goodwill. But populism becomes dangerous when it is rooted too much in ethnicity or class.
Mr. Trump’s Breitbart posse has a vendetta against Republicans on Capitol Hill and is motivated by brooding resentments that too often veer into white-identity politics. If Mr. Trump indulged these sentiments as President, he would further polarize the country and alienate non-whites for a generation.
Then there is the biggest Trump gamble of all—foreign and security policy. The good news is that Mr. Trump wants to rebuild U.S. defenses that have eroded on Mr. Obama’s watch. He would be more candid about, and more aggressive against, the Islamist terror threat.
Yet the irony is that Mr. Trump shares Mr. Obama’s desire to have America retreat from world leadership. Beyond “bombing the hell out of ISIS” and “taking the oil,” it isn’t clear the Republican has any idea what to do in the Middle East. As a rookie in world affairs, he would be unusually dependent on his advisers—if he listened to them.
His seeming bromance with Vladimir Putin is especially troubling given the Russian’s aggression in the Middle East, Europe and cyberspace. Presidents Bush and Obama also underestimated Mr. Putin’s revanchism, but Mr. Trump has been all too nonchalant as Russia presses ahead. His instincts to retreat to a Fortress America could invite more aggression from Russia, China and Iran.

***

The Wall Street Journal hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate since 1928, and if we didn’t endorse Ronald Reagan we aren’t about to revive the practice for Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump. Yet one of them will be the next President. The choice comes down to the very high if relatively predictable costs of four more years of brute progressive government under Hillary Clinton versus a gamble on the political unknown of Donald Trump.

Copyright ©2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. - Accredited to the WSJ