We walked with the dogs on Saturday morning as we do almost every morning; our two, Nemo and Connor, and the exuberant labradoodle belonging to an elderly neighbor. Penny, the labradoodle is a young dog, energetic, impulsive and quite strong; late last year, while walking down to the community mailbox, Penny pulled on her leash abruptly that our neighbor was pulled over and absolutely wrecked her shoulder/rotator cuff when she fell to the pavement. This meant several days in the hospital and weeks of therapy for our neighbor, who likely will never regain full mobility and so, we walk her dog in the morning, and the children of another neighbor walk the dog later in the day; all this aimed toward exhausting the dog, who as noted, is young, exuberant and requires an extensive program of exercise which our neighbor is simply unable to provide, as much as she adores her companion-dog. So we do it it’s what neighbors do.
Conservatism
The Quality of Your Enemies
… or the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie Donald Trump.
Paraphrasing the motto across the front of a favorite tee shirt that I wore out years ago, “I used to be disgusted; now I’m only amused.” I’ll cop to being both amused and disgusted when Donald Trump first hove into sight as a potential GOP nominee earlier in this election cycle. The whole thing was a joke, and I was certain he was playing it as such, playing it for the laughs and as an ego boost. Yes, The Donald of the bright orange tan and hopelessly fake comb-over, a crass, loudmouth East Coast real-estate speculator, with vulgar and over-the-top tastes in everything from interior to exterior decoration, in the words of the writer at Zero Anthropology, a “mountain of Grade A Beef in a $10,000 suit,” significant other of one Marla Maples back in the day when he first became an enduring feature on the front pages of national tabloids that Donald Trump did not strike me as likely presidential timber. Still really doesn’t, but then I never thought a no-name minor Chicago machine pol with precisely nothing on his professional resume save being the editor of the Harvard Law review and identifying as black was presidential timber either, yet the post turtle got elected to that high office twice.
A Fine Friday Miscellany
Ah, the stupidities come so thick and fast of late. It’s like the rain here in Texas, which has been pouring down with such intensity over the last few days that all the usual low-water flood-danger locations have been as any fool could easily predict flooded and closed to vehicle traffic. It rained so hard on Thursday morning that for the first time in ages, we skipped walking the dogs. Looked out at the flooded street, the flooded front walkway, rain coming down sideways, and the sky so dark that it looked like twilight already; nope not even the dogs were keen, especially Nemo the Terrier-God-Knows-What, who loathes and despises water with a wholly undoglike passion.
But social and political stupidities what a rich buffet was laid before us this week, even apart from the gross stupidity of deciding that the ostensible civil rights and good-will of what may be .03% of the general population that miniscule transgender portion of it supersedes the rights of women and girls in a public restroom/locker/changing room to be certain they are not being letched on by a perv who has twigged to the fact that if he only declares that he feels female on that particular day that no one will want to firmly escort his perverted ass out of said safe space. Yes, the Kennedy Administration vowed to put a man on the moon, the Obama Administration has put a man in the Ladies’ Room and damned if the pervy wretch isn’t insisting that he has a perfect right to be there. Progress, y’all. While the perv element may have witless friends in the form of various celebrities ostentatiously declaring that they won’t be performing in *insert the location here* because hate/failure-to-socially-advance/toleration-eleventy!! I am brought to wonder if their concerts were significantly less than sold-out, and this is a handy means of cancelling an event and putting a convenient cover over the economic failure of it all. And I am also reminded of the way that mobs came out to eat at Chick-fil-A, in response to an announced boycott because the gaystapo getting all (you should pardon the expression) butt-hurt over the Chick-Fil-A CEO mildly expressing personal support for traditional marriage.
A pretty good analysis of Trump/Cruz by Rush Limbaugh.
I usually don’t listen to Limbaugh as the timing doesn’t work for me. I did come across this transcript and it seems to be pretty accurate as to what is going on.
The party is never going to write themselves out of control of this process. So when that happens, oh, panic sets in! So reason that Trump ends up here with essentially a 22% bonus in delegates is because the Republican Party set it up so that the front-runner gets bonuses for being the front-runner, ’cause they thought they were gonna be in charge of who the front-runner ended up be.
They wire it or try to in a lot of ways. The problem is, they’re working four years in advance and they’re always basing rules on what went wrong the last time.
Rule 40 was directed at Ron Paul in 2012.
The problem now is to stop Trump. How to do that ?
Where’d I leave my sunglasses?
We let the Saturday/Sunday WSJ opinion pages remain unopened as we have errands to do and our local paper has dispensed with its Sunday edition to deliver its scant weekend advertising edition on Saturday. So this morning I ate my eggs accompanied by a whimpering Peggy Noonan.
She sounds like an out of phase boomer crying “Has anybody here seen my old friend Jeb?” because her Republican party is shattering in her mind. So long has she lived in the comfort of her subservient cocoon that she cannot imagine that the shattering of the chrysalis will allow the emergence of the beautiful and powerful butterfly instead of the inert pupa to which she had become accustomed. Instead the agent of that shattering, Donald Trump, is seen to be destroying the comfort to which she had looked forward in her old age.
I also saw the returns for yesterday’s contests where Cruz won two and narrowed The Donald’s margins in two others while leaving Rubio and Kasich far behind, clutching for straws. We now have the two man race. Bad news for the Donald because he now faces the candidate most likely to reveal the true emptiness of the man behind the curtain. And the candidate most likely to present a clear choice for voters in November.
And on the other side, the Bern won 2 of 3 which will force Hillary to rededicate herself to leftism past which she will, if still free, be forced to defend in the autumn against Cruz painting the future in bold colors.
Who ever became president in 2008 was doomed to preside over 8 terrible economic years. The withdrawal of the boomers from economic productivity into dependent consumerism was inevitably about to begin, our financial institutions were in disarray, and a vibrant China was eating our lunch as had the Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s.
The next president, whoever it is, will face far less difficult prospects. Boomers will continue their decline into consumption, but they will begin to abandon the jobs to which they have so bitterly clung to the X’ers and Millenials who so desperately need them. Our financial institutions, while still unreformed, are stronger than any others in the world. China faces interesting times, and our adversaries in Russia, Arabia and Persia will struggle with the onslaught created by one of the 20th century’s greatest unsung heroes, George P. Mitchell, father of fracking. Who knows, there may be enough wealth to cover Social Security, if not Medicare.
What remains unstated in all of Noonan’s and others’ commentary is that this election has the opportunity to be a revolutionary generational transfer of power. The Donald, having done the prophetic work of Jeremiah, has paved the way for Cruz, the new Josiah, to rediscover the law of old and restore it to guide a new age. An age in which Republicans have an embarrassment of talents and the Democrats none. Should Cruz gain power there is greater than normal reason to expect his redirection of the nation could be sustained simply because of the lack of opposition talent and the gift of fracking. After the last 30 years, we can at least pray for it.
No one can know the future, and there are some reasons why this may not be it, but for this afternoon, I can at least try to remember where I left those sunglasses.