Having observed the absolutely vicious battle among conservatives fighting over Trump or Cruz, I noticed it bears a striking resemblance to political infighting and other struggles during the Civil War. So here is a thought I started working up for conservative websites. ***** The reason the Trump, anti-Trump battle has all the hallmarks of a civil war is that it is another replay of the English civil war, the Revolution, and the US Civil War, with the same forces and same social elements, and it will probably go the same way. The Roundheads will win. From a conservative's perspective, Mitch McConnell is our General McClellan who makes endless excuses for failure and inaction no matter how many resources we give him. Cruz is the polished strategist who can recite the entire catechism of Napoleonic tactics and drill, and execute them flawlessly, but keeps on failing in head-to-head battles while he brags about his brilliant victories where he slipped into his opponent's camp after nightfall, in a theater that wasn't even contested, to slay defenseless and surprised camp followers, and offers this as proof of his strategic brilliance. Our problem is that Republicans keep losing because their leadership won't fight. Everything is out of bounds. Proper decorum must be maintained. Its probably the result of the GOP absorbing Southerners and combining their most dysfunctional traits with the most dysfunctional traits of Northern Republicans to create a hybrid mutant out of the pathological dysfunctions of Union generals and Confederate generals. They won't fight and they won't dare be insulted or relieved, either. Command should go to the one with the most honor and the purest heart who is most favored by the Lord, but one who also won't run unnecessary risks. In contrast, Trump is Grant. He's uncouth, uncivilized, drunk, and ignorant of nuance and complexity. He's a buffoon. There's no way he should be allowed any position of power and he shouldn't be considered in the same breath as more worthy generals. But he fights. He fights and he wins. He also fires people at the drop of a hat for failing to win. In the Confederacy, the heirs of the Cavaliers in the English Civil War, they wouldn't dare question a gentleman's honor and wouldn't stain his family by relieving him. Every excuse for failure was swallowed. In retreat Lee would always say "God didn't choose to grant us victory this day," and his superiors would just sagely nod their heads. After losing the war he was still regarded as a hero who fought and lost with honor. In contrast, the Yankees fired officers for failure, and kept firing officers, until they found someone who could do the job. The Confederacy ended the Civil War with the exact lineup they started with. The Union didn't have such sentimentality and used a high turnover rate to weed through people who talked a great game, or who had impressive credentials, breeding, and background, but couldn't deliver on the battlefield. The first time Ivanka Trump went on Letterman she said her dad would fire her if she didn't deliver. Then she related how Larry King asked Donald if he would do something like that and Donald said "I would fire her like a dog." That's what the Roundheads are looking for. He may be unschooled and uncouth, but he fights and he's willing to fire his own daughter if she can't do the job. It's in stark contrast to the GOP establishment who have somehow come to think that abject failure guarantees their job security and highlights their conservative purity, a purity that puts principle before results. That's the position staked out by National Review, who would rather lose with honor than win with a crass, unprincipled loudmouth. Like the DC pundits who still clamored for McClellan's return, they'd rather lose with Romney than disgrace the Republic with Trump. The GOP establishment may be honorable and highly principled, but they're also highly principled ineffectual losers who have failed to hold any ground Obama wants to occupy. So just as Lincoln did when faced with the same dilemma, and under the same vicious backlash from the establishment and all right-thinking people, the Roundheads are going with the profane drunk guy who will fight like the honey badger and fire anybody who fails to perform. He will make blunders, sometimes big ones that cost us a lot of casualties, but he will keep rolling forward, making bold calls without worrying about what the DC pundits and chattering class are saying. The party establishment hasn't been using the army to win anything no matter how many resources we give them, so in frustration a lot of people are for letting Trump borrow it to win some bloody head-to-head victories, even as all the useless masters of strategy explain, while they sip brandy on the cocktail circuit, how he's a fool who will be crushed. We want to win, and winning requires fighting, and principles are not a substitute for that. So by process of elimination, skipping over all the polished speakers with impeccable resumes who aren't willing to make one bad decision or utter one misstatement, that leaves Grant - er Trump. ***** I heard one supporter on the radio say "I disagree with 80 percent of what Trump says, but he fights!" I wonder how many Union soldiers felt the same way.
TLDR version: Trump's fans are awful on the inside, but lack the balls to be awful on the outside, whereas Trump is brazen enough to be awful inside and out, and thus gives the cowards a vicarious thrill.
Wait a minute. When did the talking point that Trump's fans are violent and aggressive go out the window?
That post is a really, really sad look into the "life" of @gturner He's less of a man than @Rusty Shackleford - who's only 14.
I'll add that to the questions I'd like to ask Melania. But seriously, given my strongly argued and long held position that Cruz can't actually be the nominee, I've ended up with Trump by default as Cruz knocked all my favorites out of the race. Certainly Cruz checks off the catechism of conservative positions, but he's also driven the campaign and the party into a ditch. Since there are no electable conservatives left, I just have to cope with what remains.
You don't have to vote for Trump just because you think Cruz is ineligible, you can vote for someone else.
I did. I voted for Rubio. He'd already doomed himself by the time we voted, but me and my friends voted for him anyway. But while I was at our caucus location I talked to the guys manning the Trump table. I said "Cruz is ineligible under ...." And they said, "Yeah! WTF is up with that?!!!"
Even if Trump wins the nomination, you still don't have to vote for him. I promise, it's okay, you don't even have to vote at all. You won't get in trouble, Trump won't hurt you, you'll be able to go on with your life.
Just skimming this (need to go somewhere shortly), but I'm pretty sure Muad Dib is rolling over in his grave. The North kept firing their generals because they were incompetent or wouldn't fight enough to please the folks back home, yes. The South clung to their generals, or at least most of the most famous ones, because their generals were doing about as well as anyone humanly could with the resources available. The South, in fact, already had the kind of generals that the North needed from the start. Personally I would restate your opening lines like so: And so, when people talk on this board about the US splitting up, I can see where they're coming from. I don't think it will happen as long as the US is an economics powerhouse, because money talks, but I can understand having that viewpoint.
I will vote for Trump because he's making all the right enemies. He's enraged the open borders crowd, La Raza, BLM, the Republican establishment, the press, and so many others. Every time there's something that really need to be done, or needs to be said, there's a passel of interest groups or a particular lobby that will keep things from happening. The GOP establishment keeps saying they're against amnesty and illegal immigration and for a wall, but they refuse to fund the wall because they'd rather have the issue than solve the issue. They kept saying that they're totally against Obama's Iran deal, and could block it with only a third of the Senate, but they amazingly found a way to <i>lose</i> with a majority. They had to go to elaborate lengths to intentionally engineer their own defeat. Perhaps they're in some variation of McClellan's position where the continued existence of the Confederate Army is what kept him important and kept all the troops and supplies flowing to him. We keep giving them everything they ask for and all we get in return are excuses about how it's not quite enough. As happened in the Civil War, people get frustrated, and then they get fed up and demand new leadership. Often the leadership required seems utterly crude and simplistic. In the Gulf War Colin Powell was asked what his strategy was for dealing with the Iraqi army. He said, "First we're going to cut it off and then we're going to kill it." There's an incredible amount of complexity and moving parts in doing that, but without the decision to do the simple thing, all the complexity and sophisticated plans are useless. What good is a principled conservative who buckles at the first outraged protest, and there will <i>always</i> be an outraged protest. Megyn Kelly tried her damndest to crush Trump at the very first debate, and he threw her around like a rag doll and eventually made her do the walk of shame to his office.
The South had a few good generals but they wouldn't listen to them because their suggested strategy was to not fight, and Cavaliers can't "not fight". The South lost every battle, even the ones they won, because the South couldn't afford to win a battle. Each victory brought them closer to defeat because they were badly outnumbered and outgunned. A winning strategy for them would be to avoid major battles to retain their army as a version of the French "fleet in being." As long as the French had a fleet they were a potential threat to England. The only way they could lose is by taking that fleet into major battles because then it would be whittled away to nothing. And Lee was incompetent. He tried to invade West Virginia in the winter without winter clothes. He should've been relieved but he said his defeat was God's will. His superiors accepted that as an excuse. He was constantly bedeviled because he lacked adequate battlefield maps. He had the best battlefield mapper in the US working for him directly, but he had that mapper making maps of past battlefields, recording things for posterity instead of gathering information that was vital for Lee's next battle. I recommend Civil War Generalship: The Art of Command. It argues that the best general was probably George Thomas (the Rock of Chickamauga) who was decades ahead of his time, with incredibly precise maps, mobile telegraph command centers, mounted infantry instead of cavalry, and timed artillery barrages. But he was also slow and methodical up until the moment he moved decisively. He was the only Civil War general to completely defeat an enemy army (at the Battle of Nashville). He realized that his army has to be able to advance faster than the enemy can retreat or the enemy army will still be in the field. Grant and Sherman didn't understand Thomas's method and thought he was just too slow, another McClellan. I'm focusing on the #neverTrump crowd. During the Obama administration the GOP has been pretty uniform in saying what they want to do. They're just ineffective at doing it. They're really good at drawing a paycheck and asking for more. They're aghast at Trump who actually slugs it out in the mud pit, and they're aghast at his supporters who must be equally ignorant and uncivilized. They've built such a shiny army, all in brass and blue with gleaming bayonets, and they're afraid Trump will break it by dragging it through the mud toward the enemy.
Again, what good is a principled conservative if they won't do anything but talk about conservative principles? That won't get a wall built. That won't get jobs back. That won't stop Putin. And how does Trump know what people want to hear when he doesn't even conduct any polling? Cruz knows exactly what you want to hear because he has dedicated research teams on the ground building a database of you. From the Danker Memo There is a simple reason why Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses Monday night. He is a master strategist — and he always has been." That was the lead of Yahoo News' coverage of the February 1st results. The story revealed that the Cruz campaign had targeted voters so precisely that it had even sent a message about its position against fireworks bans to a small segment of people – reported elsewhere to be just 60 potential caucus-goers. Fireworks were one of 77 local Iowa issues it had identified to chase supporters with. The only way Trump could know what we want to hear is if he thinks like we do. He was all over the place on abortion because he doesn't really think about it - at all. And frankly, who wants a President who sits around thinking about dead babies? In contrast, Ted Cruz probably thinks about abortion more than he thinks about food. He's got all the right answers, but that in itself is kind of disturbing.
Actually, the Confederacy chewed through a number of generals during the war, and many of the famous ones were only in their positions thanks to cronyism, and Jefferson Davis had a habit of dumping successful generals simply because he didn't like them. Lincoln was more interested in getting results, than he was in how much he liked a particular general, so he was less likely to toss one aside due to personality conflicts. FTFY. I've mentioned before that I had a boss who used to work for Trump, he said that Trump always structured his deals so that the other party took all the risk, while Trump got the lion's share of the profits, regardless of how much Trump had to do with the deal. Other people who know Trump have had said similar things. Trump "says" he's going to bring jobs back to America, while having all his campaign stuff made overseas. The only thing Trump cares about is himself. Putting him in charge of America is like handing a loaded gun with a light trigger pull to a toddler. If you (generic "you," not you personally, since you don't seem inclined to vote for Trump) can't vote for the Democratic nominee, vote for any third party candidate. This will will encourage more third party candidates to run, and shows to the main parties that you were willing to go to the trouble to show up and vote, but you weren't willing to vote for the asshats they picked.
Like every candidate, Trump went to rallies and town hall meeting, feeling out what people are thinking. He knows people are fed up with the establishment and he knows that people want something done about immigration, so what does he suggest, something that's been talked about for years.
And we've talked about it for years, no, for many decades, because politicians would rather have the problem as an issue to exploit than fix the problem.
Math and logistics doomed the south. No matter how well you fight (using a simple analogy) if you're a flyweight and you're taking on a heavyweight, you will fucking lose, period, end of story.
Easy: The straight white male has enjoyed a preeminent role in society. This societal 'head start' has been slowly diminished while at the same time the economy has changed in a way where they no longer have a physical advantage (moved from resource extraction and manufacturing economy to a creative economy). So the mediocre white male is being 'attacked' from both sides. Nothing creates more outrage than privilege diminished. Thus Trump. Mediocre white male is his base.
I'm pretty sure the straight white male is even more dominant in the creative economy than the manufacturing economy. Go look at Silicon Valley.
His counter argument will probably boil down to "Elon Musk is African-American!" Heck, the lone black writer on the Jon Stewart show went off on a rant about it.
