They're Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine

Conservatism is under attack and it's not who you think. Turns out we are our own worst enemy. Trump has carved off a segment of conservatives, mashed them all up with angry white people, angry black people, angry Hispanics and other fringe elements that look to Trump for salvation, but Trump isn't the whole problem.

I just spent an unpleasant hour listening to Stefan Molyneux and a guy who calls himself Vox Day explaining what the alt-right movement is all about. Apparently the term "cuckservative" originates with Mr. Day and loosely means "race traitor".  The alt-right movement claims it's better that people stay in their own cultural enclaves - the nations that bred them in other words. They further claim that the US is a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation and it's time we should make it that again. So now we have the Republican Party broken up into Trump minions, alt-right race loyalists, neo-cons, country club Republicans, Tea Party folk and a confused bunch of the rest of us who believe in the Constitution, free markets, small government and every one of the Bill of Rights.

There is an old military tactic known as "divide and conquer" that seems to be the primary strategy being used against the conservative community. Together people who identify themselves as conservatives make up 65% or better of voting Americans. Together we are a terrible roadblock to the conquest of America by progressives.  Separated and fractured into factions, we're relatively harmless.

Ironically, progressives, those advocates of multi-culturalism and promoters of non-assimilation have used the very techniques they use to create "voter groups" against Republicans and conservatives. Sadly, they have a lot of help from us in doing it. Apparently conservatives are more than willing to help out.

At any rate, I've never seen good-hearted well meaning Americans so divided in my lifetime. I've read about it in history books. It never ends well for nations that have a divided populace.

Somehow we need to find common ground for all of us. We're more Americans than we are anything else if you get right down to it, but thanks to the media, entertainment industry and the political jabbering class, we've been convinced to huddle up in our own little homogeneous groups.

It's not easy to hold a nation together when it divides itself into narrow ideologies and political ghettos.  Create those divisions along cultural and racial lines and it's even worse. We've got to cut that out or the America we know is going to be taken from us by a smug set of conquerors, who have figured out the Achilles heel in the American melting pot. Ironically, it's the same thing that is our strength - our differences.

© 2016 by Tom King 

There You Go Again.....

TRUMP IS THE SAME AS REAGAN?
Trump's PR Department Constructs New Meme

The Trump Machine scoured the picture files to find this pair of pics which equate
a Reagan thumb's up to a Trump thumb's up! They still wound up with a Trump smirk
alongside a genuine Reagan smile. Reagan's looking at people; Trump at cameras.

Here they tried to catch a Reagan smirk and pair it with
The Donald's famous smirk. The problem for the PR guys is
that Reagan looks like he shares and inside joke with his
audience. Trump here looks like he knows something that
you don't know and thinks you're pretty stupid.

I'm going to do this one in pictures so that the LIV Trump supporters at whom this is aimed may understand. I just hope they'll notice the captions or they'll miss the whole point, but seeing as how the true believers will follow Trump off a cliff, I don't suppose there's much hope of that.

True conservatives (whom Trump says he doesn't need) love Ronald Reagan. He's far and away our favorite president of the past century and a half. So (since they don't need us), Trump's minions (shown at the left) have begun constructing a new meme.  The old "lesser of two evils" meme has been successfully and widely debunked and is obviously not working with principled conservatives so they've taken a new tack. First it was the "devil you don't know is better" argument, which hasn't been as successful as they hoped, with Trump supporters beginning to jump ship lately as they realize that the devil you don't know is still a devil. Whoops!

So to reach conservatives (whom Trump doesn't need in order to win), the Trump machine has resorted to resurrecting the corpse of Ronald Reagan and propping it up beside pictures of Donald Trump that they have tried to match expression and mannerism-wise so that the LIV crowd might mistakenly believe that Trump is a chip off the old Reagan block.

Trying to remember which expression to use
versus seriously presidential

 There are a whole raft of these Trump/Reagan "which of these things is just like the others" kind of photos on the web. A lot of them are png files which makes me wonder if the same Photoshop wizard is making them. I can hear the Trump PR department going, "Chuck, we need you to find some pictures where Trump looks Reaganesque and match them up with old Reagan photos. And we need those by tomorrow. Comparing him to the devil hasn't worked out so well...."


Here's some more that Bozo the Candidate's crack PR team came up with....

 Here we have the mouth open pose. I need hardly comment on which looks like a president and which like a side show barker.

Here we go, still trying to match the serious presidential face of Reagan. Best they could do is Trump's Monty Hall face doing "Let's Make a Deal!"

 Trying to show how Trump captures Reagan's energy. Looks more like the Donald is doing an advertisement for the Squatty Potty.

Still trying to match up the serious presidential expression on Reagan's face with something (anything) remotely similar from the Donald. I've seen Dana Carvey do that same expression in his Church Lady skit on Saturday.

"Now who could it be?"

Church Lady could tell you who it is. The face and eyes are the mirror to the soul. Does anyone beside me think that Trump and Clinton both are using practice faces trying to gin up some real human expressions. Do we have a pair of sociopaths running for president this November - people not capable of expressing genuine emotions. Isaac Asimov once wrote a story about an Android that ran for public office once. He pulled it off. I wonder whether the victory of the robot said more about how well the robot simulated human emotions and expressions or more about how poorly politicians do?

We've certain tossed out any real people from the candidate pool this time around. All we have left are con artists, criminals and criminal con-artists with the cumulative moral strength of a pigeon. Here's hoping there are more wise and principled Americans out there this fall than it would appear based on the quality of this year's top tier presidential contenders.

© 2016 by Tom King

Lest you think the Trump Machine's technique is new, here's a foreshadowing.
Here they compare Cruz to Nixon, Trump to Reagan and Rubio to Bush. We
are supposed to learn from this that Trump is Reagan. I'm not sure who they
are selling this balderdash to, but their collective brainpower could hardly
summon up the energy to light up a night light.

Better the Devil You Don't Know?

The sum of things hoped for.?   What are the odds?

Really? You have to give it to he who must not be elected. The man knows how to twist a meme to his own benefit.  There used to be a saying that everyone knew that went like this:

"Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know."

The point of this old saw was that with the devil you know, at least you have some experience with defending yourself against him. With the devil you don't know, you have no idea what fresh hell is coming your way. Most old sayings are based on generations of collective wisdom. It takes an adept hand at the old tiller o' propaganda to teach everyone to believe exactly the opposite of what they once believed and to simultaneously not really notice that they've done a 180.

We conservatives who are, we are told, not needed by Trump to win are being told that we must hold our collective noses and vote "Not Hillary". The reasons given range from "Hillary is worse" to "He will build a wall.".  If we counter, "We don't know that Trump really will build a wall or that Hillary is worse," they confidently tell us, "Well, we KNOW how bad Hillary is. With Trump there's a chance he could be better."  This is the mirror opposite of the old "devil you know" adage.

                            "Better the devil you don't know than the devil you do."

That, of course, flies counter to logic, reason and "The Art of War" by Sun Tsu. It is much harder to defend our nation against an unknown threat than to prepare to fend off a known threat. With Donald Trump, it's even more so. He comes as an angel of light, all set to defend the rights and privileges of every angry American who is willing to simply ignore his myriad flaws and "eccentricities". Trump is the political equivalent of a scratch-off lottery ticket or a quarter in a Vegas slot machine. You're pretty sure you are going to lose, but, hey, you might not. I don't find the difference between a certain loser and an almost certainly worse loser to present significantly better odds. At least not enough for me to spend the one coin I have (my vote) on either. I prefer to spend my vote on someone I can feel good about supporting, even if he doesn't win.

I don't gamble. That's probably why it's easier for me to resist scratching either box on my ballot. I don't like crap shoots. With crap shoots, most of us never win. The house generally cleans up and walks away with all your money. What's disturbing about this analogy is that Trump has managed to bankrupt several casinos.

But better the devil you don't know? Who knows? You might win?

Yeah, right!

© 2016 by Tom King