Dave Neese Provocations: Trump and his alternatives
Looks like I’d better say something nasty about Trump. Everybody else is.
As the French say, It’s de rigueur.
You gotta keep up with the fashion, stay in style.
I see that one commentator — a conservative, no less!
— recently described Trump in passing as “narcissistic, crass and mendacious.”
Well, that’s a start.
For my own part — as a lowly scribe who has found myself writing from not exactly a pro-Trump but more of an anti-anti-Trump perspective — I’ll toss in some additional invective.
Yes, Trump is bombastic, thin-skinned and petty.
Yes, he’s prone to exaggerate
— when, that is, he’s not crashing through the guardrails of fact with his runaway rhetoric.
Yes, he tends to be mouthy and obnoxious.
He lacks subtlety.
He can be a bull in the china shop.
He doesn’t read books. He watches Fox, not PBS. He prefers the tabloid New York Post to hoity-toity New Yorker magazine.
Plus, he has garish, ostentatious tastes.
There. That’ll hopefully cover my Fourth Estate quarterly quota for anti-Trump vituperation, will pay up my dues, so to speak.
But — I must then hasten to add — these qualities in Trump do not logically confer sanity on the raving lunatic positions now widely and enthusiastically voiced in various Democratic precincts.
You may find Trump’s swaggering antics at his rallies alarmingly reminiscent of Mussolini’s street balcony orations.
Even so, however, this doesn’t render today’s nutty Democratic obsessions any less nutty.
Take, for example, “white supremacy.” Yes, Trump may be mouthy, but . . . . Does saying so somehow back up the claim that America has become a duplicate of apartheid-era South Africa?
Or, actually, does the whitesupremacy claim reek of bull-xxxx no matter how many times or how loudly you say it?
Yes, Trump may be narcissistic and crass. But . . . .
Does saying so somehow alter the biological, scientific fact that, for example, there are two genders, not three, as Joe Biden counts them, and not more than three as other Democratic activists insist?
True, Trump can be obnoxious. But . . . .
Does saying so mean, therefore, that it’s wise public policy to ban the word “felon” and substitute the term “justice system involved individual,” in hopes of hiding the reality there are criminals out there and they are a problem for society?
Does taking note of Trump’s obnoxious qualities make any less cuckoo the notion of, for example, extending the vote to hundreds of thousands of inmates in America’s gang-packed prisons? To empower the Crips and Bloods and MS13 as major voting blocs?
Yes, Trump sometimes flattens the facts with his steamroller of blather. But . . . . Does this render “slavery reparations” any less of a crackpot proposal?
And so it goes, up and down the extensive list of whackjob positions most of the Democratic presidential candidates have eagerly rushed to embrace. Including:
— ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. Just because Trump is annoying, does this mean it therefore makes sense to open the border to millions of illegal alien school dropouts who speak no English?
To provide them with free medical coverage and various other assistance, to encourage more and more of them to keep pouring over the border?
Is it a good idea, just to spite Trump, to allow illegals to flood the labor market, to undermine minimum-wage laws, to undercut the pay of those who are struggling to eke out a living at the bottom margins of the economy — including especially, ahem, African Americans but also Latinos who have immigrated legally?
Does Trump’s blowhard bluster make “sanctuary cities” any less batty a policy?
Does it make any sense to say, “I can’t stand Trump, therefore it’s a great idea for our most crime-plagued cities to declare themselves exempt from enforcing the law when illegals commit crimes?
— FREE-TRADE SCAM. Because we don’t like the way Trump combs his hair, must we therefore accept a trade status quo that works lopsidedly in China’s interest?
Must we therefore side with the corporate oligarchs and the Wall Street temple moneychangers in their blind worship of “free trade” dogma?
Must we, just to show our dislike of Trump, characterize every move he makes in trade negotiations as instigating a “trade war”?
Must we, just to show we’re not with the knuckle-dragging MAGA anthropoids, oppose Trump’s every move to look out for America’s economic interests?
To demonstrate that we can’t stand Trump, do we continue to look the other way as the Rockefeller and |Carnegie robber barons of the day — Google and Microsoft, for example, Democratic Party bankrollers
— team up with the Beijing bureaucrats to help them finetune their high-tech instruments of surveillance and oppression?
To register our disapproval of Trump, must we go on pretending not to notice that transnational corporations with little or no allegiance to the United States have outsourced the jobs of whole American towns to cheap-labor Shanghai, Ningbo and Hanzhou?
— CLIMATE-CHANGE HOOEY. To demonstrate our Trump-hating credentials, must we accept the hysterical and scientifically shaky claim that a climate-change Armageddon lurks just around the corner, signaling fini in just a matter of years for life on earth?
To show our scorn for Trump, must we go along with disruptive measures to dismantle the energy industry as it exists today, thereby upending the economy?
Must we, to flaunt how fashionably anti-Trump we are, champion the elimination of oil, gas and coal in favor of wind turbines and solar panels, even though those can supply but a minuscule fraction of the energy we need?
Must we, just to tweak Trump, go along with new “carbon taxes,” higher gas prices and steeper electricity rates — plus brownouts if it comes to that, which it likely would?
Must we hobble our own economy while advantaging China’s, all in the name of resisting global warming?
Regarding climate change, the high-minded progressives among us are understandably eager to let it be known they are part of the intelligentsia, not part of the deplorable, slack-jawed Trump base trailing its Wal-Mart scent.
But does this attitude somehow impart wisdom to the hysterical, knucklehead notion that climate change is the “No. 1 existential threat” confronting Americans today?
Enid Strict the Church Lady, i.e., Elizabeth Warren, says yes it does indeed. Ditto says the geezer Trotskyite, i.e., Bernie Sanders.
They say global warming threatens to end life on the planet, and soon.
Sounds serious. If accepted as true, it surely justifies radical, drastic measures — revolutionary measures — does it not?
Will Barack Obama therefore now have to cancel that $15-million real estate purchase on the shoreline of Martha’s Vineyard and move into an efficiency apartment on higher ground?
Will all of the billionaire Democrats in the Hamptons likewise have to abandon their beach-font manses and flee the rising seas?
Will Leonardo Di-Caprio have to swear off his travels by private jet and squeeze himself into a coach-class seat on Spirit Airlines?
Or maybe take the bus? And if climate change is in fact an imminent, “existential threat” to life on earth, what then does this imply regarding our military posture toward the aforementioned China?
China, after all, now leads the world in “global-warming” emissions.
Doesn’t this mean, as Bernie and Liz see it, that China must therefore be regarded as the “No. 1 existential threat” in the world?
Are we ready to go to war with China if that’s what it will take to force it to knock off its life-threatening, carbon-dioxide-polluting ways? Bernie and Liz did say “No. 1 existential threat,” did they not?
Looks like we voters have some weighty questions to ponder.