Intentional Conservative

My title could refer to Mike Pence’s surprisingly strong performance in Tuesday’s VP debate. Instead, I’m sticking to my theme for the week, arguments against respectable conservatives who support Trump. On Monday I wrote about theologian Wayne Grudem. Today I’m taking a look at the the Trump justification from Dennis Prager, a conservative talk-show host, writer, and founder of Prager University (an online video archive). National Review published his take on the first presidential debate if you want to read that piece. (While NR as a publication has refused to endorse either candidate, they do print articles from some in the pro-Trump camp as well as those who make the case for Clinton as the lesser of two evils.)

But here I want to zero in on something Prager said back in May when he first threw his weight behind Trump. Let me assure you that I am not making his statement up.  He really said this:

The choice this November is tragic. As it often happens in life, this choice is between bad and worse, not bad and good.

But America has made that choice before. When forced to choose between bad and worse, we supported Joseph Stalin against Adolf Hitler, and we supported right-wing authoritarians against Communist totalitarians.

Oh man! It’s hard to ignore the distractions out there, especially Trump’s 3:00 AM tweets and his leaked tax returns. To even hint that this mean-spirited, nasty-minded charlatan in any way resembles Ronald Reagan . . . well, mind-boggling is too weak of a term.

But I’m going to forge ahead what what I had planned to post for the first part of this week, which is an examination of the moral cave-in by respectable conservative writers as they try to excuse their support for the Republican nominee.

It’s great when you run across something from an author you admire and say, “Yes! That’s exactly what I’ve been saying!” That happened to me yesterday when I read Friday’s “The Goldberg File,” by the peerless and fearless Jonah Goldberg of National Review. (Trump has called him “really pathetic” in one of his famous insulting tweets, so that must mean Goldberg’s pretty good.) Anyway, I’ve been saying that there’s a part of me, a small part, that almost wishes Trump would win, because then all of the predictions of the NeverTrumpers would come true. We’d all be vindicated, big time.

Here’s what Goldberg has to say:

Okay, so why in my selfish heart of hearts do I want Trump to win? Because that’s the only surefire way my opposition to Trump can be vindicated. If he loses, every time Hillary Clinton does something awful — which will be a lot — people will say, “If Trump were president this wouldn’t be happening,” or, “This is all the fault of the ‘Jonah Goldberg class,’” or, “If we had Mr. Trump’s broad-shouldered leadership, the grain harvests would be historic.”

You can read the entire article by clicking below.  Warning: Don’t expect complete gentility here.

“If Candidate Trump Can’t Be Managed, What Makes You Think President Trump Could Be?”

One of the slowly-diminishing band of conservative NeverTrumpers with his usual excellence:

“Donald Trump’s Rise Reflects American Conservatism’s Decay“

This is going to have to be the last post on the first debate, as there’s so much more to cover about the issues in this election. So I’m ending with this article that puts the debate into a much larger, higher perspective.  Were any transcendent values expressed in Monday’s debate? Sadly, no.

Takeaway line from this excellent article::
Hillary Clinton may have offered little sense of humility, of obligation, of responsibility in Hempstead, but it was Donald Trump who directly rejected those virtues, reframing them instead as vices. He painted altruism as a sucker’s game, and left sacrifice for the losers. It was a performance that made clear one broader meaning of his candidacy—the eclipse of the values that long defined America.

Read the article in its entirety here:
“America’s First Post-Christian Debate“

I’ve quoted generously from Jennifer Rubin of the excellent conservative Right Turn blog; she’s a NeverTrumper of the first water.  (She’s also astoundingly prolific, writing several posts most days. Imagine how well she’d do if she weren’t so dumb!) You go, Jennifer! Just today I found out that one of Trump’s tweets said, and here I quote the entire lamentable thing: “Highly untalented Wash Post blogger, a real dummy, never writes fairly about me.  Why does Wash Post have low IQ people?” (from Dec. 2015)

So I couldn’t resist including her article, sort of a re-visit of my own post about “it might have been!” She sets out in depth and detail how four actually talented Republican candidates would have taken Clinton apart in Monday’s debate.  How I’d love to have the privilege of voting for one of them! (I know, I know. I said yesterday’s post was the last one on the debate. But this is a horse of sort of a different color.)

“Imagine If Republicans Hadn’t Lost Their Minds”

I kept checking the time to see how much longer this thing was going to last. My husband ducked out about halfway through, but my son and I stuck it out to the bitter end.

My prediction? Trump will try to weasel out of the remaining two debates. He has to know that his performance last night was an unmitigated disaster. He was unprepared and floundering, spouting various bits and pieces that sometimes hit his target (as in his remarks about Clinton’s support of the TPP or his challenge about her e-mails) but which he then utterly failed to follow up. You can disagree with every single one of Clinton’s policies and positions and still say, “We can’t have this childish, pouting, rude, ignorant man sitting in the White House.”

Once the debate takes place tonight the knuckling-under of Ted Cruz will be ancient history, so I’m squeezing in a post this afternoon just for my own satisfaction.  First, I’m going to quote myself, always an author’s prerogative. I wrote this back during the week of the RNC:

I’ll end with a little shout-out to Ted Cruz, who got booed on the floor for his speech last night in which he refused to endorse Trump.  What a great honor!  Of course one must say that he’s probably being purely pragmatic.  As I keep saying and saying, the only conservatives who will be left standing after this disastrous election will be the Trump holdouts.  (In “Beating the Saul Alinsky Dead Horse.”  Scroll to the bottom for this quote.)

​A professor of history at American University has a rubric that he has used to correctly predict the winner of the Presidency for the past 30 years. Based on his set of true/false questions, he predicts a Trump win. HOWEVER, he also says this:

We’ve never before seen a candidate who’s spent his life enriching himself at the expense of others. He’s the first candidate in our history to be a serial fabricator, making up things as he goes along. Even when he tells the truth, such as, “Barack Obama really was born in the U.S.,” he adds two lines, that Hillary Clinton started the birther movement, and that he finished it, even though when Barack Obama put out his birth certificate, he didn’t believe it. We’ve never had a candidate before who not just once, but twice in a thinly disguised way, has incited violence against an opponent. We’ve never had a candidate before who’s invited a hostile foreign power to meddle in American elections. We’ve never had a candidate before who’s threatened to start a war by blowing ships out of the water in the Persian Gulf if they come too close to us. We’ve never had a candidate before who has embraced as a role model a murderous, hostile foreign dictator. Given all of these exceptions that Donald Trump represents, he may well shatter patterns of history that have held for more than 150 years, lose this election even if the historical circumstances favor it.

If you are planning to vote for the man who fits the above description, here are my challenges to you:

1) Ask yourself whether or not the the professor’s words are accurate. Listen to your answer.

2) WATCH THE DEBATE TONIGHT. Try, as much as possible, to cast aside your partisanship and simply observe and evaluate. Remember the words of James 1:5: “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.” It is always appropriate to ask for the truth to be revealed.

God may indeed be planning to pour out His judgment on this nation by the election of Donald Trump, who is not a Cyrus figure but a Nebuchadnezzar one.

Here’s the entire article:

​“Trump Is Headed for a Win, Says Professor Who Has Predicted 30 Years of Presidential Outcomes Correctly”

Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the general who overthrew Egypt’s elected government in 2013 and has ruled with an iron hand ever since, gets the same praise from Donald Trump that he has also heaped on Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein,  and Vladimir Putin.  

Takeaway line: 

The candidates’ face time with him was unmerited and ill-advised, considering that Mr. Sissi, in addition to overseeing the extrajudicial killing or disappearance of thousands of Egyptians and the imprisonment of tens of thousands, has directed a vicious campaign against U.S. influence in his country. There was, however, a notable difference in the way that Mr. Trump and Ms. Clinton handled the strongman — one that reveals a substantive and important divide on foreign policy. 

Read the entire article here:

​“The Stark Difference between Trump’s and Clinton’s Meeting with a Dictator”