Back in 2003, the psychiatrist and columnist Charles Krauthammer declared a new psychiatric syndrome, Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency nay the very existence of George W. Bush. He had a point. But derangement can be generated by support as well as opposition for a political figure.
What do we say about conservatives people who believe, variously, in limited government, free markets, Judeo-Christian values, and the importance of character in public life who have been forced to utter absurdities in defense of Donald Trump? Its one thing to say that Hillary Clinton and her Supreme Court justices and her 4,000 bureaucrats are on net worse than Trump and whatever menagerie he brings to the White House. But when free-market conservatives find themselves enthusiastically defending the most protectionist presidential candidate since Pat Buchanan, or Christian conservatives are forced to say that personal character isnt really a big issue for them, I fear that derangement has set in. Take just a few examples in the past few days.
In Thursdays Wall Street Journal Karl Rove writes that Trump needs a Republican House to pass his agenda. But his agenda is trade war, deportation, and banning adherents of the Muslim faith from entering the United States. Is that an agenda a Republican House would pass? Say it aint so, Karl (or Paul).
Also in Thursdays Journal the Christian author Eric Metaxas writes that God will not hold us guiltless if we fail to vote for Trump. Metaxas oddly cites Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a Christian who also had to make a difficult moral choice: He joined a plot to kill Hitler. Is that really something Metaxas thinks God would consider wrong? As for voting for Trump despite his moral flaws, Metaxas tells us that God will ask What did you do to the least of these? I wonder where that leads: Perhaps the least of these are the Mexican and Chinese workers whose jobs Trump wants to destroy, the Hispanic immigrants he wants to deport, separating them from their U.S.-born children, the low-income Americans who will find it harder to afford T-shirts, sneakers, and smartphones, or the refugees fleeing war and devastation whom he would bar from the United States on the basis of their faith.
And then theres Ben Carson, who delivered himself of these thoughts at a college in Missouri:
Ben Carson urged a conservative audience to be strong in their faith and stand by their beliefs in the face of ever-growing government.
Tyranny will reign otherwise, and there will be mass killings once again, Carson told a crowd Friday. The peace that we experience now will be a memory only. This is the nation that stands between peace and utter chaos.
Asked at a press conference how he thought such a grim future might come about, Carson referenced the whole gay marriage issue.
Why must they change it? Carson said, referring to efforts to recognize civil unions as equal to traditional marriage. I believe the reason is, if you can change the word of God in one area, then you can change it in every area. Its the camels nose under the tent, and it will just be an avalanche of one thing after the other.
Maybe thats not exactly Trump Derangement, just general derangement. But Carson was the second former opponent to endorse Trump, and hes become an enthusiastic surrogate.
Finally, I note the comments of Rush Limbaugh this week. Limbaugh is often funny and sometimes has real insights lurking in his monologues. But the attempt to defend both conservatism and Trump for three hours a day seems to be getting to him. In particular, a guy who soared to the top of the talk radio business by attacking Bill Clinton and his bimbo eruptions now finds himself compelled to defend confessions of sexual assault. He fell into the abyss Wednesday with this meditation:
You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing. You can do anything, the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, its perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that theres no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.
This is just sad. A conservative, a defender of traditional moral values, denouncing the idea that consent is required for sexual activity. This is what rank partisanship, red team/blue team mentality, and a failure to recognize when your party has taken a wrong turn leads to.
None of this should be construed as an endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Ive been denouncing her statism since the 1990s. But I hope, for the sake of my conservative friends, that the Wall Street Journal was wrong when it wrote early in the Clinton years, the personal virtue known as self-restraint was devalued. In the process, certain rules that for a long time had governed behavior also became devalued, and thus there were going to be a lot of casualties. Because a lot of conservatives seem to be hurtling over the guardrails and defining deviancy down in their determination to justify anything anything the Republican nominee for president says or does.
David Boaz is the executive vice president of the Cato Institute and has played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement.
#1: nolu chan To: Willie Green (#0)
Because liberal Clinton rape, followed by Clinton destruction of the victim, is so much less concerning than unwanted conservative sexual activity involving touching and kissing.
nolu chan posted on 2016-10-17 15:47:58 Reply Private Reply
#2: Hondo68 To: Willie Green, fake libertarians, Onion tears libertarians (#0)
A Glenn Beck authoritarian neocon, FAKE libertarian!
Any a$$hole can claim to be a libertarian. Bill Weld, the Mitt Romney clone is now pretending to be a libertarian, and running in the Libertarian Party for the VP position on the Gary Johnson ticket.
He's a stinking REPUBLICAN hate America globalist big government progressive, like Mittens and Trump!
Hondo68 posted on 2016-10-17 18:24:44 Reply Private Reply
#3: Willie Green To: hondo68 (#2)
But it's Cato...
Willie Green posted on 2016-10-17 20:08:42 Reply Private Reply
#4: GrandIsland To: hondo68 (#2)
Many of them post here... hate on everything but (D)'s... and love drugs, hate war, protect fags and never posts negative about welfare.
Sound familiar?
GrandIsland posted on 2016-10-17 21:07:39 Reply Private Reply
#5: Gatlin To: hondo68 (#2)
Furthermore....anyone who claims to be a libertarian is an asshole!
Gatlin posted on 2016-10-17 21:45:09 Reply Private Reply
#6: buckeroo To: Gatlin (#5)
You have performed this majiick trick piles of tymes on LF. Are you singling yourself as an admission of failure?
buckeroo posted on 2016-10-17 22:11:02 Reply Private Reply
#7: buckeroo To: GrandIsland (#4)
Yes. You have suggested that you are a libertarian.
buckeroo posted on 2016-10-17 22:13:21 Reply Private Reply
#8: Gatlin To: GrandIsland (#4)
Gatlin posted on 2016-10-17 22:36:09 Reply Private Reply
#9: paraclete To: Gatlin (#8)
paraclete posted on 2016-10-17 23:34:15 Reply Private Reply
#10: GrandIsland To: Gatlin (#8)
That's our agenda assholes to a T
GrandIsland posted on 2016-10-17 23:48:54 Reply Private Reply
#11: rlk To: Willie Green (#0)
How do we pay for what we're getting?
rlk posted on 2016-10-18 01:00:06 Reply Private Reply
#12: rlk To: All (#11)
That's easy. We start up the printing presses and pay for it with worthless dollar bills. That's going to come to a stop also when foreigners learn we don't make anything they can buy with it except cell phones, temporarily.
Immigration? Obama and Hillary are bringing in 3,000,000 islamic jihadists under immigration reform. They are nothing but future guerilla fighters intent on establishing sharia law. They are nothing but subversive cultural incompatables.
DAVID BOAZ is an asshole.
I've wasted too much time on this.
rlk posted on 2016-10-18 01:33:15 Reply Private Reply
#13: Gatlin To: paraclete (#9)
Only you can decide what makes, or will make, you a libertarian.
As to the second sentence in your post, lets review what Abraham Lincoln said in a speech at Columbus, Ohio, on 9/16/1859:
Having read this by Abraham Lincoln, does that make you a racist?Gatlin posted on 2016-10-18 02:02:56 Reply Private Reply
#14: Hondo68 To: Gatlin, statist, demopublican, statist, strawman (#8)
Hondo68 posted on 2016-10-18 02:28:04 Reply Private Reply
#15: Gatlin To: paraclete (#9)
Why was Abraham Lincoln a great libertarian?
Gatlin posted on 2016-10-18 02:28:38 Reply Private Reply
#16: Gatlin To: hondo68 (#14)
Spit....Spit....spit!!!
HELL NO!!!
Gatlin posted on 2016-10-18 02:30:45 Reply Private Reply
#17: paraclete To: Gatlin (#15)
paraclete posted on 2016-10-18 07:57:20 Reply Private Reply
#18: Gatlin To: paraclete (#17)
I did not ask you that.
You called Abraham Lincoln a "great libertarian."
Perhaps you did not understand my question.
I realize that can happen.
Therefore I will repeat my question to you:
Why was Abraham Lincoln a great libertarian?
Gatlin posted on 2016-10-18 08:28:02 Reply Private Reply
#19: Gatlin To: paraclete (#13)
I replied by posting the text from a speech by Abraham Lincoln for you to read.
I then asked you a very simple and understandable question which I will repeat.
Having read this by Abraham Lincoln, does that make you a racist?
Well .does it?
Gatlin posted on 2016-10-18 08:43:49 Reply Private Reply
#20: Gatlin To: paraclete (#17)
Lincoln was a Republican. However, it must be noted that the parties were basically switched in their philosophies at that time. IOW, what was Republican then is Democratic now.
Trumps campaign is a populist insurgency within the Republican ranks, consisting of an anti-Washington movement designed to stoke working-class anxieties and lead a path to the White House.
Gatlin posted on 2016-10-18 10:48:39 Reply Private Reply
#21: Hondo68 To: Gatlin (#20)
Hondo68 posted on 2016-10-18 12:56:50 Reply Private Reply
#22: Gatlin To: hondo68 (#21)
Nah, that's four stone carvings of the same libertarian asshole on the side of a mountain.
Gatlin posted on 2016-10-18 13:20:57 Reply Private Reply
#23: paraclete To: Gatlin (#19)
what if I said to you that I agree with him does that make me racist. If you take his words at face value Abe was racist, yet he fought against an even more racist ideology, but he had the view that everyone should be free, isn't that what libertarian means?
paraclete posted on 2016-10-18 18:04:06 Reply Private Reply
#24: nolu chan To: paraclete, Gatlin (#23)
What do you imagine that ideoloy to be? The smallest collection of books in the world is comprised of glowing biographies of Lincoln by black authors for a reason. Lincoln was a racist. His "ideology" was colonization.
Abraham Lincoln
Address at Cooper Institute, New York City
February 27, 1860
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol 3, page 541.
Annual Message to Congress
December 1, 1862
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol 5, page 535-6.
December 1, 1862
In April 1865, Lincoln to General Butler.
Benjamin F. Butler, Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler: A Review of His Legal, Political, and Military Career (or, Butlers Book) (Boston: A. M. Thayer & Co. Book Publishers, 1892), p. 903.
nolu chan posted on 2016-10-18 18:55:00 Reply Private Reply
#25: paraclete To: nolu chan (#24)
So you can call Dumps idea of deporting illegal hispanics as the Lincoln solution.
Lincoln thought a mosquito ridden swamp as suitable for blacks (Belize) and no doubt Dump thinks the same suitable for hispanics.
But Lincoln was right racial harmony has not been achieved in 150 years and it won't be enhanced by importing arabs
paraclete posted on 2016-10-18 20:20:15 Reply Private Reply
#26: Gatlin To: paraclete (#23)
Well .does it? Are you a racist?
Gatlin posted on 2016-10-18 22:07:29 Reply Private Reply
#27: paraclete To: Gatlin (#26)
Is it racist to recognise that some cultures don't fit together? to recognise that certain peoples don't play nicely together? it is childish to think we should all be thrown into a melting pot and be happy there. Does this upset your ideology? Lincoln opposed slavery, this doesn't mean he expected integration, he was realistic, knowing the mind of his people
What I reject is a culture that has the death of others outside the culture at its centre, is this racist or common sense? What I reject is a culture that expects others to support them without any contribution. Is this racist or common sense?
paraclete posted on 2016-10-19 00:30:08 Reply Private Reply
#28: Gatlin To: paraclete (#27)
From your abstract phraseology, I can only surmise that is neither racist nor common sense.
Definitions:
Cultures - Meaning the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular human social or ethnic group.
Ethnic - Relating to or characteristic of a human group having racial or religious traits in common.
If you refuse to fit together with another culture or you determine that certain peoples should never associate together because you believe your culture (ethnic or racial group) is superior .then you may be a segregationist.
Are you a segregationist?
Gatlin posted on 2016-10-19 01:42:18 Reply Private Reply
#29: Gatlin To: paraclete (#23)
Lincoln actually said: I have always thought that all men should be free Lincoln then continued his point and went on to say: but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly, those who desire it for others. When I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Everyone should be free from slavery is what Lincoln meant when he sought to free the slaves.
Is it? Was Lincoln seeking freedom from slavery the same as libertarians seeking to maximize autonomy and freedom of choice, emphasize political freedom, voluntary association, and the primacy of individual judgment?I dont think so. If for no other reason, I find no place that Lincoln ever wanted any voluntary association with slaves. Have you found that anyplace?
While we rejoice in the notion of being free, discuss about being free, read about being free, dream about being free while others teach ,advocate and hope to be free .we must always place what we mean by be free in a context.
So, freedom means many things to many people. Libertarianism means many things to many people. Most importantly, libertarianism means many different things to many libertarians.
I think you widely overreached when you tried to tie libertarianism to Abraham Lincoln .just my opinion.
If someone has the principle to stand for something, then they should have principle to admit what they are .or what they are not. You still have never said if you are a racist, a segregationist or neither. Do you care to do so now?
Gatlin posted on 2016-10-19 09:28:25 Reply Private Reply
#30: paraclete To: Gatlin (#28)
I would not separate people without reasonable justification
paraclete posted on 2016-10-19 18:14:50 Reply Private Reply
#31: Gatlin To: paraclete (#30)
I understand.
Gatlin posted on 2016-10-19 18:22:58 Reply Private Reply