If It's a Lie Then We Fight on That Lie

Every once in a while, Twitter shows me something.

Someone managed to add a GIF showing that wonderful 32 seconds from "The Wire" where Slim Charles explains to Avon Barksdale, the king, the essential truth about war, for any nation, whether it's a subculture in Baltimore or for the United States of America. 

It's a truth which explains every American war, with the exception of WWII, going back to the Spanish American War of the 1890's.

Of course, it has much wider application in today's Trumpery era. 

And here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOQCuRdWt-A

Okay, Finally, Someone Who Can Beat Him

Yesterday, Mad Dog heard Cory Booker at a backyard New Hampshire event.
He told an affecting story about washing the blood of a gunshot victim off his chest with water hot enough to cause enough pain to his skin to deflect the pain he felt inside. Women sobbed. You could hear a pin drop.

Mad Dog was unmoved:
1. It was simply too much, too much drama, too theatrical.
2. It was all about appealing to white suburban women who are all about empathy, compassion and who are moved by "heart rending."
(Some men are, too, but this is a pitch which is focus grouped.)

Not that he was insincere. He was just not what Mad Dog was looking for.
Mad Dog loves Elizabeth Warren, but she shares that fatal earnestness of the Democrat: bleeding heart liberal, oozing concern for the wretched refuse stuff Booker is trying to sell.

Don't get Mad Dog wrong: He loves Emma Lazarus and the yearning to breathe free stuff, but he is looking for someone who can withstand the acid rain of the Trump crowd, who say all that's for losers.

Today, it was different.

At a house party in an elegant Brentwood manse, Amy Kobuchar arrived and ridiculed Trump from start to finish. She did the one thing Trump cannot stand: She made a fool of him, much to the delight of the crowd. 

The one thing that makes Trump melt is withering ridicule, laugh out loud, ridicule. 

She mentioned that when Trump pulled us out of the climate accord, only Nicaragua and Syria had not signed on. Today both of these countries have signed on--only the US has not. She went through a few stories about floods and fires and asked: Do you really think we don't have climate change? She mentioned a march of scientists who marched with banners that said, "Science matters. But first, peer review."

She said Trump has been riding on the Obama recovery for two years and he has been doing his level best to torpedo the recovery Obama gave us. 

Everyone was  laughing together. It was cathartic.

From climate change, to healthcare to student debt she said just enough, not too much wonky detail, just broad strokes.

Mad Dog could have listened to her all night.

This is just 4 days after Trump regaled his 10,000 storm troopers in Manchester.

After she finished her stump routine, she took questions, written on slips of paper she pulled from a box.
She pulled  out one slip and read it: "How to you defeat a candidate of charisma with policy?"

She laughed. "Well, I think I have plenty of charisma."

She had already proven that.

Weepy Democrats

Something's changed, it's not that I fear but
Maybe it's that I took care of you too many times
And you grew weaker for a kindness
And sometimes kindness from a friend can break a man
--Rickie Lee Jones

Don't feed stray dogs: They'll follow you home.
--Southern proverb

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
--Emma Lazarus

This is racism. Real racism. 

Riding in to work this morning Mad Dog is listening to 3 stories on NPR:
1. An ER doctor talking about treating drug addicts in Boston who sometimes return to his ER 3 times in a single day with overdoses.
2. An activist talking about Trump's new policy to deny entry to immigrant family members if their US citizen relatives who are sponsoring them have been on food stamps or Medicaid--as a way of preventing people entering who will become burdens to the state.
3. A Democratic politician who says Donald Trump is a racist because he says immigrant caravans are filled with MS-13 gang members.

Now Mad Dog is a radical leftist Democrat, he knows this about himself. But something about these stories dived subcutaneously, got into his blood stream and started his blood boiling. 
Mad Dog would like to address the drug problem, the problems of addiction, would like immigration to be fair and orderly and he agrees that there is something suspicious about a man who sees a dark man coming across a border as a rapist gang thug but who smiles and opens arms wide when he sees a blond Norwegian at the gate.

Furthermore, Mad Dog thinks we are doing something wrong in the United States that we have so many mass shootings and so many home shootings compared to other nations, especially English speaking nations.

On the other hand, nothing gets Mad Dog more irritated than hearing the typical Democratic response to all these problems because it sounds so effete, formulaic and wrong headed and the posture is always one of lachrymose --"I'm so sorry for your loss"--and never tough, pragmatic.

The Trump fan will say:
1. That drug addict is a leech on society. He is making his problem our problem. He keeps presenting himself to the ER for care then goes right out and repeats his transgression.
2. That immigrant family is on food stamps and gets free insulin from Mass Health when my insulin costs me $600 and why does the government take better care of these illegals than it does for me, a hard working guy who puts roofs on houses in the hot sun all day?
3. Trump is not racist. Look at his rallies--always a few Black faces in the stands behind him. He says he is doing more for Blacks than Obama by opening up factories and getting them jobs. Would Hitler or George Wallace have shaken hands with Negroes on stage at their rallies? Trump never said he didn't want Black immigrants or brown immigrants. What he doesn't want is criminals and people who will go straight on welfare. Has nothing to do with race. He doesn't like "shithole" countries. His antipathy is not toward Blackness but backwardness. He loves rich Black people.

What Democrat is this loved?

Anti Trumps keep pointing to the Statue of Liberty and the idea of the maternal gathering up of the suffering as the ideal of the United States.
Trump is saying, "NO! Our ship is full!"

Compassion is out, hard edge is in. We take care of our own, not the whole world. Africa, South and Central America, Asia, South Asia are huge buckets and we cannot contain all their misery in our cup.

Do we turn her away?

The fact is, Mad Dog believes, most of his fellow citizens are somewhere in between these two extremes.
1. There should be care for drug addicts, but the addict and his family are not primarily our burden. These folks have to get themselves right. We can help in a limited way but the responsibility of getting you clean is not ours.

2. We want to provide limited welfare--the welfare system was changed during the Clinton years to accommodate people briefly, for a matter of months, but we cannot support every needy family indefinitely. We can tide you over, but not accept the full burden of your family indefinitely. You must learn some skill and work. When Trump says he's open to immigrants with PhD's this is what he's tapping into. Send us your well trained, your high tech stars, but keep your failures.

3. It was for years a liberal trope that 90% of our prison population is Black, which proved, ipso facto, that the justice system is unjust and biased. 
But then someone asked, "What if 90% of the crime is committed by Blacks? 
Suppose the justice system simply incarcerates, color blind?"

The average citizen, reading his newspaper sees the description of the perpetrator and sees "a Black male, in his twenties" often enough it makes an impression. 

4. As for immigration: Yes, we want immigrants, but since the early 20th century our doors have been closed, often to whole classes of people, particularly Asians and Africans but even to southern Europeans. That was done on a straightforward master race/Nordic race racist basis emanating not from the slack jawed, illiterate Southern simpleton, but from the Harvard, Princeton, Yale set of privileged entitled white males.
Trump is simply atavistic; he's nothing new. The whole Emma Lazarus thing was but a flicker.

Desperation

We can work out immigration but we need to decide basic things like are we out to "reunite families" or to import talent or to be sure new immigrants will not be unemployable or diseased? We used to exclude people for TB and trachoma. In recent years we admitted people with HIV and severe heart disease which were sure to cost the public coffers dearly. What do we want to do about allowing the disabled or unemployable to immigrate? 

Is this racist?

What we need is thought, not slogans.
But the left gives us bumper stickers.
Trump gives us rallies.

Studying Trump; Learning from Trump

People who loathe Trump cannot penetrate his armor.
Intelligent, scholarly, otherwise learned and effective people melt before his visage.

Why? They simply lose their cool. They stop examining the disease under the microscope or in the lab and they erupt in a bilious outrage and all hope of effectively striking back at him is lost.

This happens in various (usually contact) sports: If you can just get your opponent to blow his top, he'll self destruct and be unable to hurt you.

So Mad Dog submits this proposition for your, kind reader's, consideration: Let's find what is attractive about Mr. Trump. Why people love him, and then see where that takes us.

First of all, you will note, his rallies are not conventions of snarling dogs.
People you see behind him are grinning ear to ear. 
The people you cannot see in the audience are laughing uproariously.

Take just a random, recent clip of Trump speaking to a crowd in Texas, where he complains about the criticism coming from the liberal/fake news media: 
"They complain about my saying we are seeing an INVASION coming across the border! Ten thousand coming across! What else do you call it?"

He laughs. 
The crowd laughs with him.

"Well, of COURSE it's an invasion what else would you call it?"

Now he is all reason and incredulity that the obvious truth of this assertion could be questioned.

"And what can we do about it?" he goes on, grinning.

"Shoot 'em!" someone cries out from the audience.

"Well, that's only in the panhandle you can get away with that stuff. Only in the panhandle!" Trump roars.

The crowd roars. 

Now, what has he done here, exactly?
1. He has shown the crowd he knows there is a panhandle.
2. He has suggested he shares an inside joke about the panhandle with them. (Although what exactly that joke is eludes Mad Dog, who is not even sure he wants to know.)
3. He has used a big number to substantiate his claim, 10,000. Where that comes from doesn't matter. He just says it. 
4. He shows the good folks of Texas he is with them on shooting folks first and asking questions later--a good ol' Texas tradition.

Despite his red tie and designer suits, his New York origins, he has shown he is one of them, can laugh with them, can reduce those self righteous, sanctimonious snots who are the Eastern liberal media to sputtering effete puddles of jelly.

And what is the response?  Joe Scarborough explains, tediously, that this is bad. This is racist. This is the President being unpresidential.

Trump knows if you can get the crowd laughing with you, he wins.

What Democrat--other than Bernie, on occassion--can do that?