Here’s a PJTV interview with Ann Coulter. At minute 2:40 she utters what I suspect will turn out to be the biggest lie of the campaign, when she states Trump doesn’t have any political opposition research team. Coulter insists Trump’s campaign staff is just a couple people running things for months and now a few more. Now, watching Trump show up all through last summer and fall to interviews and debates without policy details, but with his pockets loaded down with sleaze and scurrilous dirt, well someone provided Trump with this meticulous opposition research. Add to this that Trump endlessly warns people to watch out or else, hinting he has more dirt to dump (and often he dumps it, so he’s not bluffing). So, while Coulter may buy into “Trump the political genius”, I call bullshit, loud and clear. Trump came loaded down with huge piles of professionally-gathered opposition research. Who he hired to gather all this dirt remains unknown, but before this election is over, more details will likely emerge.
Trump dominates the news cycle and beyond his policy blunders, this latest controversy over his campaign manager and the former-Breitbart reporter, Michelle Fields, takes the cake for Trump being completely tone deaf and frankly a total idiot. Put aside all the arguments about the he said/she said, put aside the video and audio tapes. Just think about this as a public relations incident and pretend you’re a presidential candidate whose campaign has been alleged to encourage violence. Now, if you have some campaign messages about real issues you’d like to resonate with voters, something like this Fields incident should be something you want to get behind you as quickly as possible.
For the record, I don’t see Fields almost pulled to the floor in the video, but I also do see Lewandowski touch her arm, which puts a lie to Trump initially saying Lewandowski never touched her. So, even if Fields exaggerated, Trump and Lewandowski could have handled this in a gentlemanly fashion and the matter would be history by now. Imagine if the Trump campaign issued a public and private apology to Fields or even imagine the private apology coming with a bouquet of flowers. It would have been very hard for Fields to turn them into cads and this whole escalation could have been avoided. That’s called diplomacy and rising above the situation, but it takes character to do that and Trump lacks it.
Instead, Trump launched into a character assassination of Fields from the beginning. Coulter may applaud Trump’s approach, as she has made a career out of baiting people and creating scenes – from her books, to her TV appearances, to her college campus speeches. Her entire career can be summed up as agitation propaganda of the most vile sort. Her career centers on name-calling and vile demagoguery, then when she provokes a response, she plays the victim of the “vicious Left.” And of course, she has made flipping her long blond hair back part of her public speaking too, her nose goes up in the air with a haughty jaunt and then she flips her hair back, which comes across as a “So there!” To be fair, Coulter only touched her hair one time in this interview and did not do her trademark tossing it back, perhaps because this was a very friendly venue for her.
libertybelle diaries 
Ann C was sort of special,, I thought, She was iconoclastic, but they were mostly not MY icons, so I just laughed. Then she endorsed DT. Well, I can see why some people might like HIS iconoclasm, I guess. However, she is selling her soul in support of someone who is just not on even a very long list.
I see an ironic parallel with Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time,, when the pressure of anti-Communist investigations, and so on, fractured the Leftist movement, such that there were people who would not speak to one another, fifty years later.They were always fractious, that’s why there were Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, after all.
Of course, DT’s purpose is becoming clearer and clearer to me, to produce the same fragmentation and general mutual hostility on the Right. I have always been willing to welcome everyone into the Big Tent. Coulter a little rough? Limbaugh abrasive? The various Bush people being marshmallow Conservative? It’s OK. We can agree on certain essentials. Now, not so much. Even allowing for shifting alliances and espoused beliefs, I am provoked to wonder about people whom I had trusted.
Likewise The Episcopal Church USA, which I joined in 2007, has fallen apart. I was willing to worship alongside people who might not even be Christians, but, well, I could pray for them, that they would grow in grace. At last, I left, and joined one of the dozen or so Rump-Anglican bodies, whose combined membership is now larger than the ECUSA’s Going along to get along has not worked so well, for me, nor for my various family members, who, I would have said. were a little too purist for my taste.It has turned out that they were mostly right. Most disturbing.
I know that the Lord will know and find His own, and that we are not bound by organizations so much as by the Spirit, Who seems right able to organize enough of us to do the needful. As for the politics, I see at least a bit of trouble in Paradise, although perhaps too late.
There’s something else. I know Cruz, a little, and several in his circle, better. At the risk of sounding quite paranoid, I wonder at some of his gaffes. How are these things happening? Is there a provocateur in that crowd? Ted is not stupid at all, and he has thought through most of the pertinent issues, unlike, e.g. DT. Is the careening DT campaign having its Psy-0ps effect? If, just to take one point, he was cheating on Heidi, he kept it very well hidden from people who would have dropped him like a hot potato. (This train don’t carry no gamblers”)This weird stuff is all utterly mystifying, even allowing for the fact that so much of my information is coming through very dubious sources.
I have always thought a Christian should be a Christian citizen, that we are not subjects of an Empire, but the owners of the government, and therefore responsible for its actions. Now, I question whether we can do anything, and, therefore whether we are obligated to try. One does wonder.
I was born into the Episcopal Church, but the last time I went to church was my father’s funeral. I was 7 years old. Life turned hard and cold.
I doubt that much of what was the Episcopal Church back then is still in existence. I came back to being a believing Christian over the years, but there is so much modernism, post-modernism, and just plain Leftist ugliness in most churches it is seriously hard to find one to which I would want to belong.
Guys, it is ALWAYS our obligation to try, isn’t it? The big problem is that we have to find out what it is we are meant to do while at the same time lost in a heavily thicket-type forest with stormy skies above and just keeping moving is hard enough; directions, that’s another thing. Still, yes, we have to try.
I think.
As for Cruz, early last year I envisioned Cruz as POTUS for 8 years, then on to the SCOTUS. But he has become more and more like a typical candidate, with all the gaffes and lies and stupidities thereof. He should have stopped that thing he does when he says part of a statement, hesitates, looks down for a moment or two, and then looks up to finish the accusation or judgment, or whatever. He has several studied, practiced set of expressions and behaviors, which I am sure are effective in court, but which have grown tiresome after the thirty-billionth time on the campaign.
Cruz could have charted the stars, faced forward, steered to the open sea, and left the negatives to the lesser candidates. After tying himself to the mast to avoid the Siren Songs of the Establishment, he could have set sail to the winds of Destiny.
And the worst of it is that, even if somehow it all comes down to Cruz at the Convention, the GOPe will find some way to stop him. Both Parties are led by Educated Barbarians now, and they know how and what to destroy. Even a lesser Cruz is too much for them.
Minta, if you are still interested in historical and liturgical worship, the various ACNA bodies are doing that. I was born and eventually baptized a Southern Baptist.Thirty years later, I fell in love with the Book of Common Prayer, and moved on in that direction. Now, even if I wanted to go back to Baptist, most of their congregations in the Central Texas area have lapsed into the Happy Clappy places where the kind-of/ sort-of hymns with words, and not music, are projected onto screens, and what my daughter dismisses as “Greeting Card” level sermons predominate. My little Anglican church, in North Austin, is pretty solid, so it will do, for now. As i said earlier, we must rely on the Holy Spirit to do the organizing for us. One example of what i mean is that the solid and orthodox congregations in Central Texas cooperate in various mission endeavors, like the pregnancy resource centers.
The Presbyterian Church in America is also pretty solid, where I have had contact with it. My wife and daughter attended one of those congregations in Austin, for a few years. Daughter is exploring various options, which a 21 year old is more or less required to do, I suppose.
I suppose I ought to add, if by some chance you are ever in the Austin area, Holly has my e-mail, so get in touch. We’ll take you out for lunch or dinner, or, if it’s a Sunday, you can visit my church.And, just in case you were worried, this is not a cyber-flirtation from a sixty-five-year-old. My wife has to approve all my extracurricular activities, and so far, in the past forty four years, no one has met with her approval.
BTW: Holly, that invitation is open to you, too, although i realize that in your present circumstances, travel plans are on long-term hold.
Thanks Michael and Minta for your thoughtful comments. I grew up rebellious about organized religion, but my parents insisted on Sunday school, church and later 2 years of catechism classes to be confirmed into the our neighborhood church, which had two rotating pastors, one a UCC Reformed pastor and the other a Lutheran pastor. The services seemed the same to me. Due to a teenage experience of helping our elderly pastor’s wife care for our long-retired pastor, with the nursing home being unwilling to keep him, let’s just say I had my fill of sermons – enough to last a lifetime. This elderly pastor was very difficult, so his wife, a truly lovely petite little Jewish lady came across the road to ask my mother for help. My mother sent me to help with his care, because, according to my mother, my younger sister was too frail and my older sister wasn’t good with old people, but I, my mother assured me, was great with old people.
Thus began almost two years of getting my great-grandmother changed and tucked into bed at night at our house, as she was in very declining health, gathering up my school clothes for the next day and my books, then heading across the road to help get our elderly pastor settled. He was blind, had dementia, but still retained his imperious manner. I read sermons and religious tracts to him, often for hours to keep him quiet. Alas, reading to him was filled with interruptions – demands to reread passages, corrections on pronunciations, but often too he would launch into some interesting explanations of Biblical text, so it wasn’t all terrible.
To compound that I later had a summer job after our pastor and my great-grandmother had passed away, caring for another elderly lady (because I had experience at taking care of the elderly and it paid better than other summer jobs). As luck would have it, another job requiring endless reading of religious tracts, except this lady was also addicted to the PTL Club too – she even ordered stuff from there.
I encountered several charlatans besides the PTL club in my life, all operating under the guise of a Christian church, so I am wary of organized religion. Even with the Catholic church and the endless sex scandals, the church hierarchy took a decidedly long time to deal with the problem – too often covering for the perpetrator at the expense of the victim.
All that said, I consider Trump to be a consummate con man and unfit to ever be commander in chief, but with Cruz, although I wanted to be sold, due his stated conservative values being in line with my own, I don’t trust him at all – his preachy style seems fake to me. He’s very smart and talks about conservatism eloquently, but I understand why the so-called GOP establishment is wary of him. He lost me when he kept doing this earnest crap about how he gave his word to support the GOP nominee, after more and more outrageous Trump antics and it struck me he just wants Trump voters to defect – it was a political calculation, not a moral stance. The correct moral stance is that if you see evil or wrongdoing, you confront it – not pretend it’s the honorable thing “to keep your word” to support someone you now realize is corrupt or immoral. You don’t say you will support someone whom you feel is immoral or corrupt.
At this point watching the chaos the “Tea Party” has wrought, with nothing in the way of real changes in Washington other than to splinter the GOP, we should all be wary. The Cruz and other “outsider” campaigns have me stepping back and looking at this entire “Tea Party” agitation propaganda and all the other groups who have spent decades fomenting rabid partisan divides in a new light.
Something bothers me about the connections among them in this vital election cycle. Perhaps it’s the rapidity of how quickly they are shifting positions in this election cycle that made me step back and start looking at the big picture and doing more research on some long-forgotten “connection”. Watching the cable news giants’ behavior has been a huge revelatory process too. The phoniness of Ben Carson has been revealed as he has made ludicrous comments to defend Trump, belying his earlier sincerity. Fiorina doesn’t sound like a happy Cruz supporter. Christie and Carson sound like off-key trumpets. Palin sounds like she’s off her rocker.
It’s a circus for sure and on the left a leftover Marxist from the 60s is holding young people in thrall…. Then they’ve got America’s premiere political crime family clinging to a thread to avoid justice. Something very strange is going on and I suspect the money trails of who is funding these campaigns leads to the connections that tell the real story. That’s why I am sitting back and waiting – because I expect this entire primary to be blown out the water with hard facts and exposed as a massive fraud on many levels. A lot can still change – so I am not losing sleep over any of this yet.
Liberty and Michael, great post and comments.
Liberty, what a hard duty to hand to you as a child! I couldn’t have done it. But as I’ve told you before, you have an amazing inner strength.
Michael, thanks for the invitation! If I am ever nearby, I will certainly contact you. In the mid-1970s, after UCLA (Math/Physics), I went the art show circuit throughout the Southwest—there are shows at malls and parks every weekend—and so I did some of my animal portraits in Texas, mostly dogs, horses, and assorted livestock. I thought Texas was a wonderful place, because people were so friendly and outdoorsy, and the geography offers a little of everything, doesn’t it. But, basically, I have lived in the Greater Los Angeles Area—“Greater” by size and population, not by any quality, LOL—since 1962, when I was a child. Right now, I live in the Mojave Desert, just to the north of L.A. One of the problems I have with finding a church is increased because there are so few churches near me.
But, also, you have the perfect phrase: “Happy Clappy” places! If you want to take the depth of meaning out of something, make it cheerfully light, easy to enjoy, superficial. Make it a band-aid, decorated maybe with little felt-marker hearts. Dilute the profundity with farce, satire, mockery. Make it a wink and a shared laugh. The Left has moved throughout the institutions of our world, and one of their main targets was religious communities. In their quest to change the basic foundation of Western Civilization, and, in particular, the American Experiment, they knew that the specific Judeo-Christian, mono-theistic religion was an essential part. Early on, the Left started filling the special educational organizations from which the next generations of clergy would come, such as seminaries, with their selected people. Wherever they could do it, the Progs have taken the character, moment, and strength out of the churches and synagogues, leaving them filled with Left memes and that empty “Greeting Card” ephemera. Sometimes there is resistance, and there are outcroppings of hope, but more and more, religious Truth is not made manifest in our lives without serious search.
The moral rigor, heritage, and traditions in which our Founders embedded the American Idea are disappearing; yet, there are individual outcroppings throughout the world, fascinating people who give me hope. It is one of the most prized treasures of the Internet—meeting-places wherein the questing mind can encounter another engaging soul on a similar pilgrimage.
This year’s campaign is an epicenter of an ideational earthquake swarm in the United States resulting from the fierce cultural tectonic forces that have been unleashed as results of the Left’s deliberate and ugly Long March through the structural foundations of Western Civilization and its Institutions.
Liberty, kid, you are completely correct that the roots of this extraordinary campaign year are in the shadows. They are hidden in the diseased rhizosphere that is now infecting the soil of the Tree of Liberty. If the Tree is brought down, Humanity may not see its like again in centuries.
Quo vadis?