Thursday, January 18, 2018

Killing Edmund Burke a Second Time


    The constellation of factors that are at play with Orange Blatherskite are making him a caricature.  The first is the current standards of political correctness, which are so impossible to not violate that even liberals end up getting accused of racism, sexism, and homophobia (the liberal holy trinity).  Second, O.B. takes pride in flouting even the most basic standards of adult behavior, let alone the rarified pseudomorality of political correctness.  Insults are O.B.'s love language.  Third, O.B. has the maturity of a twelve-year-old girl combined with the aggression of Rambo.  It's no wonder Tex Killerson is on his way out of Foggy Bottom;  imagine the frustration he felt trying to calm down North Korea, and seeing his boss engage in Twitter escalation with the regime.  
        Any things on fronts like abortion or deregulation that O.B. has done the right thing on seem overshadowed by the pettiness and lack of policy sophistication he displays.  O.B.'s favorite subject is the problem of illegal immigration.  At the same time O.B. wants to build a wall to stop illegal immigration, he attacks NAFTA on the basis that it is too favorable to Mexico!  The man who calls himself a genius doesn't seem to appreciate that any economic growth in Mexico will in and of itself reduce illegal immigration.  A poorer Mexico is one which will continue to have an exodus from it.  This "Jacksonian Nationalism" is tribalistic, short-sighted, and makes it easy for liberals to call O.B. racist.  These things don't seem to matter to O.B., and the fact that Fox News seems to consider O.B. the gold standard in conservatism means that millions of Americans are being led to believe that conservatism is race politics for white people.


No comments: