Tag Archives: Election 2016

Commentary

This suprises no one: Trump won Indiana with votes from fake Christians

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Trump does well with registered Democrats, and in Democrat states
Trump does best with registered Democrats, and in states run by Democrats

Here is an interesting article from The Stream.

Excerpt:

Last night’s Indiana primary was the final showdown for the GOP nomination, and unfortunately for #NeverTrump, Ted Cruz lost to Donald Trump. Trump won half the self-identified evangelical vote (though he did better with those who weren’t evangelicals).

A CBS exit poll shows how the votes played out and brings one striking feature of this race to light: the less frequently a Republican voter went to church, the more likely he or she was to vote for Trump, and vice versa.

Cruz won those who attend church weekly (which includes more than once a week), while Trump won occasional churchgoers. As Ross Douthat has explained, active Christians aren’t going for Trump — but cultural Christians are.

Trump also does well with registered Democrats, and he outperformed in blue states like New York – where his favored policies have been in effect for some time.

One woman who supports Trump is divorced from an adulterous ex-husband, with several fatherless children and is currently sexually involved with a non-Christian man. The non-Christian man has no college degree and is unemployed, so it’s no surprise that he is a Trump supporter. The woman also has no college degree, but she fancies herself a serious Catholic. If you actually ask her questions about her faith, you’ll find that her Catholicism is just “cosmic butler” Catholicism. Her “faith” is all non-cognitive spirituality and mysticism. She hopes that God will give her goodies in this life and imagines that her poor life choices result in “unexpected” disasters because the Devil is after her. Do what you feel like, act surprised when it all explodes and you go on welfare, and pray that God will help you to win the lottery, so that all the craziness works out in the end.

I think a lot of people who make poor judgments about others based on appearances and emotions, like this divorced woman, are very impressed with Trump. He looks good, he’s confident, he says entertaining things. Who needs to look for past achievements? If he says he everything will be great, then his words are better than actual demonstrated ability. Confidence and inherited wealth matters more to them than achievements. His sinfulness is not a problem to them – they’re embroiled in the same sin themselves. Christianity is just a label they thrown on an otherwise non-Christian life. If they are willing to slap the label on themselves, then what’s wrong with slapping the “Christian” label on Trump? Or the “conservative” label? They have no ability to make judgments about someone else’s fruits, since they aren’t Christian or conservative themselves. It’s not a surprise to me that fake Christians and fake conservative voters cannot spot a fake Christian and a fake conservative like Trump. If they could, they would be impugning their own selves.

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Ted Cruz suspends campaign: what next for conservatives? #NeverTrump

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Donald Trump with some of his supporters
Donald Trump with some of his supporters

I’ll comment after quoting some of this brief message from Ben Shapiro, posted at Daily Wire.

Excerpt:

So, Donald Trump is the nominee.

After all the fighting, after all the lies, after all the conspiracy theories and bloviating and position-shifting and progressivism, after all the insults and racist pandering and economic illiteracy, after all the cruelty and full-fledged stupidity, Donald Trump is the nominee.

What does this mean?

It means that standing against Trump means more than ever.

Early in this race, I stated repeatedly that the way to defeat Trump would be to point out to Republican primary voters that he wasn’t conservative. After all, I reasoned, conservative voters were outraged with the Republican establishment that had caved over and over to President Obama; they’d want to nominate someone who wouldn’t cut deals with the wild leftists of the Democratic Party.

I got it wrong.

It turns out that a huge bulk of Trump supporters don’t care that he’s a leftist. They think he’s a tough guy who will fight for them; they think he’ll fulfill the promise emblazoned on his ridiculous red “Make America Great Again” hats. They buy his two-bit promises, his stripper glitter showmanship, his foghorn bravado. And they do so because they don’t give two good damns about conservatism.

[…][T]he Trump movement rejects conservatism. They don’t care about the Constitution – it’s a passé document that must be discarded in favor of a Dear Leader who can lead America back to Greatness. They don’t care about the Declaration of Independence – they are an interest group, and they want their payoff. They don’t care about traditional concepts of negative rights, or economic freedom, or foreign policy strength.

They don’t care about conservatives.

So conservatives must stand against them.

[…]Trump’s “something new” is something quite old, and quite un-American. If conservatives want a future, they must stand against him and his corrupt, bankrupt philosophy.

2016 could have been a time to reap the harvest of conservatism. Instead, Trump burned down the field.

It’s time to plant anew. We should do so with alacrity rather than embracing the man holding the match.

Right. There is not a single authentic conservative that voted for Trump. Trump is not a conservative, in any way, shape or form – on any issue. We should stay home during the general election and let him lose rather than let the label “conservative” be connected to a clownish liberal sociopath.

UPDATE: Don’t stay home, go vote in the other races, and just write someone in or leave it blank for President. (I stand corrected on this)

The people who voted for Trump were basically idiots who had failed in their own lives, and wanted to blame someone other than themselves. That’s what Trump promises: he will help the losers who want to win vicariously through him. Most of his support came from white registered Democrats who never completed college, and probably had never held a decent job in their lives for any length of time. But there are enough self-made losers in America, apparently, that a clown can be selected as the nominee of a major party.

Consider this post by Kevin Williamson in National Review magazine:

The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

David French, who grew up in Kentucky, and then attended Harvard Law School, adds this in National Review:

These are strong words, but they are fundamentally true and important to say. My childhood was different from Kevin’s, but I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand.Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.

For generations, conservatives have rightly railed against deterministic progressive notions that put human choices at the mercy of race, class, history, or economics. Those factors can create additional challenges, but they do not relieve any human being of the moral obligation to do their best.

Yet millions of Americans aren’t doing their best. Indeed, they’re barely trying. As I’ve related before, my church in Kentucky made a determined attempt to reach kids and families that were falling between the cracks, and it was consistently astounding how little effort most parents and their teen children made to improve their lives. If they couldn’t find a job in a few days — or perhaps even as little as a few hours — they’d stop looking. If they got angry at teachers or coaches, they’d drop out of school. If they fought with their wife, they had sex with a neighbor. And always — always — there was a sense of entitlement.

And that’s where disability or other government programs kicked in. They were there, beckoning, giving men and women alternatives to gainful employment. You don’t have to do any work (your disability lawyer does all the heavy lifting), you make money, and you get drugs. At our local regional hospital, it’s become a bitter joke the extent to which the community is hooked on “Xanatab” — the Xanax and Lortab prescriptions that lead to drug dependence.

Of course we should have compassion even as we call on people to do better. I have compassion for kids who often see the worst behavior modeled at home. I have compassion for families facing economic uncertainty. But compassion can’t excuse or enable self-destructive moral failures.

We have Trump as the nominee because there are just too many of these low-information voters voting. Some of my friends are blaming the public school system, for destroying the quality of American education. Others are blaming the churches, for focusing on feelings rather than intellect. Those are both true, but I think we should blame the TV-watching Trump cultists themselves: first for failing at life, second for voting. If you’re an illiterate loser who cannot hold a job and you blow all your money on alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, then you should not be voting.

Sadly, there is no job interview for voting. Any imbecile who knows more about sports than policy can vote. The way forward is simple. We need to play defense more than ever before, because things are going to get worse. And we need to continue to argue and explain why conservative principles and policies work better than the policies of liberal Democrats like Trump and Clinton.

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Meet Ted Cruz’s secret weapon: his supportive and loving wife Heidi Cruz

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Texas senator Ted Cruz, his wife Heidi Cruz and their two daughters
Texas senator Ted Cruz, his wife Heidi Cruz and their two daughters

For Valentine’s Day, I thought it would be a good idea to post something about the power behind GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz. I read a half-dozen articles for this post about Heidi, as well as Ted Cruz’s book where he talks about her. But this article from the Texas Tribune basically captures the point that I wanted to make about what makes a woman great.

The article says:

[Heidi] Cruz, 43, grew up in San Luis Obispo, Calif., the daughter of a dentist and dental hygienist who are Seventh-day Adventists.

When she was 5, Heidi’s parents signed her up for piano lessons, and she insisted on practicing an hour and sometimes two each night. At age 8, when her parents first enrolled her in school, a family trip to Washington sparked an interest in politics. By fifth grade, Heidi announced she wanted to go to Harvard Business School.

“I don’t even know how she knew about Harvard Business School. It wasn’t in our world at all,” her mother, Suzanne Nelson, said in an interview. “A good word to describe her is ‘driven.’ I don’t really know what has made her so driven.”

[…]Cruz went to Claremont McKenna College and was active in the college Republicans and interested in appointive political office, said her mentor, Edward Haley. She also was intent on a career in business first. She moved to New York after graduation and worked on emerging markets at J.P. Morgan, an area in which she was interested after spending summers in Africa doing missionary work with her parents. She was put on the Latin America desk and taught herself to speak Spanish between 18-hour work days.

Cruz achieved her dream of attending Harvard Business School but turned down a job at Goldman Sachs to work on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.

[…][S]he met Ted Cruz, who by his own admission turned off campaign colleagues with what he described as a “cocky” attitude. But not Heidi Nelson. She said he reminded her of “a 1950s movie star.” He grilled her on her hopes, aspirations and dreams during their first date. They were married the following year.

She was the star when the couple arrived in Washington, netting jobs at the Treasury Department and then the White House, working as a Latin America director on the National Security Council. Ted Cruz was floundering, and he moved back to Texas to become the state’s solicitor general with hopes of launching a political career. They lived apart for more than a year, until she gave up her job and moved to Texas.

After the move, she suffered through a period of depression.

“When I moved to Texas, it really was for Ted, and I wasn’t comfortable with that,” she told The Washington Post in September. She said she recovered with spiritual counseling. She started working at Goldman Sachs in Houston; she was promoted to managing director.

And she began to apply her talents to her husband’s political career.

[…]She now holds her own campaign events, talking up her husband’s values and laying out what the campaign sees as a grass-roots path to victory.

[…]She remains the campaign’s top fundraiser, now making many calls from the road instead of from the campaign’s airy Houston headquarters, where she installed a playroom with pillows decorated with raspberry prints for the girls. Cruz said she aims to make 30 calls a day but typically averages about 20 to 25; she is calling from the campaign and super PAC lists and trying to persuade donors to give the maximum allowed under federal election law.

“I don’t want to say it’s easy, and I don’t close every deal,” she said. “I think people want to be a part of something that addresses the main issue of the day, number one, which is Washington versus the people.”

[…]Ted Cruz told an audience in Winterset, Iowa, on Monday that the couple’s decision to run for president was difficult for his wife.

“Heidi spent a lot of years building a very, very successful career. And when we were deciding whether to run, particularly when you’re parents of young girls, that’s not an easy decision. And she was struggling with it,” he said.

Ted Cruz said his wife was driving, listening to a CD of Christian music sent by her sister-in-law. She was struck by a song about seeking the face of the Lord and pulled over on the freeway and started crying, he said. That moment, he said, “changed her heart,” and she decided that the race was about God, the country and the future.

Now, Heidi Cruz says her main job is to bolster her husband’s candidacy.

“There are women who use their husband’s candidacies for their own” purposes, she said recently while being driven to yet another airport. “I love my life. I love my career. This is not for me. This is for our country.”

She has a great education and work experience. And she wants to use that to help her husband. It hasn’t been easy, but in the end, she chose her husband’s plan over her own.

How to get kissed: Heidi Cruz helping her husband
How to get kissed by a man who loves you: Heidi Cruz helping her husband

Here is one more quote from a 2013 article on Heidi Cruz, from the radically leftist New York Times, of all places:

In a glimpse into their marriage that Mr. Cruz called “illustrative,” he recalled saying to his wife in the weeks before his Senate primary, when he was still behind in the polls, “Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign.”

“What astonished me, then and now, was Heidi within 60 seconds said, ‘Absolutely,’ with no hesitation,” said Mr. Cruz, who invested about $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” he added — into his campaign.

A lot of that money was money she had earned, working those 18-hour-days at J.P. Morgan. All that education, all that hard work – she sacrificed it all because her husband was running for the Senate to make a difference.

It was a good idea for her to go and do those difficult degrees and take those difficult jobs, otherwise, she would not have the background and skills necessary to be effective for her husband. But, when push comes to shove and her husband gets himself mixed up in something important, then she drops everything to support him. That’s what a Christian wife ought to do.