Quote Originally Posted by Sanlmar View Post
You posted an interesting essay from the Spectator “From Cool to Cringe”. This had to have been written by a boomer who viewed the world post 50’s and 60’s in decline. What was declining was the middle class.

The great problem in post war America has always revolves around income distribution.

During the 90’s it got particularly bad. One way to deal with that short of improving incomes was to democratize credit. People would “feel” wealthier. People who could not get credit before now could by easily leveraging the asset that was their home. That didn’t work out. It just spawned the subprime financial problem that we spent the last 15 years attempting and failing to recover from.

The underlying problem of the financial crisis was bad income distribution.

The income distribution problem remained, of course. Steve Bannon had a rap about how to apeal to the downtrodden. We didn’t jail any bankers and virtually wrote the script for him. It worked. Trump gets elected but absolutely nothing happened except a further acceleration of wealth redistribution to the few. Bannon was bounced as his usefulness expired. The Trump deficit spending didn’t end up in the pockets of the middle class.

Fast forward a few years and now the Democrats are going to appeal to the have nots in the fashion you would expect.

There is of course, no solution to the declining middle class in America. The 50’s and 60’s were an extraordinary & unique period.

Look at the way people lived in the 20’s & 30’s. Perhaps you would like to scroll back further. Life has always been unfair for most of history. Thus political paradigms come and go as do the promises.

Do I hate Trump? Do I feel vindicated? I’m a realist. I foretold his end, yes. He had low moral character. He was unintelligent. He did not surround himself with smart advisors to bolster his shortcomings. He was dangerous. He could not cope with a crisis. You could not risk him facing another perhaps more serious challenge.

Worst of all, he had no empathy as Brad Parscale pointed out. This, Parscale claimed, was the minimum required to win a landslide victory. I agree. You dismissively chimed in that Parscale was a “serial scammer”. Trump was not? Parscale was gifted in many regards and frankly is more responsible for Trump winning on the night of Nov 3rd 2016 than any other human.

Trump was proven to be a dope who developed coping mechanisms like narcissism and cared not for country or even his party.
Trump was a narcissist who only cared about himself. That's the only part of the above which is more than blather. I already stated that I didn't like Trump's behavior or his personality, aside from his willingness to stand up to the obnoxious and increasingly radical left. I've stated that for 5 years.

However, policy-wise, it was standard modern Republican fare. I can argue for 3 pages with gimmick about deficits, or we can simply agree upon the obvious fact that Trump basically governed the way most Republicans would have from 2017-2019 (we'll ignored COVID 2020). That's why, when there was quiet and internal grumbling about Trump within the GOP, it was never about policy. Almost every conservative was largely happy with Trump's policy. Many weren't happy with his behavior. Your nostalgic musings about the 1950s simply are not relevant.

Something that has irritated me about your political takes in the past few years is that you've either gone hard left, or are afraid to express criticism of Democrats. Go back and read your political posts. Almost all are critical of Trump and the GOP, and virtually nothing critical of the left, even the insane AOC wing of the modern left. This is from the guy who once mocked me for preferring light regulation over deregulation. How the mighty free marketers have fallen!

Look, if Trump emotionally wrecked you like he did rum dick, and suddenly you completely switched your political and life views because of Bad Orange Man, that's fine. Just admit it. Rum dick did, before he traveled to Tulsa to die of COVID.

But if you really are a sensible centrist who hates Trump but also thinks today's left is insane, it would be nice to see you piping up about that side, as well.

I do appreciate your sports takes, though, even the ones bashing the Dodgers.