Yup! That’s Me!

I’ve been watching some YouTube videos of folks waiting to go into the Tulsa rally for President Trump’s campaign start.

Just a quick recap of one; a young black man stopped his car, in traffic, to yell nasty stuff to the folks lined up to get into the venue. Foul-mouthed and aggressive, he was confronted by a young white woman who needed to be muzzled regardless of her MAGA hat. The young man gets in his car because drivers behind him are asking him to move (respectfully asking, I might add) and someone catches his eye. He sees a black man with a MAGA hat on and asks him, through the car window, what he’s doing there. The black MAGA hat guy says he’s waiting to see Trump “’cause I ain’t never been on the plantation.”

There was a young woman who had been reporting about the growing number of folks lining up to wait for admittance, talking to the folks, walking the line of Trump lovers, and engaging with them with respectful questions and laughing with them when fringe stuff happened around them. She was nearby when the street confrontation went on and when it was over, she interviewed the black gentleman in the MAGA hat. He promptly explained to her why he supports President Trump and was quite knowledgeable and well-spoken and you could tell he had given all this a good deal of thought.

All of which prompted me to go to my browser and see what I would find. As I typed in ‘what is a republican’, I started laughing in anticipation of what I thought I would find. Despite what you hear – everywhere – the third response (not the 10th, or the 100th, or the fifth thousandth) was excellent. I went to that site to see what it would say and I give you the link https://www.republicanviews.org/what-is-a-republican-republican-definition/

[I added what could be called the executive summary from the article here. Ed.]

What is a Republican?

As you can see, the dictionary definition of a Republican is very brief. And since a Republican is simply defined as “a member of the Republican party of the U.S.” it is important to understand what the Republican Party stands for. To understand what a Republican is you have to understand the Republican Party. And that is what the rest of this article examines.

Core Beliefs

The core beliefs of the Republican Party are centered on the idea that each person is responsible for their own place within society. The party believes that the government’s role is to enable the people to secure the benefits of society for themselves, their families, and for those who are unable to do so for themselves. Republicans believe in limiting the Government’s intervention in the work of the individual towards prosperity. The government should only intervene when society cannot function at the level of the individual. This also means that the party believes in keeping the government as close to the individual as possible, and should be focused mainly on the state and community level, not centered at a federal level.

 

Now, I’ve been Republican for fifty years. But, you know, things change, the world changes, and I thought I might find something there to object to. But I read all the information and found it factual, articulate, and rational. Fifty years on, I wouldn’t change anything. If I were registering today, I’d register Republican. Because it’s still a solid Party and still stands for the things I stand for. So – yup; that’s me.

The Slow Man

I just watched a video that I thought was very good and wondered how I’d missed it. I watch quite a bit of his videos but they are few and far between, unfortunately. 

Back during the campaign for the 2016 presidential election, I picked my guy. It wasn’t Donald Trump – not originally. I liked Mike Huckabee first; he was unabashedly Christian (he would never say like Obama did, that America is NOT a Christian country), he had experience in government, he was a smart guy, and he had a good personality. But I did some research on another man, Ben Carson. My thinking was, “Well, ok – we’ve just had a terrible black president, maybe this guy could be the best black president.” He still wasn’t ‘my guy’ but I was really curious about him and was really excited to see him in the first public debate.

 

We live in a world of instant gratification – we expect everything instantly. Remember when faxes were ‘so fast’? Instant coffee, scratch-off tickets instant pay-off, instant connection to the world via the internet. The people we tend to listen to and pay attention to, speak quickly and articulately and we like speed. Faster and faster – that’s how Americans like it; we don’t have time to sit around and wait for an answer or a reveal or a thought to reach its maturity. We want everything now – and if you can do it faster than that, we’d appreciate it.

So the first public debate aired – popcorn and soda time; this was going to be good. And it was. I thought Huckabee did well. I thought all the candidates did well. Except for Carson; too slow, not ‘quick on his feet’, so slow it made me wonder about his ‘soundness of mind’. Scratched him off my ‘maybe’ list. We tend to think speed = smart. Not necessarily. But who knew? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Republican_Party_presidential_debates_and_forums

We all know how the election turned out and I’m proud I voted for then candidate Trump. I’m proud of what he’s accomplished and will continue to accomplish if the ‘usual suspects’ will get out of his way. But every once in a while, I have to admit to wondering about Mr. Carson. Maybe slow and steady does win races.

One of the sad things about that equation, speed = smart, is that we don’t get a lot of opportunities to hear from Mr. Carson. You rarely see him interviewed on the networks – because he speaks so slowly. He’s worth listening to, he’s a solid conservative and has a deliberate way about him and carries a sort of dignity within himself. I think he’s an admirable person and I do listen when he speaks – regardless of how slow that may be.

Sigh …

There are problems associated with being a card-carrying Republican – not, however, the kind of problem the Democrats and the media would (and do!) scream out loud about.

This is a problem of a different sort; money. Remember your Mama telling you not to feed that stray cat because it will bring all the other stray cats around and you’ll have a real mess? Not a pretty analogy, I agree, but something very similar happens when you make donations to Republicans running for office. The day the internet went down for 12 hours in my neighborhood, when I was finally able to access my email, I was confronted with 64 of them! 64! I don’t run a business, I can count my friends on one and a half hands, and I don’t have 64 outstanding orders with vendors. 62 of the emails were from Congressional and Senatorial hopefuls requesting money for their campaigns.

Ok; I get it. Fine. We want to get rid of Maxine Waters, we want to get rid of Chuckie Boy, and Pelosi needs a very extended vacation anywhere but here in America. AOC should be counting her reigning days, those two Muslim bimbos need to go back to whatever they were doing before they crawled out from under the rock and Kamala Harris should go find employment anywhere and any place other than in the US. So I support the various Republican candidates in those areas in what I hope is NOT a vain attempt to take control of the House of Representatives and maintain the Republican majority in the Senate. Just for the record, I’m not talking big bucks here, but over the course of a year, it tends to add up. Like tithes in church, you can’t buy heaven and you can’t buy Republican majority in either House; the mid-term elections proved that.

But geez Louise! Somebody has got to give it a break! The subject lines of these emails are so dark, so ‘end of the world’, I’m sometimes afraid to read them, fearing I’ll be told that President Trump is dead and Adam Gopher Face is president. They come from all over the United States! Minnesota? Utah? I live in Florida! But it’s all about us and them – we don’t like ‘them’ and we need to have more ‘us’ everywhere and you’d better contribute now or else OUR WORSE FEARS WILL COME TRUE! Jiminy Cricket! Really??? When I sit back and analyze it, I have to laugh. I’ve discovered that the further away the candidate is, the smaller the donation, lol! But I can feel assured knowing I’ve contributed to the improvement of America.

It just gets exhausting, deleting all those emails. My desk mouse gets hot, my right index finger gets tired, and even retired I have better things to do.

They continue to send. I continue to contribute. Rinse and Repeat.

Sigh …

What Do You Think?

I have a dear, dear friend in England who is going through a very rough time right now. Add that to the ‘lockdown’ in England and it’s almost too much to bear. To ease her mind and distract her aching heart, she is watching the Ken Burns documentary Civil War. She shared this video with me this morning https://youtu.be/ZeYjtfsK338. I explained to her how sad it was, brother against brother and father against son but that without that war, we wouldn’t be the country we are now.

But I wonder; am I right? So I’ve come here to ask you that question. Would we be the America we are if the Civil War had never been fought? Thanks for your help – I’m looking forward to your replies.

Oh Settle Down

I look at my files and what have I got? Chinese Bat Soup Flu, enough of it to fill, at least the Indian Ocean. I’m tired of it, tired of the lies the media tells us, tired of trying to perceive the truth through the smoke that the left generates, and above all tired of non-cures that will kill more Americans than this hyped flu would if we just all ignored it. Maybe that’s why I like a blast of common sense from The Adaptive Curmudgeon. Maybe you will too.

I’ve seen this movie before. You have too. It’s easy to forget but there’s a ready aid to recollection. Deliberately keep the events of the day at arm’s length. Perspective reminds us that most “momentous” events are forgotten immediately, the rest are forgotten gradually. Only a fraction leave a mark.

Here’s one example among many; the great depression left its mark but Y2K didn’t. Ironically, if you dig up news of the time, the opposite appears true. During the great depression the word they used for their momentous event was “just another shitty day”. In modern parlance that’s “this is the new normal”. It was a long slow transformation. One could experience it yet not even recognize what was happening. On the other hand, newspapers (remember them?) from late 1999 describe a people fretting that Y2K was lurking under their bed at night. Y2K loomed, it could have been huge, it wasn’t, it passed, it was forgotten. We know this. People in December 1999, did not.

The memory of past fads and mass movements makes you seem odd. Keep the press at bay and the phone on silent. In a few years you will will note but not swim in the swirling currents of public opinion.

Now there is some serious truth, one which I have trouble with periodically. Why? Pressure to get a post up is part of it, so is Hubris that I have real answers, when often they are suppositions informed by experience, which is often, although not always, a definition of common sense.

What about the opposite side of the aisle, the sort that hates UBI but loves deregulation? Are they any different? Not really. What are they doing? Suspending regulation. I have more sympathy for that approach, but it doesn’t mean I’m learning. I like deregulation with or without the gorilla to justify it. Deregulators aren’t learning and neither am I. I’m just cheering people for doing what I already wanted them to do.

Consider “survivalists”; formerly called “pioneers” and now renamed with the balless Newspeak euphemism “prepper”. They had adequate reserves in advance. They see this virus as justification to their actions. I have sympathy with that approach. I have two freezers full of food and all sorts of associated shit. I keep a full pantry with or without the gorilla. Whether it’s COVID19, a Russkie ICBM, or a hurricane, advance stores is a tool some of us like to use. The folks that don’t like that approach (they correctly realize it’s a PITA) piss and moan about hoarding. Because that’s what they do. They piss and moan. It’s the tool they prefer. One man’s “preparation” is another man’s “hoarding”. As flu rampages through our imagination and slowly shambles toward reality, nobody is changing their mind. Everyone’s walking the path they already chose.

I’m a loner by nature. Introvert. More likely to talk to a stack of firewood than a stranger. (Better conversation.) I’m self quarantining. But I do damn near the same thing every flu season (with admittedly mixed results). Others are gregarious, desperate to be with the herd. So they’re breaking quarantines or at least bitching mightily about the situation. We are all doing what we do.

There’s a fair amount more, all of it with the same sort of calm common sense that we don’t hear very much of. Those of us of a certain age will recognize it though. It’s the voice of our fathers and grandfathers (mothers too, of course). You know those folks who lived through the shitty days of the depression, when whole states were blowing on the wind, and then kicked Hitler and company’s asses right into Hell where they belonged.

The best way to learn something? From history. Go and do likewise.

Heh! Winning the Popular Culture!

Well, as I told Unit a few minutes ago, I got into an argument with some leftover lasagna yesterday afternoon. It won, decisively, today better be better. 🙂

So a light post today, which is not a bad idea.

So apparently Fox has a show called The Masked Singer where somebody sings in a disguise. New to me, but I gave up on TV long ago. In any case, this happened.

I’m actually impressed, that a good entertainer, but who might it be?

To ask is to know

That leads to two questions. How come libs can’t relax and have fun like this? Maybe it’s just more fun to be conservative, and only responsible for ourselves, not the whole world.

And second, how in the world does Sarah keep looking so good? There’s not all that many 25-year-olds that look that good.