Phonies?

For John, BLUF:  A lot of folks who are committed to ideals but can't tell the truth.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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From Reason Magazine we have the Editor in Chief, Mr Matt Welch,♠ writing "Republican Elites Are Frightened by Their Own Base".  The sub-headline is:

#NeverTrump comes after years of cynical pandering, hypocrisy, and inaction

Here is the conclusion from the article:

Donald Trump is calling out Republicans for being phonies, and he's right. I may cheer lustily for him to lose, but until they re-examine their own lousy policies and politics (especially though not only on foreign policy and spending), I will not be cheering for the establishmentarians to win.

From the "left" side of the cloud of political positions we have an article in The New Yorker this week, by Mr John Cassidy, "Donald Trump’s Business Record Demands More Scrutiny".

Where has the media been for the last year?♥  Or last several years?  Why are we seeing this kind of thing now, and not last Summer?  Is the Media so blind it could not see Mr Trump (or someone like him) coming down the pike?

Before the Media can actually answer that question it has to deal with the fact that Mr Trump is a creature of their creation, their's and President Obama's.  If one listens to Mr Trump and thinks about how he presents himself one will see he is a mirror for the frustration of a large number of US Citizens (and maybe even some immigrants, legal and other).

There are people in These United States who are tired of being told how to think and what to say.  The Bien-pensant have been scorning and condemning a broad swath of this nation for not being like them.  The attacks of the Social Justice Warriors has further heightened the tensions.  And, it appears these folks want to make other thinking go away.  This reminds me of a comment by a friend of mine, talking about a new on-line map of wars over the last 5,000 years (2500 BC to today) suggested that some battles (such as the Mongols, Huns, and Hsiung-nu, coming out of the steppes of Central Asia) were not included because the victors wiped out the losers, killing the men and enslaving the women and children, erasing their thoughts and ideas and history.

The problem with such approaches is what is lost.  For example, it is only now that we are rediscovering that President Woodrow Wilson was a racist pig.  When I was in public schools, late 1940s and the 1950s, President Wilson was a hero, whose efforts for world peace (the League of Nations) was thwarted by a bunch of isolationist Republican Senators.  Turns out that the real story is much more complicated.  And President Wilson, a Democrat, is much less admirable than I had been led to believe.

I didn't vote for Mr Trump on this last Tuesday.  I went for Dr Ben Carson, in my own attempt to signal the Republican Party Leadership and the MSM.  I am not sure I achieved much, but I voted my conscience.  All that said, I fully understand the attraction of Mr Trump.  I think of the line that "if he did not exist we would have to invent him."♦  That is the point the MSM is missing or is unwilling to admit.

It reminds me of an item from yesterday, from a Russian Propaganda outlet:

The Russian online news portal runs an article, which claims that the Russophobic nationalistic Baltic States were made possible primarily due to Mikhail Gorbachev's conscious bent to activate anti-Soviet forces in the region in order "to support restructuring."  The article claims that the separatist movements in the Baltic States were entirely formed by Moscow and the KGB, which later were unable to control their puppets, and that eventually led to the exit of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia from the USSR.

In the case of Mr Gorbachev, I am doubtful, but in the case of the MSM, I think they need to own it.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Mr Welch is co-author, with Mr Nick Gillespie, of The Declaration of Independents:  How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America.
♥  Mr Trump has been on the stump since June of 2015.
♦  Well, I think I ripped that off of Voltaire, who said "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer."