Conservative opinion columnist, Bret Stephens
But the damage that cuts deepest is never financial, legal or institutional. As one of Smith’s greatest contemporaries, Edmund Burke, knew, it lies in something softer and less tangible but also more important: manners. 'Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us,' Burke wrote. It is, he warned, through manners that laws are either made or unmade, upheld or corrupted.
Right now, in every grotesque social media post; in every cabinet meeting devoted, North Korea-like, to adulating him; in every executive-order-signing ceremony intended to make him appear like a Chinese emperor; in every fawning reference to all the peace he’s supposedly brought the world; in every Neronic enlargement of the White House’s East Wing; in every classless dig at his predecessor; in every shady deal his family is striking to enrich itself; in every White House gathering of tech billionaires paying him court (in the literal senses of both 'pay' and 'court'); in every visiting foreign leader who learns to abase himself to avoid some capricious tariff or other punishment — in all this and more, our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized.
I wonder if we are ever getting them back — and if so, what will it take."
"This is not a country on the cusp of its 'Golden Age,' to quote the president, except in the sense that gold futures are near a record high as a hedge against inflation. It’s a country that feels like a train coming off the rails, led by a driver whose own derangement was again laid bare in that contemptible assault on the Reiners, may their memories be for a blessing."
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Trump's disgusting Truth Social post about the Reiners is as bad as anything he has done, and he will expose himself as the depraved person that he is again. As hard as it will be to witness another one of his travesties, I believe his next outrage will need to be reported and broadcast widely because this is how all this will end.
The resistance, the pushback, the organizing must continue; but at this point, I think it's become clear that we are witnessing Trump's inevitable self-destruction. The sooner that is complete, the sooner the country can start to heal.
The great Italian director and screen writer, Federico Fellini, supposedly said about television that "it is the mirror in which we see the complete defeat of our culture."
For America, Donald Trump is the mirror in which we see an ongoing debasing and mockery of our culture. He is what the tyranny of the minority adores. They elected him twice, and it appears that he will never lose substantial support from many of them, although some deterioration in that support is happening.
He is them; they are him.
And now, they're getting what they have clamored for, good and hard.
4 comments:
MAGAts are getting what they once decried.
Trump thunders, "(Narco) Terrorism", "our oil", and "regime change" in Venezuela.
Dick Cheney and Trump would never lie their way into wars, would they?
We are now being led by the Forces of Ignorance, Hate, Bigotry, and Delusion. Whether this nation recovers from it's embrace of evil (through Trump and MAGA) or not is not yet unknowable. But as Shaw points out it will depend on good and decent people uniting in oneness to overcome the forces now working to destroy our republic and its democratic norms.
Here's how LA Times Columnist Gustavo Arellano describes Trump and the Reiner debacle...
"Our president, of course, is not normal. He’s a weirdo who gets off on being mean. If there was a CruelHub, he’d be on it daily.
And so on the day after Romy Reiner found her parents’ bodies at their Brentwood home, Trump posted on social media that they died not due to stab wounds but 'reportedly due to the anger [Rob] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.' "
He goes on writing about Russell Moore and Rod Dreher...
In the wake of Trump’s selfish sliming of the Reiners, Christianity Today editor at large Russell Moore slammed his “vile, disgusting, and immoral behavior” while conservative commentator and longtime Trump apologist Rod Dreher wrote “something is very, very wrong with this man.”
The commenters at Geez, including Huntington, simply can't accept reality.
This is the crowd that during the Clinton Admin thundered "character cannot be separated from leadership. Leadership requires people of good character".
Go back to the 90s and early 2000s and read any political commentary and you'll see a bright line conservatives used as a light saber against the left.
Now? Not so much.
I mean, they wrote books on it. Anyone remember "The Book of Virtues" by Reagan Cabinet Secretary Bill Bennet? How about James Dobson who wrote that national morality cannot be maintained without religious principles. He viewed a decline in character as a "profound moral crisis" that could lead to national judgment.
President Calvin Coolidge once identified character as “the only secure foundation of the state.”
Peggy Noonan wrote back in the day that “In a president, character is everything. A president doesn’t have to be brilliant … he doesn’t have to be clever; you can hire clever …. You can hire pragmatic, and you can buy and bring in policy wonks. But you cannot buy courage and decency; you can’t rent a strong moral sense. A president must bring those things with him.”
President Truman once said “A man cannot have character unless he lives within a fundamental system of morals that creates character.”
Al Mohler, leader of the Southern Baptists has written “Americans have retained enough moral sense to know that personal character still matters in the choice of a babysitter. If this is true, we can hardly claim with a straight face that character is irrelevant to those who hold high positions of political leadership. In the end, our concept of character must be filled with specific content if it is to be meaningful."
To accept Sam Huntington's analysis, we have to conclude that all of these people were wrong, or either lying in their understanding of the importance of character.
The followers at Geez long for a return to honesty, truth, justice and the "American Way". It's a central plank of MAGA. The problem is they've elected a leader who does not himself embody those traits they once claimed to admire and expect in our politicians.
The right for years, indeed, generations was a useful counterweight to the excesses of the left. No longer. They have so discredited their movement and surrendered to MAGA that they cease to even try to exercise grace, work for unity or bipartisan common ground and as their savior calls them to do, "serve the least of these".
What are we to do?
We turn to the "experts in journalism" to get our "fix of information" when in reality all the information needed to determine what is ethical behavior rest within each of us.
If we remain open and un-attached to the beliefs and conditioning that the people with money, influence, and power spend their time and energy convincing folks like us that their belief in their own infallibility is what we should accept without question.
Unfortunately 35 to 40 percent of this nation's voting public have swallowed hook line and sinker the delusions and ignorance of the current power structure in this nation.
The future is unknowable as it never exists. But given all indications it's going to be a bumpy, rocky, and dangerous flow forward. Thanks to Project 2025, Trump, Christian Nationalism, the MAGA GOP, the corrupt SCOTUS, and our ever present systemic racism. Mow elevated through Trump and Christian Nationalism.
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