Care of Ace. I tried not to scrape all of it but there’s no good place to cut so here it is – most of it.
I watched this on YouTube last night and planned to discuss it since; I’m a bit unsure how to discuss it, because the points Cooke makes — that Trump has been (or is, depending on the issue, and depending when you ask him) “very pro choice,” in favor of the nonsense assault weapons ban, in favor of single payer socialized medicine (he cites socialist Canada and socialist-on-England’s-dime Scotland as success stories), in favor of a wealth tax on the rich, considers himself more of a Democrat than a Republican, and of course has donated lots of money and praise to Hillary Clinton and her shady Foundation — are simply deemed to not matter, for reasons that are never fully articulated.
And of course, Trump speaks vaguely about immigration, and even very recently said there must be some path to citizenship.
When conservatives speak of feeling as if they’re in the Twilight Zone, as I think Cooke does here (or perhaps Beck does in that piece Allah cites), what they mean, and what I mean, is that conservatives who have previously told me they could never sell out their Sacred Constitutional Principles and support Candidate X due to his one-time heresy on Issue Y are now telling me that It doesn’t matter that Trump thinks Planned Parenthood is a fabulous organization that does incredible, incredible work for the women and must be funded. (The fabulous/incredible parts are parody language, but he did say the “good parts” of Planned Parenthood must be funded — which is actually the current posture of the law, and Planned Parenthood’s position as well: They claim that when we give them millions of dollars, that doesn’t go to abortions.)
So I’m not sure how to talk about “politics,” because plainly we’re in a post-political phase on this Trump matter: Issues don’t matter, previous positions don’t matter, current positions don’t matter.
What matters is that Trump will fight. Who knows what his agenda is — it is clear watching him make up major planks in real time that he doesn’t know what his agenda is — but he will “fight” for it, whatever it turns out to be.
So I guess this makes the discussion ultra-political, as in “beyond the political,” above it, parallel to it: It’s not about particular politics, it’s not about conventional politics, it’s about a rebellion against whatever we currently think conventional politics are, and so the fact that he was once “very pro choice” and in fact could not oppose even partial birth abortion is, for reasons that leave me scratching my head, completely irrelevant to any evaluation of him as a candidate.
So here’s the argument, and I fully expect Charles C. W. Cooke to be branded a foreign faggit for noting that Trump supported an assault weapons ban, despite the fact that Cooke has been one of the right’s most vigorous (some might say crazed) defenders of the 2nd Amendment, whereas Trump will be labeled a hero for previously supporting the assault weapons ban and, supposedly now, opposing it, though who knows what his position will be in twenty-four hours
So let the savaging of the foreign English fruitcake Charles Cooke begin, even though he’s been an American conservative longer than Donald Trump.
