To: Brumar89 who wrote (1025554 ) 7/24/2017 1:18:57 PM From: Brumar89 Read Replies (1) | Respond to Trump Administration to Teachers: You Must Use a Transgender Student’s ‘Preferred Pronouns’Teachers and students who refuse to use 'preferred pronouns' for trans students can be charged with “gender-based harassment.”t.co Patterico J ust like telling women in the armed forces, they s/b willing to shower with men .... Before the election, Trumpers would've said you have to vote against Hillary or stuff like this will be forced on America. Now they don't care ... just like 'lock her up. 'Ben Shapiro:Trump has re-enshrined the Iran deal; his greatest defender on Fox News, Tucker Carlson, now spends his evenings browbeating commentators who suggest that Iran poses a threat to the United States. Trump has doubled down on President Obama’s policies on Russia in Syria; his cease-fire deal with the Russians was so bad that even the Israelis rejected it. Trump has not reformed taxes. There is no world in which Obamacare will be repealed. There is no wall, nor will the wall be forthcoming anytime soon. That’s not to say that Trump might not end up fulfilling some of these promises. I hope and pray he does. But it’s clear that the vast majority of Republicans no longer care if he does, so long as he does one thing: keep tweeting about the fake-news media. Were Trump to fulfill every conservative pledge but stop tweeting about Mika Brzezinski’s face and CNN’s ratings, many Republicans would be less enamored of him. Trump’s visceral rage is what thrills Republicans, not his policy — and a huge number of Republicans aren’t even interested in whether the rage undercuts his policy. If Mike Pence replaced Donald Trump and implemented every jot and tittle of the conservative program, then won reelection, most Republicans would be enraged, not excited. Trump’s (rotten) character is now a thoroughly accepted positive good. The piece is just so great, and the next passage so on target, that I hope Ben will forgive me if I quote it at some length. This captures precisely what I have come to believe about too many conservatives these days: Trump allows us to indulge our id and feel righteous while doing it. We grew up believing that decent behavior made you a decent person — but then we realized that breaking the rules not only makes victory easier, it’s more fun than having to struggle with the moral qualms of using moral means to achieve moral ends. So we’ve constructed a backwards logic to absolve ourselves of moral responsibility. The first premise: The other side, which wants bad things, cheats and lies and acts in egregious ways. The second premise: It requires cheating to defeat them. The third premise: If they are not defeated, the country will be destroyed. Conclusion: It is morally required to cheat and lie and act in egregious ways. Now, the first premise may indeed be true. But the second two are arguable at the very least. Without cheating and lying and acting in Trumpian fashion, Republicans in 2016 won massively at the state level, including governorships, and retained control of the Senate and House. And Democrats, for all their horrible perspectives, are not ISIS or Nazis. That means that the means we use matter. But we don’t want them to matter. And so we c astigate as “weak-kneed” anyone who says that colluding with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton is wrong. We suggest they just don’t get it . They must have wanted Hillary ! They must be idiots or rubes. We must fight anyone who opposes Russian collusion, because that would undercut our fun. A year ago, many conservatives said that ends justified means — and that the end was the implementation of conservative policies. Some conservatives still feel this way. But now that Trump isn’t actually implementing conservative policies, the truth is coming out: For most conservatives, the ends don’t just justify the means, the means are the ends. All that matters is the punching, even if the punching is both counterproductive and immoral. The RNC is reportedly [url=https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/conservatives-republicans/rnc-martyrdom-kim-guadagno/]refusing to support Republican candidates who criticized Donald Trump in the wake of the Access Hollywood video. “[The president] is unhappy with anyone who neglected him in his hour of need,” an anonymous RNC insider explained. Charlie Sykes :
