No Mules Allowed

National Review:

I think Jonah went all "Pharisee" relative to Trump, so I have been miffed -- but I still love him. Usually he is truly "above the issues" in a religious / philosophical sense, not the narcissistic sense of BO -- I believe what our funders intended was for Americans to LIVE and spend most of their mental energy "above politics" in that religious / philosophical sense -- opposing teams in the NFL, not Shia and Sunni seeking to exterminate the other.

This paragraph especially hit me  (it is in reference to the Billy C defense of his crime bill and spat with BLM):

One fun consequence of all this is that Bill very well could turn out to be a liability for Hillary, which would be kind of hilarious given that Hillary would be just another left-wing activist lawyer were it not for her husband. She rode her Arkansas mule all of the way to the White House gates only to see the sign reading, “No Mules Allowed.”

I stand in awe of how much and how well Goldberg writes -- I liked this as well:

There’s a natural human tendency to think that because you can’t stand the other guy -- or gal -- he or she must therefore be your ideological opposite. The Brown Shirts and Red Shirts weren’t philosophical antipodes, they were Coke and Pepsi fighting for the same slice of the radical market by changing their recipes ever so slightly. Bill Clinton, as president, wasn’t that left-wing and Richard Nixon wasn’t that right-wing. But their enemies started from the assumption that any political opponent we hate this much must have a wholly different ideology from us. And when your enemies hate someone on your “side,” that causes you to embrace your guy even more.

My theory is that when we had RELIGION that was a real actual part of life, if the person you hated was in the church, you were absolutely required to at least fake that you didn't hate them -- and for the good of your soul, even ACTUALLY love them! Even if they were your ENEMY you were admonished to do the same!

We could have a few "ideologies" running around in our heads, but we KNEW that "this is ideology and THIS is RELIGION" -- one is temporal, one is eternal, we don't mix them up because that would be HERESY and that is VERY BAD.

Today,  "The Party" (TP-D) is the combination church/state. It's "encyclicals" -- sometimes actual "law", created lawfully by Congress, but increasingly "fiat" from the executive, some alphabet bureaucracy or the SCOTUS reading "penumbras"; increasingly MUST be obeyed by those who seek to maintain the good graces and favor of TP.  Thus "men in the women's bathroom" becomes a totem that must be bowed and scraped to by ALL. Gay "marriage" must not be just tolerated, it must be CELEBRATED by all -- or jobs will be lost, travel will be cut off, nay,  the infidels who disagree will be banished and purged from the Holy Church of TP!

On the right there is no such power as TP currently. The "Republican Party" is ill organized and has extremely poor "coordination" with the media that calls itself "conservative". Indeed, TP has declared it "illegal" for there to be "coordination" on the right, and in fact has declared that if so accused they are "guilty unless they can prove themselves innocent" in violation of UN human rights law!

Thus we have had "purity" issues for a LONG time as Jonah points out. Hoover, Nixon, W ... he could go MUCH farther. Even the sainted Reagan was far less doctrinaire than a BO on the left. The little history of W the "arch conservative" is painfully funny. I actually think LESS purity is better in this case -- as long as we don't lose track of who we are.

The whole thing is worth a read -- his left/right discussion is worth a refresher. If you haven't read mine on that I think it is decent as well.

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