Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Encountering The Annoying Neocon

I recently made a comment on one of Bernie Goldberg's latest columns purporting to give advice, unsolicited of course, to President Trump. My having the temerity to point out that Bernie had never had anything nice or supportive to say about the President from the moment he announced his candidacy and as such there would be no reason to expect Trump would read his column or take his advice so that substantively it was little more than just another list of complaints being spewed into the echo chamber of the neocon blogosphere did not sit well with Bernie's resident attack dog.

This wasn't the first time I found myself being criticised for commenting on his columns with words to the effect "Well if you don't like what Bernie says what do you bother reading him or commenting?" I swear some of these people live in Plato's cave. 

This time was different however as I found myself coming under repeated attacks by one John Daly who's arguments consisted of calling me a mindless Trump supporter and conspiricy theorist. Keep in mind that after calling me a self important nobody he pointed out that he not only wrote columns for Bernie's website but also for the National Review and had appeared as a guest on Glenn Beck's (failing) live blog The Blaze! 

I told him such a CV simple proved he was of the same neocon stripe as Bernie himself and I asked him if he was Bernie's personal attack dog (i.e. forum moderator) and was he his food taster as well. I further asked if Beck had paid him for his appearance with some ground up Cheetos. 

As I said none of this sat well with Mr. Daly. (Neocons like leftists have have very poorly developed senses of humor.) The first question was deflected with a non answer answer, the second as impossible because they lived in different parts of the country and the third by telling I needed to look up what the meaning of "guest" was. I can only surmise that Beck paid him for his advice exactly what it is worth, nothing. After a bit more parrying and pointing out his apparent ignorance of historical realities I concluded with the following statement.

"You are nothing more than a phony and an ignorant lackey of forces I doubt you understand. Even if you did it would just prove you the most dangerous kind of fool.

"What you do is (falsely) present as intellect that which is but rhetorical opinion used in the service of ideology. If I had to cite just one thing that I have learned in sixty years of studying history, it is that political ideology and philosophies are nothing more than rhetoric used to obtain power and that the only thing that matters is what is done with power once attained. Collectivism, no matter what it's form or what it claims to be or disguises itself as is the path to tyranny and the antithesis of what the American Revolution represents.

"The sovereignty of the individual is the basis of the sovereignty of local government which becomes the basis of the sovereignty of state and then national governments. But there the progression must stop because national governments and to some extent state governments, in order to persist, must be based in the bonds of common cultural and linguistic identity. Dissolve these bonds and the very concept of sovereignty itself disintegrates back down the chain to the level of the individual, at which point men become ciphers, subjects rather than citizens and tyranny reigns supreme.

You would be served by remembering Santayana's full quotation not the truncated one most are familiar with.

"'Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.'

"President Trump's speech in Warsaw and his speech on the proper basis on international relations early in his campaign were reflections on this understanding. Deny it it all you want. You can't refute it so you retreat into petty sarcasm and poor attempts at belittling humor which does nothing more than exposes how shallow your intellect really is.

https://theeveningchronicle...

http://theeveningchronicle....

"You see some people can write based on actual scholastic research as opposed to your pseudo-intellectualism. There are far more important things to be learned from the lessons of history than from the sexual peccadillos Hulk Hogan or the self-inflicted wounds of Megyn Kelly. (Two of Daly's recent pieces at Nat. Review) More useless and dangerous distractions would be hard to find. At lest the likes of CNN and MSNBC are honest in their hatred, whereas you disguise yours in obfuscation pretending to be insight."

Any and all are welcome to read the entire exchange here.   http://bernardgoldberg.com/heres-an-idea-mr-president/

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