The Bookworm Beat 5/29/16 — the “pre-Memorial Day” round-up, part 1

Woman-writing-300x265I haven’t forgotten that tomorrow is Memorial Day but today is still just another Sunday — laundry, bills, and blogging. The first two are done, so it’s blogging time.

America’s real class divide. I had a very interesting lunch the other day with Thomas Lifson (founder of American Thinker) and one of his contributors, who craves anonymity, so I’ll call her Meg. Inevitably, of course, the conversation turned to Trump. Thomas and I are both people who have made our peace with Trump’s candidacy, although he was not our first choice. I think of us as strong #NeverHillary types, with a grudging respect for what Trump is accomplishing.

Meg, however, loves Trump. She doesn’t trust him and has no idea how he’ll do as a president, but she thinks he’s got unique virtues that are worth applauding.

Since Meg is from the East Coast, she has more familiarity with Trump, not as a TV personality, but as a businessman. She says one of Trump’s virtues is that he’s incredibly good a getting things done. If he wants to do what any conservative should do — namely, get rid of the alphabet soup of agencies — he can make it happen. In this, he’ll differ significantly from Clinton, Obama, Clinton, and Bernie, none of whom ever got anything significant done before running for president.

Mostly, though, Meg loves Trump’s raw courage. He doesn’t give a flying whatsit for the political class or for the media. When he isn’t bulldozing over them, he’s playing with them.

The way Meg sees it, the entire political class, both Democrat and Republican, has a vested interested in our bureaucratized, increasingly corrupt, deeply dysfunctional system. That’s why Republicans savaged Palin and Cruz, both of whom promised to end the cushy ride the feds have been dishing out for years to politicians, political operatives, and journalists feeding at the trough. Trump threatens to blow that up, which is what Meg thinks is just kind of wonderful.

Keeping Meg’s view in mind, I found fascinating Ace’s take on the class divide in the Republican party, one that sees the college crowd crying out for the Left’s approval, and desperately hoping to hop on that gravy train — only, in their minds, with more dignity and a nod to less government:

For a long time I’ve been busting on Marco Rubio people, and the class — Upper Middle Class College-Educated — so enthused about him.*

I’ve said this before, but this class, in particular, is extremely bully-able. Their class itself is is the product of liberal social cues and mores. College being one of the main prerequisites of class entry (other prerequisites: That your parents are also college-educated), this class is particularly sensitive to threats to their social status by liberals.**

Any class whose credentials are monitored by a progressive/archliberal dominant cadre is going to be easily whipsawed into conformity with that progressive/archliberal cadre.

I’m sorry to say this, but most of the right’s “leadership” — media, think tank (academic), political — is drawn from the upper middle/parents were college educated class.

It takes very little to pose a challenge to their class membership — a questioning of whether or not they’re firmly enough committed to liberal social values, to get them to back down and begin making apologies.

When you look at people like Paul Ryan, the whole point of their “conservative agenda” seems to be to accomplish every single Action Item on the liberal checklist, but through, allegedly, more conservative means (such as “market-based mechanisms” — this is how Romney, obviously a High Avatar of this class, wound up passing the “conservative version of universal health care,” RomneyCare, which ultimately gave us ObamaCare).

Read the rest here. It’s really interesting.

It’s not just Bernie who makes this a Marxist primary season. The same lunch was fruitful in another way. While we were discussing Hillary’s difficulty figuring out how to respond to Trump’s candidacy, Thomas Lifson had a wonderful metaphorical insight about the campaign. In a nod to Bernie, the insight involves some Marxian analysis, but not the kind you’re thinking about. I hope that Hillary’s not indicted too soon so that we can see this comedy play out.

Obama’s disgusting display at Hiroshima. When he’s not pushing the #NeverTrump theory (an idea that I think is over), Ben Shapiro is being his usual brilliant, informed, insightful self. I was thinking of fisking Obama’s rotten fish speech at Hiroshima, but found I needn’t bother: Ben’s done it for me and damn well too.

The short version is that Obama doesn’t see any difference between a sadistic nation starting a war in the name of slavery and conquest and an attacked nation ending the war in the name of liberty. Nor does he care at all about the lives saved — a typical problem Leftists have, as I develop at length in Chapter 5 of my ebook, Our Second Amendment Rights In Ten Essays.

America’s college-educated class has gone from cowardly to insane. Ace’s riff, above, about the cowardly college-educated class refers to graduates of yore. College today produces not only cowards but also crazy people. The stuff going on in campuses nowadays is simply insane.  For example, if you don’t actually read the following story, you may deny it’s accuracy: The University of Oregon maintains a “Bias Response Team” that deployed 85 times last year to emergency reports of triggers.

Indeed, just so you know how insane, here are some examples of the professional work your child’s teachers are publishing.

Next time the feminazis in your world mention the gender pay gap, please explain to them that, in the developed world, the gender pay gap is practically nonexistent. As I frequently, politely remind Progressive women I know, if there really was a gap, why would employers ever hire men?

A gay marriage lawsuit worth watching. Two Christian artists are going Alinsky and bringing the battle to the Left. In Phoenix, these women are suing the City, which has one of those “you must work for gay wedding” ordinances, for violating their Constitutional rights to religious freedom and freedom of expression.

English home seeks rock star owner. You just know that some rocker is going to buy one of these castles. It seems as if rockers always buy castles.

I have an entire inbox more of stuff to share with you.  I’ll pick up again later.