Politics

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Same-sex marriage is not the “law of the land” in Kentucky, and Kim Davis is right

UPDATE 10:10 P.M. CST – Now that Kim Davis has been arrested and the Kentucky Governor, AG, U.S. Senators and House of Representin’ DeceptiCONS cannot locate shining armor, creedal vows to become a Knight of St John or a Rosary, Ms Davis’s white martydom is a fait accompli. One of the protagonists of this essay have responded by proclaiming that Kim Davis groupies (she is now our Michael Brown) will “withdraw” form “public squares” (can you you name ONE and tell us the last time a “we” gathered in it for anything other than a spring or fall concert featuring a retired Bangles singer?) and that we have “no end game and don’t care [if we have one]”. Oh, and furthermore, “Kim Davis is a bad martyr for the cause of religious liberty”. Oh really? That’s strange, I have a 4 volume set of Alban Butler’s “Lives  OF THE FATHERS, MARTYRS and OTHER SAINTS” a stirring, day by calendar day record of the titular’s day to day life and death, many times in martyrdom. The funny thing is that God has this knack for choosing the least likely candidates for saints and martyrs. e.g. two days before St Stephen the apostle was martyred, Saul of Tarsus assisted in his public calumny, then conspired to have more drastic action taken if Stephen became what I call a Truth recidivist, then watched and encouraged his mock trial and subsequent stoning. 2 days after this, Saul of Tarsus, the man who would be martyr maker king, became Paul the Apostle. It’s a good thing the American Conservative wasn’t publishing then, readers may have snickered and ignored the “convert” (that’s what Ms Davis is) Saul and proclaimed him “a bad martyr for religious liberty”. I might ask the question, pray tell, just who IS a GOOD martyr for religious liberty? The TV heretics who want you to know that God loves you and wants you to live in a bigger house surrounded by newer and more expensive cars?

Mandeville, LA – Rowan County Kentucky Court Clerk Kim Davis refuses to issue “marriage licenses” to homosexuals and she is right to do so, and worthy of your [re]publican and Christian defense, despite the reigning “media” authorities of our time insisting that she “enforce the law.” Who is actually a St. Benedict or a Benedict Arnold here? I humbly submit certain conservative writers are in Red Coat uniform, and here’s why.

SCOTUS Justice Potter Stewart famously quipped about pornography and the Miracle, 14th Amendment.

“…under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

Actually, Stewart’s judicial voyeurism aside, the Miracle Amendment doesn’t say ANYTHING about porn and neither does the First Amendment unless Congress has decided to ban the sale of Debbie (Wasserman Schulz) Does D.C. videos in Schulz’s hometown of Coconut Grove, FL — as they probably ought to. Inquiring minds following Davis’s stint as the judgement porn pariah of the week, might want to know this, seeing as how Ms Davis may be the only county clerk, elected or bribed into office, that IS obeying the law these days.

OK, what does any of this have to do with homosexual marriage licenses that are now the “law of the land,” and Mrs. Davis?

For starters, the SCOTUS is not a legislature, it is a body that reviews the acts of a singular legislature (perhaps you’ve heard of it, its called Congress). AND according to its charter (Article III of the U.S. Constitution) this body only has power to settle controversies arising under the Constitution or between States involving that legislature or the Constitution. We are now wading into factual territory that Constitutional imbeciles and rookie anarchists dare not swim for the obvious reason that facts ruin good Facebook posts and blog screeds written by neo-Christian “optionists.”

In the Obergefell “decision” the SCOTUS had no plenary power to make or enforce law in any of the states that were either a party to the suit or engaged in actions with a party to the suit. The SCOTUS purported to “strike down” the legally enacted laws of those 31 states and therefore made “gay marriage” “legal.” This is the equivalent of the SCOTUS saying that Kentucky cannot have a law licensing drivers, but the court cannot say that KY must have a law licensing drivers of the SCOTUS’s choosing and neither does the Constitution. And there ends the argument, in its cradle and no “Benedict option” or “win-win” compromise can rescue it regardless of the author’s good intentions.

Pseudo-legalists are by now ready to quote Brown vs Board of Education to me and say (sic) “Mitter Chur, that ith eggthactly what the Thupreme Court Did in Brown and we are all better oth for ith.” Wrong. Elevating 9 lawyers from 2 law schools to make all moral and municipal decisions for 309 million people is not only wrong, it is antithetical to the reason we have a federal compact to begin with: the enumeration to the General government of certain powers that the ratifying parties possessed full, sovereign, jurisdiction of a priori for those SPECIFIC purposes and no others (this is the reason, BTW,  Patrick Henry insisted there be a [10th] Amendment attached to the Constitution BEFORE ratification).

Back to our story’s anti-heroes: In whose “better way” [Anderson] or “Benedict option” [Dreher] world did KY or VA or GA or LA or AR et al enumerate municipal, marriage laws (or divorce laws) to Congress? Where!? When?! It is actually the demonstrable case that those states did the exact opposite, very loudly and in front of a watching, blogging and judgement-porn hurling world. Does this legal, moral and traditional act, nay, expression of self-government matter or doesn’t it? It seems that every time there is a controversy that requires the martyrdom of a few Facebook friends or seats at the annual pancake dinner head-table, we are told to “do what’s right” and surrender.

But what’s at stake here is more than just the conscience rights of bureaucrats, and even more than marriage. It’s the historic understanding of constitutional government, which we are once again being asked to give up.

What does American history say? I will spare our subjects the useful condemnation their words words would recive from Orestes Brownson and instead impart the more secular clarion. The loudest and wisest voice among the Founders, warning of exactly this, was John Taylor of Caroline County. In 1808, Taylor wrote a series of newspaper editorials that defended and exonerated the term [r]epublcan from “it’s the law of the land” pansies who tried to hijack it, buckling under the soft pressure of dubious Yankee tariffs and manipulation into fielding standing armies, insisted the Constitution granted no such power to abuse — moreover even if it did, it should be ignored. In Spirit of ’76 # VI, Taylor wrote:

“The doctrine “that nations ought to stick by their governments,” right or wrong, is apocryphal where the sovereignty of the people exists. Are governments the best judges of national interest? No. The most honest? No. How are the degrees of liberty and tyranny graduated? From free discussion and national will down to passive obedience. “

The “national will” is today for “gay marriage” but there is nothing “national” about compulsory acceptance of sodomy, no more than there could be compulsory acceptance of “forms” of incest, provided “the court” said so. We’ve already volunteered to accept polygamy in the West. How so, you ask? Well, if the accepted terms of marriage before the time of Henry VIII were in effect today, marriage would be sacramental and thus any subsequent “re-marriages” would be … go ahead, you fill in the blank for me ____________.

The laws on the books in KY say there is no “gay marriage” to be licensed because the state doesn’t recognize it. in 1794 when they ratified the Constitution they didn’t recognize it. When they were forced to “ratify” the 14th Amendment in 1869 they did not “recognize” nor did they “enumerate” to Congress their municipal power over marriage or divorce in that ratification. So exactly which “law of the land” are Ryan Anderson and Rod Dreher insisting Mrs. Davis “enforce”? And if she will not accept the terms of this extortion, must then, “resign”? To do what precisely, become part of the damaged-soul herd meandering toward the cliff Our Lady prophesied at Fatima?

Mrs. Davis rightly claims obedience to “the law of God,” and is right to do so because without acknowledging His law there can be no recognizable law afterward. It is to the benefit of both the sodomite and the heterosexual that the governing authority not legally recognize or endorse their sinful perversions; but, since it does solemnly recognize them at Dreher and Anderson et al’s insistence, this of course means “Benedict option” fortresses might be filled with adulterers and homosexuals; seeing that few moralists St. Paul might recognize as pious would be publicly accepted, praised and defended. I suspect Dreher and Anderson might have wished that a poll be taken among Herod’s subject’s as to whether St John The Baptist should pretend he was not privy to Our Lord’s sermons on adultery or the Old Covenant’s law that He “came to fulfill” and thus, he were free to compromise a “win-win” deal for Herod and the polygamists in waiting (for licenses).

Error has no right to our minds or to control our moral affairs, says St Thomas Aquinas. In fact, we have been blessed with abundant, Christian guidance on moral questions such as these so as to prevent erroneous and Facebook inspired popular conclusions, to wit:

“We do not, indeed, attribute such force and authority to philosophy as to esteem it equal to the task of combating and rooting out all errors; for, when the Christian religion was first constituted, it came upon earth to restore it to its primeval dignity by the admirable light of faith, diffused “not by persuasive words of human wisdom, but in the manifestation of spirit and of power,” so also at the present time we look above all things to the powerful help of Almighty God to bring back to a right understanding the minds of man and dispel the darkness of error.”

The “darkness of error” has now left the SCOTUS building and has gaseously spread into the homes and offices of the erstwhile Christian press corps, who now perform due diligence on error’s behalf ostensibly because error must not be allowed to make us erroneous i.e. defy the “law of the land.”

The actual “law of the land” requires us, with complete Faith, Hope and Charity, to not ice “wedding” cakes, take “wedding” photographs or issue “marriage” licenses to or for anyone, ourselves included, who may find themselves on the wrong side of well known, yet ignored, moral theology. You don’t need to build a wall or “option” a town to do that, you just need to pray for humility and fortitude. Just ask St Jane de Chantal…

Did Catholicism become ‘compatible with the American experiment’ before or after the pope-burning stopped?

The author believes the answer to the question posed in the headline, “Is Catholicism compatible with the American experiment?” is yes. I also suspect he and most people would say the answer to the question, “Was Catholicism compatible with British colonial America?” is no, since it was officially suppressed in most colonies.

So: When did this country become ‘compatible’ with Catholicism? 1776? 1783, when the yoke of a protestant empire that had used anti-catholicism as a political glue was thrown off? Or was it 1868, when the last protestant test oath for public office was revoked? The United States have nothing comparable to, say, the baptism of Clovis.

Brendan McConville, among others, has supposed that the three defining qualities of British colonial identity were attachments to a capitalist economy, protestantism, and the monarchy. Our revolution only got rid of one of them.

The appeal to religious toleration as a Catholic (or Catholic-‘compatible’) principle rooted in the Enlightenment is the least convincing thing in Gregg’s piece, because religious liberty was not embraced by a pope until 1965. And with good reason, because programs of “toleration” often went hand in hand with efforts to check the power of the church. In British North America, toleration was never understood to extend to Catholics, that was a later thing — right up until the revolution the pope was burned in effigy yearly. This was a key civic ritual that helped cement their identity as citizens of the British Empire, and anti-catholicism was one of the few things dissenters and Anglicans had in common.

The Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom reflects the same compromise between the state church and dissenters. “[T]he impetus provided by this Enlightenment concern,” for religious liberty is really rather vague, and there’s a strong case that the Statute is only remotely a philosophical document. Religious toleration in Virginia was necessary because an embattled Anglican oligarchy needed the support of religious dissenters, reconciling the secular-minded ruling class and the anarchic revivalism taking root at the time. The concept of religious liberty prior to the revolution, in both Massachusetts and Virginia, meant hostility to Catholics and bishops of any kind.

Jefferson’s new law arose from an earlier debate during which he and James Madison conspired to quash religious education, something, again, dissenting protestants and a mostly secular-minded gentry could agree on. It also led directly to the only instance in American history of church land being systematically confiscated by the state in the Glebe Acts. The Statute on Religious Freedom is not a victory for religion, it’s close to the opposite.

Since conservatives are out of power, today they are the ones begging for “toleration” where it once was baptists, congregationalists, and so on, the leftists of their day. Gregg seems convinced that a lefty could be persuaded to support religious liberty with a pitch along the lines of, “see, as a person whose intellectual genealogy goes back to the Enlightenment, you should believe in religious toleration too.”

I also don’t get his coldness to David Hume, he extols the Scottish Enlightenment but seems to strongly dislike the most interesting part of it. He finds Hume too “irreligious” but won’t say an ill word of the man who cut up a Bible, wrote the anti-religious Statute, and banned Hume’s History of England from UVA on account of its alleged Tory bias.

Edit: Justin Logan points out that Conor Cruise O’Brien thought it was McCarthy and Kennedy:

McCarthyism was an engine for the social promotion of the Catholics in America and the promotion of Irish Catholics in particular. McCarthy backed Spellman, conveyed to millions of non-Catholic anti-Communist Americans the novel idea that Catholics were a specially reliable and especially tough breed of anti-Communists … Before the McCarthy-Kennedy breakthrough of 1950-60 American Catholics had their tents pitched in the temple of the holy nation. After that breakthrough there is a Catholic altar in the temple itself.

(For far more erudite criticism of Actonians, I refer you to Opus Publicum)

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The 1% would still rule under a Bernie Sanders administration

Much ado has been made about the presidential campaign of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

The self-styled democratic socialist is scaring the pants off libertarians and conservatives who see his rise in the Democratic primary as a legitimate threat to the country. “Bernie Sanders Is The Most Dangerous Man In America,” declares libertarian activist Christopher Cantwell. Pundit and internment-defender Michelle Malkin thinks Sanders’ “socialist odor” stinks, and would be a bad scent for the nation. Historian Tom Woods is dedicating an entire e-book to why Sanders is wrong for America.

Progressives are just as intrigued by the Sanders surge as conservatives, if not more. “Hillary Clinton can’t afford to ignore Bernie Sanders any longer,” contends Princeton professor Julian Zelizer. The septuagenarian senator is not only out-polling Clinton in New Hampshire, but is drawing massive crowds across the country. Even comedian Sarah Silverman is feeling the Bern: she recently introduced the senator at an L.A. rally, declaring he “is not for sale.”

I admit it: At first I was piqued by the independent senator’s quixotic bid for the White House. Sanders refuses to have a Super PAC – an infinite spending machine meant to provide a vehicle for the wealthy to invest dollars and gain favors. He is against open borders, saying that without national boundaries there is “no United States.” He speaks openly and passionately about the struggle working-class Americans face as they are falling behind in an increasingly competitive economy. Plus, my family hails from Vermont, and the Green Mountain State is one of the best in the Union.

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The X-Files, Anarchy on TV

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The X-Files is one of the most iconic shows of the 1990s, conspiracy theories and aliens would seem an odd idea for TV but it became a hit. David Duchovny, who plays Fox Mulder, once said that when he shot the pilot he never feel sure that they would be on TV, but they were for nine seasons. The X-Files will be back in January of next year for a small season of six episodes.

The show developed an intense fan base, it was one of the first shows that hit in the age of the internet, so since the beginning there have been a lot of online forums developed to the series. The geek culture was shaped by a show where the heroes were almost geeks themselves. It was a success both in America and overseas.

But it wasn’t just another Hollywood show. Libertarian academic Paul Cantor argues that X-Files wasn’t left or right but posed the question of the legitimacy of nation-state — after all, a key premise was that the government was part of a conspiracy involving aliens to conquer the world. After the Cold War, a show like The X-Files had the license to be anti-government. The FBI is portrayed like a bureau institution which is against the interests of the citizens. A curious thing is the strange conservativism of the show, in several episodes foreigners weren’t treated with sympathy, the strange traditions of some groups of immigrants were feared by the local population. It also seemed to have some sympathy for militias. However, some episodes had more left-wing themes, like suspicion of corporate culture or planned residential communities. The logo of the show “Trust No One” could be interpreted as a libertarian mantra.

The funny thing about a series that insinuate that the government is involved in a big conspiracy is that both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson have confessed in press conferences that some fans had told them they joined the FBI, CIA or other government agencies because of them. It doesn’t like the most logical step, but a hunger for answers exerts a powerful pull on young people. If one can fathom why a libertarian like Edward Snowden could decide to work for the government, he might have taken a similar path to Fox Mulder.

Another interesting element was The Lone Gunmen, three hackers who were friends of Mulder and Scully, these computer geniuses mixed some ideas from geek culture, conspiracy paranoia and a vague concept of achieving social justice with technology. The Lone Gunmen were some kind of precursor of Anonymus, though in the last season they were portrayed as patriotic, unlike Anonymus which is mostly described as anarchist.

There were particular aspects that made a show like The X-Files a success in America and abroad, among them the sentiment found basically anywhere in the world, that their politicians are corrupt.

The 90s were a particular time, now with a popular politician like Ron Paul it’s not difficult to imagine that today the series could have made an issue of the spying, drones and growth of the Military-Industrial Complex, positions that were before at the fringe and now have become relatively mainstream. It would not be a surprise if the new X-Files episodes retain their anti-statism. The lesson of the X-Files is that people may distrust their leaders, but they still like heroes. It doesn’t matter if their name is Fox Mulder or Edward Snowden, sometimes the anarchist is the real patriot.

What’s the matter with left-libertarianism?

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Left-libertarianism is a peculiar variant of libertarianism. It has some elements in common with the left, but it also supports positions that are at odds with the left in a general sense. I had previously written about its history, and while doing that I found that left-libertarianism is far from a united theory, but a relatively broad realm of ideas about about free markets and achieving and social justice. Karl Hess, Robert Anton Wilson and Samuel Edward Konkin III are big names in libertarianism on their own and also left-libertarians. Today the Center for a Stateless Society and the Alliance of the Libertarian Left are the new faces of left-libertarianism, most of its writers and members are young activists who despite claiming to be following the paths of the left-libertarians of the past, also raise their own issues.

Left-libertarianism is still unknown to the public. The mainstream media has portrayed libertarianism as something of the right, with an spokesperson like Ron Paul who is pro-life and against open borders, or figures like the Koch Brothers, which are donors to Republican campaigns and the bête noire of a lot of liberals, so isn’t very easy to associate libertarianism with the left. Yet a lot of Ron Paul supporters and those who identify themselves as libertarians are pro-choice, and skeptical of Republican Party. J. Arthur Bloom some time ago argued reflecting on a poll that suggests that young Americans prefer socialism over capitalism but at the same time support a free market system over a government managed economy, my initial reaction was that young Americans could find left-libertarianism interesting, but I wasn’t sure at that moment of the limits of my reflection.

The libertarian movement had been in large part financed by the Koch brothers though institutions like the Cato Institute, Reason, FreedomWorks and Students for Liberty to only mention a few. With the Ron Paul campaign the age-old paleo-cosmopolitan intra-libertarian dispute was reborn. The Ron Paul campaign was closer to the Rothbardians than the Friedmanites and it generated radicals rather than reformers. Despite that some cosmopolitans express his doubts about Ron Paul and the Koch brothers didn’t support or endorse him, I think the Koch brothers were intelligent enough to know that Ron Paul was bringing a lot of young people to libertarianism, something that could be useful to them. That’s why despite the disagreements, Ron Paul has been a main speaker at events organized by Koch-affiliated organizations, they know he energizes the base. Ron Paul and the Koch brothers are capitalist and for different reasons they had a long relation with the GOP. On the left-libertarian side there isn’t much famous politicians or bigger donors. Left-libertarians rely mostly on making new converts at libertarian events, but most libertarians consider themselves capitalists and I don’t think that will change any time soon. There is a solid left-libertarian tradition that young people could find interesting, however, especially in their critic of the corporate capitalism.

I think that it’s better to present my own philosophy before continuing exploring the limits of left-libertarianism. I’m a socialist, not a social democrat whose model is Scandinavia but rather a libertarian socialist whose model are Zapatistas in Mexico or the Kurds in the Middle East. Elections are not the only thing that matters, but I think electoral politics could radicalize the public and also move the left in a more libertarian direction. As far as I know, most left-libertarians come from the libertarian right and the anarchist left, so it’s easy to suppose that few of them ever would be sympathetic to electoral left-wing politics, but history tells us radical libertarians like Karl Hess and Murray Bookchin were involved in third party politics. So to be involved in electoral politics seems more an opportunity than a problem.

The Ron Paul campaign was a better tool for promoting libertarianism than the millions of dollars spent by the Kochs in think-tanks. Sometimes when left-libertarians said: “the dominant left-libertarian aim is to fuse Murray Rothbard with David Graeber,” I think a more interesting goal would be to fuse Ron Paul with Karl Hess. There are limits to the electoral politics, for example most leftists support the minimum wage (there are some left-libertarians that agree but most disagree). Other long time objectives of the left are universal health care (this policy was supported by Libertarian Party presidential candidate Mike Gravel but not for most left-libertarians). But compromise in the search of peace, liberty and justice seems to me a mature political move, along the lines of the one Murray Rothbard hoped for, broad on the left and right.

Here at The Mitrailleuse, there has been some polemic about left-libertarianism. James E. Miller argue that left-libertarianism is closer to left-liberalism than libertarianism, I disagree with that, I think that the fact that some left-libertarians had un-libertarian positions don’t mean left-libertarianism as a whole is doomed. For other part I recognize that the argument that sometimes C4SS sounds like Salon is true, far from joking some time ago I consider seriously writing a response Kevin D. Williamson argument that the Baltimore riots should be blame on the Democratic Party which historically has governed Baltimore, my response was going to be that the riots should be blame on the Republican Party crackdown on the Black Panthers because since then the Afro-American communities lacked radical organizing. When I was thinking where to publish the article, I thought C4SS and Salon. J. Arthur Bloom makes the case that it’s difficult for left-libertarians to gain support in the broad left, I agree a lot anarchists are closer to the Democratic Party.

There is something that should be said — Karl Hess, probably the most radical left-libertarian, was still a man of the Old Right, even when he joined Students for a Democratic Society and Industrial Workers of the World. He was deeply patriotic and inspired from the American history, he was not a cosmopolitan libertarian but a rather a man of a community. The Neighborhood Power of which the New Left speaks was an idea that had on board both the Black Panthers and radical Christians; a self-governing community was a real policy for left-libertarians. Since the New Left era, the idea of liberal identity politics was present and affected the movement. The black power, feminist and LGBT struggles were co-opted by the Democratic Party which, though movements that at some point were anti-statist, become functionally supportive of growing state power.

I don’t think that left-libertarians are going to win that argument by sounding like left-liberals, but by actually accepting that a free society would not be constructed if some day everybody started to think the same, but when one can reach broad agreement about letting communities be free. For example when it comes to immigration, most left-libertarians tend to support Open Borders, and I also do, but I understand that probably cosmopolitan communities like Williamsburg or Echo Park are more willing to receive immigrants than communities in rural Alabama, and a real immigration policy should respect that the communities could have different positions on whether or not receive immigrants. When Karl Hess spoke about education he also had the same argument, he said that there isn’t a problem if a black community decided to teach Swahili to their kids, I think that the same arguments should go for a religious community teaching their kids their values. Radical decentralization really means that abolishing the state or not, the communities at least would be freer to choose their own policies based on their everyday life rather than waiting for a bureaucrat in Washington.

Left-libertarians had an interesting history, in the present they are growing and their future is still unknown. Trying to recruit new members at libertarian events had it limits. With the exception of agorists, most left-libertarians weren’t organized in the past in any specific group but they were in a lot of ways closer to more average New Left radical, not only because of the left was more decentralist back then, but also they more willing to engage in a debate with the radical left. Most left-libertarians are great fans of the Marxist historian Gabriel Kolko, but I listen to very few about the reflections of other socialists. For example, Carl Oglesby the former leader of SDS is considered by the people of C4SS and ALL as a left-libertarian, though he wasn’t an anarchist and supported the minimum wage. Left-libertarians tend to criticize liberalterians saying that they are not radicals because they aren’t anarchist and also supported some state policies, so why do left-libertarians claim Carl Oglesby as one their own, when he probably should be called a proto-liberalterian? I think that a really thoughtful reflection of that would tell us a lot of left-libertarians claim to be radicals, yet still prefer the comfort zone of libertarian conferences rather than, say, going to the Left Forum to speak about free markets and property rights. If they want a revolution they should reject the liberal identity politics of us versus them, the real struggle is between the political elite and the grassroots rebellion.

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The Donald, and why the hoity-toity pols hate him

Republished from the Press and Journal

Rick Perry, the presidential aspirant and former Texas governor, recently bellowed this about Donald Trump at a speech in downtown Washington, D.C.: “Let no one be mistaken, Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded.”

“He’s becoming a jackass, at a time when we need to be having a serious debate about the future of the party and the country,” South Carolina senator and fellow 2016 candidate Lindsey Graham told CNN’s Erin Burnett.

“The Donald’s life has been seven decades of buffoonery,” Kevin Williamson wrote in the conservative National Review.

In the vein of Rodney Dangerfield, Donald Trump, the mega-rich real estate mogul and unlikely presidential candidate, can’t get any respect. At least not from the hoity-toity political establishment that sits (or dreams of sitting) along the Potomac.

But out in the hinterlands – what D.C. elites call “flyover country” – Trump’s message and style are actually resonating. And the best part about the Trump phenomenon is that no one in the punditocracy can explain it.

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