After watching a few of Dan Crenshaw's moronic campaign videos portraying him on special ops missions to attack progressive "targets" I have a tingle of pleasure running up my leg watching his momentary lapses of reasoning, make him a RINO target. They can't eat themselves fast enough.
After watching a few of Dan Crenshaw's moronic campaign videos portraying him on special ops missions to attack progressive "targets" I have a tingle of pleasure running up my leg watching his momentary lapses of reasoning, make him a RINO target. They can't eat themselves fast enough.
I know next to nothing about Crenshaw. Ok he is a veteran that got wounded. TY for your service (and ya, I served too in a different time and place and was lucky enough to not get severely wounded/injured).
The service and wound don't make you any smarter or better than pretty much anyone else.
And Tucker, well that guy is just a piece of shit that would probably badmouth his own mother if it helped his ratings and bottom line.
And let's not forget when after his death in 1945, Patton re-emerged as General Buck Turgidson counseling his president on the outcome a nuclean missal strike:
President Merkin Muffley : "You're talking about mass murder, General, not war!"
General "Buck" Turgidson : "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks."
Keep an eye on Crenshaw, because unlike the other faux-populist Ivy Leaguers, this guy actually had to do real "grown man shit" in his younger years, unlike a Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley. That gives him bonus points with the working class populists. The most popular Ivy League Populists are the ones who you would worry about fighting physically (man OR woman, see MTG/Boebs). The ones who have physical strength and/or size and who can FIGHT--or at least have the projected image of having those qualities. Working class men don't respect physically or argumentatively weak men, which is why they'd let a Josh Hawley or a Ted Cruz go well before they'd let a Dan Crenshaw go. They don't see Crenshaw as a pampered rich kid (even though he kinda is). They see him as a SEAL who bled for his country in an unpopular war and wears it with pride on his face, not as a a Tufts/Harvard graduate who can speak poetically. That gives him MUCH longer legs potentially than any other populist pol in the GOP.
I don't disagree with you relative to Crenshaw being more of a "real deal" person. But I think he finds himself in the no man's land of today's politics. Completely unacceptable to those of us on the center left (given his past antics) but not pure enough for MAGA. Who will trust him moving forward?
I suppose the point being that once you capitulate to nihilism in the pursuit of punishing your political opponents, you tend to stop worrying about the open hypocrisy and start embracing the shamelessness.
It all comes down to those who can mentally live with wearing their worst personal experiences on their sleeves versus those who spend their lives avoiding the subject because it brings back too much emotional pain. I've been on both sides of that fence. The part where you don't talk about it because people look at you and treat you differently after you do, and the part where you're not ashamed of who you are now post-combat defects and you'll take whatever judgement comes at you. Most don't talk often about the worst moments of their life, but some do. I count myself as one of the latter because it gives hope to the former when they see that fellow vets *can* live openly with their experiences. They also feel more seen that way when they hear similar lived experiences to their own. Or at least I like to think so as a fellow disabled vet.
My great uncle fought in WW2 at the Bulge. He was in the PA NG division that got overrun at the start.
I did not know this until I was in my late 20s/early 30s and serving myself when, one Christmas at the family get together, he sat down next to me and started talking about it out of the blue. Pulled out a cloth SS collar tab he had cut off somebody and showed it to me.
The rest of the family was shocked. I was later told that he NEVER talked about that to ANYONE.
It was a privilege and honor to listen to him--perhaps he felt that I could, in some small way, understand.
I spent the years 2004-2008 as a late teenager lying to my parents via hand-written letters about how little danger I was in. In reality, I was directly involved in the counter-IED mission and was outside of the wire every single day across three deployments as a combat engineer in the Marines. Even with all the lying, my mom was basically in a permanent state of panic for four years. It wasn't until this year that I started showing her pictures of me posing next to live IEDs that were only partially uncovered and still in the dirt with copper wires and/or pink Russian det-chord exposed in the shots. It's only later in life that you understand how close you truly were to death sometimes.
My father in law was a prisoner of war in Cabanatuan in WWII. Twelve thousand went in and 500 came out alive through the good works of Henry Mucci.. He was an officer so he was treated somewhat differently and only lost an eye but he was never quite right again. He did not talk about it. His father was the Army Surgeon General so it caused quite a stir when he was captured. He became quite the pacifist but talking about that did not happen.
Dan Carlin has a great Addendum episode about the Indianapolis for more nightmare fuel along these lines. Hats off to your pops. That's a helluva experience to survive.
I agree with a lot of your points, but it still leaves the mystery of working class obsession with Trump, who is the exact opposite of manly traits. He’s weak and soft, and I wonder if he’s ever even driven a car.
My only explanation is that Trump has fooled the working class into believing that he admires them - the biggest con of a life filled with cons. There’s plenty of evidence Trump is repulsed by his followers. He welcomed the physical isolation of the pandemic because it allowed him to avoid touching his supporters, and he was distressed watching the insurrectionists on TV because they looked “low class” to him.
Look at it more from a "how funny would it be if we selected a radical decadent elite to fuck over all the other decadent elite people we hate?" perspective and it will start to make sense. Imagine if we could get corrupt Russian oligarchs to overthrow Putin, wouldn't we want that? Wouldn't it be MORE poetic if anything from our perspective? The same could be said about choosing a decadent elite to overthrow all the other decadent managerial elites. That's who Trump is for them. Kinda poetic when you think about it.
That seems a bit meta for too much of that crowd. It seems more probable to me that they mistake the image for the reality, based upon his fame as a "tough" business "leader" and his apparent fearlessness in running his mouth so long as he has lawyers and hirelings and butt-kissers to do his heavy lifting.
I think it's both personally. He is the ultimate base male icon for what he has attained over the course of his life. But he's also like shoving a mirror into the faces of the "managerial elite" and saying "look at what the system you produced created, now you get to live with it." There really is more of an up/down economic component to populism as I understand it compared to the left/right culture war shit. Where the up/down and left/right intertwine is where it gets the most interesting. Trump is a great example of that. He was both the middle finger to elitism AND the middle finger to the "woke" multi-cultural left. He was capable of both "owning the libs" AND "owning the managerial elite". For Trumpers, the managerial elites are the ones who are in charge and the post-college left are their subservient scribe class minions. They see the post-college "woke" left as the future inheritors of the positions that the managerial elite currently hold. They see these two groups as working hand-in-glove to fuck the working class both economically and culturally. At least, that's been my take on how Trumpers see things culturally and economically going in this country.
I never really got that because Trump is kind of the epitome of the managerial elite. I mean, I understand the scam he is running (intentionally or not).. O am just kind of surprised at how many people buy it.
But, given what I know and my experience... I guess I am not really surprised, I just kind of want to be.
Basically, if his lips were moving, he was lying. I bet the closest he ever came to driving was when he acted like an excited three year old sitting in the driver’s seat of a truck being used as a prop for some event.
Are they? I mean, these are the people who see Donald Trump as the ultimate tough guy. I think you might be ascribing more rationality to their decisions than is warranted by facts.
Donald Trump kind of IS the ultimate American tough guy. Who else gets away with inciting a riot that almost overthrew American democracy via stochastic terrorism? Only like, the ultimate badass could get away with that right? He is still free, still rich, still married to a super model, still has a dynasty, still says whatever he wants regardless of norms, and can still sue the pants off of anybody who talks shit about him in print or in media--and if that doesn't work, he unleashes the "flying monkeys" as Charlie likes to call them via stochastic terrorism. He's made of teflon, and that's why he's their tough guy. The only people who *don't* see him as a badass are the people disgusted by him (myself included). But if you can't see his appeal to the other side as a "tough guy" then you're not turning the map around and looking at things from the other guy's perspective.
100%. But he fuckin HAS that protection now doesn't he? Because he has the money to acquire that power. Money is power in this country, and the old sense that "with more power comes more responsibility" left this nation's culture right around the same time we started boot-licking the rich with tax cuts as part of national economic policy. All of this left/right populism nonsense is downstream of the decadent 80's/90's. If money is power and concentrations of wealth elevate some citizens over others in terms of political power, then we've been basically begging for an oligarchy since Reagan and Nixon.
The see the outward signs of "toughness" which usually equates to running their mouths and saying things that the people listening would say if they actually had courage or overwhelming ambition and greed.
My father was an actual tough man. Yes, he said pretty much what he wanted to say (but did have some politeness when appropriate)--the difference was that he WAS dangerous and not adverse to beating the crap out of someone.. and he had a hell of a temper.
I think it was because he was a small man (5'6").
I lived in fear of him most of my youth. Did not really get to know him until I was in my mid to late 40s just before he died.
After watching a few of Dan Crenshaw's moronic campaign videos portraying him on special ops missions to attack progressive "targets" I have a tingle of pleasure running up my leg watching his momentary lapses of reasoning, make him a RINO target. They can't eat themselves fast enough.
I know next to nothing about Crenshaw. Ok he is a veteran that got wounded. TY for your service (and ya, I served too in a different time and place and was lucky enough to not get severely wounded/injured).
The service and wound don't make you any smarter or better than pretty much anyone else.
And Tucker, well that guy is just a piece of shit that would probably badmouth his own mother if it helped his ratings and bottom line.
Wasn't Patton who said there is nothing good in dying for your country, you want to have the dumb bastard on the other side die for his country?
The same point can be made about being wounded. It's too bad it happened.
As Aardvark offered, it carries no virtue, but it should carry the necessary medical care required.
Patton had a flair for drama. It was one of the things that made him as visible and ass famed as he was.
And let's not forget when after his death in 1945, Patton re-emerged as General Buck Turgidson counseling his president on the outcome a nuclean missal strike:
President Merkin Muffley : "You're talking about mass murder, General, not war!"
General "Buck" Turgidson : "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks."
Is satire much off the mark from reality????
Keep an eye on Crenshaw, because unlike the other faux-populist Ivy Leaguers, this guy actually had to do real "grown man shit" in his younger years, unlike a Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley. That gives him bonus points with the working class populists. The most popular Ivy League Populists are the ones who you would worry about fighting physically (man OR woman, see MTG/Boebs). The ones who have physical strength and/or size and who can FIGHT--or at least have the projected image of having those qualities. Working class men don't respect physically or argumentatively weak men, which is why they'd let a Josh Hawley or a Ted Cruz go well before they'd let a Dan Crenshaw go. They don't see Crenshaw as a pampered rich kid (even though he kinda is). They see him as a SEAL who bled for his country in an unpopular war and wears it with pride on his face, not as a a Tufts/Harvard graduate who can speak poetically. That gives him MUCH longer legs potentially than any other populist pol in the GOP.
I don't disagree with you relative to Crenshaw being more of a "real deal" person. But I think he finds himself in the no man's land of today's politics. Completely unacceptable to those of us on the center left (given his past antics) but not pure enough for MAGA. Who will trust him moving forward?
That's valid, but the same could've been said about Donald Trump in 2015.
I suppose the point being that once you capitulate to nihilism in the pursuit of punishing your political opponents, you tend to stop worrying about the open hypocrisy and start embracing the shamelessness.
The ones I know who served and were wounded don't like to talk about it.
It all comes down to those who can mentally live with wearing their worst personal experiences on their sleeves versus those who spend their lives avoiding the subject because it brings back too much emotional pain. I've been on both sides of that fence. The part where you don't talk about it because people look at you and treat you differently after you do, and the part where you're not ashamed of who you are now post-combat defects and you'll take whatever judgement comes at you. Most don't talk often about the worst moments of their life, but some do. I count myself as one of the latter because it gives hope to the former when they see that fellow vets *can* live openly with their experiences. They also feel more seen that way when they hear similar lived experiences to their own. Or at least I like to think so as a fellow disabled vet.
My great uncle fought in WW2 at the Bulge. He was in the PA NG division that got overrun at the start.
I did not know this until I was in my late 20s/early 30s and serving myself when, one Christmas at the family get together, he sat down next to me and started talking about it out of the blue. Pulled out a cloth SS collar tab he had cut off somebody and showed it to me.
The rest of the family was shocked. I was later told that he NEVER talked about that to ANYONE.
It was a privilege and honor to listen to him--perhaps he felt that I could, in some small way, understand.
It still brings tears to my eyes.
I spent the years 2004-2008 as a late teenager lying to my parents via hand-written letters about how little danger I was in. In reality, I was directly involved in the counter-IED mission and was outside of the wire every single day across three deployments as a combat engineer in the Marines. Even with all the lying, my mom was basically in a permanent state of panic for four years. It wasn't until this year that I started showing her pictures of me posing next to live IEDs that were only partially uncovered and still in the dirt with copper wires and/or pink Russian det-chord exposed in the shots. It's only later in life that you understand how close you truly were to death sometimes.
Amen to that.
My father in law was a prisoner of war in Cabanatuan in WWII. Twelve thousand went in and 500 came out alive through the good works of Henry Mucci.. He was an officer so he was treated somewhat differently and only lost an eye but he was never quite right again. He did not talk about it. His father was the Army Surgeon General so it caused quite a stir when he was captured. He became quite the pacifist but talking about that did not happen.
Dan Carlin has a great Addendum episode about the Indianapolis for more nightmare fuel along these lines. Hats off to your pops. That's a helluva experience to survive.
Dan Carlin is the greatest living detailed historian of our time!!!
I agree with a lot of your points, but it still leaves the mystery of working class obsession with Trump, who is the exact opposite of manly traits. He’s weak and soft, and I wonder if he’s ever even driven a car.
My only explanation is that Trump has fooled the working class into believing that he admires them - the biggest con of a life filled with cons. There’s plenty of evidence Trump is repulsed by his followers. He welcomed the physical isolation of the pandemic because it allowed him to avoid touching his supporters, and he was distressed watching the insurrectionists on TV because they looked “low class” to him.
Look at it more from a "how funny would it be if we selected a radical decadent elite to fuck over all the other decadent elite people we hate?" perspective and it will start to make sense. Imagine if we could get corrupt Russian oligarchs to overthrow Putin, wouldn't we want that? Wouldn't it be MORE poetic if anything from our perspective? The same could be said about choosing a decadent elite to overthrow all the other decadent managerial elites. That's who Trump is for them. Kinda poetic when you think about it.
That seems a bit meta for too much of that crowd. It seems more probable to me that they mistake the image for the reality, based upon his fame as a "tough" business "leader" and his apparent fearlessness in running his mouth so long as he has lawyers and hirelings and butt-kissers to do his heavy lifting.
I think it's both personally. He is the ultimate base male icon for what he has attained over the course of his life. But he's also like shoving a mirror into the faces of the "managerial elite" and saying "look at what the system you produced created, now you get to live with it." There really is more of an up/down economic component to populism as I understand it compared to the left/right culture war shit. Where the up/down and left/right intertwine is where it gets the most interesting. Trump is a great example of that. He was both the middle finger to elitism AND the middle finger to the "woke" multi-cultural left. He was capable of both "owning the libs" AND "owning the managerial elite". For Trumpers, the managerial elites are the ones who are in charge and the post-college left are their subservient scribe class minions. They see the post-college "woke" left as the future inheritors of the positions that the managerial elite currently hold. They see these two groups as working hand-in-glove to fuck the working class both economically and culturally. At least, that's been my take on how Trumpers see things culturally and economically going in this country.
I never really got that because Trump is kind of the epitome of the managerial elite. I mean, I understand the scam he is running (intentionally or not).. O am just kind of surprised at how many people buy it.
But, given what I know and my experience... I guess I am not really surprised, I just kind of want to be.
Trump has claimed he missed driving himself while president.
I guess driving a golf cart was not enough.
Yeah, I guess he can be trusted with a golf cart.
Basically, if his lips were moving, he was lying. I bet the closest he ever came to driving was when he acted like an excited three year old sitting in the driver’s seat of a truck being used as a prop for some event.
Are they? I mean, these are the people who see Donald Trump as the ultimate tough guy. I think you might be ascribing more rationality to their decisions than is warranted by facts.
In greater New York there was a term used growing up in the 1950s and 1960s --- ATNA.
All Talk No Action.
Trump epitomizes that term. He probably hired some kid to do his dirty work.
Unfortunately, there are now people out there, smarter than he is, who are doing his dirty work now! They're the problem.
and then didn't pay them.
Donald Trump kind of IS the ultimate American tough guy. Who else gets away with inciting a riot that almost overthrew American democracy via stochastic terrorism? Only like, the ultimate badass could get away with that right? He is still free, still rich, still married to a super model, still has a dynasty, still says whatever he wants regardless of norms, and can still sue the pants off of anybody who talks shit about him in print or in media--and if that doesn't work, he unleashes the "flying monkeys" as Charlie likes to call them via stochastic terrorism. He's made of teflon, and that's why he's their tough guy. The only people who *don't* see him as a badass are the people disgusted by him (myself included). But if you can't see his appeal to the other side as a "tough guy" then you're not turning the map around and looking at things from the other guy's perspective.
And if you got him in a room by himself he would fold like wet cardboard. Without his wealth and fame (and the protection it brings) he is nothing.
100%. But he fuckin HAS that protection now doesn't he? Because he has the money to acquire that power. Money is power in this country, and the old sense that "with more power comes more responsibility" left this nation's culture right around the same time we started boot-licking the rich with tax cuts as part of national economic policy. All of this left/right populism nonsense is downstream of the decadent 80's/90's. If money is power and concentrations of wealth elevate some citizens over others in terms of political power, then we've been basically begging for an oligarchy since Reagan and Nixon.
Funny how that happens indeed ;-)
The see the outward signs of "toughness" which usually equates to running their mouths and saying things that the people listening would say if they actually had courage or overwhelming ambition and greed.
My father was an actual tough man. Yes, he said pretty much what he wanted to say (but did have some politeness when appropriate)--the difference was that he WAS dangerous and not adverse to beating the crap out of someone.. and he had a hell of a temper.
I think it was because he was a small man (5'6").
I lived in fear of him most of my youth. Did not really get to know him until I was in my mid to late 40s just before he died.
I'm glad you had that chance. Hope it eased things.
It did. My last memories of him are good ones. TY.
100%
Dan Crenshaw is smug, and it’s very hard for me to find anything redeemable in him. Hero worship can be dangerous.