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A conservative magazine vs social media

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Alma, Jan 22, 2016.

  1. Alma

    Alma Well-Known Member

    I don't spend enough time around here to know if politics is OK or not - it seems to change quite a bit - but I intend to frame this issue as more of a media commentary than one on Donald Trump, although I do intend to add a small thought on how Trump's candidacy reveals something important about the conservative media.

    National Review - a tool for whatever corporate interests hold sway, IMO - has come out as strongly as possible against Donald Trump, to the point where it printed a magazine cover called "AGAINST TRUMP."

    In what appears to be an editorial about all of Trump's shortcomings, I find this graf intriguing:

    If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what would that say about conservatives? The movement that ground down the Soviet Union and took the shine, at least temporarily, off socialism would have fallen in behind a huckster. The movement concerned with such “permanent things” as constitutional government, marriage, and the right to life would have become a claque for a Twitter feed.

    and later this:

    It is unpopular to say in the year of the “outsider,” but it is not a recommendation that Trump has never held public office. Since 1984, when Jesse Jackson ran for president with no credential other than a great flow of words, both parties have been infested by candidates who have treated the presidency as an entry-level position. They are the excrescences of instant-hit media culture. The burdens and intricacies of leadership are special; experience in other fields is not transferable. That is why all American presidents have been politicians, or generals.

    This strikes me as notable, considering the nature of most political news is a kind of frenzied impermanence that runs from crisis to crisis, headline to headline, scandal to scandal. All political Web sites and rags are like this. They have to be to gin up anger and fury and interest. No political party is about permanence, either in policy or anything else. They are sharks in the water of political races. So, too, are the partisan news sources that prop up these parties.

    What's interesting, of course, is that Twitter is rendered a thing that the GOP movement should resist, that Trump, is "averagely well-informed businessman" who will get rolled like "tenderfeet" by Washington. This all may be true, since I suspect Trump is little more than a rich voter who reacts like the rest of us do in sports talk radio, but this is not a phenomenon that has particularly concerned National Review in the past.

    It concerns National Review now because Donald Trump hasn't, and never will, need National Review. For anything. Ever. When Trump suggested as he did today that the NR piece is meaningless, it is, for it never troubled him in the first place what any of those outlets thought.

    And, as a result, the National Review essentially writes something it never would about all the other awful candidates the party has produced over many years: Experience and nuance matters, as does some actual knowhow about government and Washington.

    In other words, National Review is calling on institutional competence.

    And so, of course, there is this weird kind of tension with Trump from a media perspective.

    As someone who rather likes media, but hates partisan political media, especially blogs -- and even a bigger loather of constant polls -- I am glad Trump is in the race. I am! He is the human embodiment, the conceived walking and talking fruit, if you will, of pretty much everything I can't stand about the political media. But in being that embodiment he is also exactly what he is, and not some Reaganesque cipher or preening asswipe drenched founder's sweat and a healthy love for eagles in Uncle Sam hats. And in being a craven, poll-driven openly competitive and dismissive person, he essentially renders all the craven, gossipy, embarrassing Web sites -- run by loudmouths and louts and tools of rich masters -- somewhat obselete. And in doing so, it underlines how unnecessary they should be to the politicial process, too. Red State is the work of human pap swinging between hyperbolic doom and pitiful sentimentalism. The less of that guy, the better.

    Trump is so threatenting to their overall well being that National Review, in a fit of what will certainly be self-mutiliation if Trump actually wins, is willing to stake its editorial guts to making sure the guy doesn't win.
     
  2. old_tony

    old_tony Well-Known Member

    Worse for Trump: Bob Dole and Trent Lott have come out FOR Trump. That will kill his anti-establishment cred.
     
  3. Riptide

    Riptide Well-Known Member

    Both parties have been infested by candidates who have treated the presidency as an entry-level position.

    This line should be plastered across Facebook and Twitter until it sinks in. We're embarrassing ourselves.
     
    HanSenSE, SFIND and old_tony like this.
  4. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Who is this "Trump" fella?
     
    YankeeFan likes this.
  5. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    What you don't know about National Review in particular and movement conservatism in general is a helluva lot.
     
    SpeedTchr and lcjjdnh like this.
  6. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    Which Democratic candidates have treated the presidency as an entry-level position?
     
  7. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    Trump is much smarter than Reagan ever was and, surrounded by the right people, would likely make a better president, which of course isn't saying that much.
     
    I Should Coco likes this.
  8. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    If it never troubled him, then he wouldn't respond to it - unless, of course, he's got skin thinner than even the most sensitive member of SJ.
     
  9. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Well-Known Member

    I think there is a better than even chance than Donald Trump is the next president of the United States.
     
  10. Riptide

    Riptide Well-Known Member

    Bob Knight can be Trump's vice president.

    "Trump/Knight 2016: If rape is inevitable, America, lie back and enjoy it!"
     
    Last edited: Jan 22, 2016
  11. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    William F. Buckley, Jr., corporate tool, in 2000 ...

     
  12. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    It has been argued that the current POTUS had barely broken in his political career before campaigning for the top job.
     
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