Evidently

Fourteen Points on the Election

by James Como

Why they hate Trump: 

1/ He beat the Chosen One, though he was outspent, along the way making the opposition (especially the militant punditry) look very stupid: his heresy is that he scorns their opinions.

2/ He is reversing Obama’s – and the rest of the Woke – attempts to diminish America. 

3/ He is too often amateurish, in the worst sense of the word.

4/ He’s a jerk and the proximate cause of jerkdom in others. 

5/ He doesn’t care that he’s a jerk: rather the opposite seems to be the case.

Why I like Trump: 

6/ I don’t:- ‘liking’ is for junior high school student government elections. 

7/ To my utter surprise he is making America great again, palpablywhen not impulsive, is objective-oriented and unmindful of distracting clatter.

8/ He’s both outing and marginalizing the Left and its punditry – see his take-no-prisoners State of the Union address – who together had done business smugly, raising unexamined assumptions to the status of catechetical prescription.  

9/ His opponents’ untethered tantrums – they simply are unaccustomed to a two-way street – make me (who did not vote for him) want to send them a message, if only to de-legitimize their own delegitimizing efforts: de facto red herrings.    

Why I could vote for a Democrat: 

10/ Numbers 3, 4 and 5 have materially damaged the commonweal: an unceasingly self-referential rhetoric of hyperbole and ad hominem elicits a rhetoric of ‘call and raise.’  Rhetorical good health starts at the top. 

11/ Number 7 could have been achieved without that steep a downside. 

12/ The right Dem might continue (approximately) the upside without the downside and would have my vote, though I am mindful that – for now – number 7 is appreciably more salient than any other number.

13/ The only ideologically non-zealous, rhetorically responsible, capable, not-solely-hate-Trump candidate realistically in the field is Klobuchar, whom Kavanaugh thanked for her courteous treatment of him. She is not craven. Will she come close enough to number 7 to make her repair of the downside dispositive? 

Or  

14/  Is Senator Collins right to suggest that the president has learned something? It has proven very unwise to underestimate him: Klobuchar v. Trump 2.0 would be a race worth following, and the only one.    

Withal, none of us should vote from the spleen.