These things aren't brand new. They were around during the primaries too.
hah hah thanks for the swift responses. It is indeed a "truncated rhetorical point" thing. I recognize that it is unimportant what those terms mean to me, except for me. But until I understood and pondered them thoroughly I never really WAS a conservative.
Google is ambiguous (by design, since leftists LOVE ambiguity because it gives them room to twist reality into pretzels) and no definition of "conservative" you will likely find in the top ten or even one-hundred is very positive. Combine that with the fact that so many people have different views of conservative from facile to casual to doctrinaire to fanatical to militant.
One of the biggest issues of our time is manageability. Too much complexity is in itself a problem, but many (most don't see it as such). I'm trying to get people to FOCUS on what conservatism is to THEM and hopefully get them to realign themselves with the vision of Ronald Reagan, who I still think is the preeminent political mind of our time.
The Eleventh Commandment as I understand it is: "Thou shalt not speak badly of fellow Republicans."
Michael Medved provided one of the best examples of why this is a good policy to follow, particularly in an election year. For nearly a year, that fool turned his radio show into an "anti-Trump" program. Every day, day after day, he engaged in one egocentric, nasty, over-the-top criticism/condemnation of Donald Trump after another.
Then after his prediction that Trump would never get the nomination turned out to wrong, he decided that gee, after all, he could support Trump. All through that long year of listening to him wipe his *ss with the Eleventh Commandment as I drove pas the Reagan Library (I live in the area) I thought, "Poor stupid Michael is going live to regret his savage hyperbole". Lo and behold, now that he has decided that he can vote for Trump after all, all of those horribly nasty condemnations of Trump based on verbal behavior, not overt behavior, have come back to bite him on his big *ss and inject venom.
Of all people, being married to a clinical psychologist Medved should have realized the difference between verbal behavior and overt behavior. Trump's verbal behavior has been one thing, but his overt behavior still another. Now, it's too late to take back those horribly nasty condemnations which are being used by 'Crats to try to get Hill-O-lies elected.
That is why I believe that Ronald Reagan was a genius. He could see the future whereas even a mostly very smart person like Medved could not.
The Buckley Rule is also the same thing. Wisdom based in a mind that is arguably singular in it's insight and brilliance - William F. Buckley. Another fellow who rarely spoke casually about serious matters, much less made casual pronouncements.
One of the biggest conservative values derives from the word itself. To conserve that which is worthy in life. That is at the core of what it means to be conservative for me. And to prevent a full-on Marxist administration from taking over the nation and possibly establishing one-party leftist rule, or triggering a civil war in the attempt, seems worthwhile.
Those who reject Trump seem to me to be trying to establish that the only meaningful definition of "conservative" is "doctrinaire" which is the sort which insists that only a candidate which meets certain very precise, limited criteria can possibly be "conservative enough" to support.
For me, being "conservative enough" equates to the difference between a bridge across a morass that is "strong enough to support a train passing over it to the other side" and one that is not. That is the difference between Hill-O-Lies and Donald Trump. Or another would be between water that tastes terrible and one that is laced with arsenic.
Intuitive sense that Trump is as bad as Hill-0-Lies doesn't cut it for me. If it did, I'd say that it makes no difference who one votes for between the two. But all of the arguments I have heard in favor of rejecting Trump don't stand up to scrutiny.
Mark Levin and Larry Elder agree with me. I think I can live with having a few people who don't, but I would prefer that we all march together to slaughter the cacogens together and place their heads on sticks along Pennsylvania Avenue.
I'm guessing that Trump will move more toward the right when elected so that he can be reelected. He will discover as many smart people have, that genuinely conservative values equate to superior intelligence and that will likely produce a successful term of office more than pandering to polls the way Slick Willie did.
But either one would be less disastrous than putting a psychotic extremist (proven by more than verbal behavior) fanatic ideologue into the Oval Office to wreck the Supreme Court and drive the whole nation off a cliff just because she can.
