The Boston Globe calls Trump a Nazi

But, being The Boston Globe, they did it subtly. No tabloid journalism for their writer.  He called Trump an exponent of the "Fuehrerprinzip" (leadership principle). He even spelled it out in German.  The "Fuehrerprinzip"  was of course promoted by Hitler.  That Hitler's rallies and Trump's rallies could hardly be more different doesn't count, of course


Although various grandees of the Republican Party have greeted Donald Trump’s clinching of their party’s presidential nomination by declaring they will not vote for him, Trump is still able to boast that Russian President Vladimir Putin called the casino magnate "a really brilliant and talented person." Purring like a petted kitten, Trump welcomed Putin’s praise as "a great honor" and remarked that the boss of all Russian bosses is "running his country, and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country."

Until some new whistle blower from the NSA posts a Putin-Trump dialogue online, we can only imagine what a chat between these two exponents of the leadership principle (in German, der Fuehrerprinzip) might be like. It could go something like this:

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Trump Gets An Establishment Endorsement

Former Vice President Dick Cheney will support Donald Trump, he told CNN Friday, an important move as the presumptive Republican nominee is encountering intense resistance from senior members of his own party.Cheney told CNN Special Correspondent Jamie Gangel that he has always supported the GOP nominee and will do so this year as well.  The announcement makes Cheney one of the few Republican Party elders to announce their support of Trump and comes a day after House Speaker Paul Ryan told CNN he is "just not ready" to back Trump.

To date, Cheney is the senior most American official to endorse Trump.

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Australia has a "Trump" too

Australia has a Federal Election in July and the leader of the conservative side (Malcolm Turnbull) is like Trump in not being a traditional conservative.  He favors homosexual marriage, for instance.  But let Australian columnist Miranda Devine tell the tale:

Never-Trumpers are the emotional doppelgangers of our own Never-Turnbull crowd

NOW that Donald Trump looks set to take the Republican presidential nomination, a hardcore group of angry conservatives have decided they’d rather blow up the party and vote for Hillary Clinton than adjust to the reality of the candidate they have.

Watching the tantrum of America’s Never-Trump zealots since he scooped the primary pool in Indiana last week, you can’t help but notice parallels to our own conservative ragers.

They would rather vote for the devil incarnate than accept the only conservative choice available. It’s the spoiled brat tantrum of the smugly entitled. That’s MY party, they say, whether Republican or Liberal. You can’t change it without my permission. Whaaaaaa! Foot stamp.

They seem not to understand that sometimes in life you have to choose the lesser of two evils, that things don’t always go your way.

Like those who rail against Trump as a phony conservative, those who attack Turnbull as a closet leftie who has hijacked their party are "making the perfect the enemy of the good”.

It is true that the candidates couldn’t be more different in style and temperament: one is decisive and a populist showman, while the other is a ditherer and uninspiring elitist. But both Trump and Turnbull are political outsiders, shrewd and ruthless enough to have amassed personal fortunes and plenty of enemies.

They feel no need to do politics the usual way and don’t care that they are reviled by their party ­establishments.

The psychological similarities of their spitting-chips detractors go further.

These conservative intransigents are behaving in a most ­unconservative manner, casting aside prudence and caution to ­indulge their self-righteous anger and signal their virtue.

They say they are placing conservative principles ahead of the party. But their rage is all about them, and their fear of irrelevance. The problem is that the "Nevers” don’t have a plan, other than urging people not to vote.

They think that if Clinton/­Shorten win office that an ideologically pure conservative party will magically arise like a phoenix from the ashes.

Typical of the "Nevers” is the Washington Post’s conservative columnist George Will: "If Trump is nominated, Republicans working to purge him and his manner from public life will reap the considerable satisfaction of preserving the identity of their 162-year-old party while working to see that they forgo only four years of the enjoyment of executive power.”

They imagine that wrecking their party’s chance to win the next election will lead to a brief ­period in the wilderness from which a party of conservative ­purity will emerge.

But there is no guarantee that handing power to the Democrats/Labor will result in anything good or even brief, and they risk their conservative principles being excluded from any process of party ­renewal, were it to occur.

It’s ­obvious that Trump and Turnbull are not the most desirable candidates for conservatives (although Trump’s skewering of political correctness is worthwhile).

But they are both streets ahead of the alternative.

In the Trump-Clinton contest, you can boil down the choice for conservatives to one issue: who would you prefer to choose the next Supreme Court justice?

In the Turnbull-Shorten contest, the starkest choice is border security. Who do you trust to keep control of our borders: the party that delivered 50,000 illegal boat arrivals and 1100 drowned asylum-seekers, or the one which stopped the boats?

But the Nevers refuse to rally around the least worst option, ­preferring to live in denial.

If Turnbull/Trump lose, the Nevers will own every decision of Clinton/Shorten and conservatives will not let them ­forget it.

Even after Trump swept last week’s Indiana primary, giving him a total of more than 10 million votes, on track to the highest popular vote of any presidential candidate in Republican history, the Never Trumpers wouldn’t give up.

Like the Never Turnbulls, they try to make a virtue out of delusion.

"WHY WOULD AMERICANS EVER SETTLE FOR A CHOICE LIKE THIS?” tweeted neo-conservative Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard.

"For too many Americans, the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump feels like a choice between being shot in the head, and being shot in the head”, said political blogger Liz Mair, founder of Never Trump group Make America Awesome.

But for all their noise, their petition asking conservatives to vow never to vote for Trump has barely managed 30,000 signatures.

Mitt Romney, the failed 2012 Republican presidential nominee and one of the most vocal Trump haters, summed up the situation by saying: "I wish we had better ­choices, and I keep hoping that somehow things will get better, and I just don’t see an easy ­answer from where we are.”

That’s all the Nevers have. Wishing, hoping, praying for a miracle, while reality keeps slapping them in the face.

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20 Quotes From Ancient Greek Philosophers That Liberals Still Don’t Understand

Two thousand years ago, there may not have been liberals as we think of them today, but some of the dumb ideas that underpin the whole ideology were floating around. Fortunately, in Greece some of the greatest minds in human history were there to set people straight. There are an awful lot of liberals who could benefit from reading these more than 2,000 year-old words of wisdom.

1) "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits." -- Plutarch

2) "When you are offended at any man's fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger." -- Epictetus

3) "The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle

4) "Justice means minding one's own business and not meddling with other men's concerns." -- Plato

5) "Toil is no source of shame; idleness is shame." -- Hesiod

6) "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." -- Plato

7) "We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office." -- Aesop

8) "The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so." -- Plato

9) "When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income." -- Plato
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10) "Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class." -- Plato

11) "Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous." -- Plato

12) "This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector." -- Plato

13) "Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music." -- Diogenes

14) "We praise a man who feels angry on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner at the right moment and for the right length of time." -- Aristotle

15) "We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about. As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it: the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it." -- Pericles

16) "Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms." -- Aristotle

17) "Only the dead have seen the end of war." -- Plato

18) "The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort." -- Plato

19) "Society is well governed when its people obey the magistrates, and the magistrates obey the law." -- Solon

20) "A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true." -- Socrates

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