Creepy

As we observe the unbridled Donald Trump making his now familiar outrageous claims, avoiding almost any substance when discussing matters of national import, and attacking his political enemies with nicknames that are entertaining but certainly not the norm, one can't avoid the notion the The Donald is slightly creepy.

But here's the thing—every "outrage" that is attributed to Donald Trump has been part and parcel of of the political careers of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Every "extremist" position attributed to the Donald is trumped by the true ideological extremism of Bernie Sanders. The only difference is that Obama, Clinton, and Sanders are Democrats (okay, Sanders is a socialist, but increasingly, that becomes a distinction without a difference), and because they are Dems, they live in a media bubble that refuses to note that their behavior is, well, also rather outrageous.

Victor Davis Hansen comments:

Why the #NeverTrump movement has so far failed is in part a matter of class as well, defined not so much in terms of cash, as of influence, education, and lifestyle. In 2008 it was gauche to bring up the vicious racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose trite cast-off slogan “audacity of hope” inspired the title of Barack Obama’s campaign primer. In 2012, it would have apparently been rude for Mitt Romney to have fired back at Candy Crowley, “How dare you hijack a presidential debate!” Yes, Trump may be creepy, but the reluctance to challenge our present naked emperors is just as creepy. Is the so-called establishment going to warn us that Trump would be capable of running up $10 trillion in debt, socializing our medical system, unleashing the IRS and EPA on perceived enemies, and weakening friends and empowering enemies abroad, as he offers the world historically challenged pop riffs on Islam, Hiroshima, and global geography? For each take-down of NeverTrump, can we at least have commensurate analysis of how and why a monstrosity like the Clinton cash operation was allowed to thrive without audit; or how it is that the secretary of state and her minions snubbed the law and behaved in a fashion that would have put any other federal employees in jail; or how it is that 155 years after the start of the Civil War over 300 cities, counties, and states have declared federal law null and void in their jurisdictions — and with complete impunity?

And when the intelligencia of both parties lambasts Trump's supporters as "low-IQ" members of the NASCAR crowd (you remember, the crowd that Barack Obama characterized as "clinging to their guns and their bibles"). it might be worth considering that the 'high-IQ' Ivy leaguers who have run this country for the last generation haven't done a very good job.

Again from VDH:

I wish that the high IQs of the establishment class had taken [Charles] Murray’s sage advice [to listen to Trump's words and positions] eight years ago and just listened to what Obama had said in denigration of the Pennsylvania working classes or the “typical white person” grandmother who raised him; or to his pseudo-macho references to guns and knives, and “get in their face”; or to the hokey promises to lower global temperatures and stop the seas from rising; and all the other Vero possumus tripe. Or that they had used their presumably formidable mental powers to review Obama’s public record as a state legislator and a U.S. senator — which presaged everything from Obamacare and the unconstitutional undermining of federal law to the apology tours and the near-destruction of 70 years of bipartisan foreign policy. What was the IQ of the presidential historian who declared Obama the smartest man ever to be elevated to the White House?

Murray has a point that Trump’s crudity and buffoonery should be taken seriously, but when he says establishmentarians have “high IQs,” what exactly does he mean? Did a high IQ prevent an infatuated David Brooks (whom he quotes approvingly) from fathoming presidential success as if he were a sartorial seancer, from the crease of Senator Obama pants leg? What was the IQ of the presidential historian who declared Obama the smartest man ever to be elevated to the White House? Or the Newsweek editor who envisioned an apotheosized Obama? Or the MSNBC host who motor-mouthed about the tingle in his leg at the sound of an Obama speech? Or, yes, the conservative policy analyst (and self-confessed “Starry-eyed Obama groupie”) who wrote approvingly (“flat-out plain brilliant”) of the Obama race speech in March 2008, in which Obama revealed to the world that his own grandmother — the sole steady working breadwinner of Obama’s extended family, whose labors sent him to prep school — was a supposedly “typical white person” in her prejudices, while he further contextualized the abject racism and anti-Semitism of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — a speech renounced by Obama himself when Wright later felt empowered to double down on his racism. Or perhaps the conservative wit who once wrote that Obama has a “first-class temperament and a first-class intellect,” and that he is the rare politician who “writes his own books,” which were “first rate”?

It is fair to argue that more detailed examination of Barack Obama might have avoided the results of his disastrous presidency, and that alone is reason for a detailed examination of Donald trump. I agree.

But if we're going to put Trump under a microscope, we damn well better examine (in great detail) the dishonesty, corruption, and incompetence of the democratic front-runner—Hillary Clinton. If we're going to dissect the scam that was Trump university, we damn well better examine the criminal enterprise that is The Clinton Foundation, and if we're going to dissect the extremist views voiced by Trump, we damn well better get out the scalpel and explore the equally extremist views of Bernie Sanders.

But we all know that none of that will happen. And as VDH said, maybe that's the creepiest thing of all.