Freedom of gun ownership true common sense   

"The Old Man Wept," by Del Parson

Be suspicious of anyone who defines "common sense" as restrictions on citizens' Constitutional rights and liberties.

"It is past time for our elected officials to start making the lives of students and families a greater priority by enacting common sense gun safety laws."

So wrote Matt Sinivic, executive director of Progress Iowa, in a recent Waterloo [Iowa] Courier guest essay.


http://wcfcourier.com/opinion/columnists/guest_columnists/time-for-common-sense-gun-laws/article_579c6730-5f9e-53e6-8707-31397e27a4ab.html

Sinivic insisted that The State effectively legislate into nothingness Americans' Second Amendment rights, the ones our forefathers acknowledged as gifts from God (see: Declaration of Independence) and that brave generations since defended overseas.

"Gun violence happens right here in our state," Sinivic wrote. "It happens far too often, and it's time for Iowa's elected officials to put an end to these tragic deaths instead of passing laws that endanger students and their families."

What laws might those be? Sinivic urged against the entirely reasonable Stand Your Ground law, presumably preferring that potential victims selfishly run and hide while vulnerable loved ones are brutalized and property stolen. 

Weak sorts decrying Stand Your Ground, and who would shirk their protective responsibilities, have much to explain to their dependent families. 

Sinivic cited as supportive a Center For American Progress / Progress Iowa study he himself had co-authored: Gun Violence In Iowa.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/guns-crime/reports/2018/04/04/448768/gun-violence-iowa/ 

In the Courier, he conceded that "Most gun deaths are suicides, and firearms are the most common method to commit suicide in Iowa." He offered as a solution less liberty for citizens and greater confiscatory authority for The State.

"Putting in place a gun violence restraining order would empower families to intervene when someone is experiencing a temporary period of crisis that could lead to suicidal or violent behavior."

Sinivic seemingly felt no need to explain why allowing family members who might act with ulterior motives power over others' guaranteed rights is a sound idea. It of course is not.

The Progress Iowa executive director advocated other manners whereby The State can trample the rights of the individual. For instance, he also endorsed granting local sheriffs authority to decide which Americans may have concealed carry permits.

"We should put decision making in the hands of local law enforcement and trust them to keep communities safe," Sinivic said.

Those who would seize liberties away from average people, and who favor an oppressive State that would rule with an iron fist, often deviously claim 'safety' to be their innocent ambition. 

Sinivic went one further: By calculatedly positioning himself as an advocate for law enforcement respect, he implied that any disagreeing with him are effectively against law officers.

Of course, that is a flimsy proposition. It is the freedom-protective citizen who understands that police play an important role in civilized society and who appreciates their daily courageousness and sacrifices. 

Whether one owns a firearm is irrelevant. Constitutional rights are our birthright property, not mere privileges to be grabbed back by The State. 

Surrender of individual rights is not progress. And hacking away at them certainly is not "common sense."

Breitbart skewers CNN's Jim Acosta for anti-'deplorables' bias, but silent about same of colleague Roger Stone

           Stone makes a television appearance after being kicked off the Donald Trump campaign.


On Friday, April 27, Breitbart ran a piece critical of the insufferable Jim Acosta, White House correspondent for Fake News CNN. 

Acosta, it seems, reckons his surest path to professional ascension and celebrity among the bomb-chucking Resistance lies in making a spectacle of himself as a Trump take down-commando.  

He bellows personal attacks in questions' clothing, including at plainly inappropriate moments like the Easter Egg event for children the president hosted on the White House lawn. 

The smoothly logical Breitbart analysis, neatly assembled by John Nolte, concerns Acosta's recent Variety interview. Nolte quoted a Washington Times relation of Acosta's words to Variety: 

The problem is that people around the country don't know it's [Trump's presentation] an act. They're not in on the act, and they take what he says very seriously, and they take attacks from Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders and what they do to us on a daily basis very seriously. They don't have all their faculties in some cases -- their elevator might not hit all floors. My concern is that a journalist is going to be hurt one of these days.

(Though attacks on Trump supporters were documented during and after the historic, barnstorming campaign, Acosta seems unconcerned that high-volume press hatred of Trump might encourage that violence.)

After his words were published widely and had inspired condemnation, Acosta claimed they referenced only effects Trump's media broadsides might have on select listeners, and did not implicate all of his backers. 

Perhaps. In fairness, he had cited a former and a current White House press secretary, lending possible plausibility to his defense.

But Nolte carefully dissected Acosta's interview remarks, and concluded "If Acosta wants to claim he misspoke at the end, fine. Even so, there is no getting around the fact that he opens this part of the interview clearly insulting 'people around the country' as rubes who can't see through Trump's act."

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2018/04/26/fact-check-jim-acostas-phony-claim-he-did-not-insult-trump-voters/

But one need not travel far from Breitbart to find such derision for common Americans.

Breitbart has published numerous writings by veteran 'dirty trickster' campaign strategist and unpleasant gadly Roger Stone. (To this day, the mainstream media persists in characterizing Stone as a 'Trump associate,' though the campaign fired Stone years ago for using it to seek publicity for himself.)

Stone has a history of slurring the common man who makes up the Trump Revolution. Over the years, in postings on his Stone Zone site, he has derided Iowans as hicks and hayseeds. 

As exposed in his Stone Zone words, his priorities and sensibilities are much closer to I'm With Her than Make America Great Again. He sounded more like one of the coastal elitists who assaulted the average folks Trump Revolution than someone who genuinely had its adherents' home interests at heart.

Iowa is too white, Stone lamented, also alleging with no evidence that the average Iowan is anti-Semitic. Its residents were stout (I am) and smoked. Too, its largely agricultural economy is not representative of a nation with a growing technological sector. 

http://stonezone.com/article.php?id=457

Majorities of Iowa voters had endorsed Obama in 2008 and 2012, as had voters across the country. And its 2016 general election support of Trump by some 10 percentage points also showed a state very much in line with national thinking, Stone's erroneous estimation notwithstanding.

Though Stone's untrue and hateful rhetoric was philosophically harmonious with the bigotry of CNN'sAcosta, it never prompted Breitbart to take his contributions off the site, or cut its tie to him. 

If Breitbart ever ran a piece critical of Stone's haughty prejudice, I never saw it -- and I'm a regular and otherwise appreciative reader of the site. (Disclosure: I not only like Breitbart, but have submitted writings to the site. None were picked up.)

Stone also enjoys uncritical spotlighting by Infowars and Gateway Pundit, sites ostensibly sympathetic to the Trump Revolution. 

Fox News figures Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, whose programs are otherwise rewarding, feature Stone as a guest commentator. Alex Jones and Milo favor him. Their doing so calls into question their own regard for the common people who put Trump in the White House.

I get that someone's having a wrong opinion on one topic doesn't invalidate their every other position, doesn't alone discredit them as a person, and that they might have valuable insights to offer on other subjects.

But my enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend. And I do question the integrity of sites and television hosts who give Stone a pass on his anti-common man bigotry.


DC Larson's essays championing the Trump campaign ran in numerous Iowa newspapers. He is an author, blogger, and freelance writer whose byline has appeared in Daily Caller, American Thinker, USA Today, and elsewhere. His latest book is Ideas Afoot (Bromley Street Press).

Poison-hearted birds of a feather

Last August, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell told an 

interviewer that he wished for a president who, unlike Donald Trump, “would not give his daughter to a Jew.” He then sneered, “I don’t think you can feel about race like I do, and watch that Kushner bastard walk around with that beautiful girl. Okay?”

I shared those detestable words with a purpose: To portray 

what genuine bigotry sounds like. Calls to maintain national 

borders and standards, promotion of equality, denunciations of separatist ideologies, and assertions of American exceptionalism are not of a piece with Cantwell’s repulsive notions. In fact, they are not within philosophical miles of them.

The idea that society’s supposed ‘systemic’ hostility amounts to ongoing aggression and grants moral legitimacy to criminal acts — making them reasonable defensive measures adopted by 

supposedly ‘oppressed’ people s— is imbecilic, whether claimed by Antifa, Neo-Nazis, Black Lives Matter, or the KKK.

It goes without remark that those groups have dissimilar histories. But they do share faiths of victim status, delusions of moral surety, and terrorist natures.

The full equality good people support cannot be effected by simply reversing the power dynamic, making yesteryear’s victim of racial bigotry today’s beneficiary of it. That only perpetuates unfair imbalance. The opposite of tyranny is justice, not continued tyranny with roles exchanged.

Thinking otherwise indicates, at best, limited logical grasp. At worst, it represents outright endorsement of discrimination when it serves one’s own interest.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts put it succinctly in the 2007 Parents Involved In Community Schools v Seattle School District majority decision: “The best way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Crimson-faced anti-Trump expositors hunger to mangle our 

common political and social cultures until no citizen dare utter any words but condemnatory ones about heraldic and historic matters, and conservative philosophies.

Aversion to racial bigotry is admirable. It is an indication of moral quality. But leveraging it for political ambition, as Democrats generally do, divides fellow Americans and allows animation to true hatred of the type enunciated by the cretinous Cantwell.

Ill-considered racial hostility, though, is not limited to unsavory characters at society’s margin. It can also be found under the spotlight’s glare.

If afternoon chat mogul Oprah Winfrey validates speculation that she will seek Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination, opponents of bigotry should recall that she once voiced a particularly ugly personal belief, one at whose core lay racial animus and flabbergasting fatuousness:

During a 2014 BBC interview, she leaned forward, her features deathly serious: “There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it — in that prejudice and racism — and they just have to die.”

Oprah intoned those terrible words with the reptilian purposefulness of a serenely horrible lunatic.Her theory that racial prejudice would vanish with the passing of a generation is in two manners flawed. It ignores that not all members of any one generation harbor identical notions. (Winfrey appeared to be profiling.)

And, unfortunately, bigoted bents find eager uplift by members of successive generations. Ill notions endure, as some grab for undeserved advantage. Just as salutary ideations are products of human nature, so too are negative ones. And as long as people breathe, there will be both good and bad.

In 2018, some still hope to profit by fanning into flame anti-American race hatred. Some march in angry streets, right arms thrust aloft. Others coo over frivolous celebrities on daytime television.

Poison-hearted birds of a feather.

DC Larson’s essays championing of the Trump campaign ran in numerous newspapers. He is an author, blogger, and freelance journalist whose byline has appeared in Daily Caller, American Thinker, USA Today, and others. His latest book is Ideas Afoot (Bromley Street Press). This piece was adapted from earlier posts.

Hometown Lost
Why I can never go to Marshalltown again

I grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa, and moved away in the 1990s. Of course, I can and will return to the geographic location. Family and friends are there, along with many other good people, and I occasionally visit. 

But I can never return to the Marshalltown of my youth. It's gone. A large part of that is because the town has changed, and not in positive ways. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, my maternal grandparents owned a small home in a sedate neighborhood that was populated mostly by families and older residents. People there maintained backyard vegetable gardens punctuated by ornate miniature windmills. Painted, wooden storm cellar doors were angled off their modest homes. And flamingo statues stood vigil on their painstakingly-manicured front lawns.

Today, I'm told, that neighborhood is no longer quiet, well-maintained, or crime free. In fact, a few years ago, I heard of a horrific, drug trafficking-related murder in Marshalltown. Identifying fingerprints and tattoos were sawed from the dismembered corpse, and its parts stuffed into garbage bags.

I remember thinking that my grandparents wouldn't recognize the humble town they'd so cherished, and whose affairs they daily followed via local newspaper and radio.

For years, I'd fantasized buying my childhood home and restoring it. But I'm told today that the old neighborhood has become so foul and dangerous as to no longer be viable.

Grisly devolution isn't particular to Marshalltown, of course. Similar stories can be found in many American regions, including here in Waterloo, Iowa.

So, it is heartening that President Trump has urged the nation's leaders to unite against the meth and opiod epidemics, as well as the scourge of illegal immigration that has so ravaged small towns like Marshalltown.

But astoundingly, influential persons who should be wiser and more caring of actual citizens oppose efforts to safeguard us, uphold federal laws, and restore American towns and cities to their former soundness. Marshalltown civic figures seemingly miss no opportunity to champion illegal immigration, despite its corrosive economic, legal, and cultural effects. 

(A high school friend who has remained in Marshalltown once lamented to me "we've practically become a Sanctuary City.")

As noted earlier, good people still live in Marshalltown, ones who who respect traditions, standards, and laws. But theirs seems to be a fading voice.

Perhaps not all in my Hometown Lost was as gladful as I choose to recall. Passing years may have softened in my memory some harsher aspects. And, as is typical of youth, I rebelled against established phenomena whose familiarity I only now appreciate, recognize to be of singular worth, and long to revisit.

You'll never miss your water, 'til the well runs dry
- "Rocky Road Blues" Bill Monroe

Roger Stone, trash-tongued bridge burner?

Note: While I'm critical here of various news sites (to which I've submitted writings) and Fox News programs, I patronize all regularly and generally endorse them. But honesty is the best critical policy. And I think friends should be able to speak frankly, even when it's unflattering.

Following the sad death of Barbara Bush, Fresno State Associate Professor Randa Jarrar tweeted: "Either you are against these pieces of shit [the Bush family] and their genocidal ways or you're part of the problem. That's actually how simple this is. I'm happy the witch is dead, can't wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million Iraqis have. byyyeeeeeeee."

Jarrar posted other, related vileness, and claimed her Fresno State tenure protected her from sanction. Controversy ensued. Fresno State distanced itself from Jarrar's horrible remarks (though rather feebly), and independent news media sites like Breitbart, Infowars, and Gateway Pundit published critical coverage of her nastiness.

Some observers called for Jarrar's firing. I would not, for this reason: She'd (presumably) expressed her admittedly foul sentiments in private time and not with Fresno State facility. Unless her attitude can be established as impacting negatively on job performance, professional sanction should not even enter into this matter.

But, considered as a moral issue, the bug-eyed Jarrar's spittle-flecked malevolence is undeniably reprehensible. Judging by her tweets, she seems proud of her calculatedly repulsive nature, and eager to cavort in bestial aspect for public consideration.

At issue here is not whether critical comments can be made. Of course they can. But declaring them publicly in the immediate hours following a person's death is poor taste, indeed, and underscores the given speaker's low character.

Associate Professor Jarrar was not alone in reveling in Barbara Bush's passing, or contriving disgusting commentary.

Appearing on Alex Jones's Infowars, Roger Stone declared: "I understand I'm going to take a lot of crap for speaking the truth about Barbara Bush. She was a mean-spirited, vindictive drunk. She is ascending [sic] into Hell, right now. She's not going to Heaven. She was a bad person." 

(Stone makes decisions about afterlife disposition?)

As noted above, Gateway Pundit and Breitbart had run pieces denouncing Jarrar. But they were conspicuously silent regarding fellow traveler Stone. Of course, Infowars gave Stone a pass, though it, too, had been critical of the Fresno State associate professor.

I get that some people spew provocative, outlandish rhetoric purposefully, their true ambition being not the communication of serious thinking, but merely attracting career-stoking attention and ginning up controversy. 

Stone was once of more legitimate stature in political circles. But he is now reduced to garish theatricalism on the internet, and that's both sorrowful and, given the revolting content of his Barbara Bush vilification, contemptible.

Roger Stone sometimes turns up on Fox News, particularly as a guest of the Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight programs. Whether Stone's Infowars remarks about Barbara Bush cause the producers of those shows to withhold future invitations from him remains to be seen.

(As a rule, no one should be barred from appearing on programs to comment on random subjects because of unrelated opinions expressed, elsewhere. But if those opinions are so distasteful they hang like a dark cloud over other efforts, credibility suffers.)

When Stone has appeared on their shows, Carlson and Hannity have seemed sympathetic to him, treating him with the uncritical regard afforded an instrumental confederate. Carlson is a serious thinker and generally rugged debater with no time for provocateurs or charlatans. He frequently disarms such and bears in for the argumentative kill. It's great fun to watch.

The visibility of Roger Stone reflects adversely on all of us in the populist revolution against anti-Constitution progressivism and globalism. Our movement must seem clownish to onlookers, when someone like Stone takes the stage. 

I wish his performing wasn't given oxygen by persons who should take their responsibilities, and our cause, more seriously.

Why Americans who supported Trump yesterday should continue to do so, today

Trump 2016 voters perhaps faltering in their faith, following his missile strike on Syria, should consider whether they want to cede the war for America, and whether, in general, President Trump remains their best option for ultimate victory.

His election was an historic phenomenon. Tens of millions of average Americans stormed polling sites nationwide to declare their revulsion with the Democrats' increasingly bizarre political and cultural priorities. 

We were hard-working, tax-paying citizens who constituted the backbone of this greatest nation on Earth, and we refused to be silent, inactive spectators as our country was twisted and despoiled.

Americans knocked the world off its hinges by electing Trump. By the doing, we also illustrated that professional prognosticators are too inebriated on insular assumptions to be credible, and we surely sent noisome propagandists into teary, pillow-biting distress. 

Pride can be taken in those accomplishments.

Trump's recent decision to launch the strike on Syria, though,  was in seeming conflict with his non-interventionist campaign rhetoric. Strident arguments for and against the action were made among traditional Trump advocates. Two prominent examples were Dr. Sebastian Gorka (supportive) and Infowars host Alex Jones (against).

The strike was not interventionist in character, some defenders maintained, and American interests were involved; troops were stationed nearby, and a spread of chemical warfare against America might ensue, were it not addressed immediately. 

Besides, it demonstrated that Trump is a muscular leader who will follow through, not a preening paper tiger given to impotent 'red line' speechifying.

Determining the worth of continued support of Trump, in the aftermath of that debated strike, calls for consideration of his in-office product. 

To his credit, Trump crushed ISIS; nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court; signed a massive tax cut bill that put more dollars in citizen's wallets; rescinded Obama's DACA executive order; added numerous federal judges to the bench; has assured that the opiod crisis receives appropriate attention; and dispatched National Guard troops to protect our southern border.

The number of food stamp recipients has plummeted; employment numbers shot up; industries returned to our shores; Trump repealed Obamacare's individual mandate; the stock market hit historic highs; a record number of business-hobbling regulations have been cut; and investor confidence has risen. 

The Trump Administration set in motion reforms aimed at dramatically reducing government waste; the president called for a ban on travelers from nations with substantial links to terrorism; and the United States' military capability is being restored to

optimum level.

Too, Trump continues to urge construction of a border wall. That it has not yet been constructed cannot be blamed on him. Democrats refuse to compromise with the president and respect that

voters' wish made clear on election night 2016.  

And, like Ronald Reagan, President Trump stirred Americans to renewed patriotic pride and unswerving dedication to national identity, sovereignty, and law and order. That spirit, more than any legislative phenomenon, can and will keep our country alive.

Alex Jones recently raised a point meriting observation: the nature of Trump's opposition and its goals. 

Trump Revolution enemies like the Deep State, mainstream media, Hollywood, lower level-bureaucracy, and the Washington swamp, two-party behemoth would not mount and sustain aggression against Trump -- and us -- unless they perceived a real threat to their globalist ambitions.

The Resistance has representation in political, media, entertainment, and grassroots precincts. It is indifferent to popular will as expressed through the established electoral process, and
does not accept Trump's legitimate election. 

Though the people spoke, the Resistance cared not.

This is the first time in memory that, across the country, partisans at every governmental level and in each walk of life flatly declined to accept an electoral outcome, or anything emanating from it. 

That is more than bratty intransigence. It is a rejection of democracy in which one sometimes wins and sometimes loses, lying to itself that has noble historic, moralistic bone marrow.

Americans who previously supported Trump certainly should continue to do so. It's true that realities don't always match rhetoric, but the promise of a nation's common citizens reclaiming authority and turning away from the disaster of the Democrats' upside- down-and-inside-out kaleidoscope course remains our worthy North Star. 

And it can never be reached without the energies and faith of an ongoing, fight-loyal Trump Revolution.

History written by the losers

Anyone who's read the New York Times columns of Charles Blow knows equanimity, reasonableness, and regard for truth are seldom located there. In his April 15 "Dislike Comey, Despise Trump," he assigned 'blame' for barn burning, populist candidate Trump's historic election to several nefarious forces. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15/opinion/dislike-comey-despise-trump.html

Never accountable, by Blow's reckoning, was Hillary Clinton's having been an unlikable and untrustworthy candidate, and that tens of millions of patriotic Americans had risen from the grassroots to issue a resounding 'NO' to the strange Obama legacy Hillary promised to perpetuate, the one that had so twisted our nation. 

Blow attributed responsibility to various factors, including Russian interference, Cambridge Analytica, and social media exploitation. Also, he specified the liberal usual suspects of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny whose imagined, pro-Trump advocates Clinton once derided as "a basket of deplorables."

Kyle Olsen of the American Mirror recently reported that a new history textbook paints citizens who elected Trump as bigots of the foulest order.

http://www.theamericanmirror.com/new-american-history-school-textbook-slams-trump-supporters-afraid-of-rapidly-developing-ethnic-diversity-of-country/


By the People, a History of the United States was authored by James W. Fraser, published by Pearson, and is intended for national classroom use. It has set off alarms among those warning that students are being indoctrinated to despise their own country and its character.

The American Mirror's Olsen quotes a passage from Fraser's text, noting that it reads "like an op-ed from the New York Times or the Nation." 

Trump's supporters saw the vote as a victory for the people who, like themselves, had been forgotten in a fast-changing America -- a mostly older, often rural or suburban, and overwhelmingly white group. Clinton's supporters feared that the election had been determined by people who were afraid of a rapidly developing ethnic diversity of the country, discomfort with their candidate's gender, and nostalgia for an earlier time in the nation's history. They also worried about the mental instability of the president-elect and the anger that he and his supporters brought to the nation.

Trump voters are daubed in scarlet hues, and their motives decried as hateful. Hillary backers, for their part, are portrayed in a sympathetic light, their imputed fears unquestioned by Fraser.

Without benefit of personal memory, or contemporaries' first-hand accounts, students subjected to the Pearson-issued false political record will likely assume it is accurate, when it is, instead, ham-handedly biased. 

What Hillary, Blow, Fraser, and their ilk refuse to acknowledge is that we supporters of Donald Trump are decent Americans who hold sacred our country's Constitution, its customs, laws, and national sovereignty.  We rejected the strange, progressive alternative, with its 'anything goes' morality and hostility toward common sense, judiciousness, and law and order. 

We seized back the wheel, and returned our country to its proper, Constitutional course. The traditional American standard of individual liberty is a monument to our national uniqueness, one we won't see defaced and destroyed. 

And that's the real history.

Why this heartland Trump supporter refuses to contribute to Roger Stone's defense fund.

In an April 7 essay, an anonymous Gateway Pundit "Assistant Editor" asked readers to contribute to a Roger Stone defense fund. A link to it was included. 

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/04/roger-stone-needs-your-help-under-fire-by-far-left-media-and-shadowy-liberal-operatives/

The unnamed writer urged against Stone's litigious and assuredly disagreeable adversaries, and appealed to ground-level Trump supporters' self interest:


Some of you in the Republican Party and conservative movement do not like Roger Stone...[But] if they can destroy a man like Stone, who has never been afraid of brutal trench warfare, how easily can they destroy and silence you?

But the enemy of my political enemies is not necessarily my friend. The Gateway Pundit's attempt to pass off Roger Stone as a figure deserving of average Trump backers' sympathy and sponsorship is insulting. Essentially, common folks Stone has a history of slurring were pressed to provide for his courtroom bankroll.

Stone has of late been visible in several venues upon which I generally rely for information and perspective, including the Tucker Carlson Tonight and Hannity programs, and sites like Infowars, Breitbart, and the afore-cited Gateway Pundit. [Full disclosure: I have previously submitted essays to those last three.] 

Given the uncritical reception and even flattering accord Stone has enjoyed from them, I understand they are not without fault. Heartland Americans' interests may not be theirs. I take them with a grain of salt.

Below is an excerpt from my new book Ideas Afoot. It is followed by additional thoughts on ethics and morality. Also explored is the promise of the populist Trump Revolution for whose electoral triumph millions of common Americans, including myself, worked and in whch we today take pride.

The velveteen mountebank

Candidate Trump was certainly not a hardscrabble everyman plucked from on-the-road poverty. But he did offer the same stirring quality as Frank Capra's classic cinema John Doe character, evoking national pride and citizen unity in shared struggles.

Wonderfully evident in the ongoing American grassroots-vs-Deep State, Trump Revolution is the vitality of the common man's independence and individuality.

(Remember, though, messengers are human and can prove weaker than their messages. As a general rule, it is better to advocate the cause rather than any single spokesman, lest it suffer should a figurehead stumble.)

During his campaign, Trump told rallies that, as president, he could draw on effective operatives "some of whom are nice people, others you wouldn't want to have dinner with." One would hope his firmest values and attitudes more closely match those of his heartland voters than the sickening ones held by onetime advisor Roger Stone.

Stone has a considerable background in the national electoral world. He is a decades-spanning strategist whose earliest orthodox political work was with Richard Nixon. His subsequent positions included ones with Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan.

He knows well the ways of politics, of national campaigning, and is doubtless a skilled operative. But today, he seems to pursue self-promotion ahead of any other interest. And his current visibility on otherwise recommendable stages Alex Jones' Infowars and Sean Hannity's Fox News program disturbs. 

Sophie Gilbert captured Stone well in her May 11, 2017 Atlantic 
review of Netflix documentary Get Me Roger Stone:

With his dandyish chalkstripe suits, his aggressively manicured hairstyles, and his Nixon tattoo, Stone, as the New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin memorably puts it in the film, is the 'sinister Forrest Gump of politics, who just happens to show up in the background every time there's a constitutional crisis or a major scandal.'

Now in his 60s, Gilbert later notes, sporting bowties, suspenders, and an overbearing air of insoucience, Stone resembles no one so much as a senior Pee Wee Herman. He stokes the caricature of the mustache-twirling plutocrat, being interviewed in an opulent dining room next to a three-olive martini, where he expounds on 'Stone's Rules,' one-sentence aphorisms like, 'It's better to be infamous than not to be famous at all,' and 'One man's dirty trick is another man's civil political action.'

Following Trump's very narrow (four points) second place finish in Iowa's February 2016 caucus, the candidate was both gracious and appreciative of the hard work of his Hawkeye State supporters.

"My experience in Iowa was a great one," he tweeted, the day after. "I started out with all of the experts saying I couldn't do well there and ended up in second place. Nice."

Also, that day: "I will be talking about my wonderful experience in Iowa and the simultaneous unfair treatment by the media - later in New Hampshire. Big crowd."

But the class demonstrated by Trump was not shown by Stone.

"Iowa hicks choose wrong, consistent with their history," was how he tweet-slammed Iowa voters, once the state's caucus results had been counted.

(A lifelong Iowan who'd caucused for Trump, touted his candidacy in several state newspapers, and backed him in the general, I took Stone's slurring personally.) 

Stone's freely voiced contempt for the common man was much closer to Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" slur than to candidate Trump's impassioned declarations of affinity with average folks.

In August 2015, the Trump campaign had announced its firing of Stone: "Mr. Trump fired Roger Stone last night. We have a tremendously successful campaign and Roger wanted to use the campaign for his own personal publicity," a statement read.

The Machiavellian fop maintained it was he who had chosen to sever relations. But Stone's subsequent promoting on Trump's Twitter feed of a show he hoped to launch was in keeping with the campaign's complaint that he had exploited his association with Trump for personal aggrandizement. 

Trump remarked of Stone: "[H]e likes to get a lot of publicity for himself."

The affectedly prim libertine's post-2016 Iowa Caucus demeaning of voters did have fetid precedents, one of which I'll detail, here.

"Hicks in Iowa shouldn't pick next president" was an October 12, 2011 essay Stone penned for his Stone Zone site. "I don't know why we should abrogate our right to choose the next president to a bunch of hayseeds because of some quaint notion that 'they should be first," he sneered.

That conflicts resoundingly with Trump's assurances to 2016 Iowa campaign crowds that he supported maintaining the state's first-in-the-nation status.

Also among Stone's 2011 complaints: Iowans are "stout [that one describes me] and a lot of them smoke;" Iowa restaurant food is "awful" ("one cannot possibly find edible linguine in white clam sauce," he sniffed); and the state's hoteliers raise room charges for what he claimed Iowans regarded as "them Jew-boy reporters from New York." 

That last (untrue, of course) assertion that Iowans typically harbor nasty, antisemitic attitudes was not attributed to any actual resident. It sprang instead from Stone's own sour prejudice against blue collar heartland Americans.

Again, Stone's pinky-aloft bias reminded of Hillary's favoring of a sissified persuasion that reviles regular citizens.  

In an August 2016 private tweet to a colleague, Julian Assange denied Stone's assertion that he had communicated with the Wikileaks founder and had advance knowledge of related activity. "Stone is a bullshitter. Trying to a) imply that he knows anything b) that he contributed to our hard work."

In 2017, Stone claimed credit for arranging Trump's pre-second Hillary debate appearance with Juanita Broaddrick, Kathy Shelton, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones.

Broaddrick shot back in a tweet that Stone "had no part in my appearing at second debate. I have never met or talked with Stone."

A May14, 2017 Gateway Pundit piece related this revelatory exchange from the Netflix film:

STONE: Sometimes, you confuse me with a Stephen Colbert character I sometimes play called 'Roger Stone.'"

INTERVIEWER: "What's the difference?"

STONE: "You'll have to figure that out."

"Politics with me isn't theater," the accessorized profligate once bragged to the Weekly Standard's Matt Labash. "It's performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake." ("Roger Stone, Political Animal" Labash / Weekly Standard November 5, 2007)

Underhanded gamesmanship does not advance the public interest, but only opportunistically pretends at decent intentions. 

Believing in something pure and bigger than oneself is not naive. It is, instead, the basis for every worthy undertaking from the drafting of the Constitution to the present-day resurgence of patriotic populism. 

When 2016 candidate Trump had spoken of "people you wouldn't want to have dinner with," I didn't know who he meant. But that was then.



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I understand Stone once remarked that "Nothing's on the level." I hope to never be that unmitigatedly cynical, that devoid of faith. (As we Iowans know, belief is a far piece from gullibility and naivete.) For millions of Trump advocates like myself, there can be truth, goodness, and a something of much greater import than oneself. A positiveness to which wise men hold firm.

Comes now the question: "Of what moment are salutary ideas lest put into practice, lest one's ballot choice is victorious and then in a position to implement them?"

That basically endorses the 'ends justify the means' argument. It assumes that right cannot triumph alone, and requires wrong's scurrilous service. 

Of course, a superior philosophy can carry the electoral day without employing fraudulence and grubbiness. Otherwise: 'What does it gain a man..?'

That good and bad have ever conflicted is no cause to surrender. I will not be contributing to Roger Stone.