Quotes

Beneath our Consideration

The man is contemptible. For the record, he never served in Vietnam, having received a student deferment to complete his Ivy League business degree, and later a medical deferment, supposedly over bone spurs in his feet. He lied to the press about his deferment status. This became an issue after he criticized John McCain as a loser for being captured and tortured by the North Vietnamese. I had forgotten about Trump’s trashing McCain’s service. I am very glad McCain, a hawkish hothead, did not become president, but Trump’s making fun of him as a POW and torture victim is, well, contemptible.

— Rod Dreher
“Gold Star Father Clobbers Tin Pot Politician”
The American Conservative

The First Step

Here in the Pentagon, we need to be careful about casting stones about a requirements process in need of discipline.

Dr. Jamie Morin
Director, Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation
United States Department of Defense

Source: Here’s What the Pentagon’s Top Cost Estimator Has to Say About the Death Star | VICE News

The man whose job it is to tell the DoD how much a weapons system is REALLY going to cost comes right out and confesses that the Pentagon has a real problem with controlling program costs. And he’s about 42.

I think we have a future SecDef here…

The Shifting Boundaries of Free Speech

So no society tolerates every imaginable form of speech; there are always boundaries. What’s disorienting about American society today is how quickly the boundaries are shifting. Beliefs that were almost universal less than 20 years ago—and are held by around 40 percent of the American people now—are deemed utterly beyond the pale. It’s hard not to suspect that some of the people most devoted to policing those boundaries are pouncing prosecutorially on views that they themselves held not that long ago. (The convert’s zeal.)

Alan Jacobs
“The Value of Disagreement”
The American Conservative
July 9, 2015

The Big Business Fallacy

I believe that the Republicans don’t think that there’s anything wrong economically in this country that giving big business (as distinct from small business) more power, and increasing globalization, will not solve.

via Trump and Elitism | The American Conservative.

This, from a conservative writer, Rod Dreher. And this is a significant problem with the GOP today: it seems to take its marching orders from the Fortune 500.

Once that gets out (and I’m not exactly whispering, and neither is Dreher or others like us,) the GOP will lose the center for 2016. At that point, we either step up with something better, or we step back and watch the rotten old elephant keel over and die.