Tag: conservatism

A Little Derb’ll Do Ya: Haydn’s “Derbyshire Marches”

The Portly Politico7 Comments

My Saturday morning ritual involves “sleeping in” until about 8:30 AM, brewing some coffee, and listening to Radio Derb, John Derbyshire’s weekly podcast for VDare.com.  Derb goes back for years—he used to write for National Review, before they kicked him out for writing “The Talk: Nonblack Version” for Taki’s Magazine.

I first found out about him and his controversial essay from NR, back when I was a devout print subscriber, amid the heady days when campus protests were novel enough to be terrifying.  NR ran a little blurb about Williams College cancelling a scheduled talk from Derb, and I’ve been listening to his podcast—an entertaining mix of news, science, political and cultural commentary, and updates on the president of Turkmenistan—ever since.

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Thanksgiving Week!

The Portly Politico6 Comments

It’s Thanksgiving Week!  November is flying by; Halloween Week (and Halloween!) seem like yesterday.  Yesterday was a crisp, autumnal day, a brief respite of warmth before cold weather returned to South Carolina this morning.

As a teacher, one of my favorite “weeks” of the school year is this one.  I put “weeks” in quotation marks because, from a teaching perspective, this isn’t truly a “week,” or even a “short week” (four days, such as the Labor Day holiday early in the academic year).  Instead, it’s two days of either cramming in tests and material, or of laconically drifting into the glorious Thanksgiving Break.

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TBT: Election Day 2018

The Portly Politico3 Comments

Two days ago I wrote about Election Day 2019, and posted results yesterday.  In selecting this week’s #TBT, then, I thought I would look back to November 2018 to see what I’d cooked up.

Boy, were the pickings slim.  Other than the post below, I reblogged my annual Thanksgiving message, and posted a Veterans’ Day talk I delivered to the local Republican Party.  I’d really let the blog slide as I dove into another busy school year.

It’s amazing how quickly time flies.  Not only did losing the House “stymie” President Trump’s agenda; they’re straight-up impeaching him—their plan all along.  We managed to hold onto the Senate, but by a slimmer margin than I hoped.  I also don’t trust Mitt Romney for a minute, so I think we can slot him in with the Democrats.

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Trump Stands for Us

The Portly Politico6 Comments

My blogger buddy photog at Orion’s Cold Fire is enduring some bleak New England weather.  Apparently, the bracing cold and gale force winds have sharpened his already-considerable analytical skills, as he’s been killing it lately with his posts.

He’s written a post, “The Unique Value of the Trump Presidency,” which perfectly encapsulates what Trump’s presidency means to the forgotten men and women of this country.  photog rattles off a laundry list of reasons different kinds of conservatives might like Trump—his judicial appointments, his less interventionist foreign policy, his trade war with China—but hones in on the key reason Trump matters:  “… there is actually a much more important aspect to the presidency of Donald Trump that should be emphasized.  He doesn’t despise us” (emphasis photog’s).

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Happy Halloween!

The Portly Politico21 Comments

It’s Halloween!  All the build-up, all the ghost stories, it’s finally here!

Last night I took the opportunity to carve my one of the two pumpkins I picked up earlier in the month ($4 a pop!).  He’s the cheeky little guy pictured above, and in the photo collage below (I’m getting fancy with the production values in this post).

His brother was stolen off my front porch Wednesday night.  I’d just gotten in bed and switched off the lights when I heard some tires squealing.  Thinking it was one of my neighbor’s buddies hydroplaning on the wet street, I didn’t think much of it, until my neighbor began shouting for me minutes later!

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The Dirty Pierre

The Portly Politico5 Comments

I’m on the mend, and am back at work today.  It’s pretty hectic being away for a couple of days:  I was immediately swarmed by young’uns this morning, asking about melodic intervals and the War of 1812.

If only I had a shadow Twitter account, from which I could give myself an emotional boost whenever I’m having a rough-and-tumble, post-recovery morning.

That’s my clumsy segue into today’s topic—Senator Mitt Romney’s latest pathetic act of perfidy, the Twitter account with the hysterical, outrageous nom de plume “Pierre Delecto.”

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Lazy Sunday XXXI: Trump, Part II

The Portly Politico43 Comments

This week’s Lazy Sunday picks up from last week’s edition, “Lazy Sunday XXX: Trump, Part I.”  Our perpetually embattled POTUS/GEOTUS continues to fight back against the screeching Leftists:

  • “Trump Up in Polls” – This piece from July looks at Trump’s rising approval ratings.  It also analyzes those numbers, and looks at MSNBC gasbag Joe Scarborough’s prediction that “bigotry and racism” would cost Trump reelection in 2020.  At the time, I wrote that “bigotry and racism” would not be much of a factor:  the epithet of “racism” has been hurled so much lately, it’s become like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”—it’s meaningless.
  • “Happy Monday: President Trump’s Approval Rating at 52” – Remember the government shutdown?  That seems like an eternity ago (I wish it were still going on).  Even in the midst of that, Trump’s approval ratings crested to their highest since Inauguration 2017.  President Trump has returned to the 52% (and 53%, I believe) mark since the impeachment witch hunt has begun.
  • “Babes for Trump” – This little post always seems to do well, and was seeing a steady trickle of traffic recently (consistently enough that I made it a TBT feature).  Whenever I post it to The Portly Politico‘s Facebook page, one of my Trumpian former students always likes it.  Easy, big fella!  Regardless, the post is about President Trump’s support among Republican women.  My only real fear for 2020 is that, should Fauxcahontas get the nomination, box wine aunties and suburban moms will vote for her because she’s a woman, and because Trump is a “meanie.”  Get over yourselves!
  • “Breaking:  Trump Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize” – Remember when we were supposed to be embroiled in nuclear war with North Korea?  Notice how that hasn’t happened?  A Scandinavian politician called for President Trump’s nomination to the Nobel Peace Prize.  That might have been a tad rich, but it would have been far more deserved than President Barack Obama’s receipt of the award—simply because he was a black guy who got elected President!  He won the award before he even had a chance to wreck our foreign policy.

Well, that’s it for this Sunday.  Enjoy your Columbus Day tomorrow!

–TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Lazy Sunday XXX: Trump, Part I

The Portly Politico46 Comments

It’s hard to believe we’ve reached thirty Lazy Sundays.  I’ve found these posts are an excellent way to link to multiple posts simultaneously; I’ve written so many now that I occasionally forget that I’ve written some of them, but Lazy Sunday is always there to curate and aggregate those forgotten posts.

Indeed, today’s post marks 280 days of consecutive posting.  That’s forty weeks of at least one post per day.  Noah would be getting off the Ark right about now.

So, to celebrate the thirtieth week of posts—and to honor our amazing, if embattled, President—today’s edition of Lazy Sunday is dedicated to the God-Emperor himself, Donald J. Trump.

  • “Indian Man Worships Trump as a God” – This little piece was a bit of a throwaway novelty, but I still find it amusing:  an Indian gentleman devoted himself to GEOTUS so intensely, his parents moved out of the house.  I was hoping some Twitter-savvy user would get this piece to Trump or Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and President Trump could use it as an opportunity to witness to this well-intentioned-but-misguided man.
  • “Mueller Probe Complete, Trump Vindicated” – The subject of a recent TBT feature, I wrote this piece when the Mueller Report first broke and all indicators were that “Russian collusion” was, at best, way overblown.  Yes, yes—Mueller insisted that Trump wasn’t “exonerated,” but he and the Democrats had to admit sheepishly that the drum they’d been beating for nearly three years was busted (not that they actually did admit that).  Of course, now they’ve just changed from one scary Eastern European country to another with tales of “Ukrainian collusion” to bolster a bogus impeachment inquiry.  Sigh.
  • “Symbolism and Trumpism” – An unfortunate side effect of Protestant efficiency and pragmatism is the lack of attention to symbols, which we tend to view with suspicion—“it might be an idol!”  But symbols matter immensely to uniting a people.  That’s the key insight this piece explores, care of an American Greatness essay about Trump’s ability to understand the need for and use of unifying symbols like the National Anthem, the American Flag, and so on.
  • “Trump’s Economy and 2020” – President Trump can boast a hugely successful economy, almost directly as a result of his tax cuts and regulatory reforms.  After Trump’s election, I could almost physically sense a weight lifting off my shoulders, and those of millions of Americans—and I was doing okay even in President Obama’s moribund economy.  Even in 2016, with things gradually improving from the low-point of the Great Recession in 2009, the job market seemed tight.  By the time Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, phenomenal economic growth was well underway.  Here’s hoping that buoyant economy continues to roar through 2020.
  • “#MAGAWeek2019: President Trump’s Independence Day Speech“:  This post was a Subscribe Star exclusive, so you’ll have to pay a buck to read the full thing, but it’s about how great President Trump’s Independence Day speech was.  After all the hand-wringing from the Left and the noodle-wristed Right about Trump hosting a yuge military display on the Fourth of July (see also:  “Symbolism and Trumpism“), Trump delivered a speech that reminded us of why we can be proud to be a part of this incredible, unprecedented nation.  I didn’t hear the whole “airport at Yorktown” comment, but I’m also not attuned to picking up Trump’s every minor error and calling it treason the way Leftists are.

That’ll do it for this “big league” Lazy Sunday.  Enjoy your day off, and Keep America Great!

God Bless,

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

TBT: More Never Trump Treachery

The Portly Politico4 Comments

With all the impeachment talk swirling, I thought it would be worth it to look back at a piece I wrote in May, focusing on squishy Michigan Congressman Justin Amash, the so-called “libertarian Republican,” as an example of the kind of bitter Never Trumpery that is champing at the bit to see President Trump impeached.

At that time, Amash argued that President Trump’s conduct was impeachable—not any actual crimes he committed, just that the way he comports himself is impeachable.  This claim coming from a guy who allegedly supports the Constitution.

Acting like a boor is not an impeachable offense.  It falls well below the bar of “high crimes and misdemeanors” set by the Constitution.  Further, President Trump’s phone calls to the Ukraine and Australia certainly fall well below that bar; I don’t even think he did anything wrong.

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Lazy Sunday XXIX: The New Criterion

The Portly Politico47 Comments

Conservatives, especially conservative writers and publishers, tend to get so fixated on policy wonkery and political debates, we sometimes lose sight of culture.  One reason I appreciate blogger buddy photog’s blog, Orion’s Cold Fire, so much is that he makes room for reviews of sci-fi novels, Twilight Zone episodes, and the like.

One publication that makes culture the centerpiece of its mission is The New Criterion, which takes the idea of reviewing the best in art, literature, music, and drama very seriously.  I recently re-subscribed TNC after having a lapsed subscription for a couple of years, and I’m eager to get my first issue in forty-eight weeks.

With that in mind, this week’s Lazy Sunday is dedicated to pieces the writers at The New Criterion inspired:

  • “Civilization is Worth It” – This piece discusses an excellent audio version of a piece about Rousseau’s ideas regarding civilization (that is to say, Rousseau argued civilization was the cause of all of our problems, and we were better of dancing around naked in caves).  It’s definitely worth a listen.
  • “E.T.A. Hoffman & Romanticism” – This very short post covered a charming little essay about E.T.A. Hoffman, arguably the founder of the Romantic movement in literature, as well as a brief discussion of the consequences, both positive and negative, of the Romantic temperament, and the idea of the brooding, troubled artist.
  • “The League of Nations” – Trans- and supranational organizations were all the rage in the twentieth century, and the League of Nations was the first—and the biggest flop—in this do-gooding, globalist trend.  The League of Nations was famously ineffective, which just meant we’d be saddled with an even worse organization, the United Nations, after the League failed to prevent the Second World War.  Now the European Union is creating a tyrannical empire of Belgian bureaucrats in the name of preventing a tyrannical empire of German bureaucrats from trying to conquer Europe again.  Yeesh.
  • “The Good Populism” – The counter to the aforementioned tyrannical transnational organizations is good, healthy populism, the kind of middle-class, conservative revolutions that brought us the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Donald Trump (among others).  Super historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson makes the case for the “good populism,” as opposed to Bernie Bro socialistic populism, in this piece, one of the most popular TNC published in 2018.
  • “New Criterion on Principles in Politics” – What’s more important—principles or victory?  That’s not exactly the gist of this piece, but it does examine the tricky debate taking place among the Right currently about how to handle deranged Leftists.  What are the limits of principles?  The David French model of always surrendering—but being polite while doing so—is clearly not an effective way to uphold conservative principles.

That’s it for this Sunday.  Enjoy some erudite cultural criticism!

–TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments: