Decius drops the mic

What goes up, must come down

I recently blogged about "The Flight 93 Election" by Publius Decius Mus posted on the CRB web site. I was tipped off, like 20 million other Americans, when El Rushbo read part of the essay on his radio program and so I checked it out. I cybersurf around the internet and read a lot of opinion posted on web sites from all sides of the political spectrum - I read NatReview, Powerline, RedState and I read Vox, The Nation and the Guardian and I read funky, off the beaten path blogs like the Journal of American Greatness that made an iconoclastic case for TRUMP. Flight 93 is basically a distillation of JAG that strips out some of the most inflammatory and abrasive arguments which I assumed was done in an effort to make the slaps across the face of the "conservative" punditry bracing without being lethal. The right-wing big-brains responded with their customary lies and denial and I've now come to believe that the opinion piece was just the tap-tap setting of the nail in the wood because what followed in Dedius's Restatement on Flight 93 is a righteous hammering of the #NeverTrump ninnies deep into the pine of irrelevancy. It is the greatest polemic on the subject of modern day conservatism and where (and why) it fails that I've read from any writer, of any political stripe - ever. Blow after merciless blow he beats them down, down, down and, as before with the initial flight 93 piece, I'm not going to pull many snippets for comment because you really should read the entire thing but I would like to say something about the final blow that buries the nail and leaves a hammer head indentation in the wooden cross of the modern conservative movement.

"One of those who most objected to the Flight 93 analogy also accused me of “sophistry.” I remind him that, according to Aristotle, “the Sophists identified or almost identified politics with rhetoric. In other words, the Sophists believed or tended to believe in the omnipotence of speech.” Is that not a near-perfect description of modern conservative intellectuals, or at least of their revealed preferences? Except that one wonders what, in their case, is the source of that belief, since they haven’t been able to accomplish anything in the political realm through speech or any other means in a generation."

The first point I'd make is that sophistry is not actually as bad as its current popular definition implies and that, yes, in pre-Socratic terms Decius is a sophist - the best kind of sophist. Politics right and left could do with a hell of a lot more of this kind of sophistry. Instead we get this:

1/ "The Flight 93 Election" is elegantly-written garden-variety sophistry. I presume the author is Mike Anton.https://t.co/83vzH1aiot

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) September 8, 2016

1. a gratuitous accusation of "sophistry" (the bad kind) and then calling out the anonymous author by name ("I presume").
2. Rhetorically undermine the substance of the essay by waving the bloody shirt of valiant flight 93 passengers who died fighting Islamic inspired terror.
3. Q: Is any American more distant than Donald Trump from the spirit of heroic self-sacrifice that animated the passengers on Flight 93? A: Umm... maybe... er... Bill Kristol comes to mind. Do these #NeverTrump scolds think that DJT is NOT putting his very life on the line by running for POTUS? If so, then what the hell does the "Never" in #NeverTrump stand for? In truth (which they won't admit) it probably stands for nothing to them which is why they don't perceive it as a threatening hashtag, but for some lonely, desperate souls Never means Never and those folks are keeping the candidates secret service detail very busy (and worried).
4. "Sad to see...", oh yeah, it's sad. Sad that flight 93 even happened and what transpired in it's aftermath - and also sad that the federal government still doesn't track visa overstays 15 years on since some of the 9/11 hijackers were in the USA illegally on temporary visa overstays.

Folly Wall

This is sophistry turned inside out and upside down - this is folly. Our current politics is a folly cloaked in sophistry which argues that citizens should live with squandered taxes, endless war, mountains of regulation, fractured families, sexual ambiguity, open boarders, crime and murder (+terror), Trillion dollar debt, drugs and multi-cult disunity. The politicians are all inverted sophists and the media, punditry and academic voices whisper and shout their twisted arguments irregardless of truth - in denial of truth - into the politicians ear who in their turn inform the voters (their loyal and disloyal subjects) how it's going to be.  At the metaphysical plain (which is the only true home this folly occupies) a wall of nihilistic bricks insulates the elites, the chosen, the insiders - whatever you want to call them - from the "real world" which they've purposefully shut out with a folly wall so thick and high they can't get over it. It's the main reason Trump's call to "Build the Wall" is so potent and discombobulating to the Bill Kristol's of this world - by building a physical "real" wall Trump is tearing down and replacing the virtual bricks in the folly wall that protects the ruling class with hard red clay. Call it creative destruction of the mind or whatever, he's doing the work that American politicians will not do. It's real, it's authentic, it takes courage and it's wonderful. #MAGA