By current projections, John Curtis is expected to win the 2017 Republican primary in Utah. It is interesting to break down the votes by county. The New York Times put together an excellent interactive map of the election results. This is an excellent illustration of how urban centers differ from rural areas in their priorities. People living in urban centers tend to favor tax-and-spend big government politicians more than rural areas. This is exactly what we see in Utah here. It would be interesting to break this down by precinct.
Now, John Curtis is no Barrack Obama, but he's no Rand Paul either. (Rand Paul endorsed Herrod.) The differences are stark enough to make it clear that Utah's love of the Constitution isn't great.
Barring some extreme political disaster, John Curtis will win the general election, even though John Curtis does not deserve Utah's vote. I'm sorry that the Republican Party, despite their delegates' best efforts, couldn't rally around a decent principled candidate that I could support. I would have liked to have had a candidate to support from the Republicans. I guess I'll be looking at 3rd party candidates and unaffiliated candidates then.
In other news, Mitt Romney decided to upstage the primaries with a little nonsense of his own. In response to Trump's assertion that both sides of the recent violence in Charlottesville should be condemned, Romney tweeted this:
As a person who did not support Trump, I sympathized with Mitt Romney when he decided to publicly denounce the then candidate for the Republican nomination. His decision to not endorse any particular alternative candidate, however, made his position seem more than a little buffoonish and ineffective.
It was clear from the polarization of the race that two bad things would come from Trump's candidacy; both, perhaps, an application of the principle of the Overton Window. Since Trump did not perfectly align with good conservative principles, his ardent supporters would be led to abandon many good principles themselves. (The mad ramblings of Ben Carson after he became a Trump supporter are a good example of this.) On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, since many of the things that Trump says are actually quite rational (even if inarticulate), many good people opposing Trump on principle would be led to reject good reasonable things, simply because they came from Trump.
If we are not firmly grounded in our principles, then we lose control of ourselves and are easily manipulated.
Trump is a man, and the things that he says and does are not inherently good or evil just because he does them. This is true of all politicians. Romney, it seems, was not firmly grounded, and he has let his anti-Trump sentiments get the better of his reason. I would not trust Romney to lead anyone, so long as he remains ungrounded, nor should we be lending our support to any aspirants to political office who aren't firmly rooted in good principles.
Now, John Curtis is no Barrack Obama, but he's no Rand Paul either. (Rand Paul endorsed Herrod.) The differences are stark enough to make it clear that Utah's love of the Constitution isn't great.
Barring some extreme political disaster, John Curtis will win the general election, even though John Curtis does not deserve Utah's vote. I'm sorry that the Republican Party, despite their delegates' best efforts, couldn't rally around a decent principled candidate that I could support. I would have liked to have had a candidate to support from the Republicans. I guess I'll be looking at 3rd party candidates and unaffiliated candidates then.
In other news, Mitt Romney decided to upstage the primaries with a little nonsense of his own. In response to Trump's assertion that both sides of the recent violence in Charlottesville should be condemned, Romney tweeted this:
No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.I'm no Trump fan, so it is always strange to me that his enemies seem to be competing with him to see who can communicate less effectively and be more irrational. To pretend that Antifa and Black Lives Matters are constructively opposing racism and bigotry is nearly as insane as trying to pretend that the KKK is doing so. This kind of irrational thinking is not something I would have thought to accuse Romney of (even if his conservative credentials were lacking). I always, at least, thought that he was intelligent and well motivated, even if only shallowly concerned with the principles of good government. His recent tweet, however, leads me to question his intelligence.
As a person who did not support Trump, I sympathized with Mitt Romney when he decided to publicly denounce the then candidate for the Republican nomination. His decision to not endorse any particular alternative candidate, however, made his position seem more than a little buffoonish and ineffective.
It was clear from the polarization of the race that two bad things would come from Trump's candidacy; both, perhaps, an application of the principle of the Overton Window. Since Trump did not perfectly align with good conservative principles, his ardent supporters would be led to abandon many good principles themselves. (The mad ramblings of Ben Carson after he became a Trump supporter are a good example of this.) On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, since many of the things that Trump says are actually quite rational (even if inarticulate), many good people opposing Trump on principle would be led to reject good reasonable things, simply because they came from Trump.
If we are not firmly grounded in our principles, then we lose control of ourselves and are easily manipulated.
Trump is a man, and the things that he says and does are not inherently good or evil just because he does them. This is true of all politicians. Romney, it seems, was not firmly grounded, and he has let his anti-Trump sentiments get the better of his reason. I would not trust Romney to lead anyone, so long as he remains ungrounded, nor should we be lending our support to any aspirants to political office who aren't firmly rooted in good principles.
Comments
Post a Comment