Let me be clear here:  I have no personal beef with Mr. D’Souza.  I’ve read at least one of his early books, What’s So Great About God? and watched him debate the evidence for God’s existence with the late atheist Christopher Hitchens.  Of the three debates I’ve watched between Hitchens and a prominent Christian (the other two were Douglas Wilson and Mark Lane), D’Souza did by far the best job of meeting Hitchens’ arguments head-on.  He was also funny and charming. His story of coming to America from India as a high-school exchange student and ending up at Dartmouth is a classic immigration success narrative.  After his graduation he became a voice of intellectual conservatism, serving as a policy adviser to President Reagan and working for a number of right-leaning organizations.  He was thoughtful and insightful, a true asset to the political right, or at least he seemed to be so.  As I’ve delved into his story more deeply in order to write this post I’ve begun to wonder if my initial view of D’Souza as someone who went off the rails around 2010 is really true.  It may be that he was never on them to begin with.

My point is not to attack D’Souza but to look at the larger lessons that can be gained from an examination of his career.  I don’t claim any special insight into his thought processes, but his public statements can be parsed quite easily.  And my overall reason for writing about him is that he’s still a very influential voice in American politics.  I doubt that anyone is unaware of his most recent film, ​Hillary’s America.

Of course, I’ve thought that before.  But this latest from Trump just has to be it. I’m beginning to wonder:  Is all this some kind of backwards conspiracy?  Is Trump really a ringer, put in place by those nasty Democrats?  Surely no one could really be this clueless?

In the meantime, as discussed on the excellent conservative Federalist Radio Hour, no one has any time for discussing substantive issues.  We’re all too caught up in the latest Trump tempest, myself included.  Here it is, August 10, and I haven’t posted one thing about the list of issues I want to discuss on this blog:  abortion and its association with the so-called “women’s rights” movement, NATO, the nature of religious freedom, the importance of the Supreme Court, the source of conspiracy theories, and (this is a bit self-indulgent, but bear with me) the rise and baffling fall of Dinesh D’Souza.  To name the top topics.  I’m really interested in all of these subjects, but I keep getting distracted by the latest outrage coming from Trump.  And now, I understand, he’s agreed to the three debates.  This is going to be so embarrassing of an exhibition that I think we’re all going to have to hide our heads under the sofa pillows.

1.  That Donald Trump gets into the White House.
or
2.  That the GOP loses its majority in the House of Representatives.

Option #1 is looking less and less likely as the weeks roll on. Option #2 is looking more so.

I strongly encourage you to read the following article, which examines these issues under the microscope of clear-headed conservative thinking.  (Also equal-opportunity candidate bashing, just to be clear.)

“It’s Hillary or Trump–What’s a Conservative Supposed to Do?
by David Bahnsen, The Bahnsen Viewpoint, June 29, 2016.

And then, if you are in a state that Clinton pretty much has tied up, and you think you’ll throw up in the voting booth if you pull the lever next to her name, just leave that lever alone.  (I’m not planning to do that, as I have said repeatedly, most recently here.  But I understand that flesh and blood can take only so much.)  Then vote for conservative candidates down the rest of the list.  If you are in a state that has any chance at all of going for Trump, though, you need to vote in such a way that you are helping to prevent both of the absolutely unacceptable options listed above.  That means voting a split ticket: Clinton for President, conservative (almost certainly Republicans) for everyone else.  People aren’t used to split-ticket voting, though, which is why Paul Ryan is worried about option #2.

As I often exhort myself (and believe me, I need to do this more often than I’d like to admit):  “Be a grownup.”  There are no perfect or even palatable options available to us in this train wreck of an election.  We can’t just disengage.  We can’t blindly vote on the side of our party.  We must choose, with our eyes wide open.

One of the greatest foundational principles of American government is the orderly transfer of power at the end of one administration and the beginning of another.  Now Roger Stone, a Trump “ally and unofficial advisor” who has been actively involved in Trump’s campaign since well before the convention, shows his utter contempt for this principle.  This is the same man who said at the RNC about delegates planning to vote against Trumps nomination that “’We’ll tell you who the culprits are,’ Stone added. ‘We urge you to visit their hotel and find them.’ (He said in a subsequent interview that ‘we’re not talking about roughing anybody up.’)”  (Numerous news outlets reported his statement.)

Now he’s echoing Trump’s idea that the election will be “rigged.”  Last week, on the strongly-conservative pro-Trump site Breitbart, Stone says the following:

I think he’s gotta put them on notice that their inauguration will be a rhetorical, and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath. The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it. We will not stand for it.

Note, again, that this quotation is from a pro-Trump website.  There would be no reason for the interviewer to spin or misquote Stone’s words.  He means what he says.  (How you can have a “bloodbath” and not have violence is beyond me.)

So, as I said in an earlier post, the election is only rigged according to Trump and his campaign when his poll numbers start going down.  He will not accept defeat graciously.  But, as I have also said before, I believe that the vast, vast majority of the American people are too intelligent to be fooled by this blatant attempt to manipulate and intimidate them.

As of right now, Friday night, August 5, it’s beginning to look as though Colorado is no longer a swing state.  Clinton seems to have pulled ahead by about 10 points, depending on what poll you consult.  There’s a long, long 13+ weeks ahead, and lots could happen to change that.  Still, what if I wake up on election day and nothing has changed?  Should I just stay home?  After all, my vote won’t make any difference, and I’ll be able to say that I didn’t support either a dangerous demagogue or a pro-abortion liberal.  My hands will be clean.  Won’t they?

A reader over on Facebook pointed me in the direction of a post on Douglas Wilson’s blog, a site I have visited a number of times.  Wilson is a prominent Reformed evangelical writer, pastor and teacher, a founder of New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, and the pastor of Christ Church.  I have a great deal of respect for Wilson, so I was quite interested in what he had to say.  What was he going to do?  Well, after reading his post twice I can say that he finds the two candidates equally repellent and so he’s not voting for either one. As he says, “And if I am going to be in that opposition (whether against Trump’s authoritarianism or Hillary’s despotism), I want to go into that opposition with my garments clean. I do not intend to have the yard signs of my coming adversary in my garage.

faster than I thought they would.  Here’s what I said only a month ago:

Once Trump becomes President the Republican Party will be effectively dead. No truly conservative, decent candidate will ever be able to win if he or she runs as a Republican. The party of Lincoln and of Reagan will have been destroyed by its own members, not by any outside forces. It will have to be rebuilt and revivified from the ground up, an almost impossible task, or a new conservative party will have to rise to take its place, a process that would take years. In the meantime, there will be no meaningful debate in American politics, as there will be only one side with any credibility. The election of Donald Trump will have done exactly the opposite of what his supporters think it will do.

or a personality disorder?  To read a good article on this general topic, read the first article from The Washington Post.  Too mainstream media for you?  Then read the articles from The Federalist that address more specific issues with the GOP candidate.

“There Is Something Very Wrong with Donald Trump” The Washington Post, Robert Kagan, Aug. 1, 2016

“What Trump Should Have Said about Khizr Khan’s Slain Son“ The Federalist, Susan Kristol, Aug. 2, 2016.

“Donald Trump Should Celebrate the Khan Family, Not Attack Them” The Federalist, M. G. Oprea, Aug. 2, 2016

​”Is Donald Trump a Russian Quisling?” The Federalist, Robert Zubrin, Aug. 2, 2016

I have specific topics to address over the course of the next 14 endless weeks as we stumble towards what the outcome will be of this unbelievably awful election.  But the news just keeps coming, so I will continue posting articles from other sources interspersed with some writing of my own.  I keep saying that there will be such an implosion in the Trump campaign that he just will fall off the map, but the very number of embarrassingly awful things he’s saying seem to cancel each other out.  Those of you who think that somehow a Trump in the White House would listen to sane, thoughtful advisers should ask why that’s not happening now.  So, for today, an article from the Washington Post that addresses the principled reactions of some Republicans to Trump’s outrageous comments on the Khans and his apparent ignorance about just what is going on in the Ukraine.  That should be enough for today.

“Republicans Denounce Trump as Confrontation with Muslim Parents Escalates” August 1, 2016