As the writers at Lawyers, Guns, and Money already noted, only the fact that the following opinion piece ran in the Washington Post (which presumably checks on such things) stands between us and the conclusion that it is a parody and its author is not a real person. "Jim Ruth" is taglined as a "retired financial adviser," which if true suggests that pretty much anyone can write a featured editorial in WaPo these days. Maybe if you send in 100 cereal box tops they give you 500 words. That explanation for how this happened is as plausible as any other.
If you're ready to read some Grade A, Hope Diamond level bullshit passive-aggressive rationalizations for voting for Donald Trump despite the fact that he is an idiot-child sociopath beloved by white supremacists and every American who has lost a toe on a carnival ride, read on. To reiterate one final time: this is real. You may need to come back to that sentence to ground yourself; it will be your Inception totem in the dreamlike netherworld of white Boomer fantasies in which you are about to be cast three levels deep. It is entitled – You ready? Have a sip of your drink. Dim the lights. – "I Hate Donald Trump. But He Might Get My Vote."
There is no god.
No Trump campaign buttons or bumper stickers for me.
That sounds like something a human adult who can read would say. That's great, but forgive me if we don't burst into applause for it. It's like declaring, "I have no plans at present to burn down a mosque." It's a declaration that raises questions about why you would even have considered it in the first place.
I’m part of the new silent majority: those who don’t like Donald Trump but might vote for him anyway.
Oh, you mean white people over 50. Yeah, no, that's not a majority. In fact you're all dying much more quickly than you're being replaced with new Old White People. Also I'm not entirely sure Jim Ruth knows what "silent" means. These people are the literal antithesis of silent. They bleat like goats being castrated without anesthetic. The average Trump supporter shouts more than any human being who is not employed as a gym teacher at a bad middle school. A roomful of Trump supporters sounds like a demented chorus of whistling teakettles backed by the undulating beat of an air raid siren.
For many of us, Trump has only one redeeming quality: He isn’t Hillary Clinton. He doesn’t want to turn the United States into a politically correct, free-milk-and-cookies, European-style social democracy where every kid (and adult, too) gets a trophy just for showing up.
If every email forward sent from a Hotmail or AOL account in the past eight years could be condensed into a single, insipid statement, this is it. If you didn't read that card catalog of right wing talking points in the voice of your uncle who claims he can't work because he's "disabled" but sure does ride his ATV and complain about lazy black people a lot, then you did it wrong.
Have you noticed that these people REALLY don't like "political correctness"? As best I can tell, what they mean is that they can no longer call that woman at work with short hair a dyke without getting in trouble. It's their god-given right, dammit.
Members of this new silent majority, many of us front-wave baby boomers, value hard work and love the United States the way it was.
Hoo-boy. I got some work to do here. OK. Members of (this new silent majority,)* (many of us)** front-wave baby boomers, value hard work and love the United States (the way it was)***
*Minority
**All of us
***Back when being white and male was 95% of the battle, and the other 5% was pretty much "not being Jewish or gay"
We long for a bygone era when you didn’t need “safe spaces” on college campuses to shelter students from the atrocity of dissenting opinions, lest their sensibilities be offended. We have the reckless notion that college is the one place where sensibilities are supposed to be challenged and debated. Silly us.
This is the Rainbow Parties of the 2010s. Honest to god, I have taught at three different universities of substantial enrollment and literally have not once ever encountered anything like this. This is what people who have never been on a college campus think a college campus is like. To the extent that students exist who feel this way, they are very few in number and probably no different a proportion of the student body today than such Overly Sensitive Strawmen have ever been in the past. Yeah, some people cry when they receive criticism for the first time. That isn't new. The other 99.9% of college students are interested in, in descending order, boning each other, getting drunk, and looking at their phones.
And please don’t try to stereotype us. We’re not uneducated, uninformed, unemployed or low-income zealots. We’re affluent, well-educated, gainfully employed and successfully retired. Some of us even own our own business, or did before we retired, creating not only our own job but also employment for others. While we’re fiscally conservative, we’re not tea partyers. And on certain social issues, many of us even have some leftward leanings. Shhhh . . .
OK so you're a "majority" but you're affluent, well-educated, and gainfully employed or retired? Yeah the majority of Americans are affluent. This guy knows what's up.
Bonus lolz: "Don't stereotype us! We're not like those Skoal-chomping fucktards who vote for the same people as us and believe all the same things we do! We're different."
The only pleasure the new silent majority has taken throughout this primary season has been watching progressives marinate in their own righteous indignation. They were giddy, like spoiled children opening Christmas presents, as they watched 17 Republican combatants call in airstrikes on one another. But eventually the tables turned as the Hillary-Bernie slugfest got ugly, and we took particular delight in the sourpuss expression on the faces of the lefties we know when they realized that the Republicans, left for dead, suddenly had new life and a chance to win the presidency.
It's hard to sum up six months of the nomination process involving 20-some candidates in a short paragraph, but…really? This is what Jim Ruth ("Jim Ruth") took away from that? Because it sounds an awful lot like the summary of a sporting event one would hear from someone who did not actually watch that sporting event but overheard some people who did watch it but aren't real bright summarize it.
We are under no illusions about Trump.
To read Jim Ruth say a bunch of things that contradict this statement directly, press 1
To read Jim Ruth tell some bumper sticker jokes about Hillary Clinton, press 2
To read Jim Ruth make a logically consistent argument suggesting underlying integrity, press 3
Hey, this phone doesn't have a 3!
We know that this Man Who Would Be King is a classic bully and a world-class demagogue in his personal, professional and political lives. He will continue to demonize his perceived enemies and take the low road at every opportunity.
Well those sound like some pretty goddamn convincing reasons not to vote for the man who gets to decide when nuclear weapons are used. I'd say that person would be quite dangerous with power.
And we know that if Trump makes it all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the view after that is murky at best.
SO WHY NOT LET'S ROLL THEM DICE, AMIRITE? Seems responsible.
We’re confident that he will surround himself with smart and capable people from the business world, as well as some Capitol Hill veterans. But here’s the rub: Past business associates describe him as a micromanager who likes yes men at his side. How long this new Washington brain trust will last in a Trump administration is anybody’s guess.
Yeah I'm also confident that the man who wants the GOP convention speakers to be a bunch of sports celebrities because he's "sick of politicians" is definitely going to surround himself with a real mix of talent and experience.
I read the work of college undergraduates for a living and this is the actual dumbest argument I've ever read.
Who’s to blame for the Trump phenomenon? There’s culpability on both sides of the aisle for the absence of bipartisanship that fueled his rise. The left blames the policies of a fragmented, delusional, right-wing GOP. But the left bears responsibility, too.
Who here is surprised that it's "the left's" fault? In fact, it wouldn't be entirely surprising if it was you know who's fault…
Turns out that the obstructers in Congress weren’t just the Republicans, as Bob Woodward reported in his book “The Price of Politics.” President Obama kept “moving the goal posts” in the 2011 sequester negotiations with Republicans. And who can forget the way Republicans were bullied over health care? They were left with no choice but to use every procedural maneuver in their arsenal to block, delay or postpone the liberal legislative agenda.
Ahh that's the stuff. OK seriously, which one of you wrote this? This section doesn't even make sense. And how could anyone not respect the intellectual integrity of an author who falls back on "We would totally be reasonable if the other side just wasn't so darn awful and dangerous" argument. Because that's what Republicans are: people who would work with Democrats if only they would believe all the same things as Republicans do.
So why then would rational, affluent, informed citizens consider voting for The Donald? Short of not voting at all — still an option some of us are considering — he’s the only one who appears to want to preserve the American way of life as we know it. For the new silent majority, the alternative to Trump is bleak: a wealthy, entitled progressive with a national security scandal in her hip pocket. In our view, the thought of four to eight more years of a progressive agenda polluting the American Dream is even more dangerous to the survival of this country than Trump is.
Finally, some honesty. What he means is, "We're scared." The world is different than it was fifty years ago – and somehow this surprises us, probably because we are unbelievably narcissistic and stupid – and we can't handle it. We want the demagogue who promises us that we can go back to women knowing their place and the homos staying in the closet and the blacks using the other door. That's what "American Dream" means to people like this guy – not the dream of freedom and prosperity, because as the author states he already has that. What it means, then, is the dream of a nation in which they (white men) hold a dominant position in the social, economic, and political hierarchy. He just claimed a few paragraphs ago that he and this "Silent Majority" have done extremely well. So if this isn't a social hierarchy thing, what exactly is it?
I'll wait.
So come Nov. 8, you’ll find many of us sheepishly sneaking into voting booths across the United States. Even after warily pulling the curtain closed behind us, we’ll still be looking over our shoulders to make sure the deed is shielded from view. Then, fighting a gag reflex, we’ll pull the lever. We hate Donald Trump. But he just might get our vote.
The funniest thing about this is the way he mocks Safe Spaces College Kids when in fact this entire column is a classic example of one of the most legitimately annoying thing The Kids These Days do: Wasting mental energy trying to explain how they have noble motives for making selfish choices. Look, Jim, you are going to vote for Donald Trump because he stands for everything you do. You just said as much in the preceding lines. All you're doing here is intellectualizing (or trying to, badly) your reactionary politics to make yourself look like a smart person making a sound, reasoned choice for which valid arguments can be made. I hope it made you feel better, Jim, because those of us who had to read it certainly don't. As the Kids say, tl;dr – Old racist white guy tries, fails to argue that he is not old racist white guy for voting for old racist white guy.
Bitter Scribe says:
I don't suppose this guy ever got around to saying exactly what it was about "a progressive agenda" that was "polluting the American dream." Getting health insurance to tens of millions? Ending two wars that had gone on far too long, at least one of which should have never been fought in the first place? Maybe allowing gays to serve in the military? Or jerking the American economy back from the brink to which chuckleheaded deregulation of financial institutions had taken it?
Pretending that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both equally bad, or equally "unlikable," or equally something or other, is the only argument these nitwits have left.
Jim (not that one) says:
I'm 58, white, male. I wouldn't vote for Trump if the fate of the universe hung in the balance and wolverines chewed their way into my thorax through my asshole.
Steve Clarke says:
I think you should be open to the possibility that the "Jim Ruth"s of our great nation don't actually *prefer* a racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamaphobic America. It's just that, if the alternative is the hell-on-earth that is universal health care, they expect the blacks, women, gays, and Muslims to cheerfully take one for the team. Because that's what "Jim Ruth" would definitely do if *he* were black or female or gay or Muslim.
J. Dryden says:
The arrival of a new FJM is like hearing the jingling cadence of the ice cream truck. The one that delivers heroin.
Never ever stop doing these. Ever.
Anyway–
"Let me tell you why I just MIGHT vote for Trump" invariably means "I was always going to vote for Trump for reasons that I know are selfish and shitty, but while I have enough of a conscience to know that they are selfish and shitty, I do NOT have enough of a conscience not to give into them, which means that I have to face the inescapable awareness that I am a selfish and shitty person–too selfish and shitty to be anything MORE than selfish and shitty, yet not QUITE selfish and shitty enough to not CARE that I am selfish and shitty. Truly, I am in Hell. Please, please just pretend to believe me when I tell you that my reasons for voting for Trump do not come from a place of selfishness and shittiness so that I can go back to my selfish and shitty life–the rec room is wood-paneled, the bar stocked with Seagram's, the TV channel caught forever between Fox News and 'Barely Legal' Porn–and tell myself that at least nobody knows how selfish and shitty I am."
But we do. We do.
Ed says:
Wow, I finally get to be an oppressed minority. I'm a white guy over 50 who hasn't been deluded into thinking there's such a thing as a "good old days" to return to which would make everything better. Now you know why I much prefer the company of Gen-Xers and millennials. Put me in a room of people my age and I may jump out the window to avoid committing a violent crime just to stop the aforementioned bleating.
Jestbill says:
Whew! Glad I'm not one of those white male, over 50's!
Actually, I'm too old to have been a Boomer–or even a "leading edge" Boomer.
John Danley says:
"Even after warily pulling the curtain closed behind us, we’ll still be looking over our shoulders to make sure the deed is shielded from view."
Jim Ruth explains his customized version of tearoom trade.
Jesse B says:
If you want to know how President Drumpf happens, insert the British version of this guy voting "leave" for Brexit. They may not be a majority anymore, but they can still fuck things up for the rest of us… AND they don't have to suffer the consequences very long.
Brian M says:
Ed: Another (end of the) boomer here. I agree with you: the worst people are first wave boomers who all seem to have this sense of amazing entitlement and obliviousness.
Sipsiptitimo says:
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Galbraith (1908 -)
Moar Coffee says:
My favorite old racist white guy trying to validate Trump as being anything but an old racist white guy is Ben Carson.
Dave Bearse says:
Remember this: “His physical strength and stamina are extraordinary …His cardiovascular status is excellent … If elected, Mr Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Jacob Bornstein, Trump’s personal physician, 04 Dec 2016.
"We’re confident that he will surround himself with smart and capable people…" is a notion that would be hilarious were it not for the scary possibility of President Trump.
Good advise delivered straight. Trump of course is unequivocally fitter than Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gerald Ford, the three fittest Presidents accordingly to Men’s Health. Besides, Ford was a loser that wasn’t elected to the Presidency anyway.
JDM says:
I'm pretty sure that column was actually dictated by Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper to Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake.
mago says:
"We're scared" says it all.
Kovpakistan says:
So Trump is going to save America from becoming a politically correct wasteland? That's odd, because when I was a kid in 1992 I was told that America had already become a tyrannical politically correct dictatorship. I was told that in high schools we'd be taught about how to masturbate to gay pornography while praying or having a Bible would be banned. And this was years before I even got to high school. So naturally, by the time I started in 1996, things should have been much, much worse, right? Nope. Our sex-ed was shitty abstinence only, and the school had an officially sanctioned non-denominational Christian student group that organized on campus and even held prayer meetings in front of the school.
I guess all those pundits were just a bit premature, but I'm sure THIS time they're right. Politically correct tyranny is just around the corner!
Leon says:
Best new way to get me to stop listening to anything you say is by referring to yourself as part of the "silent majority." Oy.
HoosierPoli says:
"This is the Rainbow Parties of the 2010s."
Nailed it. This is a fake controversy, shut the fuck up about it.
HoosierPoli says:
"both sides"
HEY, I FIGURED OUT HOW HE GOT COLUMN INCHES IN THE WAPO.
Bessemer Mucho says:
So we've got the Duck Dynasty vote, the "Jim Ruth" bloc, the 'Anyone But Clinton' faction, & the New Nihilists ('Just Blow It Up Already'). When the Trumpster unveils Joni Ernst as the VP at the convention, it will all be over but the shouting.
Major Kong says:
"Members of this new silent majority, many of us front-wave baby boomers, value hard work and love the United States the way it was."
Why is it that every conservative I meet these days thinks they fucking invented the concept of work.
Apparently nobody ever did a day's work in their life until THEY came along.
Katydid says:
My email is currently being blasted by my relatives, who are all certain that Hillary Clinton is the devil incarnate because Fox news says so. A few weeks back I posted a list of all the contradictory things Hillary Clinton is being accused of doing/being/saying; it's clear she scares the pants off rightwingers.
Dave Dell says:
The only thing "both sides do" is blast me with emails and send me letters both sets of which always start with the equivalent of "BE AFRAID THEY"RE COMING TO…" whatever it is. For the Dems it's deep pockets are out to get me. For the R's it's "take our Rights away."
The difference is that the last part of the letters from the Dems talk vaguely (very vaguely) about what they intend to do.
As a side note I'm a registered R in a deep red state, baby boomer, Bernie supporter, from the deep Union side of the Democratic side of the Democratic Party.
AL says:
Shorter version: old Republican says he will consider voting for the Republican presidential nominee.
I think that says all that needs to be said about the quality of the Trump candidacy.
Robert says:
Fifty five year old white guy here, career Federal civil service, retired on disability. I thank the FSM for making me gay; it helped keep me from becoming someone like Jim WATB Ruth. Well, that and my parents wanted all of their children to grow up to be human beings.
Masterful takedown.
c u n d gulag says:
"Wasting mental energy…"
Well, in all fairness, that's very little energy he's expending.
A dust-mite has more mental energy.
BRILLIANT take-down, Ed!
geoff says:
What I don't really understand about people like "Ruth" is why they think Mrs. Clinton (or hell, her husband either) and President Obama are "liberals" or "progressives". The Dems haven't nominated a liberal since 1984 ('72?)!! All I can think is that Rush or Fox tells them it's so, adds a little homosexual panic to the mix and next thing you know Barry's jackbooted thugs are takin' our guns and throwin' us in FEMA camps for the crime of being white.
Misterben says:
Great as always. My favorite bit was the occasional jabs at his goofy name. For example:
"This is what Jim Ruth ("Jim Ruth") took away from that?"
The aside – ("Jim Ruth") – had me rolling.
Emerson Dameron says:
If you don't give up everything you hold dear, Jim Ruth will kill this dog.
Isaac says:
@Geoff. Yup. The refreshing thing about Bernie was that for a few months we got a glimpse of what a centrist, nay, even a somewhat progressive platform would look like in the USA. Yeah, everything got jammed into his Wall Street funnel, but he managed to express a lot of good “new” ideas with that message, and ignited a lot of political passion. Of course, the corporate media made sure to squash everything but controversy, and was sure to parrot anything critical to be found about him. I'm afraid that, just as Clinton said to herself, "never again" after the embarrassment of 2008, the Democratic Party as a whole is going to double down on the strong-arm control tactics so that we never see this kind of populist, liberal, anti-establishment message again in my lifetime.
Dial Tone says:
I wonder if Jim Ruth retired April 7th 2016? You know, the day after the Department of Labor rolled out their new administrative rule requiring financial advisors to act in the fiduciary interest of their clients.
Philippa says:
In addition to everything else wrong with "Jim Ruth"'s piece, it's cute how "affluent" is a admirable characteristic of people like him, but "wealthy" is a criticism of Hillary Clinton.
Philippa says:
*an
Dammit.
mothra says:
Isaac: Yep, you're right. All you have to do is look at the Democratic Party's chairperson, Debbie Wasserman Schultz for the proof. Woman is actually fighting any regulation of pay day loan outfits because…that industry has been very generous to her campaigns. Of all things a Dem should NOT support, pay day loan outfits are REALLY high on the list.
Philippa: Well, Jim Ruth WORKED for his affluence. Hillary got free cellphones from the government. Or something.
And J. Dryden wins the comments for today. I think I am going to tell every right winger I talk to who says they can't vote for Hillary and may have to vote for Trump that they are just trying to justify their selfish shitty behavior. A couple of old farts who go to my neighborhood bar told me that they are seriously considering moving to Costa Rica because this country is going in the wrong direction, and if Hillary is elected it will be armaggeddon. The specific horror they cited? That transgender people will be allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity now in the U.S. In certain places. I just cannot wrap my head around the transgender bathroom derangement. I just can't.
Emerson Dameron says:
@mothra:
Dryden *always* wins the comments.
[KICKS CLOD OF DIRT.]
Seriously, as much as I think he needs his own site, having Dryden and Ed in the same place is an embarrassment of riches.
The Pale Scot says:
Douthat? Is that you?
Katydid says:
@mothra; each election cycle, the rightwing has to have something for their low-info, easily-enraged base to be apoplectic about. One cycle it was gays in the military, one cycle it was scary brown people, now it's transgender people in the bathroom. In my (mumble, mumble) years on the planet, I've never knowingly shared a bathroom with a transgender person–meaning either I haven't, or I have and they've been no problem (and why would they be? They're there for the same reason I am). OTOH, I have easily a dozen times been harassed by cisgender males being creeps in the ladies' room.
Major Kong says:
I can remember back in the 90s when the Republicans were claiming that Bill Clinton was the biggest left-winger since Karl Marx and simultaneously complaining "He's stealing our issues!"
Having it both ways is a long Republican tradition.
Gerald McGrew says:
Funny how an opinion piece regarding the presidential candidates in a respected media outlet like the WaPo is lacking in something important….
….ANY MENTION AT ALL OF WHAT EITHER CANDIDATE WOULD ACTUALLY DO IF ELECTED!
Well, maybe not so much "funny" as "sad".
mwing says:
I think some of these older guys want to vote for Trump because they think the USA is just getting too damn girly.
But you can't SAY "I want to vote for Trump because the USA is getting too damn girly!"
So they try to come up with a alternative explanation thats reasonable, or sounds reasonable, and fail because the candidate is Donald Trump and coming up with a reasonable, fact-based basis for supporting Donald Trump is pretty hard to do.
Katydid says:
@mwing and others; this reminds me of the tv show All In The Family. It was a sitcom from the 1970s featuring the character Archie Bunker, an old white guy who is always aging about how the world is changing and he feels like he's losing his erdge. In the theme song, he's at the piano in his living room singing about the good old days and how "guys like us, we had it made–those were the days!" The 1970s were 40 years ago, before Talk Radio and Fox News, but even then, old white men felt they deserved an easy life just for being born white and men.
Ruviana says:
"The world is different than it was fifty years ago…."
Hmm, fifty years ago. I was fourteen. It was 1966. Rubber Soul had come out. Students had been sitting in in colleges and universities for a while. There were freedom riders and marchers in the south. There were people opposing the Viet Nam war. It wasn't really "the sixties" yet, what we think of it nowadays, but it was beginning to bubble, beginning to start that slow boil.
Jim Ruth probably hated the world fifty years ago too.
Ed says:
"Mister we could use a man
like Ronald Reagan again."
Skepticalist says:
I know too well the types that support Trump. I'm surrounded by people like one who said that the black vote should revert to the old three-fifths compromise. Of course this shows he has no real idea what it was and I doubt many Trump supporters do. Sounds reel good though…..
Try as hard as a first year (1946) baby boomer can, I still can't come up with a reason to hate Hillary. She can be boring I suppose, which is not necessarily a bad thing for a President, but she also has you know, done stuff. She knows how to be an adult. Donald has done nothing and certainly has a lot of fun not being one.
The writers of "South Park" couldn't keep up with the 2016 Republicans.
democommie says:
@Katydid:
For a minimal fee I will be happy to engage your benighted relatives.
diana says:
this was hilarious
thank you
Gil More says:
Oboma v Trump:
18 holes golf
One on one basketball
440 yard dash
Winner get's 4 (more) years.
Katydid says:
@Ed; the late Robin Williams had St. Ronnie pegged; I remember some HBO specials from "back in the day" where he just shone a flashlight on all the stupid, nonsensical things Reagan said. I was in junior high was Reagan was elected and remember thinking the guy was an empty suit. It's absolutely astounding how much he's idolized by the rightwing, but then again, they also thought Arnold Schwarzenegger was a real-life superhero. Remember when they wanted to rewrite the Constitution so that an (obviously, no-doubt-about-it) foreign-born man could run for POTUS?
cackalacka says:
Beauty
LutherZBlissett says:
Jim Ruth's 'American Dream' is to look down on other people, ideally from a bar at a mid-grade business hotel in San Diego where the tab's being billed to an expense account, before muttering about TSA-holes in the pre-check line and demanding some peanuts and bourbon from the Admirals Club.
mrearl says:
If Jim Ruth were a Brit, he'd have voted Leave. For all the same "reasons."
Idiots like him ("affluent" majority? Christ, what an asshole!) give my generation the bad name that allows whippersnappers like Ed to blame the Decline And Fall solely on us.
But it's the Washington Post I'm really mad at. Back in the "good old days" Jim Ruth pines for, they wouldn't have published inanity like his.
Pat says:
"… Trump has only one redeeming quality: He isn’t Hillary Clinton. He doesn’t want to turn the United States into a politically correct, free-milk-and-cookies, European-style social democracy …."
So eight years ago, President Obama declined to call for aggressive government anti-poverty programs because he didn't want to be the first black president and perceived as the "food stamp president."
And the Republicans called him a food-stamp president anyway.
So now Hillary Clinton ran to Bernie Sanders's right do Republicans couldn't call her a European-style socialist, annnd…
I believe the expression is: Does anyone here know how to play this game?
Art says:
I think this sums up the idiot's argument:
"Then, fighting a gag reflex, we’ll pull the lever. We hate Donald Trump. But he just might get our vote."
That is the way it is spelled. It is pronounced as 'Stop me before I vote again'.
H-Bob says:
How come the haters of political correctness use the term "tea partyer" rather than their original self-proclaimed name of "Tea Baggers"! When Jon Stewart pointed out the alternative use of that term, then those haters of political correctness demanded that everyone use only the term "tea partyer" !
Cugel says:
My only question is "why does this idiot feel the need to be defensive and apologize for his vote?" He believes the same as Trump on every issue. Looks like the real reason is "I know libtards will hate this, so . . . hehehehehe!" I.e. he doesn't really feel bad about voting for Trump. This entire exercise in narcissism is just an excuse to list every possible reason for hating Trump that rational people have – and then say "I'm voting for him anyway! Ha! Ha! In your face liberals!"
He hasn't presented one reason that doesn't boil down to "OMG! It's not the 50's any more! I can't handle it!" And he feels guilty about that for some reason and has to find a way to blame liberals for his being an asshole?
Jado says:
"…he feels guilty about that for some reason and has to find a way to blame liberals for his being an asshole?"
YES!!!!
This is the overriding issue with these old white men – it can't be THEIR fault. It HAS to be someone else's fault. They have been in power for 30-40 years, and THIS is the USA they have, after all their "hard" work. And it sucks. And everyone KNOWS it sucks.
So it must be someone else's fault. Cause if it's not someone else's fault, well…these guys have been in charge for 30-40 years.
If it's not someone else's fault, it has to be….
RUN AWAY!!!!!