The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Ace vs. ‘Non-Binary Ben’

Posted on | November 28, 2018 | 1 Comment

Ace of Spades kills it on a daily basis and he’s been doing it for about 15 years now. Back around 2005, when the blogosphere was The New Hotness — and my Old School editors at The Washington Times totally didn’t get it — I started reading Ace habitually, laughing out loud in the newsroom and wishing I could have fun like the Moron crew did. Now that I think about it, 2005 was The Last Good Year, before the Iraq War went completely sideways, before Democrats took over Congress in 2006, before the Bush administration disintegrated into incoherence. Man, what fun it was in 2005, to laugh at the pathetic helplessness of libtards and moonbats, wallowing in their misery after “RatherGate” and the defeat of John Kerry, when every boy wanted a G.I. Joe for Christmas. But don’t look back, you can never look back . . .

Where was I? Yeah, Ace kills it every day and lately he’s been doing a regular riff against the “cucks” and “cruise ship conservatives” of the #NeverTrump variety who, honestly, I prefer to ignore. Like, I actually consider some of those guys friends, and their strutting display of their anti-Trump “principles” bothers me in several ways, so the easiest thing to do is just ignore them and go on about my business. It’s kind of like how I try not to think about the Roy Moore campaign in Alabama.

Dear God, how did that happen? Judge Moore had been a prominent figure in Alabama politics for more than a decade and nobody had ever heard a word, not even a whisper of sexual scandal against him, and then all those awful hanging-around-the-mall stories came tumbling out like an avalanche of yuck. Anyway, that’s how I feel about seeing some of my friends in the #NeverTrump camp — mortified with embarrassment — and my standard response is to avoid thinking about them. On the other hand, Ace keeps hammering away at them, and one of his favorite targets is “Non-Binary Ben” Shapiro. This epithet refers to the fact that elections in a two-party system are a binary choice, so that any Republican who didn’t support Trump was objectively and de facto pro-Hillary.

Ace is absolutely right about this, but Shapiro is an alumnus of Harvard Law where apparently they teach Advanced Quadrilateral Logic or some other kind of postmodernist thought process that makes it possible to believe that your opposition to the election of a Republican doesn’t mean you’re advocating the election of a Democrat. As someone who voted Libertarian in 2008 (because f–k John McCain and the open-borders globalist horse he rode in on), I’m probably not the guy to be making arguments for the virtues of Blind Party Loyalty, but watching Hillary Clinton’s supporters cry the tears of unfathomable sadness on Election Night 2016 was probably the most beautiful thing I’ve seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall. While Donald Trump isn’t exactly a Platonic Philosopher King, to put it mildly, he did beat Hillary, didn’t he? And I’m not sure any of the other GOP candidates could have done that.

So right now, Ace has a riff on the sidebar of his blog:

Hey John Hawkins,
My mention of you in that Ben Shapiro Quotes column was gratuitous and unwarranted.
But one thing: I said you had embraced being clickbaity because I just read an article by you which — forgive me if I misunderstood it — is all about how to get articles to go viral. Which is clickbait, right?
Or no? Maybe not. I’ve heard Buzzfeed Ben make a distinction.
Anyway, I did read most of that article so it was in my head that you had said — maybe I had this wrong in my memory — that you had played the game of clickbait, or virality at least, and had won. That’s why I thought you would have no objection to me saying the article seemed to be an example of just that. I thought you were okay with that.
In any event, I shouldn’t have called you out at all, and I’m genuinely sorry about that.
Anyway, I deleted the references to you or to the article being “embarrassing” or “obsequious.”
PS, I don’t think Trump is “perfect.” I think he’s a jackass, mostly. However, I also think he’s not Hillary Clinton, who was the other BINARY choice in the 2016 election. An election which was, like most, BINARY. No matter how badly Not-Binary Ben and his admirers need to lie about this.
I’m one of those few Republicans — just 88% of us — who chose to support him over Hillary Clinton, and who thought keeping a known serial very liberal felon out of the White House was more important than Twitter Virtue Signaling.
I know that makes me a rarity in the online right and not popular at all with the Twitter Set. But as unpopular as it might make me, I’m not willing to lie along with the Not-Binary Ben brigade and pretend that trying to get Trump defeated was totally not the same as trying to get Hillary Clinton elected, just because some people need this LOGIC-deficient and FACT-free impossibility to be true, for branding purposes.
You know how it goes — it’s hard for someone to brand himself as The World’s Most Super-Pure Conservative when he supported Hillary Clinton, though Ben Shapiro and a couple of thousand other Twitter-Based Life Forms do so every day.
I’m a little bit tired of this fucking lie and I wish the people pushing it — again, they push it for their pecuniary interests and branding purposes, not for any noble reason — would stop pushing it. They’re liars. And lies, though useful, have one big drawback: An honest man gets to call a liar a liar to his lying face.
Them’s the breaks. Them’s the risks. Anyway, sorry for the pointless shit-stirring.
Your Fake Internet Pal,

Ace

PS, you’re welcome for the Supreme Court Justices. And the economy. I know I went “crazy” when I helped bring that about, but I guess I’m comfortable with the trade.

Which sums it up pretty good. Obviously, I never would have written that, because I don’t like getting “in your face” with friends (and John Hawkins is a friend), but if you want to know what’s been grinding Ace’s gears lately, there you have it. Ace admits it was stupid for him to throw an elbow at Hawkins in the middle of beatdown on Shapiro, but what he had in mind was the “clickbait” modus operandi of blogging, which he sort of free-associated with the way Shapiro uses Twitter. Ace sees the posture of the #NeverTrump crowd being about “their pecuniary interests and branding purposes” — they want to be The Smart Guys™ as opposed to us Dumb Right-Wing Trumptards — and that’s an implicit insult to the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump.

Politics is a team sport. If you’re a Crimson Tide fan, you don’t cheer for Auburn, and if you’re a Republican, you don’t want Democrats to win. What happened in 2016 was this: The Smart Guys™ didn’t believe Trump could possibly beat their favorite GOP candidate (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush or whoever) and in the process of trying to convince others, they argued that Trump was such a bad candidate that he would lose to Hillary, in the process convince themselves of this. But guess what? GOP primary voters didn’t care what the The Smart Guys™ were saying. They liked Trump and voted for him and Trump won the nomination and The Smart Guys™ who had crawled out on that limb then sawed it off behind themselves, so to speak, predicting Trump’s defeat and positioning themselves to say “I told you so” after Hillary won. Except . . . she lost.

Pure morphine couldn’t alleviate the pain of that butt-hurt, because if you’ve got a Harvard Law degree, you’re supposed to be smart, right? And yet The Smart Guys™ were proven completely wrong, and they can’t come to grips with the consequences of their own failure. So the #NeverTrump cruise will continue as they sail together into the sunset, congratulating each other on their superiority to those Dumb Right-Wing Trumptards, as if their credibility has not been permanently damaged.

Well, the Last Good Year is long gone, and I’ve been convinced since 2012 we’re hopelessly doomed, which is another reason I just ignore the #NeverTrump crowd most of the time. If we are now in the Late Imperial stage of our national decline — wallowing in decadence while the Gothic hordes prepare to sweep down upon us — there’s no point making enemies over trivial crap that probably won’t deserve more than a footnote in some future historian’s Annals of Post-Christian America.

Sic transit gloria mundi.



 

Category: Ace of Spades, Intellectuals

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One Response to “Ace vs. ‘Non-Binary Ben’”

  1. “An honest man gets to call a liar a liar to his lying face.” | 357 Magnum
    November 29th, 2018 @ 9:44 am

    […] tip to The Other McCain and Ace vs. ‘Non-Binary Ben’. Where a bit of nostalgia originally caught my […]