| RUNNING AGAINST THE DEVIL A Plot To Save America from Trump — and Democrats from Themselves Rick Wilson New York: Crown Forum, January 2020 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-593-13758-1 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-593-13758-2 | 326pp. | HC | $27.00 | |
| Page 4: | "You didn't repeat the Hillary mistake of not visiting the states Trumpand his Russian allies scored in 2016." |
| What was "the Hillary mistake" — not carrying enough crampons for the assault on Everest? Bus seriously, it annoys me when people refer to Mrs. Clinton by her first name. |
| Page 5: | "...but your candidate insisted not only on an assault weapons ban but a ban on semiautomatics as well." |
| Straw man: No serious Democrat would touch a ban on all semiautomatic guns. Banning assault weapons is risky enough (as Beto O'Rourke discovered.) |
| Page 13: | "This book is not a value judgment on any particular political philosophy. I'm not telling Democrats that they're wrong on any single economic, social, environmental, of foreign policy question. I mean, they are, but that's not the point." |
| Apparently it is the point, or Wilson wouldn't have written this. |
| Page 26: | "Trump makes Nixon look like a rookie, a small-ball piker. He makes the nontroversies of Obama, the Bushes, Clinton, and Reagan feel utterly trivial by comparison." |
| I wouldn't write this about Iran-Contra (and probably not about the 2003 invasion of Iraq.) |
| Page 42: | "Democrats can and must use working- and middle-class examples of the foolishness of the Trump economic model to actually communicate that they give a damn instead of proposing some ephemeral and unsaleable 'Yay, free college!' and 'We'll all build solar panels' nonsense that voters no longer buy." |
| Why is he dissing solar power? He'd have to go some to convince me voters aren't buying it. As for free college, I expect that's another straw man. |
| Page 44: | "We saw both Clinton and Obama promise to restore jobs, manufacturing, unions, and the rest of the old signifiers of Rust Belt America with a gauzy, hazy 'Well, we'll retrain you to become an organic solar panel installer and holistic home health care aide.'" |
| Again with the slur on solar? (He does it elsewhere with windmills.) |
| Page 57: | "Democrats do need to saddle a bit of the blame here." |
| Word choice: S/B "bear". |
| Page 123: | "Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government." |
| True? |
| Page 137: | "They will send in donations by the billions if you promise to crush Donald Trump, see him driven before you, and hear the lamentations of his women." |
| But... McConnell promised us the open steppe on a day of high summer—. |
| Page 152: | "No behavior will stop them from towing Trump's line." |
| Word choice: S/B "toeing". |
| Page 187: | "Democrats who think this whole battle will be fought and won on social media have another thing coming." |
| Typo: S/B "think". |
| Page 251: | "There is no evidence of the ideological preferences of MS-13. No reference to either gay marriage or socialism could be found on their website." |
| Since this responds to bogus claims purportedly by Trump, but made up by Wilson, it has no need to be factual itself. However, I looked for a Web site run by MS-13 and didn't find one. Perhaps it's on the Dark Web? |
| Page 289: | "The Senate will exonerate Trump." |
| Word choice: S/B "acquit". |
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