This past Sunday, American Thinker’s editor Thomas Lifson posted the above titled article — below are an excerpt or two, but first, the definition of schadenfreude:
“pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune.”
And:
Schadenfreude is a compound of the German nouns Schaden, meaning ‘damage’ or ‘harm,’ and Freude, meaning ‘joy,'”
Here is Lifson’s opening:
Yesterday, it turns out, was the three year anniversary of Donald Trump descending the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for President of the United States. I missed marking the date yesterday, but two of my favorite bloggers, Don Surber and Jim Hoft, did not. The occasion is worth noting because of the scorn it engendered, and the deep contrast of that scorn with the results to date of the Trump presidency, which for any sane person are impressive.
Start with “It’s the economy, stupid,” the immortal expression of James Carville. We are in near-boom times, and the results are being felt in paychecks as well as stock portfolios. Given the propaganda we heard about the “new normal” during the eight years of the Obama presidency, as if low economic growth were somehow inevitable, a force of nature caused by unspecified but pervasive factors understood only by the The One We Have Been Waiting For, Trump’s results are shockingly impressive.
Lifson goes on to discuss Trump’s successes in foreign policy, his Supreme Court nomination, and the Lifson names some of the “Never Trumpers” that continue to act irrationally. He concludes with this about how conservatives have failed in the information war despite many hundreds of millions spent:
I could go on and on, and probably so could most readers. Donald Trump has functioned as a Rorschach test for elitism. We expect it on the left, but on the right, to me, it is more unforgivable, for conservatives are supposed to focus on results. Don Surber quotes Tucker Carlson on the disappointments we have experienced with those who once ruled the prestige roost of the right:
“Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted,” Carlson wrote.
“Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents ‘an existential threat to conservatism.'”
Read more: American Thinker
