Enjoying the view from Limbo
For a generation or more, Republicans have built a substantial and ardent, albeit frustrated, grassroots voter base largely on the mantra, implied or directly stated, that the Democrats are trying to shift America toward despotism. The entire array of opinion sources that are generally collected under the term “conservative media” have built their considerable audience on the more explicit form of that mantra....
I cannot call this post “The Two Weakest Defenses of Trump,” because the president’s cult has amply proved that there is no depth to which they will not go, and from which point they will not dig even lower, in defending Mitch McConnell’s wayward puppet against the impeachment charges. Today, therefore, rather than waste time debating against those who believe Trump is God’s...
Justin Amash, the Michigan congressman who, completely against recent congressional protocol and tradition, apparently decided that turning himself into a spineless, hypocritical yes man for his party’s agenda of the moment was too high a price to pay, has gone a good distance toward fulfilling my prediction of a month ago, namely that he would seek the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination in 2020. ...
The Republican Party’s McConnell-Trump brain trust — a dusty, echo-filled cavern — believes it has hit upon a brilliant new strategy for the 2020 election: “Do what we always do!” Specifically, according to the New York Times, the aim is to portray their Democratic opponents in Washington’s intramural game of electoral tiddlywinks as “extreme” and as “socialists.” In other words, the Republicans are...
As I have often noted, there is perhaps only one political issue on which Donald Trump has been relatively consistent throughout his public life, including during his presidential campaign: socialized medicine. He loves it, thinks it is the greatest thing, and has frequently promised universal health care coverage, provided by the federal government, as his policy goal. That, after all, is why the...
For the past several years I have been chronicling the fall of one “conservative media icon” after another, exposing their gradual submission to the Republican Party establishment, even as they tried (or pretended) to cater to their primary audience, namely the true believer hordes we used to flatteringly mistake for “grassroots conservatives.” The Trump era, however, has amplified the problem ten-fold, as Trump’s...
Let me state my conclusion bluntly, right up front, in order to reject one sickening effect of the Trump era immediately, namely the recasting of wormlike obfuscation as a courageous moral stand: Erick Erickson has decided that the principles which led him to coin the hashtag #NeverTrump no longer apply. Erickson, the founder of RedState, with which he is no longer affiliated, and...
For a year and a half, I’ve explained to anyone who would listen that all this “Trump vs. The Swamp” nonsense was propaganda to hoodwink a lot of naïve people into giving the GOP’s half of the Uniparty establishment exactly what it wanted — carte orange to roll Washington’s progressive agenda right over that minority of Americans who liked their country and wanted...
For those who still harbor illusions that America’s alleged “two-party system” is anything other than the fraudulent face of the United American Progressive Party (Uniparty for short), the health care reform proposal from Mitch McConnell’s Senate must seem a real head-scratcher. I mean, gee, didn’t they promise to repeal Obamacare? Didn’t they object to government-run medicine? Didn’t they warn against the slippery slope to single payer? And yet...
On the afternoon of March 7th here in Korea, late night on March 6th in the U.S., I sat down at my office computer and signed into my e-mail account with the vague idea of asking a few of my American friends for their immediate responses to the newly unveiled RepubliCare bill. As it happens, one of those friends, conservative writer Steve McCann,...
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