Enjoying the view from Limbo
Vladimir Putin appears to be on the verge of launching a full-on military assault against a democratic ally of the Western democracies, a country that was most infamously decimated by the Soviet tyranny under which Putin did his dictator training course, and the renewal of which was one of the West’s great boasts at the supposed “end” of the Cold War. In response...
Former U.S. Senator Bob Dole died a few days ago. Dole fought, and was severely wounded, in World War II. He was a member of congress for most of his adult life after the war, and a leading Republican senator for a generation. In 1996, he was the Republican Party establishment’s chosen presidential candidate, where his intended role was roughly the same as...
New polling shows the Republicans with a huge “lead” as America looks forward to the 2022 midterm elections. And so, exactly as I explained just a few days ago, the well-trained herd of “individualists” who call themselves “grassroots conservatives” or “constitutionalists” will be unable to resist running toward that football Lucy is holding for them yet again. The result will be the same...
Madison Cawthorn is a twenty-six year old freshman Republican congressman who got elected, (a) because he is young and handsome, (b) because he is in a wheelchair, (c) because he lied during his election campaign about how he was on his way to the Naval Academy before the accident that crippled him (in fact, as he was later forced to admit, he was...
The Republican Party is currently embroiled in confusion over how to deal with a newly elected congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump cultist who believes the 2020 election was stolen because Trump says so, that Jewish aliens are setting California wildfires with laser beams (I may have rendered that one slightly more sensible than the real theory), and that leading Democrats should face...
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...
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