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The Goldberg Rationalizations
“It may be that once Trump is no longer the commander in chief in the war against Blue America, the ardor of his troops will give way to a better understanding of the price the GOP paid on his watch.”
This is the last paragraph of Jonah Goldberg’s latest, edifying us with his crack understanding of history, wholly out-of-context. You can read it here. Most of it is written to advance his rationale for why Republicans are supporting Trump.
He deftly (he is a professional) inserts the idea that Trump is a wartime President, only the enemy this time is Blue America. Why is his popularity so high he asks? It’s because he’s a wartime President! See? You have to read the whole thing to understand, but it makes sense – as long as you don’t think about it too much.
There’s not one mention of the media’s hostile obsessions, their disingenuous – often wholly false – reporting, which is unprecedented in modern history, or Obama/Bush embeds in our intelligence agencies and Department of Justice who have been proven to be liars, leakers, framers, and rank partisans without a smidgeon of professional ethics. Very likely some of these people may be traitors. Certainly, they have worked to undermine the will of the American people. I think that qualifies. All of which predated Trump even taking office. If there’s some kind of war happening, as Jonah asserts, it might be important to mention who started it. (Some FBI agents did something?)
Almost as noteworthy, Goldberg makes no mention of Trump’s accomplishments on behalf of his voting bloc as possible reasons for the strong support, nor is there any reference to likely alternatives which might be animating Trump’s support, all of whom are somewhere on the socialism spectrum.
He’s a wartime President. That’s it.
According to Mr. Goldberg’s account, Trump started this “war” he speaks of. And he never really explains how Trump is warring against “Blue America” or who or what this Blue America is.
Taking issue with Jonah’s conclusion, I would say that Trump is the price the GOP paid for being weak, for being fraudulent, for being the party of perpetual war and globalism, and for misunderstanding and/or taking advantage of their base.
Mr. Goldberg is fantasizing that someday the ardor of his “troops” will better understand how wrong they were. On the contrary. The game Jonah, et al., have been playing is over for good. There will be no going back. It may well get a lot worse for the Nevers after Trump is gone. They will have to take refuge with Democrats. Some already have.
Now, for some real genius, edification and a palate-cleanser, I offer this:
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Published in General
Well, let’s take a look at the situation. ACA passes, Republicans in Congress tell us because they were shut out of the process that none of their plans were under consideration, and that if only we had a Republican President, on day 1, we’d have a plan to replacement. Tom Price is heading the effort, and he’s a doctor, so he knows how this is hurting people.
Trump wins, appoints Price head of HHS, turns out nobody had a plan and Price just wants to fly first class everywhere.
See also reduce spending, cut the size of government by eliminating unneeded departments, etc.
Trump beeing a boorish dope wasn’t the problem with the GOP Congress. The GOP Congress was scared to death of the press who told them if they did anything for a Republican president, they’d lose their seats and people would hate them. So they did nothing and they lost their seats.
Having read all the previous 212 comments very carefully, I’ll add my two cents.
Jonah really wants to like Trump. He acknowledges the things that Trump has done that are good. He says in the article that prompted this thread that “The irony is that the need to provide unwavering support for the president of your party is a direct function of the unwavering hostility from the president’s critics.” So he does indicate that there has been this hostility, counter to what the OP says. I take him to include the legacy media in with Trump’s critics. No sentient creature would have missed that phenomenon.
But Trump makes it hard to like him, even though one admits to all the good things he has done. He does lie, all the time and for stupid reasons, with little or nothing to gain. He is vindictive and a bully. As someone who criticized him from the moment he came down the escalator —”I’m sure some of them are nice people,”—to his comment about “I like the ones who weren’t captured,” to, well, no need to rehash it all. Anyway, as someone who was as critical as anyone, I found myself relieved to wake up the morning after the election to find that Hillary Clinton was not the president-elect.
But that does not mean that Trump the person deserves even a little bit of respect. Better to praise him when he gets it right, and to criticize him when he gets it wrong. But to go along with his BS? That’s asking too much.
Very few people want to join a group that wider society thinks is stupid? You claim this is controversial? In groups are more popular than out groups. People don’t rush to associate themselves with a cause or people they believe to be stupid. Look at how strong the Conservative movement was from 1952 to 1978…that should be proof enough.
“Unwavering support” might be a bit of a straw man, at least here at Ricochet.
I believe that’s where most of us are.
Instead of “unwavering support,” how about “persistent rebuttal to dishonest criticism”?
It’s what we had to do during the Bush years, even though there was a lot to dislike about that presidency.
Both presidents have made it harder than necessary. Trump with his mouth and Bush with his refusal to defend himself.
Obama went way left. Clinton moved closer to the center after 1994 and getting smacked in the elections. He was first against, then supported a tax cut, then took credit for it, later.
That’s not Obama. Can you imagine Obama championing a tax cut, or “ending welfare as we know it?” There are other examples but Obama undid Clinton “ism”, in a very large way.
Clinton loved the give-and-take of politics, at both the retail level and trying to win his negotiating battles with Congress. Obama was sold the idea of running for president by being told all he’d have to do is proclaim he wanted something done, and then Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would do the heavy lifting and give Obama the credit once it passed.
That was all tied into the attempt to frame Obama as a demigod by the media. Each legislative triumph would be used to further proclaim his higher-form-of-human-life status and justify the next big government project. But Obama hated face-to-face contact with people wielding equivalent political power who weren’t on his side, so when he lost having a pliant Congress, as Clinton did after his first two years in office, he simply refused to adjust to the new reality.
His “Don’t call my bluff” quip to John Boehner over the 2012 budget negotiations, after telling Boehner in 2009 that he didn’t have to give him anything because “I won” showed Obama’s inability to deal with not being able to rule by fiat. That led to the “I have a pen and a phone” decision to rule by executive order for the remainder of his time in the White House, safe in the knowledge that the media would never call him on going around the legislative process (since the media thought Obama’s EOs were just as good as actually passing bills, because President Hillary would never reverse them. Now they’re foaming at the mouth over Trump using the same EO system).
Epic.
Record high, schmecord high. Most people can’t name their own congressional representatives, but I’m supposed to consider what unnamed poll responders think of something that’s patently stupid, at face value?
No.
Oh, and “record high” means “split down the middle”.
A record high could be 10%, too, if prior approval was 5%. That doesn’t make it good policy. It also doesn’t make it something you have to, or even should do.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/249146/obamacare-earns-split-decision-americans.aspx
Slight addendum:
Obama did sign the bill to extend the Bush Tax Cuts. However, he did it only because if he did not, the truth would have come out that those tax cuts really were mostly for the middle class, and all the Democrats in Congress knew it. Middle-class Democrats would have been blindsided with a Federal Tax increase that they never saw coming. There was no fanfare and the Press conveniently overlooked this endorsement of Bush’s tax cuts.
Obama stayed left and Clinton also stayed left, in my opinion, Obama was betting on his charisma to keep himself in power, and so he defended the basis of his charisma. Clinton bet on his political instincts and surrendered on some policies to wrong foot his enemies and keep himself in power. I don’t see him as actually shifting right, himself in any real way. He simply realized that he was constrained by Reagan’s success and if he took it on too directly, too quickly, he would lose power.
The advantage to him in that was that the Democrats feared that too. If Clinton failed, after 12 years of Republican rule and now the House falling after 40 years, the Democrats feared permanent minority status. So they had to rally to Clinton’s side and give up on several of the core issues to keep him in office. They paid on a price for this when Gore lost to Bush and then Bush had a politically triumphant first term. Clinton sacrificed the future viability of the Democrat party and set his own movement back to save his political hide. Fear of the Republicans made the Democrats allow him to do that.
The Democrat strategy against Bush, despite Bush’s own political failings, was pretty much a failure until fatigue with Bush due to Katrina and the problems of pre-surge Iraq allowed the Democrats to gain advantage. Still there was no guarantee of victory and the only agenda the Democrats had was the one that Clinton had pushed 16 years ago. Obama’s charisma was a game changer. But he didn’t really add anything to the well of the Democrat agenda, he simply took Clinton’s ideas and ran with them.
Once in power Obama was stronger politically then Clinton ever dreamed of being but lacked the political skills to use that power. Exposed the Democrats to horrible no win votes allowed the Republicans to gain strength from a position of weakness and then bet everything on his Charisma allowing his party to be gutted while saving himself.
If you look past the different tactics Clinton and Obama, due to there different political gifts, they were very similar men that created similar outcomes for their party. They would sacrifice nothing for the benefit of their cause, party or movement and so they came out looking like a winner but with a legacy of failure their party has trouble recovering from.
Considering this podcast and the one two weeks ago , I must say I’m really at a loss as to why Trump is considered manifestly unfit and particularly odious in light of what we know about:
JFK – deflowering an 18 yr old in the White House and then having her service his friends plus Fiddle and Faddle and all the rest of the White House shenanigans. LBJ – jumping uninvited into the beds of female reporters and conducting meetings on the toilet. WJC- crouching intern , hidden salami while conducting meetings on the phone , Broderick, Wiley , Jones and all the rest. BHO – siccing the entire federal apparatus on political enemies like Trump and even innocent civilians like Catherine Englebrecht. HRC- and her odious acolytes Sid ‘vicious’ Blumenthal , the snake John Podesta and many many others. I don’t think it’s whataboutism or defending Trump to wonder why he, in particular , is the recipient of unending opprobrium and what sounds like hatred from Never Trumpers, semi-Never Trumpers and even reluctant Trumpers. I really don’t understand it.
Not our kind, dear.
If you spent your life fighting against these people why would want to support someone that takes their road, uses their tactics and leads America in that direction?
You would want to support leaders that were unlike, not like, your enemies would you not?
I think saying that semi-Never Trumpers and reluctant Trumpers don’t dish out unending opprobrium, either.
Like it is difficult for me to understand the amount of attacks on David French and Jonah Goldberg for hating Trump voters when they have never said they hate Trump voters or insulted them. David French is often accused on Ricochet of attacking the Covington School kids when he did not and for not attacking AntiFa which he has done multiple times. It is just another weird by product of our loony political culture.
The problem is that they always assume the worst possible spin on what Trump is doing. Also, they assume that the good things Trump does are the outlier as opposed to the bad things being the outliers. In essence, they treat him as equivalent to Barack Obama. That’s why I stopped reading Jonah. It’s also why I don’t listen to too many podcasts anymore.
If I wanted that perspective, I would watch CNN, or talk with all of the damned leftists I work and live with.
I’d also add that they seem to view the left as far less of a threat than Trump, which strikes me as insane.
Jonah Goldberg and David French do not really matter to me anymore. I don’t view them as horrible or great. I just stopped reading their columns or considering them worth listening to.
‘If you spent your life fighting against these people why would want to support someone that takes their road, uses their tactics and leads America in that direction?’
When did Trump do any of those things? Still not getting why they consider him uniguely horrible.
David French and others at NR did initially attack the Covington school kids with middle of the night tweets (don’t they hate Trump for that?), that they quickly erased and revised … Turmoil inside National Review over Covington Catholic story …
I agree with this. The problem is that the Left does use these “useful idiots” on the Right to provide them with “cover” and additional “blocking” to peddle their lies. That’s a problem.
In what direction is Trump leading America?
You were equating bad Democrat behavior with what Trump has done, I saw the link we were making between sexual immorality and the like with Trump’s cameos in porn videos, sexual misadventures and claiming to be sinless. Then you seem to me to be making the point people like Jonah and David French found those previous Democrats acceptable so what is the big deal about Trump?
I was pointing out that Trump making the Republicans care as little about personal morality as the Democrats care is one of the bad things they have been opposing all their lives. To have the Republicans care as little about a persons moral character as the Democrats is not a good thing. Especially to someone like David French the Republicans having higher standards was feature not a bug. Now Republicans have become more like Democrats.
Agree or disagree with the view I think you can see why just saying “Trump is no worse than a bunch of bad Dems” is not enough for them. They wanted something better than the Dems not something no worse than the Dems.
If I misunderstood your point I am sorry and the fault is mine. Also I was not crystal clear in my previous comment and that is also my fault.
I would ask you to read your own article again and please tell me where David French attacked the Covington kids? One hastily written editorial based on the false narrative of the media ran and was rescinded and apologized for, a few writers got their initial takes wrong, David French was not one of them. It is a severe case of French Derangement Syndrome that insists, falsely that David French or Jonah for that matter attack Trump reporters.
Thanks for clearing that up. I originally skimmed the article and assumed that David French was one of those who attacked the Covington boys as many people assert, but after reading it more carefully, I understand that he did not.
He was just a heavier sleeper. If he was awake, he’d have been first in line.
Generally regarding people like French, Mitt Romney and the like….
it’s akin to believing first reports coming from Tokyo Rose. And we’re stuck on the same submarine with them. .
Don’t you know the entire Pacific Fleet is at the bottom of the sea? She says.
These men are so afraid things are and will go badly.These twits don’t know their actual enemies. Who they are, what their plan is and least of all how they have manipulated by all the gaslighting. The Republicans are polling badly. Suburban women are putt-off by Trump. Then they start in with telling us how they are going to call balls and strikes when Tokyo Rose is the umpire. The Japanese play baseball too.
We are fighting for these nitwits and they don’t know it. They don’t deserve it but they are getting it anyway.
How many good Congressmen walked the plank for Trump in 2018? We used to brag about how many state houses and Governors we held, how’s that statistic looking in the age of Trump? The Congressman in NC-9 lost heavily in the state senate district he represented a few days ago. Yes, we are going to get our clock cleaned unless the Dems implode. Yes, suburban women still care about character and are willing to accept a lot of bad policy from the Dems to express it, the ninnies. But you folks can still chuckle amongst yourselves – nothing to see here, move along now.
What does this mean?
Orange Man Bad.
I was thinking it was a reference to all the Republicans who decided, with upturned noses and pursed lips, that they simply could not work with this uncouth person from New York who was not part of the Washington Club. And they thought that they could raise their profiles by making a public spectacle of resigning. Sweet CNN or MSNBC gig, here I come!
Well, people voted for Reagan, who most political elites of the time thought was stupid (“a dullard”).