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Both Parties Digging Graves: Republicans Deeper
About 14 months ago, American politics began to resemble a grade B Washington novel. A former Secretary of State is revealed to have endangered US secrets and possibly sold aspects of US foreign policy to the highest bidder. Will she face indictment? No, but the FBI chief acknowledges that the only way she could possibly attain a security clearance would be through her election as commander-in-chief.
The writer might have come up with a more compelling character. Clinton is robotic, shamelessly money-grubbing, calculating, secretive, and promiscuously deceitful. To the degree that she has any discernible principles at all, they’re the wrong ones. When she raises her voice, which is often, the sound is like tires screeching. She represents the status quo in a change year.
As deep as the hole is that Democrats have dug, the Republicans have bested them with a full-on suicide that not even a novelist would have imagined. A mob of self-styled “conservative” activists, jumped up talk radio and TV hosts, Republican Party apparatchiks (oh does that word have new relevance), a plurality of primary voters, and spineless elected officials across the fruited plain have signed on with a repellent demagogue who will destroy the party at its moment of maximum opportunity.
Now that it is too late, the rats are asking to be rescued from the sinking ship they helped to launch. Newt Gingrich, who hailed Trump’s convention speech on July 22 as a “revolutionary moment” and reinforced Trump’s reckless suggestion that NATO might not come to the aid of Estonia in the event of a Russian attack — among countless other lickspittle bits of analysis — has discovered after Trump’s terrible post convention week that candidate Trump is “unacceptable.” He and other lackeys like Rudy Giuliani and Reince Priebus are reportedly planning an intervention to get the candidate to stop being Donald Trump. Ha. Why now? Trump’s ignorance, malevolence, and instability have been on spectacular display for more than a year. Yet men and women of honor and sanity buckled into his cliff-destined train.
There is no doubt that Trump has been at his Trumpiest lately. He committed outrages against decency, the truth, and even his own best political interests at about twice his normal rate. In addition to dishonoring and insulting a gold star couple and keeping up the feud for days (when he might have been discussing the dismal economic numbers), he vocally fantasized about punching out the speakers at the Democratic National Convention, lied about his relationship with Putin (though his previous lie was on videotape), threatened to fund challengers to fellow Republicans Ted Cruz and John Kasich to punish their disloyalty, claimed that he had received a letter from the NFL complaining about the debate schedule (the NFL denies this), assured an interviewer that “Putin’s not going into Ukraine ok?” only to issue a corrective tweet later when he remembered (learned?) that Putin was already in Crimea. He claimed that he turned down a meeting with the Koch brothers. False.
Now Trump has batted eyelashes at Speaker Paul Ryan’s primary opponent, and mused that he would not support Senators Kelly Ayotte or John McCain. There’s your party leader, Republicans. Well done.
Martha Bayles reminds us in the Claremont Review of Books of two barrels — one contains sewage, the other wine. If you pour a cup of wine into the sewage, it’s still sewage. But if you pour a cup of sewage into the wine, it is no longer wine but sewage.
Trump is a pathogen. A man who heedlessly promotes conspiracy theories (vaccines cause autism, Obama was born in Kenya, Bush lied us into war in Iraq, Rafael Cruz was caught up in the JFK assassination), is either not fully sane or at least indifferent to the demoralizing effect that such lies have on our social cohesion. A man whose confidence is so shaky that he must attest to his own intelligence, malign even the most insignificant critic, scapegoat minorities, and threaten the free press is to be pitied, maybe, but not trusted with power. He is very, very comfortable stoking mobs and threatening violence. His warning that there would be riots in Cleveland if he failed to get the nomination – to cite just one of the thousands of ways he has transgressed basic norms this year – ought to have been enough to activate the antibodies of a healthy electorate.
Every single Republican with influence, from the local sheriff to the Speaker of the House, at every stage of this process, should have stood up on his hind legs and denounced this fraud (where are his tax returns again?), condemned his ugly methods, and scorned his flood of lies. Every Republican should have lined up for Judge Curiel. Chris Christie’s endorsement was the first tablespoon of sewage. Jeff Sessions’ was the second. The list of defilers is too long to itemize now. RIP GOP.
Published in General
We can only hope.
Bryan,I see your point, but I don’t feel that pundits like Jonah Goldberg are under any obligation to shill for Trump. Trump’s behavior from the beginning has been totally self-destructive. If he would do anythng to demonstrate that he is serious about this election, I am sure that many pundits who I read and listen to would be willing to come around to supporting him over Hillary. However, as I stated elsewhere, Trump is totally absorbed in playing to his base. He has no interest in attempting to draw in those less enthralled with his rhetoric. His statements about Cruz, that he does not seek or want Cruz’s support, can easily be generalized to the millions of us who were Cruz supporters or Kasich supporters who Trump seems to believe he can win without. It isn’t a matter of our rejection of him throwing the election to Hillary. It is his rejection of the majority of Republican voters who refuse to kiss his ring that will lose the election for him. It is his deep insecurities and their consequent overblown egoism that will bring Hillary to her long awaited throne. He remains as he was in the beginning, the one candidate of the original 17 who could not beat Hillary.
So what do you see as the job of the conservative intellectual?
I’m no Mona, by any stretch, but I am well-educated and I engage in another punditry on Ricochet. Even in that role, my goal is to analyze and discuss the ideals of conservatism, not to stump for every republican candidate in each individual race… this is partly what makes us different from liberals. We aren’t all party-arms, duty bound to blind partisanship. The goal is to speak the truth, considering the movement as a whole and the bigger picture.
History will not say: “conservatism failed because it’s intellectuals allowed consistency to keep them from backing an interloper in 2016.”
Rather, it will say: “Conservatism failed because people did not listen.”
It is a consistent characteristic of all tyrannical regimes that truth must take a back seat to loyalty… and yet you wonder what it is that scares us about Trump.
Then she wins.
I have not said they are under any obligation to shill for anyone. No one is under any obligations at all. I am just stating the facts.
Calling what is essentially opinion “facts” will always be a stumbling block in our discussion.
I agree.
This is what made me make my rant post a while back. These #nevertrump people have no understanding of why an orange-haired, real estate tycoon, reality TV star is orders of magnitude better than Hillary Clinton.
People with loads of money (book deals, weekly columns, political connections) are insulated from the effects of collectivists in power – I’m not. As I’ve pointed out before, I believe voting on principle (often cited by these #nevertrumpers). To me, this means keeping Hillary Clinton out of office, even if it means putting Donald Trump in.
This is a war, and the morality of winning the war trumps (pun intended) the “morality” of not voting for Trump.
Stad… that doesn’t explain me. It doesn’t even really explain Rob or James, and it certainly doesn’t explain the many other members who, like me, don’t have book deals or weekly columns or political connections.
Interestingly, I make the exact same argument as you, only the other way around. The long-term effects of at least one party sticking to its principles and not allowing itself to be manipulated into the same despicable behavior as the left is so much more important than whatever Hillary might do in 4 years.
You – and many others – seem to be committing the same logical error that the left does every day. Namely, to assume that because we disagree on this, we also disagree on our ultimate goals. It is no different from the left saying “you don’t want welfare, you must hate the poor,” or “you don’t want single-payer because you think people don’t deserve quality medicine,” or “you don’t like medicare/medicaid, you must want to push granny off a cliff.”
It is not that I think Hillary is a better person than Donald Trump. It is not that I want her in office. Presumably, if I assume good faith on your part, we have the same basic goals.
We disagree about the best way to get there.
Wait… I’m supposed to be getting loads of money for this gig?
Apparently!
You appear to have me confused with one of Susan’s “Australian friends.”
I suspect your “loads” don’t fare too well compared to Rush and Hannity, those voices of the common man. Stoking conservative rage is a profitable business after all.
Who’s that?
Susan from Coupling, whose catchphrase is “Apparently!”
I really don’t care about Trump’s tax returns, Hillary’s tax returns, or anybody else’s tax return. I care about my tax return, the one I have to fill out every year that is tantamount to my testifying against myself. If audited, I have to prove I’ve not commited an error (or crime), not the other way around per our Constitution.
Yes, I believe in the Fair Tax. Both liberals and conservatives don’t want to lose the income tax code, though. It provides too many opportunities for crony capitalism, social engineering, and election year finger-pointing.