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The Bulwark: Walking it Back, Just a Little?
Our mutual friend @garyrobbins has called my attention to a change at The Bulwark, one that I think is positive, so I thought I’d give a little bit of credit where a little bit of credit is due. The Bulwark has changed its mission statement. Previously, its “About Us” page described its mission as follows:
Our mission will be to say [that the president of the United States is a serial liar, a narcissist and a bully, a con man who mocks the disabled and women, a man with no fixed principles who has the vocabulary of an emotionally insecure nine-year-old] out loud and encourage others to do so as well.
They have revised their mission statement. The page now reads:
The Bulwark is a project of the Defending Democracy Together Institute. DDTI is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to preserving America’s democratic norms, values, and institutions, and educating the public on conservative principles like rule of law, free trade, and expanding legal immigration.
I think that’s an improvement, though I don’t believe it represents an actual change in focus of the organization. My suspicion is that the previous mission statement was, correctly, considered unduly petty and Trump-obsessed. My perusal of the website does nothing to dispel the notion that the publication remains petty and Trump-obsessed, but I do appreciate the more adult theme expressed on their “About Us” page.
The Defending Democracy Together Institute (DDTI) seems particularly entranced by the prospect of Russian collusion by the 2016 Trump campaign. I don’t expect Mueller to report evidence of such collusion; if that’s the case, it will be interesting to see how the organization and its pit bull of a publication deal with that.
Incidentally, anyone who figures out how to monetize references to The Bulwark should jump on it. My prior two posts on the topic netted 93 likes and a whopping 658 comments between them.
Published in Politics
@rufusrjones,
Thanks for posting those. They’re in my YouTube history now, and hopefully I can remember to go back and listen to those while I’m driving, or washing dishes, or whatever.
Unfortunately, I’m not one for economic issues, so I’m guessing some of those won’t really register with me. I’ll give them a try.
Our big problem is, the Fed and the financial system really get in the way of conservatism and libertarianism actually selling or working. In my opinion democracy just isn’t what people think it is when you have all of the central banks that are really almost 100% discretionary. I think it drives how people vote far more than anything else.
This is a great article and it’s also available as a podcast.
Ronald Reagan knew that the Fed needed overhauling but so many of those guys that work for him got in the way. Stockman talks about it on the part about getting rid of Paul Volker.
You have no idea what that even is.
There is nothing about America that resembles, even at a surface level, a nation-state.
It is an empire.
We just posted the largest monthly deficit ever in February. Yes, he’s horrible on deficits. Probably should pick another issue to worship Trump over.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-budget-deficit-widens-to-234-billion-in-february-2019-03-22
I never said that. That’s not what I’m saying.
Reagan started it. No one cares.
Why just one? Why can’t I pick two or three issues to worship Trump over?
Nope. Nope. If you want to say “how can you support Trump when he does X?” which is a way of saying “your moral character must be bad for support of such a man”, then I can hold you to account for the immoral people you support .
You have given full throated support of them. If you refuse to condem them, then you support them. They called Victor Davis Hanson a Nazi. If you don’t repudiate that , you agree.
Can you knock off with the “worship” talk”? Nobody “worships” the President. It’s insulting for you to keep saying crap like this.
When I see a post with numerous embedded links in it I get irritated as a reader. I don’t want to have to do homework in order to read a blog post. Just share the information with me in the post, don’t make me click off to some other site to read a 1,200 word post in order to have the context to understand the second paragraph of your 800 word post. And what if that 1,200 word post on a different site has its own 25 links?
I like it when mentions of books include the Amazon links. I’ve bought several books, both kindle and paper versions, after clicking on somebody’s link here. But I’ve also bought some in cases where a link was not provided.
Those are annoying.
But if you provide the relevant quotes and link to the context, it is far more appropriate and stops dead in the water the “proof-checkers”.
You’re blaming Reagan now for last month’s record deficit?Does Trump take any blame?
No supposed ‘conservative’ has done anything to overhaul the system to stop this type of stuff. Spending and Fed easy money are the only things between us and a recession. Yelen should’ve started raising rates years ago. Why didn’t they? So Obama would look good. It’s structural.
Look at the interview of representative Ken Buck on Full measure News and basically any interview or speech by representative Massie of Kentucky. You combine that with discretionary Fed policy, and there is only so much anyone can do. No one has shown any leadership, including Ronald Reagan, on this.
To be fair, Reagan had the guts to stop inflation, and he knew that FED discretion had to be taken away but he only gets two terms.
This is just my opinion, but I really think the hard decisions had to be made the second the Soviet Union fell. They didn’t do it. Why? Because everyone just wants to get past the next election.
I’ve heard some stuff that Romney and Ryan were going to overhaul everything in this sense, but I don’t know how dependable that is.
***one edit***
In other words, an ever worsening debt to GDP and a bunch of crazy social problems is really just baked into our system. The only issue is how fast or slow what happens. It’s basically all about increasing centralization and robbing from the future. Stealing with government.
I don’t like those “link dump” posts either. I usually ask people to either quote the relevant portion or restate it in their own words.
However, a link dump is different from a link to the material you are quoting or critiquing. I might be persuaded that providing the URL without making it an actual link is an adequate alternative, but I’m still uncomfortable with the general approach of making the site less convenient in order to discourage people from wandering away.
This merits a full OP. My answers for the records are: 1. Maybe, 2. No.
Gary
First, I do not recall any exhortations by me to deny Trump the Presidency. He won the Electoral College fair and square.
Second, I have suggested that there are constitutional methods for removing Trump, via Impeachment (and conviction) and the 25th Amendment. Any effort to remove Trump would be by the Constitution that James Madison gave us.
Third, I did recommend the voting for Democrats for the House as the Republicans in the House and Senate had been fully cowed by Trump, and were failing in their duty to provide an institutional check on Trump. On the other hand, I supported the election of Republicans to the Senate, as the Senate is in the personnel business. We lost the House by a gross 9% in 2018, while we had won the House by a gross .4% to 1.3% in 1996, 1998 and 2000. We lost women, the educated, the young and the suburbs.
Fourth, I would suggest that references to the “Insane Clown Party” is not helpful.
My suggestion is that if you are going to condemn The Bulwark for an article titled “Is Socialism Really That Big of a Threat,” fair play would require that you provide a hyperlink to that article. Here is that hyperlink.
https://thebulwark.com/is-socialism-really-that-big-of-a-threat/
Here is another article from the Bulwark titled “Socialism Chic; It’s back. And it’s worse than ever.”
https://thebulwark.com/socialism-chic/
In 2018 we lost the House by a gross 9% nationally, the worst result since the 1974 Watergate election. By contrast in 1996, 1998 and 2000, we won the House by a gross .4% to 1.3% nationally. We lost 7 governorship’s. We have lost 400 legislators. Sticking with Trump will be the death of the Republican Party.
The Bulwark did not call Victor Davis Hanson as a Nazi. Period. That was a shoddy review of The Bulwark’s review of VDH’s book. What The Bulwark’s review actually said was:
“This is not to say that Hanson’s book lacks value. As a part of a larger phenomenon, it is instructive in its way. Anyone with an iota of historical awareness is familiar with the fact that intellectuals in Europe and the United States lauded Joseph Stalin even as he sent millions to the Gulag and their death. By the same token, Adolf Hitler, one of the 20th century’s other mega-mass murderers, also found his share of admirers in the academy, among them such brilliant minds as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger. An entire branch of Western scholarship was devoted to the adulation of the genocidal Mao Tse-tung. Whatever Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, it is a grotesque absurdity to compare him to history’s most terrible tyrants. My point is something else: If such monsters could find admirers among the highly educated, it is unsurprising that our infantile, ignorant leader has found an assortment of professors to sing his praises. Julian Benda wrote The Treason of the Intellectualsin 1927. With legitimate historians like Hanson abasing themselves to write what can only be called propaganda, Benda’s title, if not his entire argument, is perennially pertinent.”
I think that you owe The Bulwark an apology. The article is located at:
https://thebulwark.com/sophistry-in-the-service-of-evil/
.
Gary, why do you think the Bulwark posted a tweet with that headline, and how in your estimation does a tweet and an article like that help the conservative movement as a whole regain its ideological bearings in the wake of the Trump presidency? (remember we’re not talking the moral high ground here, but the ideological high ground in the debate over big government socialist policies, which was the point Bethany was getting at with her Twitter reply)
Just like sticking with Obama was the death of the Democrat party.
Go on.
What on earth is this about?
It wasn’t a tweet, it was an article. There is an old adage that one should not judge a book by its cover. A corollary would be that one should not judge an article by its title. To balance this assertion, here is a portion of that article:
“Is the threat (or promise) of socialism the defining issue of 21st century politics? Many Republicans seem to think so. ‘They want to take your pickup truck,’ the former deputy assistant to the US President, Sebastian Gorka, told the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month. ‘They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved.’
…
“Color me skeptical—both about culture wars receding into history and about the abstract idea of ‘socialism’ being in the foreground of coming political fights.
…
“Yes, left-wing firebrands such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have embraced the label of ‘democratic socialism’ and have pushed an economic agenda that would expand the role of government significantly—Medicare for all, Green New Deal, and steep marginal tax rates would be all large departures from the status quo. It also makes perfect political sense for the GOP to try to mobilize rhetorically against the real or imagined prospect of the left’s turning the United States, through such policies, into the next Venezuela.
“But upon closer inspection the right’s bashing of socialism rings a little hollow—and not just because of Gorka’s bombast. Yes, AOC’s proposals are misguided but they are unlikely steps toward a planned economy, show trials, or the gulag system. …
…
“In other words, the abstract distinction between ‘socialism’ and small government seems to be of little relevance to substantive policy questions. It also carries little political salience for the ongoing political realignments. Both La République en Marche in France and the Independent Group in the U.K., to take just two examples of emerging political forces on the ‘open’ side of the spectrum, would be hard to pin down in size-of-government terms.
“Notwithstanding the recent rhetoric on this side of the Atlantic, it would be extremely odd, to say the least, if the post-Trump political parties in the United States defined themselves using such vocabulary in a durable way. It may be therefore time for everyone involved, left and right, to leave the socialism talk to the 1980s, where it belongs.”
See Comment #204.
If the government is running out of money and they’re proposing wealth taxation…literally…well…
We’ve just gotten through 24 months of people loyal to the former Executive Branch leadership making a concerted effort to de-legitimize the current Executive Branch through the criminal justice system. And many people on the left were truly irked with Obama in 2009 because while they knew during the 2008 political campaign that Obama was, if not lying, at least remaining a cypher about his political positions to moderate swing voters (so that they could paint whatever image of Obama they wanted to paint), they also believed Obama was hiding/lying his true political temperament.
They knew the first African-American president could not campaign as an aggressive, progressive Alpha male, or swing voters would think Al Sharpton, and he wouldn’t have even beaten Hillary in the primaries, let alone McCain in the general election. But they thought once in office, he would become that type of ruler and shut down his and their ideological enemies, via use of the federal government powers.
These are the people who don’t just believe is socialism, they’re the ones who were mad that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld weren’t arrested and tried for war crimes by the summer of ’09. And that’s the mindset of the AOC crowd. The fact that the Bulwark downplays their commitment to both government control of the state and making sure their enemies never regain power is an indication that their distaste for Trump has led them to seek his removal in 2020 by Any Means Necessary. And if that means four years of a far left Executive Branch, well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. They just attempt to downplay the True Believer mindset of those people at their own peril.
You keep saying that. You’ve said it enough. Now, let’s just wait and see if you’re right or wrong. You’re going to look pretty silly if the Republicans sweep in 2020.
The ACA is a scam to force single-payer.
I suppose “insane clown party” is probably too nice a term for them. Given that they’re a bunch of Jew-hating, baby-killing racists, how about just “evil”?