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John Podhoretz
Based on years of listening to him, and on everything I’ve heard about him, John Podhoretz is a gentle, humane, and thoroughly decent man. I envy him his ability to pluck precisely the right word from his obviously vast vocabulary, and to speak, when he chooses, with extraordinary nuance and precision.
Sure, he’s prone to outrageous hyperbole (a quality hardly unique to him in this, the Age of Trump), is unduly proud of his Judaic morosity, and has a sense of humor that resonates with 12-year-old boys and Jonah Goldberg (but I repeat myself). But still, I enjoy listening to him.
But he often lands a clinker, as he did in the June 6 podcast (here) when he averred, at about 1:10:00, that, should the Democrats win in 2020, the right is “certainly going to turn anti-patriotic in the event of his defeat. … So you’re going to have the right hating America and the left hating America.”
I’ve mentioned this before about our own Rob Long, and I’ll say it now about John: I think too many conservative intellectuals have a poor idea of what actual conservatives are like, and of who makes up “the right” out in that vast unexplored and boring portion of America that people who don’t live in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles call home.
Thank G-d we still have VDH.
Published in Culture
Is it because Jews have had a sense of being different while looking the same for over a thousand years? I have the impression that Asian-Americans feel more mainstream than Jewish-Americans. Your comment is fascinating.
At an absolute minimum, the price of four years of Biden will be younger replacements for Ginsburg and Breyer, assuming that Clarence Thomas holds out. As I indicated above, the possibility exists that we will have 12 years of Democratic Presidents.
If I believed that I wouldn’t be supporting Biden. Of note, I have given to the primary opponents of the Squad.
Rashida Tlaib (MI-13) is in the fight of her life against the former incumbent Brenda Jones who Tlaib beat by only 31% to 30% in the 2018 primary, and then went on to beat the Republican 84% to 11% in this D+32 district. Tlaib can only be removed in a primary and the Michigan primary is in August. For the sake of our nation, I urge my fellow Ricochetti to contribute to Brenda Jones. Yes, she is far to the Left of you and I. But Brenda Jones is not an Anti-Semite. Just as the Republican party needs to purge the Trumps and Q-Anon, the Democrats need to purge “The Squad” in their primaries.
That is clearly a huge downside. Voting for Biden is a calculated risk that I am willing to take.
The point is — and which Andrew Klavan has made repeatedly on his show — you’re railing at people on the GOP side at the bottom of the food chain who might someday be a threat if they can first get elected, while completely ignoring the fact that their equivalents on the left are not wanna-bes, but hold or have held high positions of power, including Democratic National Committee deputy chairman. You’re fear-mongering the hypotheticals on one side while being in denial about the reality on the other.
What is it that leads you to believe that Joe Biden would have any effect on policy or make any decisions that people would follow? Even today he can only say what is put in front of him. Have you not watched any of his on line appearances?
You may have other sources of information, but an article in The Dispatch for which you just provided a link casts doubt on your characterization of Lauren Boebert as either “Q-Anon” or a “nut.” Other than that article, I do not know much about her, besides the facts that she is a small businesswoman and gun rights activist.
I saw part of Biden’s talk in Pennsylvania yesterday. He seems much more with it than Trump.
As a tactical matter, I would prefer the crazies win in the Dem party. Let their party be defined by the anti-semitic commie loons.
That is a great position to take as a partisan, but I would submit that it is a horrible position to take as an American. Dems are going to win from time to time. We need a sane opposition.
The only real difference at this point are the one who are open and enthusiastic crazies, and the one who are weasels hoping to sucker the dumb and delusional.
Gary,
You’ve got your bumper sticker and your wishful thinking — that a Republican loss will galvanize the party and, “in the long run,” make us better off, despite four years of Democratic leadership and the cultural and economic destruction that will bring.
Your theory is based on the assumption that Republicans will learn from their loss. Of course, Democrats would presumably learn from their win, and what they’d learn is that you win by going hard, hard left, pull out all the stops, attack relentlessly and dishonestly, and demonize the opposition at every turn. In other words, the Trump/Kavanaugh strategy we’ve seen the past four years.
So we should hope the Republicans learn something, and hope the Democrats don’t? Does that make sense? And if the Republicans learn something, perhaps what they’ll learn is that what the Democrats did worked, and we should do the same: get uglier, get less honest, get less tolerant, run the most vicious and corrupt campaigns possible in order to win.
It will be pretty if it works out in life as in your imagination, with everyone learning just what they need to learn to be better people. You dream in color, and that’s nice.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we’d have four years of Obama/Clinton era lawlessness, compounded by radical attacks on free speech and the electoral process, a continuation of the march through the institutions at the highest levels, economic and environmental policy that ends growth and pushes us into recession, a ballooning debt with no chance of growth to offset it, and a renewed corruption at a newly weaponized DoJ.
You have never made a concrete case, because you’re willing to court actual economic and political disaster if there’s a long-shot hope that it will somehow make your party more virtuous by your measure, never mind that most of your fellow Republicans have reached a different conclusion.
Gary, I’m an arrogant know-it-all and never much of a team player, but you’ve got me beat all hollow. I’d never consider sticking my finger in the eye of my own party and telling them that I know better than all the rest of them what’s good for them and, by golly, I’m going to join the enemy and stand against them all and undermine their efforts and hard work, because I think my virtue and wisdom is bigger than theirs. Shoot, I wouldn’t even do that if I agreed with you, because it’s disloyal and dishonorable. There is such a thing as loyal opposition; you and your bumper sticker have just crossed into the disloyal opposition category. That choice reflects on you as a person, in my opinion.
Hank
I’ve been looking for a “Biden — I Can Beat Harrison’s Record” sticker. Have you seen one?
Great points. Will you grant me that Biden was the most moderate of the Democrats who ran this cycle?
I was actually driven to try to price a “Republicans for Biden” bumper sticker and other gear for joke gifts. Such is the boredom inflicted by Covid-19.
I didn’t have a lot of luck finding a website, but suffered through a few minutes on the Facebook page. My time was rewarded by this wonderful picture.
Note that those who have “character concerns” about Trump are perfectly fine with an organization featuring the likes of Rick Wilson. In a jumpsuit.
Note bar and well-stocked wine fridge on left :). Your donor $$$ at work.
Why do those “Republicans” excited about voting for Biden remind me of this character?:
Maybe. I keep thinking of “The Widening Gyre”. It really looks to me that the center cannot hold.
Gary, I will, if you’ll grant me that:
Metaphorically, if Biden wins, I can see the hardcore #NeverTrump people like those at The Lincoln Project at the Bulwark start trying to advise the president-elect on how to run his administration, and end up walking out of the virtual room with their underwear pulled up their back and over their head. And then they’ll pivot and tell the GOP what they need to do to fix things — as David Frum did after Obama’s election in 2008 — and get the exact same reaction on the Republican side.
“Mr. President, Vice-President Harris and the staff all agree it would be a show of compassion to the American public if you started your presidency with a tour of New York City area nursing homes…“
Perhaps at the beginning of the primaries, Biden may have been the most moderate…but since that time he has adopted all of his more fringe Leftist opponents’ ideas, proposed policies and programs.
He is an empty vessel that the radical Left is happily pouring their toxic ideas into his confused mind. And Biden is too senile to see how he is being used.
Biden . . . just . . . wants . . . to . . . be . . . President. He is a career politician who has no knowledge of the working world, but probably sees becoming President as some sort of validation. What happens once he gets in, as well as the likes of those that he has to get into bed with, are irrelevant to him.
Jim Geraghty has pointed out that Biden is a moderate Democrat, not a moderate. That is Biden is always in the middle of the Democrat Party. Now that the party has lurched so far to the Left, Biden has moved way Left to stay in the party center.
I’m sorry Gary, I’m glad that you are able to give your thoughts here, but based on what you said above how is your stance not “a horrible position to take as an American”?
The Democrats learned something from the last six years of the Obama administration – when you get power, do everything you can as early as possible in the term, because the backlash will come – but the ACA still survives.
Boy, I hope that this will not be me. But based upon the evidence before me, I will be voting against Trump this year.
What a great crew! There was a Zoom Town Hall for The Lincoln Project yesterday. Here it is.
Those are great points and valid concerns.
We shall see. Right now Trump is due to lose in 8 states that he won in 2016: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That would be a Biden win 368-170. Biden is 5 points or less in six more states: Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Texas and Utah. https://www.electoral-vote.com/
Right now, the Dems would pick up 5 net Senate Seats, with Republicans losing Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Montana and North Carolina, and Dems taking back Alabama. Lindsey Graham is a toss-up, and his opponent has raised more money than Lindsey in the 2nd Quarter. https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Senate/Maps/Jul10.html https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/506148-graham-challenger-harrison-raises-record-shattering-139-million-for-sc
My point is that if the Republican Party is wholly rejected by the American people in 2020, I would think that the Republican Party would seriously reconsider the wisdom of Trumpism. Even a mule learns from a hit on the head by a 2X4.