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On the second of this week’s podcasts, John Podhoretz asks Abe Greenwald and Noah Rothman whether the health-care debacle this week is simply a reflection of the same pressures on the conservative coalition Donald Trump saw and conquered by running for president last year–and what it will mean for him and them that he has provided no rallying point for Republican politicians. And then they discuss OJ Simpson. Give a listen.
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Published in: Politics
Keep those borders open.
It’s all Trump’s fault. Those Republicans promising repeal for 7 years now are the greatest Conservatives this country has ever seen.
Telling irony in the show is John’s valid points regarding the many conservatisms within the Republican Party followed by Noah’s assertion, time and time again, that those who don’t adhere to his distinct minority brand of academic neoconservatism either don’t know what they are thinking or are incoherent or disingenuous.
Rothman is a sharp young man, and seems to be personally pleasant, but he may be the most dismissive and condescending personality at Ricochet, though his personal style defuses some of that effect.
On some upcoming issues — infrastructure spending, maternal leave — Trump will roil the party and redefine and dilute conservatism. But to ascribe the dysfunction over Obamacare repeal or the forthcoming dysfunction over tax reform/tax cuts to Trump is unserious.
Do you imagine President Rubio or Kasich would be penning a reform agreed to by Mike Lee and Susan Collins? How many GOP governors expanded Medicaid?
Trump is a transactional politician. Whatever bill the GOP put on his desk he would have signed.
No one voted for Trump thinking he was going to provide an articulate, comprehensive and compelling conservative vision.
I enjoyed the podcast, as I normally do, but the thing that struck me as horrifying–genuinely cringe inducing–was the fact that one of the commentators was in the 7th grade during the OJ trial, and he watched the verdict live in school. I mean, first I’m made to think, I am old as f***. (Sorry, @henryracette, who currently has a piece posted about the too casual use of obscenities in our culture.) And then I must conclude, “No wonder Reality TV became so successful in this country….”
Imagine Podhoretz setting up and asking the questions and Epstein answering.
Be curious to hear Noah’s straight-up no-b.s. feelings about Black Lives Matter and Heather MacDonald’s recent book “The War on Cops.”
Does Noah have a positive or at least mixed opinion of the former and — incredibly — a negative opinion of the latter and also its author?
I fear he might.
Why? What makes you feel that way from anything that was said in this podcast? I completely don’t get how you got to BLM or Heather MacDonald.
Is it because there was the comment that LA once spent too little money on police and thus had some predictable problems within its small department more than a generation ago because people in LA didn’t want to spend an appropriate share of tax dollars to keep order? That the LA police department fostered a reputation that violence was highly possible in encounters with the public?
If a commentator recognizes that there has ever been abuse of power by any police departments for even complicated reasons–or that some individuals are subject to corruption whatever uniform they wear–that means that the commentator would naturally embrace BLM and disavow MacDonald? That’s quite a leap, isn’t it? What exactly is your purpose in making that kind of leap?
Regardless, I read Commentary at which Rothman is the associate editor, and your vision of what his feelings would be are certainly not the position that’s ever been presented there. Rather, BLM has been addressed as a radical black liberation movement with roots in organizations like the BLA. Assaults on free speech–specifically assaults like those directed at MacDonald–are viewed as pernicious and dangerous. Per the views it actually publishes/espouses, the magazine seems to abhor the demagoguery of groups like BLM and value the scholarship of academics like MacDonald. It is reasonable to think those views align with an associate editor’s views.
So… uh. I see no evidence for what you’ve implied, and I feel that you’ve inserted it here only to discredit the podcast and a young commentator you dislike for whatever other reason.
It’s because he was in the 7th grade during the OJ trial right? (Yeah. That makes me feel old, too.)
I’m pretty sure it was John, not Noah, who was talking about LA spending too little money on police officers back in the 80s and early 90s.
Rather, it was Noah’s remarks about cops gunning down unarmed black men and getting off scott free (or with extremely light sentences) that motivated my question.
Noah didn’t think to add that the “epidemic” of cops gunning down unarmed black men is a myth… that it absolutely happens but at a rate disproportionate to the rate at which blacks commit violent crime… that in the same circumstances a typical U.S. cop is more likely to shoot an unarmed white suspect than a black one… etc etc.
He made no effort to provide that sort of context. Instead he implicitly reinforced the Progressive (and highly toxic) idea that institutional racism is alive and well in the 21st century, at least as far as cops are concerned.
Sorry for the mix-up of commentators. I listened to the podcast earlier so could not remember exactly. This is in part because I heard nothing said that was egregious or required broader context, though I appreciate your specific reference here. I mean… the audience of a Commentary podcast is already familiar with the type of data you wanted, and that was not the focus of the conversation on any count.
Ironically, you’re asking for an asterisk of the sort that progressives require all the time, i.e. if I point out there are some obvious problems in a minority neighborhood, I must also give a laundry list of finer attributes about the broader minority group to prove that I’m not a racist, or I’m called a racist: “Multiple terrorists have emerged from that mosque” MUST INCLUDE “but studies show most Muslims in the United States are a peace loving people with no violent record.” That gets super tedious.
Therefore, I still think your implications are unfair, and your conclusions about what this guy “thinks” are not supported by the evidence.
This is actually a terrific idea — and I’m not being sarcastic. I pay to listen to a podcast between the two of them. So different yet so similar (and I love them both).