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Recorded about 18 hours after the polls closed in New Hampshire, Commentary Magazine Editor John Podhoretz and Assistant Online Editor Noah Rothman reflect on history being made before our eyes. A Socialist who wasn’t even a Democrat a year ago wins 61 percent. A billionaire reality-TV star who has never voted Republican is the clear frontrunner in the GOP. Can Hillary Clinton survive her own party’s doubts about her trustworthiness? Can the Republican Party survive its own cravenness in the face of Trumpism? Is America going the way of vaudeville and the Betamax?
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“… A billionaire reality-TV star who has never voted Republican”
Where are they getting that? Trump doesn’t often vote in primaries, but he’s voted in most general elections, and several times for Republican candidates.
I was so hoping that the title would be a joke and not the usual idiot-preferred mangling of “uncharted territory.” Unless it was something to do with party platforms being like charters or just that my blinding rage concerning this phrase kept me from seeing the jest, it would appear that hope is dead. As are William Safire, E.B. White, and William Strunk, Jr. Enjoyable podcast irregardless.
@SParker It was a typo and it is now fixed. Thanks for the catch.
Guys you dont have to worry about the gloom factor, you sound positively sunny compared to my reaction to current events.
I keep looking in vain for signs of intelligent life but see very little to indicate the citizenry is willing or able to meet the tragedy of the last 8 years with anything other than farce.
we live in an age of mindless rhetoric and emotionally f**kwitted melodrama. The reasonable person has no choice but to retreat and try to prepare for the fallout.
We sold our souls for temporal gratification and now we live moment to moment, unable to recognize timeless truths, unwilling to examine our own contribution to the chaos, desperately seeking a man who will make everything okay by sheer force of will and a red hat so we can return to our regularly scheduled programming of NFL and streaming porn, but i repeat myself…
Ross Douthat had an excellent to the question Noah posed about Trump. Basically, stop trying to knock him off pedestals he’s not standing on, and focus on the ones he is:
I do not get from the podcast that the participants are all that familiar with Ted Cruz’s foreign policy, if they are lumping him in with Trump.
Wow. I listened to the finance guys Kudlow and Pawlenty on their podcast almost giddily talking up the wonders of a possible Trump presidency, and then listened to John and Noah take the completely opposite view. Mind bending.
“…. who will destroy the animating philosophy of the Republican party”, and who will also fail to do what he is promising those gullible enough to support him. Frankly, if he wins, Cruz or Rubio should run as a…fourth? Fifth-party candidate.
“…which would be a spectacular war crime”- yup. And that’s part of Mr. T.’s alleged “positive message”. He’s a wanna-be war criminal.
First I picked up Andrew Klavan’s new show and now comes this one. I’m in podcast heaven as our nation heads the other way. Between the arrogant mogul leading the polls in a once-glorious party and the criminal leading in the other, we are surely doomed. Keep it up guys. I need all the wise perspective I can get.
Why is taking the oil a war crime? Who decided that?
The only non-criminal way to go to war is to do it for no possible national interest following rules of engagement that ensure it’s easier to kill your soldiers than theirs, and if you’re American you’ll still be branded war criminals even if you do.
It’s not just the Status Quo of the party, it’s the Status Quo of the pundits too. The only opinions that can be expressed are the ones that haven’t been ruled out-of-bounds by the media for being “impolite”. Whether or not we agree with Trump politically there are those of us who welcome a disruption of that system.
The rules have all been written to make sure that conservatism loses.