Thursday, April 25, 2024
Professional Left Podcast Episode #798: Fartstorm!
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Sarah Palin Walked So Donald Trump Could Run
I suppose you could consider this a teaser or a trailer for the No Fair Remembering Stuff podcast we just did on the subject of Sarah Palin. She was the Republican's party's beta-test version of Donald Trump, and the thing is, pretty much all of your recently-former Republican Never Trump heroes knew exactly why she was so appealing to the base.
Long before Donald Trump, they knew that the center of gravity in their party had shifted from Buckley/Romney/Bush to Limbaugh/Hannity/Gingrich.
Bill Kristol said as much in an October 27, 2009 Washington Post column.
A good time to be a conservative
Bien-pensant conservative elites and establishment-friendly Republican big shots yearn for a more moderate, temperate and sophisticated Republican Party. It's not likely to happen. And probably just as well...
Obviously, many Republicans and conservatives -- and lots of moderates and independents -- will be grateful to Mitch McConnell if he can stop ObamaCare, and to Jon Kyl if he can induce the president to embrace a stronger foreign policy. But it's unlikely that the minority party in Congress will be the source of bold new conservative leadership over the next three years. Even if Republicans pick up the House in 2010, the party's big ideas and themes for the 2012 presidential race will probably not emanate from Capitol Hill.
The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties. Some will lament this -- but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots...
The lesson activists around the country will take from this is that a vigorous, even if somewhat irritated, conservative/populist message seems to be more effective in revitalizing the Republican Party than an attempt to accommodate the wishes of liberal media elites.
So the GOP is likely, for the foreseeable future, to be of a conservative mind and in a populist mood. In American politics, there are worse things to be.
Every party in opposition goes a little crazy. For Republicans in the early Obama era, insanity took the form of the Sarah Palin spasm. Veteran politicos took the former Alaska governor seriously as a national figure. Republican primary voters nominated the likes of Todd Akin, Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. Glenn Beck seemed important enough to hold a big rally at the Lincoln Memorial.
Fortunately, serious parties eventually pull back from the fever swamps. That’s what’s happening to the Republican Party. It has re-established itself as the nation’s dominant governing party...During the primary season, groups like the Chamber of Commerce chased away or defeated renegade conservatives and opened the way for the triumph of this sort of institutional conservative...The new Republican establishment is different from the old one. It is more conservative. It’s shaped more by the ideas of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the American Enterprise Institute than it is by the mores of the country club. But, at least judging by the postelection comments coming from all corners, it does believe in politics, in legislating, in compromise.During the Palin spasm, Republicans seemed to detest the craft of governing. Hothouse flowers like Senator Ted Cruz preferred telegenic confrontation to compromise and legislation.But current party leaders are talking about incremental progress, finding areas where they can get bipartisan support: on trade, corporate taxes, the XL oil pipeline, the medical devices tax, patent reform, maybe even tax reform generally.Republicans are also talking about restoring the traditional practices of the House and Senate. Let individual members introduce bills. Let those bills work through the committee structure and get votes. Pass budgets on time and according to the rules.If the party is to fully detoxify its image, something will have to pass next year. Midwestern Republican governors will have to develop a compelling governing model. And the volcanic effusions of the Palin era will have to look like 1970s neckties — inexplicable oddities from another age.
Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges....In the end, while the press can make certain political choices understandable, it is up to voters to decide. If they can punish ideological extremism at the polls and look skeptically upon candidates who profess to reject all dialogue and bargaining with opponents, then an insurgent outlier party will have some impetus to return to the center. Otherwise, our politics will get worse before it gets better.
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
Professional Left Podcast Episode #797: No Fair Remembering Sarah Louise Palin
Monday, April 22, 2024
Sunday, April 21, 2024
Nice Job Google!
Google AI Javert just flagged an +18 year old post of mine with a "Sensitive Content Warning".
Damn.
Almost got away with it.
Shut Him Up or Shut Him Down
Donald Trump Tests Limits of Gag Order Once AgainDonald Trump posted an article containing an attack on the daughter of the judge overseeing his hush-money trial, once again testing the limits of the gag order imposed on him.
The former president shared a Newsmax article on his Truth Social platform on Saturday in which a former Trump lawyer called for Judge Juan Merchan to recuse himself from the trial "because of his daughter's political fundraising activities."
In the article, David Schoen, who represented Trump in his second impeachment trial when president, was quoted as saying: "We know that the judge and his daughter have a vested interest in making sure this case isn't dismissed and goes on."
In another post on the platform, Trump said his trial is being president over by "POSSIBLY THE MOST CONFLICTED JUDGE IN JUDICIAL HISTORY, WHO MUST BE REMOVED FROM THIS HOAX IMMEDIATELY."...
Rolling Stone notes the irony:
‘They’ve Taken Away My Right to Speak,’ Trump Says While Ranting to ReportersThe former president got very mad about his inability attack witnesses and jurors before reportedly dozing off in court again
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Professional Left Podcast Episode #796: The Great Republican Sell-Out
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
The Conservative Road to Damascus is a Merry-Go-Round
The Great Hypocrisy of the Pro-Life Movement
I still believe there are many deeply sincere pro-life Americans. I see their anger in response to Trump’s statements, even when they’ve previously supported him. They are people who genuinely believe that all human life is precious and should be protected from conception until natural death.
But I also recognize that many of the critics of the pro-life movement were right all along. When push came to shove, the pro-life position was either secondary to other values or it genuinely was punitively tribal — enthusiastically aimed straight at the supposedly licentious left but ready to be abandoned the instant the commitment to unborn children might endanger the larger MAGA political project. Abortion is the poison pill that Trump doesn’t want to swallow.
At its worst, the pro-life movement was also deeply cynical. Many of its members have spent the last eight years mocking and bullying pro-life conservatives who’ve refused to support Trump, even when we rightly said he was a terrible ambassador for a virtuous cause. I’ve been called a baby-killer or murderer or heretic more times than I can count.
The older I get, the more I’m convinced that we simply don’t know who we are — or what we truly believe — until our values carry a cost. For more than 40 years, the Republican Party has made the case that life begins at conception. Alabama’s Supreme Court agreed. Yet the Republican Party can’t live with its own philosophy...
You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I-I am the man who has granted you your wish.
Does Bush Owe the Religious Right?...What do they think Bush owes them? His campaign barely had time to sweep up the confetti last Nov. 3 before the victorious President got a congratulatory bouquet of praise, threats, warnings and demands. "In your re-election, God has graciously granted America — though she doesn't deserve it — a reprieve from the agenda of paganism," wrote Bob Jones III, president of the namesake South Carolina university that his grandfather founded to foster "Christ-like" character. "Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing." But if Jones saw the victory as an opportunity to be seized, others were preaching the biblical virtues of patience and caution. "Can we handle success and increased influence with grace and prudence?" Watergate conspirator turned prison evangelist Chuck Colson wrote in a column. "Sad to say, the church has managed to shoot itself in the foot almost every time it has achieved power in society. So what we need right now is a bracing dose of humility."Having helped wage a presidential campaign over big issues like a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage, conservative Christians are not likely to be content winning skirmishes like the one that newly installed Education Secretary Margaret Spellings fought last week against the cartoon character Buster, famous for being Arthur's best friend. She objected to one episode that featured Buster visiting a real-life lesbian couple in Vermont. After her warning about the dangers of exposing young viewers to "the lifestyles portrayed in the episode," PBS decided not to distribute the show to its 350 publicly financed stations.As Bush begins his last term in the White House, the voters who believe they did more than anyone else to put him there are asking themselves and him: What now? And when, if not now? "He's not the typical politician who 'understands' us," says Michael Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association. "He's one of us."...Evangelical activists, for their part, say that as Bush looks forward, he should also look back. They claim that what brought churchgoing Christians (including a record number of Hispanics) to the polls more than any other issue last year was gay marriage. Initiatives banning it were on the ballot in 11 states and passed in every one, overwhelmingly in almost every case. So religious groups were startled and angry when Bush, bowing to what he said were political realities, seemed to signal in a pre-Inaugural interview with the Washington Post that he would not press the Senate to pass the federal ban.The reverberations came almost instantly. Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who sends a daily e-mail to 125,000 Christian activists, says his computer mailbox was jammed with hundreds of complaints, many lamenting, "I worked my heart out for this guy." The Arlington Group, a coalition of conservative religious organizations, quickly fired off to Bush political guru Karl Rove a private letter signed by such figures as Bauer, Don Wildmon of the American Family Association, Focus on the Family's James Dobson, conservative standard bearer Paul Weyrich and evangelist Jerry Falwell. They laid down a none-too-subtle threat that the Administration's "defeatist attitude" on gay marriage might make it "impossible for us to unite our movement on an issue such as Social Security privatization where there are already deep misgivings."
-
To date, this is how the very few interactions I've had with Never Trumpers have gone, because I want to talk about the Befor...
-
* (I will rarely do a modification to an existing post, but this seemed too sadly appropriate not to add.) This is a graphic-intensive post,...