Never Trump

Open Thread

Mark Noonan82 Comments

Trump announces for 2024, McConnell gets re-elected as Senate GOP leader, the GOP takes the House.

A lot of people are saying a lot of things about what this means and making their stout assertions of what will happen. Spoiler: nobody has the first clue. If the election we just had didn’t tell you that you can’t predict things, then nothing will. As for me, I predict nothing. I will pay no attention to any poll. I will pay no heed to the Experts telling us how it will go. It will be as it will be and we’ll find out after it is over how it went.

That said, there is still much we can say. And of course I’ll say it!

Trump’s speech last night was rather low key, wasn’t it? I’ve never subscribed to the view that Trump is unscripted: I’m pretty confident that he plans everything out to the last detail. So, that was the effect he wanted to present. Why? Could be because after last week’s disaster, being too rah rah would look ridiculous. Could also be that he’s trying to overall strike a new tone: “look, guys, it is bad: we can fix it, here’s how”. Could also be influenced by the potential GOP field…you know, look weak and see who strikes first and then your response is a counter-attack which, no matter how blistering it is, always seems fair turnabout by regular folks.

As for myself, I have decided not to commit myself to anyone this early on. I’m going to see how it plays out. As we get to the end of 2023 I’ll probably decide who my candidate is but even that is subject to change based on circumstances. I really don’t think anyone is wise to commit this early. Once you start getting invested in a thing, you start to blind yourself to possible alternatives. I’m keeping my powder dry.

A lot of Never Trump is now gleeful thinking that the Bad Orange Man is done. He may be! But don’t count on anything. Certainly don’t count Trump out given what we’re getting in the Senate. The bottom line is that a huge portion of the GOP base despises the GOP leadership – and the Senate GOP leadership in particular. I have had a lot of respect for McConnell but I do believe his time is done and he’s making a mistake by hanging on – and if it starts to look like he only hung on thwart Trump, then Trump’s stock with the GOP base will only grow and solidify. McConnell is very much the past presiding over the councils of the present – and his post election statement about finding ways to work with Biden caused immediate outrage. We didn’t send GOPers to Congress to pull Biden’s chestnuts out of the fire! McCarthy, set to be Speaker, seems to at least understand this a bit. He’s a squish, but he also doesn’t hold the base in contempt the way McConnell does. With Mitch there making deals with Biden, Trump will have the perfect foil for a GOP primary – and his opponents will be faced with the stark choice of denouncing McConnell or being seen as Establishment tools.

I make no predictions but I’m working on the assumption that we’re going to lose 2024. Always hard to pry the incumbent Party out of the White House, no matter. Absent a complete economic meltdown (a 50/50 prospect at the moment), let’s just say we’re gonna lose. This, first off, will make any defeat feel less bad – and it can also impel us to try things. Zeldin is pushing to be RNC chair and he has it right: you fight in every precinct. You don’t resign any of the board to the enemy. I think that if we discard the worn out notions of the past and simply try new things we might get some remarkable results. As we can’t change the early voting laws in Blue/Purple States, use them (it is already being done to great effect in NY and CA – and Newsom, the Democrat’s rising star, is way underperforming what was expected because of it). Find a guy or gal to run in the Deep Blue. Mike Garcia is apparently the Giga-Chad: I guess he won a Biden +8 district in 2020 so the Democrats decided to get rid of him by making his district Biden +12..and he still won easily. While voting in the House like he represents Alabama! One jokester said “its 2032, Democrats redistrict Garcia into downtown Los Angeles and swear they’ll get him this time!”. Mostly what it shows is that if you try and find the right message and messenger, no place is really off the table.

That is the attitude I want us to carry into 2024: lets just fight. Do our best. Try something new. It can’t possibly go any worse than it just did!

What I’m also thinking is that DeSantis should think carefully here. I don’t go with the Trumpsters who think he’s just a GOPe mole. He came out of the GOPe, but his fights against woke Corporations show that he’s learned the lesson. Mitch and Co might think that RDS is their ticket back…but they may find that, as the GOPe did with TR, that they just made that damned cowboy President. My concern is that if 2024 is a loser, then we don’t want to expend RDS in a bruising fight to beat Trump and then have him lose the White House. If I were an RDS advisor, I’d be thinking long and hard about telling my guy to back away from 2024. Or make only a token run and then get behind Trump. It works like this:

If you get behind Trump and work your tail off for him, you’ll build up huge goodwill with the Trumpsters. They won’t forget: they’ll be in your pocket for 2028. This works out even if Trump loses. If, however, Trump were to win then its still just 4 years, Trump can’t run again and you’ve not only got the Trumpsters in your pocket, you’ve got the President clearing your path in the primaries in 2028. Plus if we do win in 2024, we’ll almost certainly be coming in during a time of severe economic pain that will take years to dig out of. Might be better to let Trump tackle that: he’ll be free to piss people off, after all.

Anyways, that is mostly where my thinking is right now. I will add one last thing: the only people I’ll pay no attention to at all are those who say they won’t back the GOP nominee unless it is their choice. Such people – and there are Trumpist and Never-Trump people like this – are not only useless, they are destructive. I’ll vote in 2024 for whomever is on the GOP ticket because that person will always be the moral and intellectual superior of the Democrat. If a person can’t commit to that, then get out: we got better things to do.

The Endurance of Lies

Mark Noonan14 Comments

Over this past few weeks it was fully confirmed that Hillary Clinton and her team made up Trump-Russia out of whole cloth, passed it on to the MSM and Justice and both those institutions ran with it – for years – even though a cursory examination right at the start showed the whole concept was false. For us on our side, we knew it fairly instinctively that it was false – partially based on our mistrust of the MSM but mostly because it simply didn’t make sense that Russia would want Trump as President. They knew Hillary Clinton very well: they knew, that is, that a second Clinton Administration would sell out American interests as readily as the first Clinton Administration (not to mention as readily as the Obama Administration). Russia and indeed all global powers wanted Clinton to win in 2016. Nobody knew for sure what Trump was going to be like, but they knew – every person on Earth with an interest knew – that a Hillary Clinton Presidency meant continued hobbling of American economic and military power and American assistance in undermining the American position in the world. If Russia, or any foreign actor, was to interfere in the 2016 election, it would be to benefit Hillary.

And now that it is all exposed what do we see? That people still believe the anti-Trump Narrative. I see it all day long on social media. Of course, it helps that so far the New York Times has not run a story about Clinton’s role in starting Trump-Russia. Nobody is more ignorant of the world than someone who is an avid consumer of the MSM! But while belief based on ignorance is still bad, belief based on refusal to admit error is much worse, because that is what causes our side the most trouble.

I’ve been watching the Never Trump and the Dislike Trump people and while they do now know Trump-Russia was false, they still go with the overarching anti-Trump Narrative. In other words, faced with the proven fact that the primary objection to Trump is false, they still fall back on the feeling that Trump was and is just bad and so must be opposed. And their conviction that Trump is bad is based entirely upon information provided to them by the very same sources which made up and ran with the Trump-Russia story. The believed or at least lent credibility to Trump-Russia and this made them oppose Trump and now that they know it was all false, they still want to maintain their anti-Trump stance. The Lie is dead, long live the Lie!

I used to think that lies couldn’t endure the truth. Turns out I was wrong: if it is a lie that people want to believe, it is going to be quite durable. And for many people, the anti-Trump lies are comforting. And I think this is because they simply do not want to confront what Trump exposed: the utter rot in all American institutions. For these people, life remains good (though inflation is now putting some pressure on that). They tend to work in professions that don’t require a lot of effort and they are well paid. They live in nice areas. As long as they don’t rock the boat too much, they can stay on the gravy train for life and, with a little luck, make a great deal of money. But even if they don’t rise to the heights of money and fame, they still live well. Writing a couple articles a month is a lot less bothersome than clocking in 40 hours a week, right? Trump showed them that while life was good for them, things were bad for the United States. That millions of people were losing their hope for the future…and that the enemies of the United States were on a rampage. And the fault for everything going wrong was in the American institutions which had become both stupid and corrupt in equal measures. How can you defend that? Well, you really can’t – but you can at least attack Trump as a backhanded way of defending the Establishment. An anti-Trump diatribe kept you on the gravy train…pointing out that Trump has been maligned by MSM and government liars gets you kicked off right quick.

So, expect them to continue. And take your fun while you can – these people sift data now to “prove” that Trump is no longer popular with the base and that we’re finally going to get Romney II in 2024 to restore the Balance or some such drivel. Basing their whole worldview on a pack of lies, they simply don’t see what is coming – and their tears will be even more delicious than the liberal tears. But I do wonder – once Trump or Trump II (DeSantis) becomes President and starts to dismantle the Empire of Lies, will they then come around to admitting they were wrong?

Open Thread

Mark Noonan22 Comments

You read about the Great Terror during the French Revolution and from your safe, prosperous American home you wonder how people could act like that? I mean, you understand that there was injustice and even cruelty in the Ancien Régime, but you still look upon it in shock. And then you read a piece in Bloomberg opinion which has an upper class twit telling us to eat lentils and let the dog die to deal with inflation.

And then you understand.

Cruelty and injustice can be dealt with – it is having people treat you with contempt that gets the blood boiling and makes cheering as a noble’s head comes off something understandable.

And there is monumental contempt for us.

When the Hunter Biden story was actively suppressed by the MSM and the Tech Giants in 2020, do recall that 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter stating that the Hunter story was Russian disinformation. It was this letter which allowed Team Pudding Brain, the DNC and the MSM to justify spiking the story. People actually got banned from social media for bringing the story up! The MSM and Tech efforts were bad enough, but the crucial thing was the bald-faced lie by the intelligence officials…without that, the rest wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. But really grasp that: the organizations charged with protecting American national security produced 50 people to lie in print. When you add in the fact that the FBI knew all about this months before it broke and not a single person there blew the whistle you really see our problem: they are against us. They hate us. They hold us in contempt.

I pointed out on Twitter earlier that the same MSM and government agencies who assure us the 2020 vote was legit are the same people who lied about Hunter Biden.

And, yet, you still can’t get through to Never Trump on this. I’m not talking about those Never Trump who have morphed into Never Republican…I’m talking about those who remain Republican and are already largely lining up behind DeSantis for 2024: they remain impervious. One of the more famous said today that he’s backing DeSantis because he doesn’t have the character flaws of Trump. Which is a sort of reverse lie: what character flaws does Trump have? The only one’s we know about are those told to us by government and MSM sources which are proven liars. I mean, seriously: maybe Trump is an immoral man, but nobody can really know. He’s been so consistently lied about that no outsider can sift it and determine what might be true or false (though we can rely on it that Trump has never broken a law – if he had, even in the most trivial manner, he’d already have been tried for it). But, also, for all we know, he’s a moral man. Sure, he had his divorces and his playboy days when young…but young billionaires tend to do that sort of thing and in the year when we have drag queen story time, I’m going to place getting busy with a super model rather low on the moral outrage scale. And rely on this: were Trump still playing around on the side, we’d know about it…I’m sure the MSM has people watching him 24/7. So if he was a bit of a cad from 25-50, he’s not today.

Dr Oz is still rolling along in the Pennsylvania Senate race. I get the doubts about him – he’s from Oprah Universe, something I hold in utter contempt. Over the years, as part of the price of being part of that universe, he staked out positions which are pretty much anathema to anyone on the right, especially on issues like “red flag” laws for gun ownership. But, I also don’t automatically condemn him for that. Lets face it: we’ve all had an education the past 7 years. Perhaps Oz has looked around and figured a few things out? He’s presenting himself as the Trumpist candidate. So far, Trump hasn’t endorsed him – but the rumor from Trump World is that Melania, who apparently is a good friend of Oz, is pushing for him. We’ll see how it comes out – to me, the most important thing is getting the (R) to victory. Is Oz that guy? Don’t know. But I can’t see how he’d be worse than Toomey…who took our Tea Party movement to get into office and then became a colorless GOPe Establishment guy once in, going as far down as to vote to convict Trump in the second trial (and that vote sunk his career in the GOP).

The war with the Ukraine continues to drag on – and Putin, so far, shows no sign of quitting. Ukraine still stands firm and there are even reports of local Ukrainian counter-attacks. OTOH, a recent video of Zelensky in Kiev looked a little photo-shopped. Like they had him in front of a green screen that they projected Kiev on to. I still hold it isn’t our fight – but it does affect the world. In one case, over food supply. The Ukraine is one of the world’s bread baskets. The Ukrainian farmers should be starting to plant their crops right about now. If they aren’t – and it looks like they’re not – then the world is going to have some serious problems in the Fall.

In other news on that front, China and India are working deals with Putin – China and India do need Russian oil and other raw materials, after all. From a geo-political standpoint, our obsession with Putin is taking us out of the global equation while a should-be ally (India) and our definite rival (India) are cutting deals which undermine America’s overall position. My view: we should have declared absolute neutrality in the Russo-Ukrainian war, holding ourselves willing to host peace talks and providing humanitarian aid to both sides.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan40 Comments

What will happen in Virginia on Tuesday? Your guess is as good as mine – if I was confident that fraud was unlikely, I’d figure that Youngkin has it. All trends, polls and increasingly ridiculous actions by the Democrats indicate that Youngkin has the momentum. But, after 2020, none of us are going to be sure in any place Democrats have control over the vote count. At all events, if they manage to cheat to a narrow win, it is still a disaster for them. This should be a walk over for them…Virginia with its massive population of DC people living in Northern Virginia is a Blue State. It isn’t California Blue, but its just a couple steps away from it. And the Democrats are in trouble.

And they are in trouble because at the top of their heap sits a senile old crook who’s staff is made up of idiots. Add to this the complete failure by Democrat Congressional leadership and what we have is a nation spinning out of control into political and economic paralysis. My view is that Biden didn’t get close to 81 million votes in 2020 but even supposing he did, those votes are long gone, now. He’ll keep the partisan Dems on board but all indications are that he’s already lost Independents and absent a complete turn around where things are positively booming in November of 2022, the Democrat party is going to get wiped out everywhere they don’t have total control over. Its why they’re doing things like their absurd redistricting in Illinois which will result in 3 GOP House members in a State Trump got 43% percent in…these are desperate expedients to save as much as they can.

Kinzinger announced his retirement today – it looks like, at most, only 1 or 2 of the GOPer’s who voted to impeach Trump over 1/6 will return to Congress in 2023. Good riddance. They cast their action as a vote against political extremism but that’s only because they’re stupid and corrupt. Whatever 1/6 was, it wasn’t an insurrection. It wasn’t a threat to the Constitutional order. The only person killed was an unarmed protestor, shot by an incompetent cop. The impeachment of Trump over it was a crude and disgusting political ploy and no person of sense or honor could lend it credibility. They did: and now their careers are largely over and they’ll end their days as pathetic “Conservative” punching bags on MSNBC.

Some Conservatives have recently made the startling discovery that we should be gearing our economy so that one person working can support a spouse and kids. Glad to see the guys getting to where I was more than a decade ago.

What destroyed the Bonhomme Richard? It appears that what the ship lacked was sailors. Go ahead and read this article about it – and if you are an old sailor like me, weep. I wasn’t on my ship part of the Damage Control Party but I could have been grabbed at random to fight a fight or fix a leak because I was trained to do so – by actually fighting staged fires in training. I knew how to use the equipment and where it was stored. To this day, I would know exactly where to hit the fire with water or chemical retardants if I was aboard a ship on fire. It astonishes me that this basic sort of training is lacking. And, my goodness, the training, itself, is the most fun you’ll ever have in the Navy! They set steel buildings on fire for you and let you go put it out. For a bunch of 19 and 20 year old kids, it is a blast. But, I guess the kids are busy with other things these days.

One of the things that scares me about cruise ships is the knowledge that hardly any of the crew are sailors who know how to handle a ship in a crisis. I didn’t imagine in my wildest dreams that US naval warships had become heavily armed cruise ships. The report about the Bonhomme Richard shows that the ship wasn’t prepared for disaster and the crew was untrained in how to deal with disaster. It was a war ship! It is supposed to he shot at. It is supposed to experience life and ship threatening disaster…and everyone on board better know how to knock down a fire and plug a leak. The next President simply must clean house – drop all the intersectional pronoun drivel and get our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines back to doing their jobs.

America’s Future is Trump or Bolshevism

Mark Noonan9 Comments

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution. – G K Chesterton

I saw earlier today a bit of a Blue Check Never Trump True Conservative discussion, the gist of which was a division between those True Cons who say they want to keep fighting in the realm of practical politics and those who are throwing up their hands and will just observe from the outside, as it were. To be clear, this is different from those True Conservatives who have now become mere Democrats (Bill Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, etc). These people still argue in favor of at least some conservative ideals (though I’ve noticed in all of them a softening on issues such as gun rights and abortion) but they simply hate Donald Trump and they despise his legions of supporters. Some, like Jonah Goldberg, have now given up – they’ve written us off, you see? We’re not just Deplorable, but Irredeemable. Others, like Dan MClaughlin haven’t quite given up on us, but they still hate Trump and figure their job – their duty! – is to ween us away from Trump so that a pure, clean Conservatism can revive and… and…

Do what? I mean, what really?

The quote above tells you what: this clean, pure Conservatism will merely ratify what the Progressives did a few years ago. It is all Conservatism has ever done ever since it first arose in response to the enormities of the French Revolution. What the Goldbergs and McLaughlins are aiming at, if anything, is their idealized version of Conservatism circa 1977. If you recall (and some of us are just old enough to remember) it was going to dismantle the New Deal and restore the old American ideal of rugged self reliance. It was going to restore order in the streets, discipline in the classroom and the rule of law in the country. It was led by some very high intellects and, of course, in Ronald Reagan it had a leader who could articulate the ideology in a way that regular folks responded to. And, of course, for all the things that had happened from, say, 1967 to 1977, we were still living in the America our grandfathers would recognize. The seeds of social disintegration were firmly planted and being vigorously cultivated in popular culture, but it hadn’t fully taken hold. Most people were still living in families and there hadn’t been a divorce. Most wives still stayed at home. Most jobs included a nice pension to retire on. We still were a manufacturing powerhouse.

This old Conservatism swept very famously into power in 1980 and here was the big chance – we had the White House, the Senate and a shell-shocked Democrat House majority which still contained a fairly large number of center-right Democrats. We had our matchless Ronald Reagan to lead the charge. And what did we get? Tax cuts and a defense build up.

That’s it. We didn’t even get rid of the Department of Education which had only been created the year before Reagan came in. We couldn’t even dispense with that boondoggle for the teacher’s unions. There was no push back against the social disintegration and no effort was made, even on the smallest level, to stop the hard left’s march through our institutions. But this is still what the Never Trump True Conservatives want us to go back to – to something that ultimately failed.

I’m sorry, guys, but you had your chance. The True Conservatives of 40 years ago messed up. They lost. They conserved nothing. Now its 2021 and there are no rules or norms or even an agreement on basic things such as what is right and wrong. We’ve got a Democrat party enthralled to whomever is the most woke at the moment on the Left. They are pushing programs which will disenfranchise us and force us underground. They are striving to set up an electoral system where no matter what, we lose. Led by whomever is most lunatic at the moment, the Democrat party is leading us, step by step, into a Bolshevik future. It doesn’t matter if Pelosi or Biden don’t mean to lead us there – it is where we’re shoved because inside the Democrat party are hard-left, anti-American, hate-filled lunatics who ultimately set the agenda. At best, the most insane proposals get pushed to the back of the line for a while – but they never get rejected and a few years down the road, they are brought back up to be implemented as if it were common knowledge that they had to be implemented.

We won’t ever go back to the Old America. It is done. Finished. Kaput. A nice memory of days gone by, never to return. What sort of America we will have is what the argument is about – and we are here deciding if it will be a Bolshevik America, or a non-Bolshevik America. It doesn’t matter that you don’t like Trump. It doesn’t matter that you don’t like his most ardent supporters. It is either Trump and his people, or some purple-haired radical activist getting you fired because you didn’t say the correct words fast enough. I mean, seriously: take your pick. Whatever Trump and his Trumpsters are up to, they aren’t going to force you to say things you know are untrue. The left will. They’ll make it a condition for you to be able to hold a job, carry out financial transactions, own a home. You can try to fool yourself – but I don’t believe you can, really – that they won’t go for the most radical of the current proposals, but you’re stupid if you do. You know they will. What was insane on the left a mere five years ago is dogmatic Party Line today.

Anyone who wants to be free has to get in line here. I don’t like a lot of things. But there is only one side which wants to force me to say things I know aren’t true in order to live. I already can’t say a hundred things I know are true – as in indisputable, scientific facts – because if I say them I risk social destruction. The next step is to force me to say lies. I don’t want to go there. I just want to live my life free of coercion. I’m not asking for much. But I can only get that – I can only possibly get that – by signing on to Donald Trump and his supporters. Only they have the chance of stopping the imposition of totalitarian dictatorship in the United States. It isn’t what I would have preferred. I can think of lots of better possibilities. But the only thing I got his him and them so, I’m in. Because I’m not stupid.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan48 Comments

Now that McConnell has come out against Majorie Taylor Greene all the liberals who hate us will…keep hating us.

We must stop playing this game with them.

Bernie Sanders is a White Supremacist. Eventually, every non-insane person will realize that you can’t be woke enough. That’s when we win.

Portland has discovered that allowing Antifa to run riot for a year kinda sucks.

The guys at the Lincoln Project are pretty much what you expected them to be. We must keep in mind that for decades, these people were the real leaders of the GOP. Now we know that some of the accusations against “us” were true because these garbage people were our face to the world. I am so glad they unmasked themselves and are no longer part of us.

The MSM is now reporting what a lousy job Cuomo has been doing in NY regarding ‘Rona. This, I suspect, is Team Harris making sure Cuomo doesn’t run for the Democrat nomination in 2024.

We’re supposed to get hair-on-fire about the coup in Myanmar. Democracy is under attack! Well, it is a Democracy which brutally forced into exile about 740,000 Rohingya Muslims. I’m not sure I want us propping up a “Democracy” which does that sort of thing. I’m also just sick and tired of Imperial America. Its none of our business. The people of Myanmar have my prayers for peace, freedom and prosperity and I hope they are able to work out their problems. Without us.

Florida never went into the massive lockdowns and they are doing very well – and their economy isn’t crushed. The lunatic Democrat attacks on Governor DeSantis are because they fear this man running against Kamala. You know – the lady installed as VP. Who couldn’t even make it out of the Iowa Caucuses.

Post Vacation Open Thread

Mark Noonan170 Comments

Hi guys! Sorry, went to San Diego for a few days. Del Mar and La Jolla are still heaven on Earth, even though they are in Commiefornia.

Anyways…

I think three days of rioting is “ok” in the sense that people won’t get too upset about it. Three weeks of rioting raises a lot of eyebrows. Three months of rioting…I think there could be massive reaction against it. Like a Trump 45 State landslide sort of reaction. I don’t know, of course: I am theorizing. Democrats seem convinced that chaos helps them: the implied threat is “vote Biden or this continues”. But Trump has his answer for that: sending in federal cops to arrest the BLM/Antifa types on federal charges (did you know merely spray painting a federal building can get you a year in jail?; the laws against vandalizing federal property have some teeth!). Trump is letting the American people know that their choice is him and peace or them and war. We’ll see how people decide: but I’m starting to run across deep blue people who have had enough.

Do keep in mind that we are already 2nd class citizens in our own country. That is an established fact: the St Louis couple who defended themselves have been charged with a felony while the rioters get their charges dropped. To be sure, the State AG is going to ride to the rescue, and that is good: but how many times will you and I be let off by liberal city politicians and how many times will the GOP AG ride to our rescue? We are the oppressed; not them. Their oppression is a made-up thing (so made up that they have to fake racist incidents) our oppression is real: our jobs and social standing is at grave risk merely for people finding out we’re Trump voters. Voting Trump is the only chance we’ve got to restore ourselves to full citizenship.

Kasich will speak at Biden’s convention. I think that Kasich will switch parties and run as a Democrat in 2024, myself. I think he also knows that Biden is doomed and he’s essentially going to build his brand as the man who can lead the Democrats out of the far left fever swamps starting in 2021. It won’t work: he doesn’t realize how much he’s despised by the left base of the Democrat party. Only a complete rejection of everything he’s ever stood for will be acceptable to them…and even then, they’ll just take the scalp and go with someone who has always been a true believer. Its not that Kasich isn’t willing to crawl…its that no one like a turncoat.

Planned Parenthood is ditching their founder, Margaret Sanger, over her support for eugenics. They won’t ditch the baby-killing, of course. After all, Hitler built the Autobahn…

This be ridiculous.

I don’t think teachers realize how much they are shooting themselves in the foot by insisting schools remain closed. Every ounce of goodwill they have is being wrecked. Kids don’t seem to catch the ‘Rona very much and they also don’t seem to transmit it very much. Meanwhile, store shelf stockers have been doing heroic work for months. My hope: this kills the very concept of public education.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan29 Comments

Jared Kushner’s peace plan was released – looks like it would be excellent for the Palestinians if they would accept the deal (and the money) and settle down to build themselves a national life…but we can rely on it the Palestinian leadership will reject it out of hand and work up some paid mobs to pretend to be the Palestinian people expressing their righteous anger. Two things will decide the fate of this plan:

1. Trump getting re-elected: if he is, then US policy on this won’t change any time soon.

2. Most of the Muslim world telling the Palestinians to accept the deal or get bent.

We’ll see how it comes out. Elder of Ziyon has a brief rundown.

The impeachment thing still goes on – now with Bolton being the White Knight who will save the day for the left. What really irks me is now many times we on our side went to bat for Bolton and this is how he pays us back. They really are garbage, these old-line GOPe types, aren’t they? You wonder if they ever really believed anything they ever said when they were supposedly on our side. Thanks to RINO’s like Mitt and Collins, there’s still some back and forth about whether witnesses will be called. Ultimately, the witnesses, themselves, don’t matter: there’s nothing for them to tell. But it is amazingly irritating that the RINO’s keep doing this stuff – they’ve got to realize by now that we really can’t stand them doing this. In the end, though, its all a big nothing: Trump won’t be removed – it is only a 1% chance that any GOPer actually votes to convict (10% chance that Manchin votes to acquit).

The Supreme Court ruled that Trump, indeed, has the power to enforce American law which bars welfare bums from immigrating.

Latest on the Coronovirus: 100,000 may already be infected. I’m still pretty “meh” about it.

Some of our Liberal and Never Trump Elite Expert Super Smarty-Pants guys yucked it up about how we Trump supporters are all morons. They have been massively dragged on social media for it, and deservedly so. But it got me thinking: these guys really aren’t too bright and really don’t know much. They are always insulting us as having not gone to college and that we don’t read books. But I’d stack my list of read books against any of these dimwits…and I’ll bet mine is a lot larger and covers more variety.

The Last Gasp of Never Trump

Mark Noonan10 Comments

So, one-term Congresscritter Joe Walsh has decided to challenge President Trump in the GOP primary. I can figure why Walsh would do it: attention hounds do need attention and grifters do gotta grift…I’ve been watching Walsh implode towards this position since 2017 and it hasn’t been a pretty sight. But, he’s going to get media attention and donations and, for him, that is what is must be about. But what about those who engineered his entry?

We must not discount the mere sins of Pride which are likely driving a good portion of this, but beyond the Never Trumpers risking their immortal souls there is, I think, something else behind this: I can’t remotely prove it, but I’m thinking that the selection of the old GOPe money class – seconded by Democrat money bags sowing division – it making one, last effort to recapture the GOP. They only liked the GOP when it was a party of Progressive Light: the Progressive party which wanted low taxes, especially on corporate earnings and large amounts of stored wealth. As far as it went, such people only tolerated gun owners, pro-lifers and such because these people were, by an large, in favor of low taxes. But, all along, these Never Trump types despised their base…considered them hicks and were never going to do anything to help the base’s cause. Trump came along, read the situation precisely as it was (and is), and proceeded to roll over the GOPe simply by speaking to the desires of the GOP base. The real fear of the GOPe types is not just that Trump will be re-elected (though they’d hate that). No: their real fear is that the GOP base will never come back to the GOPe. That after Trump, the GOP will become an increasingly Populist Conservative party and start doing horrendous things like breaking up large corporations; taxing high end wealth; dismantling the education system…you know, destroying everything that keeps GOPe types rolling in wealth and privilege.

So, they’ve been looking not for a way to win, but for a way to show the GOP base that they can’t have what they want. They want to show that Trump was a one-off which only happened because the GOPe was asleep at the wheel and that the GOPe can just whistle up a situation where Trump gets destroyed. After that, the GOP base – in their thinking – will just have to knuckle under and accept a whole string of Mitt Romney’s and Jeb’s and live with the fact that every last iota of the Progressive agenda will be enacted (except high taxes on corporations, of course). Trouble is, they couldn’t really find anyone to go after Trump. In this, I think that the leadership of McConnell and Graham has been crucial: by understanding what Trump really represents, these two (and there are others) have understood that the GOP can win smashing victories for an indefinite period of time…and all it takes is actually doing something for the base. McConnell is cementing his legacy as the most consequential Senate Majority leader in half a century…and he seems to be enjoying the heck out of himself doing it. Why would he want to give that up so that Democrats can take the White House in 2020 just because Orange Man Bad? Why would any serious political leader want to do that?

But now momentum takes over – the Never Trump contingent has to keep going, or admit defeat. Too filled with Pride to admit defeat or error, they just kept going and going and going…until the found Joe Walsh, who seems to be a bit of a raving lunatic. He’s made racist statements in the past – and I’m not talking Progressive versions of racist statements; actual, genuine racist statements. He once tweeted out that if Trump lost in 2016, he’s grab his gun and start shooting. He peddled stories about Obama that would make a paranoid conspiracy theorist blush. The guy, in short, is all over the place…with the only consistency being that he’ll say whatever garners him attention. Being just another trooper for Trump wouldn’t get him anywhere (likely because he’s so mercurial that only an idiot would trust him); so he decided to become anti-Trump…and the Ahoy Boys of Never Trump have now latched on to him. It is going to be fun to watch.

But, mostly, it is going to be fun to see the last of these types. We’ve been sold out by them too many times and for too long. They’ll ride Walsh right out of the GOP and Conservatism, and I believe for good.

Conservatism Recovered

Mark Noonan38 Comments

Excellent article by Julie Kelly about understanding what has really happened to Conservatism:

The realignment of the political Right has prompted a public confessional of sorts, a raw acknowledgement that millions of us were led astray by Republiican leaders we trusted, we voted for, and we defended during times of war. We only have ourselves to blame, of course, because we did it with our eyes wide open. But the Trump era is forcing many Republicans to reexamine what we once believed and reassess what actually is true.

In a fiery speech earlier this month at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., Fox News host Tucker Carlson talked about purging his “mental attic” to dust off the ideas that he had accepted as legitimate over past few decades.

“The Trump election was so shocking . . . that it did cause some significant percentage of people to say ‘wait a second, if that can happen, what else is true?’” Carlson said. “Just look around . . . who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? A lot of the people we’ve been told are good guys are not. Some of them are the worst guys. I’ll let you figure out who.”

One of the crucial things to understand about politics is that it draws layabouts like s*** draws flies. That is, it draws rent-seeking nincompoops who are determined to live well without having to actually produce anything. No political ideology is free from this. Heck, even the most productive companies in the world aren’t entirely free of it. There are always – always – people trying to get a free ride.

Modern Conservatism got its start in reaction to the changes in American governance introduced during the Roosevelt Administration in the 1930s. It was correctly understood that the ultimate result of Roosevelt policies would be the end of the America founded in 1776. It was a movement to roll back the government; stand firm for American defense and defend the family and our social institutions from the remorseless attack of the Left. This movement reached its peak in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980…and I think we all thought that we really had won. That is, we thought that our ideas had proven correct and that going forward it would just be the increasing implementation of the ideas of Conservatism. We now know that it didn’t work out that way…and it didn’t work out that way because in the wake of Reagan, we got a host of political barnacles who spoke the words of Conservatism, but didn’t really have an interest in carrying out Conservatism. We were consumed by rent-seekers when we needed committed fighters.

But for the longest time, most of us went along with them – they were our leaders, after all. They wrote for prestige magazines. They had best-selling books. TV shows. And they did, indeed, speak the words of Conservatism…but always with a caveat which we ignored or didn’t understand. Now was always not the exact, perfect time to really press for Conservatism. We always had to do something else first, and getting that done invariably meant not fighting a particular battle for a Conservative principle. We were kept on the hook by endless promises that the New Dawn would come, and we’d finally be in the right moment where we could fight the left tooth and nail. But, it never came. Of course, it was never meant to come. The grifters running the Conservative show didn’t want that – because they weren’t really Conservative. They liked their swank gigs and they knew that to keep them they needed to keep talking right, but they weren’t about to go to their liberal friends and explain that they had to actually fight to defend the family, or even to defend the concepts of “male” and “female”.

Those of you reading me here have known that I had my doubts for many years – even stretching back to the Bush the Younger years…and, truth be told, some doubts even in the Clinton years. A gnawing feeling that we were being sold down the river and that not everything we were taught to revere was worthy. But I did keep to being a loyal foot soldier. Partly, of course, because no matter how bad the GOPe squish being foisted upon me, he or she was still miles better than the Democrat. But that was still folly on my part, and I see that now with blinding clarity. It has always been better to suffer even crushing defeat while fighting for what we believe in than to “win” with someone who will merely slow down our defeat. Douglas MacArthur was once asked his formula for defensive war and he gave a one word answer: “defeat”. You can’t win unless you attack – and attacking requires a ruthless willingness to take and inflict pain.

Trump isn’t a Conservative; not remotely. Except in one, crucial aspect: Conservatism is really just common sense, and Trump has bags of that. He’s not someone, I think, who has delved deeply into Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and F.A. Hayek. He’s not, that is, an intellectual of the Right. But, then again, who is? Bill Kristol? Max Boot? David French? If these are our intellectuals, then we’re doomed. Trump isn’t advancing Conservatism in a conscious sense – but by doing what makes sense, he’s advancing it all the same. It is common sense that the judges merely enforce the laws; to do otherwise means there is no law, and thus no chance for justice or mercy or even sanity. The only judges out there who will simply enforce the laws are Conservative judges…and, so, common sense dictates the appointment only of Conservative judges. It’d be stupid to waste even a single life time appointment on a non-Conservative judge because that means you’re just giving the anti-law, insane Left side of the aisle an unearned win and making life harder for yourself going forward.

So it is with act after act. True, it’d be nice if Trump would take on the national debt, but that is something that only concerns a small number of people. Yes, the debt is a looming national catastrophe and if we don’t get a handle on it, we’re going to pay a high price for our profligacy. But Trump isn’t particularly concerned about it and never has been. Can’t ask a man to be what he isn’t. And at the end of the day, the pretend-Conservatives who ran our movement since Reagan also didn’t do a damn thing about the debt. Perhaps Trump’s successor can be made to do what is necessary (it won’t really be hard: at it takes is a good economy and a really very small reduction in overall government spending over a period of 10 years to get to balance and debt reduction). But the bottom line is that outside of the debt, Trump is moving the Conservative ball forward even more effectively than Reagan (who also didn’t tackle the debt). And by doing this – by actually implementing Conservatism – Trump is doing the best thing anyone has ever done for us: exposing the traitors in our ranks.

Remember, these are grifters who merely want to live well without doing anything. They are best friends with their Leftist counterparts, who are also grifting (but who also do advance Leftism…so while the liberal foot soldiers are getting robbed just as blind as we were, at least Leftism is being advanced; this makes the Leftwing grifters the moral superior of the Conservative grifters). It was all fine as long as nothing actually happened in a Conservative sense. Along comes Trump and he starts doing Conservative things and they all had a choice to make: some choose to actually join the side they said they were on…others have decided to join the Left, which they always in fact were part of. For us, it means we have been able to recover Conservatism. We’ve taken it out of the hands of the thieves who stole it in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan…and no longer bound to anything that happened in the past, we are able to jettison even the mistakes that Reagan made, most notably the 1986 Amnesty. But we’ve also given up on nation building and endless war. We no longer desire to defend large corporations. We no longer defend “free trade” which merely meant middle class jobs being sent to Chinese sweated labor. We are able to start counterattacking the advances of the Left.

In my view, it is time to forget 1989 to 2009. It was a wasted 20 years, as far as Conservatism was concerned. Anyone – even the most dyed in the wool Never Trump – is free to join or reject us; we don’t care what anyone chooses and no hard feelings against anyone who repents and gets on board. But we’re now going to fight. We still may lose, but we’re not going to roll over for the Left.