The GOP's Case Of The DTs

What was, just a few months earlier, a golden opportunity to elect a Republican president in 2016 has become, depressingly, a seemingly lost opportunity. The Democrats were...are putting up a deeply flawed, old (both age- and idea-wise), and eminently beatable opponent. The Republicans had...have, a vast array of young, smart, articulate, successful (politically and otherwise), attractive, and (importantly) conservative potential candidates. Unimportant as it is, the GOP group is also ethnically and gender diverse, providing an inducement to potential voters who are foolishly swayed by those trivialities.

And so who works his way to the top of the GOP field? Donald Effing Trump, that's who - a blustering, obnoxious, ignorant, thoughtless, old fool (older than Hillary) who proudly brandishes his well-deserved reputation as a crony capitalist and who embodies every Republican caricature the Democrats can pull out of their nether parts. To top it off, he's not conservative! As Guy Benson points out, (Townhall column linked below), Trump proclaims solidly left-wing positions on health care, the Iran nuclear deal and raced based affirmative action, to name just a few. As an advocate for frequent and robust government involvement in people's lives, he would fit quite comfortably in the field competing for the Democratic nomination.

In a recent Gallup poll, 36 percent of Republicans and 19 percent of Democrats said they would support Trump as a third party candidate. That's impressive support from the jackass party, but even so, it understates his potential. Make Trump a primary challenger to Clinton instead of a GOP candidate and those numbers could conceivably reverse. A (D) instead of an (R) following Trump's name would make all the difference.

This past week, Barack Obama offered a pathetic defense of his failed anti-terror policy and Hillary Clinton shamefully, disgracefully lied about telling the grieving parents of the victims of the Benghazi tragedy - a tragedy of her making - that she blamed the planned terrorist attack on an obscure video. In other words, she lied about her lie.

And the big news was - Donald Trump's bigoted and hilariously unworkable "plan" (see Krauthammer below) to prohibit all Muslims from entering the country.

That Trump is unqualified for the presidency is almost beside the point. (Our current president is similarly far out of his depth). The most frustrating thing is, in the general election, Trump is unelectable. (Benson runs the numbers below). Supporters of Trump are as blind to this fact as they are to his intellectual and moral failings. 

My personal dream ticket is Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin (in either order). Aside from the excellent leadership it would provide, such a team would drive the left absolutely, irretrievably, bonkers. What fun that would be! But I would never support such a ticket because - It. Could. Never. Win.

Un-conservative and un-electable. Trump violates the Buckley Rule at both ends.

Trump devotees are delusional if they envision their guy taking the oath of office January, 2017. If Trump manages to secure the GOP nomination or if he runs as a third party candidate, the person solemnly swearing will be HRC. (We'll find out if she can do it straightfaced). This will probably happen even if Trump isn't on the ballot because of the damage he has inflicted on the Republican brand. And the Trump crowd is hallucinating if it claims there would be no difference between a Clinton presidency, or one administered by, say, Marco Rubio.

There is one last hope. The Obama Justice Department will eschew politics, do the right thing, and indict the presumptive Democratic nominee for criminally negligent handling of classified, non-classified, and top secret material; for criminally negligent endangerment of national security; for multiple counts of perjury; for obstruction of justice; and for dozens of other prosecutable crimes.
Yep, all that's needed is a principled display of integrity and independence from Attorney General Lynch. Or as Kevin Williamson might say, "Look! A unicorn!"

Summing it all up -- Aaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!!!!!

Links to some good recent commentary on Trump --

Quin Hillyer --
http://www.weeklystandard.com/trump-the-worst-human-being/article/2000122

Charles Krauthammer -- http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428354/donald-trump-muslim-ban-absurd

Guy Benson -- http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2015/12/10/poll-nearly-70-percent-of-trump-followers-would-support-him-in-independent-run-n2091546

Mona Charen -- http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428222/donald-trump-hillary-clinton

Added 12/12 - Jonah Goldberg's G-File today includes an analysis of pernicious populism and the noxious celebrity cult of Donald Trump. He also has some amusing metaphor-laced thoughts about dealing with ISIS. Sprinkled liberally (in a good sense) with Goldbergisms, the column is, as usual, entertaining and enlightening. And it's long. More to savor.

When populism is yoked to a cult of personality, the mob defines success as success for their leader, principle be damned.

Indeed.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428408/donald-trump-populism-corruption-conservatism

Added 12/14 -- Kevin Williamson warns the left that their enthusiastic support for Obama's repeated flouting of the law will come back to haunt them in the form of a

President Cruz, President Rubio, President Fiorina . . . 

Or, angels and ministers of grace defend us, President Trump. Last week, the civically illiterate reality-television grotesque declared before a meeting of a policemen’s union that one of his first acts in office would be to issue an executive order mandating capital punishment for anybody convicted of murdering a police officer. Never mind that the president has no such power and that Trump doesn’t seem to understand the difference between state and federal law; we have so quickly accustomed ourselves to believing that anything that sounds good to us is right and proper (“constitutional” in 2015 anno Domini means “I like it”) that no one other than a few persnickety constitutionalists (that suspicious foreigner Charles C. W. Cooke leaps to mind) even bothered to note how nuts Trump’s promise is. In this, as in many things, Trump resembles Barack Obama and the Clinton mob, who have been, it bears remembering, his traditional political allies.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428431/obama-power-cruz-trump

Presented Without Comment

Blowing Up Safe Spaces

Ben Shapiro targets campus racialist totalitarians with his rapid fire monotone. Trigger warning - Not for squeamish leftists!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqpXL8TxiU

A Dangerous Fourteen Months

Victor Davis Hanson warns of the impending calamity of a Barack Obama unencumbered by electoral politics and provides a summary of the Smirker-In-Chief's assorted malevolent characteristics.

What remaining unpopular executive acts might anger his opponents the most? Close down Guantanamo, let thousands more refugees into the United States, free thousands more felons, snub another ally, flatter another enemy, weigh in on another interracial melodrama, extend amnesty to another million illegal aliens, make global warming laws by fiat, expand Obamacare, unilaterally impose gun control? In lieu of achievement, is the Obama theory to become relevant or noteworthy by offending the public and goading political enemies?

An Obama press conference is now a summation of all his old damn-you clichés — the fantasy strawman arguments; the caricatures of the evil Republican bogeymen; the demagogic litany of the sick, the innocent, and the old at the mercy of his callous opponents; the affected accentuation (e.g., Talîban; Pakîstan, Îslám, Latînos, etc.) that so many autodidacts parade in lieu of learning foreign languages; the make-no-mistake-about-it and let-me-be-clear empty emphatics; the flashing temper tantrums; the mangled sports metaphors; the factual gaffes; and the monotonous I, me, my, and mine first-person-pronoun exhaustion. What Obama cannot do in fact, he believes he can still accomplish through invective and derision.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427522/obamas-most-dangerous-year

Words For Obama's Tombstone

A Jonah Goldberg citation led me to a piece in the American Spectator by historian Walter Russell Mead, a Democrat and a 2008 Obama voter. Mead castigates Obama for his preening moral certitude in pushing for the acceptance of thousands of Syrian refugees.

Goldberg excerpted parts of the essay and put the following passage in bold type (so I will too). --

...no one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama. No one has committed more sins of omission, no one has so ruthlessly sacrificed the well-being of Syria’s* people for his own ends, as the man in the White House. In all the world, only President Obama had the ability to do anything significant to prevent this catastrophe; in all the world no one turned his back so coldly and resolutely on the suffering Syrians as the man who sits in the White House today—a man who is now lecturing his fellow citizens on what he insists is their moral inferiority before his own high self-esteem.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/11/17/president-obamas-cynical-refugee-ploy/

* And Iraq's I might add

No Contest

Kevin Williamson does a comparison - the American Right vs. the American Left and Republican vs. Democrat and comes to an obvious conclusion.

I left the Republican party a long time ago for a number of reasons, one of which is that I didn’t want to be part of any organization that had Arlen Specter as a member. The man this magazine famously named “America’s worst senator” eventually bailed and hooked up with Team Jackass, but I didn’t see any real reason to come back. Still, for all the angst regarding the presidential primary and the endless largely phony us-and-them theater of base vs. establishment, I cannot remember a time since the Alex P. Keaton years when the Republican party has seemed to me so attractive.

...Though conservatives’ internal debates sometimes get a little silly and theatrical, practically the entirety of the meaningful political discourse in our country is taking place on and among the Right. Our argument is Mark Levin and George Will and Reihan Salam; the Left’s debate is Franz the Eternally Wounded Transgender Activist at Amherst vs. Caitlyn the Eternally Wounded Women’s Studies Major at Yale on the subject of which malevolent pronouns turn literary criticism into rape. Take a little time some afternoon and read an issue of National Review cover to cover and then do the same thing with The New Republic. Listen to Justin Amash talk for five minutes and compare him with Bernie Sanders. And if Amash isn’t your thing, check out Cole, Martinez, Abbott, LePage, the ladies and gentlemen of the 38 state legislatures under full (30) or partial (8) Republican control, or one of those 32 Republican governors. The Republicans aren’t having a meltdown — they’re suffering from an embarrassment of riches.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427180/gop-is-looking-good

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Last week's voting results in Kentucky and Virginia continues a pattern of GOP Obama-era electoral success in all sectors of government save the White House. Since 2010, Democrats have lost 12 governorships, 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats and an incredible 900+ seats in state legislatures. Foreign policy failure, a $19 trillion debt load, ongoing scandals and corruption, and a four decade low level of employment participation have contributed to the public's rejection of Obama, Reid, Pelosi governance. However, the primary factor in the stunning turnaround has been, and will continue to be, the disaster of Obamacare.

And, as far as Democrats are concerned, it will all be for naught. Kevin Williamson writes of the impending death of that misbegotten piece of sh...legislation.

The fact is that Obamacare has fallen apart without Republicans’ dismantling it. Almost all of its basic promises have failed, it is an economic shambles, and it is a political mess: Unsurprisingly, people still don't like it. Less than a third of Americans support the individual mandate, three-fourths oppose Obamacare’s tax on high-end health-care programs, and more voters oppose the law categorically than support it. A quarter of voters say the law has hurt them personally. The question isn’t why Republicans haven’t gotten around to repealing and replacing it — the answer to that question resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a while, still — the question is when Democrats will get around to admitting that, purity of their hearts notwithstanding, they and they alone — not one Republican voted for Obamacare — have created a mess that has introduced nothing to American health care except chaos.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426550/obamacare-failures?target=topic&tid=1330

Next, KW focuses on the "Cadillac Tax", one of the parlor tricks Gruber and company utilized to make the bill appear fiscally sustainable. Problem is, unions hate it and their wholly owned subsidiary, the Democratic Party, desperately need them to hold the White House in 2016.

The Cadillac tax was never going to be long-lived. It was a lie from the beginning, a part of the great fiction that allowed Democrats to claim that Barack Obama’s signature health-insurance initiative would add “not one dime” to the deficit, as the president repeatedly insisted. But the tax was and is bitterly opposed by important Democratic constituencies: the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers, the members of which enjoy very generous health-care programs (the teachers at your direct expense, suckers) and don’t much like paying taxes despite their endless nattering about the need to make sure everybody pays his “fair share.”

The teachers’ unions, it should be noted, are the biggest political spenders in the country — not the NRA, not the Koch brothers, not the Chamber of Commerce or Big Oil or Big Whatever. In the private sector, unions are in decline and have been for decades, mainly because extortion is a terrible business model in the long term. But in the public sector — in government — unions rule the roost, which is why they run the Democratic party in spite of their relatively small overall numbers. Hillary Rodham Clinton cannot be president without the support of the teachers’ unions, period, and so she supports repealing one of the main revenue-generating measures attached to Obamacare.

...Republicans blew the health-care fight last time around. Barack Obama rolled into town with his sack of goodies like some cracked Santa Claus, and all Republicans could muster was: “We have the best health-care system in the world. Harrumph! Harrumph!” We didn’t. We had a half-socialized mess of a system in which very important health-care decisions — the ones regarding insurance — were mainly taken out of the hands of consumers and put in the hands of their employers, who have very different economic incentives. Thank Franklin Roosevelt for that. Add to that a wildly corrupt, fraud-ridden Medicaid program and an insanely unsustainable Medicare program, insufficiently competitive insurance markets, and a few other flavors of nightmare fuel, and it’s easy to see why people wanted health-care reform — and why they want it still. “No” is my favorite word in politics, but it isn’t the right answer every time, and it wasn’t the right answer on health-care reform.

Neither was Obamacare, of course. The president had campaigned on health-care reform, and the Democrats had an unusual commanding position in Congress that was unlikely to be sustained or repeated. The president made it clear that he would happily sign any stack of paper, up to and including a three-year-old Denny’s menu, if the words “health-care reform” appeared in its title. The Democrats indulged the worst sort of dishonesty — we’ll cover millions more people while saving money and improving quality and look a unicorn! — and they cooked up the Affordable Care Act, with Nancy Pelosi famously insisting that Congress had to pass it to discover what’s in it. Now that she’s discovered what’s in the act, she doesn’t much like it.
 
 ...For now, eliminating the Cadillac tax is one tax cut that Republicans should resist. The teachers’ unions and the AFL-CIO put these clowns in office and inflicted Obamacare on the country, and we should make them pay for it. As Ed Koch famously said: The people have spoken, and now they must be punished.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426748/obamacare-cadillac-tax-democrats-unions-harry-reid-nancy-pelosi