Yeah, there's been a realignment, but it's as garbage as the previous alignment

 We're starting to see the broad outlines of a second Very Stable Genius administration come into focus, and it indicates, as expected, an incoherent populist-nationalist mess where the few sound, conservative policies get sullied by having been folded into the overall cluster-you-know-what.

Henry Olsen is kind of an odd cat. He's a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a fine house in Washington, and he's capable of articulating the conservative vision as applied to specific areas, but he, for some reason, seems to have a soft spot for Trump. 

The latest example is his current New York Post column, in which he asserts that Trump's November victory signals an historic American political realignment, which is probably true, but doesn't follow up with much in the way of signals as to whether he thinks it's a healthy one:

Signs suggest it could be something even worse: a historic defeat that puts Republicans in the political driver’s seat for a generation or more.

That’s because the exit poll showed that more voters said they were Republican than Democrat — for the first time in a presidential election since 1928.

Such a result hasn’t happened since talking pictures were new and Babe Ruth clobbered homers in the original Yankee Stadium.

No one alive today has ever voted in a presidential race where this has occurred.

Now, watch how he words this part.:

A world where Republicans lead Democrats by 8 to 10 points in partisan preference is one where Republican preferences and priorities prevail.

Like the GOP in the last century, Democrats could win only by running as “me too” candidates, offering a slightly less bold version of the Republican agenda.

Well, okay, but those preferences and priorities are, as I say, populism-nationalism with the occasionally actual conservative position showing up like a blob of flour in a lumpy gravy. 

Olsen does qualify his wowee-zowee level of amazement with this:

This isn’t set in stone, though: Trump needs to have a successful term.

If the economy tanks, or illegal migration continues, or Trump goes to war with China or Russia, voters will flee from the GOP like rats off a sinking ship.

Trump could also mess up by prioritizing issues he didn’t run on.

George W. Bush did that in 2005, when he tried to reform Social Security without first getting a mandate to do so.

Barack Obama, too, in 2009 and 2010, when he made passing Obamacare his focus even after running as a centrist.

Trump could make either or both mistakes. Failure and fecklessness will be punished.

But imagine if he doesn’t.

Imagine an America in 2028 that’s at peace, with illegal immigration virtually ended, the woke tsunami broken and the economy humming.

Henry, the signs during this transition period don't point in the direction of the scenario you want us to consider.

At a time when the very notion of the West is extremely wobbly (the financial woes of Britain and France, the Orban camp within NATO, Turkey's clear shift to an anti-Israel stance, the ongoing inadequate trickle of what Ukraine needs to defeat Russia, the cultural rot and population decline common to Western nations on both sides of the Atlantic), he's getting his kicks with kidding-on-the-square comments, as well as outright threats, to the United States' allies and neighbors:  

Trump on Wednesday continued to tease US territorial expansion in social media posts, criticizing the operation of the canal and doubling down on suggestions the US should absorb Canada and Greenland, a territory controlled by Denmark.

In a sardonic Christmas message, Trump claimed Chinese soldiers are operating the Panama Canal and reiterated his criticism that Panama is exploiting US vessels that use the waterway.

“Merry Christmas to all, including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal (where we lost 38,000 people in its building 110 years ago), always making certain that the United States puts in Billions of Dollars in ‘repair’ money, but will have absolutely nothing to say about ‘anything,’” Trump wrote on his Truth Social network.

In the same message, Trump called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “governor,” again insinuating Canada should become a US state. He also suggested the citizens of Greenland “want the US to be there, and we will.”

Recall that he also got off on a contentious footing with Mexico's new president Claudia Sheinbaum, suggesting US forces may have to enter Mexico to deal with the cartel problem.

Then there are the tariffs, about which a National Retail Federation report released last month had this to say:

• The proposed tariffs on the six product categories alone would reduce American consumers’ spending power by $46 billion to $78 billion every year the tariffs are in place.

• The proposed tariffs would have a significant and detrimental impact on the costs of a wide range of consumer products sold in the United States, particularly on products where China is the major supplier.

• The increased costs as a result of the proposed tariffs would be too large for U.S. retailers to absorb and would result in prices higher than many consumers would be willing or able to pay.

• Consumers would pay $13.9 billion to $24 billion more for apparel; $8.8 billion to $14.2 billion more for toys; $8.5 billion to $13.1 billion more for furniture; $6.4 billion to $10.9 billion more for household appliances; $6.4 billion to $10.7 billion more for footwear, and $2.2 billion to $3.9 billion more for travel goods.

• Based on current trade, average tariff rates for all categories examined would exceed 50% in the extreme tariff scenario, up in most cases from single or low double digits.

Then there is - yeah, I'm gonna go there - the appearance that the VSG is instinctively drawn to associates and appointees whose sex lives and marital track records are as sordid as his. Musk, Hegseth, Kennedy. Matt Gaetz, who is no longer in the running for Attorney General, nor even a House member, but to whose defense the VSG came a couple of days ago, calling the exhaustive ethics report "unfair."

Henry, character is not a part of the Trumpist vision that now pervades the Republican Party.

Then there is the hawking of a perfume line and the Lee Greenwood Bible during this transition period. 

Donald Trump thinks this whole thing is a hoot. He's never experienced more glorification, which is the end aim of anything he does in life.

Henry, I honestly don't get your wow-this-is-exciting assessment of this new Republican alignment. It's not going to achieve your dream scenario, and any table scraps of conservatism to be found in it are hopeless tainted by the surrounding garbage.

"New political era." Big effing whoop. We're still headed toward the same accelerated decline the Left had us on. 

 

 

 

 

 

Unifier, my tail end

 The blather about how, now that the Very Stable Genius had locked up complete control of the Republican Party, he'd pivot toward some kind of at least minimal magnanimity and extend a welcoming hand to Americans broadly gained momentum after he got his ear nicked in Pennsylvania. He even participated in the revising of his RNC acceptance speech, which had observers anticipating the new version with bated breath.

Alas, his feeble attempt to deliver on that last night lasted three minutes max. And then we were into this:

Despite the call for unity, Trump soon referred to “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” repeatedly cited false allegations of stolen elections, called for the firing of the head of the United Auto Workers, cited the “China virus” and the “invasion” at the Southern border. He called a Democratic senator a “total lightweight.” He even repeated a puzzling allusion to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” from “The Silence of the Lambs,” which he’s used before. 

Of course, the hall full of drool-besotted leg-humpers, dutifully wearing their solidarity ear bandages, ate it up. Their "fighter" is still that. 

And because the Democrats are facing the nightmare of a candidate (and current president) who is increasingly under pressure to step down due to his obvious feebleness, with the alternatives being the specter of either a Harris candidacy or a free-for-all at their convention, Trump has a pretty good chance of re-election. 

I agree with the likes of Jonah Goldberg and Yuval Levin who say that unity is not only too much to hope for in our present moment, but has never been a realistic aspiration in a country whose citizens have widely diverse viewpoints and are free to express them.  I concur that our magnificent Constitution provides the framework for Americans to disagree well. 

As Levin puts it,

Our political system allows citizens to share a common life even when they differ fiercely on important public questions. Their disputes aren’t always settled civilly, but they are settled politically, through competition and negotiation rooted in the premise that partisan victories and defeats are both inevitably temporary, and that the people we disagree with aren’t going away. Politics within this framework can be so intense, its stakes can be so high, precisely because we are arguing about what our common future looks like. 

Constitutionalism defines the boundaries of this political realm. It offers the rules for setting priorities, deploying power, resolving disputes, and making demands of each other. Its purpose is not so much to help us agree as to help us disagree constructively and safely.

But the first step toward that aim is to get a critical mass of Americans to give a diddly about the Constitution. Our public education system has seen to it that up-and-coming citizens aren't even acquainted with it. The yay-hoos assembled in Milwaukee have no regard for it. Democrats have likewise demonstrated that they don't either, with their fierce defense of the cabal of "experts" ensconced in the various executive-branch agencies as being more qualified than elected legislators to shape policy, and their presumption that the executive branch has the authority to affect the character, and independence of, the judicial branch. 

So, no Squirrel Hair isn't unifying anybody. We're still stuck with the pugnacious populists and the current disarray of the identity politics / climate alarmism / wealth redistribution bunch.

Or somebody is. I have no truck with either of them.

These people are not conservatives

 MAGA has a challenge based on a paradox. It is at least as purist a movement as any flavor of either progressivism or conservatism, but, given its intrinsic incoherence, it must try to define what it wants to be pure about in terms of stomping into the dust anyone who deviates the first micro-inch from its jumbled set of orthodoxies. In short, it makes more clear what it's against than what it's for.

It also, by its nature, operates in the short term.  It can't conceive of any kind of principles that would guide it through, say, the next century. 

Nothing sparks its hatred like public recognition of anyone's actual conservative bona fides who ever obstructed anything about its "program."

As you know, Mitch McConnell has announced he will step down as the Senate GOP leader in November. Now, I have my share of real frustrations with McConnell. Shortly after having given a floor speech in which he placed the moral culpability for January 6 on Donald. Trump, he told an interviewer with a great deal of certainty in his tone that he'd vote for Trump if Trump were the GOP nominee.

But, sitting out here in the hinterland as I am, I'm sure I don't appreciate all the factors McConnell has to balance every day in his role. And the fact is, he steered a lot of legislation through his chamber that advanced conservative causes. And he was primarily responsible for getting three great Supreme Court nominees approved during the otherwise unfortunate administration of the Very Stable Genius.

Here's how the ate-up yay-hoos are framing McConnell's legacy:

Jeremy Carl

@realJeremyCarl

McConnell was a cancer on the GOP and the most unpopular national political figure for many years. He hasn't died and there's no reason to sugarcoat his legacy.

Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, which at one time was an exemplary think thank. It was founded by the west coast Straussian Harry V. Jaffa. But it has pretty much gone all in for MAGA-ism.

How about this charmer from a group of currently-serving federal lawmakers?

House Freedom Caucus

@freedomcaucus

Our thoughts are with our Democrat colleagues in the Senate on the retirement of their Co-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-Ukraine).  

No need to wait till November… Senate Republicans should IMMEDIATELY elect a *Republican* Minority Leader.

What's the main thing that leaps out at you in each of these tweets?

Is it not the utter lack of grace? The refusal, or perhaps incapacity, to consider any kind of context?

Matt Vespa, one of the most toxic columnists at that sewer of MAGA-ism, Townhall, has a piece today - sorry, not giving it any linky love - on the occasion of Liz Cheney on yesterday's Supreme Court decision that throws a wrench in Jack Smith's ability to move his cases against Trump forward. The whole piece is an attempt to portray her as an irrelevant laughingstock. At one point his poses the question of how does someone in deep-red Wyoming lose the state's House seat? He doesn't answer his own question, but the piece is pregnant with the clear implication: She saw Trump's behavior on January 6 as disqualifying him from further participation in America politics. Her voting record in Congress was as conservative as you can get. She was elected conference chair when she was only in her second term. Hell, she voted with Trump's preferences 93 percent of the time.  She had a reputation for policy chops. 

But she crossed the MAGA red line. 

Let us also bear in mind that to Trump, his former UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, is now "braindead."

The drool-besotted throne-sniffers have completely taken over the Republican Party, which is why I'm staying home in May and November. 

I won't have any truck with a movement based on pure meanness. 

 

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Stay home in November - today's edition

 The immediately preceding post here at LITD got into the fissures that suggest a bipartisan package deal combining border measures and Ukraine aid is in peril, with a focus on Mitch McConnell's cowardice and cynicism. 

The matter continues to get more pathetic, with a group of ate-up yay-hoos  organizing a trucker convoy to travel to three points along the border to make a statement about the "globalists" and proclaim that God takes an unambiguous stand on the issue. 

The cynicism now clearly extends to the top of the not-so-grand old party, with the Very Stable Genius asking anyone concerned with a stall in a solution to "please blame it on me." His thinking is that such blame launches a narrative in which he alone can come up with the golden remedy, just like the way he'd end the Ukraine-Russia conflict in 24 hours.

States are now squaring off against the federal government over the matter. 

It's not as if the Biden administration deserves any cutting of slack. It has handled the illegal immigration issue abysmally, and even Democrat big-city mayors are insisting that the administration get serious, so that immigrants quit arriving on buses and finding miserable circumstances. There are also the human trafficking and fentanyl elements. Probably a terrorism element as well, which may fully present itself in ways we don't want to imagine.

A lot of Democratic fecklessness stems from the fact that the always-automatically-ascribe-unassailable-virtue-to-those-from-the-global-south wing drives everything about that party's policy orientation. Perhaps the best-crystallized display of the self-congratulation behind this bias is the moment when AOC put on a crying jag at the border fence.

I have always thought it was ill-advised to package a major domestic issue (the border) with a pressing foreign-policy concern (Ukraine), but Capitol Hill dynamics often result in awkward legislative bundles.

Republican wack jobs like Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Matt Gaetz have made Ukraine aid a matter of "principle," calling that West-friendly country's desperate attempt to roll back the brazen aggression inflicted on it by its neighbor a waste of taxpayer dollars. Those in that camp often cite the corruption problems Ukraine has dealt with since its 1991 independence. Their hope is that those willing to give them  an airing will not look at the big picture: Zelensky's understanding that those he's trying to weed out of his government for skimming money and war materiel are stymying his and the nation's ability to set things aright. They're traitors, in a word.

If it seems like I'm going back and forth between Republican and Democratic transgressions, it's because I want to make it clear that I take no side in this year's election cycle. I don't give a flying diddly who gets elected president or to my city council. 

All I'm standing for is seeing that tried and true fusionist conservatism gets an airing. 

David Corn, a well-credentialed lefty columnist, has a piece today that demonstrates how hard it is for most observers - of his stripe or the Trumpisst stripe - to keep an agenda out of their assessments of the lay of the land.

He accurately paints the picture of who the players are, with a focus on Never Trumpers. But when he takes his scalpel to the distinction between types pf Never Trumpers - Bill Kristol types on th one hand, who are going to vote for Biden because "binary choice," and those who are going to fold and kiss the ring of the Very Stable Genius - he shows his hand.

David, there's another type: me.

I refuse to have any truck with the drool-besotted leg-humpers of my former party. I come from a red state, but one with a reputation for its Republicans generally avoiding the yay-hoo vibe. But that era appears to have ended.  Both major candidates for governor are dead to me. 

But on the other hand, I will never abide by the hatred for human advancement, comfort, convenience and safety that drives the Democratic Party, nor its militant identity politics, nor its penchant for wealth redistribution. 

Furthermore, I will not take the bait and engage in any kind of argument catalyzed by an are-you-saying-that-stuff-is-as-bad-as-trying-to-prevent-a-Constitutional-transfer-of-power type challenge. 

I will not choose between poisons. 

I am staying home for both my state's primary in May and the general election in November, and I will tell you that you should, too.

It's the only moral choice.

This isn't the first time I've spelled out this position, and I'm sure it won't be the last.

But I honestly can't see how anyone who likes to sleep well at night can proceed otherwise.

Mitch McConnell goes all in as the Very Stable Genius's eunuch

 The Senate Minority Leader stands at the corner of Cynical and Cowardly to publicly announce the abrupt reversal of his view on a bipartisan package that addresses the US southern border as well as aid for Ukraine:

In a private Senate Republican meeting on Ukraine, McConnell said effectively that time and the political will to pass a bipartisan immigration and border security compromise are quickly running out — and may have actually run out already.

McConnell told GOP senators that before border security talks began, immigration policy united Republicans and Ukraine aid divided them. “Politics on this have changed,” McConnell said of solving the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s because former President Donald Trump wants to run his 2024 campaign focusing on immigration.

“We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” McConnell said of Trump, a one-time collaborator turned nemesis.

This is a big about-face for McConnell, who earlier this week said Congress needs to pass the border security bill and unlock billions of dollars in new Ukraine aid.

On the floor Wednesday, McConnell asserted that supporting Ukraine was a matter of “cold hard American interest.” But the Kentucky Republican made his own cold political calculation later in the day that the scheme he had been relentlessly pushing for weeks was in jeopardy and a new approach was needed.

Got that? "We don't want to do anything to undermine him." He's decided that it's more important to give Squirrel Hair a talking point for the remainder of this election cycle than to get going on solution to the thousands of illegal immigrants pouring across the border weekly. And aid for Ukraine, a West-friendly European nation that had its sovereignty suddenly and brutally violated, remains flapping in the breeze for the foreseeable future.

I guess what McConnell had to say in his February 2021 Senate floor speech about Trump being "morally responsible" for the Capitol riot the previous month was a lot of hooey. Is anything he's ever said anything other than hooey? How would we be able to tell?

Ted Cruz, who got a double dose of humiliation from the VSG in 2016 in the form of getting his wife called ugly and his dad accused of conspiring to assassinate JFK, now wants to talk tough about what a bad deal it would be immigration-wise:

“This supplemental bill is a kamikaze plane in a box canyon with no exit headed for a trainwreck,” quipped Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Gee, it looks to me like it has some teeth:

The deal – which has not yet been finalized – would reportedly make it harder for migrants to claim asylum, make it easier for U.S. officials to deport migrants who have remained in the country illegally, expand detention capacity and add Border Patrol staff.

Add this cynical calculation to the zeal with which Tim Scott and Marco Rubio have lined up to publicly fellate the VSG.

Cowards, loonies and sycophants. The entire Republican Party is now given over to them.