The National Review has just come out with an entire issue dedicated to convincing Republicans not to nominate Donald Trump to be their presidential candidate. It wasn’t a painless decision. It cost them the right to cohost (along with Salem Radio and Telemundo) a Republican debate with CNN.
The magazine is more conflicted about Ted Cruz. Writing for The Corner, for example, David French accuses the Republican establishment of being petulant in their refusal to contemplate serving under a Cruz presidency.
What’s remarkable about Mr. French’s position is that he places absolutely no weight on the idea that a person who belongs to a 100-person organization and manages to make about 98 of the members detest and despise them, probably is not the kind of person you want to make the leader of anything.
French was responding to a report at CNN in which Senator Dan Coats of Indiana said that the wounds Cruz has created with the Republican caucus are so deep that they’d find it nearly impossible to work with him. And Coats was hardly alone in expressing that opinion. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina likened a choice between Trump and Cruz to a choice between being shot and poisoned to death. Most strikingly, Texas’s other senator, John Cornyn, refused to defend his partner after Bob Dole said that a Cruz candidacy would be “cataclysmic” for the party.
But French dismisses this as letting petty personal differences get in the way of the good of the party.
…this is sheer crazy talk. Look, I get that senators are people — they have feelings and pride and don’t like to be called names. But talk through the hurt with your spouse or pastor, and then man up, get out there, and make it clear that you’re going to campaign your heart out for the GOP nominee. After years of tough election campaigns, food fights on cable television, and withering attacks on social media, Ted Cruz is the one who broke your spirits?
I don’t think Ted Cruz broke their spirits. They know him. They know him and they don’t like him. They don’t like him and they don’t trust him. They don’t trust him and they don’t want to serve under him. They don’t think he should be our president.
Maybe their collective wisdom should count for something.
The fact that it doesn’t seem to among a lot of fairly well-educated conservatives is another indicator of just how little credibility the GOP establishment has with anyone.
But another indicator of how much Cruz is hated is that folks outside of the Senate are beginning to make sounds about Trump being more acceptable.
“If it came down to Trump or Cruz, there is no question I’d vote for Trump,” said former New York mayor and 2008 presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has not endorsed a candidate. “As a party, we’d have a better chance of winning with him, and I think a lot of Republicans look at it that way.”
So, this is where we are. The conservatives at the National Review, Weekly Standard, Red State and other like publications are doing a full-court press to stop Trump because they think he’s a flim-flam artist and a confidence man, while the elected officials (current and former) are telling anyone who will listen that Cruz is completely unacceptable.
For once, I agree with a lot of conservatives. I think they’re all right.
“as you sow, so shall you reap”
These asses blessed the idea that if you dislike the president enough, you don’t have be civil, you don’t have to have any respect for the office, you don’t have any rules of decency or common sense.
And now they are eating their own.
Karma. It may not arrive when you want it to but it always arrives.
And it remains undefeated.
Doesnt mean they cant win.
I really wasn’t aware of that. Thanks.
They should have done this 6-9 months ago. Now this is just too little to late.
As Josh Marshall noted it actually IS a GOP civil war for once.
Too soon to tell. Both major political parties have a remarkable resilience to coalesce around the nominee regardless of the anger and bitterness during created during the primary season. To what degree that is accomplished is probably highly dependent on the degree of hunger among the party elites and their respective voters bases to occupy the WH.
My guess is that the GOP elites aren’t all that hungry and large swaths of their base are ravenous and can perceive the lack of hunger among their elites because they haven’t been offered a credible candidate that can win.
I struggle to identify a policy reason that would lead to a lasting split.
Much of this is over personality and temperament.
I don’t buy the party is horribly split argument.
They may get creamed because Cruz and Trump are awful candidates, but there is no policy split here like in ’64
The split is between those who actually believe their nonsense, and those who are using it for profit.
That has been a feature of the GOP since at least ’72. Yet somehow the profiteers have always managed to corral the believers by general election day and when they win deliver a few bones for the believers to gnaw on and continue to use rhetoric to shine on the hopes of the believers. Democrats, OTOH, don’t just fail to deliver much to their believers, but actively dismiss them. Rahm’s “fucking morons” was the rawest and purest expression of how the DEM elites view liberals/progressives.
The feature of subtly pushing the GOtP southern strategy worked till it failed and a blah person was elected then it resulted in their minds melting down.
Birthers, tea party et al followed.
After the GOtP claim of not allowing President Obama to achieve anything and blocking his re-election they held out hope till it failed also.
The meltdown morphed into a wing of the party which currently is at odds with those insider operatives who sang the last two swan songs of defeat in GOtP primaries.
The base isn’t getting the rainbows and ponies the establishment GOtP has been promising for decades, and have seen their economic position slipping year by year. If somebody can capitalise on this dichotomy, they have the inside track to the next primary win, cause T-Rump is currently milking it for all it is worth in this one.
Yes — Trump is milking it. But because those believers only manage to figure out the real nature of one small part of the elephant at a time and by the time they figure out another part, they’ve forgotten all about the last part they figured out. Seriously, how dumb does one have to be to glom on to a narcissistic, born wealthy, billionaire TV celebrity that that primarily talks about beating up minorities as a solution to their economic insecurity and declining real incomes? As if this isn’t the some wine they’ve been swilling for over forty years but with a new and improved label.
They want something that cannot happen; role back time culturally to the 1950’s, for some 1850’s. Given they cannot have something they deeply want, they grab to whom ever or what ever they can, that keeps their impossible to achieve dream alive.
Hence the GOtP subterfuge over the decades.
The GOtP approved approach to fleecing the rubes is failing so T-Rump is unravelling the onion to get at the core, which means reversing political approach through the last 40-50 years of GOtP campaigning. Each time he is slipping he ups the ante, hopefully he doesn’t have to unleash a 2016 version of Bull Conner (or Nathan Bedford Forrest) to win.
A roll back to some time that never existed.
You are confusing the facts you present with their pseudo religion. It doesn’t matter that you can prove it false, because THEY BELIEVE.
You will do no better against their belief system, then those who try to argue against the 6000 year old earth believers,
cause Jesus rode dinosaurs don’cha know?
I chortle at the GOP and how they have painted themselves into a corner. Trump was a joke who was supposed to fold like a cheap lawn chair, paving the way for Jeb$, but that is all in the rearview now. And the options are a handful of Conservative empty suits and a couple of radicals who are nuttier than squirrel turds.
So, in no way am I gloating because the Dems have shown many creative ways of shooting themselves in the foot, but right now the Republicans look like collective bunch of morons.
A couple of weeks ago, National Review published a piece by the execrable David Horowitz called “The Left’s Betrayal of America”. It was some sort of atavistic throwback to the Red-baiting that I recall from the Reagan era. Indeed, Horowitz wrote that referring to Red-baiting, or calling the Red Scare “the Red Scare”, was a clear sign that the person doing the naming was (still) a Commie pinko bedwetter: you know, the people on the left of the Democratic Party. People like readers of this blog.
How can anyone take seriously a magazine that publishes Horowitz’ screeds?
Extremists of any sort that flip to an opposite side are the worst. They retain all of what made them unattractive, intellectual lightweights and/or unemployable in the first place and flipping sides is not much more than finding a more appreciative or lucrative audience for extremism. Hence David Brock.
And by extension, Hillary Clinton.
Didn’t intend my comment to reflect on Clinton. Although she’s not too fussy about whoever offers to be loyal to her. Wouldn’t ever categorize her as an extremist at any point in her life. And while she does flip-flop in her public statements, it’s within a fairly narrow range and always an effort to appeal to some demographic. But at crunch time when she has to show her true cards, she’s highly predictable and consistent. Back in 1970 we called her policy positions Nixonian, buy with a little less of the old Teddy Roosevelt environmental legacy.
Rafael Cruz:
No Ted, you’re a Canadian first — that predates your Christian and American bona fides.
Imagine the outrage if Chuck Schumer or Rahm Emmanuel declared: I’m a Jew first, American second, a neoliberal third, and a Democrat fourth.
There would be no outrage at all among the large number of people who subscribe to the traditional anti-Semitic slur that Jews either have divided loyalties or no loyalty at all to the countries where they reside.
Only Nixon could go to China.
Only Clinton could end welfare.
Only the Republican base can destroy the Republican party.