This is pretty good, from Rick Wilson:
“The Republican Party’s head first dive into breathless conspiratorial fantasies in defense of Donald Trump is a brand-defining moment as the Party of Lincoln morphs into the Party of LaRouche. Listening as members of Congress, the Fox/talk-radio world and the constellation of batshit crazy people drawn to Esoteric Trumpism adopt increasingly baroque theories to protect The Donald isn’t just depressing, it’s tragic. A diseased slurry of fake news, post-Truth Trumpism and Russkie agitprop infects the Republican Party. It’s an Ebola of wild-eyed MK-ULTRA paranoiac raving, spreading to every organ of the Republican body politic. This loon-centric new world of crazy talk has dissolved the old ideological skeleton of the GOP and reduced it from the Conservative Party of Ideas to the Crackpot Party of Infowars.”
Why do people give Rick Wilson a pass? He was behind the 2002 ad smearing Max Cleland. Remember that?!?
Same reason we allied with the ancien regime in 1778, and Joe Stalin in 1941 – tactical alliance against an existential enemy.
The Nunes memo is as much of a joke as we all expected. It reports that Carter Page was wiretapped, as he should have been according to FISA law and national security, and that the FBI followed all proper legal procedures during the process. From this it concludes there was a massive evil conspiracy against Trump. Talk about a non sequitur (although what did you expect from Nunes?) All the same, incompetent as they are, it’s part of a full-fledged direct attack from the entire Republican party against the rule of law in the country, with the entirety of the Republican House supporting the nonsense and launching an “investigation” into legitimate law enforcement by the FBI with the intent of suppressing it.
With all this going on, we need every ally we can get, no matter how unsavory. Don’t worry, retweeting Rick Wilson today doesn’t require you to support some Swiftboat attack of his on a decent Democrat in the future any more than shipping arms to the Soviets in 1942 required us to help keep political prisoners in the gulag. In practice, with the way things are going in the Republican party, I doubt he’ll even get a chance.
Also, it’s worth following him on Twitter and reminding him every blessed day.
As for myself, I wonder why Rick Wilson, Ana Navarro, and similar pundits remain Republicans. Say what you will about Jennifer Rubin and Joe Scarborough (both horrible, disgusting people), at least they jumped ship for real.
They still delude themselves into thinking they can get the Republican party back, where racists are the marks rather than running the show, and where there is still some respect for sovereignty and democracy. They’re not going to get it and at some point I expect they will ditch the party too. Any sane politician Republican will eventually have to become a Democrat to get elected. Media figures like Scarborough, Navarro, and now Wilson can be “independents” indefinitely.
Nah. Jen Rubin dreams of a new center-right party to compete with the GOP from the left. Delusional.
But…but…The Ratpubs are now the center-right party, only they competing from the left with a third party. The Trumpists (For want of a better label.), who are ;Ratpublican in name only.
Delusional?
Only if she can’t see the Trump trees from the Ratpublican forest. And if she can’t, then she is joined by a whole lotta other squares…including of course a number of people on this site…who think that any Republican who actively sides with the Trumpists is not trying to get on the bandwagon of the new party.
Republican in name only.
Truth? They are hopeful Trumpists, waiting for the constitutional dam to break. They think that they’l be on the winning side.
AG
Arthur, haven’t you noticed the Trumpists have completely taken over the Republican party? I don’t think there are enough significant elected Republicans left opposing Trump to count on two hands. They have completely transformed into a quasi-fascist party and aren’t center-right or even hard right anymore. Rubin has noticed, and that’s why she’s pushing for a third party.
We will see how much Trump has “taken over the Republican Party” after the midterms in November. A RatPub disaster? The centrist Rats…the ones who have been keeping their mouths as shut as possible because they want to maintain their position in government over the long run…will slip-slide right back to the remaining, old-line Center Rats. McCain, McConnell, etc.
But if the DemRats botch this opportunity? (Something that is quite likely to happen considering the old-line Dem leadership.)
All bets are off.
AG
Same reason we allied with the ancien regime in 1778, and Joe Stalin in 1941 – tactical alliance against an existential enemy.
LOL!! Wilson helped the GOP get to where it is today. You’re comparing two different things. Also, if we can’t defeat the GOP without the help of Wilson, Navarro an Frum we’re truly screwed anyway. All of them are going to stab you in the back the first chance they get.
Then we are truly screwed, as dems have yet to really step up to the plate and call them out forcefully, and in no uncertain terms. Where’s our Wilson, Navarro?
. . . gets disqualified for . . . ?
I’d hate to think anyone on the left is foolish enough to think they are “on our side,” just as I’d hate to think anyone thinks that anyone appreciating the righteous accuracy and utility of the comments of Wilson et al is equivalent to thinking they are “on our side.”
Mr. “Perspective” is utterly incapable of understanding this point no matter how many times it’s been explained.
Do you think the French Resistance welcomed any one of Vichy France to their ranks?
A better comparison might be Gaullist and Communist resistance fighters (mostly) fighting Vichy rather than each other.
Wilson helped build that which he now criticizes. Why should he get a cookie for that? If he was truly contrite he’d take a long walk off Santa Monica Pier.
Nobody’s “getting a cookie”. I know from experience you’ll never understand this point but maybe, someday…
And Stalin helped the Nazis defeat Poland and France, both by freeing Nazi troops and supplying natural materials Germany was short of, notably oil. But we still allied with him.
I’m rewarding good writing. Rick Wilson will burn in hell.
The problem is that the Party of Crap has the power.
Tonight’s SOTU will be applauded by the pundits, as Trump clumsily reads his usual self-congratulatory, lie-filled speech, written by white supremicists and billionaires. They’ll marvel at how he’s reaching out and fulfilling his promise to make America great again. No big shockers tonight, really.
The American voters who love Trump will be dazzled, and they’re already overjoyed that they’re getting more money in their paychecks, thanks to Trump’s tax bill. They are happy that those dark-skinned illegals won’t be coming in anymore. Everything’s coming up roses for them.
It’s hard to predict what will come of these current developments. Trump has to want Mueller out of the picture, so how can he make that happen? The MEMO is another big stink bomb, and nobody knows how to diffuse it.
I won’t tune in to see the Asshole-in-Chief delivers his crap tonight. I have a weak stomach.
The memo is an attack on Rosenstein, possibly a pretext to fire him. Anyone who has been Senate confirmed can be shifted over to Rosenstein’s job.
Contar con nuestros servicios le dará la confianza y la tranquilidad de dejar sus reformas sus instalaciones de fontanería en las manos de una plantilla de profesionales altamente cualificados para efectuar cualquier tipo de labor, desde las pequeñas reparaciones en casa hasta los trabajos más grandes a nivel industrial residencial.
https:/reparaciones-madrid.com/fontaneros
Why is Rick Wilson/Bill Crystal/etc.(only after burying their own uniforms in a manner ready for exhumation at a TBD date) the only ones allowed talking like this in the public square?
Why does my local TV news and other national media outlets still try to normalize this administration, refuse to call things like the Nunes Memo what EVERYONE fucking knows it is, and then “Bothsides!” Trump’s atrocities?
Why would I not be wrong to assume the NYT and others already have “Tonight, He Became President!” jerkoff pieces filed for posting after the State of the Union?
The “turned the corner,” “pivot,” “has finally become presidential” pieces were written and set in type days ago. The pundit class (including some who really disappoint and surprise me) can’t seem to get over its longing for a “normal” Trump.
Your local news is probably controlled by Sinclair and Liberty and others of their ilk. They control the news.
Did you see that BezosPost has hired Max Boot as a full-time op-ed contributor? Yeah, that means they’re paying him a salary. More catastrophically wrong white men failing up!! Sinclair and Liberty are only part of the larger problem.
Boot has followed in the footsteps of George Will and is an anti Trumper now.
Not only is he an anti-trumper, he’s even more so than George Will and withsome sane Foreign policy views to go along with it. He’s frequently on MSNBC shows and is really quite sane. One has to wonder going forward if folks like that will ever formally desert the GOP in its present iteration.
Any M$M is not worth the time of day to read, watch or listen to. Turn off your tv and radio, and don’t read most newspapers. You’ll find yourself feeling much better by not being subjected to b.s. hype spin lying propaganda 24/7/365.
That’s all it is, even on so-called “liberal” (ha ha, fooled you) outlets like National Propaganda Radio and MS-I-Pretend-I’m-Not-Fox-Light.
I have been watching a lot of MSNBC and find it pretty informative. There is worthwhile stuff to be found in the NYT and WashPo, JMHO.
Also, McClatchy breaks some important stories fopm time to time.
Like minds can agree to disagree.
That said, some selective reading and viewing can, I suppose, be worthwhile. I’m not impressed AT ALL by MSNBC, but that’s just me. To each his or her own.
On point!!! Thanks.
AG
Hey, our Ron Paul evangelist is back.
Arthur, your man Rand Paul voted in support of Senate Bill 2311 today, along with literally every single Senate Republican.
AG, do you approve of criminalizing women’s rights to abortion and other family planning services?
You ask:
No, I do not.
Nor am I a “Rand Paul” evangelist.
As with everybody else…yourself included…I agree with some of his positions and disagree with others.
He’s playing a long game…compromise/counter-compromise, the story of U.S. democracy for 300+ plus years. Maybe he learned from his father’s failures; maybe he’s just not as wise as his father and maybe the whole thing is simply way beyond my own limited understanding.
I don’t really know, nor do I claim to know..
I do know this, however:
Your own kneejerk understandings of what’s going on are so limited as to be nothing but a (potentially tragic) bad joke.
Kneejerk on…
AG
It’s understandable that I would need to ask whether you fully support a woman’s right to choose.
After all, you’ve gone on and on here about your opposition to strong enforcements of Federal civil rights laws.
You write;
No, I have not.
I have “gone on and on here” about the lack of civil rights across the board here in the United States. Real civil rights. The right to get a good education, the right to work and live where and how you want to work and live. We have plenty of laws on the books already, and they are not working. Not sufficiently working, for sure. If they were we would not have ongoing riots in the streets of minority areas. More laws will make no difference, because the laws are not enforced up and down the line. Yes, you can write legislation to send kids to certain schools, but unless those schools are well supported in terms of money and teachers, the only thing that happens is that whole segments of the society are schooled to fail. Yes, you can make it unlawful to discriminate in terms of housing, but without truly good education those same whole segments cannot find enough good paying work to be able to afford to live in neighborhoods that those laws are meant to open up. Yes, you can write laws that call for non-discrimination in terms of work for whole segments of the society…including females and the several other sexes…but attempts to enforce those laws across the board have too often resulted in the hiring of people who are not qualified for a given job because the so-called equal opportunity education system has failed to be able to provide them the necessary education. Yes, you can pass laws enabling women to have control of their own bodies, but once again, if those women and the men who impregnate them are not educated to the point that the women don’t get pregnant in the first place…a moral education, which is almost non-existent in the educational system of the U.S. today… then what good do those laws do besides making it at least borderline safer to have an abortion. (I do not trust the medical system as well.)
I am truly stumped by all of this, but the one thing of which I am sure is the following…more laws are not going to make things better. The faults in the system are too deep. In the social system. Why? Too many laws, and deeply flawed enforcement of them. I personally believe that this country has gotten too big and it should break up into separate countries with separate cultures, but that’s probably not going to happen, and if it does there will be some hellish years much like what happened to the U.S.S.R. during and after its breakup.
So yes, the “libertarian” idea of less national laws/enforcement and more local laws/enforcement appeals to me. When things get too big and thus too complicated, one way of fixing that ind of situation is to compartmentalize a given system, give people a chance to control things on a more individual and local level instead of from the top down. As Ron Paul has said many times, something like that has never been tried. Not in any large, anti-federalist sense in a very diverse country it hasn’t. Let states and counties control their own destinies and see how things shake out. Yes, there would be primarily racist and sexist areas, as there would be primarily inclusive areas. Let’s see which areas thrive and which suffer. i know where I would choose to live. I would choose to live in the same totally diverse, working class urban neighborhoods in which I have lived almost all of my adult life, and I would also treat females as fairly as I have all of my life as well. My thoroughly liberated, hard working mother taught me that, God bless her.
Where do you live, centristfield? How many people of color live in your neighborhood? You talk a good..if way too simplistic…talk, but do you walk the walk?
I wonder.
AG
My God, you will write on and on in desperate attempts to avoid being truly accountable to your own policy and cultural beliefs.
When the whole same sex marriage faceoff was happening between that horrible county clerk in Kentucky and those who wanted to enjoy the very important right to marry, you wrote about how people in these regions of the United States would never accept this, and that if we pushed to enforce their civil rights protections we would cause LGBTQ people to be viciously physically assaulted. You advocated that States should be allowed to legally enforce separate and unequal civil rights policies.
Despite your wish to whistle past your moral graveyard here, your regressive views come through all the same, particularly in your horseshit “…ongoing riots in the streets in minority areas…” claim and completely unsupported assertion that affirmative action policies “…have too often resulted in the hiring of people who are not qualified for a given job…”.
We see the Trump fan coming through in these type of scurrilous lies, despite your desire at other moments to avoid being accountable to the acts of the President you organized voters to support.
I live right next to Oakland, California, and much of my organizing work takes place there. I live in a very ethnically diverse neighborhood, and work with an extremely ethnically diverse staff and membership.
With the de-adversarialization and plutocratization of the corporate media, and the extreme factionalization and self-retardation of the Repub party, the system of American government has obviously collapsed. Still, it is wonderful to see that some jeremiads are still being constructed for the delectation of the connoisseurs, haha.
The Repub party has now stepped into the fevered Hitlerian fantasyland of “Stabbed in the back!” and “Zionist-controlled!” and “Dagger pointed at the heart of Germany!” Having gone all-in on defense of their authoritarian Trumper, the only thing that stops “conservatism” now is Gotterdammerung.
I remember that from the 1950’s! They just returned to their roots.
Hi Martin: Are you on vacation from WM, or ill, or something? I miss you there even though I usually read you here … best, Pete
What Rick Wilson said has been in effect for the past 25 years, and he finally took his blinders off?
Nope.
The Republican party believes what Trump believes but never talks about it with their outside voices. These fucks are attempting to build life boats just like they did after Bush Jr.
Fuck that.
Burn the fucking life boats.
“The Party of Lincoln morphs into the Party of LaRouche” — the irony is that LaRouche considers himself a Democrat. I’m not sure the rest of the Democratic Party agrees. Personally, I’d love to run all of the LaRouchies out of the party.