George Will: Vote against Republicans

[brooklynite]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/vote-against-the-gop-this-november/2018/06/22/a6378306-7575-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html

Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of misrule, clarified something. Occurring less than 140 days before elections that can reshape Congress, the policy has given independents and temperate Republicans — these are probably expanding and contracting cohorts, respectively — fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote.

The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers. They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them.

[duforsure]

1. Why are they still republican?

That party is now the loyalist party of trump, so any remaining republicans unless their racist, or neo nazi, or child abusers or molesters, or for Russia and putin over the USA, why again are they with that party and not a Democrat to help stop trump again? And to save our Democracy , or do they like dictators better?

[OliverQ]

17. Will quit the Republican party.

He's still a generally anti-Democrat conservative, but he's no longer Republican and views them as a danger.

[BigmanPigman]

2. He was on Bill Maher last week and said that the GOP

has become a party of invertebrates. I see he is sticking with it...good!

[grantcart]

3. +1

[blueseas]

6. +100

[ailsagirl]

13. This I like!!!

[JHB]

21. Then he's still denying what actually happened, trying to wipe off the fingerprints...

George is a conservative. The "Big C" Conservative Movement kind.

The very people who insisted Republicans get with the program or be driven out of office. It's what they did to the Rockefeller Republicans in the 70s and 80s. And did it pretty damn gleefully.

When Poppy Bush wheezed the last gasp of of semi-authentic Republican "fiscal conservatism" by signing a too-small tax increase because the cherished 1986 tax reform was blowing an even bigger hole in the budget than earlier Reaganite cuts did, conservatives crucified him. And kept pounding the nails all through his presidency.

To get all the items on the Conservative Movement wish list, George's friends and colleagues played on voters' fears (especially bigoted voters' fears), said liberals and Democrats would make those fears come true, capitulate to the Soviets, be puppets of the Russians, and destroy the nation, while Republicans would stave off the end of civilization and restore us to our former glory (hey, don't that remind you of something?).

This all happened in the heyday of George Will's career, and he was fine with it. He and his fellow Movement Conservatives still thought it wasn't enough. When the Democratic candidate for president described himself as "pro-business", it wasn't an occasion to celebrate bringing an opponent closer to their point of view. No, they needed to demonize him, question his legitimacy, and throw up a fogbank of steam rising from great mountains of bullshit, lest they face pressure to compromise and have to sacrifice the biggest item in their wish list, destroying every last remnant of the New Deal and restoring the Gilded Age.

The Republicans aren't a party of invertebrates, George. You and your fellow conservatives transformed the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Ahab, and any among you who questioned the wisdom of hunting the White Whale were thrown overboard. When those people were fish-fodder, the ones who clove to norms and looked mildly askance at some of the excessively uncivil rhetoric were brought to heel or brought under the keel.

Think that's an exaggeration? For how may decades did any Republican who was even mildly critical of Rush Limbaugh jump to be on his show within 48 hours,doing qualifying runs for Olympic backpedaling?

Your elected officials are spineless, George, because they are your apparatchiks.

You're a conservative, George, and the Republican party is in the state it is in because your people made it that way. Good on ya for saying "elect Democrats", but don't pretend you and all of your NeverTrump colleagues didn't spend your entire careers preparing your party to embrace him.

No Disowning.

[BigmanPigman]

27. "destroying the New Deal and restoring the Gilded Age"...

you have a way with words, JHB. Brilliant!

[JHB]

35. Thanks. Makes me wish...

...I'd thought of "Of course they're invertebrates. There aren't any vertebrae in an elephant's trunk" earlier, dammit. I'll have to include that next time a wingnut welfare case whines about about their oh so saintly party was just taken over by visigoths, and sets me off.

[yonder]

29. holy cow, nice post!

+1 and then some.

[BumRushDaShow]

31. THIS! Him, Kristol, (the late) Krauthammer, top dog Buckley

THEY created this monster by stoking the embers of the draconian policies that the GOP insisted on putting in place, no matter how many people they hurt, while staying silent, even when the crazy teabaggers took over 8 years ago. They penned pages and pages of commentary in the "intellectual" media that carefully danced around the David Dukes and Ralph Reeds and the manufactured "Moral Majority", and continued to pivot around the manufactured "Tea Party" loons, even when they threw their gawd Raygun under the bus, until finally 35 years later, the dam broke.

But it's too late now.

[erronis]

39. I'm going to re-read your post, over and over.

You have encapsulated so many of my feelings about these recent "come-to-hay-soos" pontificators. I remember a few during Cheney's (W?) regime but they still gravitate to the cesspool of the AEI and money.

[JHB]

43. Edited: Thanks

edited because I just recapitulated my "Party of Ahab" rant. I've repeated that a couple of times over the past few days, and forgot I'd used it in the post you were responding to.

Conservatives have been driving the Republicans on this path for decades, and on this specific trajectory since Newt Gingrich exhorted Republicans to, at every opportunity, treat Democrats as "the enemy of normal Americans". They made him Speaker of the House for it, when he should have been treated like stuff you scrape off your shoe.

Will recently used an old Roman proverb to describe the 'recent "come-to-hay-soos" pontificators':
"the owl of Minerva flies at dusk", meaning if you see the owl, it's already too late: dusk is upon you.

But dusk isn't now. It as back when Newt was made Speaker. Not only were the owls flying, they were flying in formation. Big, WW2-bombing-mission style formations, with the air filled with wings and hoots.

And when it could have made a difference, George said nothing.

[c-rational]

53. Wonderful post...I especially liked the wording "brought to heel or brought under the keel"

[flying rabbit]

55. +1

[Honeycombe8]

4. He has a way with words. Excellent writer. He says it succinctly, & sends a msg.

to his "friends" on the hill and to Republican & Independent voters.

Excellent. I hope they do what he suggests.

[moreland01]

5. I don't think . . .

George Will was endorsing Dems. He was just saying neuter the Republicans so that trump is neutered. George Will will become a Democrat when pigs actually fly.

[localroger]

12. Indeed not. However...

...he is saying, essentially, that "the enemy of my enemy is, if not my friend, my temporary ally." We can disagree on everything else while agreeing that Trump is a dumpster fire that needs to be extinguished at any cost. And while he's wrong about almost everything else, he's right about that.

[tomp]

42. trump is just the soul american imperialism fully exposed.

the world knows that all our high-flown phrases about liberty, and democracy, and peace are window dressing compared to the way "policy" is carried out at home and abroad, and has been since at least the turn of the 20th century. trump is who we really are until our actions match our words.

[DeminPennswoods]

7. This little gem is tucked in at the end

A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House.

So no, George Will gets no credit for enabling today's GOP then running to Dems to bail out his past support of bad people.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

10. He's just pompous douchebag with a thesaurus who's been wrong about everything his entire

life. Yet thinks he's too clever for us peons. Fuck him and everything he's prostituted himself for all these years.

[ecstatic]

15. "pompous douchebag with a thesaurus"

Love it!

[erronis]

40. A wannabe WFB (WTF) Buckley

Lots of words an a scholarly demeanor. No real life experience. Fortunately will soon pass the way of Krauthammer and Buckley - but not into some Christian Nirvana (sic).

[Nitram]

49. +1 Corngood

[lunasun]

54. +1 on that account Corngood

[janx]

18. He seems to be vacillating between the desire of a functional Congress

and some kind of equivocation re Republicans and Democrats, because he just can't shake himself out of his former years.

This is NOT the time for that.

[Martin Eden]

8. Will had me until ...

...

Ryan traded his political soul for . . . a tax cut. He who formerly spoke truths about the accelerating crisis of the entitlement system lost everything in the service of a president pledged to preserve the unsustainable status quo.

Paul Ryan was a lying snake in the grass then, and he's a lying snake in the grass now.

[JHB]

37. Yeah. Ryan never had a soul, political or otherwise...

...and he's ever spoken truths. he simply regurgitated the same conservative dogma that Will has scriv'ed for nearly half a century.

[Hamlette]

9. I'll be you $100 he does not vote for one Democrat in 2018.

they talk a good line but it is so ingrained, I don't trust him.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

11. Yeah...Thanks for the tip George.

Speaking the obvious as if it were profound.

[hatrack]

22. He's David Brooks with better vocab and greater pomposity . . .

Blah blah blah usufruct blah blah blah Reagan blah blah blah inchoate blah blah blah fiduciary blah blah blah vortices blah blah blah eelemosynary.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

24. Meanwhile...

He goes home to a secure future. The rest of us,,....not so much. And another week is under dt's belt.

[hatrack]

25. Yes, but he's really, really smart - just ask him!

And he used to have lunch with NANCY REAGAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



A hack whose day has long since passed.

[yonder]

32. "eelemosynary", you got me - had to look it up

George will use words.

[hibbing]

34. Wow....nice description n/t

[Nitram]

50. Yup, hatrack, you have him pegged.

[janx]

14. He left the Republican party a couple of years ago.

I can't help but notice how many Republicans who have jumped ship in one way or another still cling to the good old Reagan days--precisely the days when the Republican party shifted by appealing to the Dixiecrats/evangelicals.

That is when the real tribalism, the popular media term, started. It was fueled by talk radio and cable, but in the early days mostly the former. The Clintons were usually the targets and the subjects of the conspiracy theories hatched via those media.

(Yes, I know about the Southern Strategy, but it was during Reagan that the results really began to take shape.)

Why can't they acknowledge that? My guess is that many of these journalists got their start in those years and cannot admit or rationally analyze what happened.

[erronis]

41. Yes - there was a tidal shift during that time. Well orchestrated and taking advantage

of the small minds of the rigid conservatives. Fear of the unknown, fear of the infidels at the gate.

[McCamy Taylor]

16. George Will delivers the talking point du jour for the RNC. The RNC plans to clean out the Tea Party

I see nothing implausible about the RNC telling their point man to tell the faithful to sit out this election. And this message spells the doom of the Trump and Tea Party.

The GOP only wins because their base always turns out to vote in even the dinkiest little special election. If the core Republican base--the soccer moms, the economic conservatives, the Catholic conservatives--stay home, the Tea Party will die.

For years, the Tea Party has been counting upon the extraordinary brand loyalty that Republicans have for their party. They have been able to get away with murder and treason, safe in the knowledge that Republicans would vote them back in.

Way to go, RNC. Looks like NO party wants to be Putin's puppet, not even the opposition party.

[awesomerwb1]

19. So Democrats are a basket of deplorables?

He can go f-ck himself.

[paleotn]

20. The George Will?

The guy that's been so close to Republicans since at least Nixon, that he virtually lived in Reagan, George H. W. and W Bush's underwear? The Rethuglican party, as we once knew it, is dead. It's going the way of the Whigs.

[czarjak]

23. Poor George...

[llmart]

26. The only good thing about this editorial is...

the fact that most Republicans, especially the teabaggers and trumpsters, have no idea what 99.9% of those words mean.

George Will can go jump in a lake - a very deep one.

[GoCubsGo]

28. Hell has frozen over.

[Nitram]

48. No, Will still hates Democrats, and believes the Republican role is essentially to block

Democratic policy. Beyond that, government has no role in Will's "mind."

[hibbing]

30. Just who are these "temperate" Republicans in Congress?

The ones that think moderation is putting whole families in camps instead of babies and toddlers? I see no indication of moderation, instead I see the exact opposite.

Peace

[Nitram]

52. Only if "temperate" means being Trump toady unable to express a coherent opinion of their own.

Like Brooks, Will believes in a mythological silent majority of gray-suited quiet men who think he is an intellectual and actually knows what he is talking about.

[Cha]

33. Thanks George Will.. it's true

[Nitram]

51. Nope, Will is as deplorable as they come. He sees the evil of Trump, cannot admit that his own

ideology and biases led to Trump's election, and still hates Democrats.

[CabalPowered]

36. Will can GFH

"A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House."

[KPN]

38. I agree. His likes over a period of 30 plus

years are the chief reason we have the asshole we have in the WH. Praising him for this is praising him for saying “the GOP needs to ratchet it back just a wee bit. Not so much that progressives make any gains, but just enough to avoid WWIII.”

It may be good to see given the disparate circumstances, but fuck GHW nevertheless.

[struggle4progress]

44. Will is playing "They're all equally bad!"

His aim is to convert the waffling middle into non-voters

[Nitram]

47. Good point, struggle. Will doesn't want government to work, and he sees Trump as proof that it

shouldn't. He is a radical of the worst kind, clothed in an intellectual's gray suits, and conservative ties. His hatred of the Democratic Party clouds his ability to think clearly.

[Nitram]

45. Make no mistake about it, Will vehemently hates liberals and Democrats.

And he always will. He writes in this OP that "congressional Democrats are equally supine toward Democratic presidents," ignoring the fact that no Democratic president has come anywhere close to the danger to democracy, national security, or the economy that Trump represents. Will actually makes the point that no one has ever been the immoral, insane monster that Trump is, but still writes not a word about the fact that Democrats are the only viable alternative. Will wants people to vote for libertarians, independents and moderate Republicans, when only a Democrat could possibly defeat Trump.

[Nitram]

46. If anyone has any doubt that George Will sees Democrats as only a slightly less evil alternative

to Trump, he wrote this: "A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House." In other words, no government is better than a Democratically-led government, and only slightly better than a Trump-led government. Will's mind is poisoned against the Democratic Party, and he is blind to the fact that the Democrats are a far better alternative to a Tump presidency and a Republican-controlled Congress. Will as much as admits that Republicans are useless except as an obstacle to Democratic initiatives. His intellectual dishonesty and his inability to see past his blind hatred of the Democratic Party, render him totally incapable of making a clear analysis of the political and economic state of the union. In Will's mind, the best government is a total stalemate in which the government can do nothing at all. He sounds like an anarchist, or a radical libertarian to me.

[betsuni]

56. He's just upset that Republicans are being too vulgar, that's all.

[UCmeNdc]

57. George Will is 100% correct. Trump has become a major problem for the US to survive.

Trump is slowly draining the life out of the United States. Trump is trying to grab control of every part of the US government. Trump is using the Republican party lackey leadership to accomplish his goal of complete control. George Will recognizes the coming catastrophe if Donald Trump is not put into check. So all Republican voters should vote for the Democratic candidates come Nov. 2018.