Going Down with the Flagship: Roy Edroso on the despair of National Review about Trump

[muriel_volestrangler]

(Roy Edroso does the best take-downs of right wing bloggers and pundits there are - his column is published each Monday in the Village Voice, and his blog links to it, and has occasional posts like this one too - always worth following)

That National Review broadside against Trump last month seems not to have done the trick, and the magazine's employees are hysterically demanding Republican Presidential contenders lay down their political lives for the good of the Bush tax cuts and their phony-baloney jobs.
...
Meanwhile imported wingnut Charles C.W. Cooke says "It’s Time for an Anti-Trump Manhattan Project," and blames not the candidates but that plurality of the GOP electorate who won't vote for National Review-approved, housebroken wingnuts:

For the last eight months or so, a significant portion of the Republican party’s voters have been in thrall to a bizarre, Occupy-esque conspiracy theory, which holds as its central thesis that sabotage and pusillanimity are the root causes of the Right’s recent woes. In this mistaken view, the conservative movement’s failure to counter all of the Obama era’s excesses is not the product of the crucial democratic and structural factors that prevent any one faction from ushering in substantial change, but of a lack of will or desire...

On its face, this theory is irrational to the point of absurdity — if I am told one more time that it makes sense to nominate a single-payer-supporting defender of Planned Parenthood because Congress’s repeal-and-defund bill was vetoed by the incumbent, I shall begin to order bourbon in bulk.

Shall he, now? Yet Cooke is the same guy who, a few years ago, wrote in "In Praise of Paranoia" that "reflexive suspicion of government power is a magnificent and virtuous tendency, and one that should be the starting point of all political conversation in a free republic," and also this:

Odd as it might sound, having a sizeable portion of the population reflexively take the view that the government would hurt them if it could is, I think, a good thing. There are no black helicopters and there may never be any black helicopters. But isn’t it positive that people are worried about them?

Now, having fluffed the black-helicopter-watching, lunatic fringe of his movement in expectation that all the benefit would accrue to him, Cooke has seen them go Trumpers -- who could have predicted! -- and tries now to summon sensible conservatives to shut them down. But don't worry, he has suggestions:

If Donald Trump can flood the airwaves with his nonsense, his opponents can counter it incessantly. And while they are at it, they can tie him up in court, just as he’s trying to do to Cruz. There are a good number of “just asking” questions ready to be put to them, among them “Trump’s mother was Scottish, can he really be president?” and “Trump ran a host of scams designed to rip off the poor; surely one of them would like to sue him?

http://alicublog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/going-down-with-flagship.html

[Renew Deal]

1. The republicans have done this to themselves

Similar to the birth of the tea baggers. Denying reality, misleading voters, using voters to get elected and then ignoring them while rich benefactors prosper, obstructing at every turn. The fools have woken up slightly and turned the tables on the National Review types.

Reap what they sow and all that. The National Review and their cohorts created Trump.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. And a post from John Cole at Balloon Juice - who gets Cooke to react:

Either they are too stupid to recognize it, or they don’t want to take the blame, or some combination of both, but they built Trump. It was decades of these stupid mother fuckers shouting about Obama being a secret Muslim or Hillary murdered Vince Foster and Dan Burton shooting a fucking watermelon to prove it to another melon based theory about Mexicans having calves the size of cantaloupes and women wanting to abort babies for shits and giggles and sending rock salt to Olympia Snowe and claiming there is no global climate change because LOOK RIGHT FUCKING HERE I HAVE A SNOWBALL IN FEBRUARY or convincing America that welfare and food stamps only go to young bucks buying t-bone steaks or welfare queens with big screen tv’s or that public transportation is totalitarianism or that the main cost cutting technique of health care reform will be Death Panels or that prison makes you gay or that man and dinosaurs lived together in harmony or that women can magically abort pregnancies created by rape or that scientists are genetically creating human/mice superbrains or that agribusiness is using aborted fetuses in soda or that if gay people marry pretty soon people will be marrying dogs or that Presidents Lincoln and Washington used electronic surveillance and actually writing, promoting, and believing a fucking book that said liberalism is fascism and running this person as a Vice Presidential candidate to claiming with no scientific evidence that vaccines cause autism.

My bad. That last one is a Democrat. Fuck you, Robert Kennedy, you fucking stain on our party and your family name.

But that list is real. I didn’t make any of it up. And that’s just a list of things they BELIEVE IN, and not a comprehensive list of the stupid shit they’ve actually done or the vile things they have said. That’s just too depressing to actually tabulate.

So yeah, Mr. Cooke, while you are calling on a Manhattan Project to defeat Trump, maybe you should sit back and reflect on just how the fuck this train got so far off the rails. If this list isn’t comprehensive enough, I’ve got another something that may convince you. Something that appeared just this fucking morning in your own god damned magazine:



https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/02/24/yes-guys-you-actually-built-this/

(The list has about 20 links - it's as good a summary of the Republican insanity as I've seen)

Cooke responded on Twitter:

@Johngcole Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

https://twitter.com/charlescwcooke/status/702680684347957252

And the replies are tearing into Cooke.

[Mojorabbit]

3. K&R nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. Fun read

but the mood of distrust of the establishment and a base revolt is not just limited to Trumpism.