Posted on 06/29/2017 7:43:13 AM PDT by lowbridge
Almost two years ago, I wrote an article for Politico endorsing Donald Trump for president. It was a tongue-in-cheek effort—I “supported” Trump only because I thought he would lose to Hillary Clinton, disastrously, and that his defeat would cleanse the Republican Party of the extremism and nuttiness that drove me out of it. I had hoped that post-2016, what remained of the moderate wing of the GOP would reassert itself as it did after the Goldwater debacle in 1964, and exorcise the crazies.
Trump was a guaranteed loser, I thought. In the Virginia presidential primary, I even voted for him, hoping to hasten the party’s demise. In the weeks before the November election, I predicted a Clinton presidency would fix much of what ails our country. On November 8, I voted for Clinton and left the ballot booth reasonably sure she would win.
-snip
Trump has turned out to be far, far worse than I imagined. He has instituted policies so right wing they make Ronald Reagan, for whom I worked, look like a liberal Democrat. He has appointed staff people far to the right of the Republican mainstream in many positions, and they are instituting policies that are frighteningly extreme. Environmental Protection Administration Administrator Scott Pruitt proudly denies the existence of climate change, and is doing his best to implement every item Big Oil has had on its wish list since the agency was established by Richard Nixon. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is actively hostile to the very concept of public education and is doing her best to abolish it. Every day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions institutes some new policy to take incarceration and law enforcement back to the Dark Ages. Trump’s proposed budget would eviscerate the social safety net for the sole purpose of giving huge tax cuts to the ultrawealthy.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
That’s part of it.
Sounds about right to me! Keep on Trumpin’!
Bruce is raising the humidity level.
Now there’s an article that warms my heart. That’s my President!
He refuses to see that the reason why Trump won the Republican nomination was that the public was tired of empty “ideas”. They wanted somebody who would actually GET SOMETHING DONE.
The taxpaying electorate is tired of “moderates” who serve only to maintain the pretense of opposing socialism.
Bartlett lost his mind years ago. The party that has no ideas is the Democrat party, though the GOPe isn’t much better.
Conservative leaders like William F. Buckley, the editor of National Review, the leading conservative publication, took to heart progressive historian Richard Hofstadter’s critique of widespread paranoia on the right. Buckley purged the extreme libertarians like Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, anti-Semites like Willis Carto of the Liberty Lobby, and the conspiracy-obsessed John Birch Society. And he made peace with the civil rights movement, as historian Al Felzenberg has documented. In the 1970s, the conservative movement became receptive to moderate conservatives, called “neoconservatives,” such as Irving Kristol (father of Bill, the prominent anti-Trump conservative), who had been turned off by the anti-intellectualism of movement conservatism in the Goldwater era. Irving Kristol established an important journal, The Public Interest, which brought intellectual rigor and sophisticated policy analysis to the conservative table. Politicians like my former boss, Representative Jack Kemp, began reading it religiously. Others, like Rep. Dave Stockman, wrote for it and made names for themselves in the process. Eventually, this crowd found a powerful leader in Reagan, who appointed important neoconservatives like Stockman and Jeane Kirkpatrick to high-level positions.
In other words, this idiot believes that the only way the Right can succeed is by becoming more like the Liberal Establishment. We've already tried that with Bush, Dole, Bush, McCain, and Romney. And what did we get? Either losses or "victories" that resulted in having someone in office who may as well have been a Clinton Democrat.
Bruce Bartlett is what happens when a newspaper is devoid of any journalists who have a clue.
No ... Trump is what happens when citizens get sick and tired of the same old same old from the idiots in Washington DC. If only the voters would show up and do likewise during Congressional elections.
Bartlett is nothing more than a Democrat who infiltrated the Republican Party and got into a position of power.
‘In the Virginia presidential primary, I even voted for him, hoping to hasten the party’s demise.’
Congratulations; you played yourself.
He should basically have stopped there.
The problem with the Republican party did not result from the moderates losing their dominance, it lost it's way by following the moderates.
Every budget resolution, every liberal nominee approved to the courts, and every Democratic scandal allowed to pass set the Republican party and the nation just a little back more and more. Finally, Trump arrived and said, enough is enough! America (and Americans) comes first!
And modern day Dems make JFK look like a far right conservative.
That statement - alone - tells the reader all one needs to know about the lack of judgment and intellectual capacity of this author.
Trump is what happens when one party makes so many mistakes that they can no longer come up with ideas on how to cover them. correct them, or make them go completely away. He is not a political icon. He’s not even a politician. He’s the product of screw ups for more than a half century and is willing to give the tough love needed to try to get it back to where it actually worked.
And he’s trying to do it in less than 8 years in what took you 60 and a whole lot more of you to accomplish even using rules you set up, and have used, that you bitch about now.
Kinda leaves a bad taste in your mouth, doesn’t it?
rwood
The establishment Republicans that Bruce Bartlett supported in the past had no ideas at all, they just offered a slightly watered-down version of what the Democrats were already peddling. I don't remember John McCain putting much on the table that we didn't or couldn't get from Bill or Hillary Clinton.
Trump is holding all of us back. Imagine what would happen if he asked the people to go after his detractors? You need to be thankful that Trump has self-control.
By the sounds of it, his name should be Bruthe not Bruce.
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