https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/democrats_hoist_with_their_own_petard.html
Democrats Hoist with Their Own Petard
Clarice Feldman
FTA:
Dumber still has been the Democrats’ ridiculous refusal to fund the $5 billion the President has asked to build the wall. Polls show overwhelming support for a hardened border and a halt to streams of illegals storming into the country from Mexico. Despite the best efforts of the media to show that it has created great hardships, the shutdown of about 25% of the federal government has not done so. The vast majority of the furloughed workers are Democratic voters. In effect, the Democrats handed them over to the president as hostages.
A look at Senator Schumer’s face in the public “negotiation” in the White House showed me that he realized the stunt was a loser. If I had any doubts, the picture of his face as he left the White House this past Friday confirmed it. He looked like a man being led to the gallows.
...
The President has said he’ll keep the government shut down as long as it takes to build the wall, that the wall will be differently constructed in different places to suit the terrain and the Border Patrol’s recommendations. It may not have yet occurred to the Democrats, but the government cannot be reopened until they pass a spending bill that the Senate will vote for and the President will sign. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t do it otherwise. Basic civics.
But Nancy Pelosi seems to have missed that while flunking high school civics, because she claimed this week that the Constitution makes her the President’s equal. The consequences of failing to understand the basic federalist structure in which she heads only one-half of one of the three branches are more significant than just getting an “F” on the final exam.
The Breaking Of The Never Trump Mind
Christopher Bedford
FTA:
...At 2016’s cocktail parties, the party of Donald Trump was decidedly less welcome. There were no calls for unity this time around, nor many offered in return.
When Jeb Bush touted his brother’s record on keeping Americans safe, Trump didn’t pay homage to the last Republican president. “The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign,” he replied. “Remember that.”
The professional Republican audience booed loudly, and professional journalists were aghast. But elsewhere, it rang true.
“I became Trump’s biggest fan,” J.D. Vance, a Marine and the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” wrote. “I wanted him to go for the jugular. I wanted him to inquire whom, precisely, George W. Bush had kept safe. Was it the veterans lingering in a bureaucratic quagmire at the Department of Veterans Affairs or the victims of 9/11? Was it the enlistees from my block back home, who signed their lives on the dotted line while Jeb’s brother told the country to ‘go shopping’—something kids like me couldn’t afford to do?”
“Trump was not the origin of the discontent,” Kesler writes, “however vital he was to its crystallization.”
When Trump debated Hillary Clinton on the border, he didn’t color his language with “act of love” or apologies for our law. “We have some bad hombres,” he told the country, “and we’re going to get them out.”
The professionals were aghast. Large swathes of the country, however, agreed with him.
And that very night, when Clinton went on the offensive on abortion, conservatives might have expected more of the familiar Republican defenses: an oath of fealty to women’s rights followed by a nonthreatening confession of religious belief, finished with an agreement to disagree because “it’s the law of the land” or some such platitudes. Instead, in an arena in the Las Vegas desert, the New York businessman hit harder than any presidential candidate in memory: “Based on what she’s saying, and based on where she’s going and where she’s been,” Trump began, “you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month on the final day. And that’s not acceptable.”
“Such a nasty woman.”
Somewhere in Georgetown, the professional class may have blanched, but at Stoney’s Rockin’ Country cowboy bar on a highway outside the security parameter, a crowd of truckers, mothers, postmen and real estate agents erupted.
Trump “identified with working men and women, and promised (at least) to add jobs, to boost economic growth, to ‘win’ for pipe-fitters and waitresses, too,” Kesler writes. “He defended their Social Security but blasted the fraud of Obamacare, whereas Romney had scorned the 47%’s ‘entitlements’ but gave Obamacare (based, you may recall, on Romneycare) a pass.”
Romney hit every bell the donor class asked for: Successful governor in a blue state, successful businessman, success of the Winter Olympics; religious but not too religious, conservative but pragmatic, and, paradoxically, seemingly willing to stay in Iraq until it had democracy and a middle class.
“Romney,” Kesler muses, “lacked perhaps what Kanye West would call ‘dragon energy.’”
The Never Trumpers say they don’t recognize a Republican Party where the core tenets are neither free trade nor foreign democracy promotion. But maybe they just didn’t know their voters by sight, because the only party that has truly departed recognition is Never Trump.
Each week brings this movement a new and bizarre position: Opposing tax cuts, supporting Obamacare; wishing North Korean talks ill, wishing Democratic investigators well; dreaming of European political meddling, pining for American political comeuppance.
Rick Santorum, the Catholic working-class firebrand rarely seen among Washington’s polite classes, had long commented that a party such as the GOP, with a donor class so out of line with its base, could not possibly continue to function.
There could not be such a massive realignment without something somewhere snapping, but despite the Never Trump hysteria, it doesn’t appear to be the party. Though the president’s House was defeated in the first post-Trump national elections and his two-year approval among Democrats lies at historic lows, his approval with his own voters—those who the Never Trumpers courted not long ago—is second only to George W. Bush after 9/11.
As the second year of Trump’s presidency ends, these former Republicans have insulted and alienated their readers until they had none. They’ve squandered their time on unimportant, self-righteous panel discussions, finally reduced to bobbing up in partisan anti-Trump venues surrounded by men and women who called them war criminals just years before, buoyed for a time by saying the right thing about the right enemy.
NAFTA, mean words and Donald Trump cannot possibly be the origin of these shattered minds, however vital those were to the breaking.
Ignoring the last paragraph, he has the right idea.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/01/in-re-romney.php
In Re: Romney
Steven Hayward
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I boldfaced “promoted” because Romney has unwittingly provided the devastating argument against his style of Republicanism. Yes, it is quite true that nearly all Republican presidential candidates—and presidents—have promoted tax reform, lower regulation, getting tough with China, and appointing better judges (and add in moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem), if by “promoted” you mean giving lip service to the ideas.
None of them have delivered on these “promoted” ideas (Reagan excepted, of course). The two presidents Bush botched judicial appointments, extended regulation, delivered little in the way of serious tax or spending reform, and did nothing serious with regard to China. I wish Romney had defeated Obama in 2012, but does anyone think this Massachusetts technocrat, who gave us the state-level version of Obamacare in the Bay State, signed up for a regional climate change cap-and-trade scheme, who appointed the egregious Gina McCarthy (Obama’s second EPA administrator) to be his environmental adviser, and appointed state judges who struck the first judicial blows for same-sex marriage, would have governed as a serious conservative had he won?
The point is, Trump has proved that “mainstream Republicanism” was a colossal failure. Whereas Bush-Romney Republicans “promoted” good ideas, Trump has delivered on them.
I’ll restate once again that I think Trump is, in Wall Street terms, a “high-beta presidency”—high risk, high reward. I wish he was more prudent and measured in the fights he picks and how he conducts himself. He remains his own worst enemy. I fear Trump’s presidency could end disastrously for conservatism. But in the meantime he has mounted the most vigorous challenge to liberalism of anyone since Reagan, under much more difficult political circumstances. We know what we’re going to get from Trump. From Romney, Jeb Bush, or John Kasich, we have no such confidence. Romney should just get to work at being a good senator, and stop the posturing. Or to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld’s most famous remark, we have to go into political battle with the president we have, rather than the president we wish he had.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/elizabeth_warren_dead_phony_walking.html
Elizabeth Warren: Dead phony walking
By Thomas Lifson
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Warren’s Instagram video, in which the prissy professor pretended she was an average Joe using working-class vernacular and said, “Hold on a second – I’m gonna get me a beer” was cringe-inducing, as was the body language purporting to be slugging down a brewski:
The faux, visibly uncomfortable and out-of-character attempt to speak in the Vulgate brought to mind, as Ed Driscoll reminded us, John F. Kerry’s immortal fake folksiness in telling people, “Can I get a me a hunting license here?”
I don’t know a single person who likes being patronized, as Warren, Dukakis, and Kerry were obviously doing to people they regarded as their social and intellectual inferiors. People who patronize others are blind to their own contempt for those they seek to enlighten with their own virtue. A dose of humility is the only remedy, and humility is, to a Harvard professor turned senator, like a cross to a vampire.
Elizabeth Warren does not understand that she is now damaged goods, her image as a snobby phony cast in stone. I hope she persists in her futile quest for the Oval Office, for all she will do is remind voters that Democrats speak with forked tongues (as her nonexistent Native American ancestors said in countless movies) when they talk about affirmative action, or helping the working class, among other subjects.
One of the root problems Democrats face is that the mainstream media never call them out and never really warn them when they are being phonies. The press operates as a claque for them, sparing them warnings about how out of touch they get with the public they seek to persuade. The fact that media elites share the same class preferences of Democrat elites is all the more dangerous.