Lots of Republicans and Conservatives Drubbing This President Today and Lately

 I'm telling you, all kinds of negative press is coming out today on this President and all I'm seeing is actually from Republicans themselves. Herewith, a list.

First from David Brooks and The New York Times:

Where Do Republicans Go From Here?

The party looks brain-dead at every spot Trump touches

Jonathan V. Last thinks President Trump is here forever. Last, the editor of The Bulwark, a conservative site that’s been hostile to Trump, argues that if Trump loses in November, he’ll claim he was cheated out of the election. He’ll force other Republicans to back up his claim. He’ll get a TV show, hold rallies, be coy about running again in 2024.

He’ll still be the center of everything Republican. Ambitious Republicans will have to lash themselves to the husk of the dying czar if they want to have any future in the party. The whole party will go Trump-crazed and brain-dead for another four years.

I salute Last for coming up with a post-2020 scenario even more pessimistic than my own!

Next up, a story and link from a conservative and Republican who has a new book out on this President and his political party.

Veteran GOP Strategist Takes On Trump — And His Party — In 'It Was All A Lie'

Veteran political consultant Stuart Stevens has spent years working as a strategist for Republican campaigns, including the presidential bids of Bob Dole, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. But Stevens didn't support the party's candidate in the 2016 presidential election — and he wasn't alone.

"In 2016, when I went out and attacked Trump on television," he says, "I would say maybe a third of the party hierarchy would email me and thank me for doing this."

But Stevens notes that many of the Republicans who had privately voiced concern about Trump changed their tune on election night. "I started getting emails like, 'Could you maybe delete that email?' " he says.

"It's an extraordinary contradiction," Stevens says. "I've never heard any Republican office-holder speak of President Trump as if he should be president. ... They know he shouldn't be president. [But] he is president, and they still support him."

And that story, of Mr. Stevens' new book, is so good, here's another article on it.

Longtime GOP strategist says he’ll ‘work with Democrats’ to defeat Trump

Stuart Stevens is one of the Republican Party’s most successful campaign strategists, with a career spanning decades. In his revealing new book, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump,” Stevens admits the GOP uses race as an issue to divide Americans and win elections -- and says the party has abandoned its principles in the Trump era.

This next one is especially brutal, not just on Trump but on the entire Republican Party. And it's tough not just on this President and not just on the Republican Party--that's a lot--but it's brutal on Missouri's own Senator Josh Hawley, too, here folks.

Conservative Columnist Explains Why GOP May Not Deserve To Have A Future

“Trump’s entire presidency has been an affront to what conservatives used to think their movement was all about,” wrote Max Boot of The Washington Post

Conservative columnist Max Boot explained in his latest column in The Washington Post why the GOP “doesn’t deserve to have a future” if its best alternative to Donald Trump is four senators who’ve enabled the president every step of the way.

Boot, a vocal critic of the Trump administration, recalled a column by The New York Times’ David Brooks that suggested “a high-minded debate to define the nature of the GOP is underway” among Republican Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Josh Hawley, (Mo.), Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Ben Sasse (Neb.).

“But I’m sorry, I can’t take any of their high-minded blather seriously,” Boot wrote in his op-ed Monday. “Not when they have spent the past four years acting as enablers for the worst president in U.S. history — or at least the worst in the past 151 years.”

Boot asked “what is conservative about” multiple Trump scandals, policies and controversies that the four senators either endorsed or remained silent about.

“Trump’s entire presidency has been an affront to what conservatives used to think their movement was all about,” Boot wrote. “And yet at every step of the way, Rubio, Hawley, Cotton and Sasse have been Trump’s willing accomplices.”

Next up is this from right next door in Nebraska:

Sasse responds to Trump: 'America doesn't have kings'

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) on Monday defended his opposition to President Trump's use of executive orders to address the coronavirus pandemic, hours after the president publicly called the GOP senator out over his criticism.

Sasse — in a note tweeted from his campaign account and signed "Gym Rat" — indicated he would rather have the discussion privately with Trump but added "since you moved our conversation from private to public, here we are."

"On the topic that had you mad this weekend: No president — whether named Obama or Trump or Biden or AOC — has unilateral power to rewrite immigration law or to cut taxes or to raise taxes. This is because America doesn't have kings," Sasse wrote.

Finally today is this from former Republican member of the House of Representatives Joe Scarborough, now from MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program:

‘Wake up and read some history’: Joe Scarborough blasts ‘stupid’ Trump in epic rant

On MSNBC Tuesday, Joe Scarborough ripped into President Donald Trump’s ignorance, and outlined how it is threatening the entire country, telling him to “wake up and read some history.”

“I remember talking to them. I remember other people going and talking to them, and Jared’s opinion and Donald Trump’s opinion was we don’t need to know history because look what happened in the past,” said Scarborough. “In fact, they were saying they didn’t even need to know about Middle East history. You know, tried to talk to Jared about 1967 boundaries, about the ’73 war, about Camp David, just about all of it. And the attitude remained, I don’t need to know about history, stop talking about what’s been done in the past because everybody failed.”

“If you had just listened to what General Mattis said, and other advisers were trying to tell you, we’d be in a much better place right now,” said Scarborough. “But no, you had your own ideas about North Korea … you were stupid enough to believe you could go over there and talk to a communist who put people through paper shredders, you were stupid enough to believe you could play Apprentice with him. You got used and fooled, and America is in more danger today from North Korea than ever before. You thought you could invite the Chinese over to Mar-a-Lago for dessert. Oh, isn’t this good dessert? You thought you are going to win over President Xi? You followed him along like a little puppy dog.”

I'm telling you, folks, it's unprecedented in our nation and our nation's history how many people from this President's own political party want to make sure he isn't reelected.

On to November!

VOTE!!

And VOTE BLUE!!

Links:

A devastating indictment of the Republican Party from a GOP insider

GOP Finance chairman raises concerns about Trump push to make payroll tax deferral permanent

Kasich on decision to speak at Democratic convention

Dr. Ranney: 'Absolute abdication of responsibility' by executive branch on COVID-19 response

GOP Finance chairman raises concerns about Trump push to make payroll-tax deferral permanent

Kentuckians Turn on McConnell as Economy Implodes

Poll: 59 percent of voters disapprove of Trump's decision to share videos promoting hydroxychloroquine

Think government surveillance is new?

The whole brouhaha over government surveillance of our emails and phone calls gives me two reactions.

First, it makes me laugh because I think people are making a great deal out of not much and second, it kind of p*sses me off because the people complaining are quite likely, also, the ones who would REALLY scream bloody murder if we WERE attacked by some wack-jobs, intent on killing and hurting people in this nation.

And for anyone who thinks this is a new phenomenon, think again.

Back in 1937, the following happened:

"When Princess Juliana of the Netherlands became a mother, CBS planned a fifteen-minute spot" on the radio, mind you "...about the new heir to the House of Orange. For reasons of scheduling, New York changed its mind. The decision to drop it, a cabled order went back to London:

"KILL JULIANA'S BABY." 

That afternoon, Helen Sioussat found two FBI men at her door."*

Mind you, that's 1937, too.

When it comes to the government surveillance of our emails, so far, I come down with the likes of Right Wing, Republican, small-government, though moderate columnist David Brooks last week on NPR :

"You know, I'm not as bothered as some. I'm somewhat bothered by the secrecy, but I don't feel it's intrusive. Basically, they're running huge amounts of megadata through an algorithm. That feels less intrusive to me than the average TSA search at the airport. And so I don't think it's particularly intrusive. It is supervised by the court. It has some congressional supervision.

It seems to be reasonably narrowly focused. And so I don't regard this as a crime against our civil liberties. I regard it as a somewhat moderate and balanced way to look for people who are calling bad people."

What the government is doing was put by the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, also, so it's not as though it hasn't been "aired out", so to speak. It was never a big secret.

And what's the alternative choice?  That we have wackos with bombs running around the country for some God-knows-what purpose, trying to kill and hurt Americans?

I'll stick with the possible loss of a little privacy every time.

*Director of Talks and Public Affairs for CBS radio from 1937 to 1958. Passage taken from the book
 Murrow: His Life and Times by A. M. Sperber.

Link:

Week In Politics: Sifting Through Surveillance

Additional, great article, just out this week, that rather agrees with my points:

The New Yorker:  So Are We Living in 1984?

Notes and quotes on this presidential election

Some quotes from NPR yesterday, from a conversation of reporter Robert Siegel with E.J. Dionne, journalist and political commentator, and conservative commentator, journalist and writer--also Republican--David Brooks:

First, David Brooks on Mitt Romney: "His campaign is now in a sort of a state of crisis, I would say. The Republican elites are in somewhat panic.

You're seeing - the whole electoral map has sort of shifted. Some polls don't show it. The Gallup poll, to be fair, shows the race still tied, but basically, if you look at the whole electoral map, you have Obama up by five points in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, maybe five in a bunch of others, eight in some others. And then you're beginning to see the states, the key states - Ohio, significant Obama leads, all the swing states, with the possible exception North Carolina, all shifting Democratic.

And so, I don't know how bad it's hurt him, but the electoral map is shifting in the Democratic direction."

More from Mr. Brooks: "I think it's mostly Romney, frankly. I think the country would like to vote against President Obama if they had a plausible alternative. But Romney is the only candidate in modern political history where his unfavorables are higher than his favorables. John McCain, Al Gore, people who lost, had double-digit advantage in favorable.

So people just don't like Romney. And the core problem is he's insincere. It's an insincere campaign. He's a non-ideological person in an ideological age and he's pretending to be something he's not."

Link to original interview: http://www.npr.org/2012/09/21/161581380/week-in-politics-the-47-percent-senate-races

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(journalist)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._J._Dionne

More of the best TV on TV

I've often held that National Public Radio--NPR--is the best radio on radio. I have to go one step further, in a similar thread, and say that for news, coverage of important national issues on their news, their history specials, their entertainment with series like "Downton Abbey" and, Austin City Limits, broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York and more, PBS--the Public Broadcasting System--is some of the, if not the best television on TV. With all that in mind, I have to say I think their PBS Newshour nightly discussion with David Brooks and Mark Shields is the calmest, most lucid, intelligent, least emotional and partisan and so, most important, regular discussion on our national politics, politicians and situations in the country, I feel sure. The country would be helped greatly if more people saw this brief segment and really listened to the men.

A Right Wing Conservative on the Republican Party

"...the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative. The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no. The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it. The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor." --David Brooks, Columnist, Writer, etc., The New York Times. Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/opinion/05brooks.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

Quote of the day--on Newt Gingrich

"I wouldn't let that guy run a 7-11, let alone a country."  --David Brooks on Newt Gingrich's candidacy for the Presidency

Thank you, Mr. Brooks.

Link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(journalist)

The death penalty to show killing is wrong?

If you've read or seen anything about this Jared Loughner in Arizona who shot and killed the 6 people and wounded Congresswoman Guiffords, you've learned he's not connected with reality.

Some examples of how out of touch Mr. Loughner is:

Lydian Ali, a classmate at Pima Community College, said, “He would laugh a lot at inappropriate times, and a lot of the comments he made had no relevance to the discussion topic.”

 Mr. Ali, 26, continued: “He presented a poem to the class that he’d written called ‘Meathead’ that was mostly just about him going to the gym to work out. But it included a line about touching himself in the shower while thinking about girls. He was very enthusiastic when he read the poem out loud.”



At the Y.M.C.A. where Mr. Loughner worked out, he would ask the staff strange questions, like how often they disinfected the bathroom doors. Once he asked an employee how he felt “about the government taking over.” Another time, he sat in the men’s room for 30 minutes, leaving front-desk staff members to wonder what he was doing. When he emerged, he asked what year it was.

David Brooks writes, in The New York Times, that it seems clear Mr. Loughner is schizophrenic: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/opinion/11brooks.html?src=me&ref=general.

Check out the 2nd link, below, for more on his state.

His videos on YouTube made no sense at all, just as his writings were completely, totally and utterly incoherent.

So a couple things come to mind.

First, there is no way possible he could remotely get a fair trial in Tuscon, at least, if not in all of Arizona.  No way.  The trial needs to be moved out-state, let's put that up right away.

Second, killing this guy--giving him the death penalty--would be just like his writing in that it would make no sense at all, either.

If the guy weren't patently crazy--and while it hasn't been proven in a court of law yet, I think that seems to be only a matter of time--I'd say sure, there may be a point to executing the guy.  Maybe. 


But he would have had to show he was more in touch with reality, to begin, and then they would have to show that it was part of some diabolical plan he had, for whatever reason.

Yes, the fact that they found that, at his home, he wrote he "planned ahead" goes against him but the fact is, the guy, it has been shown already and in at least a few ways, is just out of his head.  This would be like executing someone with an IQ of 25.

The only thing that can be claimed is that people don't want to pay for this guy to be in prison for the rest of his life.

Okay, no one can take that away from you but the fact is, the humane thing to do is to put this guy away with an unbreakable, unbeatable life sentence.

It's not like that will be pleasant for him.

Links:  http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/jared_lee_loughner/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/us/10shooter.html?ref=jaredleeloughner

This is it for the Dems, I think

There was a terrific article in The New York Times by columnist David Brooks this week, with a fictional account of how the Democrats seemed to make a "deal with the devil" to get the banks to collapse and a big oil company to have an environmental disaster, etc., all so it could prove to the American people we need government. And regulation. As it turned out, it all happened but the American people still didn't end up believing in government for solutions. Not big government, anyway. It turns out polls of late are telling of Americans turning away from Democrats. Now, news out today tells of a new, additonal twist in this ongoing story: House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in a speech Tuesday that Democrats would have to consider passing only a short-term extension of the middle-class tax breaks, which expire at the end of this year. In the longer term, taxes likely will be going up, at least for some people, he suggested. Okay, so if Democrats are seen as not having solutions AND spending like crazy (like Geo. W. Bush on steroids) AND they want or need to up a middle-class tax hike, well, ladies and gentlemen, I can tell you, it may be the responsible thing to do, what with our big Federal Deficit, but it won't win the Democrats any friends. Far from it. People will jump their ship even more than they already are, I'll wager. People are "mad as hell" and "not going to take it anymore." However they themselves mean it and whatever that means. Link to original story: http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/109897/middle-class-tax-boost-is-broached?mod=taxes-advice_strategy

A column someone from the "left" could have written

A column from The New York Times, written by Consevative David Brooks, also posted in The Kansas City Star, yesterday, that could have been written by someone from the Liberal "left":

The Story of an Angry Voter

By DAVID BROOKS

Let’s imagine a character named Ben. A couple of decades ago, Ben went to high school.

It wasn’t easy. His parents were splitting up. His friends would cut class to smoke weed. His sister got pregnant. But Ben worked hard and graduated with decent grades and then studied at East Stroudsburg University and the University of Phoenix.

That wasn’t easy either. Ben would like to have majored in history, but he needed a skill so he studied hotel management. Others spent their college years partying, but Ben worked hard. After graduation, he got a job with a hotel chain. A few years later, he got a different job and then a different one.

He didn’t have lifetime security or a fabulous salary, but Ben worked. He filled in for the night manager, hired staff and cleaned up the breakfast area when that needed doing.

In other words, in school, he labored when others didn’t. At work, he sacrificed when others didn’t. He bought a house he could afford when others didn’t.

This wasn’t a robotic suburban life. It was a satisfying, moral way of living. Ben lived according to an ethos of what you might call “earned success.” Arthur Brooks has a good description of this ethos in his new book “The Battle.” As Brooks (no relation) observes, the key to happiness is not being rich; it’s doing something arduous and creating something of value and then being able to reflect on the fruits of your labor.

For Ben, right and wrong is contained in the relationship between effort and reward. If people do not work but get rewarded, that’s wrong. If people work and do not get rewarded, that’s wrong. But Ben believed that America is fundamentally a just society. He loved his country because people who work hard can usually overcome whatever unfairness is thrust in their way.

But when Ben looked at Washington, he saw a political system that undermined the relationship between effort and reward. People in Washington spent money they didn’t have. They just borrowed it from the Chinese. People in Washington taxed those with responsible homes to bail out people who’d bought homes they couldn’t afford.

People in Congress were caught up in a spoils system in which money was taken from those who worked and given to those with connections. Money was taken from those who produced and used to bail out the reckless, who were supposedly too big to fail.

This was an affront to the core values of Ben’s life.

Once there was a group in the political center that would have understood Ben’s outrage. Moderates like Abraham Lincoln believed in the free labor ideology. Their entire governing system was built around encouraging labor and rewarding labor.

But these days, the political center is a feckless shell. It has no governing philosophy. Its paragons seem from the outside opportunistic, like Arlen Specter, or caught in some wishy-washy middle, like Blanche Lincoln. The right and left have organized, but the center hasn’t bothered to. The right and left have media outlets and think tanks, but the centrists are content to complain about polarization and go home. By their genteel passivity, moderates have ceded power to the extremes.

So when Ben looked around for leaders who might understand his outrage, he only found them among the ideological hard-liners. In Arkansas, he saw a MoveOn candidate, Bill Halter, crusading against the bailouts and the spoils culture. On the right, he saw the Tea Party candidate Rand Paul crusading against runaway spending and debt.

Ben wasn’t naturally an extremist sort of guy. He didn’t live his life for politics or go in for the over-the-top stuff he heard on talk radio. But he did have some sense that the American work ethic was being threatened by debt and decadence.

It was going to take spit and vinegar to turn things around. So he voted for one of the outsiders. This is not time for a tinkerer, he figured. It’s time for a demolition man.

In a few years’ time, Ben is going to be disappointed again. He’s going to find that the outsiders he sent to Washington just screamed at each other at ever higher decibels. He’s going to find that he and voters like him unwittingly created a political culture in which compromise is impermissible, in which institutions are decimated by lone-wolf narcissists who have no interest in or talent for crafting legislation. Nothing will get done.

In a few years’ time, Ben is going to look for something else. It will be interesting to see if, by that time, any moderates have had the foresight and energy to revive and define the free labor tradition — a tradition that uses government to encourage work, to reward work, and to uphold the values at the core of Ben’s life.

Food for thought.

As Mr. King asked, "Can't we all just get along?"

What needs to happen instead

Yesterday, I wrote that the US won't have a new, inclusive, workable health care system by the end of the year because we haven't got the will for it and we don't understand and/or accept that we have to take profit out of that same system.

I stand by that.

But more than all that, what really needs to happen is that, as David Brooks said Sunday morning on "This Week with George Stephanopoulis" on ABC, "The house is burning down around us."

It's all great that President Obama is tackling our other big problems, sure. Tackle health care. Tackle relations with the Soviet Union, the Taliban, Iran and the rest of the world.

But not right now.

Above all, get a handle on our economy. It is THE big problem, above all others, that needs to be addressed.

Fortunately, everyone agrees on this.

But that's not, it seems, what is coming out of the White House, to date.

I think this is going to change. The President and his staff and administration are all bright people.

I'm not just being trusting here. I'm not simply being naive.

The people running the country are opportunists and the kind of people that jumps on the biggest problems that would run them down otherwise.

But this needs to happen sooner--like this week--rather than later. The need to get on top of and pay attention to the economy, right now, above all other and as soon as possible.

Great Expectations (?)

The question keeps getting asked or proposed, lately, about President-elect Obama and that is, "Can he live up to our, literally, great expectations?"

And my answer is, yes--unequivocally, absolutely yes.

And here's why:

The conservative writer David Brooks, on PBS evening news last week, said he thought Obama was "non-partisan", in his words.

From a Conservative Republican, that's pretty extraordinary, for starters.

But more than that--much more--is that it seems that this new President is going to be, apparently and hopefully, a statesman, of all things.

We haven't seen one of those for a long time.

You may have already heard that the President-elect had dinner last week with a few very conservative columnists like William Kristol, for heavens sake, at George Will's home.

That's already very nearly unbelievable.

Can you remember the last time such a thing happened? I know I can't.

Another quote from last Friday evening's newscast was that Mr. Brooks found Mr. Obama to be much less of an "ideologue" and this, too, is so very welcome and now foreign to our politicians and politics.

It's generally agreed that the last 16 years have been tremendously ideological and divisive.

Far from being a "uniter", as President Bush promised he would be, years ago, he and his administration were loaded with ideologues and ideology, to the point of out-and-out dogma.

Right-wing, conservative, business-serving dogma and it's been very divisive and negative for the country.

When Republican Presidential administrations and campaigns started, years ago, clearing and denying attendees at what were supposed to be public speeches and presentations, so they could get audiences that were purely and completely acceptable to them and their ideas and directions, I was surprised--almost shocked--and disappointed, knowing we were going down a bad path.


I think President-elect Obama, as President, is going to bring statemanship, wisdom, calmness and intelligence back to the Presidency and so, the whole country.

Will Democrats and liberals get everything they want, always, from this new President?

No, certainly not. I'll say that right up front.

Barack Obama isn't perfect--he doesn't "walk on water", by any means.

But he's going to be what we need in this country, especially now, when we need to recover from the legal, internal and external, constitutional and financial issues, problems and messes we have now, due to the last 8 years of mismanagement, ineptitude and travesties.

This really is a new day.

A very welcome new day.