The Impossibility of Being A Pro-Trump Intellectual, An Ongoing Series

Paul observed recently that the New York Times hired one Chris Buskirk, grand poobah of the Trump propaganda outlet American Greatness. He is back, with some analysis of the Greatest Seriousity:

Please read my forthcoming column, “If I Am Named People’s Sexiest Man Alive, This Will be Why.”

You wouldn’t think it would be possible to go downhill from the title, but:

It was also a chance for rank-and-file Republicans to replace an insulated, often feckless, party leadership that had elevated its own interests over everyone else’s.

Here is a graphical representation of Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s leadership:

Above, L-to-R: Barney Gumble, Homer Simpson, Duff executive, Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell.

With their fixation on the person of President Trump, most Democrats don’t understand that for Republicans, taking the party back is part of a larger intellectual and political project.

If it’s been 18 months and you haven’t spotted the sucker, you are the sucker.

As far as Republicans are concerned, the primaries are a continuation of the fight to claw back control of the party. Will it be retaken by the Bushes, their allies and clones and the claque of sinecured retainers who smothered the once-vibrant conservative movement of Buckley and Reagan?

Mr. Trump isn’t on the ballot, but the ideas that animate the current conservative renaissance are. They are represented by some interesting Senate candidates, who have quite different biographies but common goals. Josh Hawley in Missouri is a Stanford- and Yale-educated lawyer who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, while Matt Rosendale in Montana is a rancher-turned-politician. Both are running on a platform of returning power to the people and nurturing a sense of community and solidarity among Americans that many Republican politicians either ignored or openly disdained.

“Republicans are different kinds of rich white guys, but they’re all running on a platform of white supremacy.”

UPDATE:

If Rosendale is their idea of authenticity, they have a ways to go. Especially when you identify him as a "rancher." In Montana, there aren't many ranchers who made their livings as Maryland real-estate tycoons and who have never owned cattle.https://t.co/rGINUlFfOf

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) June 10, 2018

The three-legged stool of the new Republican majority is a pro-citizen immigration policy,

See above…

a pro-worker economic policy

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA sure. Yes, since the beginning of time the American worker has yearned for upper-class tax cuts, breathing toxic air, usurious interest rates, and having their health insurance either taken away or changed so it no longer covers anything.

and a foreign policy that rejects moral imperialism and its concomitant foreign wars.

So Glenn Greenwald isn’t the only person left you thinks that Trump has a “non-interventionist” foreign policy. Good to know! Anyway, Trump should award Buskirk Chris Christie-style and send him on a fact-finding mission to Afghanistan.

Anyway, we’re a long way into the column and still seeing no argument offered in defense of a “red wave”…

This year’s class of Republican candidates seems to get that in ways that they didn’t in 2016. As a result, the Democrats’ advantage in the generic congressional vote dropped from 13 points in January, according to the Real Clear Politics poll average, to 3.5 points at the end of May. A Reuters poll, which recorded a 14-point Democratic edge in April, gave Republicans a 6-point advantage last month. Apparently “resistance” and impeachment aren’t as popular as Democratic megadonors like Tom Steyer and their vassals would have Democratic candidates believe, although RealClearPolitics and Reuters now show Democrats with roughly an eight-point advantage.

Republicans are losing the generic ballot by only 8 points instead of 14! RED WAVE! I wonder if whichever Bennet flunky edited this momentarily found their dignity and forced him to add the last part, or if Buskirk doesn’t realize that a true hack wingnut columnist just engages in undiluted cherry-picking and leaves out the self-rebuttal.

OK, but despite the polls typical and representative Democrats are worried!

There are even more cracks in the Democrats’ front line. Longtime Democrats like Mark Penn, a former Clinton pollster and confidant, are sick of the scandal mongering.

Sorry, but until I find out what Pat Caddell and Dirk Morris think I won’t be truly worried.

If Mr. Mueller is not able to prove collusion with Russia, the stated reason for his appointment, then Democrats, who have talked about little else for the past 18 months, will be left looking unserious or worse.

Yes, the many indictments of Trump associates and collaboration with Russian ratfucking are excellent news for the Republican Party. Although the column does provide some value in showing that Trump’s most egregious lickspittles and the Greenwald/Henwood left both rely in the same dumb talking points. PUTIN!

Up until recently, the conventional wisdom has been that a blue wave powered by a huge enthusiasm gap would propel Democrats to midterm glory. But the evidence doesn’t bear that out. Yes, Democrats have won some special elections and those victories are real and should warn Republicans against complacency. But left almost totally unremarked upon is that Republican primary turnout is way up from where it was at this point in the 2014 midterm cycle. This is often the result of competitive primaries, but that underscores the vibrancy of the grass roots’ struggle to reclaim control of the party.

Sure, the polling looks terrible for Republicans, and sure they’ve been losing one election after another in favorable contexts, but there are some cases where Republican turnout is up because there was a contested primary. CHECKMATE LIBS!

According to Chris Wilson at WPI Intelligence, Republican primary turnout was up 43 percent or more over 2014 in states like Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia. The president’s popularity has been rising overall but especially in these critical battleground states. In West Virginia, his approval rating was over 60 percent in 2017. That sounds more like a red wave than a blue one

Trump is at 60 percent approval in a state he won by 42 points. RED WAVE!

It’s truly embarrassing that this shit got published in the New York Times, but then why should the standards for its pro-Trump conservatives be higher than for its nominally anti-Trump ones?