Not a hero, not then, not now, not ever-- just a right-wing kookTucker Carlson, Max Boot and Bill Kristol... what comes to mind? Conservative Republicans, right? Stop there. Don't over-think it. That's the answer. No, "buts" about how Boot and Kristol are anti-Trump. Glad they are, but it doesn't matter about who they are and what their advice on anything other than-- very precisely-- Trump's odiousness, means. In yesterday's American Conservative, oddly enough, it was Carlson-- a much bigger face of odiousness than the other two of late-- who pointed out why we should never get sucked into any sympathy for what they all are (as we agreed, conservative Republicans). "Why," he asked, "are these professional war peddlers still around?, pointing out that "pundits like Max Boot and Bill Kristol got everything after 9/11 wrong but are still considered "experts." Not in our world but in the conservative Republican world these 3 live in.There's plenty in Carlson's-- and remember, we're talking about Trump Machine Fox propagandist Tucker Carlson-- little essay to agree with. Like, right off the bat: "One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America." Boot's foreign policy recipes have all tasted like raw sewage... basically because they are. Back in the day, Boot wrote that "Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul,” Boot wrote. “To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim. Is this an ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also without a doubt." Yes, he hates Trump now-- and Carlson's head resides up Trump's ass-- but that doesn't make Boot's opinions on anything, other than Trump's unsuitability, worth listening to. Same for Kristol. As for Tucker, nothing he says is ever worth listening to, except how terrible Max Boot and Bill Kristol are. (I'd be happy to hear him go off on the MSNBC Republicans as well. No doubt he feels as strongly about them as we feel about the Fox Democrats.)Bill Weld isn't usually referred to as a "conservative Republican." Bozos in the media call him a "moderate Republican." Others refer to him as a "libertarian Republican." This might be as good a time as any that many Libertarians really do not like their 2016 vice presidential nominee at all. He screwed them when he ran fro governor of New York in 2006, when he endorsed Obama in 2008, when he virtually endorsed Hillary in 2016 and just recently when the man who announced at the 2016 Libertarian Party convention that he was a Libertarian member for life switched his party registration to the GOP again. "Weld lacks loyalty," wrote Grant Deltz for the Libertarian Republic this week. "He embodies the meaning of the stereotypical career politician... Weld is simply an opportunist... He’ll probably be endorsing Kamala Harris before it’s all said and done."Weld was the Republican governor of Massachusetts from 1991 through 1997, when he resigned to concentrate on an unsuccessful battle with Jesse Helms over his nomination by Bill Clinton to be ambassador to Mexico. Yesterday he announced an exploratory committee to run for president as a Republican. (He had endorsed Kasich for president in 2016.)Reporting for the Boston Herald, Joe Battenfeld, wrote that, "in prepared remarks at the Politics & Eggs breakfast in Bedford, N. H., Weld delivered a blistering critique of Trump, saying 'we have a president whose priorities are skewed toward promotion of himself rather than toward the good of the country. To compound matters, our President is simply too unstable to carry out the duties of the highest executive office-- which include the specific duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed-- in a competent and professional matter. He is simply in the wrong place.'"
In his speech, the former federal prosecutor called out his own party for supporting Trump, saying “many Republicans exhibit all the symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, identifying with their captor.”“The truth is that we have wasted an enormous amount of time by humoring this President, indulging him in his narcissism and his compulsive, irrational behaviors,” Weld said.The former governor, who served in Massachusetts from 1990 to 1997, did not mention the “impeachment” word but hinted he would like to see Trump removed even before the 2020 election.“The situation is not yet hopeless but we do need a mid-course correction,” he said. “We don’t need six more years of the antics we have seen. We need to make a change, and install leaders who know that character counts.”...Weld’s announcement is likely to trigger anger among President Trump and his supporters, who see the former governor as a flip-flopper who deserted the Republican Party. The New Hampshire GOP chairman told the Herald he doesn’t expect Weld to get a welcome reception from voters there, and polls show a vast majority of GOP voters back Trump.But sources close to Weld say he is determined to make life difficult for Trump, even if his candidacy is a long shot.While Weld was harshest in his criticism of Trump, he also singled out Democrats for drifting too far left toward socialism.“We need the opposite of socialism,” he said. “In the federal budget, the two most important tasks are to cut spending and to cut taxes-- and spending comes first.”Weld laid out his positions on other issues, calling for less government intervention in health care and for more intervention to prevent climate change.
Yesterday, writing at the neoCon website, The Bulwark, for Jeb Bush operative Tim Miller explained why he thinks Trump has lost it (mentally) and is now running our country based on his hallucinations about marauding Hispanic invaders.
[M]aybe Trump is really a 243-pound (lol) septuagenarian Haley Joel Osment, and he’s seeing the corpses of contractors he and his father have screwed over in decades past? Or maybe he’s gone deep down a YouTube suggested video rabbit hole and he’s watching clips from a Middle Eastern war zone that have been mislabeled as present-day Mexico and Trump is convinced its real because the people are brown-skinned and it looks kinda like what he imagines the border to be. I don’t know. As I said, I’m not a doctor.We should also consider the possibility that a member of the Deep State has been dosing his Diet Coke with acid. After all, they never found out who wrote that anonymous New York Times op-ed.What I know for certain is that here on the physical plane of existence there is no security emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border. The incursion the president describes is not the lived reality of any actual Americans. Border crossings are down, crime is down, employment is up. Yet the president’s hallucinations persist, and in the past week they seem to be growing more severe.At a speech in El Paso, rather than just talking about the imaginary caravan of people invading the country, Trump actually claimed that he had invented the word “caravan” altogether. (In fact, the word is sourced from medieval Latin, caravana, picked up during the Crusades from Persian karwan “group of desert travelers.” Donald Trump is very old but this is slightly before his time.)He has also begun touting the construction of an imaginary wall. “The wall is being built. It’ll continue. It’s going at a rapid pace,” he said. “Now you really mean ‘finish the wall’ because we’ve built a lot of it,” he continued. None of these statements are remotely true. And rather than be alarmed that the president is having a wall-themed seance, everyone is going along with it. After all, the wall is in our hearts.So then I start to wonder-- maybe I’m the crazy one. Maybe this is all just equal parts Trumpian hyperbole and good old fashioned gaslighting.But if so, what explains the other delusions, like the blubbering tough guys crying whenever they meet Trump. And it’s not just this one time. Trump seems to keep meeting “monster” sized buff men who are brought to tears by their gratitude to him. For a wall that doesn’t exist. That’s designed to stop an infiltration that isn’t happening.The layers of unreality build upon itself.After-all, whatever happened to the president’s friend “Jim” who used to go to Paris every year but now doesn’t? He was scared of the imaginary brown-skinned “infiltration” of the City of Lights. We haven’t heard from him in a while. Are you in there Jim?Now the dots are being connected . . . Pepe Silva . . . Time replaced by a fever dream . . . Paris under siege. The apparitions in Trump’s delusions are having menacing delusions of their own.So now the Orange King is set to act. Haunted by these threats he is poised to declare an extralegal national emergency to prevent a U.S.-Carcosan nightmare. This, you would hope, would be the moment for those close to the president recognize this illness and shake him back to reality. To stand with him by the window and with kind eyes let him know that, no there is no ominous car out there. There are no barbarians at the gates.But no, the delusions persist. The fantasy is fed. And at times even those who can see the light can feel our definitions fading.
Miller may be right about Trump, and he's funny to read, but do you care what he has to say about Jeb Bush? Or AOC? Or Ilhan Omar? Or democracy? Why would you?