Tag Archives: #Politics

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Republicans take control of the House of Representatives; Vanity Fair writer waxes wroth If there's one thing the left despise, it's populism

The Democrats in the House of Representatives, the ones who created the silly Capitol Kerfuffle Committee, the one which almost all Republicans refused to join, are just terribly, terribly worried that, now that the GOP have regained the majority, they’ll, Horrors! investigate Democrats.

Remember Paul Ryan? He was House Speaker in 2018, the last time Republicans were in control. He left Congress quietly in the middle of the night. Well, not really, but sort of. Blaming “identity politics” and “polarization,” Ryan abruptly announced in April 2018 that he’d be exiting at the end of his term the following January, just as Democrats assumed power. Ryan went on to join the board overseeing the place that helped cause so much of that polarization in the first place, Fox News. Ryan may have reaped the benefits of Donald Trump moving into the White House—tax cuts!—but he didn’t have the stomach for MAGA. The same cannot be said for “my Kevin,” the little nickname the former president has given to Kevin McCarthy.

McCarthy helped rehabilitate Trump after the January 6 riots with a visit weeks later to Mar-a-Lago, where the two grinned side by side for a photo op. As fellow Republican Liz Cheney pointed out after McCarthy’s trip, “He’s not just a former president. He provoked an attack on the Capitol, an attack on our democracy. And so I can’t understand why you would want to go rehabilitate him.”

Here’s where Vanity Fair’s paywall begins, but, if you have only checked in for one of their articles in a month (?), you’ll still be able to access it for free. That’s how I did it; I would certainly never pay for it!

There is, of course, the amusing point of referring to Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY At Large) as Representative Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA 22) “fellow republican,” when Miss Cheney decided to abandon all party loyalty and accept Nancy Pelosi’s appointment to the January 6th committee.

Wyoming was President Trump’s strongest state in the 2020 elections, but Miss Cheney hated him. Despite having won re-election in 2020 with 66% of the vote, her participation in the Democrats’ witch hunt had her lose the 2022 Republican primary to Harriet Hageman by a landslide margin. Molly Jong-Fast Greenfield’s[1]Although the author does not respect her husband, Matthew Greenfield, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect, and always refers to married women by … Continue reading article, which is based heavily on sources from not just the Democrats in the House, but the farthest left Democrats, is so ridiculously biased that her calling Miss Cheney Mr McCarthy’s “fellow Republican” is more of a mockery than an accurate description.

Maybe because McCarthy was desperate for the Speakership?

Now, with Republicans winning a slim majority in the midterms, that guy could be Speaker of the House—and honestly that’s the best-case scenario. McCarthy may be a cowardly sycophant, but he’s not full MAGA, something that MAGA-world is very much aware of. Though McCarthy won the Republican nomination for speaker on Tuesday, with 188 votes, dozens of members voted for Freedom Caucus member Rep. Andy Biggs—a signal that McCarthy might have to make major concessions to the party’s far-right flank in order to secure 218 votes before the full Congress in early January.

Yeah, referring to Mr McCarthy as a “cowardly sycophant” is going to help! 🙂

Meanwhile, the queen of MAGA, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is more than ready for Republicans to be in charge and apparently expects the likely next Speaker to appease the base. Regarding McCarthy, she told The New York Times that “to be the best Speaker of the House and to please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway.” She even predicted Monday that she’d be on committees investigating “traitors and criminals.” McCarthy has said he plans to put Greene back on committees, with some of her Trumpworld allies reportedly urging the likely Speaker to give her a plum seat on the House Oversight Committee. Imagine, from promoting QAnon conspiracies to possibly landing a key oversight post in Congress.

“We have to have the gavel,” Greene said Tuesday in discussing her support for McCarthy. “That is extremely important, because the gavel means subpoena power. And Republicans need subpoena power going over the next two years.”

Mrs Greenfield was in no way offended when Democrats had the subpoena power!

For Democrats, the outlook of a GOP-led House is grim. As Democratic representative Eric Swalwell texted me, “The GOP has laid a historic egg. Democrats ran on competence and contrasted it with chaos. And if Kevin McCarthy somehow holds on to become Speaker, he’s no Nancy Pelosi who can lead a narrow majority. McCarthy would be the leader of the land of misfit toys, a place that will exist exclusively as a vessel state of MAGA nation. A MAGA House majority will also operate as the largest law firm in Washington, DC, but serving just one client and his endless grievances. Functionally, without a Democratic votes it will spectacularly fail to execute its core functions: keep the government open, pay America’s bills, and fund the fight for freedom in Ukraine.”

I would imagine that the House under the GOP will keep the government open — though I would hope that they’d try to eliminate some of the stupid functions — but “fund the fight for freedom in Ukraine”? Try fund the struggle to make nuclear war more probable, because that’s how I see it. Sure, we all want Russia to somehow lose the Russo-Ukrainian War, but for some of us, including me, not at the expense of making a nuclear war more probable.

There’s more at the original, but what Mrs Greenfield tells us, almost as an aside, tells us a lot about her biases. Eric Swalwell, Ro Khanna, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all congressmen who know where to go for a sympathetic journolist[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading, reached out to her via text. Richie Torres, “first openly gay Afro-Latino elected to Congress,” is cited as calling Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Tayor Greene as “lunatic likes”. I’m just surprised that Mus Greenfield failed to mention Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), but, then again, Mrs Boebert’s race had not been decided by last Wednesday, when she published the article. Mrs Boebert was re-elected, though by just a few hundred votes.

There are several more paragraphs but none of it is sensible reporting; it’s simply more Democratic propaganda masquerading — though not very well — as a measured and sensible opinion piece.

What Mrs Greenfield and the rest simply don’t understand is that the Republican electorate has moved on from the go-along-to-get-along politicians, and is now solidly populist in outlook. The attitudes of Representatives like Mrs Greene, Mrs Boebert, and Mr Gaetz are the attitudes of the majority of Republican voters. We saw this in 2010, with the emergence of the short-lived TEA Party, rebelling against President Obama’s stimulus and socialized medicine programs, but the TEA Party movement failed to last, dominated in Congress by the more polite Republicans.

Now the populists are the apparent majority of Republican voters, and that means that more populists are among the elected Republican office holders. And the left really, really, really don’t like that.

Donald Trump is mortal. More than just mortal, he’s very overweight and eats terrible food. The populist idea in the United States will outlive him.

References

References
↑1 Although the author does not respect her husband, Matthew Greenfield, enough to have taken his name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect, and always refers to married women by their proper names.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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If you’re scared, say you’re scared! And The New York Times are scared poopless!

Today’s credentialed media are wholly in bed with progressivism and the Democratic Party, so it must’ve really hurt The New York Times to publish this:

Republicans Gain Edge as Voters Worry About Economy, Times/Siena Poll Finds

With elections next month, independents, especially women, are swinging to the G.O.P. despite Democrats’ focus on abortion rights. Disapproval of President Biden seems to be hurting his party.

By Shane Goldmacher | Monday, October 17, 2022, | 3:00 AM EDT

Republicans enter the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress with a narrow but distinctive advantage as the economy and inflation have surged as the dominant concerns, giving the party momentum to take back power from Democrats in next month’s midterm elections, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found.

The poll shows that 49 percent of likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican to represent them in Congress on Nov. 8, compared with 45 percent who planned to vote for a Democrat. The result represents an improvement for Republicans since September, when Democrats held a one-point edge among likely voters in the last Times/Siena poll. (The October poll’s unrounded margin is closer to three points, not the four points that the rounded figures imply.)

With inflation unrelenting and the stock market steadily on the decline, the share of likely voters who said economic concerns were the most important issues facing America has leaped since July, to 44 percent from 36 percent — far higher than any other issue. And voters most concerned with the economy favored Republicans overwhelmingly, by more than a two-to-one margin.

There’s a lot more at the original.

Also see: William Teach: Surprise: Republicans Have The Edge On Mid-Terms

I’ve said this before, countless times: while a subject like global warming climate change may elicit large claims of support for action to do something to stop it, when it’s a choice between spending more or being taxed more to fight a problem that may be thirty or fifty or eight years in the future, and putting food on the table this evening, food on the table will always be the more immediate concern. And today’s Democratic Party is running on everything but today’s concerns. They’ve invested so much effort in the so-called “January 6th Committee”, but that’s an issue of the past, not the present. They’ve energized the supporters of former President Trump to fight against the Democrats far more than energized Democrats to fight against Republicans, because it’s simply not an issue that’s important in 2022. They’ve shilled climate change, at a time when inflation has significantly reduced the real value of Americans’ wages. Joe Biden walking away eating an ice cream cone and telling us that the economy is great might not be the best sales technique to people who have noticed that groceries cost a lot more, as does the gasoline to get to the grocery store. The Democrats’ concentration on abortion, abortion, abortion is, in effect, a concentration on black voters — black women have abortions at five times the rate white women do — and while there was a surge in support of Democrats when Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization was announced, much of that has now faded, as most of the states in which Democrats are strongest had already acted to keep prenatal infanticide legal in those states. The Democrats’ cries about 15-year-old rape victims turned out to be kind of meaningless when the vast, vast majority of abortions are in no way or sense therapeutic. When you have a former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate saying that one of the reasons she’s leaving the party is because they can’t even tell the difference between males and females anymore, you know that the Democrats, as fueled as they are by their hatred of former President Trump, just aren’t campaigning in the real world anymore.

Despite controlling both Houses of Congress, and the White House, the Democrats are in trouble because they are not campaigning on the things which affect the vast majority of Americans today.

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“There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them,” said no Republican leader, ever.

Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, an extreme supposed champion of the working class in 19th century France, purportedly said what serves as my headline, which came to my mind when I read this from Robert Stacy McCain:

Cast your mind back to November 2012, when you went to the polls to vote for Mitt Romney. Chances are, Mitt wasn’t your first choice for the GOP nomination. Probably, he wasn’t your second or third choice, either. You probably weren’t too excited to go vote for Mitt on Election Day 2012, and might not have been too optimistic about his chances of beating Obama, but you voted for him anyway, because he was the Republican nominee and you’re a Republican voter. If millions of conservatives could vote for Romney — who has always been a moderate, if not indeed a liberal — then why couldn’t moderate Republicans support Trump? Why is it that the demands of party loyalty seem to be a one-way street like this? And, by the way, shouldn’t it matter that Trump was far more popular and successful than GOP Establishment choices like Romney and John McCain? The Republican presidential candidates got about 60 million votes in both 2008 and 2012, but Trump got 63 million in 2016 and 74 million in 2020. Why such hatred from “Republicans” toward a man who increased the GOP vote by more than 10 million?

Think about what Donald Trump advocated to win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. He advocated control of our borders, something every other Republican candidate did. He differed in one respect: he actually proposed a way to do it, building a wall along our border with Mexico, to make simply walking across the border far more difficult. He took strongly pro-life positions, as almost all of the other Republican candidates did. He advocated tax cuts, as all of the other Republican candidates did.

What was different about Mr Trump? He spoke in terms that the Republican primary voters saw as not just mouthing platitudes, but believed that he would actually do something to achieve the goals he set forth.

The result? We saw thousands of supposed Republicans marshal against him, including both the elder and younger President Bush, the ‘neo-conservatives’ like Bill Kristol, Max Boot, the subsequently scandal-ridden “Lincoln Project,” and, sadly, Patrick Frey. Mr Trump used strong, strong, language, and he wasn’t a particularly nice guy, but the great mass of Republican voters saw in him someone who would actually fight for the things he advocated. It helped that Mr Trump was running against the wholly uninspiring Hillary Clinton, and he flipped stated like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin red. The Keystone State, despite normally being called a ‘battleground state,’ had not been carried by a Republican presidential candidate since 1988.

The nation was stunned, and the Republican ‘leadership’ were most particularly stunned. How could this boorish brute win the presidency? I mean, the guy couldn’t even be bothered to button his suit coat during his inauguration!

The Republican ‘leadership’ would have been much happier had they lost the election with Jeb Bush as the nominee, than win it with Donald Trump. My guess is that they’d have rather lose the election with Jeb Bush than win it with Ted Cruz as well, because Mr Cruz can be a bit on the bull-in-a-china-shop side himself.

But the Republican voters loved Mr Trump, even if the ‘leadership’ did not.

And so we come to Representative Liz Cheney Perry(R-WY). Mrs Perry, who did not respect her husband, Philip Perry, enough to take his name, but to whom I will not show a similar disrespect, decided that President trump should be impeached, even as his term was coming to an end, due to the college-keg-party-gone-wild that is the Capitol kerfuffle. More, she allowed herself to be appointed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to the committee to investigate the kerfuffle, when Mrs Pelosi would not accept the Republican members nominated by the House Minority Leader. Mrs Pelosi wanted a kangaroo court, and got one, with a couple of pro-impeachment Republicans for window dressing.

In 2020, not only did President Trump carry Wyoming, but by percentage of the vote, the Cowboy State was his strongest state; he defeated former Vice President Joe Biden 193,559 (69.94%) to 73,491 (26.55%). The same voters who gave the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney 68.56% of the vote in her 2020 re-election campaign gave Mr Trump even more votes, 193,559 to 185,732.

Back to Mr McCain:

Tuesday, I said that Liz Cheney might lose by a 30-point margin, which was wrong — it was 38 points! She lost more than 2-to-1 and didn’t even get 30% of the vote in Wyoming’s Republican primary. Her contempt for the electorate — her fathomless hatred for Republican voters — was expressed quite clearly in her concession speech:

“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and House before he won the most important election of all,” she said before an audience of what few supporters she has. “Lincoln ultimately prevailed. He saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”

Hardly finished with her delusional Civil War era comparisons, Cheney went on to equate her ongoing fight with former President Donald Trump to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Battle of the Wilderness.

“As the fires of the battle still smoldered, Grant rode to the head of the column. He rode to the intersection of Brock Road and Orange Plank Road, and there, as the men of his army watched and waited,” Cheney said. “Instead of turning north back towards Washington and safety, Grant turned his horse south toward Richmond and the heart of [Confederate Gen. Robert E.] Lee’s army. Refusing to retreat, he pressed on to victory.”

That scene, portrayed vividly in Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, indeed captures what made Grant different from any of his predecessors commanding the Army of the Potomac, who had a habit of getting into a fight with Lee, losing thousands of men in a battle, and then retreating to the fortifications of Washington. But how does it function as an analogy for Liz Cheney’s defeat? That is to say, who is the enemy she proposes to defeat if she presses “on to victory”?

Do you get the point? The enemy is you, the Republican voter!

This is the part that’s important: the Republican Party, like any political party, is made up of the mass of Republican-registered or identifying voters, but for Mrs Perry, for the (supposedly) Republican #NeverTrumpers, for the disaffected neoconservatives, what the vast majority of the Republican Party want is not only not what they want, but what is anathema to them. As I said, they’d rather lose with a polite milquetoast than win with a strong fighter.

The problem for them is simple, even if they don’t understand it: the mass of the Republican Party have moved beyond them. Mrs Perry has made noises about running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, but look how the left view them:

As I have noted previously about Bill Kristol and the “Lincoln Project”, the left may look upon them as useful for the moment, but they’ll never actually trust them, while Republicans will never trust them either. Mr Kristol destroyed the opinion magazine he founded, The Weekly Standard, by refusing to allow any articles which supported President Trump, thus alienating a significant portion of his readership, still supports a few, few! conservative positions, positions which are anathema to the Democrats. Given the opinions of some of them, like Max Boot and Mr Kristol, to force people to take the COVID-19 vaccines, the Libertarian Party won’t want to have anything to do with such authoritarians, either. They have nowhere to go!

This is, in the end, a good thing. The mass of the Republican Party have moved toward populism, an ideology which holds that the great mass of the people are not being seriously listened to by the political elites. There’s some of that in the Democratic Party as well, as exemplified by the ridiculous “Occupy Wall Street” movement and some of their far-left but nevertheless back-bench politicians like the anti-Semitic squadristi,[1]The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the Italian names given to … Continue reading but, at least thus far, the left of the Democratic Party have nevertheless fallen into line with the (purportedly) more moderate elements to support President Biden.

The Republican elites are looking for their people, so they might lead them, but the mass of the party have no interest in being led along the garden path of squishy go-along-to-get-along Republicanism. They want leaders who will fight, who will fight the left, and that’s why Mrs Perry lost.

References

References
↑1 The group of ‘progressives’ elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 called themselves the ‘Squad.’ Squadristi, or Squadrista in the singular form, is one of the Italian names given to Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts, his paramilitary/thug force in fascist Italy. I think referring to the ‘Squad’ as Squadristi is completely appropriate.
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A Democrat says the quiet part out loud Former Representative Ben Chandler admitted that he tried to confuse voters about his own positions

Albert Benjamin Chandler III, a Democrat, and the grandson of former Governor, Senator and Commissioner of Baseball A B “Happy” Chandler, won a special election in 2004 for the Sixth District congressional seat, and was re-elected in 2006, 2008 and 2010. In 2012, he was defeated by Republican Andy Barr, who continues to hold the seat today.

An article on the Lexington Herald-Leader’s website references Mr Chandler and his electoral history.

‘All politics is national’: How Kentucky’s congressional districts have slid off the map

by David Catanese | Thursday, March 31, 2022 | 10:27 AM EDT

WASHINGTON Four years ago, Andy Barr had a real race on his hands.

An outside Republican group poured more than $3.5 million into Lexington’s 6th Congressional District to counter the nationally recruited Amy McGrath’s $8 million warchest.

Barr survived the rough and expensive environment, but only by 3 percentage points.

Now his former battleground seat in the heart of Kentucky’s commonwealth looks downright hospitable, if not sleepy.

The article continues to tell readers that every congressional district in Kentucky has a party favorability rating in double digits, five for Republicans, and one, in Louisville, for Democrats. Mr Barr’s district actually has the smallest partisan advantage, at 13%.

The Bluegrass State was the friendliest in the South for Democrats, with Democrats winning most gubernatorial races, and controlling the state House of Representatives up until the 2016 elections. But it was tough going for Mr Chandler in the Sixth District, and he told the reporter how he held on for as long as he did:

Lexington’s 6th Congressional District used to fall in the competitive category when Chandler held the seat for four terms. But Chandler, now the CEO of The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, says he had to practice the “politics of confusion” in order to survive in a place where most identified as conservative.

“I had to confuse my constituents so they couldn’t tell whether I was a liberal or a conservative or a moderate,” he said, noting that endeavor became more difficult as data showed him that an increasing amount of his constituents were primarily depending on conservative media outlets like Fox News, which blared narratives that tarred his entire party with the same broad brush. “When that’s the case and you’re a Democrat, you clearly are looking at a hell of an uphill battle.”

Translation: Mr Chandler had to lie to the voters to win the races he did.

Mr Chandler lost to Mr Barr in the 2012 elections, but Democrats in the Bluegrass State held on to a majority in the state House of Representatives until the 2016 contests. The Sixth District, which includes more liberal Lexington, is Kentucky’s second most Democratic district, and, as the cited article pointed out, Amy McGrath Henderson, who wasn’t an incumbent, ran a competitive race against Mr Barr in 2018. Is it possible, just possible, that Mr Chandler lost in 2012 at least in part because the voters in the district were not as confused about him as he thought he could make them? Given that Democrats controlled the state House of Representatives following both the 2000 and 2010 elections, it wasn’t as though Republicans could gerrymander the district against them.

Mrs Henderson tried to confuse the voters as well, spending a clear pile of money — $8,274,396 to Mr Barr’s $5,580,477 — on mailings and television ads telling us how moderate and patriotic she was. However, she attended a fund raiser in Massachusetts and said, “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky.”

There’s a simple truth here: while Mr Chandler and Mrs Henderson both tried to fool the voters of the Sixth District, Mr Barr has not, because the voters in the Sixth more closely match conservative Republican principles.