Tag Archives: Republicans

It’s Trump’s Party, Now, by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on March 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

In public forums, at least, President Trump has the Republican Party eating out of his hand. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

Before the largest audience of his political career, save perhaps his inaugural, Donald Trump delivered the speech of his life.

And though Tuesday’s address may be called moderate, even inclusive, Trump’s total mastery of his party was on full display.

Congressional Republicans who once professed “free-trade” as dogmatic truth rose again and again to cheer economic nationalism.

“We’ve lost more than one-fourth of our manufacturing jobs since NAFTA was approved,” thundered Trump, “and we’ve lost 60,000 factories since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.”

Yet a Republican party that embraced NAFTA and voted MFN for China every time it came up gave Trump standing ovations.

“(W)e have inherited a series of tragic foreign policy disasters,” said Trump, “America has spent approximately six trillion dollars in the Middle East — all the while our infrastructure at home is crumbling.”

And from Congressional Republicans who backed every Bush-Obama war — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen — not a peep of protest, as their foreign policy legacy was being consigned to the dumpster.

Watching Republicans rise again and again to hail Trump called to mind the Frankish King Clovis who, believing his wife’s Christian God had interceded to give him victory over the Alemanni, saw his army converted by the battalions and baptized by the platoons.

One had thought the free-trade beliefs of Republicans were more deeply rooted than this.

“We have withdrawn the United States from the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership,” Trump exulted, having just tossed into the trash that mammoth trade deal beloved of Bush Republicans.

GOP champions of the TPP, if there are any left, sat mute.

To continue reading: It’s Trump’s Party, Now

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This Is How the U.S. Empire Destroys Itself, by Bill Bonner

Posted on February 18, 2017 | Leave a comment

One of the best parts about Trump’s reign is the whining and wailing of his enemies. From Bill Bonner at bonnerandpartners.com:

BALTIMORE – Victoribus spolia…

So far, the most satisfying thing about the Trump win has been the howls and whines coming from the establishment.

Each appointment – some good, some bad from our perspective – has brought forth such heavy lamentations.

You’d think Washington had been invaded by Goths, now raping the vestal virgins (if there are any within the Beltway) on the White House lawns while the Capitol burns to the ground.

Regret and Suffering

Trump is happening, of course.

And the very people who made it happen are now in various stages of regret… suffering… or hysteria.

What a delight it is to see them in such pain!

All along I-95 – from the Holland Tunnel to Route 295 into the heart of D.C., at a distance of a football field between one and another – you see their fabled leaders, lieutenants, and water carriers crucified, with a small crowd gathered around each, weeping.

There is Hillary, of course. And Senator Elizabeth Warren (secretly happy to see HRC brought to grief).

Then there’s Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. If there is another 9/11 crisis with Trump in charge, he warns: “America as we know it will soon be gone.”

There are the Republican traitors, too – Colin Powell, Henry Paulson, Michael Chertoff – now hanging from their crosses.

And there are the neo-con turncoats, too – Max Boot, Robert Kagan… Crucifixion is probably too good for them.

They are not only traitors to the Republican cause, whatever that may be, but warmongers, too, ready to switch allegiances just to keep the money flowing to their crony friends in the security industry.

Now they all keen away… But what did they expect?

To continue reading: This Is How the U.S. Empire Destroys Itself

 

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Annals of the Stupid Party, by Brion McClanahan

Posted on February 18, 2017 | Leave a comment

No matter what Republican politicians say about limited government and reducing spending and taxes, once they get to Eunuchville (Washington) they reveal they’re conversion to the statist religion. From Brion McClanahan at lewrockwell.com:

No matter what happened while Barack Obama occupied Pennsylvania Ave., several things have become clear since Donald Trump took office in January:

Most Congressional Republicans don’t want to repeal Obamacare.

Most Congressional Republicans don’t want to restrict immigration.

Most Congressional Republicans don’t want to lower taxes.

Most Congressional Republicans want to go to war with the world.

Most Congressional Republicans like unconstitutional federal power and bloated bureaucracy.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone.

The late Sam Francis labeled the Republican Party the “Stupid Party” for a reason. But perhaps the label should be on the voters who keep sending them to Washington. They lie and we punch their ticket to D.C.

Clyde Wilson has been sounding the alarm about these faux conservatives for nearly five decades. As he writes in the Forward to his recent Annals of the Stupid Party: Republicans Before Trump (published just before the November election), “the greatest obstacle to meaningful change will be the Republican Party.” It always has been.

Wilson romps through the history of the GOP in this splendid collection of essays. From Lincoln to George Quincy Bush to the current establishment crop in Washington, including Mike Pence, he explains why Americans should never trust a Republican. Trump is different to a degree, but he is an outlier and the inertia of the “Stupid Party” is already working against him.

Most Americans forget or we never taught that the Republicans were from their inception in 1854 the party of revolution, be it economic, political, or social.

From the income tax to the loss of real federalism, to the establishment of state capitalism and central banking, to heavy-handed regulation and social engineering, to activist federal judges, the Republicans have their fingerprints all over every unconstitutional and immoral act.

To continue reading: Annals of the Stupid Party

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The Silence of the Lambs Congress, by Ann Coulter

Posted on February 16, 2017 | Leave a comment

Once in a while Ann Coulter knocks the ball out of the park. From Coulter at anncoulter.com:

Let’s compare what President Trump has accomplished since the inauguration (with that enormous crowd!) with what congressional Republicans have done.

In the past three weeks, Trump has: staffed the White House, sent a dozen Cabinet nominees to the Senate, browbeat Boeing into cutting its price on a government contract, harangued American CEOs into keeping their plants in the United States, imposed a terrorist travel ban, met with foreign leaders and nominated a Supreme Court justice, among many other things.

(And still our hero finds time to torment the media with his tweets!)

What have congressional Republicans been doing? Scrapbooking?

More than 90 percent of congressional Republicans kept their jobs after the 2016 election, so you can cross “staffing an entire branch of government” off the list. Only the Senate confirms nominees, which they’ve been doing at a snail’s pace, so they’ve got loads of free time — and the House has no excuse at all.

Where’s the Obamacare repeal? Where are the hearings featuring middle-class Americans with no health insurance because it was made illegal by Obamacare?

The House passed six Obamacare repeals when Obama was president and there was no chance of them being signed into law. Back then, Republicans were full of vim and vigor! But the moment Trump became president, the repeals came to a screeching halt.

After the inauguration (gigantic!), House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put out a plan for repealing Obamacare … in 200 days. They actually gave their legislative agenda this inspiring title: “The Two Hundred Day Plan.”

TWO HUNDRED DAYS!

What was in the last six Obamacare repeals? If we looked, would we find “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” carefully typed out 1 million times? Seriously, what does Paul Ryan’s day look like?

This is the Silence of the Lambs Congress. They’re utterly silent, emerging from the House gym or their three-hour lunches only to scream to the press about Trump.

To continue reading: The Silence of the Lambs Congress

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A Thought Experiment About Republicans, by Scott Adams

Posted on February 5, 2017 | Leave a comment

According to Scott Adams, Republicans police their own ranks and Democrats do not. From Adams on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

The left has done a stellar job of demonizing Trump supporters and Republicans in general. Their excellent persuasion involves conflating the bad apples with the entire group. Both sides do it. The right calls everyone on the left selfish snowflakes, and the left calls everyone on the right racists. They do it because it works. The brain likes to conflate things. And if the shiniest object in our view involves headlines about racists, or lefty rioters, those images stick in our minds and taint our impressions of the entire group.

So let’s try this thought experiment.

Let’s say there is a group of Trump-supporting racists – the violent kind that I have never met – that starts terrorizing an African-American neighbor of yours. And let’s say it turns into a violent confrontation between the racists and the victim family. The neighborhood hears some commotion and pours into the streets. The racists have weapons and they are about to kill the family that was just minding its own business. The police are on the way, but not in time. Violence is about to happen.

Suddenly a shot rings out. A bullet goes through the back of the scariest racist’s head and hollows out his skull. He drops like a rock. The other racists drop their weapons and flee.

Who fired the shot that saved the African-American family? Was it a Republican or a Democrat?

One of the most underrated qualities of Republicans is that they police their own ranks. If you have a problem with a violent Republican racist, call some Republicans. They’ll solve it for you.

To continue reading: A Thought Experiment About Republicans

 

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The Cloud Party Declares War, by the Zman

Posted on January 31, 2017 | Leave a comment

As SLL noted in “Trenches, Human Nature, and Numbers,” Trump’s entrenched opposition has a lot of tricks they can use to slow or stop him. From the Zman on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

When the Muslim Brotherhood “won” the 2012 election in Egypt, most of the world just assumed Egypt was going to go down the road to Islamism. Either a slow trot like we have seen with Turkey or perhaps a faster pace into something closer to Iran. That did not happen. Instead, Egypt ground to a halt as the civil service and military, which are intertwined, refused to cooperate with the new government. The result was a sort of coordinated work slowdown and the Brotherhood got the blame for it.

That was not the only reason the Brotherhood failed. They had no idea how to run a country and they never had the depth of support they assumed. Still, the bureaucracy set itself to stymieing Morsi, so they simply stop functioning. People still showed up for work and manned their posts, but they got nothing done. It was a good lesson in how a modern country works, even one on the fringe of modernity. Real power is not in the office, but in control of the system. He who controls the bureaucracy controls the nation.

That comes to mind after Trump has been in office for little more than a week. His initial flurry of executive orders has dominated the news cycles, simply because of the infantile theatrics of the Left. Adult toddlers throwing tantrums at the local airport makes for good TV, especially when the people covering it are toddlers themselves. What has gone unnoticed is the fact that the Republicans appear to have settled on a strategy similar to the Egyptian bureaucracy. They will slow walk everything Trump wants out of Congress.

To continue reading: The Cloud Party Declares War

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Doug Casey on What Trump’s Victory Means Going Forward

Posted on November 12, 2016 | Leave a comment

Doug Casey’s take on the election, from a guest post on theburningplatform.com:

The Trump victory is very good news for the US—relative to a win for Hillary, which would have been an unmitigated disaster. So I’m happy he won.

Will Trump winning mean a real change in direction for the US? Unlikely. Don’t mistake Trump for a libertarian. He has all kinds of stupid notions—torture as official policy, killing families of accused terrorists, and putting on import duties. He has no grasp of economics. He’s an authoritarian. His cabinet choices, so far, are all neocons and Deep State hangers-on. He’s likely to treat the US as if it were his 100% owned corporation.

On the bright side, he has real business experience—although of the kind that sees government as a partner. I doubt he’ll try, or be able if he does, to pull up any agencies by the roots. He’ll mainly be able to set the tone, as did Reagan. But, hey, something is better than nothing.

THE POLITICAL FUTURE

A brief word on US political parties. I’ve said for years that the Demopublicans and the Republicrats are just two wings of the same party. One says it’s for social freedom (which is a lie), but is actively antagonistic to economic freedom. The other says it’s for economic freedom (which is a lie), but is actively antagonistic to social freedom. Both are controlled by members of the Deep State.

I still think that’s an accurate description of reality. But, in truth, it’s a little unfair to the Republicans. The creatures who control the Republican Party are one thing—and they were massively repudiated by the victory of Trump. Good riddance. But the people who gravitate towards the GOP are something else. To them, the GOP mostly represents a cultural club they belong to.

Rank and file Republicans don’t have any cohesive philosophy binding them together. They’re just sympathetic to “traditional” values. They like the picture postcard version of America. The 1950’s style “Father Knows Best” family. The world of “American Graffiti”. A house in the suburbs, or a small, neat farm. Thanksgiving dinners with relatives. The exchange of Christmas cards. Going to church on Sunday. The husband having a job that allows him to support the wife and kids. Chevrolets and Fords. A relatively small, non-predatory government. A friendly neighborhood cop. A basically decent and stable society, which doesn’t tolerate crime, or overly outlandish behavior, where social norms are understood and observed.

You get the picture. It’s a cultural thing, not an ideological or political construct. Unfortunately, it’s no longer a reality. It’s more and more just an ideal, about as dated as a Norman Rockwell painting on the defunct Saturday Evening Post.

The Democrats are quite different in outlook. They see themselves as hip and sophisticated, and see traditional values as “square”. They’re for globalism, not American nationalism. Forget the clean cut Mouseketeers; the fat and loathsome Lena Dunham is the new role model. Political correctness rules. White men are automatically despised. Black is beautiful. Women are better than men. The very idea of America is in disrepute, and held in contempt. Multiculturalism overrules home-grown values. Etc. Etc.

To continue reading: Doug Casey on What Trump’s Victory Means Going Forward

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Contempt in Stone, by Porter

Posted on October 13, 2016 | Leave a comment

Nothing but contempt is due the Republican “leaders” who have stabbed in the back not just Trump, but millions of regular Republicans who support Trump. From Porter at kakistocracyblog.wordpress.com via theburningplatform.com:

A reader, commenting here as Reader, drew my attention to a Ross Douthat article today in the Journal of Mexican billionaires

The piece is a keening lament at the failure of Republican Party elders to quash the Trump candidacy at its spring crest. He views their capitulation to primary results as the fuel that is lighting the party’s self-immolation. That Republicans agreed to field the voters’ preference is something he regards as a stupendous mistake. Douthat deploys the term “compromise” multiple times in describing the party’s concession to its voters. And finding that description wan through overuse, he proceeds to brighten the sentiment by calling the acceptance of Trump’s nomination a “surrender.”

A surrender to whom, motherfucker?

It certainly wasn’t a surrender to Donald Trump. A candidate holds no power beyond the votes he has accumulated. I notice the party didn’t compromise with or surrender to Tom Tancredo in 2008. That they have now done so to Trump is not what is more favorably regarded as sacred democracy when blacks and the dead vote democrat but rather, by Douthat’s implication, a grim example of Republicans’ moral infirmity.

What a statement of cake-eating contempt.

The Republican party’s alleged ‘surrender’ was to its constituents. The people that party exists to serve. This being a relationship enduringly confused by those at the Acela end of it.

Politicians, lobbyists, pundits, and every one of you scavengers and parasites in the Republican ecosystem exist because its base of voters makes the party viable. Not you. A tick rides on the dog’s back for so long it eventually forgets who’s doing the walking.

You Paul Ryan, Ben Sasse, Rick Wilson, and John McCain are apparatchiks. Stewards. Showmen and functionaries. You only have value in the party to the extent you have value to its voters. They don’t serve at your pleasure, and they don’t require your approval of their choices. That choice was made clearly and unequivocally by tens of millions of people who do the actual work in this country that pays for your prostitutes and pomposity.

I understand if you disagree with the selection. Keep your goddamned mouth shut. Your fiduciary responsibility as a party hack is to lubricate the political machine. If unable to perform even that menial task, then you are merely worthless. Yet so many of you have aspired to be worse. You have actively sabotaged your constituents’ choice. The people who made that choice have every right to their candidate receiving a fair hearing in the general election. But with that possibility foreclosed by a uniformly corrupt media, they at least expect their own party apparatus to sulk when it will not help.

But that was asking too much. No, a phalanx of you leap on 11 year-old pretext to withdraw support and demand the nominee withdraw a month out the election. You could have observed the obvious: that far greater concerns are at issue in this election than antique machismo. Or you could have simply said “no comment.” Instead you unsheathed the knives.

To continue reading: Contempt in Stone

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The Truth About GOPe Abandoning Trump, by Karl Denninger

Posted on October 13, 2016 | Leave a comment

The Republicans are far more worried about being blamed for the consequences of the US’s exploding debt than they are about Donald Trump’s behavior with women. From Karl Denninger, on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

Let’s cut the crap eh?

Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Renice, John McCain and the others are not upset about Trump’s foul mouth.

That’s yet another lie.

Here’s the truth:

They know damn well that last year alone the House and Senate, both of which are Republican, presided over, passed and spent at a level that generated a $1.4 trillion deficit.

Let me remind you that all revenue bills must originate in the house. The President may not spend one dollar that has not been allocated by Congress.
It is a fact that the government ran a $1.4 trillion dollar deficit in the fiscal year ending September 30th. Read the link for the documentation; the MTS showing exactly where that went will be out Tuesday, and I will be reporting on it.

Here is the problem: If Trump wins the election then both Houses of Congress and the Presidency will be carried by Republican majorities.

This means they will have nobody to blame for what is a certain fiscal and economic crack-up that will come during the next President’s term on the path we are on now and which none of them intend to change.

If Hillary is in office they can blame her just like they blame Obama now, even though, as noted, the Constitution requires all revenue bills to originate in the House and the President cannot spend one dime without a Congressional appropriation.

However, the people of this nation are either too stupid, too ignorant or have their face stuffed too far up a social media site’s ass to pay attention to this fact and demand that it stop before the federal government blows up on a budgetary level, before our economy blows up and before all of our asset markets — stocks, bonds, housing, all of it — go up in smoke with losses that could easily reach 90%.

THAT is what is coming, it is likely coming during the next President’s term and the GOPe knows it.

If it happens when the GOP controls all three portions of the bill-passing mechanism in the United States they will own it and have it tattooed all over their bodies and will not be able to blame it on anyone else.

That is why the “outrage” now, when it is being widely reported that Paul Ryan along with others in the Republican Party knew that leaked audio recording from Trump existed months if not years ago.

The issue is not a leaked audio recording from 10 years ago.

It’s their mortal fear of being hung, either politically or literally, when the economy and federal government collapse on their watch and as a direct consequence of their actions with no way to blame anyone else.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/10/13/the-truth-about-gope-abandoning-trump/

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Never #Never Trump: Not Voting Trump Is Republican Suicide, by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on September 22, 2016 | Leave a comment

From even a traditionalist Republican perspective, Trump is starting to look better than the alternative. From Victor Davis Hanson at national review.com:

The Republican dilemma

Any Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red. Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views.

In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney – once found useful by the media when running against more-conservative Republicans — were reinvented as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of a Frank Capra movie.

When the media got through with a good man like McCain, he was left an adulterous, confused septuagenarian, unsure of how many mansions he owned, and a likely closeted bigot. Another gentleman like Romney was reduced to a comic-book Ri¢hie Ri¢h, who owned an elevator, never talked to his garbage man, hazed innocents in prep school, and tortured his dog on the roof of his car. If it were a choice between shouting down debate moderator Candy Crowley and shaming her unprofessionalism, or allowing her to hijack the debate, Romney in Ajaxian style (“nobly live, or nobly die”) chose the decorous path of dignified abdication.

In contrast, we were to believe Obama’s adolescent faux Greek columns, hokey “lowering the seas and cooling the planet,” vero possumus seal on his podium as president-elect, and 57 states were Lincolnesque.

Why would 2016 not end up again in losing nobly? Would once again campaigning under the Marquess of Queensberry rules win Republicans a Munich reprieve?

The Orangeman Cometh

In such a hysterical landscape, it was possible that no traditional Republican in 2016 was likely to win, even against a flawed candidate like Hillary Clinton, who emerged wounded from a bruising primary win over aged socialist Bernie Sanders.

Then came along the Trump, the seducer of the Right when the Republican establishment was busy early on coronating Jeb Bush. After the cuckolded front-runners imploded, we all assumed that Trump’s successful primary victories — oddly predicated on avoidance of a ground game, internal polling, ad campaigns, sophisticated fundraising, and a sea of consultants and handlers — were hardly applicable to Clinton, Inc. She surely would bury him under a sea of cash, consultants, and sheer manpower.

That Trump was an amateur, a cad, his own worst enemy, cynically leveraging a new business or brand, and at any time could say anything was supposedly confirmation of Hillary’s inevitable victory. Her winning paradigm was seen as simply anti-Trump rather than pro-Hillary: light campaigning to conserve her disguised fragile health, while giving full media attention to allow Trump to elucidate his fully obnoxious self. Her campaign was to be a series of self-important selfies, each more flattering to the beholder but otherwise of no interest to her reluctant supporters.

For insurance, Clinton would enlist the bipartisan highbrow Washington establishment to close ranks, with their habitual tsk-tsking of Trump in a nuanced historical context — “Hitler,” “Stalin,” “Mussolini,” “brown shirt,” etc.

To continue reading: Never #Never Trump: Not Voting Trump Is Republican Suicide

 

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