John McCain Dead at 81

When John McCain ran for president in 2000, I was an enthusiastic supporter.  That George W. Bush ultimately won the GOP contest and the 2000 election is a tragedy that, in my view, cost America and other parts of the world needless lost lives. By the time that the 2008 election rolled around, the cancer in the GOP was beginning to metastasize and  when McCain foolishly picked Sarah Palin - the insane idiot of Wasilla, in my view - there was simply no way that I could overlook the wrongheaded policies that McCain was embracing out of expediency to pander to the uglier elements of the GOP base.   All of that said, I never stopped respecting McCain as a man who, despite mistakes, tried to do the right thing, including voting against the effort to kill the Affordable Health Care Act. His sense of morality, opposition to torture and rejection of the racism of much of today's GOP is in stark contrast to the foul creature in the White House. An editorial in the New York Times looks at the man who died yesterday:  

With John McCain, you never quite knew. That was a big part of his appeal, one of the things that made him interesting, and also one of the things that drove people who value ideological consistency a bit batty.

As a professed maverick, Mr. McCain, who died Saturday at the age of 81, was bound to make somebody unhappy. Though for much of his career his votes on the Senate floor were mostly along party lines, his periodic challenges to Republican orthodoxy made him more popular among independents, Democrats and the tattered remnants of his party’s moderate wing than with the absolutists in the party’s base. Five years of torture in a North Vietnamese prison camp appeared to have left him with a pretty good idea of who he was, an ability to think for himself and the capacity to tune out partisan noises.

He had principles, and he had flaws, from time to time betraying those principles — most grievously in the 2008 presidential campaign. But in a Senate mostly devoid of the kind of commanding figures who once roamed its halls, he was a rare bird. And he could surprise you.

Especially his fellow Republicans. At a time of confusion and nastiness over immigration, it is worth recalling that he joined with Senator Edward Kennedy in 2005 and then again in 2007 to push a grand compromise that paired stronger controls at the border with a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 or so million undocumented immigrants.

At a time when the political system is once again drowning in money from special interests, it is worth recalling that back in the early 2000s he co-wrote, with Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, a landmark bill to tighten the post-Watergate campaign finance reform laws.

At a time when the man who now occupies the White House and his cabinet factotums deny the plain reality of climate change, it is worth recalling that back in the early 2000s, Mr. McCain and Joseph Lieberman, then a Connecticut Democrat, drafted the first serious bipartisan bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions by putting a price on carbon.

The campaign finance reform effort eventually succeeded, named for a companion bill in the House sponsored by Chris Shays, a Republican from Connecticut, and Marty Meehan, a Democrat from Massachusetts. The climate and immigration bills did not succeed, partly for want of Republican support. But even in defeat, Mr. McCain, through his willingness to tackle thorny and even politically toxic issues, gave hope for the future. His example still does.

A military man to the core, and the son and grandson of two decorated admirals, Mr. McCain held views on foreign and defense policy that were relentlessly hawkish; He lobbied hard for the ruinously misguided invasion of Iraq, as well as the bombing of Libya. At the same time, and despite his brutal treatment as a prisoner of war, he strongly supported Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to normalize relations with North Vietnam.

Mr. McCain’s final years in the Senate were a similar mix of independence and fealty to party norms. Last summer, he dramatically entered the Senate chamber and cast a decisive vote against the administration’s ghastly health care bill, partly on grounds that it had been concocted in haste and without hearings and had thus failed the basic requirements of sound legislative process. But not long afterward, he voted in favor of a similarly ill-conceived, backward-looking tax bill. (Mr. McCain was absent for medical reasons when the bill came up for final passage three weeks later and he did not cast a vote).

That vote provided precisely the kind of opportunity for one last display of the adventurous bipartisanship for which Mr. McCain was so well known. It was not to be. Still, there had been plenty such moments in a long and distinguished career. Mr. McCain was a charming, imperfect man, driven by a code of honor and self-aware enough to know when he had violated it. A Senate where the phrase “happy warrior” is an oxymoron will miss him.

My sincere condolences to the McCain family.

John McCain's No Holds Barred Book

While I have often disagreed with his positions, I have always had respect for the man and still wish that he, rather than George W. Bush, had been the 2000 Republican presidential nominee. So much tragedy and needless deaths might have been avoided in Iraq and elsewhere.  And compared to the current occupant of the White House - who I never give the title of "president" - McCain has always tried to maintain a level of moral decency and "American values" if you will.  Now, leaving Congress and with likely not much time left on this side of life, McCain's new book, Restless Wave, seems written with a view of how McCain will be viewed by history and he confronts not only some of his own biggest mistakes but also the moral cesspool the Republican Party has become as best symbolized by Der  Trumpenführer.  A review of the book in the Washington Post gives a brief summary of points in the book.  Here are highlights: 

Unlike the previous six books McCain and Salter have composed together, this one wasn’t written for voters. It was written for history. In an era of all-caps tweets and angry denunciations of supposed “witch hunts,” the Arizona Republican’s final book, published Tuesday, casts him as a profile in courage. McCain highlights his advocacy for the Iraq troop “surge” when it was toxically unpopular in 2007 and his decisive vote against repealing Obamacare in 2017. He finally tells his side of his 2008 Sarah Palin partnership. With what time he has left, the “maverick” — an appellation he has worn throughout his career, at some times more comfortably than at others — is going to put country first and tell the truth.

He expresses regret that he did not pick Joe Lieberman to be his running mate 10 years ago. His best friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), “enthusiastically endorsed the idea” of bringing their colleague, who had been the 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, onto “a national unity ticket.” But everyone else in McCain’s circle told him it would fatally divide the GOP.

McCain attributes the insufficient vetting of Palin, 44 and two years into her first term as Alaska’s governor, to his sulking about not being able to tap Lieberman. Taking the blame for her stumbles, he writes, “She was a skilled amateur performer asked to appear on Broadway twice a day.” I wish he had grappled more fully with the mayhem Palin’s selection created inside the GOP. It laid the groundwork for the ascent of Donald Trump a few years later.

Trump emerges as a bete noire in the book. When McCain after the 2016 elections received a copy of the “dossier,” detailing unverified allegations about the president compiled by an opposition researcher, he immediately turned it over to James Comey so the FBI could explore whether Trump was compromised by the Russians. “Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell,” writes McCain.

But he also portrays [Trump] the president as an outgrowth of tectonic shifts in a party for which, just 10 years ago, he was the standard-bearer. Now he sometimes struggles to recognize it. “Trump seems to vary from refusing to believe what [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is doing to just not caring about it,” he frets. “And some House Republicans investigating Russian interference seem more preoccupied with their own conspiracy theories than with a real conspiracy by a foreign enemy to defraud the United States.”

McCain repeatedly criticizes conservative “talk radio blowhards.” He calls the House Freedom Caucus “the say-no-to-everything crowd.” He says nativists “need to be confronted, not ignored or winked at or quietly dismissed as kooks.” He mocks his 2016 primary challenger, Kelli Ward, for attacking him as “a champion of compromise.” “You’re damn right,” he responds. Former Trump aides Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka are “self-proclaimed nationalist radicals.” “Bigger misfits haven’t been seen inside a White House since William Taft got stuck in his bathtub,” he writes.

All politicians self-mythologize. This book is an effort to codify McCain’s maverick brand. He puts extra emphasis on his work across the aisle, including a 38-page chapter about working with Sen. Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion from Massachusetts, on health care and immigration. He has kind words for other leading Democrats, too, including Hillary Clinton.

McCain says he’s a proud Reagan Republican. “Not a Tea Party Republican,” he writes. “Not a Breitbart Republican. Not a talk radio or Fox News Republican. Not an isolationist, protectionist, immigrant-bashing, scapegoating, get-nothing-useful-done Republican. Not, as I am often dismissed by self-declared ‘real’ conservatives, a RINO, Republican in Name Only.”

McCain’s maverick-iness has ebbed and flowed. He’s mostly been a reliable party-line vote since getting elected to Congress in 1982, but he’s broken with Republicans on a few key issues. He earned the enmity of appropriators in both parties by battling earmarks before that was in vogue, and he clashed with his own party leaders by agitating for campaign finance reform. 

He admits to some big mistakes: “The principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam [Hussein] had WMD, was wrong,” McCain writes. “The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.”

But the senator’s critique of [Trump] the current president is more sustained than any other. “For all our disagreements I never doubted President Obama shared the seventy-five-year bipartisan consensus that American leadership of the free world was a moral obligation and a practical necessity,” he writes. “I’m not sure what to make of President Trump’s convictions.” . . . . “He seems uninterested in the moral character of world leaders and their regimes,” McCain writes. “The appearance of toughness or a reality show facsimile of toughness seems to matter more than any of our values. Flattery secures his friendship, criticism his enmity.”

McCain does not want to be defined by opposition to Trump, . . . . He would, however, like to be remembered for his long crusade against torture. He devotes a meaty chapter to the topic and recounts apologizing personally to someone who suffered at the hands of his American captors while in Libya, over the objection of the CIA station chief. 

McCain wants to hold that moral high ground, and he’s peeved by any suggestion that he’s not worthy of claiming it. The senator tried to run an honorable campaign in 2008. He forbade his staff from mentioning Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial former pastor. In many ways, this gesture seems much more impressive now — after Trump spent years insisting that Obama was born in Kenya and demanding to see his birth certificate.

“I worry that we are at a turning point, a hinge of history, and the decisions made in the last 10 years and the decisions made tomorrow might be closing the door to the era of the American-led world order,” McCain writes. “I hope not, and it certainly isn’t too late to reverse that direction. But my time in that fight has concluded.”

McCain is one of the few remnants of the GOP I was proud to be a part of.  Sadly, those days appear to be gone forever as the GOP sinks deeper and deeper into a complete moral cesspool.  From my own experience in the GOP, it is no surprise that the Christofascist have lead the way towards the GOP's moral bankruptcy. 

The Republican Myth That it Represents "Real Americans"

It is hard to tell when the myth began, but it certainly gained traction among Republicans with John McCain's disastrous selection of Sarah Palin - the idiot of Wasilla.  What myth?  The myth that the Republican party speaks for "real Americans" while the Democrat Part speaks for effete liberals and  those who are "other."   Never mind accurate facts and history.  Take Donald Trump, the supposed champion of these "real Americans."   All of his grandparents and his mother were born in Europe.  Meanwhile, most American blacks can traces their ancestry in America back a century or more longer.  In my own case, some of my ancestors were in America close to a century longer than Trump's.  Why am I not a "real American" while Trump with a short term family history in America claims he is?  Sadly, it is all a lie and when stripped of all of the smoke and hypocrisy, the myth is a coded message driven my race and in some cases religious extremism.  Despite their protestations to the contrary, many of my Republican "friends" ultimately bought into this race based myth.  A  column in the Washington Post  looks at the disingenuousness of the myth peddled by the GOP.  Here are column excerpts:

The most offensive and corrosive idea in our politics today is that some Americans are more “real” than others. Don’t you dare buy it.

Republicans are cynically peddling this un-American conceit. “Real Americans” elected and continue to support President Trump, they claim, in defiance of snooty “coastal elites” who are hopelessly out of touch with the country. It’s a total crock, and shame on those using it for political gain.

The whole point of democracy is that every citizen’s voice is supposed to have equal weight — even voices in favor of fair and compassionate immigration policy, universal health care, fighting racism, promoting gender equality, enshrining LGBT rights and other progressive causes. There is no need to be tentative about these views for fear they somehow make you, I suppose, “unreal.” They do not.

 

Nor does living within some arbitrary distance of an ocean, having a college education or preferring big-city life deprive anyone of standing as an American.

 

The notion has taken hold that because the miner is a “real American,” his views must therefore be more authentic — and the barista, if he does not share or accede to those views, is “out of touch.”

 

With world-class hypocrisy, Republican officeholders and activists are selling this load of bull while themselves, by and large, being “coastal elites.”  One recent illustration: No group is supposedly more elitist and clueless than the so-called mainstream media. At the media’s biggest social event of the year, last month’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, comedian Michelle Wolf made some biting jokes about the Trump administration. Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, and his wife, Mercedes, the White House director of strategic communications, conspicuously stood up and walked out.

 

“It’s why America hates the out of touch leftist media elite,” Mercedes Schlapp harrumphed on Twitter. She sent the tweet while she and her husband were in a limousine, on their way to a glittering after-party thrown each year by NBC.

 

I know the Schlapps. . . . they recently purchased a $3 million home, as I certainly did not. Both have advanced college degrees. Matt Schlapp was a top lobbyist for Koch Industries before taking over at the ACU. The couple also founded their own public relations and lobbying firm. How are they anything but “elite,” according to the false dichotomy they espouse?

 

To put icing on the cake, Mercedes Schlapp reportedly said at a recent White House meeting that “I stand with Kelly Sadler” — referring to the White House aide who said of Sen. John McCain’s opposition to CIA nominee Gina Haspel that “it doesn’t matter, he’s dying anyway.” Schlapp is awfully selective about what she finds offensive.

 

Think for a moment about how ridiculous this whole thing is. Trump is a billionaire who started life as a millionaire, his father having been a wealthy developer. His Cabinet is a coven of plutocrats. His administration’s most consequential achievement thus far is a tax cut that showers corporations and wealthy citizens with lavish benefits, leaving just peanuts for the middle and working classes. The administration is also waging a relentless campaign to punish immigrants and the poor, apparently for existing.

But Trump cleverly uses cultural, racial and geographic markers to define who is “real” and who is not. And the Republican Party, to its eternal shame, has decided to go along.

Yes, it matters a great deal what people think in small-town Pennsylvania or rural Texas. But it matters just as much what people think in the rebuilding inner cores and thriving suburbs of our major cities, even if those cities happen to be on or near a coast.

Progressives have to speak to those left behind by wrenching economic and social change. But our voices are as authentic, and as worthy, as anyone else’s. I am a real American, too. Deal with it.

McCain, Palin and the GOP Descent into Insanity

When John McCain selected Sarah Palin - the idiot of Wasilla - as his vice presidential running mate, he likely sealed his own defeat in 2008.  For many now former Republicans, Palin's selection began the exodus from the GOP and her proud embrace of ignorance, religious extremism and dog whistle calls to white supremacists embodied what has now come to define the Republican Party.  McCain in his twilight still does not fully accept his responsibility for paving the way for Donald Trump and transformation of the Republican Party into something foul and toxic.  But as a piece in New York Magazine notes, history may see McCain's horrible mistake as a pivotal moment in setting the course for the train wreck now consuming the nation.   I had long respected McCain who had been held prisoner at the "Hanoi Hilton" with a long time friend of mine, but his selection of Palin was just too much to stomach and helped confirm my support for Obama. Here are article highlights:

When historians — or, really any of us — look back at President Trump’s ascent to the presidency, they will identify many moments over the years, big and small, that could be identified as warning signs of the catastrophe to come.

But in purely political terms, one other moment leaps to mind: the day in 2008 when John McCain upended expectations by picking then-Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential running mate. It’s not as if Republicans hadn’t worn the badge of anti-intellectualism before (see: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush). But Palin personified a dangerous new strain. She (infamously) didn’t read much; put forth few policy positions beyond “drill, baby drill”; excelled at whipping up crowds into a frothing frenzy; and attacked Barack Obama in brazen, personal terms. Stylistically, she seemed to be almost completely at odds with McCain, a deeply conservative traditionalist who prefers military wars to cultural ones.

But by and large, the GOP base adored Palin. Its loving embrace of such an unhinged figure was an early sign that the Republican Party was far more willing to tolerate qualities once thought to be disqualifying for public life than many people understood.

Throughout the campaign, and since, McCain has steadfastly defended Palin. But in a story reported from his Arizona ranch, . . . . reports that McCain does have regrets about his VP pick. The reason for his discontent — which he has elaborated on in an upcoming book and movie — is that he wishes he had trusted his instincts and picked Joe Lieberman instead.

[I]it’s striking that, even at this late stage, McCain won’t admit that Palin represents the same variation of grievance politics he now abjures.

McCain, who President Trump has taunted in grossly personal terms (“I prefer war heroes who weren’t captured”) has been one of the few Republicans to consistently take on the president. He has attacked Trump’s “spurious, half-baked nationalism” and furiously criticized his continuous praise of Vladimir Putin. And while he often votes for the president’s priorities, making his everlasting “maverick” label something of a joke, he was the deciding “no” to kill Obamacare repeal in the Senate, an act of apostasy that has earned Trump’s perpetual ire.

[McCain is] also out of sync with the GOP base in most other ways. He’s a national-security hawk in a time of Republican isolationism, a centrist on immigration in a party full of America Firsters. Beyond his policy positions, McCain is out of step in another important way: he wants Republicans to step back from the toxic, grievance-based ideology that now dominates the party.

McCain framed the problem as a bipartisan one. But it’s the Republican party where “the bombastic loudmouths” have really gained control in recent years, culminating in the party’s surrender to President Trump. John McCain has always called himself a maverick, but he’ll end his life as all but an outcast.

It is facile to draw a straight line from Palin to this sad state of affairs. But it is striking that, even now, McCain cannot, or will not, fully reckon with the forces he helped unleash.

The Republican Apostates

I left the Republican Party years ago when I saw the beginnings of the monstrous thing the GOP has become, fueled in large party in my view by the rise of the Christofascists within the party base and a willingness of the party leadership to prostitute itself to those sought to undermine American democracy and force their beliefs (and often racism) on all of society.  Now, the Christofascist trait of lying about virtually everything has metastasized through out the GOP.  How else to explain for example Paul Ryan and the GOP's claims that the Trump tax bill is good for average Americans?  The same holds for claims that granting licenses to Christofascists is about protecting "religious liberty."  When I left the GOP, it wasn't pretty, especially since I had also "come out."  I was dragged through the mud by former "friends" and my past efforts for the party and reputation for "doing my homework on issues" all meant nothing.  Now, many others who held far loftier positions than I in the GOP who have put morality ahead of surrendering to Trump/Pence and the toxic GOP base are finding themselves likewise treated as apostates.  Some have formally left the GOP which has proven what I figured out long ago: it cannot be reformed from within.  Unlike some of these people, I always opposed the Iraq War. A long piece in Esquire looks at this new group of Republican exiles/apostates.  Here are excerpts:

Some of the guests were liberal journalists whose faces were as familiar as their bylines: Jane Mayer and Elizabeth Drew, Andrew Sullivan and David Corn. But among them, too, was a cadre of the uprooted and displaced, writers, intellectuals, and pundits who, had they gathered in Paris or London—well, Ottawa, anyway—might have worn the haunted glamour of émigrés and exiles, though in this case they are strangers in the same precincts where they once felt very much at home. Call them Republicans with a conscience, conservatives without a party, or simply, as most do, the Never Trumpers. 

Liberals and conservatives have always commingled easily in Washington, but a year into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, old lines are blurring and new alliances are forming in remarkable ways. Exhibit A is the owner of the grand house on Foxhall Road: David Frum, a former hardcore conservative and speechwriter for George W. Bush. It was Frum who, with another Never Trumper, Michael Gerson (now a Washington Post columnist), coined the phrase “axis of evil” in 2002 and promptly entered the annals of liberal infamy. These days, however, Frum is better known as a heretic and outcast, primus inter pares of the Never Trumpers. The week that had just ended was no more or less lurid than many others in the first year of Trump’s America, that bottomless tasting menu of national debasement. . . . . it didn’t seem odd to be celebrating, near a lighted pool with fountain spouts on a warm Indian-summer night, the publication of Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (sample chapter: “Starvation: Spring and Summer, 1933”), which had just that week gotten a rave in The New York Times. . . . the book’s author, Post columnist Anne Applebaum, gave brief remarks. She thanked her “beloved friends the Frums,” who “care about the things I care about,” Today, it is the Never Trumpers who are holding out against “forced collectivization”—imposed by the leaders of their own party—and feel locked in an epochal struggle, with a great deal riding on the outcome. To them Trumpism is more than a freakish blight on the republic. It is a moral test. “We’ve seen a moment before when holders of property gambled that their best hope of retaining their property was to disenfranchise fellow citizens,” Frum told me. “We’ve seen before when important parts of society put their faith in authoritarianism. Because Americans have emerged safely at the other end of some pretty scary pasts, they think no one has to do anything—‘It’ll just happen automatically.’ ”

This is not the sort of thing Frum said in his former life, as a wunderkind of the American Right. But for him, as for many of the guests at his party, the rise of Trump changed the old refrain “It can happen here” into something more dire and pressing: “It’s happening now and must be stopped.” . . . . it’s a sign of how far things have come that these insiders have now become outlaws.

[A] small but influential band of Republicans, not yet called Never Trumpers, were warning that he was an authentic global menace. One august figure on the Right, the Post columnist George Will, renounced the Republican party in June 2016, declaring himself unable to witness its submission to Trump.

What was missed was the message the Never Trumpers were trying to send, and how genuinely alarmed they were. “There wasn’t a single conservative I talked with at the beginning of 2016 who thought Donald Trump was a remotely acceptable candidate for president,” says Max Boot, a neoconservative foreign-policy writer who served as an advisor to John McCain in 2008 and Marco Rubio eight years later. In March 2016, as Trump closed in on the nomination, another neocon, William Kristol, a founding editor of The Weekly Standard, tried to engineer a third-party escape hatch. It went nowhere. Two years on, Boot has quit the Republican party and says of his Never Trump confederates, whose numbers seem to shrink by the day, “Right now we could all fit in my living room.” Boot’s tone, plaintive but defiant, is common among the Never Trumpers. . . . This latter group sometimes sounds like liberals, but its members are in fact counter-Republicans who mean to take their party back, or blow it up.

His [Frum's] bill of particulars against the movement and the party he once championed long predates Trump and Trumpism. In the essays and columns he writes for The Atlantic, in his fluent commentary on MSNBC, in his smart Twitter observations (he has close to six hundred thousand followers), and in his new book, Trumpocracy, Frum’s sharpest jabs are aimed not at the “kleptocrat” Trump but at House and Senate Republicans whose “ideas for replacing Obamacare bubbled with toxicity” and were a “radical attack on American norms of governance.” His pages on the “Rigged System,” the Republican campaign to disenfranchise African-American voters in no fewer than twenty states, burn with the white-hot anger we would expect to read in The Nation, . . .

The Never Trumpers have their own history to live down. Many were lusty cheerleaders for the second Iraq War, the event above all others that cleared the path for Trumpism.

Jewish conservative intellectuals, with a few exceptions, have been pretty stalwart.” That’s not surprising, given the anti-Semitic odor that clings to the alt-right pockets of Trumpism. It also stirs troubling memories of the long history of white ethnocentrism on the American Right, from the Depression-era demagoguery of Father Coughlin through the “Christian Front”–style offensives against the civil-rights movement in the fifties, up through Pat Buchanan’s attacks on the pro-Israel “Jewish lobby.”

This may explain the Never Trumpers’ defensiveness. “I’m a registered Republican,” Frum told me recently, as if trying to convince himself that the party he once belonged to still exists . . . somewhere.

Frum dates his apostasy to the 2008 election, which he wrote about as a conservative journalist (for National Review) and policy expert (for the American Enterprise Institute, the Beltway’s premier conservative think tank). Everyone knew it was going to be a tough year for the Republicans. . . . The Democrats had a charismatic presidential candidate in Barack Obama. John McCain, the Republican nominee, was overmatched and showing his age. In desperation, he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate.

McCain’s team hadn’t vetted Palin with any rigor, but Frum did, informally. “YouTube was still a very new thing,” he recalls, “and I remember watching all the video I could find. There wasn’t much, maybe three hours.” It was enough to see the obvious. “She was just out of her depth, even when she talked about Alaska.”

Palin’s ignorance alone was disqualifying. Even worse, Frum remembers, she had a brilliant but disturbing campaign style. “She had a genius for finding the stress points in American society and turning people against people,” he says, meaning her insinuating praise of small-town “real America” and her accusation that Obama, the nation’s first black presidential nominee, had been “palling around with terrorists.” Palin didn’t invent this style of demagoguery. But she was, in Frum’s telling, the purest practitioner.

After the election, he began to rethink. The trouble wasn’t McCain’s drubbing. It was the conservative embrace of Palin, which seemed tied to “the collapse of support for the Republican party by the young and the educated,”

Conservative opponents of the ACA were well aware of the bill’s provenance. But since attacking Obamacare worked at election time, they pretended otherwise, inventing the fiction of “repeal and replace.” The same dishonesty explains why they couldn’t come up with a workable substitute: Obamacare was the GOP plan.

All of this is obvious today, but Frum saw it happening in real time. Though he is by temperament and talent an intellectual pamphleteer, he’s also a first-rate wonk. His book Dead Right, published in 1994, stripped bare the myth of Ronald Reagan as the vanquisher of big government.

As he was pushed further out of the circle, something inside him was freed up. He began to reinvent himself as a conscientious objector to the Republican party, criticizing it from within. In 2011, he wrote a blistering cover story for New York magazine in which he said the GOP had “lost touch with reality.” All its policy ideas, he said, boiled down to a single fetish: “more tax cuts for the very highest earners.” (Six years later, Trump’s GOP made a prophet of him with its tax “reform” bill.) Frum also wrote a takedown of Rush Limbaugh in Newsweek.

“Conservatives have decided they are a tribe,” says Jennifer Rubin, the conservative Washington Post writer who has declared war on both Trump and his GOP. “They’re not Americans first. They’re Trump defenders first.” It is ideological groupthink, the Right’s own political correctness. And it gives credence to the old argument, rooted in the culture wars of the nineties, that a great many conservative writers and policy experts are intellectuals manqué, tightly leashed by wealthy donors, just like the Republican politicians they promote.

The good news is that the Never Trumpers are getting a close hearing. Whatever mistakes they made in their time of devotion, they have emerged as the best exegetes of the conservative god that failed. No one else understands it so well—its means, its ends, its methods, its costs. “The problem with the devil’s bargain is that the devil never delivers,” Frum says. “That’s the point of the story.”

 Like me, these people, all strong conservatives, are finding that they GOP they thought they knew is dead and that they party in reality left them, not vice versa.  I hope they continue the fight. Would that more of them had begun it sooner.

The GOP Is Riddled with Moral Rot

The moral bankruptcy that has overtaken the Republican Party did not happen over night.  In my view, it began when the wrongly name "Christian Right" - a group that is neither Christian in its behavior or right on moral issues - was welcomed into the party.  Then, when excesses and extremism began to take off under the influence of those who hate almost everyone and refuse to accept science and even objective reality, far to many conservatives and members of the pundit class became apologists for what was increasingly reprehensible (this includes David Brooks who in a column in the New York Times laments the consequences of his own accommodation with evil).  Add to this betrayal of decency Fox News and the rest of the right wing media and lunatics like Sarah Palin became mainstream in the GOP.  All of that we are witnessing in the GOP is the result of embracing toxic people and embracing hate and ignorance.  Brooks' column is on point.  Some of us saw this coming long ago, but our protests were ignored.  Here are column excerpts:

A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either. You could sort of float along in the middle, and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed.

Now it’s clear that middle ground doesn’t exist. That’s because Donald Trump never stops asking. First, he asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism. At the same time he asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault.

There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him. Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too.

That’s the way these corrupt bargains always work. You think you’re only giving your tormentor a little piece of yourself, but he keeps asking and asking, and before long he owns your entire soul.

The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve. If Republicans accept Roy Moore as a United States senator, they may, for a couple years, have one more vote for a justice or a tax cut, but they will have made their party loathsome for an entire generation. The pro-life cause will be forever associated with moral hypocrisy on an epic scale. The word “evangelical” is already being discredited for an entire generation. Young people and people of color look at the Trump-Moore G.O.P. and they are repulsed, maybe forever.

 “What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?” The current Republican Party seems to not understand that question.

It’s amazing that there haven’t been more Republicans like Mitt Romney who have said: “Enough is enough! I can go no further!”

The reason, I guess, is that the rot that has brought us to the brink of Senator Roy Moore began long ago. Starting with Sarah Palin and the spread of Fox News, the G.O.P. traded an ethos of excellence for an ethos of hucksterism.

The Republican Party I grew up with admired excellence. It admired intellectual excellence (Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley), moral excellence (John Paul II, Natan Sharansky) and excellent leaders (James Baker, Jeane Kirkpatrick). Populism abandoned all that — and had to by its very nature. Excellence is hierarchical. Excellence requires work, time, experience and talent. Populism doesn’t believe in hierarchy. Populism doesn’t demand the effort required to understand the best that has been thought and said. Populism celebrates the quick slogan, the impulsive slash, the easy ignorant assertion. Populism is blind to mastery and embraces mediocrity.

Today’s tax cuts have no bipartisan support. They have no intellectual grounding, no body of supporting evidence. They do not respond to the central crisis of our time. They have no vision of the common good, except that Republican donors should get more money and Democratic donors should have less.

The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational. More and more former Republicans wake up every day and realize: “I’m homeless. I’m politically homeless.”

 All of which is why I am now more or less a Democrat.  The GOP left me years ago.

A Lament of a Former Republican

As I have often recounted on this blog, I am a former Republican.  Indeed, my entire extended family was Republican and I served as a City Committee Member for the Republican Party of the City of Virginia Beach for 8 years.  But then the GOP began to change.  Church (i.e., right wing Christian) and state became intertwined; learning, science and objective fact became irrelevant, if not an outright enemy of America; and racism increased, thanks in large part to the Christofascists, most of whom are closet white supremacists.  I left the GOP as a result.  Other family members such as my late mother fled when John McCain tapped the idiot from Wasilla as his VP pick. With the nomination of Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer, the descent of the GOP into bigotry and insanity became complete. Expect the exodus to continue despite Trump's electoral vote victory.   A column in The Hill contains the lament of a former Republican.  Here are highlights:

For sixteen years now, I have identified as a classic conservative. I enthusiastically supported Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in his primary fight back in 2000, and was glad to see him make it to the final round eight years later, although I couldn’t ultimately support him in the wake of his running mate selection.

I’m a proud gun owner and concealed carry permit holder. I drive a big, ridiculous V8 Mustang because ‘Murica. I believe in fiscal responsibility, a government that doesn’t intrude into the private lives of its citizens, and largely believe in the power of properly regulated markets and private enterprise to innovate towards solutions to the big problems.

Know what I want? I want to get back to arguing against my liberal friends. I want to return to really rubbing their noses in it. I want to go back and have a real knock-down, drag-out argument over the best way to tackle healthcare in this country, whether we should go to single-payer, or keep the ACA and tweak it to make our private, for-profit healthcare system work for everyone. 

I want to get back to arguing over how to approach global warming, either with top heavy government regulation, or a free-market, cap-and- trade type system. I want to get back to shooting down dumbass arguments against “assault weapons” (which is redundant) or supporting reasonable alternatives like universal background checks.

But I’m not doing that.  Do you know why I’m not doing that?  Because the party that is supposed to represent my values as a conservative has lost its ever-loving mind.

Instead of arguing over the most cost-effective to deliver affordable healthcare to all Americans, Republicans continue to argue that the plan they spent thirty years fighting for is suddenly socialist because it was signed into law by a black dude, and that twenty million people need to lose their health care without any plan in place to help them. 

I know some of these people personally. They are old clients of mine from back when I was selling health insurance. They are friends and colleagues I’ve met as an author and comic, self-employed people who were finally able to start their own businesses because they didn’t need their old employer’s group insurance anymore.

Instead of looking for market-based solutions to the undeniably real crisis of global warming, the President elect claimed that it’s all a lie invented by the Chinese and that 97 percent of the world’s climatologists are in on the conspiracy for, I don’t know, all that sweet Greenpeace money? 

The economies and infrastructure systems of the future will be green, not because of tree-huggers, but because of bedrock market forces. We can either embrace that reality and start running ahead of the curve in preparation, or we can continue to fall further behind, wasting untold billions propping up an outdated system that only benefits the wealth of extractors at the cost of the health of everyone else.

[H]is campaign rhetoric, coupled with his victory, has given a semblance of credibility to xenophobia, racism, sexism and religious bigotry. 

Since the election, hate crimes have spiked, with over a thousand incidents reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center since Nov. 8.  One of which I witnessed personally not a week later.

Instead of fighting for conservative solutions to our shared problems, I find myself arguing with “conservatives” who, despite all the objective, verifiable evidence, can’t even admit that our shared problems even exist in the first place.

I am a conservative. I have always been a conservative. And I really, really want to go back to arguing for conservative causes. But until the people who have stolen that word from me return it, and return to the evidence-based ideology demanded of them by people like Edmund Burke, and Michael Oakeshott, I have to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with my liberal friends.

Because I have tell you, as it sits, they are far closer to where I have always stood on the political spectrum than anyone who wears an (R) after their name in Congress or pulled the lever for that precancerous orange colon polyp who is about to enter the White House. 

 "Orange colon Polyp"  - I will have to remember that term since it fits perfectly.  I also have to confess that I generally view Charlie Sheen as an idiot, his tweets "Trump next . . . Trump next  . . " after all the recent celebrity deaths would seem to be brilliant.

Trump Is A Symptom of America's Embrace of Ignorance

Once upon a time, America - and even the Republican Party - embraced knowledge and science and academics and the highly educated were respected.  But then something happened.  The Republican Party was largely hijacked by right wing Christians, those I call Christofascists, who hold science, knowledge and anything that questions their myth and legend based belief in open contempt.  That corruption of the GOP has been compounded by Donald Trump who has embraced and would normalize white supremacists.  A piece in Psychology Today looks at this frightening trend which threatens not only America's position as a leader in the world, but also the constitutional framework laid down by the Founding Fathers.  Here are some highlights: 

The United States is tumbling fast toward a dangerous place. In just the last twenty years or so it has become increasingly acceptable for national political candidates to be openly and obviously dumb about things that matter. More than okay, dumb is now a selling point, an admirable quality that separates uninformed politicians from despised scientists, historians, and other educated experts. Empty-headed politicians and their handlers were once tasked with figuring out how to fool voters into believing that the candidate was smart and competent. Today it no longer seems necessary to hide or pretend. Vote for me because I’m as dumb as you are!

The United States may be on the verge of electing Donald Trump, a presidential candidate who has relied on conspiracy theories, fear, anger, and volume to win over the mob. But Trump’s success to date is a mere symptom of something far worse. He is but the latest candidate in a surge of loud and proud stupidity that threatens to reshape American culture long-term if it hasn’t already. Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Ben Carson, and other such candidates achieved national political prominence in recent years to show that anti-intellectual reality distortion can gain traction now better than ever before. Trump’s lack of knowledge about government, history, science, current events, national security, foreign and domestic policy, and the military may be alarming but it does not make him unique.

[T]his problem is larger than Republican vs. Democrat and contrasting political ideas. Intelligence and knowledge should be valued by all in a way that political labels can’t overcome. Voters ought to make the minimal effort necessary to recognize the wisdom in wisdom.

To be clear, for those who find it difficult to see over the walls of tribal politics, I stress that the problem addressed here stands apart from political philosophies. This has nothing to do with small vs. big government, gay marriage, tax rates, gun control, abortion, or any of the other usual points of contention. This is about millions of Americans failing to value intelligence, critical thinking, and a rational worldview when choosing candidates to support.

Trump’s critics have accused him of being racist, sexist, corrupt, a corrupt capitalist, war monger, fascist, and ego maniac. But such charges are not nearly as worrisome as Trump’s demonstrated lack of awareness and understanding of important topics. For example, a debate moderator asked him a question about America’s nuclear triad (the system of planes, land-based missiles, and subs that can deliver nuclear weapons) and it was clear that Trump didn’t know what nuclear triad meant.  . . . . Many people have expressed their concern about Trump having his finger on the nuclear button because they feel he is too sensitive and temperamental. The greater concern, however, ought to be that Trump doesn’t seem to know much about what “the button” does when pushed.

America can survive a racist or sexist president. There have been more than a few of those in the past. America can suffer through incompetent and corrupt presidents. We have had those, too. But I’m not sure it can endure many leaders who embrace, flaunt, and champion stupidity. The new dunce worship threatens everything good about America.

We all labor within a steep-walled canyon of ignorance. What has changed is that fewer Americans seem to agree that scaling those walls toward knowledge is a good and worthwhile thing to do. Many now seem content to lie down and wallow in the ignorance. And this is the greater problem. Consider what a Trump presidency might mean given his vigorous embrace of stupidity. Ben Carson—a man Trump has mentioned as a possible cabinet member—thinks the Earth is less than 10,000 years old and humans once coexisted with the stegosaurus and triceratops. Yes, a man who would be incompetent as an elementary school teacher might be the nation’s Education Secretary. 

[W]e can’t just laugh along and enjoy the circus because national leaders make decisions that can get people killed. President George W. Bush, a Yale and Harvard graduate, was not the complete imbecile his critics charged. But even his most loyal supporters never described him as a policy wonk or deep-thinking intellectual with a keen eye for world affairs. And, sure enough, this mattered. It was revealed after the invasion of Iraq, for example, that Bush knew nothing about the centuries-old tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Bush had never heard of, much less studied and considered, this obvious and foreseeable powder keg that turned out to be the very thing that sent the Iraq War spiraling down into a still-unsettled catastrophe that has cost many thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

We must abandon the peculiar desire to recognize a peer or even an inferior in a national leader. Let’s admire and elevate people who are brighter, more educated, and more capable than us. Leaders should be out in front leading because they are the best. We don’t need presidents who shuffle alongside of us or, worse, behind us. America is a huge country with a population of more than three hundred million people. It’s not as if the supply of bright people has been exhausted. . . . . This is an easy fix. . . . . All we need is a new awareness movement to sell the public on an old idea. Spread the word: Presidents should be smart and well informed.

Sarah Palin: I Will Work To Defeat Paul Ryan In Primary

John McCain is worrying that Donald Trump heading up the GOP ticket may doom McCain's own re-election effort.  The irony is that one of Trump's loudest supporters is the lunatic from Alaska that McCain had tapped as his own vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.  In many ways Palin embodies the insanity and embrace of ignorance that has swept the Republican Party and ultimately lead to Trump being the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.  Now, Palin is threatening to try to rally the GOP base to defeat Paul Ryan in a primary contest in revenge for Ryan's reluctance to support Trump.  Crooks and Liars looks at Palin's anti-Ryan rantings.  Here are excerpts:

Just when you thought this election couldn't get any crazier....Crazy Sarah inserts herself into the mix, guaranteeing there won't be enough popcorn to go 'round.

Washington (CNN) - Sarah Palin will work to defeat House Speaker Paul Ryan by backing his primary opponent in Wisconsin, the former Alaska governor told CNN's Jake Tapper.

Palin said in an interview that airs Sunday on "State of the Union" that her decision was sparked by Ryan's bombshell announcement to Tapper last week that he wasn't yet ready to support Donald Trump, the Republican presumptive nominee. Palin endorsed Trump back in January.

"I think Paul Ryan is soon to be 'Cantored,' as in Eric Cantor," Palin said, referring to the former Republican House majority leader who was ousted in a shocking upset in 2014 when challenger Dave Brat ran to his right in a Virginia primary.

"His political career is over but for a miracle because he has so disrespected the will of the people, and as the leader of the GOP, the convention, certainly he is to remain neutral, and for him to already come out and say who he will not support is not a wise decision of his," Palin continued.

Palin deserves to be in a mental institution, in my view, yet she remains a heroine of much of the knuckle dragging, ignorance embracing GOP base.  If McCain is defeated in November, perhaps it will his just reward for giving the nation Palin back in 2008. 

Today's GOP: Cranks, Zealots, and Extremists

Today's Republican Party increasingly resembles an insane asylum where the inmates have taken over the asylum.  It seems that just when you think things cannot possibly become more deranged, Donald Trump or Tea Cruz or some professional Christian spouts unbelievable batshitery.  Such insanity is not a new phenomenon in some ways as a piece in Salon explains, but seemingly never before has a major political party been so controlled by rabid dog extremists.  Here are some article excerpts:

Indigenous and deeply rooted in American history, the paranoid politics Hofstadter described began with a panic among Federalists, echoed in New England’s pulpits in 1789, when preachers warned of the Bavarian Illuminati plots to undermine the new republic.

In the 1820s and 1830s the nation was seized with a fear of Masons, who were perceived to be a threat to republican government because Masonry was a secret society with its own system of loyalty and its own jurisdictions. Public hysteria about Masonic plots was followed by an anti-Catholic movement focused on the Society of Jesus, better known as Jesuits. “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritans,” Hofstadter wrote.

All of this is understandable in a young nation defining itself and defending itself from external and internal threats. It’s when Hofstadter takes what he describes as the long jump to the contemporary right wing that the paranoid style of politics he describes speaks to our current political moment.

It doesn’t take much more of a leap to conclude that the same rancid syndrome, which Hofstadter chronicled as occurring in episodic waves in American political life, is upon us today, and the political cranks and zealots are Republican voters animated by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio.

Hofstadter quoted Harvard professor Daniel Bell’s description of “the modern right wing” of the 1960s. If Bell’s description weren’t so articulate, it could be passed off as briefing notes for Sarah Palin’s speechwriter.

America has been largely taken away from them and their kind; though they are determined to try and repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; capitalism has been gradually undermined . . . the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen at the very centers of American power.

The “modern right wing” of 2016? You can find it at a Trump rally in a Birmingham stadium or a Cruz caucus in Iowa—even with Palin on the hustings in New Hampshire—promising to take back our country from the intellectual elites who have dispossessed “real Americans.”

Like today’s Republican presidential candidates, Hofstadter’s paranoids opposed the income tax and worked to repeal it. They were anti-intellectual and anti-cosmopolitan. They had a deep-seated aversion to “the democracies of Western Europe.” They harbored a “nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization.” They envisioned the enemy eroding our values and undermining our national security: “A perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman, sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury loving.”

Throw in “African-American”—which was beyond even the most febrile delusions of the hysterical conservatives of the 1960s— and you’ve almost got Rev. Raphael Cruz’s description of the sybaritic, foreign-born Muslim pretender to the American presidency.

If political rhetoric is any measure of the moment, a short excerpt of the speech Sarah Palin delivered when she endorsed Donald Trump on January 19 illustrates how far around the bend the extremists in the modern Republican Party have gone.

Palin might be considered a marginal figure by sensible moderates in both parties. But she’s revered on the far right, and in the 200 words above she addresses most of the paranoid fears of today’s right: a treasonous government selling out our sovereignty, coming after our guns, eroding religious rights, inviting aliens into the country to take our jobs, treating the Constitution with contempt. Palin managed to include in one over-the top speech most of what animates today’s Republican right wing—a constituency of “political cranks and zealots” who have moved far beyond the extremists Hofstadter described in an essay written half a century ago.