This election season is going to be a tough slog for the GOP Never Trumpers. For the next three months they’re going to have to come up with nasty attacks on the GOP nominee that aren’t simply regurgitations of mainstream media attacks.
When Trump does pull out a stunning win – as he has today by bringing Hillary’s email woes to the top of the news cycle in the middle of the Democrat National Convention – they have to waste precious column inches with rote denunciations of the maestro.
Out first example comes from The Federalist, which used to be an amusing read but which I hardly visit any more.
The title is great, exactly what conservative readers like to see:
Dumb Media Play Right Into Trump’s Hands On Russian Hacking
And yet to find out what Trump did, the reader has to trudge through four paragraphs of anti-Trump invective.
Talk about burying the lede.
Over at the normally sensible PJ Media, the hapless Tyler O’Neil has basically cut-and-paste the lies of the New York Times:
Trump to Russia: I Hope You Hack Hillary
Er, no. Trump never said that. He said that he figured Russia already had Hillary’s 30,000+ illegally deleted emails and then joked that they should share them with the FBI.
It’s a brilliant turn of phrase, but completely lost on O’Neil. I don’t know the man, haven’t read him much and I won’t bother to in the future.
This highlights the problem of the Never Trump dead-enders: No one needs them. There is plenty of anti-trump nastiness out there, so why seek out their version of it?
The whole point of magazines like National Review and The Weekly Standard was to provide an alternative to the biased mainstream press. By continuing to hit Trump, they pretty much undermine their rationale for existence.
Sure, I guess there is a segment that likes to have pointless b.s. sessions about some sort of Platonic conservative ideal, but they aren’t even good at that.
Seriously, Ace of Spades has provided a better framework for what’s going on at the moment than the entire staff of National Review. True, Ace is prone to bouts of depression and/or temporary insanity, but when he is on, he is brilliant.
SHALL WE JUST NUKE RUSSIA AND GET IT OVER WITH? Since the Federalist brought it up, I have to ask: What’s the point of continually pissing on Putin, anyway?
The point of the Cold War was to resist Communist subversion of democracy both at home and abroad. The Soviet Empire had imprisoned Eastern Europe as well as disrupted most of the developing world.
At this point, the disputes are pretty small-ball stuff. The Crimea, for example, is pretty obviously Russia’s core turf. They have a far better title deed to it than we do to most of our country, and expecting them to cough it up is delusional.
Similarly, the pissing match over Donbas is hardly something to start World War III over. Yeah, I don’t like Putin, but guess what? He’s the guy we have to deal with. I’m getting real tired of GOP types ratting their swords as if we’re going to deploy the Third Army on the Ukrainians steppe.
Could a firmer, more resolute foreign policy have checked Putin’s adventurism? Yep. But at this point, that ship has sailed. The path forward is to yes, make deals with Putin. Perhaps trading Transnistria for Crimea and border adjustments in Donbas, for example.
It ain’t morally pure, but that’s diplomacy.
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