Oh, great. Now I’m going to be thinking about this all day. » « Lessons from Mordor

Conservatives always disappoint, but always in new, surprisingly repellent ways

You know, I really think we ought to burn the Republican party right down to the ground, salt the earth it stands on, and stand by with flamethrowers in case anything should sprout from it ever again. I was surprised, though, to see that Ann Coulter and Jason Chaffetz might be slowly creeping towards the same conclusion — at least, the title of the article says that ‘We need to disband the entire Republican Party’: Ann Coulter flattens her own party, which sort of implies that we’re converging on an agreement here (also, please, Raw Story, stop with they hyperbole in your headlines — no, she hasn’t flattened anything).

But then I read why they are unhappy with the GOP.

You see that with the left and the elite conservatives in the Republican Party that don’t want an honest dialogue about the successes of this president, said Chaffetz. Instead of joining together and moving forward with specific goals to restore getting wins in the midterms, they are being disruptive in a haphazard way.

Holy fuck. They’re unhappy with Republicans because they are insufficiently fawning and sycophantic to Trump.

They are a prime example of how the problem isn’t just Trump, but the whole damn Republican party and the fools who vote for them.

Oh, great. Now I’m going to be thinking about this all day. » « Lessons from Mordor

Comments

  1. Ichthyic says

    what to do with the bloody authoritarians.

    not a new problem.

    will there be a new solution?

    doubtful.

  2. Jeremy Shaffer says

    “You see that with the left and the elite conservatives in the Republican Party that don’t want an honest dialogue about the successes of this president,” said Chaffetz. “Instead of joining together and moving forward with specific goals to restore getting wins in the midterms, they are being disruptive in a haphazard way.”

    Well gee, Jason; if that’s really your concern, maybe you shouldn’t have been so quick run away from the congressional seat you had just been re-elected to as soon as you got a good whiff of the shit your party was about to dump on us all.

  4. petesh says

    I rather enjoy his phrase “the left and the elite conservatives.” I guess they don’t dare use “moral majority” to describe those in between, who are of course neither.

  5. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    she hates Republicans for not being completely in synchronized lockstep march behind “45” leading them over a cliff he calls the valley of riches filled with gold for … <mumble>
    –
    honest dialogue about the successes of this president,
    okay. Honest successes:
    waiting…
    <crickets>

  6. rayceeya says

    Ask a Puerto Rican how successful that asshat is.

    When he was elected we expected absolute failure. Every time something bad happens I keep thinking,”Is this the one?”. Unfortunately, the big one hasn’t dropped yet. I really wish the horrible bad thing that’s I’m absolutely sure will wreck this country would happen so we can just get it over with. (I’m not trolling I really feel this way, honest)

    It’s a real credit to our federal and state bureaucrats and employees that so many things could have gone really wrong in the last year and a half of Preznit Nincompoop, have been diverted by these thankless souls. This includes the FBI.

    I hate to say it, but we really need the shit to hit the fan before we can finally break this guy. I honestly can’t understand how he keeps lucking out. I’m absolutely certain this is nothing more than luck keeping this administration afloat. Luck runs out though. When that happens, my money is on Donny Boy suffering a stroke, heart attack, or maybe even suicide.

  7. says

    I see his success in a similar light to events in the Bob Clampett Bugs Bunny cartoon, TORTOISE WINS BY A HARE, where Bugs is maneuvered into donning a costume that makes him look like the tortoise, and the rabbit Mafia, who has bet heavily on him, grabs him before he can reach the finish line and refuse to believe that he’s the rabbit. As they are hammering him, the tortoise shows up in a rabbit suit, and they carry him across the finish line themselves.

    It’s not a perfect analogy—Trump isn’t a master manipulator, but just the beneficiary of decades of increased cheating technology on the GOP side (They didn’t really even want him to win, but they had all these dodges in place. How could they not use them?), but that’s what I see whenever I hear about Trump doing this and that: a fake being carried across the finish line by organized criminals.

    Speaking of organized criminals, I was going to link to the cartoon, but YouTube has it behind a pay wall. I generally hate the series of cartoons where Bugs is a feckless patsy*, but this one rises above the rest by virtue of tight plotting and split-second timing.

    [*] I have written before about my theory that the major animated cartoon characters go through several stages: Dangerous Screwball, Righteous Avenger, Feckless Patsy, and Suburban Homeowner. Like any great theory, it has loopholes I won’t go into now.

  8. raven says

    When he was elected we expected absolute failure. Every time something bad happens I keep thinking,”Is this the one?”. Unfortunately, the big one hasn’t dropped yet.

    The USA is too big for the One Big Disaster scenario.
    The Trump Disaster won’t end with a bang.
    It will end with a whimper.

    I’m expecting it too though.
    1. Usually the GOP crashes the economy.
    Hoover and the Great Depression and Bush with the Great Recession.
    Trump has taken steps to wreck the US economy with his tax cuts, huge deficits, pointless fights with our allies, killing NAFTA, and trade wars.
    But this will take years to show up.
    Right now the next recession isn’t even on the horizon.

    2. A huge pointless war somewhere, another few trillions of dollars down the drain. More of our soldier children dead.
    Could be North Korea or Iran. Could be Canada or Mexico for all we know.
    It’s obvious Bolton, Trump, the GOP, and the chickenhawks are drooling for a big war somewhere.

    Neither the next Great Recession nor the Next Pointless War are predictable right now.
    They are contingent on future events, so nobody knows right now.

  9. DLC says

    So, Ann Coulter and Jason Chaeffetz are upset because there hasn’t been enough cheering for the Dear Leader ? Perhaps if we have a lovely big military parade complete with an armored stockade transport for Donnie to ride in, that would cheer people up. Although I do agree with Coulter — the GOP needs to be burned down, fall over and sink into the swamp.
    Oh, and to show I’m not completely partisan, here’s a few Donnie successes:
    1) he succeeded in throwing millions of Americans off health insurance.
    2) he succeeded in blowing up the budget deficit by instituting a 1.5 trillion dollar tax cut.
    3) he succeeded in getting a tax cut for the top 5% of the nation.
    4) he succeeded in getting us reviled by our closest allies in order to glad-hand and schmooze with one of the world’s most brutal dictators.
    See, He has too succeeded in doing things.

  10. What a Maroon, living up to the 'nym says

    The problem in framing the debate in terms of “success” is that, in his own radical right terms (I can’t see how the word “Conservative” in any sense describes what Trump and his party are doing) he has been very successful. In addition to the list DLC provides in @9, he’s succeeded (or is succeeding) in gutting environmental laws, in appointing radical right wing judges throughout the judiciary, in demonizing immigrants, in making his people see the press as the enemy, in promoting empty but virulent nationalism, and just in general marching the US further down the path of authoritarianism.

    The message from progressives (and anti-Trump conservatives) should be not that Trump has been unsuccessful, but that his successes are disastrous for the US and the world.

  11. Marcelo says

    rayceeya, #6:

    Unfortunately, the big one hasn’t dropped yet. I really wish the horrible bad thing that’s I’m absolutely sure will wreck this country would happen so we can just get it over with.

    I visualized as that segment of one of the John Oliver where he was waiting to announce a news item which would allow him to press a Big Red Button which would deploy a big banner reading “We got him!” and call for a band and a parade celebrating the final nail in the coffin of the Big Cheeto.

    …Of course, as you express, nothing of the sort has happened yet.

  12. MetzO'Magic says

    What a Maroon #10 perfectly summarises The Donald’s ‘successes’. If you’re a rich, white, right-wing nutjob, he’s got your back 100% covered. OTOH, if you’re a poor, white, right-wing nutjob, you’ve been had — but you don’t know it because you live in that miasmic, self-enforcing right-wing media bubble.

  13. blf says

    If you’re a rich, white, right-wing nutjob, [hair furor]’s got your back 100% covered.

    Not 100%, hair furor discards / attacks / insults some people who fit that description, perhaps especially if he perceives them as “disloyal” to him.

    He seems to perceive the world — not just economies or whatever — as a zero-sum game: One “winner” and a bunch of “loosers”. (And he’s always the “winner”, and not repeatedly saying-so is Fake NEWS!)

    During the campaign (March 2016), Adam Davidson published in the New York Times a very insightful essay on how hair furor views the world, What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About ‘the Deal’:

    […]
    It’s easy to dismiss Trump as a loutish ignoramus who simply doesn’t understand how modern economies function. But I’ve come to see him as a canny spokesman for a different sort of economy, one that often goes by the technical name “rent seeking.” In economics, a “rent” is money you make because you control something scarce and desirable, whether it’s an oil field or a monopolistic position in a market. There is a bit of “rent” in nearly every transaction. When you pay rent on an apartment, some of the money is for the value the landlord has added to the property, by upgrading the kitchen, say. But much of the money your landlord makes comes from the fact that he or she controls property in a desirable location. If you think of the transactions that make people the most frustrated, they are, most likely, rent-seeking transactions in which some force is imposing a better “deal” for one party. Your cable service costs more and is less responsive because local monopoly allows the company to make a better “deal” for itself. The owner of the local pro-sports team can make a “deal” with the city for a new stadium, or else the team packs up and leaves town. Without real competition, one or both sides of a rent-seeking transaction lack leverage, and so decisions can be hashed out only by powerful people making deals in back rooms.

    [… As an example, in Iraq], there would be some business opportunity — building a hospital, say, or getting a license to import a new line of cars — and Saddam Hussein’s family would essentially auction off the opportunity to the handful of wealthy businesspeople whom they deemed trustworthy. Success came not from being better at building hospitals or more efficient at importing cars. It came from understanding the internal family politics of the Husseins and the power of the state bureaucracy.

    [… In the States, an example is] Manhattan real estate development […], not a marketplace characterized by competition and dynamism; instead, Manhattan real estate looks an awful lot more like a Middle Eastern rentier economy. It is a hereditary system. We talk about families, not entrepreneurs. A handful of families have dominated the city’s real estate development for decades […] These are people of immense power and influence, but their actual skills and abilities are opaque. They do, however, make “deals.”

    In recent weeks, hearing Trump talk, I’ve realized that his economic worldview is entirely coherent. It makes sense. He is not just a rent-seeker himself; his whole worldview is based on a rent-seeking vision of the economy, in which there’s a fixed amount of wealth that can only be redistributed, never grow. It is a world­view that makes perfect sense for the son of a New York real estate tycoon who grew up to be one, too. Everything he has gotten — as he proudly brags — came from cutting deals. Accepting the notion of a zero-sum world, he set out to grab more than his share. And his policies would push the American economy to conform with that worldview.

    […] The native-born population of the United States is aging rapidly; without immigrants the nation would quickly face a disastrous level of debt. Middle-class workers may be struggling now in a changing economy, but a clampdown on global trade would only make that worse. Any health care reform that revolved around the president’s ability to “deal” would inherently be one more prone to corruption. In a rentier state, every ambitious person knows that the way to become rich and powerful is to grab the sources of wealth and hold onto them, by force if necessary. It’s no accident that, around the world, rentier states tend to be run by unelected dictators — the ultimate dealmakers in chief.

    In rereading the essay now, I note Davidson doesn’t mention hair furor’s obsession with personal “loyalty”. He does, however, note his similarities to dictators, who (I claim without checking) are typically so-obsessed.

    I cannot find it at the moment, but there was an article(? editorial?) very recently (this week?), also in the NYT, pointing out — this is from memory — hair furor’s “diplomatic” “successes” tend to align with the viewpoint of an (unethical) investor looking for (potential) rapid-growth markets: Russia, N.Korea, and so on.

  15. blf says

    Onamission5@14, Yes, Maroon…@10 pointed that out. Hair furor’s distortion of the judicatory — with the active cooperation of the thugs in the Senate — is perhaps the actually-happening aspect of this reign of terror which concerns me the most. The other disasters, to-date, can be reversed / neutralised, in the main fairly quickly given an absence of thugs in the “government”, but the “judge” disaster will literally last a lifetime. (More probably, thugs not being in a position to obstruct, derail, etc., rather then the perhaps ideal situation of none at all.) There are technical problems with certain reversals, e.g., from memory, a rescinded regulation cannot be restored without Congressional approval, but that is obviously possible post the hair furian thugs’s dalekocracy. Nazis for “judges” is a whole different & longer-lasting problem.

    There are legal ways of ousting judges, so it is not impossible. But, as far as I know, the level of difficultly is very very high. With properly-functional executive and legislative branches, long-term judges have been seen to be a good thing. As hair furor is making exceptionally clear, in the States there is an enormous presumption that, overall, the various levels of “government” are not self-serving rent-seeking megalomaniacs. When that presumption fails, disaster !