Politics

[Whiskeyjack]

#AynRandsux #ChicagoSchoolofEconomicsfail #releaseyourinnerKeynesian

Bluto, you may be interested in this meme:

 

[Whiskeyjack]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Just don’t think we can ever define conservatism as “common good” because conservatism is about liberty and freedom of the individual. It is the support of the individual against the collective common good.</p>— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) <a href="https://twitter.com/EWErickson/status/1245137069191639041?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 31, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

"Conservatism", ladies and gentlemen.

 

[Irish YJ]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Remember when everyone was mad at the My Pillow Guy for talking about the Bible <a href="https://t.co/XI2Uo2iUXP">https://t.co/XI2Uo2iUXP</a></p>— JERRY DUNLEAVY (@JerryDunleavy) <a href="https://twitter.com/JerryDunleavy/status/1245417154842935298?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 1, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Bishop2b5]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elec...presidential-race/ar-BB12kzlV?ocid=spartanntp

Bernie just announced he's dropping out of the race.

 

[ulukinatme]

Wait, what??? You're saying Bill & Hill don't have lingerie night, BJ Thursdays, or chocolate sauce in the nightstand?

I think we should elect ACamp for Pres. I'd like to see Steak and BJ night become a national mandate.

 

[Irishize]

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Here's some interesting reading material for those bored at home. Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule published an article in The Atlantic titled "Beyond Originalism" which sparked a ton of controversy on Twitter last week. The first three paragraphs provide a good synopsis of his argument, but it's worth reading in full:

In recent years, allegiance to the constitutional theory known as originalism has become all but mandatory for American legal conservatives. Every justice and almost every judge nominated by recent Republican administrations has pledged adherence to the faith. At the Federalist Society, the influential association of legal conservatives, speakers talk and think of little else. Even some luminaries of the left-liberal legal academy have moved away from speaking about “living constitutionalism,” “fundamental fairness,” and “evolving standards of decency,” and have instead justified their views in originalist terms. One often hears the catchphrase “We are all originalists now.”

Originalism comes in several varieties (baroque debates about key theoretical ideas rage among its proponents), but their common core is the view that constitutional meaning was fixed at the time of the Constitution’s enactment. This approach served legal conservatives well in the hostile environment in which originalism was first developed, and for some time afterward.

But originalism has now outlived its utility, and has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation. Such an approach—one might call it “common-good constitutionalism”—should be based on the principles that government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate. In this time of global pandemic, the need for such an approach is all the greater, as it has become clear that a just governing order must have ample power to cope with large-scale crises of public health and well-being—reading “health” in many senses, not only literal and physical but also metaphorical and social.

Varad Mehta wrote a supportive blog post about it here titled "Abandoning Defensive Crouch Originalism":

Originalism has been the dominant mode of constitutional interpretation on the right for four decades. But it has not been the only one. Nor is it the same today as it was in 1980; it has evolved and spawned several variants.

As Georgetown professor Randy Barnett recognized in his rebuttal to Vermeule, there are signs of emerging dissatisfaction with originalism. In this sense, we should see Vermeule’s challenge to the reigning orthodoxy as part of the intellectual ferment that has been roiling the right since Donald Trump’s election.

Is Vermeule’s scheme extreme? His critics, who have assailed it as “anti-democratic,” “illiberal,” and “un-American,” and “fascist compatible” certainly believe so. Yet if it is, so are many of the progressive proposals discussed above.

In this sense, Vermeule poses no less a challenge to the left, whose extremism is seldom beheld as such. It is treated as normal, or bold, adventurous, and daring. But rarely if ever as beyond the pale. That fate is reserved for conservative ideas, including those much milder than Vermeule’s. If he draws attention to that disparity, he will have performed a beneficial service. If he can convince progressives to reconsider some of the Constitution’s virtues, he will have performed a necessary one.

Until that happens, we should expect more of Vermeule’s brand of constitutional revisionism. Progressives have been embarked on a program of constitutional extremism for years. No one should be surprised to see conservatives start demanding one of their own.

As the left becomes more extreme, so will the right. This much, if nothing else, they will continue to have in common.

And Pat Smith gave it a qualified endorsement from a more theological angle here:

Everyone has read Adrian Vermeule’s piece at The Atlantic advocating for a common-good conservatism. Basically, Vermeule argues, conservatives should abandon originalism in favor of a constitutional approach founded upon the common good, the natural law, and the law of nations. He argues that the powers of the government, while they could be founded upon specific constitutional provisions, need not be founded upon them. Instead, the general constitutional structure and the principles of the common good and just rule would provide the support for the government’s powers.

Vermeule’s piece has met with significant criticism from all quarters. The conservative legal establishment, even the Catholics among them, has too much invested in originalism to abandon it in favor of “progressive” approaches to the Constitution, even when those approaches would further conservative goals. Right- and left-liberals see in Vermeule’s argument incipient authoritarianism: state power untrammeled by the checks and balances of the federal constitution. Through all of this is the thread that, for whatever reason, the suggestion that the Constitution ought to be interpreted according to the natural law and moral principles is seen as dangerously reactionary. Worse still is the idea that the government has the obligation to promote the common good, which is an idea with definite content.

However, I think there are some points that ought to be brought out. First of all, the idea Vermeule advances is simply the doctrine of the Roman Church. In Gaudium et spes, the Second Vatican Council outlined an energetic civil authority with the obligation to promote the common good for the total well-being of its citizens. Second, there is a tradition going back to the founders of the Republic that (1) morality applies to republics as well as men and (2) that there is a law higher than the written constitution. These principles, in fact, may be readily found in the writings of Thomas Jefferson. Originalism must reckon with this reality, in addition to its regular citations of Noah Webster’s dictionary and The Federalist.

 

[Woneone]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This is art. <a href="https://t.co/Ptk0KZsrZn">pic.twitter.com/Ptk0KZsrZn</a></p>— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) <a href="https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1249333861395267586?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 12, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

They have since, in what may be record time, already edited the tweet.

 

[Irishize]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">This is art. <a href="https://t.co/Ptk0KZsrZn">pic.twitter.com/Ptk0KZsrZn</a></p>— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) <a href="https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1249333861395267586?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 12, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

They have since, in what may be record time, already edited the tweet.

I would type “unbelievable” but I’d be lying

 

[Whiskeyjack]

 

[ab2cmiller]

Is that Pelosi listed as "perfect balance" LOL

 

[NorthDakota]

Is that Pelosi listed as "perfect balance" LOL

Lmao yes it's hilarious. Poor Nance.

 

[Old Man Mike]

Bernie has announced support for Joe earlier than I thought that he would. (I picked Biden as the nominee in our poll months ago because I just hoped for it against my intuition that his party would entirely screw up the possibility of "electability" again with irrational romanticism.) Somehow they must have decided that they actually didn't want to simply concede the election to the current elected individual. (I am an independent because of my environmental knowledge and philosophy, but I admit that this means usually picking a Democrat --- picking a "Green" is, in this society, a waste of one's vote.)

Now at least there is some real chance for a true battle. Obama may have had some behind the scenes role in this early concession (I have no idea) but it would seem to signal an earlier than suspected build-up of the Blue war machine state-by-state and media format-by-media format. It will be painfully interesting to watch the White-Red Rural Power vs the Mixed-Blue Urban Power hate against each other for State dominance, and meanwhile widening the American Rift which barely touches the Country together as a nation.

Oddly, this coronavirus thing MIGHT just soften the hating of "others" enough that just being on the other side of issues isn't enough to wish evil on one another. We, for all it hurts in all its ways, are sort of "in this together" vs the virus. Hopefully some of that will stick.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

 

[ACamp1900]

Articulated more perfectly why I am a man without a country better than any Cantor or Hanson work ever could,...

 

[Irishize]

https://twitter.com/battlecat847/status/1250790816286736384

 

[Irish YJ]

https://twitter.com/battlecat847/status/1250790816286736384

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The fact it’s Cillizza is just perfection. <a href="https://t.co/RfvLDt3QA1">pic.twitter.com/RfvLDt3QA1</a></p>— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) <a href="https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1250788354087510018?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 16, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Irishize]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The fact it’s Cillizza is just perfection. <a href="https://t.co/RfvLDt3QA1">pic.twitter.com/RfvLDt3QA1</a></p>— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) <a href="https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1250788354087510018?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 16, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Thank you. Is there a way to post photos via iPad? I’m on another message board as well and run into similar problems.

 

[Irish YJ]

Thank you. Is there a way to post photos via iPad? I’m on another message board as well and run into similar problems.

If you're trying to post a tweet...

In Twitter, and on the specific tweet, use the upper right drop down, and select embed tweet. Then click on copy code. Then come over to IE and simply past into the reply box and post.

If you're trying to post a pic...

In whatever browser you're using, you need to make sure you have the URL to the image, not the URL to the page that the image is embedded on. If you use google, you can right click on an image and chose open image in new tab. Then copy that url. When you come back to IE, click on the little pic image above the reply box. A dialog box will open, and paste your image URL in there.

 

[Bluto]

Bluto, you may be interested in this meme:

That’s a good one.

 

[Bluto]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Just don’t think we can ever define conservatism as “common good” because conservatism is about liberty and freedom of the individual. It is the support of the individual against the collective common good.</p>— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) <a href="https://twitter.com/EWErickson/status/1245137069191639041?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 31, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

"Conservatism", ladies and gentlemen.

Summarizes my core gripe with “conservatism”.

A good history of how things got to where they are is Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan.

 

[Bluto]

This is funny.

Mexico however, should be on the "new axis" side in my opinion or under a third category of Narco State. Who would that be in Harry Potter lore?

 

[Whiskeyjack]

JD Vance just published an article in The American Mind titled "End the Globalization Gravy Train":

In the present crisis, we find ourselves locked in an interminable debate about whether to “reopen” the economy. To put my cards on the table, I’ve found many of the orders issued by governments—allowing Michigan Home Depots to remain open while preventing them from selling garden supplies, harassing people for reading books in public parks—pretty dumb.

Yet evidence grows that short-term “lockdown” orders have far less effect than we imagine. Restaurants and movie theaters saw a collapse in customers well before any shelter-in-place orders. Data from Safe Graph, a company that tracks foot traffic using mobile phone data, reveals that millions of people had changed their daily routines before they were told to. Sweden is the case study that anti-lockdown advocates point to as a model. But its economy will tank in 2020, its unemployment rate is among the highest in Europe, and every indicator that exists suggests the Swedes have radically altered their daily lives.

Laissez-faire? Au contraire.

The point is not that government shelter-in-place orders are always perfect. Many are more annoying or economically destructive than they need to be. The point is that much of the economic damage predates the lockdowns, and reveals how fragile our economic life is in the face of pandemic. While we debate lockdowns, we spend precious time and political capital focused on something limited in both damage and duration. In this way, the lockdown debate is a bit like every debate we’ve had in this country for decades: an argument about a short-term policy that is far less important than our long-term decadence.

What the Virus Reveals

The Chinese state has unleashed a plague that, if we’re lucky, will merely be the worst in a decade rather than the worst in a generation. The CCP has lied and manipulated international institutions in a way that ensures the deaths of thousands of additional Americans.

The virus has revealed an American economy built on consumption, reliant for production on regimes either indifferent or actively hostile to our national interest. Production, where it still exists in our country, clusters in megacities, where “knowledge economy” workers live uptown from the low-wage servants (disproportionately immigrants) who clean their laundry, care for their children, and serve their food.

Perhaps we shouldn’t build our cities like that. Perhaps we should make things in America. And if not all things, then at least enough so that the next time China unleashes a plague, it can’t threaten us with a loss of medicines and protective equipment.

These are more important debates than whether we should end our lockdowns. Our economy is based on consumption, debt, financialization, and sloth. There is no end to the lockdown that returns our country to health or prosperity if it ignores these facts. The minute before COVID-19 hit, our stock market was at an all-time high, yet our middle class had only seen its net assets grow by 4 percent in over a decade. We have shut down health care facilities—even those far from overwhelmed by COVID-19—to preserve face masks and rubber gloves, because we don’t make enough in our own country for a time of crisis. Can we honestly say the most important question in our public life is whether we should be allowed to eat at restaurants that many would avoid anyways?

But debate the lockdowns we will, because they are more pressing to the people who fund our political distractions. And what’s more important to them than ending the lockdowns is not ending the globalization gravy train.

Peter Thiel recently observed that one of the best barometers of globalization is the share of corporate sector profits going to the financial sector. When you have an economy built on borrowing money from China and then buying the stuff it makes, you need a robust financial sector. Getting all that money from the U.S. to China, and then there and back again, takes, well, money. And for two decades, while America has consumed much and made little, there has been no better industry than moving fake currency from one location to another. Even if you zoom out from the finance industry, it is hard to find an American tycoon who hasn’t benefitted, directly or indirectly, from the rise of Beijing.

And if you look at the boards of most of our big conservative institutions, you’ll find many of those people. Increasingly, they talk a big game about China. They’ll express concern for the Uighurs, who are undoubtedly an oppressed people. They may even encourage a satellite military conflict in the years to come, because it won’t be their children loading the magazines or firing the rifles.

But there will be precious few resources for those designing the policies to shift a substantial share of our manufacturing capacity back to the United States. There will be limited campaign dollars for politicians who advocate those policies. It is one thing to offer platitudes for the Uighurs, and I suspect we’ll hear many of them in the years to come. It is another thing entirely to tell Apple’s leadership that they can’t flog them half to death for failing to meet production deadlines, or to tell the S&P’s shareholders that they will no longer benefit from the labor arbitrage of China’s slave camps. It is one thing to whine at NBA owners and superstars for bending the knee to the Chinese Communist Party and another to make them pay for doing so.

Yet to make the real change would require that we come to grips with the fact that so much of Conservatism, Inc. depends on the status quo.

The Conservative Donor Problem

In 2015, I joined a small gathering of conservative writers and academics. The group—dubbed the “reformicons” by national media—advocated a more working-class friendly set of policies for the GOP.

In hindsight, the group contained all kinds of ideological fissures that would prevent it from exercising greater influence on national politics—most notably on immigration, with hardliners and doves about equally represented. Though intellectually enriching, it was also a bit awkward: I had, just weeks earlier, been invited to join Jeb Bush’s then-promising presidential campaign on one day, and then uninvited the very next. The problem? I had written in 2012 that an obsession with supply-side tax cuts was equal measures politically stupid and morally unjust, and someone on the campaign had uncovered my transgression.

There are many moments from the recent past that I reflect on in the age of Trump, but perhaps none has proved as prescient as a remark made by one of the leaders of this nascent movement. “Our project,” he said, “is comparable to the DLC”—Bill Clinton’s centrist Democratic Leadership Committee. “But it has a crucial difference. Bill Clinton was attempting to move his party closer to its donors. We mean to move ours further away.”

The specter of “the donors” hangs over many private conversations among conservative intellectuals these days. The donors who provide an overwhelming share of the capital to conservative campaigns and institutions have quite literally gotten rich off of the “Washington consensus” of neoliberalism and globalization. Accordingly, there are things you’re not allowed to say—about tax rates, the social value of financial engineering, and the size of government, especially—and things you must say—also about tax rates, the social value of financial engineering, and the size of government. Any departures from orthodoxy must be qualified—“this doesn’t mean we’re for big government”—if the check writers might see or hear.

In my experience, most people are aware of this pressure, even if they agree entirely with the priorities of Conservatism, Inc. Recently, after I publicly criticized donor influence on the conservative movement, one young conservative journalist told me privately that he’d like to join in, but “brutal self-awareness of my non-profit status prevents me.”

It has always been thus. Or at least, it has been thus for a very long time.

Much ink has been spilled on the post-war conservative intellectual movement. It has contained three broadly distinct groups: national security hawks, free market fans, and social conservatives. The non-cynical view of this movement is that these three groups shared a common enemy in the 1950s—the Soviet Union—and united in a conservative “fusionist” coalition to defeat it. The cynical view is that donors—motivated by genuine ideological fervor or self-interest—funded think tanks and YAF and a host of other organizations to push a market-obsessed version of conservatism.

An Incoherent Fusion

However this coalition formed, and however strategically necessary it might have been, its moral incoherence was obvious at the time. How could a vision of traditional virtue possibly map onto the hyper-individualism of people like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman?

Frank Meyer famously tried to square the circle, arguing, in effect, that virtue required a lack of constraint. A man who remains loyal to his wife out of legal pressure is not nearly so virtuous—perhaps not virtuous at all—as the man who remains loyal to his wife purely out of individual moral willpower.

Brent Bozell dismantled this argument years ago: we are concerned with people behaving well, and if cultural (and legal) pressures encourage them to do it, that’s just fine. Research by Jonathan Gruber has found that that state “blue laws”—laws that force businesses to close on Sunday—increase church attendance. Aside from spiritual benefits, Robert Putnam has chronicled how church attendance is actually a positive social good for many attendees.

While we might praise the meritorious worker who finds his way to church despite working a 12-hour shift on Sunday, the average traditionalist will (correctly) want to make a life of virtue easier, and not harder. So close the damn businesses on Sunday. Commercial freedom will suffer. Moral behavior will not, and our society will be much the better for it.

These sorts of tradeoffs—between the freedom of the commercial space and the values of traditionalists—are common, though we might not realize it because we so often defer to commerce.

Take another example: we have known for some time that members of unions are less likely to drink and more likely to maintain their familial commitments. We have also learned that these benefits appear independent of the (obviously important) wage benefits of union membership. Social capital, and the mediating institutions that cultivate it, really are useful. But in virtually every major campaign of recent decades, the donors have demanded the denouncement of unions and their pernicious commercial effects. And so denounce them we have.

The Right Was Wrong About China

There is perhaps no better example of the failure of this ideology than in the rise of China.

Almost certainly the most influential right-of-center thinker of the last fifty years was Milton Friedman, a brilliant monetary economist and quick-witted debater. Friedman’s ideas have influenced at least two generations of conservatives (including yours truly), but he missed a lot.

His view that commercial freedom would reduce “the area over which political power is exercised” motivated a lot of U.S. policymakers in their approach to China and has proven tremendously short-sighted. China is perhaps the most hypercapitalist regime in the world, but it has used its economic power to become even more politically authoritarian.

His views on trade similarly encouraged policy makers to ignore the costs of opening our markets to cheap consumer goods. “Can you think of a better deal,” Friedman wrote in 1970, to those then concerned about Japan, “than our getting fine textiles, shiny cars, and sophisticated T.V. sets for a bale of green printed paper?”

Well, a conservative in 2020 might reply to this nonsense that a better deal might include millions of men in the South and Midwest with jobs instead of pill bottles and iPhones. How about communities with more steady father figures than opioids?

Western Civilization was, in fact, built by figures—one in particular whose resurrection we just celebrated—who recognized that material consumption, while necessary and important, was hardly the only good worth pursuing.

Ignored Ideas

The tragedy is not that such responses didn’t exist in prior decades, but that they were ignored.

Recently, I observed on Twitter that the postwar conservative movement was dominated by donors who pushed an individualist obsession. Richard Reinsch got mad, and pointed to a number of thinkers who took a different tack: Chambers, Strauss, and—I’d add—Kristol, among others. Yes, these people existed, and yes their ideas were often interesting.

But a few days ago I decided to peruse the curriculum and book recommendations of well-known organizations that spread the gospel among our youth. And while I never came across Chambers or Kirk, I did find The Income Tax: Root of All Evil and Liberty and the Great Libertarians.

The question is not whether there are conservative ideas worth hearing (there are). The question is if a conservative idea falls in the woods, but there isn’t a libertarian dollar to fund it, does it even make a sound?

The recent history of the conservative movement almost answers this question. Virtually every conservative think tanker not only failed to support Donald Trump for president, but failed to even question the reaction against globalization his nomination and election personified.

Most of the interesting ideas on the Right—from Patrick Deneen’s critique of liberalism to Peter Thiel’s long efforts against globalization—unsurprisingly come from thinkers not subject to the financial pressures of Conservatism, Inc.

Though it’s still early, an anti-globalization agenda has began to take shape. We should tax the labor arbitrage so many “U.S. firms” depend on, while subsidizing—as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has proposed—firms to move some of their manufacturing capacity back to the United States.

Meanwhile, we can take direct aim at the institutions that stand at the nexus of elite credentialism and globalism: our prestigious universities. We’ve learned recently how financially dependent Ivy League universities are on donations from overseas oligarchs, and that they’ve apparently hidden that dependence from our own Department of Education. Penalize those donations and the endowments that have grown in their midst, and aggressively investigate and prosecute university professors—and their Chinese national graduate students—who conspire to steal our intellectual property.

These policies will form part of a broader pro-worker agenda on the American Right. But that agenda will struggle to be realized until at least some of the donor class supports it.

Knives Out

We should concern ourselves not with the failure of institutions past, but with the capacity of institutions present.

We are in the midst of our most important crisis in decades. The closest near-term competitor was 9/11. Our response then to those terrorist attacks was to borrow, cut taxes, buy stuff—”go shopping” as our president at the time advised—and blow shit up.

It is easy to think of those decisions as historically contingent—the mistakes of one man or group of them. But they are the necessary consequences of an institutional conservative movement that advised consumption as the solution to all our woes.

The problem with our donor base is not the commercial obsession of yesterday’s libertarians, but the complete lack of conservative antibodies in the modern body politic. In that body politic, everything is a battle between statists and limited-government conservatives.

When Oren Cass announced a new conservative organization (American Compass) to advocate what is, essentially, a neo-Hamiltonian approach to economics, Senator Pat Toomey took to the citadel of Conservatism, Inc.—the Heritage Foundation—to describe it as a “dagger thrust into the heart” of the neoliberal consensus that has dominated the American Right.

Let’s thrust more daggers into that heart. Otherwise, we may wake up in ten years to the realization that we wasted the political moment of COVID-19 because we were obsessed with distractions: reopening a broken economy and whining at the Chinese instead of reforming a system in a way that would do damage to Chinese leadership—and the American elites who profit from them.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Social democracy and libertarian conservatism simply reproduce each other endlessly, what is needed is a small, strong state that acts to ensure the just distribution of resources throughout society.</p>— Sebastian Milbank &#55358;&#56640; (@JSMilbank) <a href="https://twitter.com/JSMilbank/status/1255101733350658048?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 28, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Circa]

The way GWB can say these things and than Joe Scarborough (with his sidekick on MSNBC as a spy for a father in Mika).... has tweeted them shows me just how ridiculous and ignorant our political system is.

It's more than worrisome, It's just Fraud at the highest level.
Do we all really look this dumb?
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">FT: George W Bush is Africa’s favourite US President for pushing an AIDS in Africa initiative that has saved 13 million lives. <a href="https://t.co/Fi14iGuQrO">https://t.co/Fi14iGuQrO</a></p>— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeNBC/status/1256759828745256963?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 3, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[drayer54]

The way GWB can say these things and than Joe Scarborough (with his sidekick on MSNBC as a spy for a father in Mika).... has tweeted them shows me just how ridiculous and ignorant our political system is.

It's more than worrisome, It's just Fraud at the highest level.
Do we all really look this dumb?
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">FT: George W Bush is Africa’s favourite US President for pushing an AIDS in Africa initiative that has saved 13 million lives. <a href="https://t.co/Fi14iGuQrO">https://t.co/Fi14iGuQrO</a></p>— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeNBC/status/1256759828745256963?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 3, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="und" dir="ltr"><a href="https://t.co/q60UMdXdpX">pic.twitter.com/q60UMdXdpX</a></p>— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) <a href="https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1256774362394320897?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 3, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Irishize]

 

[BleedBlueGold]

Ross Douthat was recently on Ben Shapiro's Sunday Special podcast. I enjoyed the conversation they had. It's worth a listen.

We'll see what kind of traction this new wave Common Good Conservatism via Marco Rubio, American Compass, etc can gain on the direction of the Republican Party...or perhaps the creation of a new party. I wouldn't mind experiencing a sit-down interview with those from this camp and those from the American Solidarity Party. It seems there can be a lot of common ground.

 

[ab2cmiller]

Disappointed

 

[drayer54]

Disappointed

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">After much reflection, I’ve concluded that circumstances don’t lend themselves to my success as a candidate for president this year, and therefore I will not be a candidate.</p>— Justin Amash (@justinamash) <a href="https://twitter.com/justinamash/status/1261714484479041537?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 16, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Why? He wouldn’t win.