Columnist.
What are political conventions for? If you've ever been to one, you might think the purpose is for attendees to schmooze, drink and drink some more. That holds true for both the delegates and the journalists who usually outnumber them by at least 3-to-1. But that's not actually why political conventions exist. They're sort of like volunteer fire departments that almost never get a call. It's not that the firefighters don't want to put out fires, but until they're needed, they're pretty happy to play cards, watch movies and eat chili. They understand that when the call actually comes, the game ends, the TV goes off and the boots go on.
Much has been written about the ignorance, impracticality and offensiveness of many of the Republican front-runners' policy proposals. Not nearly enough has been written about the ignorance, impracticality and offensiveness of the policy proposals emanating from the Democratic side, some of which, unlike Donald Trump's Mexican-financed wall and Muslim ban, could actually become law. Consider the race to hike the minimum wage. Bernie Sanders wants it to get to $15 as soon as possible. Hillary Clinton wants to get there almost as soon as possible.
"Maybe the makers of 'The Big Bang Theory' don't watch 'Meet the Press.'"
Maybe the makers of "The Big Bang Theory" don't watch "Meet the Press." Hillary Clinton got into a bit of trouble earlier this month when she told "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd that "the unborn person doesn't have constitutional rights." Clinton was merely noting that some restrictions on abortions are permitted under the law. But the real kerfuffle was over the idea that a person can exist in America without any rights — or that fetuses are people at all. The International Planned Parenthood Federation cautions activists to avoid the "p" word.
I wouldn't say that the GOP is falling in love with Ted Cruz, but maybe it's falling in like. In arguably the most improbable political season of our lifetimes, this fact has to rank high on the list of things no one could have seen coming. If they gave out report cards for first-term senators, Cruz would get an "F" in the "plays well with others" category. Party leaders believed that his 2013 gambit to shut down the government over Obamacare was a disaster for everyone but Cruz, and they have harbored a not-so-secret disdain for him since.
For years, supporters of free trade have been trying to reach a bipartisan consensus on the issue. They've finally succeeded. Free trade is now unpopular in both parties. Perhaps because I am a conservative, I can at least understand where most conservatives are coming from in their opposition to free trade. Overt displays of nationalism and patriotism (which are not the same thing, by the way) are not merely tolerated on the right, they're often celebrated. Conservative intellectuals openly extol American exceptionalism while liberal intellectuals tend to deride the notion. Virtually no Republican politician agonizes over wearing a U.S. flag pin.
There was an old "Saturday Night Live" fake movie trailer narrated by horror movie veteran Christopher Lee. John Belushi played a houseguest who couldn't take a hint from a couple that just wanted to go to bed. The husband tells Belushi, "Look, I don't want to be rude, but my wife is VERY tired!" Belushi responds by picking up the TV Guide and saying dismissively, "Yeah. ... Hey, there's a good movie on tonight! I think I'll call up some friends and watch it over here!"
With apologies to Buffalo Springfield, there's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear. Here's Bill Clinton in Spokane, Washington, making the pitch for his wife last week: "But if you believe we can all rise together, if you believe we've finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us and the seven years before that ..." The awful legacy of the last eight years? That'd be a strange thing for any Democrat to say, but it's particularly odd given that Hillary Clinton has made it abundantly clear that she's running for a third Barack Obama term.
How can Donald Trump be stopped? For months, conservatives have debated what Trump represents and whether they can or should support him. While millions of voters still have time to make their choice (and still need to be informed about his baleful record), among those pundits, politicians, activists, donors and strategists who've been hashing this out for a seeming eternity, that argument is over. Trump is either someone you can live with — or celebrate — as the standard-bearer of your cause and your party, or he isn't.
"Ronald Reagan is dead, and he's not coming back." "I wish more conservatives could come to grips with this relatively simple fact. We are now in something like the fifth round of the pin-the-tail-on-the-next-Reagan game and it's getting old. Catering to the conservative base, the GOP presidential candidates keep trying to put on the Reagan mantle the way Cinderella's ugly stepsisters tried to cram their dogs into her glass slipper. Not gonna happen."
Nominating Donald Trump will wreck the Republican Party as we know it. Not nominating Trump will wreck the Republican Party as we know it. The sooner everyone recognizes this fact, the better. Denial has been Trump's greatest ally. Republicans and commentators didn't believe he would run. They didn't believe he could be an attractive candidate to rational people, no matter how angry with "the establishment" voters said they were. They — which includes me — were wrong.
Given the rancor and turmoil inside the GOP these days, even a bitter, partisan, hammer-and-tongs battle to the death over a Supreme Court justice seems almost quaint by comparison. The Republican-controlled Senate, which is empowered by the Constitution to offer both advice and consent to the president's judicial nominees, has offered the following advice: Not now and not you. Antonin Scalia's death left a court vacancy larger than a mere one-ninth of the voters on the bench. Replacing Scalia with a reliably liberal justice would upend the court's ideological balance, to an unacceptable degree for the GOP.
For the last few days the burning question among pundits has been: "How much blame does Donald Trump deserve for the violence at his rallies?" It's a fair question, and the obvious answer is: a lot. On Sunday, the demagogue paid his usual lip service to social norms, rejecting "violence in any shape." He then proceeded to say — again — that he's willing to pay the legal fees of those who commit violence on his behalf. He routinely waxes nostalgic for the good old days when troublemakers were "carried out on stretchers." That said, there was a good deal of Kabuki to the recent chaos in Chicago.
The so-called Republican establishment is coming to the painful realization that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz may be its only hope to block Donald Trump from winning the nomination and Hillary Clinton from winning the White House. It's not assured, of course. There are as many theories on how to emerge from this year's Republican convention with an acceptable nominee as there are interpretations of what was going on in the TV show "Lost." But the most plausible path to a Trump-free, Republican-controlled White House is consolidation around Cruz. It's a difficult conclusion for many people, and some may not get there until Sen. Marco Rubio loses the primary in his home state of Florida. And some may never accept Cruz, opting to bend the knee to Trump instead.
What a short, strange trip it's been for Donald Trump's conservative supporters. Ever since the Goldwaterite takeover of the GOP, the party has tried to convert voters to conservatism. This orientation has sometimes led it to follow a "better to be right and lose" axiom — hence Goldwater's disastrous defeat in 1964. Now we seem to have tipped in the other direction, thinking it's "better to be wrong and win." George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was seen as a nod in this direction, and a great many conservatives — myself included — were critical of his efforts to triangulate against traditional limited-government conservatism.
When losing to the star of a reality TV show, is it really so crazy to resort to reality-show tactics to defeat him? I'm not referring to Marco Rubio's decision to fight fire with fire with Donald Trump and return insult for insult. I, for one, thought it was wholly appropriate for Rubio to give the schoolyard bully a taste of his own medicine. The evidence shows that Rubio's attacks, while tardy, paid off. Voters not already enraptured with Trump are open to persuasion, and late deciders broke disproportionately for Rubio on Super Tuesday in most races.
Is Joe Scarborough having his Colonel Nicholson moment? That's what I wondered Monday morning as I watched the host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" insist that Donald Trump's inability and unwillingness to simply and plainly denounce the Ku Klux Klan in a Sunday CNN interview was "disqualifying." For those who might not have seen "The Bridge on the River Kwai," it's partly the story of British Lt. Col. Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness. Nicholson, a prisoner of war held by the Japanese, convinces himself that he and his men should help his captors build a strategically invaluable bridge over the Kwai River. Nicholson thinks that if he shows the Japanese what good British discipline is all about, he will win some kind of moral victory. Of course, if they finish the railway bridge, the Japanese military will win an actual victory.
I'm not sure I'd ever heard of Jimmy Savile prior to revelations that he was a monster. A hugely popular DJ and TV personality in the United Kingdom for decades, Savile lived a double life as a child molester and rapist. He abused older victims as well. His victims, many of whom were patients in hospitals, ranged from 5 to 75 years old. As a major fundraiser for hospitals, he had free rein to prey on boys and girls. He assaulted one 10-year-old boy with a broken arm while he was waiting on a gurney for an X-ray. He assaulted teenagers recovering from surgery in bed.
As things stand, Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee. That's awful news, and depressing to contemplate. But terrible possibilities don't become less terrible if we refuse to contemplate them. Rather, they become more likely. The GOP's collective desire to look away has been a problem for months. Nearly everyone, including yours truly, believed that Trump's candidacy would exhaust itself on its own terms. There are many reasons why that hasn't happened. Chief among them: Too many people thought it was someone else's job to bell the Trumpian cat. No better evidence for this can be found than the fact that of the $215 million spent by super PACs so far this cycle, only 4 percent was spent attacking Trump, according to the Washington Post.
We get it already. The Iraq war was a mistake. Indeed, on this point pretty much everyone agrees. Jeb Bush, the brother of the president who launched the war, has said so. So has Hillary Clinton, the only presidential candidate in either party to have actually voted to invade Iraq (though she refused to admit her vote was a mistake until fairly recently). The only disagreements on the Republican side are about the degree and nature of the mistake. Catch Donald Trump in a glandular moment and he'll say that George W. Bush knowingly sent thousands of Americans to their deaths based on a lie. Ask Trump when he's in a more mature mood — or when he gets bad press for his slanders — and he'll say he doesn't know whether it was a lie.
