https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2019/11/12/molly-jong-fast-declares-bret-kavanaugh-a-legendary-sexist/

From an AEI fellow. You ever wonder how much Republican failure theatre is a consequence of employing a brain trust which actually favors the other side?

https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2019/11/12/impeaching-trump-via-secret-ballot-may-democrats-next-plan/

We are only talking about a dozen people. However, those dozen have a high profile in the media. Their function is to be fodder for their employers’ gamesmanship and to provide emotional validation for those employers and for liberals in the audience. They have little constituency among starboard voters. The owners of The Weekly Standard pulled the plug on it because they were running out of readers. There are some admirers of Trump in broadcast media, but they’re all on Fox and that’s not a universal disposition at Fox.

(The modal viewpoint at NR is take-it-case-by-case. Victor Davis Hanson is generally pro-Trump; David French and Jonah Goldberg are anti-Trump. The situation is much the same at Hot Air).

We’re not just talking about a dozen people. Did you miss the “Against Trump” issue of National Review? How about the Wiki page of “Republicans who opposed the 2016 election of Donald Trump?” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Republicans_who_opposed_the_2016_Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign

Now, some of those on that Wiki page have…shall we say “adjusted” their views to accommodate a Trump Administration. But again, the issue isn’t really numbers and the issue isn’t that anyone was opposed to Donald Trump in 2016. The issue is the people who haven’t changed their view of Trump, despite his being the most successfully conservative President since Ronald Reagan and despite the unprecedented attacks waged against him by Democrats and the media.

Donald Trump is pretty popular with the overwhelming majority of Republicans and conservatives. If you criticize him, you’re going to get some pushback. The more arrogant and condescending that criticism and the more you parrot liberal lies and slanders against Donald Trump and his supporters, the more vociferous that pushback will be.

What is hard to understand about that? What is different about that than with any previous political leader?

Mike

Of course there are people who use the term for anyone who ever criticizes Trump. For example, there are some people who comment on other blogs and make sure to diss me as a NeverTrumper any time I am mentioned, even at this point.

Obviously I’m not a NeverTrumper. So either they stopped reading me long long ago and are holding a grudge, or they are over-generalizing and using the term for anyone who has ever criticized Trump. But I don’t think they represent a very large portion of the Trump supporters, although they may represent a vocal and active portion online.

However, I don’t think that is what most people are talking about. If we were only talking about a dozen people, the linked article would not be generalizing so much about a generation of heroes he now dislikes, he would specify, not only as examples, but in signaling limitations. Commenters here and elsewhere on conservative sites would not be using the term so frequently, and they would specify. They would not so easily resort to screaming in all-caps.

Are there a lot of people unthinkingly and angrily overusing the term? I don’t know, we cannot easily measure such things. However, I am certain there are a lot of them in comment sections on conservative sites who work themselves into a lather daily, because I see them right there in front of me. Perhaps they are the few. There is some reason to think there are more than that.

Mr. Rosenzweig, take some counsel from Pat Buchanan: “When the mob is coming to get the old man, you don’t having him sit down and write a list of his ‘mistakes’. You start firing from the upper floors”

The self-centered attitudinizing of these people doesn’t make them scum. It makes them tools, and worthy of being ignored.

Disagree. French has been busily promoting con jobs like the Russian collusion hoax, even as Andrew McCarthy dismantles his arguments in an adjacent column.

He didn’t tell you to vote for Hillary. He told you to cast a ballot for a decoy named Evan McMullin.

French writes an article for The Atlantic on gross and rude messages he and his wife received in regard to their adoption of an Ethiopian orphan. My regrets about that, but I’m not impressed with his inclination to extend culpability in such matters to an amorphous class of people who had nothing to do with sending him these messages (but with whom he is irritated at this time).

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/kentuckys_real_lesson_for_conservatives.html

November 7, 2019
Kentucky’s Real Lesson for Conservatives
By Sally Zelikovsky
The lesson Republicans and conservatives should take from the Kentucky gubernatorial race is not whether Trump showing up is a net positive or negative or whether the GOP put enough money or effort into the race or whether Bevin should have been the candidate in the first place or whether he was likable. The true lesson lies in the overwhelming success of Kentucky’s down-ballot election results for attorney general, agriculture commissioner, auditor, secretary of state, and treasurer, where Republican candidates demolished Democrat candidates
…
If Bevin is certified the loser, it will come down to the fact that tens or hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians, who had no problem voting for other Republicans this year and Bevin four years ago, decided to stay home or cast their votes for Democrat Andy Beshear or the Libertarian candidate, John Hicks …

They, not Matt Bevin, are the Kentuckians to blame for the election of Andy Beshear. He hasn’t changed. He is the same rough-around-the-edges, somewhat obnoxious carpetbagger he was when he ran four years ago and remained during his tenure as governor of Kentucky and when he was put on the ballot to be re-elected. He made enemies trying to fix the things he was elected to fix — things Republicans and conservatives find important like budgets and unfunded liabilities. Like him or not, he was their guy. As long as he was on the ballot and didn’t commit a crime or reveal himself to be a RINO, they owed him their vote. They owed it to the rest of the Republicans and conservatives in Kentucky. They owed it to the rest of us in the country.