I think there is something missing from leftists. Behaving the way they behave now while “forgetting” about the last three times a Republican has won the presidency destroys their creditibility and the credibility of the institutions that we all need (and that progressives especially need to achieve their objectives.)

Maybe they’ve grown so used to the media acting as the propaganda arm of the Democratic party that they are beginning to believe their own BS. How can any minimally informed person not understand that Stacey Abrahms looks like a fool when she criticizes Trump for denying election results?

I think I can answer that question. For some, it is a case of 2+2=5; that is, believing what the Party says. Republicans questioning election results means Republicans are bad, and Democrats questioning election results means it’s okay to do so because Democrats are good. But for a lot of Democrats it’s not that. For example, I can almost guarantee that the majority of my Democrat-voting friends either do not even know who Stacey Abrams is (or if they know now, they didn’t know who she was the first time she ran for governor), or do not know what she claimed about the election of 2018. It’s a detail that isn’t on their radar screens.

But if they do happen to know those details, they would claim it’s a different order of denial. It’s not a denial resting on a claim of over-inclusion – in other words, Abrams didn’t claim that too many “people” voted fraudulently, including dead people or non-existent people. That’s the sort of claim Republicans make. Instead, her denial rested on a claim of under-inclusion – that is, exclusion. And that exclusion was in turn based on a claim of systemic racism in the voting system.

So to them, the claims would not be equivalent. The principle on their banner is not that every challenge of voting results is bad. The principle is that there are noble challenges (which are challenges that claim exclusion and particularly racial exclusion) and there are base challenges (challenges that claim cheating and over-inclusion, particularly cheating on the part of people of color in big cities such as Atlanta or Philadelphia and therefore are racist challenges).

As for the claims about the presidential vote in 2016, that was a claim by Democrats that rested on Russian influence, which in turn rested on an uncharacteristic demonization of Russia, a foreign country that until that moment had elicited little anger from Democrats. After all, as Obama said, the 80s had called and wanted their foreign policy back. Nevertheless, for those who already hated Trump – which meant most Democrats – it was a convenient fiction that allowed them to call him an illegitimate president and to mount an instant Resistance.

And what was the difference between that Resistance and the January 6th supposed insurrection? I think most people on the right give insufficient emphasis to the very real although erroneous belief among Democrats that January 6th was an armed, bloody, lethal, white-supremacist insurrection that is ongoing and must be fought with every tool fair or foul. For very many Democrats, the riots in 2017 at the Trump inauguration are either quite literally forgotten, or are considered mere demonstrations of the ordinary sort. The post-Floyd riots in 2020 are either quite literally forgotten or remembered as “mostly peaceful,” and at any rate did not involve an “armed insurrection invading the Capitol” in order to stop a “duly elected” president from taking office. That last description of January 6th is the one they believe is the truth, and there is no exact parallel in the riots that came at the hands of the left.

The perception of January 6th that way is vital to the claims the left is now making. That’s why the coverage right from the start was so unified and so over-the-top: it was a lethal insurrection. And that is very widely believed to this day. If January 6th was in fact engineered by the FBI, aided by the failure to have enough security that day, as some on the right have asserted and that may be true, it was a brilliant and coordinated move that served its purpose quite well.

The post Election denial, left and right appeared first on The New Neo.

Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated. And that’s where MAGA Republicans are today.

But there is no indication that so-called “MAGA-Republicans” believe that all elections they lose are the result of cheating. In the 2020 presidential election, however, there was reason to believe it based on the loosening of the rules for voting and the way some of the votes in key states came in. But underlying all of that was the unverifiable nature of mail-in voting, which became very common in 2020 with the excuse of COVID, and enabled possible fraud that would be undetectable, thus undermining general trust in elections.

Democrats will never admit that – unless it’s they who lose the election.

Actually, there’s plenty of reason to say that it has been the Democrats who – both in 2000 (which was a bona fide photo finish election) and in 2016 – cannot accept defeat and must charge cheating. To refresh your memory:

Joe Biden would also dump Kamala Harris as his VP. She said in 2020 that it was "absolutely right" that Trump is "an illegitimate President who didn’t really win" in 2016. pic.twitter.com/3lCFkvNi4T

— Matt Wolking (@MattWolking) September 1, 2022

I had forgotten this resolution that was introduced in the Missouri House, if I ever even knew about it in the first place. It’s got some good reminders in it, as well:

WHEREAS, House Speaker NancyPelosi indicated that the 2016 election for President of the United States was illegitimate by stating, “Our election was hijacked. There is no question” in her Twitter comments to the nation;

WHEREAS, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indicated on numerous occasions that President Donald J. Trump and members of his family likely colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election; and

WHEREAS, in January 2017, Senator Tim Kaine appeared on MCNBC’s “Morning Joe” where he stated, “What we’ve got to do is fight in Congress, fight in the courts, fight in the streets, fight online, fight at the ballot box, and now there’s the momentum to be able to do this”;…

WHEREAS, on November 17, 2018, Senator Richard Blumenthal told MSNBC host Chris Hayes “the evidence is pretty clear that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians”; and

WHEREAS, on January 14, 2020, Nancy Pelosi spread further debunked conspiracy theories and discord by tweeting: “American elections should be decided by the American people, not by the Russian Government. Retweet if you agree”; and…

WHEREAS, in August 2020, Representative Ayanna Pressley stated, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that, “you know, there needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as there’s unrest in our lives”; and…

WHEREAS, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has referred to the Senate as a “kangaroo court” whose impeachment votes are illegitimate; and

WHEREAS, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has issued threats against individual justices of the Supreme Court of the United States in such a virulent manner…

WHEREAS, these actions are clear and convincing evidence of a long-term pattern of disrespect for the rule of law and disdain for the democratic process; and

WHEREAS, these statements by Democrats in Congress have been unchecked by Democrat leadership, allowing conspiracy theories of Russian interference, Russian collusion, and an “illegitimate” presidential election to grow, leading to a probe into these debunked theories that cost taxpayers millions of dollars…

Let’s focus on Biden himself:

During his first news conference since March, Biden refused to say the country’s upcoming elections would be free and fair or that the results would be legitimate, unless Democrats’ voting reforms were passed.

“I just wanted to clarify: A moment ago, you were asked whether or not you believed that we would have free and fair elections in 2022 if some of these state legislatures reformed their voting protocols,” a reporter said. “You said that it depends. Do you … think that they would in any way be illegitimate?”

I’m not saying it’s going to be legit,” Biden responded. “The increase in the prospect of being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed.

He later denied that’s what he meant. Oh, and there was also this from Biden in May of 2019, shortly after he announced his candidacy for the 2020 race:

After a woman [during a visit by Biden to New Hampshire] claimed she had a “very severe case of what’s called Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and that Trump is an “illegitimate president in my mind,” Biden responded: “I absolutely agree.”

We also have this:

Vice President Kamala Harris’ newly appointed communications director Jamal Simmons insisted more than once that George W. Bush’s first presidential election victory was “illegitimate,” according to resurfaced statements and tweets.

While Simmons repeatedly noted that he behaved respectfully toward Bush, his insistence that the 2000 election was stolen pairs awkwardly with the Biden administration’s furious response to former President Donald Trump’s insistence that widespread voter fraud cost him a second term — a claim the White House and many top Democrats have labeled the “Big Lie.”

I could go on and on and on – but really, I could save myself the trouble, because this video provides a host of incontrovertible evidence:

Remember the “Resistance”? Not the people who during WWII opposed the Nazis, but the other – self-styled – “Resistance,” the enormous number of Democrats who declared loudly and often that Trump’s 2016 election was illegitimate, and many of whom went on to try to frame him with lies such as the Steele dossier. And yet Biden and other Democrats who denied and denied Trump’s 2016 election (some of them even denying Bush’s 2000 election) have the gall to accuse the “MAGA Republicans” of what they themselves have repeatedly done. And those same Democrats had even less evidence to go on – except, of course, for the evidence they themselves manufactured.

The post Those “election deniers” appeared first on The New Neo.

Whether that is true or not we’ll never know. Cashill also doesn’t answer the question of why, although he does write:

As the weeks counted down to the November 2020 election, he was the Achilles sulking in his tent. The Achilles of legend, however, refused finally to see his own men slaughtered and joined the battle. Bush never left the tent. In betraying Team GOP, Bush, in effect, betrayed Team USA. From reading Dovere, one gets the sense he did not much care. Bush had a new team now, Team World.

After the events of January 6, 2021, Bush joined his new teammates for an end zone dance. Dovere reports, “Clinton, Bush, and Obama released coordinated statements decrying what happened.” Coordinated? Had the three released coordinated statements decrying the summer of mayhem the left inflicted on America, one might forgive Bush his complicity here, but they did no such thing.

The last the reader sees of George W. in the Dovere book is at the 2021 Inauguration of Joe Biden, an event at which he seems much too comfortable. Reports Dovere, “Bush leaned in to make a joke to Obama, and they both started laughing.” It gets worse.

I think I know what motivated Bush, though. It has three elements. The first is that Bush isn’t a conservative; he’s always had some leanings towards what, for want of a better word, I’ll call internationalism. So he probably disliked Trump’s trade policies. The second is that Bush also was not much of a verbal puncher during his term or after; he remained quite silent during Obama’s term, for example. I believe he’s old school enough to detest Trump’s general style and his verbal pugnaciousness in particular. That combativeness had turned personal in the 2016 campaign (and even earlier), when Trump not only attacked Jeb Bush quite viciously, but attacked George W. in various ways that must have stung so badly that it made it impossible in Bush’s mind to ever bury the hatchet.

I wrote about the situation back in October of 2015, in a piece I did for the online version of the now-defunct Weekly Standard. Old links to the article don’t work, but I preserved it in my own records. It was titled “An Old Animus,” and here are some quotes from it:

It’s no secret that Donald Trump has contempt for Jeb Bush, some of it well-earned. And Trump’s recent remarks pointing out that “the World Trade Center came down” during George Bush’s “reign” have been rightly seen as a way to needle and flummox brother Jeb…

But this was hardly an isolated incident of attack on George W from Trump. In fact, it’s one of
the milder things that Trump has said about the 43rd president over the course of many years, beginning long before either Trump or Jeb Bush were presidential candidates. Trump may have changed his mind on some things, such as single payer health care. When asked his opinion of people, he sometimes speaks in generalities, often saying “I like him/her a lot.” But one topic on which he’s been the soul of consistency and specificity since at least 2007 (and perhaps earlier) has been his extremely low opinion of George W. Bush…

Trump’s criticism of Bush not only goes back many years, but it has often followed the leftist template rather than the pattern on the right. And although it’s Jeb he’s running against this go-round, the evidence is that there’s a rift between Trump and the Bush family that goes back to the 1980s, when George H. W. Bush the elder was president:

“Trump is open about his animosity toward [the Bushes]; he characterizes his relationship with former president Bill Clinton, for instance, as far closer. He lashed out at former president George W. Bush over the war in Iraq during his tenure. He turned on Bush’s father when he raised taxes during his term as president, despite pledging not to do so.”

The WaPo piece says that during their interview with Trump in August of 2015, “He found 33 ways to skewer the [Bush] family – about one put-down per minute.” One of those put-downs of George W. Bush was still another jibe far more typical of leftist taunts than of the right:

“He didn’t seem smart. I’d watch him in interviews and I’d look at people and ask, ‘Do you think he understands the question?’”

But the sharpest of Trump’s attacks on GW had occurred much earlier, in a series of interviews in 2007 and 2008, when neither Trump nor Jeb Bush was a candidate. For example, in a 2008 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Trump advocated Bush’s impeachment while adding how much he likes Nancy Pelosi:

“BLITZER: [What do you think of] Nancy Pelosi, the speaker?

TRUMP: Well, you know, when she first got in and was named speaker, I met her. And I’m very impressed by her. I think she’s a very impressive person. I like her a lot. But I was surprised that she didn’t do more in terms of Bush and going after Bush. It was almost – it just seemed like she was going to really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office, which, personally, I think would have been a wonderful thing.

BLITZER: Impeaching him?

TRUMP: Absolutely, for the war, for the war.”

In the same interview, Trump repeated the familiar “Bush lied about WMDs” mantra, and when Blitzer questioned whether he actually believed that, Trump repeated it:

“TRUMP:”Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying, by saying they had weapons of mass destruction, by saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.

BLITZER: Their argument is, they weren’t lying, that that was the intelligence that he was presented, and it was not as if he was just lying about it.

TRUMP: I don’t believe that.

BLITZER: You believe that it was a deliberate lie?

TRUMP: I don’t believe it. The fact is that he lied.”

Later in the interview, Trump said that Bush was “is probably the worst president in the history
of the United States.”

That’s an awful lot to swallow; Ted Cruz managed to get past a lot of insults from Trump (including some to Cruz’s family), but what Trump said about Bush was considerably worse.

For the sake of the republic, it would have been good if Bush could have done stopped being a NeverTrumper in 2020. But I doubt most people could do it under the same circumstances, and at any rate, certainly Bush couldn’t or wouldn’t.

I don’t really think it mattered, though. I don’t think a Trump endorsement from Bush would have changed the results. If fraud occurred, for example, it would not have changed that. And I doubt there are many people following the lead of George W. Bush anymore, and so I doubt his endorsement or lack thereof had a chance of making a difference with a significant number of voters.

The post Why George W. Bush didn’t support Trump in 2020 appeared first on The New Neo.

And since for the most part the Democrats control the voting in our biggest cities – not only because they have such large margins in those cities but because the entire apparatus of each city is set up by Democrats – if they want to skew things even further towards larger Democratic majorities through their rules about voting, or if they want to conveniently “find” more votes if they need them, or to allow vote “harvesting” and the like, they can do it fairly easily because of that control.

I wrote that passage in March of 2019, not long after a bill known as HR 1 or the “For the People Act” had been passed in the newly-elected Democrat House. In fact, that bill was one of the very first orders of business in that House. Here’s a description of its main provisions, and you can easily see that one of its goals is to federalize and expand the ability to commit voter fraud to every state in the Union – and to do this in the name of voting rights.

I plan to write a lengthier post on that, because the same basic bill is currently already under consideration in the new Congress. Now that the Senate is also held by Democrats (unlike in 2019, when the Republicans were in charge), due to the VP’s ability to break a tie, it will all really come down to whether or not the Democrats nuke the filibuster.

I plan to write more about the filibuster issue later, and more about that “voting reform” bill later, too. For this post, though, I want to emphasize that a great deal of what has happened was easily foreseeable because the goals of the Democrats, and even some of their methods, were readily apparent long ago. I did not foresee COVID, but once it came it’s no surprise that the Democrats were poised to take full advantage of it to push an already-formulated agenda regarding a change in the way America votes.

[NOTE: Not only that, but also in March of 2019 I discussed the Democrats’court-packing plans. These things were certainly not hidden, and if some people who voted for Biden or a Democrat in 2020 professes not to have known this, they are either woefully ignorant or lying. They should have known.]

[NOTE II: For those who say the GOP is no different than the Democrats, consider that in 2019 the Republicans in the Senate blocked that bill. It was by no means the only thing they blocked that the now-leftist Democrats were trying to do, either. The Democrats are determined to entrench changes that will make it impossible for the right to ever take power again. Splitting the right is also one of their goals, because they know that benefits the left.]

The post The Democrats’ plan wasn’t that hard to see even back in March of 2019 appeared first on The New Neo.

I don’t think the polls are necessarily wrong, either, although I just don’t know – and neither does anyone else. One can argue back and forth about it for a long, long time. There are points made about “shy Trump voters” and the like, but we don’t know the extent of that phenomenon. What we do know is that the polls are telling a bad story.

It’s even a frightening story. For a host of reasons, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are probably the two worst national candidates I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. They’re also tremendously unappealing, and their voters don’t even like them, for the most part. And yet at least half of Americans and maybe more are prepared to vote for them or have already done so.

And that’s because they hate Trump even more.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time now talking about why, because we’ve discussed it already so many times before. Let’s just say it’s a combination of the media, celebrities, the educational system, social media, and the naturally abrasive and rather unconventional personality of Donald Trump himself.

Let us not forget, either, that if the Democrats don’t win fair and square in the voting, I believe they are fully prepared to game the mail-in voting system which they insisted on setting up. That might include dead registrants, as well as this sort of thing.

I have thought for quite some time now that the continued drumming up of COVID panic even as the number of deaths and serious cases falls, is partly in order to expand the use of mail-in voting and therefore of fraud.

Ordinarily there’s a limit to how much fraud can be committed, but the sky’s the limit now in mail-in states. Report of people getting multiple ballots, and of people who no longer live at a certain address getting ballots there, seem rampant. The states that ordinarily have this method of automatically sending ballots to everyone on the voter rolls, whether requested or not (dead or alive) are: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah. Utah is the only one that’s Republican, and in the others I don’t think Trump has any kind of chance at all to win. Belatedly joining their ranks this year are California, New Jersey, Vermont, DC (not a state – yet) and Nevada. The first three are deep deep blue, but although in 2016 Nevada went to Hillary Clinton, it was only by a couple of points. So Nevada could be a state where this method of voting and the potential for fraud ends up mattering a great deal. And they all matter if the Democrats use the method to pump up the popular vote, so that even if Trump somehow manages to win they can complain as they did in 2016 that he lost the popular vote and the Electoral College has got to go.

Mailing unrequested ballots to all voters is the most dangerous method of voting in terms of potential fraud, but some other states have applications for a ballot mailed to all registered voters, who then may apply for a ballot to be sent to them. The issue is not just how the applications are sent, but also how the ballot requests and ballot submissions are authenticated (or whether there’s an effort to authenticate them at all), and when.

I know that things can change. I know that the polls favoring Biden might be wrong. But my level of anxiety is very high. I wish I could write something that wasn’t such a downer, but honestly I can’t.

I was thinking the other evening about Thomas Sowell. How many lucid and brilliant books has he written over the years? A great many; a remarkable achievement. How many columns has he written? Likewise. And yet, although he has indeed influenced a lot of people – including me – in the end, did he just have his finger in the dike all that time? And are the waters about to rush in? There are forces much stronger than logic, and there always have been.

One thing I tell myself is that, even if this election goes the way I’m dreading, it doesn’t necessarily mean the country won’t or can’t wake up in a few years. I think the Democrats will fix things so that they entrench their own power (new states, court packing, and the like) and a reversal might be difficult or impossible. But perhaps the backlash will be so strong it will overcome whatever they do.

Another thing I believe is that, even if Trump is somehow able to pull this one out and win four more years, the forces allied against him are formidable and they will be angrier than ever. Whoever wins, I don’t see this settling down. Not at all.

I remember back in the fall of 2012 before the election, I went to my book group – which, except for me, consists of women from left to liberal who are predictable Democratic voters. I wondered what they’d say about Romney, who seemed to me to be the sort of person they wouldn’t be able to work up much of a head of steam against. Wrong, wrong, wrong. They had swallowed, and were bent on regurgitating, all the stupid memes they’d been fed. I recall in particular all the angry dissing about “binders of women,” and how it meant that Romney hated women and if elected would be harming them in some way or other.

It taught me just how very susceptible almost everyone I know is to propaganda. To see it get spread in real time that way was an education. Now, of course, the situation is far worse. To almost everyone I know, Trump is a sort of secular devil, and anything he says or does must be opposed with every fiber of a person’s being. And that is true not just of people who don’t follow politics, or who aren’t especially intelligent, but of people whose intellect and reasoning power I ordinarily respect.

And although I have never heard anyone say a single good thing about Joe Biden, he is truly irrelevant in their equation. He’s simply the un-Trump, and that will do.

The post Making election prognostications appeared first on The New Neo.

Both men are outside whatever passes for the establishment in their parties. For the Democrats, the “establishment” is in a state of flux, but it appears to be represented by Joe Biden, who is in somewhat of a similar position to that of Jeb Bush within the GOP field in 2016. Joe and Jeb share a bit more than just their initials, too; each was thought to be the frontrunner and yet both don’t seem to engender much (if any) enthusiasm in the public. They’re different as personalities and certainly politically, but there’s something similarly tepid in their support, and they seem flatfooted in knowing how to deal with their more energetic opponents, Bush’s Trump and Biden’s Sanders.

Like Trump, Sanders has enthusiastic supporters. That counts for a lot. They are devoted to him and believe he can make it, and are willing to work hard for it. Sanders is a leftist but a sincere one, and when he speaks his supporters don’t hear the same-old same-old. One of Trump’s greatest strengths is the fact that his supporters feel he understands them and is talking to them from the heart, and the same is true of Sanders.

It’s a rare quality these days in politicians, and a valuable one. I believe it’s the main reason Sanders is doing so well right now – that, and the Democrats’ huge shift to the left duirng the last decade or more.

The other thing both men have in their favor is the number of candidates running against them. To those who oppose them, it seems as though if only the opposition would coalesce behind just one other candidate, that would be the solution to defeating Sanders (and Trump before him). This deep desire to nominate just about anyone else is partly due to the idea that Sanders (and Trump before him) cannot win. In 2016, if Trump were nominated and he didn’t win, that would mean that the dread Hillary would be elected. In 2020, if Sanders is nominated and he can’t win, that will mean the dread Donald would be re-elected. These are nightmare scenarios for each party, and although Trump won the presidency against most predictions, and Sanders could win the presidency, neither outcome seemed very likely at the outset. Thus, the fear within each party.

[NOTE: Oh, and both Trump and Sanders are from New York City. Bernie’s been away in Vermont for many decades, but to me he’s a New Yorker through and through. And, interestingly enough, one of the un-Sanders (anti-Sanders?) candidates on the Democratic side is another New Yorker: Bloomberg.]

The post Sanders 2020 and Trump 2016 appeared first on The New Neo.

Nearly two-thirds of Trump voters who supported Democratic congressional candidates in the 2018 midterms that flipped control of House to Democrats reported they would back the president over the three candidates currently leading in the Democratic primary, according to the Times.

Further, the new polls show Trump maintaining or strengthening his edge in the six key battleground states that swung the election in the Republican’s favor, particularly among white working-class voters who flipped to Trump after eight years of backing President Barack Obama while Democrats continue to fall behind this critical voting bloc.

“The poll offers little evidence that any Democrat, including Mr. Biden, has made substantial progress toward winning back the white working-class voters who defected to the president in 2016…

On reading that, I’m wondering why – if they really were Trump supporters – they voted for the Democrat candidates for the House back in 2018. Did they not realize that flipping control of the House to the Democrats would be very likely to lead to the impeachment circus we have today? Didn’t that factor into their votes at all?

I think the answer for a lot of people was “no.” How many people today actually understand that when you vote for a candidate in your Congressional district, you’re not just voting for candidate A or candidate B, you’re voting for Speaker of the House and control of all the committees and the agenda? I think a surprising number of people are ignorant of that fact, although I’ve never seen a poll measuring it.

Of course, there’s also the phenomenon of Democratic candidates in a swing district promising that they won’t just vote in lockstep with the Democratic leadership. They’ll be their own man or woman. But when push comes to shove and the issue matters, they just about always vote the Party line.

And of course, whether such a candidate does or doesn’t end up voting with the Democratic Party, voting for a Democratic candidate for representative in your district is a vote for Democratic leadership of the House. Whether or not that particular representative votes with the Democrats on any particular issue, that person still helps create a Democratic Speaker of the House and Democratic majority. The majority party sets the agenda and essentially runs the show, and it’s a game of numbers in which that particular individual representative’s vote hardly matters except under very rare circumstances.

But I bet if you were to poll one hundred random people on the street, you wouldn’t get more than a quarter who understand those facts.

The post Are some 2018 Democratic voters moving back to Trump? appeared first on The New Neo.

The WSJ reports that back in January of 2017, a short time before Trump’s inauguration, Politico wrote an article that stated:

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation…

It’s a very long piece, but it seems to be describing the same fact situation I wrote about in this recent post, particularly the excerpts from Andrew C. McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion. This is hardly new information, but it’s information the MSM seems to have no interest in anymore.

The post Hillary’s Ukrainian connection appeared first on The New Neo.

Case in point, this interview. Unfortunately, the Podoretz interview itself is behind an impregnable paywall, so that link is to a post at Ace’s that contains lengthy excerpts from the interview such as this one:

So for a while I was supporting Marco Rubio and I was enthusiastic about him. As time went on, and I looked around me, however, I began to be bothered by the hatred that was building up against Trump from my soon to be new set of ex-friends. It really disgusted me. I just thought it had no objective correlative. You could think that he was unfit for office–I could understand that–but my ex-friends’ revulsion was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him.

They called them dishonorable, or opportunists, or cowards–and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, and various others. And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump. By the time he finally won the nomination, I was sliding into a pro-Trump position, which has grown stronger and more passionate as time has gone on…

…[S]ome of them have gone so far as to make me wonder whether they’ve lost their minds altogether. I didn’t object to their opposition to Trump. There was a case to be made, and they made it–okay. Of course, they had no reasonable alternative. A couple of them voted for Hillary, which I think would have been far worse for the country than anything Trump could have done.

But, basically, I think we’re all in a state of confusion as to what’s going on. Tom Klingenstein has made a brilliant effort to explain it, in terms that haven’t really been used before. He says that our domestic politics has erupted into a kind of war between patriotism and multiculturalism, and he draws out the implications of that war very well. I might put it in different terms–love of America versus hatred of America. But it’s the same idea.

Please read the whole thing.

By the way, when Podhoretz uses the phrase “my soon to be new set of ex-friends,” he’s harking back to a book he wrote in 2001 entitled Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.

Interestingly enough, Irving Kristol was another early neocon. Kristol senior is now deceased, but Bill Kristol is his son. And in a strange (or maybe not-so-strange) parallel, John Podhoretz (another NeverTrumper, although I’m pretty sure he’s not nearly as strongly so as Bill Kristol) is Norman Podhoretz’s son.

As someone remarked in one of the comments to a piece on Norman Podhoretz’s interview, I wonder what Thanksgiving conversation is like at the Podhoretz house.

The post Let’s hear it for Norman Podhoretz, the original neocon appeared first on The New Neo.

But here’s the additional fact (some of you may already know this, but I certainly didn’t) via Chris Cillizza:

…[The Democratic Party of Virginia] has been ascendant in recent years — having held the governorship for all but four years since 2001 and now controlling both of the state’s US Senate seats and seven of the state’s 11 congressional districts…

Cox is speaker solely because Republican David Yancey won a state House seat in early 2018 when his name was picked out of a bowl. Yes, this really happened! (The race was tied. If Yancey had lost the random drawing, the state House would have been split 50-50.)

You can read about it here. 2018 was a very very good year for the state Democrats in Virginia:

Prior to the Nov. 7 election, Republicans had a 66-34 majority in the House, but Democrats flipped 15 GOP-held seats while winning statewide races for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.

Here’s the story of how it came to a drawing for the tiebreaker:

[Republican] Yancey held a 10-vote lead over [his Democratic opponent] Simonds in unofficial results tallied on election night, but the Dec. 19 recount showed Simonds squeaking out a one-vote win. Republicans appeared to concede the seat but went into a final court hearing Dec. 20 armed with a surprise letter from a Yancey-aligned recount official suggesting a ballot that had been discarded should have been counted for Yancey. On the ballot in question, the voter filled in bubbles for both Simonds and Yancey but drew a line through Simonds’ bubble.

Simonds’ lawyers argued the ballot was an impermissible overvote and should be tossed out because the voter’s intentions weren’t clear. The judges sided with Yancey, saying the ballot met the criteria for an exception that allows voters to scratch out erroneous votes to clarify their choice.

And that, folks, could be the thing that ultimately gives Virginia a Republican governor. I very much doubt it, though, because I don’t think all three of the Democrats will resign. But what a long strange trip it’s been in Virginia, and not over yet.

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