Politics Archives

Tuesday

August 25, 2020

The GOP’s ‘Great American Story’ will play well at the ballot box

I can’t prove it, but it would not surprise me to discover that the architects of the Republican convention had read Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. That book was published last year by Encounter Books. I am the publisher of Encounter Books. So when I tell you that I believe it is a great book — at last, an effective answer to Howard Zinn’s pink, anti-America People’s History of the United States — take it with a grain of salt. But after you savor the salt, I think you’ll agree with me. Since it was first published in 1980, Zinn’s book has poisoned the minds of millions of high school students.

Amber Duke

The difference between the RNC and the DNC, according to the Trump campaign

The Republican National Convention kicked off last night with big ratings — the C-SPAN livestream broadcast of the event had five and a half times as many viewers as the Democratic National Convention a week prior. According to the Trump campaign, that wasn't the only major difference between the two events. The Spectator asked Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh during a press call Tuesday to describe what he viewed as the main contrast between the RNC and the DNC after the former's first night of programming. Murtaugh pointed to the fact that the RNC included multiple everyday Americans as speakers, as well as the fact that the party united around its nominee, President Donald Trump.

Dominic Green

The Republicans have a race problem

Congratulations to Sen. Tim Scott for delivering one of the best speeches on the opening night of the Republican meta-convention, and combining an inspiring personal story with a dog whistle louder than Kimberly Guilfoyle.Guilfoyle merely bellowed a passing slur at ‘cosmopolitan elites’. As the daughter of a Puerto Rican ‘immigrant’, a cable news star, the ex-wife of a governor and the girlfriend of the President’s son, she knows a member of the cosmopolitan elite when she sees one — for instance, when she looks in the mirror.Scott went beyond hypocrisy. ‘They want to take more money from your pocket and give it to Manhattan elites and Hollywood moguls, so they get tax breaks,’ he said of the Democrats.

Toby Young

Make America Normal Again

To win in November, Trump should seek inspiration from President Alexander Lukashenko, the 65-year-old autocrat who has ruled Belarus since 1994. He trounced his liberal opponent in the presidential election in August with 80 percent of the vote. I’m not suggesting Trump emulate Lukashenko’s methods. Among other things, the man dubbed ‘Europe’s last dictator’ disqualified his three main political opponents at the beginning of the race, imprisoning two of them. He has never won an election with less than 75 percent of the vote, although none have been found to be free and fair by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an election monitoring body.

Charles Lipson

Playing with fire

Some conflicts begin with clear aims but morph into endless battles, the original motives forgotten. The timeless metaphor for self-sustaining battles is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the inheritance case at the heart of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on,’ he wrote. ‘This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means... Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.’ Now we have Portland v. Public Order. What Jarndyce was for the law, Portland is for the lawless. For over two months, young demonstrators have gathered each night in Oregon’s largest city.

Chadwick Moore

Republicans actually make better TV

Here’s a question no one will ask. How is it possible the Republicans — the party universally deplored and maligned by Hollywood, Big Tech, and all of mainstream media — consistently manage to pull off far better production quality in broadcast content than the Democrats?This was fully evident Monday on night one of the Republican National Convention where the GOP delivered a sleek, well-produced, visually and audibly impressive presentation to American voters. Stack that next to what we saw from the Democrats last week, who have virtually every millionaire and billionaire in Hollywood and Silicon Valley on their ideological side — yet apparently, that support doesn’t extend to basic production, styling, or home office assistance.

Monday

August 24, 2020

Amber Duke

Populist Trump can win

The Republican National Convention kicks off Monday in the hope of offering voters an alternative to the unfocused, self-serving Democratic counterpart that took place last week. President Trump's best chance of accomplishing this lies in following the blueprint of a speech he gave in Pennsylvania this past Thursday. The Democratic party's convention attempted to appeal to everyone and thus appealed to no one, stacking excessively woke and anti-American screeds in the daytime with establishment figures giving vapid, hyperbolic anti-Trump speeches during the primetime national broadcast. Missing was an expression of a cohesive policy platform, which would seem key in a year where a division between the moderates and progressive left defined the primary.

Sohrab Ahmari

The right after Trump

Two broad camps divide American conservatism today: those who get it, and those who don’t — the woke and unwoke, if I may borrow a lefty term but give it a slightly different meaning. For the right to have any shot at taming liberalism’s raging furies, woke conservatives must remain ascendant and consolidate the movement. President Trump was among the first to get it, in his own intuitive, messy way. The ambitious Missouri senator Josh Hawley is likewise woke. So are Attorney General Bill Barr and Fox News host Tucker Carlson. But too many credentialed conservatives don’t get it. What’s the it conservatives need to get?

Freddy Gray

The mob are turning into Trump’s useful idiots

Protesters have been setting fire to yet another American city today to tell us that black lives matter. This latest eruption is in response to a disturbing video that shows a black man being shot repeatedly in the back by police as he reaches into his car in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The man in question is called Jacob Blake. He is reported to be in a serious condition, but still alive in hospital this morning. An investigation into the shooting is taking place, but the mob smashing up Kenosha doesn’t care about that — it cares about rage and destruction. We see the now familiar liturgy of so-called protest: cars on fire; windows shattered; shops looted and tagged with ‘BLM’ and ‘ACAB’ (All Cops Are Bastards) graffiti.

Sunday

August 23, 2020

Stephen L. Miller

Why isn’t Joe Biden being tested for COVID-19?

Joe Biden has faced questions on his mental and physical acuity throughout his presidential bid. For example, he first said he is cognitively tested ‘all the time’ and then clarified to say he has not had a formal cognitive test But there is a larger issue lingering over the 77-year-old — Joe Biden has not been tested for COVID-19. Joe Biden receives Secret Service protection and intelligence briefings similar to that of the President. So why is he refusing to be tested regularly, as the President is, for a highly contagious virus that has killed 173,000 Americans? As of August 19, COVID-19 has claimed the lives of approximately 41,000 Americans aged between 74 and 85. Joe Biden is an American aged between 74 and 85.

Friday

August 21, 2020

Stephen L. Miller

China disappears at the DNC

Members of media hailed the all-digital Democratic National Convention and convention coordinator Stephanie Cutter, the former Obama adviser famous for smearing Mitt Romney as a killer. The Washington Post’s conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin gushed that the week-long Zoom show should be nominated for an Emmy. Honest onlookers, however, would notice that there wasn’t an explanation as to why the event had to be held this way: China.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Sleepy no more: Joe Biden unmasked

It was like an Elvis sighting. ‘WHERE’S HUNTER,’ Trump kept bellowing in his tweets. Well, there was the recently reclusive 50-year-old lobbyist Hunter Biden, the black sheep of the family, who almost brought down his pappy’s campaign with his Ukraine shenanigans. He looked youthful with his hair slicked back, dark suit, white shirt, and blue tie, appearing at the Democratic convention together his sister Ashley to endorse him for president. Hunter probably will retreat back into seclusion for the duration of the campaign, but it was a smart move to feature him so prominently, a version of the courtroom tactic of getting the unpleasant facts before the jury before the prosecution can air them.

Charles Lipson

Joe Biden offers platitudes, not policies

Joe Biden’s speech was effective in many ways and sure to please his supporters. But anyone who expected him to say something substantive about his policies left empty-handed. He did little more than spin gauzy pictures of a rosy future.First, the good news for Biden supporters. He looked strong, never stumbled, and delivered the speech with remarkable empathy, energy, and modulated tones. His performance showed no traces of the confusion he has shown occasionally or the cognitive decline he has been charged with. He was at his best.Biden also made the best of his strongest quality: he’s a likable guy, whose tragedies have made him deeply sympathetic to others facing their own difficulties. He’s not faking that, and it shows.

Joe Biden

Joe Biden’s DNC speech

Good evening. Ella Baker, a giant of the civil rights movement, left us with this wisdom: give people light and they will find a way. Give people light. Those are words for our time. The current president has cloaked America in darkness for much too long. Too much anger. Too much fear. Too much division. Here and now, I give you my word: if you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us not the worst. I will be an ally of the light not of the darkness. It's time for us, for We the People, to come together. For make no mistake. United we can, and will, overcome this season of darkness in America. We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege.

Thursday

August 20, 2020

Matt McDonald

That dreary Bloomberg speech cost him $18 million

There’s an infamous anecdote from an old New York magazine story, in which then-New York mayor Michael Bloomberg arrived at a party, ‘gestured towards a woman in a very tight floor-length gown standing nearby and said, “Look at the ass on her.”’Presumably Mr Bloomberg exuded similar bluntness during his negotiations to speak at this year’s Democratic National Convention. When you’re the 19th richest man in the world, you can stroll into a room and say what you want. Money talks, and therefore so does Michael Bloomberg.

Ben Sixsmith

Cuckoo Q: are the QAnon crowd as crazy as they seem?

‘Have you guys been following 4Chan?’ asks Marjorie Taylor Greene in a 2017 video. A mysterious ‘patriot’ named ‘Q’, Greene explains, is prophesying the downfall of satanic ‘swamp creatures’ in Washington, DC, Hollywood and other liberal fiefdoms. Is Greene a kind of female Alex Jones? No: she is now a Republican congressional candidate in Georgia and, in all likelihood, headed for the House of Representatives. Only weeks ago, an investigation by Facebook discovered thousands of groups and pages, boasting millions of members and followers, dedicated to QAnon conspiracy theories. In July, Twitter banned more than 7,000 accounts associated with the movement.

Karol Markowicz

Who do Democrats want to be?

In 2004, Democratic senator Zell Miller spoke to the Republican National Convention in New York City. Focusing on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Miller spoke about being a Marine and how partisanship should be put aside for patriotism, especially in a time of war. ‘What has happened to the party I've spent my life working in?’ Miller wondered.His speech brought the house down. I was in attendance and no speech from that convention was more memorable than Miller’s. Compare Miller’s speech to the one given by Republican former governor John Kasich to the Democratic National Convention on Monday night. Miller spoke of patriotism and past instances of statesmen putting aside their partisan strife to work together for a better America.

Amber Duke

All pageantry, no progress: Wednesday night at the DNC

'I'm in love — but not with anybody here. I'll see you in a couple years,' Billie Eilish crooned during the third night of the Democratic National Convention. The teen vocalist was singing her new single 'My Future’, but the lyrics could just as easily be a rallying cry for the young progressives kicked in the teeth yet again by the Democratic establishment. Democrats love to boast about their youth support and the party’s future generation of leaders, but their convention displays a political party that is fully enamored with the past. It's not wrong for them to make the calculation that young people don't vote and thus they're better off trying to bring in moderates who sat out 2016 or held their nose and voted for Trump.

Wednesday

August 19, 2020

Roger Kimball

For the Democrats’ sake, I hope the DNC viewership is low

I almost gave tonight’s DNC performance a miss. How could they top the fey chap pretending to be a bat while miming to a poor rendition of Buffalo Springfield’s 'For What It’s Worth' as a collage of kneeling athletes in 'Black Lives Matter' t-Shirts flitted by behind him? It was...special. I’d say that the chap who tweeted that it was 'the moment Trump won reelection' was right, except that there have been so many such moments: positive ones like President Trump’s magnificent speech at Mount Rushmore last month, as well as negative ones like the Biden campaign’s pick of Kamala Harris as his running mate. One wag said that that decision was a huge in-kind donation to the Trump campaign. That sounds right to me.

Will Lloyd

A country for old men

When 83-year-old New Jersey congressman Bill Pascrell shared a photo of American lawmakers meeting a Chinese trade delegation in Washington in 2018, he probably didn’t expect it to go viral on Weibo. (You wonder, rather cruelly, if the congressman is familiar with the term ‘viral’ at all.) But it did go viral — gleefully and potently viral — on Chinese social media. Why? The picture showed two delegations at a table. The Chinese look young, or at least they do when sat opposite the Americans. They look grizzled in the original sense of the word: like gray-haired old men. This image was cannily juxtaposed on Weibo with another one, taken in 1901 in Beijing, at the close of the Boxer Rebellion.