Republican party

Helplessness and passivity were the defining themes of the Democratic convention last week. The American people are unable to overcome COVID-19 and an even more all-pervasive racial guilt without the right man in the White House — the nation is weak, and truth be told its would-be savior, Joe Biden, is not strong. But he is nice. The convention emphasized not Biden’s 47-year record in government, but his family and the tragedies it has suffered. Even in building up the nominee, suffering was the dominant trope. Americans must huddle together, and somehow by huddling around Joe Biden everything will be all right.This passivity was perhaps an inevitable byproduct of the rationale behind the Biden candidacy. Is he the best Democrat around?

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.

So Mitt Romney is good for a surprise other than strapping the family dog, Seamus, to the roof of his station wagon on a vacation trip to Canada in 1983. The revelation that Romney has been operating a secret Twitter account under the cognomen Pierre Delecto should come as delectable news to his fans and detractors alike. The hifalutin moniker is sure to confirm President Trump’s belief that Romney, as he put it in an earlier tweet, is a pompous “ass” who has been fighting me from the beginning.’ Not to mention Romney’s resort to French to confirm his hidden identity: ‘C’est moi.

John Bolton has left the White House and those of us who desire some modicum of peace in this world can breathe a sigh of relief. Bolton was appointed to serve as Donald Trump’s third national security adviser barely a year and a half ago, succeeding H.R. McMaster. It was always a strange choice: Trump’s foreign policy is premised largely on hard-nosed (and often hard-of-luck) deal brokering, while Bolton’s preferred method is to bomb other countries. This is the man who has no regrets about the calamitous occupation of Iraq, who wanted to assassinate Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who seemed to advocate for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran, and who lamented that we didn’t destroy the Syrian regime all the way back in 2003.

When America’s educated elite imagines what the Republican party will look like after Donald Trump, whether he’s defeated next year or leaves office in 2025, they think in terms of the past. The Grand Old Party will once more be the party of Mitt Romney and the Bush dynasty, those formerly reviled figures now celebrated by the center-left as decent Republicans in contrast to Trump. They are the obvious and inevitable alternative to him. Aren’t they? If you don’t have Mr Hyde, then you must have Dr Jekyll. If you topple Saddam Hussein, then you obviously get a tolerant, pluralistic liberal democracy. America’s educated elite is not really in truth well-educated at all, and it has the moral sophistication of a Star Wars movie.

David Brooks, the center-right Cassandra of the New York Times, reckons that a GOP apocalypse is coming. The data predicted as much in 2016, when all the smart pollsters predicted a Clinton landslide, and I predicted as much when mourning the fact that Trump was the new Republican standard-bearer. But tinsel didn’t rain forth from Hillary’s near-anointing at the Jacob Javits Center. The end of the world is deferred, yet again. Trump is not conservative in the strict sense of the word; he’s a libertarian and a libertine. So you could plausibly argue that despite Trump’s victory, conservatism did not win in 2016. You could even argue that conservatism didn’t really compete at all in 2016, or, if it did, that it lost.

There have been darker days for the House of Cheney. In 2008, Vice President Dick Cheney left office amidst two imprudent wars and a capsizing economy. A decade on, the times are surprisingly kind to a family once among the most controversial in American politics. Dick’s daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, is looking at a Senate run. ‘She’s got pretty good foreign policy, national security chops,’ Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said unironically earlier this month. ‘She’d be a great addition.

Why do conservatives oppose preserving the environment? Why do they fail to address the pollution of the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink? Why do they oppose regulating the plastic waste that destroys habitats and causes the extinction of species? If ‘conservative’ means conserving a way of life, then protecting the environment is not only helpful but necessary to conservatism. Instead, the environment has become a partisan issue for the progressive left, while conservatives defend the industrial system which causes pollution, deforestation, and animal extinction. According to the World Health Organization, 91 percent of the world’s population live in places where air quality exceeds health guidelines.

Good news for Team NeverTrump: they have their man — a declared 2020 primary challenger to Donald Trump, and it’s exactly the man they wanted, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, a man who has graced a presidential ticket before, Mitt… Sorry, Willard… No, wait… Will... William. As in William Weld. The other former Republican governor of Massachusetts who once had a spot on a national ticket, as the Libertarian party’s 2016 nominee for vice president. Romney has carpet-bagged his way to the US Senate, after all, a perch from which he can write Washington Post op-eds to show how woke he’s become.

The normally sober Associated Press is reporting the Senate’s vote to overturn Trump’s declaration of emergency in the southern border as ‘a stunning rebuke’ and ‘a remarkable break between Trump and Senate Republicans.’ But it isn’t. The 12 Senate Republicans who joined forces with every Democrat in the vote to annul Trump’s declaration did so for predictable ideological reasons. Libertarian-leaning Republicans such as Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Pat Toomey voted to overturn the emergency on ‘constitutionalist’ grounds, seeing the National Emergencies Act of 1976 as constitutionally dubious or worse and rejecting the mechanism by which it allows the president to appropriate funds.

Congress is back in session and it's enough to make one wish the government shutdown – or more accurately, the government slowdown – extended to the legislative branch too. I, for one, will only believe the government shutdown is real when Uncle Sugar stops collecting payroll taxes. Until then, it’s just a particularly degrading form of street theatre.But Democrats, now in control of the House of Representatives, are feeling their oats. In the first, holiday-shortened week of the new session, they wasted no time pursuing their long-stated priorities. Here are some of the highlights: they introduced an impeachment bill on day one sponsored by Brad Sherman (D-CA) and Al Green (D-TX).

The world knew him as ‘Bush 41.’ I knew him by a different name during the time I worked for him as his speechwriter when he was Vice President. In those days, the staff called him ‘The Vishnu.’ It was his own devising. He’d been to India on a state visit, where they’d presented him, amid much pomp and ceremony and clanging of brass, with a statue of the four-armed Vedic deity Vishnu. Its plaque described Vishnu’s numerous godly qualities, among them: omniscience, omnipotence, and his title ‘Preserver of the Universe.’ Mr Bush immediately recognized a kindred godhead. He began referring to himself, in staff memos and aboard Air Force Two’s loudspeakers as ‘The Vishnu.’ In more intimate settings, simply, ‘The Vish.

The chapters of the life of President George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday night aged 94, are the history of an era. If he was not one of Emerson’s ‘representative men’, it was to the good. The ‘representative man’ of Emerson’s imagination was Carlyle’s ‘great man’, a conqueror who stamped his mark on his age by forcing his environment to reflect his inborn character. G.H.W. Bush’s character reflected its environment, and represented the virtues of a vanishing class and suddenly distant age. Born in 1924 a senator’s son, Bush was educated at Phillips Academy and Yale, decades before the acronym WASP was coined. In 1942, he enlisted in the US Navy on his 18th birthday. As a naval aviator, he returned to duty after being shot down and rescued from the Pacific.