The Runback: A Lesson to Be Learned
The late great Ron Smith call the Republican Party "The Stupid Party." He was on to something.
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FEATURED STORY
No Change Recommended: Anne Arundel County Public Schools Sees No Problem with Peddling Transgender Propaganda to Kindergartners
News and Politics
Maryland Bans Gas-Powered Car Sales in 2035: Gov. Wes Moore to the State: Leave Your Affordable Cars Behind
Moore Plows Ahead With Disastrous California Vehicle Plan: In Wes Moore's Quest to Make Maryland Too Expensive to Live, the State Will Adopt the Advanced Clean Cars II rule
Madness on the Plains: What possessed Nebraska Senator Machaela Cavanaugh to filibuster in support of Child Abuse?
Bouchat Needs to Resign: Delegate's suggestion that House Republicans should be a doormat for Maryland Democrats is an insult to his District, his colleagues, and his constituents.
The Natural Conclusion of Celebrity Politics and Proportional Representation: Yoshikazu Higashitani's Election and Removal shows Americans what not to do
Maryland GOP Asleep at the Wheel: Nicole Beus Harris’s decision to hire an incompetent naif like Adam Wood as Executive Director is continuing to be a slow-motion disaster.
Democrats: Five Year Olds Can Determine Their Gender: Absolutely bonkers comments from Democratic Delegate Kris Fair
Why Can't Wes Focus? Wes Moore, like Martin O'Malley Before Him, Seems too Focused on National Issues to Do the Job
Sports
One Year Ago: Maryland Native Scott Hall Passes Away: "The Bad Guy" was born in St. Mary's County
OLW on The Duckpin debuted yesterday
The Monday Thought
The late great Ron Smith1 often said “The Democrats are the evil party, but Republicans are the stupid party.” Recent events have shown again why that analysis was so accurate.
Last week, Ramesh Ponnuru wrote about socialism within the Democratic Party for the Washington Post. He wrote:
Today’s Democrats are indeed more left-wing than their forebears in many ways….
….But it turns out the party’s left wing has spent much of the past few years fooling itself about its ascendancy. Sanders did well in the 2016 primary because he was running against Hillary Clinton. He fizzled in 2020, when she wasn’t in the race as a foil. Ocasio-Cortez and her closest allies in the House are in liberal districts where, as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) remarked a few years ago, ‘a glass of water’ with a D next to its name could win an election. They represent the voters Democrats already have, not the ones they need to win.
Which helps explain why Medicare-for-all has languished. When Democrats had a House majority, from 2019 through the start of this year, it was because they prevailed in moderate districts. The number of co-sponsors for the legislation actually dropped a little.”
One of the first polls of a potential 2024 Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race matchup has State Senator Doug Mastriano leading the Republican primary field.
The Public Policy Polling survey found no candidate with a plurality of support with Mastriano receiving 39% support among a survey of 616 likely Republican primary voters.
The same poll had Trump receiving 49% in a Pennsylvania Republican Primary poll.
‘This shouldn’t surprise anybody, really. Mastriano’s super fans are still worshipping him. That Mastriano and Trump both got their asses kicked in the 2020 Election seems to be of little consequence to these dead-enders who would rather be mad than be victorious.
National Republicans, for their part, seem to have learned their lesson. They are going all-in for a different candidate in Pennsylvania’s Senate Primary. It’s a return to a preexisting policy where the National Republican Senatorial Committee, among others, are playing in primaries where they had sat out for a few years.
Now, there is a LOT of disagreement as to whether or not that’s a good thing. National Republicans attempting to impose their will upon a primary can sometimes mean that bad candidates without conservative credentials win primaries.
But of course, when nationalist statist conspiracy theorists who have already bombed statewide like Mastriano are on the ballot, it is understandable why they want to jump in and stop the insanity.
But can they? I mean, let’s look at this recent kerfuffle about U.S. interests in Ukraine between two Presidential candidates.
I mean, these are the defacto three front runners for the Republican Nomination Right now. And they are madness. It is three candidates having a pissing contest all while agreeing with each other on the substance of the argument. Which also happens to be a bad argument at odds with most Americans.
Finally, here are some sobering thought that Tom Nichols wrote about last week. These days I often disagree with Nichols; he, like many anti-Trump ex-Republicans, has become far too comfortable toeing the Democratic line for my tastes. But he’s right about this:
Even before Pence’s Gridiron-dinner speech, I had a conversation last week with Tom Joscelyn, one of the principal authors of the House’s January 6 committee report. Joscelyn is worried, as am I, that Americans don’t really yet grasp the degree to which the Republicans have been taken over by their most extreme wing. “The American right is overrun with grievance politics now,” he told me. “And they’ve married that approach to an authoritarian movement and cult of personality” around Trump.
Joscelyn is not a man who rattles easily: He was Rudy Giuliani’s senior counterterrorism adviser back in 2007, when “America’s mayor” was gearing up to run for president. He thinks Giuliani’s sad decline, in which he has become a kind of political Dorian Gray right before our eyes, is emblematic of the Republican collapse and surrender to Trump. He argues, and I agree, that Trump’s opponents, especially those running against him in the GOP, are not taking this threat as seriously as they should. Trump “puts the auto in autocrat,” Joscelyn said, because Trump sublimates everything to his personal needs, including his party. (I would argue that this is why Trump, despite his fascist rhetoric and Mussolini-like strutting, is incapable of the consistency and discipline required to build a truly fascist movement, but that’s an argument for another day.)
Today, as Joscelyn notes, the GOP has ceased to function as a normal political party. There is no consistent ideology or set of policies, no internal mechanisms to check the power of the Trump cult. Even the people who want to dislodge Trump as the leader of the party and the 2024 nominee dare not to take him on in a direct confrontation. Trump’s critics are often accused of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” an irrational hatred of Trump that forces disagreement with Trump on everything, but Joscelyn rightly points out that Trump’s Republican enablers are the ones who have had to betray all of their deepest beliefs merely to avoid being cast out. Trump, he says, “broke his sycophants, not his critics.”
All of what Nichols reports is why I left the GOP in the first place. The GOP used to be the party of ideas, while the Democrats were the party of demagoguery. Now, the Republicans are just as autocratic, just as statist, and just as demagogic as the Democrats. They can’t get elected because of it, yet refuse to acknowledge why that is.
Most Republicans knew all of this back in 2016 when Trump was the nominee. Most Republicans knew this when Trump was elected and the tumult and turmoil of his term in office. And most Republicans damn well have known it since the attempted coup d’etat of January 6th. And yet, despite what he has done, despite the electoral consequences that he has on the Republican Party, the type of candidates that he has helped win primaries2, and the damage he has done to our Republic. Few, if any people left in the GOP have the balls to stand up and say “No.”
Stupid party indeed.
Ron Smith would be an outcast in the modern political movement. His listeners practically tried to drive him off the air when he opposed the Iraq War in 2003. Imagine what he would have said about Trump?
A distinguished list of complete losers like Mastriano, Dan Cox, Michael Peroutka, Kari Lake, Kelly Tshibaka, Eric Greitens, Blake Masters, Adam Laxalt, Herschel Walker, Dr. Oz, Jake Evans, Vernon Jones, Joe Kent, Luther Strange, Roy Moore, Kris Kobach, Kelly Loeffler, David Purdue, Tudor Dixon, and Geoff Diehl among others.