Let’s see what some of our favorite Republican establishment figures have been up to lately:
- Bill Kristol is thinking of running for president – again.
- Christine Todd Whitman is playing the “my fellow Republicans” and “clearly unfit” cards in calling on President Trump to resign from office in an L.A. Times op-ed.
- House Speaker Paul Ryan, in a pained defense of “classical liberalism,” openly equates nationalism with racism. “That is not conservatism. That is racism. That is nationalism. That is not what we believe in.”
Doesn’t it all sound so familiar?
Having learned exactly nothing from its abject humiliation and total rejection by the American people in the 2016 presidential election, many in the Republican establishment remain tethered like a stone to sad fantasies that it still occupies the moral high ground on the right, that it can still define – and enforce – what conservatism is.
Centrist Republicans
Really now, how can someone like Whitman be so oblivious to her own complete inability to move the needle within today’s Republican voting base that she would write with a straight face that “[w]e must put aside the GOP label, as hard as that may be” and demand Trump “step down”?
Disavowing, scolding and dismissing didn’t work in 2016 yet here they are wagging their fingers like Swamp school marms once again.
The truth of the matter is that these entitled elites have no other options. Having spent their entire careers devoted to serving the donor class that greased the wheels of corruption in our government for decades, they cannot – it is simply not possible – do the only thing that might give them real grassroots support: Commit themselves to policies that put the interests of the American people above the interests of the D.C. Dirty Money.
In an essay posted at Zero Hedge, Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg points out that the centrist posturing of the Kristol crowd “is nothing more than a failed status quo attempting to rebrand itself in the wake of being outed as the corrupt charlatans they are.”
Krieger notes how establishment politicians are eager to position themselves as “the voice of reason, lovers of apple pie and staunch defenders of our constitution and all that’s good and right in the US of A.”
That would, of course, make those who want to topple this imaginary center position dangerous demagogues, or worse.
But, as Krieger correctly observes, “[p]opulism isn’t a response to mythical centrism, it’s a response to robber baron looting. An American pastime aided, abetted and institutionalized by ‘moderate’ Republicans and Democrats for decades. There’s nothing moderate about taking money from billionaires and doing whatever they want. That’s not centrism, that’s the status quo.”
GOP Centrists on Immigration
The fact that Ryan was still pushing an immigration reform bill that would grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens as recently as six weeks ago despite the overwhelming support for tough immigration laws and a wall at the Mexico border (77 percent in a recent Quinnipiac poll) in the Republican ranks shows exactly who this “classical liberal” actually serves as House speaker.
Which leads us to the bombastically-titled CNN commentary piece “The myth of the all-powerful Trump” penned by former Eric Cantor deputy chief of staff Douglas Heye in June.
According to Heye, Republican establishment candidates are losing ground not because of the rise of Trump Nation but simply because they run bad campaigns.
Heye calls on mythical-centrist Republicans to “remain focused on the policies affecting their districts” and all will be well.
But the former Cantor staffer fails to acknowledge how hard that is to do when you’re carrying water for the graft machine, as his boss learned to his dismay in 2014.
In his article, Heye blames the sitting House majority leader’s stunning primary defeat to upstart Dave Brat on a failure to take Brat’s challenge seriously and (somewhat contradictorily) the running of too many negative ads against Brat, which boosted his public profile.
Author: Joe Schaeffer
What Heye leaves out is the grotesque attempt by the Cantor campaign to openly lie to the voters the candidate was supposed to be representing by orchestrating false-flag pro-immigration protests in Cantor’s district by a La Raza-type organization carrying signs declaring Cantor to be “The One Man Blocking Immigration Reform” at the same time it was mailing letters with the very same message to Republican voters Cantor knew wanted strong border security.
As David Steinberg at PJ Media reported at the time, notorious open-borders fanatic Democrat Rep. Luis Gutierrez staged a rally in Cantor’s district to bring home the duplicitous message that Cantor was the main roadblock to immigration reform.
This despite the fact that Cantor and Gutierrez had hit the road together just one year earlier to push… immigration reform.
Oh, and the leader of the La Raza-type organization that staged street protests against Cantor throughout the primary season met with Cantor’s legislative director one month before the canned rallies began taking place.
And he’s reportedly a former communist guerrilla who has publicly said he fought U.S. military personnel in El Salvador in the 1980s.
So much for focusing on the policies that affect your district.
And let us not forget the cynical attack on their own voters that Republican establishment bigwigs perpetrated in Mississippi in 2014. In order to keep dementia-ridden 36-year incumbent Thad Cochran occupying a Senate seat for one more term instead of populist challenger Chris McDaniel, veteran connected GOP Swamp insect Haley Barbour spearheaded a get-out-the-vote campaign for Democrats to cross over and vote in the Republican primary runoff.
Unfit to Run
A main element of Barbour’s appeal to Democrats was declaring that McDaniel wanted to abolish the Department of Education.
This GOTCHA fact was used to paint McDaniel as an extremist who wanted to destroy education in the state of Mississippi.
This is the same Haley Barbour who served in the Reagan White House.
That would be the same Ronald Reagan who made it a platform plank of his 1980 campaign for president to abolish the Department of Education, declaring, “I have never believed in federal control of the schools.”
None of that dissuaded a scare-mongering Barbour from using the issue to entice Democrats to back his creature Cochran in a Republican runoff.
Thanks to that added support, Cochran narrowly won the runoff and went on to be re-elected to a seventh six-year Senate term that he was medically unfit to serve. Cochran resigned for health reasons on April 1 of this year.
How can these Swamp dwellers hope to reach a voting base it so openly despises? It knows it cannot, and so it retreats into comfortable fantasy as its time slips away.
