Despite the numerous allegations made by women that Moore had acted inappropriately toward them when they were teenagers, Bannon blazed ahead with his support for the candidate, stumping with him in the campaign’s final days.
“If they can destroy Roy Moore, they can destroy you,” he told a crowd in early December.
.. many prominent conservative voices, including the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, were quick to question Bannon’s importance to the party because of the loss.
On Breitbart, the site that Bannon serves as executive chairman, conservative writer Ann Coulter pushed back on the assertion that he deserved blame for the loss.
“Bannon is the least culpable!” she tweeted
.. Coulter’s piece served more as a broadside against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for fighting against one of Moore’s primary challengers, Mo Brooks, a view shared by far-right Fox News host Sean Hannity.
.. She said she believed that the election demonstrated the importance of harsh immigration policies for Republicans.
“Everyone who screwed the pooch on this one better realize fast: All that matters is immigration. It’s all that matters to the country, and it’s all that matters for winning elections,” she wrote.
.. The Daily Caller, a reliably conservative site with a large following, downplayed the election news entirely, with only scant references on its home page. Instead the site focused on negative stories about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into possible Russian collusion: sound bites of Republican congressmen aggressively questioning Rod J. Rosenstein
.. One story, which later led the website, focused on the “pressure” facing Doug Jones to vote with the GOP, a push started by the Republican National Committee immediately after Moore’s loss.
.. A couple of conservative sites published stories saying the election was tainted by fraudulent voting, claims that were published with scant evidence.
.. “And they, as they do all over the country, had the dead people vote and had the folks bused in in those Democrat areas, and they stole the election,” he said. “So it really is biblical what we’re witnessing, and the dirty tricks of the Clintons and the dirty tricks of their systems in this country reaching down through into daily life. I mean, they come after you when you fight them.”
.. Right-wing site Big League Politics, which was started by former Breitbart employees, ran multiple stories that sowed doubt about the integrity of the vote.
The Ezra Klein Show: How the Republican Party created Donald Trump
Mitch McConnell promised bipartisanship in his speech about healthcare and delivered the exact opposite. The speech had very little “truth content”. (38 min)
The Koch brothers announced that they had 360 million dollars to spend on the next election if the Republicans passed healthcare and tax cuts. (48 min)
Tucker Carlson condemned the right wing media ~6 years ago and said the right needs its own institutions comparable to the New York Times. He started the Daily Caller which now makes money putting up bikini pictures, and then plays a host on Fox News that does nothing to challenge his audience, preferring to embarrass guests and make its visitors feel good. (1 hr 25 min)
Ezra: I think many of the criticism of the mainstream media are right. It has a cosmopolitan bias.
Tucker Carlson is all about business model. Dinesh D’hsousa is doing well because the Ann Coulter principle — the more extreme you are, the better you do. Authors always check their Amazon ratings.
Many Conservatives don’t consume mainstream media.
The media knew that the John Podesta leaks were coming from the Russians, but the business is comptetitive and people were concerned about appearing biased. (1 hr 38 min)
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have studied American politics for more than three decades. They are the town’s go-to experts on the workings of Congress. In 2012, they rocked Washington when they published It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a book that marshaled their considerable authority to argue that the dysfunction poisoning American government was the result of “asymmetric polarization,” notably a Republican Party that “has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
This was a controversial diagnosis then. After Trump, it’s closer to the conventional wisdom.
E.J. Dionne is a columnist at the Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of the classic book Why Americans Hate Politics. He’s one of the sharpest political observers alive.
And now, like a Canadian indie-rock supergroup, the three of them have come together to write One Nation After Trump, a dive into how the Republican Party created Trump, how Trump won, and what comes next.
As Dionne says in this interview, the American system was “not supposed to produce a president like this,” and so a lot of our conversation is about how the guardrails failed and whether they can be rebuilt. Mann, Ornstein, and Dionne may be political sages, but they’re also a lot of fun, and they have a lot of fun together. You’ll hear that in this conversation.
Books:
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal by William Leuchtenburg
Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr.
The First Congress by Fergus Bordewich
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels
Morality Is Negotiable for Mr. Trump
Even on matters of near-perfect moral clarity, he is often transactional and capricious. If he does the right thing, there must be an angle.
.. His word is never final; it’s only the latest in a never-ending set of tactical adjustments made with one eye on his poll numbers, and the other on Fox News.
.. Conservatives erupted. Ann Coulter, author of “In Trump We Trust,” unleashed a stream of protests, demanding that he be impeached.
.. Of course, Mr. Trump always saw the wall as more of a campaign slogan than a possibility. Even congressional Republicans are balking at handing him billions for a quixotic project
.. conservative Never-Trump stalwart William Kristol had sound advice on dealing with Mr. Trump.
“To liberals, centrists & conservatives,” he wrote, “work for good policies during Trump’s presidency; never lose sight of his unfitness to be president.”
No one should cheer Mr. Trump’s latest moves as a pivot toward principles. So far, his main operating principle seems to be service to himself.
One Theory Over Meaning of Trump’s ‘Many Sides’ Remark
Mr. Trump seems to have concluded what many other conservatives did about the tragedy in Charlottesville, Va.: As tragic as it was, it was incited by a small, unrepresentative group of bigots purporting to speak for the right whose antics would be exhaustively covered in the news.
.. “They think there were 300 or so racists who showed up to a rally, and who got exactly what they wanted: Violence, and violence in a way that inspires the nation’s elite to double down on iconoclasm in a way they hope grows their movement,” said Ben Domenech, the publisher of The Federalist, an online magazine.
.. Mr. Trump and conservatives have pointed to several recent episodes as evidence of the left gone mad.
- They include the comedian Kathy Griffin’s posing for a picture with a fake severed Trump head, and
- a production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” that featured a Trump-like actor as the emperor who is fatally stabbed onstage.
- Some seized on the shooting that seriously injured Representative Steve Scalise
- One recent web video from the National Rifle Association accused liberals of attempting to “bully and terrorize the law abiding” as it implored Americans to “fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.”
.. Of at least 372 murders that were committed by domestic extremists between 2007 and 2016, according to a study by the Anti-Defamation League,
- 74 percent were committed by right-wing extremists.
- Muslim extremists were responsible for 24 percent of those killings,
- and the small remainder were committed by left-wing extremists
.. the emphasis for many conservatives is not on statistics that indicate who is the more violent offender. Rather, he said, the point is about the general tenor of political debate, which people like him believe is weighted against them.
.. “You don’t have a ton of reporters banging on the doors of Democrats asking them to denounce Antifa,” he said, referring to the militant Marxist-inspired group that rioted at Mr. Trump’s inauguration and often shows up looking for confrontation at sites where conservative writers like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos are scheduled to speak.
.. Mr. Trump is no mere bit player in the discussion of political violence. At various times, he has offered to pay the legal bills of supporters who get in brawls at his events and stated, without offering any proof, that paid agitators were responsible for protests against him.
.. Alex Jones .. said people who protested the white supremacists over the weekend were probably actors
.. Mr. Jones played down the significance of the violence, saying it was likely staged by “Democratic Party activists” who are looking to “overdemonize” whites and “put chips on the shoulders of the so-called minorities.”
.. Demographically, blacks are 12 times more likely to attack whites for no reason,” Mr. Jones went on, providing no evidence for his claim. “It’s a fact.”
.. He then recounted his own experience watching a Nazi rally he said was attended by Jews posing as Nazis, evident by their “curly hair, and you know, dark eyes.”
.. Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theory peddler, was gleeful as he posted on Twitter about the violence on Saturday. “Civil War is here!” he wrote.
.. There is also a new political term to describe the circular firing squad in which right and left have blamed the other for the country’s degenerating political debate — “whataboutism.”
.. Guy Benson, a conservative writer and an author of the book “End of Discussion,” which argues that the left has tried to shut down political debate by declaring certain topics off the table, said he sees a “whataboutism overreach” among some conservatives.
.. “Round and round we go with this one-upsmanship of who’s worse,” Mr. Benson added, “and that’s a really terrible way to argue.”