Laura Ingraham doesn’t really want to debate David Hogg

Ingraham’s effort to marginalize Hogg does not mean that she is afraid to debate him. Ingraham is a lawyer, and even the best lawyers — no matter how strong their arguments — would rather see cases dismissed because opponents lack standing than try to win on the merits.

Then again, we are talking about cable news, not a courtroom. Yet Ingraham — author of a book called “Shut Up and Sing” — often attacks opponents’ standing instead of their substance.

When NBA stars LeBron James and Kevin Durant suggested last month that President Trump is racist, Ingraham did not make the case that the label is unfair; she told the players to “shut up and dribble.”

.. Ingraham has taken the same approach to late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel, a critic of Republican health-care policies.

“Leave it to the pros, Jimmy,” she said in December.

Marco Rubio Must Be Destroyed

Since the Parkland shootings in Florida, Senator Marco Rubio has done many of the things liberals say they are desperate, desperate for decent Republicans to do. He has changed his position on gun control, expressing support for new restrictions: age limits on gun purchases, new background check rules, possibly magazine restrictions. He has co-sponsored legislation encouraging states to issue restraining orders that temporarily would strip people deemed dangerous of their guns.

.. March for Our Lives the students wore price tagsaround their neck, $1.05 each — the amount of money Rubio’s campaigns have received from the N.R.A. divided by the number of students in Florida schools. David Hogg, one of their leaders, began his speech with the price tag line, and told a CNN interviewer that if anything he feels that their attacks on the Florida senator haven’t been provocative enough.

.. Republican majorities were forged by anger and a kind of smash-mouth politics, it’s incumbent upon liberals to give no quarter in return, and to treat any sudden conciliation from a prominent figure like the Florida senator not as an opportunity for deal making but as a welcome sign of weakness that should inspire further fierce attack.

.. The problem, then, is relying on the bipartisan impulses of few Republican politicians when what you need is a broader climate change. The path to that change requires first putting the fear of God (or, if you prefer, the fear of the Arc of History) into vulnerable Republican lawmakers, and then making them unpopular enough that you can simply beat them.

.. he’s precisely the kind of Republican who needs to be defeated to build a Democratic supermajority.

.. the chance to make him the face of G.O.P. intransigence on gun control

.. The deeper logic here is that the only plausible mission for Democrats after the Trumpian takeover of the G.O.P. is a kind of Carthaginian peace: Delenda

.. it seems to me that once conservatism surrendered to Donald Trump, arguments about corrosion became a bit irrelevant.

.. the president that the Florida senator endorsed is as consistently ad hominem as the young school shooting survivors with rather less excuse.

.. one reason that the Dreamer amnesty was an executive decision that Donald Trump could simply reverse, landing us in our current immigration stalemate, was that the Obama White House deliberately chose to make it one, pre-empting an effort by, yes, Marco Rubio to craft bipartisan legislation.

.. Don’t let Republicans disguise their anti-immigrant views with modest bipartisan maneuvers, create a clear contrast so that voters will reward you even if doing so requires pushing certain constitutional limits on your power.

.. if anything Obama’s executive action contributed to Trump’s victory by helping to radicalize conservative voters

.. Marco Rubio who made an extended effort to move the bill in a more middle-class-friendly direction by adding and then enlarging a child tax credit. The push was opposed by many of his Republican colleagues, but for a time Rubio thought that he could get an amendment in with Senate Democrat support.

.. having watched the Trump G.O.P. hold power with a largely negative agenda and an ugly rhetorical style, I can certainly believe that a no-quarter liberalism will gain power eventually in its turn.