In which we discover that the editorial board of The New York Times is a buyer’s market for magic beans. Having already advised the president to bail “to serve his country,” the board now points out that the former president* is “unfit” for the job. But that’s not the sweetest gumdrop in this dispatch from Happy Gumdrop Land.
For more than two decades, large majorities of Americans have said they are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, and the post-Covid era of stubborn inflation, high interest rates, social division and political stagnation has left many voters even more frustrated and despondent. The Republican Party once pursued electoral power in service to solutions for such problems, to building “the shining city on a hill,” as Ronald Reagan liked to say. Its vision of the United States—embodied in principled public servants like George H.W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney—was rooted in the values of freedom, sacrifice, individual responsibility and the common good. The party’s conception of those values was reflected in its longstanding conservative policy agenda.
Somebody check on Rick Perlstein, because I think he may stroke out.
One of the truly annoying aspects of the current political situation—and the reason I’ve never fully trusted our Never Trump allies—has been the attempts to obfuscate the simple fact that conservative politics made someone like the former president* not only possible but inevitable. (Stuart Stevens is an honorable exception in this regard.) The NYT editorial is the perfect distillation of this assault on recent history.
So much in the past two decades has tested these norms in our society—the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, the failures that led to the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed, the pandemic and all the fractures and inequities that it revealed.
Gee, I wonder which party was in charge when all of that stuff happened. Let me get back to you guys on that. Meanwhile, here’s a bucket of whitewash to keep you busy.
As a candidate during the 2008 race, Mr. McCain spoke out when his fellow conservatives spread lies about his opponent, Barack Obama. Mr. Romney was willing to sacrifice his standing and influence in the party he once represented as a presidential nominee, by boldly calling out Mr. Trump’s failings and voting for his removal from office....When Mr. Trump wanted an end to Obamacare, a single Republican senator, Mr. McCain, saved it, preserving health care for millions of Americans. Mr. Trump demanded that James Comey, his F.B.I. director, pledge loyalty to him and end an investigation into a political ally; Mr. Comey refused....As Mr. Comey, a longtime Republican, wrote in a 2019 guest essay for Times Opinion, “Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from.” Very few who serve under him can avoid this fate “because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites,” Mr. Comey wrote.
Comey was as responsible for the previous president* as anyone outside of the campaign was. Romney ran one of the most unprincipled presidential campaigns of the pre-Trump era. This is just embarrassing. And this is my favorite passage.
...Bill Barr, whom Mr. Trump appointed as attorney general, said of him, “He will always put his own interest and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest.”...
When lapdogs attack. Robert Mueller must be having a good laugh, assuming he’s awake.
Mainstream Republicanism has been the river of lava from the Mustafar system for decades now. Of course, the NYT has profited from this lushly—Whitewater, Judy Miller, But Her Emails, and the Haberman-Trump fandango—and would rather nobody remembered anything about this. As Milan Kundera once put it, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Too many people have abandoned that fight.
