I think the title here is the name for the broad category of my interests. They all blend together. They connect.
For today:
- Would conservatives ever allow a revision of the US Constitution? No matter how dysfunctional it’s become, no matter how they ignore it anyway?
- How Republican policies are ‘anti-family’;
- Links from my favorite aggregate site about conservative superstition and nonsense;
- About Trump’s embarrassing appearance at Arlington;
- How Rich Lowry defends Trump’s “character” and how Tom Nichols responds.
Can we change our ways based on experience? Or are we forever stuck with the wisdom of the ‘ancients’ (in this case the Founders)?
LA Times, Erwin Chemerinsky, 23 Aug 2024: Opinion: We’re living under a flawed Constitution. Let’s start fresh and rewrite it
How is it flawed? For example:
The framers of the Constitution, out of distrust for democracy, created the Electoral College so that elites would choose the president. However, never in the 20th century did the loser of the popular vote become president because of the Electoral College. But population shifts and partisan realignment have made this a regular occurrence in this century. It happened in 2000 and 2016, and it almost happened in 2004 and 2020. In the last election, if just 42,921 votes had changed in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, Donald Trump would have been reelected president despite losing the popular election by almost seven million votes.
I’ve read elsewhere that the rationale for the Electoral College wasn’t distrust for democracy, per se, as that ordinary people 250 years ago had no easy way of being informed about political issues at the national level. No TV, radio, let alone internet. So the ‘elites’ referred to had the job of keeping informed.
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NY Times, Nicholas Kristof, 24 Aug 2024: Republicans Are Right: One Party Is ‘Anti-Family and Anti-Kid’
Guess which.
Children are more likely to be poor, to die young and to drop out of high school in red states than in blue states. The states with the highest divorce rates are mostly Republican, and with some exceptions like Utah, it’s in red states that babies are more likely to be born to unmarried mothers (partly because of lack of access to reliable contraception).
One of President Biden’s greatest achievements was to cut the child poverty rate by almost half, largely with the refundable child tax credit. Then Republicans killed the program, sending child poverty soaring again.
Can anything be more anti-child?
To Republicans, apparently, a sort of libertarian self-sufficiency is supposed to override any notions of government programs to increase the “common good,” i.e. to increase the general health and education of everyone because that would benefit society at large.
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From my favorite aggregate site:
- Megachurch Pastor: All Christians Should “Enter Into Prayer And Fasting” To Stop Harris’s “Dark Powers”. Let’s see how that works out for them.
- Cultist Host: The Bible Predicted Trump’s Shooting. In other words, he found something in Leviticus about a sacrifice to the right ear, and got chills. Search hard enough, and the Bible has foretold everything!
- Newt Gingrich Blames Harris For Stranded Astronauts
- Felon Blames Biden And Harris For Rally Shooting
- Newsmax Host: Feds Were Behind Trump Rally Shooting. These three items are variations on the superstition that anything bad must be due to angry gods you haven’t sufficiently propitiated, or people you don’t like. Just as they blame bad weather on the gays.
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Other items.
This one concerns the Trump appearance at Arlington National Cemetery a couple days ago, in which, among other things, Trump stood at the grave of a solder with a big grin and a thumbs up. Is he ‘saying’ something? No, he has no clue. It’s all about him. I won’t link that photo.
The Nation, Chris Lehmann, 28 Aug 2024: The Trump Campaign Is Now Running on Pure Contempt, subtitled “Both Trump and JD Vance are incapable of hiding their lack of basic humanity.”
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Finally for today. A couple days ago the NY Times posted a guest essay by Rich Lowry, editor in chief of the National Review (the leading intellectual conservative magazine), with the following unlikely title. The essay appeared in today’s print paper.
NY Times, Rich Lowry, 26 Aug 2024: Trump Can Win on Character
When I saw this, like many people, I thought WTF? Trump’s *character*? Has Lowry been paying attention? It seems what Lowry means that compared to Trump, Harris is weak. Trump is a moron, but he comes off strong. She changes her mind too often. And so she can’t be trusted. Again — has he been paying attention, especially to Trump’s back and forth positions about abortion? Which he just changed against, promising to protect women’s healthcare.
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Tom Nichols responds.
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 26 Aug 2024: The Conservatives Who Sold Their Souls for Trump, subtitled “The rage and shame of the anti-anti-Trumpers is getting worse.”
Today, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review (the flagship conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr.), published an article claiming that Donald Trump could win the 2024 election “on character.”
No, really. But bear with me; the headline wasn’t quite accurate.
Trump could beat Kamala Harris, Lowry wrote, not by running on his character but by attacking hers. According to Lowry, you see, one of Trump’s “talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power.” Thus, he argued, Trump could hammer Harris into the ground if he called her “weak” enough times—50 times a day ought to do it, according to Lowry—and especially if he gave her a funny nickname, like the ones he managed to stick on “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and “Little Marco” Rubio.
All of this was presented in the pages of America’s newspaper of record, The New York Times.
What’s going on here?
His thesis is that many Republicans supported Trump provisionally: he supported their positions, despite his being morally reprehensible, because they thought he couldn’t win. They hated Trump, but they hated Democrats more. And so on. Political intricacies, where support for this or that politician has less and less to do with policy provisions. Or reality.
