When Trump loses the Moonie Times, strange days are here.

[kpete]

The coronavirus catastrophe, and the Trump administration’s inept response to it, has betrayed a mindset that, while not strictly speaking liberal, can hardly be considered conservative.

...................

Conservatism has been associated with a hard-headed realism, if not outright dourness and pessimism. (There was a reason that John Derbyshire, the erstwhile National Review writer, titled his treatise on conservatism “We Are Doomed.”)

Yet when it came to the coronavirus, the president and his defenders embraced the kind of fact-free optimism that Voltaire satirized in “Candide” with the declaration by parody-Enlightenment philosopher Pangloss that we “live in the best of all possible worlds.”

On Jan. 24, as China locked down 60 million people to stop the spread of the newly emerging virus, Mr. Trump tweeted, “It will all work out well.” On Feb. 10, he said, “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” Later that month, while taking minimal action to prepare the country for the scourge, he promised, “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

Pangloss would have been proud.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/5/coronavirus-and-decline-conservative-sensibility/?utm_source=The+Bulwark+Newsletter&utm_campaign=faa40c954f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_04_06_01_24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f4bd64ac2e-faa40c954f-72795213

Link to tweet

?s=20

[The Magistrate]

1. Damn, Ma'am

There really ought to be pigs doing formation aerobatics overhead....


"Overthrow of a hated enemy is something to be for!!!"

[underpants]

2. Tough tarts Moonies. You were part of the foundation of what grew into Trump

Coulter
Drudge
David Brock - before he turned
Didn't that little douchebag Goldberg write for you at some point?


I do love when conservatives tried to paint themselves as rooted in history and so guiding by principles. The conservative parties in all their modern/Reagan/Tea bag post modern BS exists to advocate for two groups - racists and polluters. That's it.

[JHB]

3. Nonono, you don't get to disown this inconvenient truth

No ideological lifeboat for you guys.

You conservatives spent fifty years fostering a base that would give you the numbers to get elected and bend policy to your ideology. You leaned hard and heavy on pushing people's hot buttons, blowing kisses to their biases and playing footsie with their bigotries.

After all, you guys would never get a majority on a platform of deregulation and tax cuts for wealthy people, so doing that was just your "hardheaded realism" at work.

So was driving the moderate wing of the Republican Party, the Rockefeller Republicans, to extinction. Compromise was for Chamberlains, after all. A weakness. They were a pack of quislings, Republicans in name only.

And as it went on, the circle of what counted as a RINO steadily expanded, wider and wider, as any deviation from Conservative Correctness was pounced on and punished.

In 2001 a Republican administration came in showing open contempt for its Democratic predecessor. "The grown-ups", as they thought of themselves. They knew what was what better than anyone else, so they dismissed warnings of a potential threat that needed to be carefully monitored as shrill panic from people who were getting hysterical over small stuff. I mean, they shot multimillion-dollar missiles at a guy in a tent! Dopes!

So that threat was neglected, the resources devoted to it reallocated elsewhere...

...only to be blindsided by precisely what they'd been warned about and dismantled the capabilities to detect.

This is conservatism in action. You guys may not like the ugly truth, but the mirror doesn't lie. You just refuse to hold it in front of your face.

[cilla4progress]

4. It discredits conservative thought

across the board.

That would be a silver lining.

[SunSeeker]

5. They suggest conservatives were the voice of reason in a society. What a crock of shit.

And if course, they had to throw in a line about how crazy it was for President Johnson to try to end poverty.

But they wrapped that poison in the yummy goodness of a Trump takedown. Sigh.