Channeling Catholic convert Newt Gingrich, Charles C. W. Cooke, who thinks Trump is a lunatic and Joe Biden an asshole, spends a whole column telling us how Harris is an idiot

In Cooke's telling, the three constitute a "trilogy", which is about as implausible as it is witless.

The dismissive spleen is the point of all this, because no one listens to National Review anymore. "We are the arbiters, dammit", and Kamala Harris Is An Idiot.

On the contrary, Harris is a left wing, doctrinaire ideologue, who knows her creed but clearly isn't a theoretician. On the rare occasions when she has been confronted about its content, or with deviations from that creed, she has simply reasserted it in its defense, or stressed her good intentions, eschewing reason, like any good dyed in the wool Christian would quote from the catechism, not write a new one, and stress that you too can be saved. Join us joyful followers!

It is the primary reason that her campaign representatives are tasked with saying that her well known leftist positions are old hat, from 2019, burbling something about that was then, this is the new Kamala. Maintaining silence from her is the point, and all the true believers know she hasn't changed one whit. She knows it and they know it.

Her leftism must be shielded from public view.

Lying is the modus operandi of leftism. The media, who are all on her side to one degree or another, are thus tasked with not asking any uncomfortable questions, and are practiced in the art of lying by omission. They don't probe their candidate too deeply, while it's open season on the other side.

So no, Kamala isn't simply an idiot, any more than Joe Biden is simply an asshole, or Donald Trump simply a lunatic. This "idiot" still has a very good chance of winning, which says more about the country than it does about her.

These Cooke eruptions meanwhile are Papal Bans from the Church of National Review, which is one thing which hasn't changed much since the days when William F. Buckley Jr. founded the magazine, except in their effectiveness. NR is nothing if not an excommunication machine.

Against this NeverTrump catechist, Mr. Cooke, however, because that is who he is, one commenter actually broke through and nailed some theses on his Wittenberg door for a change.

One loves to see it.

 

 

Biden's radical, Supreme-Court-packing, power-grabbing proposals sound like somebody else entirely wrote them, because he once opposed them all quite publicly and vehemently

Is Biden another "Body Snatchers" president? 

 

Jonah Goldberg, Charles C. W. Cooke and NATIONAL REVIEW have it all wrong: The Founders' modest goal was to keep CHRISTIANS from killing each other

The Conservative Divide:

The post-liberals think that Enlightenment-based liberalism is the disease afflicting society because it has no answer for how people should live. They have a point: It is not a religion or moral philosophy. But it wasn’t meant to be. Instead, as National Review’s Charles Cooke rightly put it, classical liberalism was a system designed to keep people of different religions from killing each other.

This is hubris, but not American hubris. America wasn't about people of different religions, broadly conceived. To say otherwise remains the Big Lie of contemporary liberalism.

The Founders sought to create a unique home for mostly English Christian diversity, which meant Protestantism in relation to Catholicism, where its citizens would "assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them". 

Classical liberalism in America was as much a creature of Protestant Christianity as it was of the Enlightenment. It wouldn't have existed without the unique history and interaction of the two phenomena. By importing non-Christian religion into the Founders' equation as liberals do today, however, private hostility among Christians has been all but replaced by public hostility toward Christians. Some parties actually want to kill Christians just as much as some Protestants and Catholics once upon a time wanted to kill each other. Some think that's actually their plan.

It's been a recipe for disaster, and we're living it more and more.

It was a difficult enough game of chess before non-Christianity got introduced. The history of Protestant-Catholic relations in America proves that. But now it's 3-D chess, and very few can play that game, or want to.

But the last person who is going to reset this game board, touted by Goldberg, is the atheist George Will, an open borders libertarian who wants any and every immigrant who can get here to come here. Nor, frankly, will the Catholic enthusiasts at First Things Magazine be of much help. They are not inspired by American sensibilities, by definition, and represent Protestantism's fiercest theological opponents and are at the same time Catholic illegal immigrants' most practical defenders. Their loyalty is plain. All the ills of America and the West they blame on both the Enlightenment and Protestantism.

Both of these parties, ostensibly opposed to each other, seem to agree on one thing: reducing the Protestants to minority status.  

The hatred for what we were and what we are, coming from our supposed allies on the right, should astonish more Republican voters.

Jews now have Israel, thanks to the West. They should move there. Muslims have Arabia, and much more. We don't need them here. Catholics have Rome.

America is the once and future home of Protestantism. Everyone deserves a home.

"No free speech for fascists" is incoherent and Orwellian

Charles C. W. Cooke, here:

“No free speech for fascists” is an incoherent, almost Orwellian, position. Happily – and on a routinely “bipartisan” basis – the Supreme Court concurs.

Charles C. W. Cooke embraces the impotence of contemporary conservatism faced with Donald Trump

Where else but in National Review here, the locus of conservatism as ineffectual cult and ideology, which finds it impossible to revolt against anything except for the rebels:

As it happens, Trump’s critics do grasp the appeal [of revolt]. What they do not do, however, is act upon it in this manner. The temptation to deliver a bloody nose to one’s ideological enemies is a human and comprehensible one, by no means limited in its allure to the disgruntled part of the Republican primary electorate. But temptation and reasonable conduct are two separate things entirely, and they should always be treated as such. Can one understand the instinct that is on display? Sure. Can one look beneath the surface and do anything other than despair? I’m afraid not. Such as they are, the explanations provided by Trump’s discordant choir are entirely risible and easily dismantled. Great, you’re annoyed! But then what?

He's obviously proud of it. In 1776 he'd be called a royalist.

Was taking up arms against England "reasonable conduct"? Only a Catholic sensibility could fail to grasp the point. "But then what?" Well, a long war of several years, full of privations and without guaranty of success, followed by another long period of several years preparing for and culminating in a constitutional convention, during which local and colonial institutions were strong enough to support the absence of a centralized framework. The same is still true today, if only the locals more frequently told the federal courts to go to hell, as the Kentucky county clerk recently did.

By definition, an ideology ought to have some ideas in it which form a system, and should be, when all is said and done, unrealistic. That pretty much describes American conservatism since forever: unable to roll back anything, including the income tax, direct election of Senators, universal suffrage, the Federal Reserve Act, the Reapportionment Act of 1929, Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, Obamacare, and the enormous regulatory code, and unable to permanently refound the country on any constitutional principles, say, of limited government or separation of powers. Conservatism has a massive record of zero achievement while liberalism's untruths keep marching on like tanks in Tiananmen Square.

Trump's camp, meanwhile, thinks three modest things: the way to make America great again is to restore law and order by starting with enforcing its borders and putting an end to illegal immigration, to bring jobs back to Americans by reforming the tax code, developing energy independence, cutting wasteful spending and punishing unpatriotic corporations who profit from exporting jobs, and to rebuild the military to protect freedom at home and for our friends and allies abroad.

It takes near religious nuttery to call the proponent of these measures "a self-interested narcissist and serial heretic whose entirely inchoate political platform bends cynically to the demands of the moment."

To understand Trump, it takes a village . . . of Protestants.