Another good insight from Richard Fernandez.
Otto von Bismarck said, There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.
Is it true? I think we may find out, especially if Hillary Clinton, in spite of all her crimes and corruption, is elected President.
Shimon Peres said, I said, “America will win no matter what you do.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because they are lucky, and you are not.”
Is that true ? I wonder.
The last eight years have been one unending liberal search for the Great Man of history, the belief that “history can be largely explained by the impact of ‘great men’, or heroes … who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence, wisdom, or political skill utilized their power in a way that had a decisive historical impact.”
Liberals thought they had it in Obama 2008. They think they have it in the historic First Woman, Hillary in 2016. They may even think they have it in Kerry. Steve Clemons of the Atlantic asked America’s top diplomat in the context of his diplomatic record: what exactly is the “John Kerry secret sauce?” And Kerry patiently explained that it was coming to an agreement with rival negotiators. “You have to figure out whether you can find in the adversaries a meeting of the minds on any of the interests and/or values.”
This, I assume, is why they think negotiation can solve all differences.
The New York Times Magazine thinks it knows the answer.
The conservative media has always been a playground for outsize personalities with even more outsize political ambitions. The National Review founder William F. Buckley fashioned much of the intellectual genetic code of the Reagan Revolution, while also writing fringe groups like the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement and, for good measure, running for mayor of New York against the liberal Republican John Lindsay. In 1996, the former Nixon media consultant Roger Ailes brought his attack-dog ethos to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel and built the network into a transformational power in Republican politics before his fall this year amid accusations of sexual harassment.
But alongside the institution-builders like Buckley and Ailes, the conservative-media landscape has also produced a class of rowdy entrepreneurs who wield their influence in more personal, protean ways. The godfathers mostly came to power in the 1990s: Clinton-administration antagonists like Rush Limbaugh, who began broadcasting nationally in 1988 and became talk radio’s hegemonic power in the Clinton years, and Matt Drudge, who started his pioneering Drudge Report online in 1996.
“Hegemonic Power?” Talk radio was the only alternative to left wing news media, especially the New York Times. All other media outlets were in the hands of the left.
What does George Will think ?
Recently I visited Will at his office, a three-story Georgetown brick rowhouse erected in 1811. Its walls are covered with framed photographs, several of them depicting the writer in his youth alongside Reagan and other titans of his former party. The dean of conservative pundits, now 75, wore a crisp pinstripe shirt and gray slacks, his customary owlish Mona Lisa expression a bit tighter than usual, owing to the subject matter. Will told me that he cast his first vote in 1964, for Barry Goldwater. He voted for the Republican candidate in every succeeding presidential election, until now.
“I don’t use the word ‘frightening’ often,” he told me. “But it’s frightening to know this person” — Trump — “would have the nuclear-launch codes. The world is getting really dangerous. His friend Mr. Putin is dismantling a nation in the center of Europe. Some trigger-happy captain of a Chinese boat with ship-to-ship missiles might make a mistake in the next three years near the Spratly Islands. All kinds of things can go wrong. And the idea that this guy will be asked to respond in a sober, firm way? My goodness.”
He seemed genuinely despondent. “Given that, could you see yourself urging your readers to vote for Hillary Clinton?” I asked.
Will’s lips pursed slightly. “Well,” he said, “it’s clear from everything I’ve written that I think she’d be a better president.
Well, that determines it, then. Or does it ? How about this ?
Did Trump beget all of this? If so, what begot Trump? Erickson argued that the fault lay with Beltway Republicans. “They’ve broken so many promises,” he said. “They promised to defund the president’s immigration plan. They promised to defund Obamacare. They promised to fight the president on raising the debt limit. At some point, the base of the party just wants to burn the house down and start over.”
That is pretty close to how I feel. I have had serious reservations about Trump.
However, he seems to have struck a chord with the American public that elite disapproval only stokes.
We will what happenes.