It’s nice to be validated once in a while, especially when you know something is obviously true and yet it feels like nobody else is saying it.
And the clip I’m about to show you satisfies that need to a great extent. You’ll see it in just a moment.
But before we get there, a moment of clarity and, not quite optimism, but at least the meager appearance of a green shoot in the otherwise burned-out forest of our Obama Redux politics.
Namely, the results Tuesday night in New Hampshire, in which some 70 percent of the vote going to Nikki Haley as she lost a double-digits contest to Donald Trump did not come from Republican voters, tells you a lot of what you need to know about where we are.
There is a faction inside the Republican Party. It’s a remnant. It’s the “warmed-over corporatism” adherents, as Ron DeSantis described Haley.
I call them Bush Republicans. They’re defined by a number of things, and perhaps most prominent among them are a willingness to sell out our future to China, an abject submissiveness to Democrats on domestic policy and politics, an utter contempt for the GOP’s own voting base, and a pathological need to involve our military in conflicts (1) that aren’t in our national interests and (2) where there is no clear path to victory.
That’s how you get things like George H. W. Bush demanding in 1988 that America be a “kinder, gentler nation,” the zenith of our cultural hegemony and charitable spirit. Or his son George W. Bush bragging that he was a “compassionate” conservative, as though conservatism isn’t compassionate. Or Mitt Romney bragging that he was a “severe” conservative. Or John McCain pandering to his constituents about “building the damn wall” when he sabotaged efforts to do just that.
Or Mitch McConnell trashing the GOP’s Senate nominees as an excuse for their underperformance in 2022 — while poll after poll identified McConnell as the least popular politician in Washington, which would necessarily make him an albatross around the neck of every Republican Senate candidate.
Or any number of things Haley has said and done that have insulted the GOP’s voting base.
Bush Republicanism took over the GOP in 1988 and had utterly run the party into the ground by the time Donald Trump came along to apply the defibrillation paddles in 2016. It had embraced corporatism over capitalism (Republicans bristled when lefty Democrats would yell “Fascist!” at Bush, but they weren’t altogether wrong), utterly surrendered on cultural issues, was badly out of touch on foreign policy, and couldn’t stop playing Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters on every major political issue. It was a party even its most loyal supporters were struggling to support.
Trump rerouted the party and has given it life, mostly by making what I call the revivalist coalition, the people who were Reaganites, then were Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America people, then the Tea Party, and are now MAGA/America First folks, the active ingredient in the GOP. He’s done to the Republicans what Barack Obama did to the Democrats (and if you haven’t picked up your copy of Racism, Revenge and Ruin and read all about exactly what that was, then what on earth are you waiting for?), in that the GOP actually stands for something now.
The problem is that unlike the Obama Democrats, the Trump Republicans have not fully consolidated control over the GOP. They’ve not become the party’s establishment despite clearly boasting support from more than two-thirds of the party’s base.
Obama managed to turn a lot of old liberals into mouth-breathing leftists. Today’s Democrat Party is an Obamunist party; its ideology is strongly Marxist and maybe even Maoist. Its focus on culture and insistence on radical cultural aggressions without respite or limiting principle is right out of Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
But if the pre-Trump Bush Republicans ever similarly changed their spots, it sure didn’t take. Lindsey Graham, for example, enjoyed a brief and interesting moment as a based conservative, but it didn’t take long for him to stab the revivalists right in the spine. Graham couldn’t wait to bring an abjectly unpassable national 15-week abortion ban bill as soon as the Dobbs case was decided, something that would very obviously juice the pro-abortion crowd and lend Democrats a boost.
Because underperformance in Senate elections is the best way to ensure that Graham’s buddy McConnell remains the leader of the caucus. If there were a big blowout cycle that gave Republicans 55 Senate seats or more, why, there might just be enough new people that an appetite for fresh faces and fresh approaches might develop.
Can’t have that.
So here were are, and the polling is now continuously showing Trump in a fairly comfortable lead over Joe Biden despite everything that has been thrown at him. The RealClearPolitics average has Trump up on Joe Deadhorse by a 47.3 percent to 43.5 percent margin in the swing state polls, and the RCP average on Biden’s approval is mired below 40 percent.
There are lots of reasons why those numbers should look as catastrophic as they do. The most prominent of them is the horror at our border and Team Biden/Team Obama’s utter refusal to address it in any positive way.
And what does the Bush Republican crowd running the Senate GOP caucus do? Find a way to rehabilitate Biden on the issue by trying to do a grand bargain on the border and immigration as part of a deal that throws another $60 billion into the killing fields of Ukraine.
It would be unfathomable, except for the running pattern of this kind of timid political stupidity that the McConnell Gang has continued for going on two decades now.
And Ted Cruz has had enough.
1. Call This the Texas Flamethrower
This clip runs just under 10 minutes, but it’s worth every second. It’s Cruz going all Tsar Bomba on Mitch McConnell and the Senate GOP leadership team over the idiotic border deal they’re trying to cut with Chuck Schumer, and what emerges is a nuclear holocaust of brutal truth:
Lion Ted Cruz grabs mic in the US Capitol and singe-handely dismantles Joe Biden Administration over Border Crisis, BLASTS weak Republicans for working on Uniparty border deal:
"A STINKING PILE OF CRAP!"???? pic.twitter.com/JbfQLnoAf6
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 25, 2024
Look, I get it. Cruz is a little caustic but not in the fun, theatrical way Trump is, and so there’s a bit of a charisma deficit with him like there is with Ron DeSantis. So he’s more like your lawyer than your president.
But as your lawyer, he’s damn good. And that performance was pure gold. Maybe now we can start to have a conversation about why this party has to put up with the Mitch McConnell Sabotage And Surrender Gang running its efforts in the Senate.
It’s nice to finally see some real, spirited, public resistance to the discredited old guard. It’s not enough, but it’s a necessary precursor to the change we need.
2. Texas Resists; Red States Rally to the Cause
Good for Greg Abbott.
The Supreme Court’s ruling lifting a lower court injunction that prevented Border Patrol from cutting the razor wire down at Eagle Pass that makes it more difficult and dangerous for illegals to invade the country there doesn’t stop Texas from putting up new razor wire. But it does create a situation in which Texas is supposed to back down and let the Biden administration escort the migrants into the country and then process them for their journey into the welfare rolls, American citizenship, and Democrat voter registration.
But Abbott, Texas’ governor, isn’t backing down. He can’t, because the people who elected him don’t give a red hot damn about what the Supreme Court says. Texas has declared an invasion, and by constitutional right, it can repel invaders.
So it seems we’re going to have a big fight about this because every red-state governor looks to be standing with Texas. Here’s Louisiana’s newly inaugurated governor, Jeff Landry:
Louisiana stands with Texas.
Enough is enough. pic.twitter.com/MqC5x3RlOt— GovJeffLandry (@LAGovJeffLandry) January 25, 2024
The smart play, if you’re Biden, is to read the room and back down from this. The public is not on his side. A telltale sign will be if he continues pushing to hold that border open to all comers — if he does, it’s a good indication that the people actually making decisions in that administration don’t care about Biden’s political future.
Either that or they don’t think the future will be decided by elections. Which is scary, and it means those red-state governors need to make preparations for a whole lot more than just a hard stand on the border.
3. Vive La France!
The globalist/socialist project is a lot further along in Europe than it is in America, so much so that they’re attempting to destroy their own agricultural sectors in service to the dystopian Eat Ze Bugz climate change narrative that the ruling class on that continent is pushing.
Well, it’s a dead end for them.
It’s already produced Geert Wilders as the Dutch prime minister after the attempts to put Holland’s farmers out of business, and here’s what it’s producing in France:
???????? French Farmers have announced they’ll be blocking major highways to and around Paris tomorrow. Citizens are asked to join the protest.
If the roadblocks are successful, Paris will run out of food in ± 3 days. Talking about a good reminder where your food comes from. ???? https://t.co/f2mxGtN8vq
— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) January 25, 2024
That’ll get their attention. Although my guess is that the French government will come down a lot harder on the farmers than they ever did on the Muslim rioters burning cars in the banlieues. I hope I’m wrong about that.
4. The Venezuela–Guyana Thing
We’ll check in on this periodically, for reasons that will become more obvious next week.
The latest is that Venezuelan and Guyanan diplomats met Thursday in Brazil to discuss Venezuela’s claims on two-thirds of Guyana’s territory. You can imagine how that might go.
“Give us all the land or we’ll take it.”
“How about no?”
“How about a knuckle sandwich?”
The fact that this is even a possibility is a testament to the weakness of the Biden administration — who gave life to Venezuela’s claim on oil-rich Essequibo when it lifted its embargo on Venezuelan oil last year. And while we’re no closer to a hot war in South America, it doesn’t sound like we’re any closer to resolving this mess, either.
How come we don’t have anybody at those negotiations? It’s quite possibly our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who’ll have to go down there and protect the Guyanans if things get kinetic.
Naturally, you’ll hear absolutely nothing about this from the thoroughly uncurious legacy corporate media. Which also by the way has not bothered to inform the average American at all about the fact that a little closer to home the Dominican Republic is now building a wall across the island of Hispaniola to seal off its border with Haiti. What a bunch of racists, right? Well, er, ummm…
For a full explainer on the history, economics, and geography of the potential war between Venezuela and Guyana, I can recommend this:
5. The Novel Begins Soon
I mention the Venezuela–Guyana thing because I’m about halfway through the first draft of King of the Jungle, the new novel we’re going to serialize here at The American Spectator starting in a week or so. We’ll begin dropping a chapter or two each week, and, by the end of April, our readers will have access to the whole thing.
And if you’ve seen references to King of the Jungle in previous 5QT installments, you’ll know that the Venezuela–Guyana conflict, and the main characters getting enmeshed in it, is the backdrop to the story the novel tells. The book makes a few assumptions of facts not quite in evidence, but having discussed this with a few folks in the national security business, it’s not implausible at all that something could happen down there.
Of course, the main character of the story, a red-pilled billionaire who finds himself in an inconvenient position vis-á-vis a rather tyrannical and incompetent presidential administration here in the States, is maybe less plausible.
Or is it?
We’ll start to unravel this in a week or so.
READ MORE:
The Spectacle Ep. 63: Nikki Haley’s Throwback Politics Won’t Work in 2024
Gov. Abbott, Send Every Illegal to Washington, D.C., From Now On