Or a loser!
Following links from that cite can take you to this Vanity Fair piece:
…in which Graydon Carter claims that Trump is still bristling over being called a “short-fingered vulgrarian” a quarter of a century ago:
What’s really interesting, of course, is that the part of “short-fingered vulgarian” Trump objects to and is trying to disprove is the “short-fingered” part.
Future historians will see this issue of National Review as the last feeble cries of intellectually bankrupt and anti-national fusionist Kochservatism who sold out the Republic and her citizenry in favour of the billionaires and the warmongers.
Of course they’ll breath ammonium gas and have their eyes on the ends of long stalks also.
True, but not inconsistent with what I said. His supporters alone are not going to get him elected.
The major thing that’s changed is that Bush is turning out to be weak and witless, but Rubio seems to be emerging as a polished and articulate extremist, which makes him all the more scary. He’s the one poised to pick up the Cruz followers and probably many of Trump’s.
Well said, and that’s what I think, too. BobLibDem’s quote from Michael Medved is spot-on, too.
National Review isn’t quite the establishment, at least in this decade. And this isn’t really a take-down: it’s more like a marker, a line in the sand. Trump would govern disastrously, and NR wants to wash his hands of the guy. [1] Kevin Drum:
[INDENT]Every editor in the world knows that the easiest way to fill pages is to corral a bunch of writers from the ol’ office Rolodex and ask them each to write 300 words on some topic. Every editor also knows that unless there’s some serious adult supervision, these “symposiums” are usually flaccid and unpersuasive. Lots of contributors will repeat what others have said. They mostly just bang something out instead of working on tight pieces that make crisp points. Some of them just toss out a few bromides and email it off.[/INDENT] Drum continues that if they really wanted to rip Trump a new one they would make a list of weaknesses that would even worry his supporters (e.g. Trump was a lousy businessman, but a great sales guy) and assign one writer to each weakness. Something like that would be taken seriously. A baker’s dozen of 300 word chin strokers will not, least of all by the GOP base.
Trump has real vulnerabilities. Yet none in the GOP establishment are willing to pull out the napalm.
[1] Worse, Trump isn’t ideologically reliable. So he’s neither especially electable nor especially attractive to the conservabeast.
Brad DeLong, borrowing from Jeet Heer: Bad blood between Frankenstein and his Monster!
“To be enthusiastically for Limbaugh and Palin… and then to be against Trump… somehow does not compute…”
How is *National Review * discredited by opposing Trump? I would say it is pretty much the opposite - a GOP that would nominate Trump is the sellout.
Regards,
Shodan
Does not compute indeed.
As with most instances of drunken one-upsmanship AKA “Hey y’all, watch this!”, it’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt. Seems like the laugh riot is almost over and the hurt is approaching rapidly.
They’ve been discredited by the past generation of American history, where Republican policies have served to alienate and impoverish the middle and working classes of this country. If you don’t believe me look at the rise in income inequality, the decline in community ties, rising death rates for the white working-class, and so forth.
What does that have to do with repudiating Trump, even if it were true?
Regards,
Shodan
I beg to differ with you, brother.
Now it IS true that Iowa and NH don’t look like the other 48 states. This is particularly relevant on the Dem side, where a candidate can win both states by mobilizing a lot of white liberals. (Bernie Sanders just might win both states, and it still wouldn’t pull him even with Hillary.)
But it’s a little different on the GOP side, where Iowa and NH represent nearly polar opposite extremes of the GOP. NH is one of the most secular and moderate states in terms of its GOP electorate, while Iowa is a state that can most easily be won by rallying extremely conservative evangelicals. If you win one, it indicates that you’ve got one end or the other of the party behind you. If you win both, you’ve managed to unite both extremes behind you, and are going to be hard to beat.
But oddly enough, Iowa and New Hampshire, taken together, are extremely predictive for both parties. Candidates for the past 40 years have had to win at least one* to win their party’s nomination, and so a candidate that’s won both wins the nomination.
One of these days, this pattern is going to fail, like all patterns that aren’t due to direct causation. Particularly, per the above, Bernie could hit a brick wall after winning both Iowa and New Hampshire. And this pattern has been successfully tested three times since I originally discussed it on this board in 2007: by both parties in 2008, and by the GOP in 2012.
*With one exception that doesn’t exactly contradict the rule: Bill Clinton in 1992, the year there effectively was no Iowa on the Dem side, as everyone else skipped the Hawkeye State and let Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) have an uncontested win.
QFT. I’ll add that this can happen because the GOP has become almost completely a post-policy party, to the extent that their actual policies aren’t really much more complicated than slogans: Cut taxes! Get rid of regulations! Give us our guns! No Meskins! No handouts for Those People! Bomb the shit out of this week’s Bad Guys! No more persecution of poor helpless Christians! Take back America / make America great again!
When policy is watered down to that level, and they all agree on 95% of it anyway, it boils down to repartee and dick-swinging. And Trump is really quite good at both. But he’s just the logical extreme of a party that is very good at politics and winning elections, but doesn’t just suck at policy, it’s abandoned it.
Your first mistake is using the term “everyone”. Everyone did not think Trump would simply monkey around in front of a camera. Everyone did not assume that Trump’s would sink. What Trump’s rise in the polls has proven is that the pundits are wrong and that they don’t actually understand what the voters want.
Trump draws larger crowds than any other candidate. The pundits chose to ignore that. Trump says that Muslim immigration should be halted UNTIL THE U.S. GOVERNMENT CAN DO A BETTER JOB OF SCREENING THEM. The pundits say Trump wants to deny all Muslims access to the U.S… The pundits lied.
The National Review editors don’t seem to understand that the voters are sick and tired of the words and actions of the same old, run-of-the-mill political candidates. The voters are sick and tired of the same old pundits telling them what to think. It appears that the NR editors and authors are the ones who are out of touch with reality.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are currently leading in the polls. The pundits are too full of themselves to understand that the voters outnumber the pundits and it’s the voters who are going to decide this election.
He’s not a good salesman. He’s a swaggering cunt. That level of confidence is attractive, but I’m pretty sure Trump couldn’t make a living selling cars or timeshares, if you stripped his fame and wealth away. He’s so ignorant that he has no self-doubt. Which is why dumb people think he should be in charge. They assume he knows what he’s doing.
A Trump follower doesn’t need to hear how he’ll “make America great again” they just trust that Trump will do it.
If the GOP base weren’t composed of ignorant, misinformed, angry people, Trump would have no success at all. He’s just a key that fits the lock of the GOP base. It’s not that he’s some brilliant strategy expert, he’s just resonating with the degenerate yokels that vote in GOP primaries.
So your prediction is that Trump will get the nomination and then, no doubt, move on to win the general election and the presidency? Please say yes! That would be so fine a prediction on so many levels! 
Keeping civil war refugees out until they can be thoroughly screened will effectively lock them out entirely. Documents? Well, good, how do you know they are not forged? We’re already expecting the Bad Guys to do that, so how do you tell? Address a letter to the crater and rubble that used to be the Hall of Records?
Name one election that he’s won.
I was referring just to the Republican history, and I’ll argue that the history you gave in that other thread supports my case. Saying that Iowa and New Hampshire are predictive because one extreme or the other wins would be laughable in any other context. “Buy my two $100 million market newsletters. One says Apple will dominate the market, the other says Microsoft will. And one is always right!” The only winners are Iowa and New Hampshire. Bah and humbug.
Factual correction: Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders nationally and consistently: 2016 Democratic Presidential Nomination Polls | RealClearPolling
Clinton generally leads in Iowa, though polling there is trickier due to the caucus system. The 1/15-1/20 CNN poll is an outlier. RealClearPolitics - Election 2016 - Iowa Democratic Presidential Caucus
Sanders does lead Clinton in New Hampshire, unsurprisingly as Sanders is a fixture in the next-door Vermont: RealClearPolitics - Election 2016 - New Hampshire 2016 Democratic Primary