NIXON ’68; TRUMP ’20: Rod Dreher on RNC’s new “Squad Goals: Anarchy” ad. “Note to readers — and let this be an evergreen — my quoting or posting an ad for any candidate or cause does NOT mean that I support that candidate or cause. I’m ‘quoting’ this ad here because it tells us a lot about the kind of campaign the Republicans are going to run in 2020:”
As Dreher writes (updating his post to admit he accidentally quoted Nixon’s ’72 slogan), “Golly, 2020 is gonna be lit. Trump is going to run as Nixon ’68, positioning the Democrats as the party of ‘acid, amnesty, and abortion.’ It lacks the alliteration of Tricky Dick’s line, but ‘open borders, socialism, and anarchy’ has a beat, and you can dance to it. Check out this 1968 Nixon campaign ad:”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEdtwQ8OguY
Read the whole thing. As in ’68, all the Democrats have to do is not be crazy, and they can’t even do that.™
That we had seen a demonstration of man at his best, no one could doubt — this was the cause of the event’s attraction and of the stunned, numbed state in which it left us. And no one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being — an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality. How many people would connect these two facts, I do not know.
* * * * * * * *
The response of Congress to Apollo 11 included some prominent voices who declared that NASA’s appropriations should be cut because the lunar mission has succeeded.(!) The purpose of the years of scientific work is completed, they said, and “national priorities” demand that we now pour more money down the sewers of the war on poverty.
If you want to know the process that embitters, corrupts, and destroys the managers of government projects, you are seeing it in action. I hope that the NASA administrators will be able to withstand it.
“The Apollo program was designed by men, for men. If we do not acknowledge the gender bias of the early space program, it becomes difficult to move past it.”
The Post’s Apollo 11 piece paints the team who put man on the moon as retrograde compared to the rest of the country. “The space program imagined the future. Yet the community of trim haircuts, shaved chins, white shirts (with contractors’ company badges emblazoned on their pockets) and pressed slacks, led by many veterans of World War II, seemed decades removed from the prevalent culture that was shaggier, angrier and sometimes stoned,” writes Heller.
Yes, because they were busy putting men on the moon, not sitting in the mud in Yasgur’s farm. Evidently, the latter is the more impressive accomplishment according to the Post. (But couldn’t the Post’s Sally Quinn have simply used a magic talisman to will the astronauts there?)
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The “Golden Quarter Century” of stunning progress ended in 1971. Weirdly, that’s when the regulatory explosion took off. And it’s when economic inequality started to get worse, so it’s a two-fer for the left.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ ON TRUMP AND THE DEMOCRATS: “This provoked spontaneity keeps the Democratic Party from presenting a unified front and communicating through carefully prepared spokesmen in controlled venues, a system that served them so well in the past. It also keeps them from getting their story straight. As Time Magazine notes ‘lying can be cognitively demanding. You must suppress the truth and construct a falsehood that is plausible on its face and does not contradict anything known by the listener, nor likely to be known. You must tell it in a convincing way and you must remember the story. This usually takes time and concentration, both of which may give off secondary cues and reduce performance on simultaneous tasks.’ Lying is hard work. In a rapid exchange people can accidentally tell the truth. . . . By forcing the pace Trump obviously hopes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her companions will blurt out their unvarnished reactions. In velocity veritas and it seems to be working.”
Which is disastrous when your strategy is built on lies.
Plus: “What a scene it presents. On the one hand are a group of people who think America is the source of all evil that should spend the rest of its historical existence atoning for mischief it has loosed in the world. On the other hand are a group who believe that for all its faults it is the greatest country in the world and that those want to destroy it should go back to Somalia. Whichever point of view you subscribe to (or neither) it’s hard to deny that these factions have existed for some time and are only now coming to grips. . . . In retrospect the psychological center of American politics must have been fraying for a long time.”
“Americans of conscience have a proud history of participating in boycotts to advocate for human rights abroad, including … boycotting Nazi Germany from March 1933 to October 1941 in response to the dehumanization of the Jewish people in the lead-up to the Holocaust,” the Minnesota Democrat’s resolution stated.
In response, as the Washington Examiner notes, “Rep. Lee Zeldin criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar for supporting a movement he said was linked to Hamas after she introduced a resolution supporting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement:”
“My colleague who just spoke used the frequent use of the words ‘honestly’ and ‘honest.’ Let’s just get to a lot of what is left out,” the 39-year-old New York Republican said Wednesday, referring to Omar, who had just given a speech during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing supporting a resolution promoting the BDS movement. “The BDS movment has not distanced itself from Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization. BDS supporters individually are not distancing themselves from Hamas either.”
The Jewish representative then went on to explain that a senior Hamas official has called for the death of all Jews last week.
Zeldin continued to criticize the resolution after the hearing in a statement: “[T]here are Members of this House who continue to prop up the BDS movement and blame Israel for all of its challenges. Israel is our best ally in the Middle East; a beacon of hope, freedom and liberty surrounded by existential threats. Shame on Rep. Omar for bringing her hateful twist of this reality today to the committee and this chamber.”
Exit question from Twitchy (also the source of the above screen shot): “Has anyone asked Chuck Schumer about this? Senate Minority Leader is on record calling BDS ‘anti-Semitism.’”
A lot of Christians are criticized for not being very compassionate to the poor. But you can’t say that about Larry DeManson, a local believer who is so committed to charity for those less fortunate than himself that he always votes for government to steal money from his neighbor and give it to the impoverished.
“The Bible calls us to take care of the poor,” he told reporters, “but that’s tough because it costs money. But then I was looking over at my neighbors and realized they have more money than I do—why not just vote for the government to confiscate their wealth and give it to the poor? Problem solved.”
DeManson no longer has a guilty conscience whenever he sees people in need.
“I don’t personally have to do anything,” he said. “The government does it for me.”
WHAT’S NEXT, AN ANCHOR-OF-THE-MONTH-CLUB? Norah O’Donnell Sinks as Anchor of ‘CBS Evening News.’ “You can’t pin all the blame on O’Donnell, since CBS’s news division has been an underperformer for a long time. Nevertheless, it’s telling that the well-known newsreader couldn’t generate even a one-night buzz, given all that positive press and one seriously hot-button issue (Trump’s tweets) for a headline story.”
OBAMA ADMIN CYBERSECURITY CHIEF: Peter Thiel is right about Google and China. “Clarke was responding to Thiel’s weekend accusations that Google works with the Chinese military and Thiel’s calls for the FBI and CIA to investigate.”
DECOUPLING: Apple to begin trial production of AirPods in Vietnam. “Apple will begin soon trial production of AirPods in Vietnam in an attempt to circumvent tariff fees imposed on Chinese-produced goods by Trump Administration.”
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