The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Carly Cut His Balls Off’?

Posted on | September 24, 2015 | 137 Comments

Certainly, many Fox News viewers must have been shocked Wednesday night by Rich Lowry’s comments to Megyn Kelly:

“Look Trump attacks everyone but she’s become a much bigger target. And I think part of what’s going on here is that last debate. Let’s be honest, Carly cut his balls off with the precision of a surgeon.”

Fox is becoming the anti-Trump network, as Trump himself has noticed and, whatever its effect on Trump’s campaign, I’m not sure that is a wise marketing strategy for Fox. The populist anti-Washington “mad as hell” voters who like Trump are a huge part of Fox’s viewership. Nor are the Trump voters a negligible component of the electorate:

Americans are “fed up” with politics, suspect the wealthy are getting an unfair edge, and think the country is going in the wrong direction, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll that lays bare the depth and breadth of the discontents propelling outsider candidates in the Republican presidential field.
The survey shows that 72 percent of Americans think their country isn’t as great as it once was—a central theme of front-runner Donald Trump’s campaign. More than a third prefer a presidential candidate without experience in public office.
Three of the four candidates leading the Republican field fit that description: Trump, the first choice of 21 percent of registered Republicans and voters who say they lean that way, followed by neurosurgeon Ben Carson with 16 percent, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush with 13 percent, and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina with 11 percent.

My suggestion last night on Twitter:

People need to calm down about this primary campaign. We are still four months away from the Iowa caucuses. If Trump is your favorite candidate, OK. If you hate Trump, that’s OK, too. But there’s no point in conservatives denouncing their own friends and amping up the all-or-nothing rhetoric as if nothing else mattered.

Six months from now, in late March, a lot of people are going to disappointed that their favorite didn’t get the nomination, but so what? As long as the eventual Republican nominee wins in November 2016, conservatives generally will be happy, while liberals generally will be freaking out in paroxysms of rage and despair.

Imagine the disconsolate tears of liberals when Hillary loses. Be happy.




 

Category: Fox News, Media Bias, Republicans

Comments

137 Responses to “‘Carly Cut His Balls Off’?”

  1. MohammedTheTeddyBear
    September 24th, 2015 @ 8:43 am

    In the first place, Shrillary! 2016 will be POTUS in 2017, as declared by the $oro$/MSNBC/NYT/CNN media-machine. Secondly, !Jeb! 2016 has been selected by the GOPe/Fox combine to be their Designated Loser and Reason Why We Can’t Stop the Dems by Boehner and McConnell. Thirdly, you will assimilate peacefully, Comrade, as the Nation needs taxpayers to pay for the voter-slaves, else they’ll riot….

  2. Locutor
    September 24th, 2015 @ 8:48 am

    The point is the establishment has been ignoring the base and picking the nominees for us. We conservatives hated McCain but held our noses. We distrusted Romney and stayed home. Now they’re shoving Jeb at us and trying to destroy the only outsider who has a shot at it. Carly is an insider and she’s being propped up to bleed support from Trump. The whole loyalty oath they made a huge deal about and made him sign? Pataki the other week said he’d ignore it.

    So, no. If the nominee is just another insider and they screwed the will of the people – the base – yet again the party is over. The deck is stacked. They fiddled with the primary rules to get Jeb the nomination. They fiddled with the campaign finance rules to make sure the super-PACs were running the show, and the candidates ‘can’t’ co-ordinate with them, so who exactly gets to run them? The insider money men. (Brad Dayspring was pulled in for Scott Walker’s PAC, why many of us wrote him off early.)

    IF Donald implodes and loses on his own then fine. IF they use the entire media apparatus and the beltway insiders to tear him down, just like they tried with Reagan, then no. I’m not a slave to the GOP, I can and will leave the plantation any time I want.

    For a very well documented explanation go to TheConservativeTreehouse. They have a LOT of information but everything will become clear.

    Oh, and the Dem nominee will be Biden because Hillary is too risky now and Bernie will definitely be torpedoed.

    It’s one big DC cabal.

  3. daialanye
    September 24th, 2015 @ 9:05 am

    “Everyone” attacks Trump because Trump attacks everyone. He initiates attacks but immediately claims to be the victim when his target either counter-attacks or merely goes into a defensive mode. I see no convincing evidence that Fox has gone anti-Trump simply because they invite people like Lowry. Ratings are their main interest, and certainly the other networks are more openly anti-Trump.

    Whether it’s wise for his opponents to attack Trump is another question, since even the mildest of comments (see Ben Carson) is super-hyped by a media that is wild to create controversy. Cruz and Santorum are smart enough to realize that anti-Trump comments simply give the man more publicity.

    As for Fiorina specifically, she’s simply the sharper, slimmer, better-prepared version of Trump. In essentials, though, they’re both sarcastic resume-bloating narcissists who would rather prate slogans than lay out a coordinated set of policies. (NTTAWWT, of course.)

  4. CrustyB
    September 24th, 2015 @ 9:10 am

    Like him or not, the whole “Trump thing” will go away well before the Primary Election. He’s a Romney RINO which means conservative Republicans will not support him. Plus, the press and establishment GOP will never let him be the candidate. And they’re the ones who control who we vote for, not us.

    As far as defeating Hillary goes, she’s not going to be the DNC candidate. Democrats are through masquerading as anything but Socialists and Bernie will be their guy.

    Ted Cruz is the most suitable man on the planet to be the next POTUS which means he’ll have to sit out the next election, as will I.

  5. Finrod Felagund
    September 24th, 2015 @ 9:19 am

    Sixty percent of GOP voters polled hate Trump. Fox for once is a bit ahead of the curve here.

  6. kbiel
    September 24th, 2015 @ 9:47 am

    The FoxNews-Trump “feud” is exactly what both parties want. They are both benefiting from it. Both are very familiar with “reality” TV and how to get people to watch. Are there commentators brought in who are truly spiteful against Trump? Sure. They are being used.

    All these contretemps are what I call producer moments. You see it on the Discovery shows, which I am guilty of watching on occasion. Somebody on a fishing boat or at a gold mine will completely overreact and pitch a fit like a middle school girl. We all know that people in businesses like that don’t behave that way regularly. If they did then nothing would get accomplished. No, they do it because there are cameras there and a producer telling them to pump up the drama to boost ratings. So something that would have been a 5 minute admonishment in a closed door office with both parties continuing on afterwards, becomes a school yard fight.

  7. Art Deco
    September 24th, 2015 @ 10:08 am

    The point is the establishment has been ignoring the base and picking the nominees for us.

    Nobody picked any nominees for you in 2012, 2008, 2000, 1996, 1992, or 1988. It a reasonable guess that about a third of the Republican electorate will cast a ballot for someone with whose name they are familiar, provided that person is not ‘divisive’, so you get last time’s runner up time after time (except when they have astringent political principles, as Messrs Buchanan and Santorum do). The establishment is a problem on Capitol Hill. The problem in primary contests would be donors and vacuous people in the primary electorate.

    One might also remark that when you scrape away the ambitious pols to whom issues and programs are commonly instrumental, the people who compete well in Republican primaries are demonstration candidates, not working politicians. See Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, ‘Steve’ Forbes, Alan Keyes, and Ron Paul. Working politicians who are basically principled do run, but the only two who’ve scored well in a generation are Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, neither of whom are beloved of combox denizens.

  8. Art Deco
    September 24th, 2015 @ 10:12 am

    There was a family of wrestlers named Hart of whom the two youngest were fixtures on World Wrestling Entertainment. Their was supposedly a feud between the two brothers which incorporated their mother dabbing her eyes at wrestling matches. Supposedly, it was all cooked up by promoters and the brothers were actually quite congenial. There’s something about this which reminds one of that.

  9. Scoob
    September 24th, 2015 @ 10:27 am

    You should check out Conservative Treehouse. It is not a Republican thing or a Democratic thing . . . it’s an Establishment thing. And the Establishment doesn’t care who wins if the respective nominees are Clinton and Bush. And there are candidates in the GOP primary running interference for Bush to get just that outcome on the GOP side.

  10. HamOnRye
    September 24th, 2015 @ 10:28 am

    You say “But there’s no point in conservatives denouncing their own friends and amping up the all-or-nothing rhetoric as if nothing else mattered”

    But this is genuinely the crux of this whole issue. Are the talking heads from inside the beltway actually conservatives? If so what exactly have they conserved? From where I stand it seems they have made a damn good living pretending to be conservative while rolling over for the Democratic party platform.

    Trump wouldn’t have made it past the first debate if it were not otherwise.

  11. kbiel
    September 24th, 2015 @ 10:53 am

    Wait? What?!? Are you telling me the wrastling is fake? That all the between match drama was scripted?!? Shut your mouth!

  12. Achilles
    September 24th, 2015 @ 11:22 am

    Fox News has the same problem that until now was exclusive to CNN and MSNBC. They have to decide between ratings and ideology. With McCain or Romney the nominee they didn’t need to choose. With Trump way out ahead the decision finally comes. And like the other networks they have chosen ideology. And Fox is run and staffed largely by progressives. Inside the beltway establishment scum who would be lobbyists if they couldn’t get in front of a camera. The progressive elite will rule or we will be free. There is no middle ground. No compromise. There will be no de-escalation. There will be only war. War to the knife.

  13. Quartermaster
    September 24th, 2015 @ 11:50 am

    Yes, alas. I well remember my years of enjoying wrestling on Portland, OR TV in the 5th and 6th grade. I well remember my disillusionment when I found out there was a script and that my hero was written out the championship script.
    I’ve never recovered from the shock.

  14. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 24th, 2015 @ 11:57 am

    http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HIckb3j-sAg/VgL1CP8PeGI/AAAAAAAAzT4/8qMycVvZq9c/s1600/The%2BDonald%2Band%2BMegyn.PNG

    Who did Rich think he was speaking to: Sandra Dee “Sandy” Megyn or Naughty “Sandy” Megyn?

  15. Quartermaster
    September 24th, 2015 @ 12:00 pm

    There is some merit in Trump’s accusations against Fox. Fox has been slowly sliding left for years and I’m not surprised at some of the hijinks O’Reilly and Kelly have engaged in. Both are narcissists and simply a pimple on the posterior of the news business.
    From a biz stand point, Fox is not acting wisely and they have already chosen a side in the battle. They are establishment through and through and they will sacrifice ratings for their ideology. The extent of that sacrifice is the only question at this point.
    The specifics Trump has published on his positions have been quite good. There are those who feel trump has had an epiphany and sees where the country is going and is willing to fight to reverse the course. A man can change, whether he actually has only time will tell.

  16. Quartermaster
    September 24th, 2015 @ 12:02 pm

    Just remember: Rich Lowry is a coward.

  17. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    September 24th, 2015 @ 12:17 pm

    We have always been at war with East Asia (insert: Trump, Fox, etc.).

  18. JosephBleau
    September 24th, 2015 @ 12:25 pm

    I look forward to Lowry’s assessment after the next debate about how Trump pimp slapped Carly, or maybe how he absolutely bent her over and had his way with her.

  19. Matt_SE
    September 24th, 2015 @ 12:25 pm

    FOX News went mostly establishment a while ago. This can be seen by their giving the odious Karl Rove a platform from which to spout. Rove is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the Konservative Konsultancy Klass, and is the instigator of many of our party’s present troubles.

  20. Matt_SE
    September 24th, 2015 @ 12:35 pm

    That sounds rather decisive. You have previous history to relate? I’ll bet it’s entertaining.

  21. Treacher: #NotAllMuslims Publish Hit List Of Bloggers | Regular Right Guy
    September 24th, 2015 @ 12:40 pm

    […] ‘Carly Cut His Balls Off’? […]

  22. Kaiser Derden
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:04 pm

    the thing is if you don’t attack Trump with insults he doesn’t attack you back … and that is the key, Trump only counter punches … and quite hard I might add … you’ll notice no attacks by Trump on Cruz or Carson … why ? they stick to policy and avoid insults …

  23. Art Deco
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:14 pm

    You should check out Conservative Treehouse.

    The Last Refuge / Conservative Treehouse has some ordinary participants, but the place is thick with the psychological descendants of the John Birch Society and Penn Jones. You have people quite persuaded that Barack Obama never attended Columbia University, that Barack Obama was born abroad (I think there are a couple of lines of speculation there), that the entire GOP nomination contest is stage-managed by some shadowy cabal who could have guaranteed the nomination for Jeb Bush had not their paladin Trump ridden to the rescue.

    The principal contributor (“Sundance”) has been known to get quite shirty at even minor expressions of skepticism. In years past, I’ve marveled at his sources. The thing is, when he writes as if he has inside knowledge of the workings of an obscure police department in small town Mississippi, it kind of gives the game away that what he was writing about Miami was a coolly-crafted derivative of his imagination.

    Read these people for entertainment, not instruction.

  24. Art Deco
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:25 pm

    Lowry’s stewardship of National Review merits criticism, but I wonder if the economy of magazine publishing has simply destroyed the capacity of publications to recruit capable people to make opinion journalism their occupation. The last wave of capable starboard commentators working through conventional channels appeared ca. 1998. Other than Megan McArdle and Ross Douthat (neither of whom ever had much to do with the conservative press), you have not had any since then. They run from the bland (Ramesh Ponnuru) to the pathetic (the trio of Daniel Foster, Robert ver Bruggen, and Jason Lee Steorts at NR). Lowry’s deputy (Steorts) is despised by the magazine’s readership who have an opinion about him and every contribution to the online edition he makes is greeted with contempt on the comment boards; no one ever defends him (and, looked at dispassionately, he never says anything anyone would want to read). You look over at the online edition of Commentary, and you discover that only one of their regulars is under the median age for the American workforce and that the modal contributor is a supremely annoying fellow named Tobin who is 67 years old. The Public Interest and Policy Review have ceased publication. I think The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard and The American Spectator may still be in satisfactory shape. For now.

  25. Art Deco
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:30 pm

    The whole pro-Trump vs. anti-Trump thing: Can everybody just de-escalate
    that and focus on how the Democrats who are ruining America?

    OK. The thing is, the sectarianism to which you’re referring did not start with the Trump thingy. It has been around for some time directed at various figures who are flawed in various ways (as working politicians tend to be). John McCain, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Mike Huckabee have all been the recipients of it. (The snob-appeal version of this would be hating on Sarah Palin. Charles CW Cooke, I’m looking at you).

  26. Scoob
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:32 pm

    The site definitely is pro-Trump. That said, they said that the media, particularly Fox, would be promoting Fiorina and Rubio. And at least the clips that I have seen, that appears the case.

    Trump is not the “savior”. But if the candidate is from the Establishment, how does that move the ball for the conservative cause? When the GOP took over Congress, they have defunded ObamaCare, Executive Amnesty, and Planned Parenthood, and have passed budgets. Ooops my bad. They have done none of those things. And if we get Bush, my concern is that he will “cross” the aisle to work with Democrats and undermine conservatives, just like McConnell and Boehner do now.

  27. Matt_SE
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:33 pm

    Then, there was also the firing of Derbyshire (who I never had the chance to read, but hear about secondhand), and the “parting of ways” with Mark Steyn.
    Shameful.

  28. Quartermaster
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:34 pm

    You weren’t around these parts during the defenestration of the Derb were you?

  29. unusr1
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:37 pm

    Actually if you watch Trump, he won’t preemptively attack, but will respond aggressively when attacked.

    I doubt ratings are the main concern of most media owners. For example, there are plenty of profitable lines of business, but mega-tycoons will gladly buy up newspapers and magazines that hemorrhage money. The main benefit is that they get to push their ideology on the public.

  30. Art Deco
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:38 pm

    They favor Trump, but that’s not their signature. Their signature is their fanciful conception of the matrix in which Trump and the other candidates are working.

    There is a limit to what the Republican caucus can accomplish. The trouble is, they do not wish to accomplish what they can accomplish re the administration and seem otherwise most intent on being shills for an odious Chamber of Commerce lobbyist named Donohue. Perfect errand boys for the Krony Kapitalist nexus.

  31. unusr1
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:39 pm

    What exactly is a “RINO” in an era when mainstream republicans support national suicide through amnesty, and the destruction of traditional values by promoting “gay” “marriage” and pedophilia?

  32. Matt_SE
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:39 pm

    Nope. Why was Derb a good columnist? I hear about the episode, but what made the readers get so angry he was fired?

  33. daialanye
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:39 pm

    The people behind the “outsider” phenomenon, and particularly the Trump aspect of it, are Boehner and McConnell plus their enablers. The outsiders successes are reactions to the multiple establishment surrenders to Obama, Holder and Reid.

    The establishment has been with us since the Dewey/Taft days if not earlier.

  34. daialanye
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:40 pm

    As usual you allow your biases to color your perceptions.

  35. Art Deco
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:42 pm

    John Derbyshire had been begging to be given the gate for years. Its a reasonable inference that Lowry only employed him as a diversion (rather like the columns that Cathy Seipp and Meghan Cox Gurdon used to write for NR, bar that they were funnier). In 2006, he published in the New English Review a vitriolic attack on the writings of one of the magazine’s staff editors (R. Ponnuru). For some strange reason, he was not cut loose then. By 2012, he wasn’t worth the embarrassment anymore. If you’re going to criticize Lowry on that, I’d take him to task for being willing to tolerate gross insults directed at anti-abortion constituents and unwilling to tolerate mild insults directed at blacks and their patrons.

  36. Art Deco
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:48 pm

    I doubt they were. Derbyshire is a mildly amusing alt-right denizen, specifically the alt-right segment obsessed with IQ tests. Some of the perspective he could bring to bear was instructive, as someone who grew up in the post-war British working class could be when confronting some of the inane discussion of social policy in this country. As time went on, he grew more and more fixated on certain hobby horses (“HBD” in Unzworld, crummy popular science stuff). The last straw was an article he wrote for Taki’s providing an amusing counterpoint to the humbug about “The Talk” some people fancy black parents give their kids so the kids won’t be killed by cops. Most of it was unobjectionable, but some of it was…asking for it.

  37. Art Deco
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:49 pm

    I think Steyn may have been fed up trying to deal with NR’s legal counsel and Lowry’s insipid deputy. The publisher slapped down Lowry’s deputy publicly in the online edition and made clear Steyn was a valued contributor.

  38. Art Deco
    September 24th, 2015 @ 1:54 pm

    Neither Boehner nor McConnell are descendants of Dewey, who was a prominent Republican at a time when programmatic preferences were not a strong vector in differentiating Democrats and Republicans. Dewey was a straightforward mugwump. The only members of Congress who fit that description after 1982 were relics, and they’d nearly all disappeared by 1993. Boenher and McConnell are shills of various business interests and do not seem to care about much else.

  39. Art Deco
    September 24th, 2015 @ 2:02 pm

    The term RINO is dumb and should be retired.

    The thing is, the Republican leadership is largely drawn out of the metropolitan professional managerial bourgeoisie (think Rob Portman or Kelly Ayotte) and when they’re not (as Boehner is not), they still hang around with those types all the time. “Everyone” they associate with in the flesh is for amnesty or caving on the gay crap or in a state of crippling anxiety when ever someone yaps ‘raaaaacist’. Some of them who have serious intellectual equipment (e.g. Ted Cruz) think in counter-point to their social matrix, but that has to be atypical, as it is in mundane life. The salesmen and skilled workers who demonstrate at abortion clinics are no one they know.

  40. jwb7605
    September 24th, 2015 @ 2:22 pm

    Carly has said several times “I think presidential campaigns test character under pressure and over time”.
    Trump’s response(s) to Rich Lowry highlight the substance of that remark.
    As frustrating as Fox News is, boycotting them and propping up CNN, MSNBC etc, and then calling for FCC fines on Lowry does not rank up there with adult, presidential behavior in my view.

  41. Quartermaster
    September 24th, 2015 @ 2:42 pm

    Physician, heal thyself!
    As I have said repeatedly, I’m no Trump aficionado. OTOH, you haven uniformly against the man. I’d say biases are more of a problem for you than for me and I certainly have made no claim of being free from bias. If I have biases, it would be angst the man, not for him.

  42. Quartermaster
    September 24th, 2015 @ 2:45 pm

    The article Derb had posted was a parody of “the talk” black men give their sons. Lowry went off half cocked and made an utter fool of himself calling Derb a racist, when Derb was nothing of the sort. It was exactly the sort of thing you would expect from a man that is a moral coward and afraid of CHORFs and SJWs.
    If you plug “Rich Lowry is a coward” into a search engine you will find a lot of the results point to this blog.

  43. Quartermaster
    September 24th, 2015 @ 2:53 pm

    Derbyshire dealt with the accusation you make on the supposed vitriolic attack you reference. The target of that “vitriol” is still on good terms with Derb even after that review. Derb was hardly an embarrassment to NR anymore than Steyn was. NR lost a lot with the departure of Dervb, and Steyn just got disgusted with Lowry and the behavior of Lowry’s idiotic minions.
    The results of Buckley’s years as a doddard are still haunting NR and it is unlikely to recover from it.

  44. CrustyB
    September 24th, 2015 @ 2:56 pm

    Fair point. I prefer the term CINO, since Conservative is what the average Republican is not. Like Michelle Malkin says, I’m not a Republican, I’m a Conservative.

  45. Quartermaster
    September 24th, 2015 @ 2:57 pm

    There is no segment of the alt-right obsessed with IQ tests. That’s simply a statement generated by your preening foolishness.

  46. Quartermaster
    September 24th, 2015 @ 2:58 pm

    Nah. RINO is a very good descriptive term and will continue to be used.

  47. Ilion
    September 24th, 2015 @ 4:05 pm

    Because — though Derb is frequently an ass, and like every other ‘atheist’ in the world is simultaneously irrational with respect to “God questions” and superciliously convinced of his rationality — what he wrote is observably true.

  48. Ilion
    September 24th, 2015 @ 4:09 pm

    Well, sure, scratch ’em and they surely bleed leftist; but everyone considers ’em rightist.

  49. Ilion
    September 24th, 2015 @ 4:15 pm

    “You have people quite persuaded that Barack Obama never attended Columbia University, that Barack Obama was born abroad …”

    Yeah, I know what you mean — people who believe what Obama *initially* claimed about his birth are surely evil, and certainly when compared to those who believe what Obama *subsequently* claimed about his birth (while never supplying any proof).

    Then again, it isn’t *where* he was born that is the problem; that’s only the distraction.

  50. Wombat_socho
    September 24th, 2015 @ 4:22 pm

    Keyfabe is real. Habeeb it!