The Other McCain

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

Attention Republicans: Stop Scapegoating Others for Your Own Personal Failures

Posted on | December 5, 2019 | 1 Comment

Ted Bundy in his 1965 high school yearbook.

One of the hallmarks of a sociopath is his inability to accept personal responsibility for his own failures. The sociopath is dishonest and cruel by nature, seeking to manipulate others through deception — he is a compulsive liar — and taking pleasure in humiliating his chosen enemies. These antisocial traits may be cunningly concealed by a mask of charm. This is why sociopaths are so often successful con men. Or politicians. Before he became infamous as a serial killer, many people who knew Ted Bundy personally found him to be a charming and attractive person.

Did I mention that Ted Bundy was a Republican?

[Bundy] volunteered at the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller’s [1968] presidential campaignand became Arthur Fletcher’s driver and bodyguard during Fletcher’s campaign for Lieutenant Governor of Washington State.
In August of that year, Bundy attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami as a Rockefeller delegate. . . .
In 1971, he took a job at Seattle’s Suicide Hotline Crisis Center, where he met and worked alongside Ann Rule, a former Seattle police officer and aspiring crime writer, who would later write one of the definitive Bundy biographies, The Stranger Beside Me. Rule saw nothing disturbing in Bundy’s personality at the time, and described him as “kind, solicitous, and empathetic”.
After graduating from [the University of Washington] in 1972, Bundy joined [Republican] Governor Daniel J. Evans’ re-election campaign. . . . Evans appointed Bundy, ironically, to the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Committee. After Evans was re-elected, Bundy was hired as an assistant to Ross Davis, Chairman of the Washington State Republican Party. Davis thought well of Bundy and described him as “smart, aggressive … and a believer in the system”.

Far be it from me to compare, for example, Bill Kristol to Ted Bundy, but the point I wish to make is that a person can be charming, intelligent, persuasive and, also, a dangerous sociopath. No one can deny that some Republicans fit this description, and their sociopathic tendencies become obvious when they refuse to accept responsibility for their own failure. The “Never Trump” crowd lack the political skill necessary to successfully run a winning primary campaign and yet, when all of their schemes to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2016 GOP nomination came to naught, the “Never Trump” crowd didn’t blame themselves for this failure. Instead, they blamed — well, you, if you voted for Trump.

Among other things, this is poor sportsmanship. Auburn beat Alabama on Saturday, but Auburn wasn’t to blame — no, ’Bama lost that game, far more than Auburn won it, and no player on the Crimson Tide could deny that they failed, both individually and as a team. So, in 2008 and 2012, Republicans could have nominated anyone for president, but instead they nominated first John McCain and then Mitt Romney. Well, who is to blame that those two losers lost? Did John McCain ever admit his own political incompetence? Did Mitt Romney ever accept responsibility for his role in re-electing Obama? No, of course not. John McCain (and his supporters, including Nicolle Wallace) made a scapegoat of Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney . . . well, he spent six years campaigning for the GOP nomination (counting the two years he put into his failed bid for the 2008 nomination) and you might have thought that somewhere during that time he might have gotten a clue. But no, he was clueless the whole time and — hang on, I’ll check — yeah, he’s still clueless.

What is it that these #NeverTrump losers don’t understand? Well, OK, everything — they’re completely without a clue. But what they specifically don’t understand is that Bushism is over. It’s finished. It failed. It’s “pining for the fjords,” so to speak. The so-called “center-right” strategy of Bush-era Republicanism (i.e., be nice and try not to offend liberals) never actually worked. Recall that Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote in 2000, and that Bush just barely edged John Kerry in 2004. The illusion of “success” for the center-right strategy is what inspires the tantrums of the #NeverTrump crowd, who want to go back to what they see as the Golden Era of Republican prestige, when we had half-a-million troops in Iraq and middle-class suburbanites were all re-financing their homes and investing with Lehman Brothers. What Trump did in 2016 was to throw away the Karl Rove playbook and go after the votes of people who were sick and tired of “nice” Republicans.

And, oh, by the way, how many kids does your typical Republican have? Because somewhere along the line, it seems that America developed a shortage of children, and this in turn led to the idea that we should just import foreigners as substitutes for children Americans weren’t having. Did John McCain or Mitt Romney — or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush — ever say anything about demographics?

In the summer of 2018, journalist Vivian Yee amused herself with the thought that Orange Country, California, was once an agricultural, “conservative (think Richard Nixon and the John Birch Society) and white (very, very white),” slice of America. But “Chinese and Korean immigrants, and Asian-Americans from other states,” she wrote on the eve of the midterm election, “have made Irvine nearly half Asian.”
Asians, Yee noted, are reliably liberal on gun control, climate change, and public spending. . . .
With the midterms at the time of Yee’s writing just over the colorful California horizon, Yee, along with the Democratic Party and left-wing intelligentsia, saw the writing on the wall. Five months later, analysis of the midterm vote by the Pew Research Center showed that 77 percent of Asians went for the Democratic candidate on the ballot, compared to 69 percent of Latinos and 90 percent of blacks. By November 17, all of Orange County had been delivered to the Democratic Party. . . .
“One way Democrats could capture states like Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan,” said MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, “boils down to mobilizing hundreds of thousands of ‘new American citizens.’” Data from the progressive group New American Leaders show that in these key states, “new citizens” outnumber voters who, as Velshi said, “separated Trump from Clinton in 2016 by a lot.”
An analysis of Census Bureau statistics for the 2018 midterm elections by Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic, found that “Democrats now control more than 80 percent of the House seats in which minorities exceed their national share of the population, and nearly 90 percent of the seats with more immigrants than average.”
In other words, every congressional district across the country where the foreign-born population exceeds approximately 14 percent had a 90 percent chance of being dominated by Democrats. Note that in 1990, Virginia’s foreign-born population was 5 percent, compared to 12.5 percent in 2017.
Trump lost Virginia in 2016 by 5 points but won white voters 59-35. On the other hand, he won Georgia by just 5 points, even though he took white voters 75-21. It is not, therefore, “college-educated white liberals”—another favorite conservative scapegoat—who are the mainspring of the Democratic Party’s march. Pew Research data show 6-in-10 minority Americans are Millennials, Generation Z, or younger. The most common age for minorities is 27, according to Pew, compared to 58 for whites. Analysis of 2018 Census data by the Brookings Institution found that less than half of children under 15 are white. . . .

Read the rest of that by Pedro Gonzalez and think about those numbers. Isn’t it obvious that any future for the Republican Party depends on (a) maximizing its share of the white vote, and (b) doing something to reduce the tsunami of immigration by which Democrats are importing new voters? Also, you could add (c) figuring out why white people don’t want to have children. Everybody talks about economic factors, but when my wife and I had our first baby, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and now with six kids and four (soon to be five) grandchildren, our financial situation is still quite shaky. My father once said to me, “Son, if you wait to have children until you can afford to have children, you’ll never have children.” I’ve long since gotten used to the idea that parenthood causes poverty, or vice-versa, and so what?

Would you rather have money or grandchildren? This is not a rhetorical question, because the selfishness and immaturity of the Millennial generation has driven U.S. birth rates to a historic low. As a result, a lot of Baby Boomers (now ages 55-73) are starting to lose hope of ever becoming grandparents. Their kids are in their 30s, unmarried and childless, and apparently in no hurry to change that status. This problem is not about money — poor people keep having lots of babies — it’s about a selfish status-obsessed attitude typical of the spoiled offspring of the suburban middle class. And hey, whose fault is that?

You have no idea how often, at CPAC and other gatherings of young conservatives in Washington, I’d meet young couples and ask them, “When’s the wedding?” Republicans are supposed to be the party of “family values,” but there’s a lot of fornication going on among young GOP operatives who, like others in their generation, prefer screwing around to settling down. Given what we know about the fertility of human females (which begins declining at age 25, and slides sharply after 35), the woman who does not become a mother before she’s 30 is highly likely never to have children. And you might think that conservatives who claim to be “pro-life” and “pro-family” would actually be doing something in their own lives to uphold the values they claim. Instead, they’re in the bars on Capitol Hill every night, partying like there’s no tomorrow. The future leaders of the Republican Party, and young “conservative” journalists, are living no differently than young Democrats and liberal journalists, and when some old codger like me points to the demographic trend, the reaction of these young Republican hedonists is to shrug: “Who, me?” They don’t have any sense of personal responsibility, and cannot make the mental connection between (a) the dire demographic forecasts, and (b) their own dissolute lifestyle.

Six years ago, Sen. Lamar Alexander’s chief of staff was arrested for child pornography. Ryan Loskarn was into “sexually explicit” videos of little boys. Loskarn committed suicide at age 35. That’s an extreme example of the degeneracy among Republicans in D.C., but less extreme cases are a dime a dozen. The extent to which the GOP machinery is staffed with drunks and perverts is not trivial. And, to return to my theme, this problem is related to the sociopathic tendency of some Republicans to scapegoat others for their own failures. There are a lot of people earning six-figure incomes as Republican operatives who are fundamentally incompetent, and who resort to blame-game rationalizations to explain away their failures. Bullies and backstabbers proliferate in the toxic environment of GOP politics, where consultants care more about getting paid than they do about winning elections. And like Ted Bundy, a lot of these monsters are superficially charming people.

Don’t let these “nice” Republicans fool you — they’re in politics for the money, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get that money. Donald Trump’s success has shaken up the game to such an extent as to deprive some of those operatives of lucrative financial opportunities, so when #NeverTrump types claim their “principles” are at stake, they mean the “principle” that involves them getting lots of money.

Nicolle Wallace has a nice contract at MSNBC, eh?

The people who ran the Republican Party into the toilet — the people who were part of the Bush/McCain/Romney money train — don’t want to accept responsibility for their failure, and so they blame the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump. You are the problem, not them. You’re a stupid ignorant racist, and they’re better than you.

Well, I wouldn’t accept a ride from them, if you get my drift.



 

Category: Republicans

Comments

One Response to “Attention Republicans: Stop Scapegoating Others for Your Own Personal Failures”

  1. On Why the GOP Establishment Hates Trump | 357 Magnum
    December 6th, 2019 @ 9:40 am

    […] Because they are denizens of the Swamp, just like the Democrats. Attention Republicans: Stop Scapegoating Others for Your Own Personal Failures. […]