NRO's The Corner: Obamacare ‘like a house on fire’ with more flammable parts yet to come

@JAYNORDLINGER A couple of words on a couple of posts, below. I have a bias where Ted Cruz is concerned — as a friend and helper of his — but I must say I find his stance on ethanol, in Iowa, downright noble.

There’s a reason that Governor Branstad has singled out Ted, and no other candidate, as a man who should be unacceptable to Iowans: Ted has taken a principled conservative stance on subsidies.

At the debate in Des Moines the other night, a moderator, Chris Wallace, made sure to highlight Branstad. He called him “the popular governor of Iowa” who, moreover, “is in the hall tonight.” The cameras showed Branstad. There was big applause for him. Then Wallace asked Cruz why Iowa voters should “side with you over the six-term governor of the state.”

I thought Ted answered logically, compassionately, bravely, persuasively, and, again, downright nobly.

Today in Iowa, he’s getting hammered on ethanol. And also on birtherism, or by birtherism: the charge that he is ineligible to run for president on account of his mother’s presence in Canada. (Can’t you tell Ted is Canadian? He is so self-effacing and modulated.)

If you can know a man by the attacks on him, these attacks are pretty complimentary.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/430552/ted-cruz-donald-trump

Someone should tell Ted and Jay that the only voters who care about the ethanol subsidy are voters who like the ethanol subsidy. Telling the uncaring voters that they ought to care about Cruz's noble brave compassionate (?!) stance is like trying to re-crisp milk toast after the hot milk has been poured on.

A Friend and a Helper-- sounds like Oscar-bait title for 2017

nordlinger vaguely . . . otm?

ethanol subsidies are total horseshit, weird that they didn't get banned along with every other pork barrel/local appropriation

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/10/10-national-review-women-draft.w529.h352.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Israel_Defense_Forces

precisely

What does Norway, Israel and Eritrea have in common?

kind of odd that women are mothers and daughters, not sisters

Or widows

The army needs battalions composed entirely of widows. What have they got to lose, right?

NRO has been less offensive than usual lately

Do you think these guys would be fer or agin' a film about the Nachthexen?

On the one hand, a WWII movie where Nazis get blown the fuck up but good. On the other, a flick about Red Army women fighting and dying on the front lines as True Believer Communists, put into the pilot seat as a direct result of ideological gender equality.

by Andrew C. McCarthy February 10, 2016 7:23 PM

I was just in the car flipping radio channels. Landed on the classic rock station and was treated to Mick Jagger, er, crooning his way through “Wild Horses.” Painful … so I switched over to the political station only to find Hillary screeching her way through the end of last night’s speech. Mick is starting to sound like Bing Crosby to me.

xp kind of amazing to me that the scale of shared brutality of the eastern front has spawned so few movies tbh

probably bc Americans are generally uninterested in war narratives outside their direct experience but still

by Jay Nordlinger February 13, 2016 6:48 PM @jaynordlinger

A student wrote me, many years ago. I’m going from memory, but I think I have it. S

calia was visiting the law school at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. A student mentioned to him, “My roommates and I bought some fish. We named one after you.” Scalia said ,”Oh, so you called him Nino, did you?” “No,” said the student. “We call him Justice Scalia.” “Well, what about the other fish?” said Scalia. Replied the student, “Justice Scalia ate them.”

What a great guy, Antonin Scalia. Connoisseur of the opera. Lover, and singer, of the American Songbook. Master jurist.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

Jay Nordlinger does not realize that, the fish being a symbol of Christ, Our Savior, that 'Justice Scalia' devouring them all is emblematic of Satan's dominion over the earth.

It’s Time for an Anti-Trump Manhattan Project

weird that they would call for an enormous, expensive and secretive government project to stop their own party's front-runner

I'm disappointed this thread isn't revived daily. Are K-Lo and her rosary beads sitting this one out?

https://twitter.com/jpodhoretz/status/702534912205836289

from that stop-Trump piece:

On its face, this theory is irrational to the point of absurdity — if I am told one more time that it makes sense to nominate a single-payer-supporting defender of Planned Parenthood because Congress’s repeal-and-defund bill was vetoed by the incumbent, I shall begin to order bourbon in bulk.

Lev Bronshtein • 5 minutes ago

National Review has spearheaded a GOP Establishment that is, in a nutshell, a traitorous cabal against the American people.

Offshoring our jobs, bringing in hordes of foreigners to undercut Americans on the jobs that are left--the GOPe is the only class to benefit.

Harry Holder Lev Bronshtein • 3 minutes ago

You act like jobs and your neighborhood turning into Guadalajara are more important than conservative talking points on free trade and open borders.

id du Lev Bronshtein • 3 minutes ago

I once had a malignant tumor that did nothing but lecture and belittle me. I had it forcibly removed.

•... Lev Bronshtein • 3 minutes ago

Unions and welfare state did that....nice rant though

enjoyed his use of 'redounded', 'pace' and the seven years war in a piece despairing of his party's base

"Melt down the fences if you have to" was also great in that regards.

trumpist revolt against neoconservatism/nro has been fascinating.

lotta trump fans are antisemites, if twitter is any measure

Trump, standing athwart NRO and telling it to stop

maybe the democrats will notice the nixon pact is unraveling and actually offer something to the underclass before they learn how to goosestep

"Mr. Gorbachev, melt down this fence."

Hmm. Doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?

Earring wearer and civil rights history illiterate Kevin Williamson:

But, beyond that, the presidential blog post (what an odd thing to write!) and his previous statements remind us of something more fundamental: Barack Obama rejects the notion of the rule of law as such, and he nominates to the bench justices who also reject it, which is dangerous and corrosive. Contrary to the president’s insistence, yes, the law is — or is intended to be — a set of abstractions, a neutral body of rules that applies equally to everybody, be they gay, straight, black, white, old, single mother, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, or Methodists. That is the beauty of the rule of law — and it is, incidentally, the only thing that makes the rule of law useful to the poor and the marginalized.

President Obama and like-minded thinkers (“thinkers”) believe that the law should be a respecter of persons for purposes of restitution, putting a thumb on the scale in favor of the poor, the powerless, minorities, etc. There is good reason to object to that on principle — you either believe in equality under the law or you don’t — but there’s a practical reason to reject that, too: If the law is a respecter of persons, you can bet that it will have outsized respect for persons of wealth and power. Consider all of the economic policy over the last 60 years that has been, in theory, aimed at “leveling” some imaginary “playing field” (one of the great examples of mistaking the metaphor for the thing itself) or raising blue-collar wages, or promoting manufacturing, or stimulating the economy, etc. Who actually benefited from all that? In almost every case, it was the powerful and the politically connected, and generally the wealthy. (The owners of Solyndra thank you very much for your investment in their well-being.) The powerless, above all, should want a rule of law that is truly neutral — it is their best chance at achieving real justice.

thinkers (“thinkers”)

this just isn't how you do snarky scare quotes

http://twitchy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/KevinNR_fb1.png

Here's another beaut: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431807/guantanamo-bay-detainees-why-not-shoot-them

Why Not Shoot Them?
A not-entirely-facetious consideration of the Gitmo conundrum

This takes us to a broader moral question about the use of execution per se. While U.S. military policy is not governed by Catholic teaching, it is worth considering Rome’s thinking on the question. If you listened only to U.S. bishops, who have an unfortunate weakness for peddling social-justice nostrums, you’d be tempted to conclude that the Catholic Church is categorically opposed to the practice of capital punishment. In fact, canon law is much more sophisticated than the Nerf-headed progressivism that dominates the American episcopal corpus, and it takes account of such relevant considerations as whether the sparing of an offender’s life might put innocents in mortal danger. We already have adjudicated that question: That the prisoners at Gitmo present a mortal danger both to U.S. forces abroad as well as civilians in the United States and around the world is precisely why they remain prisoners at Gitmo. Those who have been judged (often wrongly!) to present no future threat are discharged. Catholic or otherwise, the fact that these men are likely to commit unspeakable outrages of the sort that we have come to expect from the worldwide Islamic-supremacist movement is unavoidably relevant.

If the law is a respecter of persons, you can bet that it will have outsized respect for persons of wealth and power.

I love that Kevin Williamson takes as his default position the idea that in the USA the law is applied impartially, without respect to persons, and that wealth and power have no sway in our courts, but Obama threatens this ideal state of perfect justice.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CcMOlMEW8AAwf1x.jpg

close enough

@MediaBuzzFNC
On #Mediabuzz, @RichLowry says he & National Review haven't decided whether they could back Trump if he is nominee bit.ly/1oJkf5n

lol

Kevin Williamson:

Donald Trump, all the best people insist, represents something radical and new on the American political scene. There’s something to that, though it’s not entirely true: Woodrow Wilson had similar strong-man fantasies, and Franklin Roosevelt had admiring words for Benito Mussolini. But Donald Trump also represents something that should by now be utterly familiar. He is, of course, the second coming of Barack Obama.

As David French points out today, every election is a test of character, and Americans are just now giving every indication that they intend to flunk this test in spectacular fashion. Why shouldn’t they? They flunked the last two, too, for similar reasons.

Barack Obama had, and has, a remarkable ability to inspire irrational devotion among his minions, whom he holds in more or less open contempt. The Hollywood types were literally singing hymns to his name, you’ll recall. Trump inspires a similar abject devotion. Observe that his actual history in business suggests very strongly that he was lucky to inherit a great deal of money – 2006 was “a great time to start a mortgage company,” he insisted – or that the man himself has confessed to exaggerating his wealth, and you’ll get a stammering: “B-b-b-b-b-b-but, you’re not a billionaire!” Suggest that his fundamental rejection of basic things like property rights and free speech means that he isn’t a conservative, much less a constitutionalist, and they’ll scoff that you’re a purist. (The same people scoffing that you’re a purist also insist that such deviations from conservative orthodoxy as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio have entertained are per se disqualifying.) Obama’s daft minions insisted that he was a “lightworker,” while Trump’s only boast that he is an “alpha male.” George H. W. Bush, who completed his flying mission in World War II with his airplane on fire after being shot in the head before bailing out over the Pacific and dodging angry Japanese intent on eating him? Meh. What’s that compared to playing a tough guy on television or throwing a temper tantrum about Macy’s?

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

The NRO types who were literally insisting that the second GOP debate take place in Ronald Reagan's Air Force One.

George H. W. Bush, who completed his flying mission in World War II with his airplane on fire after being shot in the head before bailing out over the Pacific and dodging angry Japanese intent on eating him?

so Bush puking on the prime minister nearly 50 years later was revenge

surprising that Kev didn't also cite his idol Reagan liberating the concentration camps. oh wait

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cce5cihW0AUpG2I.jpg

haha, so their anti-Trump issue failed so spectacularly that they are falling back on the argument that Trump = Obama? Good luck with that one!

this is pretty good

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11135756/donald-trump-nationalism

ymmv with yglesias explainer mode but the first two paras are like duuuuh of course

the anti-trump right trying to pin this all on obama or liberalism generally has been hilarious. so acrobatic, these guys

oh i put that on the wrong thread, whoops.

a more appropriate post: of all of the NRO stable i'm the most surprised that williamson isn't a trumpist -- the most cynical, the most pointlessly aggressive, etc.

They posted the John Oliver thing with no added commentary.

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@kathrynlopez 1h1 hour ago
The blessing in all this? A real nudge to consider what gifts we have and a renewed challenge to be good stewards & nurturers.

Kathryn Jean Lopez Retweeted
Richard Brookhiser ‏@RBrookhiser 17m17 minutes ago
"Be of good cheer. My religion steps in where my understanding falters and I feel faith as I lose confidence." Gouverneur Morris 6/13/1788

@kathrynlopez 12m12 minutes ago
Protect us, Lord, as we stay awake; watch over us as we sleep, that awake, we may keep watch with Christ, and asleep, rest in his peace.

Drink the blood of the unbelievers