Category Archives: republicans
Two Corinthians
The Donald is reaching out to Christians with Bible quotes. In a speech at Liberty University he quoted St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. He called it “Two Corinthians”. The Pharisees of the press were quick to jump on this proclaiming the proper usage is “Second Corinthians”.
New York Values
Ted Cruz stood up to Trump in the Charleston debate but the “New York values” card backfired on him.
The Donald gave an eloquent response about 9/11. Some of us here in flyover country actually kind of admire New York. And when Cruz said he meant New Yorkers aren’t conservative Trump mentioned that William F. Buckley was a New Yorker.
New York Values
Meanwhile many actual New York voters were pissed. At least the ones at the Daily News were.
Update: Kevin Williamson (who writes for Buckley’s magazine National Review) defends New York values and says of Cruz, “He is a very, very smart man who apparently believes that the median Republican presidential primary voter is very, very dumb.”
Trump Triad
The Donald may not know much about the nuclear triad but he’s created his own Trump triad for dealing with ISIS. He wants to ban immigration for Muslims, close the internet for ISIS, and take out terrorist families.
Trump Triad
For his part, fellow Republican front runner Ted Cruz channeled his inner Curtis LeMay and promised to carpet bomb ISIS until the sand glows in the dark.
Cruz has been playing nice to Trump, even after Trump called him a maniac. During the CNN Las Vegas debate Trump rewarded Cruz’s good behavior by saying he has a wonderful temperament.
Prayer Shaming
Prayer shaming went viral last week. Some on the left seem more upset with Christians, Jews, and Muslims who pray than radical Muslims who kill.
After the terror attacks in France, and San Bernardino, and the shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood, normal people and politicians did the only thing they could – they offered their thoughts and prayers.
That was a prayer too far for some in the gun control crowd. And so the prayer shaming began.
This was the front page of the The New York Daily News on December 3. 
The paper complained that Republicans were “preaching about prayer” instead of getting your guns.
The NYT ran its first front page editorial in 95 years demanding confiscation of “assault style” weapons. (NR Online notes that sort thing had zero success preventing the attack in Paris where gun laws are stricter than anything being called for here.)
Even my old Tropic editor at the Miami Herald, Gene Weingarten, tweeted, “Dear “thoughts and prayers people”: Please shut up and slink away. You are the problem and everyone knows it.” He now says he respects people who pray. He claims he was only bashing politicians who offer platitudes instead of action. Gene is a very funny guy. I know for a fact he’s more interested in poop than prayer.
Molly Hemingway in the Federalist, however, is serious about prayer. She says the left prays to its god of government.
If some in the media didn’t want God to “fix this” at least one of the victims did. Townhall says that Holly Petit asked for prayers as the shooting raged around her at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. She survived.
Trump and Carson Foreign Policy
The two Republican front runners are better at brain surgery and bluster than foreign policy.
In the last debate Donald Trump was asked about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. He went on about Chinese currency manipulation. Rand Paul piped up that China isn’t a partner in the deal. In fact the point of the deal is to contain China.
You knew that, right? Neither did I. But The Donald claims he did. The WSJ has its doubts about that.
So does Charles Krauthammer:
Ben Carson had an awful night — the Chinese intervening in Syria? But it was bookended and thereby saved by two good moments: an early answer, the preemptive “Thank you for not asking me what I said in the 10th grade,” and his closing statement about the suffering in the country being overcome by America’s inner strength.
Trump shares with Carson the GOP’s vast anti-politics constituency, now fully half of the Republican electorate. Carson’s antidote to the nation’s failed politics is moral strength. Trump’s is unapologetic brute strength.
Trump did not have a particularly good night, either. He was again at sea on foreign policy. And when asked about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-nation trade deal he opposes root and branch, Trump did his riff on the Chinese economic menace — to which Paul calmly pointed out that China is not party to the TPP. Indeed, the main strategic purpose of the TPP is precisely to contain China by binding its Pacific neighbors to the United States, thus blunting Beijing’s reach for regional hegemony.
Never mind. As long as the anti-politics mood prevails, neither Trump nor Carson is even dented by such policy misadventures.
