By An Old Friend
fri, jan 27, 2023 1:17 a.m.
New Neo [Jean Kaufman] analyzes a prominent NeverTrumper
It’s Mona Charen, whom I very rarely see anymore (and certainly wouldn’t seek out).
Charen did make one useful coinage, nearly two decades ago. She referred to the Islamic crimes of september 2001 as “the savage enormity.” (Quite the contrast with the usual bleating about “the tragedy of 9/11.” Yes, for the people who died, it was tragedy, but the events themselves were enormous crimes.)
https://www.thenewneo.com/2023/01/17/the-imaginary-biden-versus-the-real-one-mona-charens-dilemma/
N.S.: Here’s what I think is going on with Charen. She’s at Bill Kristol’s the bulwark, which someone financed for him, after his publisher at the weekly standard fired him and shut it down, for seeking to sabotage Donald Trump’s initial candidacy in 2016. Kristol was then and remains a leader of the Never-Trumpers.
That makes Charen a Never-Trumper.
How do Never-Trumpers fill their bellies? Either republican Never-Trumpers or democrats stuff their pockets with money.
Charen’s rhetoric here is reminiscent of another “conservative” saboteur who, after years of variously promoting Rudy Giuliani and John McCain as presidential timber, suddenly went turncoat on the eve of the election. He called Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party” and spoke of the “Obamas” as prime examples of a “valedictocracy,” i.e., rule by people who graduated first in their high school classes (which wasn’t true of Michelle or Barry Soetoro), and celebrated Soetoro’s splendid, presidential “temperament.” (Sarah Palin was the only good thing to come out of the 2008 election, which turned out to pit one Manchurian Candidate—“Obama” vs. another—McCain.)
That “conservative” saboteur was David Brooks, who was being paid by Episcopalian communist new york times publisher, Pinch Sulzberger. (Since Pinch’s 2018 retirement as publisher, Brooks has been in the employ of Pinch’s communist son, A.G. Sulzberger.)
For the life of me, I don’t know why anyone takes anything the saboteurs say seriously.
Friday, January 27, 2023
What is Never-Trumper Mona Charen up to?
The imaginary Biden versus the real one: Mona Charen's dilemma
Erstwhile conservative columnist Mona Charen is struggling to retain the image of the Biden she wishes existed. Her piece in Time is called, "We Elected Biden to Be Better Than This," and it begins this way:
In 2020, America elected Joe Biden to be not-Trump—a role for which he seemed well-suited.
And yet "not-Trump" is not a government position, as far as I know. "President" is, and little in Biden's history (including his stint as Obama's VP) indicated he was well-suited for that role. And I say that as a person who was a Democrat for much of Joe Biden's political life, and yet there was no point even back then when I would have considered him a decent candidate for the presidency, much less a good one. He was always a mendacious mediocrity at best.
Charen continues:
In 2016, the country voted for burn-it-all-down upheaval.
No; in 2016 the country voted to make American great again. And Trump just might have done it, given half a chance. But "burn it all down upheaval" is what the left has given us, in a particularly graphic manner in the post-Floyd riots. And even before he was elected, Biden made it clear that he was now a man of the left or at least a servant of the left.
Back to Charen again:
Trump was the tribune of those who felt betrayed and misled and mistreated.
True of some, but not of all of those who voted for him.
…Four chaotic years later, alarmed voters fled into the arms of an aging former vice-president and senator—a man they had twice rejected as a presidential contender—who seemed the personification of the steady hand.
That may be the most interesting sentence of Charen's essay. The chaos of those four years was hardly Trump's fault, unless you call mean tweets "chaos." The chaos was the result of the all-out war against him. But yes, many "alarmed voters" – whipped into a frenzy of anti-Trump mania by the press and the Democrats and the NeverTrumpers, among whom Charen, as policy editor of The Bulwark, must be counted – did indeed vote for Biden for president. But "the personification of the steady hand"? Tell me another one. That was always a fable, and an obvious one at that.
This next paragraph is a marvel of self-delusion, if in fact it is what Charen actually believes:
No one expected Biden to be transformational or extraordinary, but we did need him to be the anti-Trump in the most important ways. We needed him to be sober and responsible, to play by the rules, and to uphold the primacy of law and procedure. And he delivered. President Biden freed the country and the world from the tyranny of tweeted insults, conspiracies, threats, lies, fantasies, and reversals. And while naturally some will criticize his policies, Biden has conducted the presidency with dignity. He has gone some way toward restoring a sense that the system, whatever its flaws, is basically sound.
What strange fantasy world does Charen inhabit? Of course, it may be that she's lying through her teeth and doesn't believe a word of what she's writing. But that's not the impression I get. I think that this is the Biden she hoped existed, and she hoped it so strongly and detested Trump so profoundly that she saw Biden with proverbial rose-colored glasses. That she is a long-time supposedly conservative commentator may have made her need for self-delusion greater rather than less. If Trump was unacceptable to Charen's sense of propriety, or to her snobbery, or to whatever it is that motivates the NeverTrumper, then Biden must be the un-Trump because he was the only alternative that ultimately presented itself.
But the revelations of classified documents stored in Biden's garage along with his Corvette seem to Charen to be too too Trumpish to justify. Her dream-Biden has come tumbling down, confronted by a reality that for some reason Charen is finally unable to completely deny. So Charen admits, "Biden really did do something similar."
But Charen can't just rest there; she has to backtrack with this:
The TV analysts who are rushing to explain that what Trump did was orders of magnitude worse than what Biden did are correct, but it will not alter the political calculus.
I'll just mention a few more highlights (lowlights?) of her essay [my emphasis]:
The great loss here is not that this makes it more challenging to bring criminal charges against Trump for his contempt of the law regarding classified materials, the tragedy is that this is a victory for the kind of cynicism that Trump has popularized. "Drain the swamp." "Lock Her Up." "Stop the Steal." "Defund the FBI." Trump's message has been consistent. Everyone is corrupt. The system is rigged. No one is honest. No one really plays by the rules.Until now, it seemed that President Biden was defying that theme. His administration has been staffed by grown ups. There have been no scandals. The Department of Justice has been methodical and fair in its prosecutions.
How could anyone have been following Biden for the last fifty years – or really, any fraction of that time – and write those words with a straight face? In particular, the "staffed by grown ups" part? And yet there it is – followed by an assertion about the fairness of the DOJ.
Why do I bother with Charen's essay? I do it because I continue to be fascinated with how people perceive reality, and the process by which they either finally change their minds when faced with something that strongly challenges those perceptions, or they rationalize their reluctance to do so and retain their former beliefs. Charen seems poised on some sort of seesaw that remains weighted more heavily on the "Biden is a good guy" side but is starting to tip.
But Charen made her anti-Trump choice in 2016, and unlike many others she's never wavered in that choice. By 2020, she had to make believe that Biden was a person he is not, never was, and never will be. So for now I guess she's stuck with it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Trump could speak off the cuff,put one foot in front of another while walking and wanted to save the country from the invasion and commies.So voters going for Biden "to not be Trump",got what they wanted.
--GRA
Mona Charen is one of those "conservatives" who is a big open borders type, typical among the neocon-never Trumpers. She has called herself "squishy-soft" on immigration.
Post a Comment