SECOND-SUPER-TUESDAY THREAD.
I mean, it's guilty fun to see rightbloggers blinking in the hot white light of the Trump Express as it bears down on them, but it's unashamedly a riot to see them acting pissy about the instrument of their destruction: Hmmph, he thinks he's such a big deal, well I'll show him with my Tweet! It's even more enjoyable than their ObamaHitler shtick, because they only got occasionally around to being dismissive about him -- you know, the talk about his sissy mom jeans and so forth; most of the time they have red-facedly denounced him as the tyrant crushing the Constitution with his big black cock. I still think Trump fades, but if he doesn't I look forward to watching conservatives fumbling to develop Trump snark -- they're so not used to being genuinely bullied that they haven't got the chops liberals (older ones anyway) developed over decades of Reaganism and Middle East war fevers. Maybe after five or ten years they'll learn to make jokes that are actually funny.
Ah, who am I kidding -- even before the electoral coup de grace they'll be on the Trump bandwagon, thumbing their nose at the people too sissified to climb up there with them.
UPDATE. Jonah Goldberg farts fretfully, or frets fartfully, over what might have been:
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this sorry state of affairs is that many conservatives have been arguing for years that we must update Republican policies to help the very people Trump is now winning over through ideologically haphazard and substance-free demagoguery. Indeed, a diverse group of intellectuals associated with the Conservative Reform Network and the journal National Affairs developed a host of policies that apply Reaganite principles to today’s problems.
"Policies that apply Reaganite principles to today’s problems!" Why would people choose an entertaining strongman over that! But look, Goldberg's willing to be reasonable:
As Ramesh Ponnuru (my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute and National Review) has argued, cutting top marginal tax rates were a priority when President Reagan took office in 1980 because they were at 70 percent. Now they’re at 39.6 percent, so maybe other forms of tax relief should take priority?
We've been servicing the rich and telling you to wait for the trickle-down for 35 years, but now that you're coming down the lane with pitchforks and torches, I am authorized to offer you a slight expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit. (Also, what's with the question mark? Maybe Goldberg is emulating Vox-y millennial uptalk in hopes it'll make him look smart, like a dog with glasses and a pipe.)
...Reformocons, as they’re sometimes called, were trying to find a way to grow the party without abandoning Reaganite principles...
I wrote about the Reformicon scam back in 2014 -- it was a self-evident smoke-and-mirrors show to make disastrously failed old policies look fresh 'n' wonky. But I thought they were still pushing it -- Big Chief Reformicon Michael R. Strain keeps appearing in the pages of NR, most recently to pimp his own Washington Post column in which "I argue against Mr. Trump." Yet Goldberg talks about Reformicons' efforts in the past tense. Has the routine been shelved, and is the "Young Guns Network" of Reformicon wonks at this very moment being reimagined as some other kind of racket -- maybe as a legion of super-heroes? Stay tuned!