Lipinski Finds Another Champion Besides Cheri Bustos-- The Editors Of The National Review

On Monday, Vox published a strong piece by Tara Golshan about the establishment Democrats' uncomfortable dilemma over Lipinski: The Democratic Party is protecting one of its last anti-abortion members in a safe blue district. "Lipinski," she reminded her readers, is "one of the last remaining anti-abortion Democrats in the House. He has voted to defund health clinics that offer abortion services, and to ban abortions at 20 weeks. He opposed the Affordable Care Act and its mandate that employers cover birth control. He speaks at the annual March for Life and attends fundraisers for anti-abortion groups."

Marie Newman's primary battle for the seat Lipinski holds is "one of the most competitive Democratic primaries in 2020. And already, Newman is encountering some roadblocks. Though the district leans heavily Democratic, the national party has erected rules to protect incumbents like Lipinski. Newman says she can’t find a pollster who will work for her. Four political consultants have left her campaign because of a policy, made public in April, that the official campaign arm for House Democrats won’t do business with political vendors-- like direct mail companies or political consultants-- that also work for candidates challenging incumbent Democrats. Party superstars like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez oppose the rule; she also managed to topple an incumbent in a primary challenge. But the DCCC isn’t budging. The DCCC says it’s committed to incumbents, a loyalty to dues-paying members, that it believes represent the party’s best chance of keeping control in the House. And the DCCC’s chair, Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, is a big proponent of “big tent” politics. Progressive lawmakers in Congress are still railing against what they see as a “divisive” policy that effectively “blacklists” groups and candidates. The Democratic Party may need ideological diversity to regain national power, but already, Lipinski’s side of the 'big tent' is looking sparse. Newman came within 2,200 votes of beating Lipinski in 2018. She’s running again, already picking up endorsements from progressive groups like Emily’s List and NARAL, as well as from 2020 presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders and Gov. Jay Inslee. In a year when Democrats are newly energized around abortion rights, the Democratic apparatus protecting an anti-abortion candidate in friendly territory is raising eyebrows."

It's not just Bernie and Jay Inslee. Even a relatively conservative senator like Kirsten Gillibrand, once a dues-paying member of Lipinski's right-wing Blue Dog Coalition, has endorsed Newman. If you'd like to help Marie replace Lipinski, please click on the Blue America Primary A Blue Dog thermometer above.

Democrats have tolerated some anti-abortion lawmakers in their coalition, but the numbers are dwindling in a party that’s adopted a pro-woman mantle. Only three sitting House Democrats regularly vote against abortion rights; Lipinski; Rep. Collin Peterson, who represents a conservative Minnesota district; and Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar. Everyone else has moved on the issue or left. Even Joe Biden, the current frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, recently revised his position, saying the ban on using federal funds for abortions, which he used to support, should be overturned.

The issue has taken on new urgency in the 2020 primaries as Republican state legislatures pass stricter abortion laws explicitly designed to be brought before an increasingly conservative Supreme Court and unravel Roe v. Wade. Bustos was pressured into canceling her fundraiser for Lipinski in light of the Alabama state law banning abortions at six weeks, without exceptions for rape and incest.

But in the liberal stronghold of Illinois’s Third Congressional District, the anti-abortion Lipinski family has been in power for nearly 40 years-- first Lipinski’s father, William, held the seat before passing it on to Dan-- and they’re fighting against the current.

Once known for its conservative pockets, the area-- surrounding Midway Airport, which spans parts of Cook and Will counties-- is more diverse both socioeconomically and politically than it once was. It’s younger and middle class; the median age is 37, with a $65,000 household income, according to the most recent census estimates. There’s a growing Latinx population. Sanders beat Hillary Clinton here in 2016 by 8 points. Clinton went on to beat Donald Trump by an even bigger margin. Interestingly, Lipinski, who was a superdelegate in the 2016 elections, pledged his vote to Sanders.

But between Newman and Lipinski, only one has adopted Sanders’s worldview.

“I’m a real Democrat,” Newman likes to tell voters. “To be a real Democrat, you have to believe in the platform,” she said to Vox. She, like Sanders, identifies income inequality as the root cause of American suffering. At a Saturday morning Pet Parade in Chicago’s Garfield Ridge neighborhood, Newman led a procession of staffers and volunteers-- and their dogs-- with signs supporting Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage, and a Green New Deal. Newman supports abortion rights, the Equality Act, and free college and thinks Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be “repealed and replaced.”

...Even Lipinski’s most loyal supporters are beginning to see him as an outsider.

“He had a really close election last time, so what he has to do is find out what the constituents want and sort of modify those positions,” Albert Reiff, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran, said. “Like with the women and stuff like that. You’ve got to understand society is more [supportive of] equal wages for equal work, more open-minded with who you can love and stuff like that. He could do it, though. He’s not like Lindsey Graham. He is a moderate.”

At a senior fair in Summit, Illinois, Lipinski was in his element. A group of older constituents, mostly white, many veterans, lined up to share their gripes: Their grandkids were having trouble covering health care bills, the music festival at the local park was too damn loud, the DMV was too confusing. In this community, Lipinski is known for this kind of affair; he regularly holds events for seniors and veterans. His district office is known for getting their concerns taken care of. Reiff said Lipinski’s staff organized his paperwork for the Veterans Affairs hospital and got his Vietnam War medals mailed to his home.

As far as Reiff was concerned, Newman’s insurgency is a “reflection of the millenniums”-- referring to the progressive millennial energy that has boosted candidates like Sanders. Lipinski operates in a different world.

Talking Trump, Lipinski chose his words carefully. According to exit polling, 18 percent of his primary support in 2018 came from Trump supporters. He treaded lightly on impeachment, saying the election was the better way to oust the president, but was undecided in the 2020 presidential primary. He wouldn’t say whether he sees the national outrage around abortion rights playing inside his district.

Like Lipinski, the editors of the National Review never use "anti-Choice" to describe the fanatics who oppose women's Choice. Like Lipinski, they always use "pro-Life." And in their sympathetic response to Vox yesterday, Dan Lipinski: The Last Pro-Life Liberal Democrat they also referred to the ardently conservative Lipinski as a "true liberal." ProgressivePunch rates him a solid "F" and his crucial vote score-- even though fear of Newman has seen him vote somewhat differently in the past 2 years-- is still a repulsive (to liberals) 58.05%. The National Review appears to be dubbing him a "true liberal" because, unlike the two other anti-Choice Dems still left-- Henry Cuellar and Collin Peterson-- he doesn't have an "A" from the NRA like they do.

The eight-term congressman faced his first serious assault from the left in a 2018 primary, when challenger Marie Newman and the energized progressive base came within two percentage points of defeating him. Newman is running again to finish the job in 2020. Taking out Lipinski makes perfect sense to pro-abortion activists: Democrats have no fear of losing a general election in Lipinski’s district, which Hillary Clinton carried by 15 points in 2016 and Barack Obama carried by 13 points in 2012. Yet the anti-Lipinski effort does carry risks for the Democratic party. No single seat in the House is worth very much in terms of political power. The odds are very low that a crucial piece of legislation will advance by a single vote in the House. Purging Lipinski is more about sending a message than it is about gaining one more vote.

The message that the anti-Lipinski campaign is sending is that dissent will not be tolerated and pro-lifers and even those with moderate views on abortion are unwelcome in the Democratic party. Newman’s last campaign even carried a whiff of anti-Catholicism to it. She attacked Lipinski, a practicing Catholic, for believing contraception is morally wrong. Newman falsely suggested Lipinski wanted to ban contraception, when he has in fact voted for federal funding for it but also supports religious-liberty protections.

It says something about the leftward lurch of the Democratic party that it has fallen to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a liberal Democrat from San Francisco, to explain to her colleagues the political peril of purging pro-lifers from the party. “You know what? That’s why Donald Trump is president of the United States-- the evangelicals and the Catholics, anti-marriage-equality, anti-choice. That’s how he got to be president,” Pelosi told the Washington Post in 2017. “Everything was trumped, literally and figuratively, by that.”

“I grew up Nancy D’Alesandro, in Baltimore, Maryland; in Little Italy; in a very devout Catholic family; fiercely patriotic; proud of our town and heritage, and staunchly Democratic,” Pelosi told The Post. “Most of those people-- my family, extended family-- are not pro-choice. You think I’m kicking them out of the Democratic party?”

Pelosi may not want to kick them out of the Democratic party for nakedly partisan reasons. All pro-lifers should hope on principle that Lipinski prevails against the campaign to purge the last Democrats who are willing to defend the right to life.

That was a slick trick Pelosi pulled-- conflating officials of the Democratic Party who can vote in Congress to take away health care from women-- as Lipinski has at every opportunity-- and ordinary voters who are certainly free to call themselves Democrats even if the party is pro-Choice. No one asked Pelosi to kick a bunch of Italian-American voters out of the party. Lipinski-- along with Cuellar and Peterson-- well, that's a different matter.

I asked Marie Newman what she thought of the National Review asserting that Dan Lipinski is somehow "a true liberal." She probably recalled the thousands of texts the Lipinski campaign sent out, in desperation at the end of the 2018 campaign, claiming she wants to "jail nuns." Pretty insane, right? Marie told us that this whole National Review nonsense makes her scratch her head "in disbelief. As a Catholic, I am a true liberal because I am pro-immigrant rights, pro-economic rights and pro-healthcare rights, so clearly, with Dan Lipinksi’s record of voting against immigrants’ rights, voting against Obamacare and recently voting to take away Obamacare from workers (last month’s Republican bill to stop workers who work under 30 hours from receiving Obamacare (HR 2782). Dan is not a true Liberal. Further, I never said Dan Lipinski wanted to ban contraception, I merely repeated what he has said many times. [Lipinski has stated several times in front of large groups, he voted against Obamacare because it had contraception in the bill.] To be clear, I am running with the district to fight for Everybody’s Everyday: 1. Healthcare for all, 2. Fighting Income Inequality and 3. Addressing the Climate Crisis. Dan is running against those issues. Finally to suggest I am anti-Catholic is beyond disrespectful to my family and specifically, to those members of my family who are Catholic faith leaders."

The Great Trumpf Take Down Falls Flat On Its Face

Louisiana's Duck Dynasty Klan is split on who to support for president. None are following North Carolina Republican Richard Burr's example and pledging fealty to Bernie Sanders, but Phil Robertson, patriarch of the reality TV show went for Cruz while Phil's son, Willie, a former Bobby Jindal backer, is now pumping for fellow TV reality star, Herr Trumpf. "Mr. Trump is a real leader. He represents success and strength, two attributes our country needs. Like me, he is a successful businessman and family man and I endorse his candidacy for President of the United States," said Willie. Willie Nelson, of course, supports Bernie Sanders.

Greg Sargent detects some cynicism among the GOP elites: they're "telling themselves that Trump doesn't mean any of it."

One Republican-aligned business figure says GOP elites prefer Trump to Cruz because Trump “has no obvious core values.” One Republican donor says: “in the middle of the campaign a lot of people say things that they think are going to help them get elected.” Another donor says that while he finds Trump’s demagoguery to be wretched, that’s overshadowed by the fact that Trump is the only contender with the “entrepreneurial spirit” to solve our country’s “big problems.” Bob Dole says that Trump is preferable to Cruz because in reality, Trump is “kind of a deal-maker.” Translation: Trump won’t actually go through with all that crazy stuff he’s talking about.

As I noted the other day, the emerging argument is that Trump’s various pronouncements (even if these establishment types personally loathe Trump’s expressed values) merely reflect an entrepreneurial and adventurous spirit-- they are the inevitable byproduct of thinking big, of a refusal to be constrained by convention. Come to think of it, that’s a good thing, isn’t it!

Yes, they think-- like the German industrialists thought in the early 1930s in regard to their version of Trumpf-- that they'll be able to handle President Trumpf. So just as the Republican Big Money Establishment convinces itself that Trumpf is just fine and is practically one of the boys, as long as he can stop Cruz who they-- and everyone in DC--now hate more... a last ditch effort to stop Trumpf breaks out from the Republican Not-Big-Money Establishment.

The GOP civil war always looks strange but now it looks like the Hate Talk Radio hosts have all turned on Herr Trumpf and are urging their listeners to get on the Cruz train. Limbaugh, Beck, Deece and Levin currently treat Trumpf like the enemy and Levin seems to be implying Trumpf has a private investigator on his tail and is trying to silence him or blackmail him or some kind of crazy right-wing nonsense.

And, as you know, while the Hate-Talkers rally for Cruz, the rightist intellectual base all got together and wrote up little snippets for National Review about why Herr Trumpf is the conservatives' anti-Christ. Now, Erick Erickson, one of the organizers of the anti-Trumpf effort says he would still vote for Trumpf over Hillary (although he hasn't said if he will join Richard Burr and Willie Nelson in voting for Bernie Sanders). Erickson is basing his anti-Trumpism on the Bible: "I take my conservatism seriously, and I also take Saint Paul seriously. In setting out the qualifications for overseers, or bishops, Saint Paul admonished Timothy, 'If anyone aspires to the office of overseer . . . he must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil' (1 Timothy 3:1,6)... Like the angels in heaven who rejoice for every new believer, we should rejoice for Donald Trump’s conversion to conservatism. But we should not put a new conservative in charge of conservatism or the country, so that he does not become puffed up with conceit and fall into condemnation. Republicans have wandered in the wilderness already by letting leaders define conservatism in their own image. Donald Trump needs more time and more testing of his new conservative convictions."

Public intellectual Glenn Beck kicked off the National Review anti-Trump onslaught. "Sure," he wrote, "Trump’s potential primary victory would provide Hillary Clinton with the easiest imaginable path to the White House. But it’s far worse than that. If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, there will once again be no opposition to an ever-expanding government. This is a crisis for conservatism." His case:

While conservatives fought against the stimulus, Donald Trump said it was “what we need,” praising Obama’s schemes of “building infrastructure, building great projects, putting people to work in that sense.”

While conservatives fought against the auto bailouts, Donald Trump claimed “the government should stand behind [the auto companies] 100 percent” because “they make wonderful products.”

While conservatives fought against the bank bailouts, Donald Trump called them “something that has to get done.” Let his reasoning sink in for a second: “[The government] can take over companies, and, frankly, take big chunks of companies.”

When conservatives desperately needed allies in the fight against big government, Donald Trump didn’t stand on the sidelines. He consistently advocated that your money be spent, that your government grow, and that your Constitution be ignored.

Cato's David Boaz's case is that Trumpf is not just crazy but that he lets everyone see that he's crazy-- bad enough, but... "From a libertarian point of view-- and I think serious conservatives and liberals would share this view-- Trump’s greatest offenses against American tradition and our founding principles are his nativism and his promise of one-man rule." So... exactly what the right-wing masses want.

Cruz organizer Brent Bozell III uses the Richard Viguerie test: does he walk like us? Trumpf, he says, doesn't. "Trump might be the greatest charlatan of them all."

Mona Charen finds Trumpf too much the boor, a creep and a louse to be president and has the backup:

• "My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body"
• "If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her."
• he tried to bully an elderly woman, Vera Coking, out of her house in Atlantic City because it stood on a spot he wanted to use as a garage.

And he's not a conservative, just an ego-maniac "simply playing one in the primaries."

Who, except a pitifully insecure person, needs constantly to insult and belittle others including, or perhaps especially, women? Where is the center of gravity in a man who in May denounces those who “needlessly provoke” Muslims and in December proposes that we (“temporarily”) close our borders to all non-resident Muslims? If you don’t like a Trump position, you need only wait a few months, or sometimes days. In September, he advised that we “let Russia fight ISIS.” In November, after the Paris massacre, he discovered that “we’re going to have to knock them out and knock them out hard.” A pinball is more predictable.

Is Trump a liberal? Who knows? He played one for decades-- donating to liberal causes and politicians (including Al Sharpton) and inviting Hillary Clinton to his (third) wedding. Maybe it was all a game, but voters who care about conservative ideas and principles must ask whether his recent impersonation of a conservative is just another role he’s playing. When a con man swindles you, you can sue—as many embittered former Trump associates who thought themselves ill used have done. When you elect a con man, there’s no recourse.

Ben Domenech of The Federalist asserts that "the case for constitutional limited government is the case against Donald Trump," not a bad argument, although none of the Trumpf backers would care about it. "Trump assures voters that he will use authoritarian power for good, to help those who feel-- with good reason-- ignored by both parties. But the American experiment in self-government was the work of a generation that risked all to defeat a tyrannical monarch and establish a government of laws, not men. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people is precisely what the Constitution offers, and what is most threatened by 'great men' impatient to impose their will on the nation."

Mark Helprin also makes the Mussolini/caudillo argument and likens him to "a tapeworm [that has] invaded the schismatically weakened body of the Republican party" and that "he is astoundingly ignorant of everything that to govern a powerful, complex, influential, and exceptional nation such as ours he would have to know."

He doesn’t know the Constitution, history, law, political philosophy, nuclear strategy, diplomacy, defense, economics beyond real estate, or even, despite his low-level-mafioso comportment, how ordinary people live. But trumping all this is a greater flaw presented as his chief strength. Governing a great nation in parlous times is far more than making “deals.” Compared with the weight of the office he seeks, his deals are microscopic in scale, and as he faced far deeper complexities he would lead the country into continual Russian roulette. If despite his poor judgment he could engage talented advisers, as they presented him with contending and fateful options the buck would stop with a man who simply grasps anything that floats by.

Should I keep going? How about William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, which probably has even fewer readers than National Reviews? He's posing questions to conservatives: "Hasn’t Donald Trump been a votary merely of wealth rather than of freedom? Hasn’t he been animated by the art of the deal rather than by the art of self-government? ... Hasn’t Donald Trump always been a man inclined to go along-- indeed, impatient to get along-- with history? ... Isn’t Donald Trump the very epitome of vulgarity? In sum: Isn’t Trumpism a two-bit Caesarism of a kind that American conservatives have always disdained? Isn’t the task of conservatives today to stand athwart Trumpism, yelling Stop?"

Dana Loesch writes that she knows Herr Trumpf. "He’s been a frequent guest on my radio and television programs, and I introduced him at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2015. He has always been amiable and complimentary. I genuinely like him. But not as my presidential pick." She doesn't believe his conversion (to conservatism) story. Does anyone?

David McIntosh, head of Club for Growth, which ran some ineffective ads against Trumpf to try to stop him a few months ago, says Trump isn't a conservative and that he's "no better than what we already have. He’ll say anything to get a vote but give us more of the same if he gets into office." Trumpf's platform, he says are "the ramblings of a liberal wannabe strongman who will use and abuse the power of the federal government to impose his ideas on the country."

If you've been listening to Michael Medved's Hate Talk Radio show you already know he loathes everything about Trumpf and sees him as an embarrassment to the party: "Worst of all, Trump’s brawling, blustery, mean-spirited public persona serves to associate conservatives with all the negative stereotypes that liberals have for decades attached to their opponents on the right. According to conventional caricature, conservatives are selfish, greedy, materialistic, bullying, misogynistic, angry, and intolerant. They are, we’re told, privileged and pampered elitists who revel in the advantages of inherited wealth while displaying only cruel contempt for the less fortunate and the less powerful. The Left tried to smear Ronald Reagan in such terms but failed miserably because he displayed none of the stereotypical traits. In contrast, Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans... If Trump becomes the nominee, the GOP is sure to lose the 2016 election. But the problem is much larger: Will the Republican party and the conservative movement survive?"

Edwin Meese, Reagan's Attorney General, compares Trumpf to Reagan and finds him negative, divisive and destructive. Another GOP Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, insists that a "Trump presidency would imperil our national security." (I bet he'd vote for him in the general anyway.)

Katie Pavlich from Townhall seems most worked up that "Trump has made a living out of preying on and bullying society’s most vulnerable, with the help of government. He isn’t an outsider, but rather an unelected politician of the worst kind. He admits that he’s bought off elected officials in order get his way and to openly abuse the system."

Can't leave out John Podhoretz, right? He makes an interesting and plausible case that Herr "is the apotheosis of a tendency that began to manifest itself in American culture in the 1980s, most notably in the persons of the comic Andrew Dice Clay and the shock jock Howard Stern: the American id. Guys like the Dice Man and Stern had been told and taught and trained by respectable middlebrow culture to believe that their tastes and desires were piggish and thuggish and gross, and they said: So be it! Clay filled stadiums across the country with young men who chanted dirty nursery rhymes along with him. Stern invited young actresses onto his show to discuss their breasts. The screams of outrage that greeted them were part of the act... The cultural signposts Trump brandished in the years preceding his presidential bid are all manifestations of the American id-- his steak business, his casino business, his green-marble-and-chrome architecture, his love life minutely detailed in the columns of Cindy Adams, his involvement with Vince McMahon’s wrestling empire, and his reality-TV persona as the immensely rich guy who treats people like garbage but has no fancy airs. This id found its truest voice in his repellent assertion that the first black president needed to prove to Trump’s satisfaction that he was actually an American. In any integrated personality, the id is supposed to be balanced by an ego and a superego—by a sense of self that gravitates toward behaving in a mature and responsible way when it comes to serious matters, and, failing that, has a sense of shame about transgressing norms and common decencies. Trump is an unbalanced force. He is the politicized American id. Should his election results match his polls, he would be, unquestionably, the worst thing to happen to the American common culture in my lifetime."

There's more, of course-- read it all here-- but how can anyone top the Trumpf/Andrew Dice Clay comparison? By the way, you can contribute to the antidote to all this Trumpism here.

Trumpf Got His Breeding From Papa Fred Trump

Today, the RNC has disinvited National Review from co-hosting the February 25th debate in Houston for their all-out attack on Herr Trumpf. Not that anyone of the Trumpf mass has ever heard of National Review, let alone read it. As you know by now, the old conservative mouthpiece devoted its new issue to bashing Herr. The editors' introduction asserts he doesn't "deserve" conservative support because he's "a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones." Trumpists don't care about that.

Trump’s political opinions have wobbled all over the lot. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV star has supported abortion, gun control, single-payer health care à la Canada, and punitive taxes on the wealthy.

Trumpists don't care about that.

As for illegal immigration, Trump pledges to deport the 11 million illegals here in the United States, a herculean administrative and logistical task beyond the capacity of the federal government. Trump piles on the absurdity by saying he would re-import many of the illegal immigrants once they had been deported, which makes his policy a poorly disguised amnesty (and a version of a similarly idiotic idea that appeared in one of Washington’s periodic “comprehensive” immigration reforms). This plan wouldn’t survive its first contact with reality.

Trumpists don't care about that.

Trump has shown no interest in limiting government, in reforming entitlements, or in the Constitution. He floats the idea of massive new taxes on imported goods and threatens to retaliate against companies that do too much manufacturing overseas for his taste. His obsession is with “winning,” regardless of the means-- a spirit that is anathema to the ordered liberty that conservatives hold dear and that depends for its preservation on limits on government power.

Trumpists don't care about that.

Trump’s record as a businessman is hardly a recommendation for the highest office in the land. For all his success, Trump inherited a real-estate fortune from his father. Few of us will ever have the experience, as Trump did, of having Daddy-O bail out our struggling enterprise with an illegal loan in the form of casino chips. Trump’s primary work long ago became less about building anything than about branding himself and tending to his celebrity through a variety of entertainment ventures, from WWE to his reality-TV show, The Apprentice. His business record reflects the often dubious norms of the milieu: using eminent domain to condemn the property of others; buying the good graces of politicians-- including many Democrats-- with donations.

Trumpists don't care about any of that.

If Trump were to become the president, the Republican nominee, or even a failed candidate with strong conservative support, what would that say about conservatives?

That's way too abstract for the average Trumpist.

Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.

Trumpists don't care about that. If they understood it, they would realize they were being disrespected and mocked. Back in September Neal Freeman did a feature for National Review that contrasted, unfavorably, Herr with his sainted father, Frederick. "Fred," he wrote, "was a legendarily hard worker, a nickel pincher, and, by most accounts, a straight shooter. And so in the predictable order of things-- this was 20th-century America, after all-- Fred became a financial success, so much so, in fact, that his son Donald would become while still in short pants one of the richest kids in the country."

I suppose

Old Man Trump knows

Just how much

Racial Hate

he stirred up

In the bloodpot of human hearts

When he drawed

That color line

Here at his

Eighteen hundred family project

Fred gave his son a lot of money and a lot of knowledge about building and selling. But, apparently, that isn't all he taught young Herr. This week Will Kaufman wrote a piece for Quartz that shows the Trumpf family in a different light, through the eyes of one of America's greatest songwriters: Woody Guthrie really did not like Donald Trump's racist dad. In December 1950, Guthrie rented an apartment from Fred Trump.

Guthrie’s two-year tenancy in one of Fred Trump’s buildings and his relationship with the real estate mogul of New York’s outer boroughs produced some of Guthrie’s most bitter writings, which I discovered on a recent trip to the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa. These writings have never before been published; they should be, for they clearly pit America’s national balladeer against the racist foundations of the Trump real estate empire.

Recalling these foundations becomes all the more relevant in the wake of the racially charged proclamations of Donald Trump, who last year announced, “My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy.”

In the postwar years, with the return of hundreds of thousands of servicemen to New York, affordable public housing had become an urgent priority.

For the most part, low-cost housing projects had been left to cash-strapped state and city authorities. But when the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) finally stepped in to issue federal loans and subsidies for urban apartment blocks, one of the first developers in line, with his eye on the main chance, was Fred Trump. He made a fortune not only through the construction of public housing projects but also through collecting the rents on them.

When Guthrie first signed his lease, it’s unlikely that he was aware of the murky background to the construction of his new home, the massive public complex that Trump had dubbed “Beach Haven.”

Trump would be investigated by a U.S. Senate committee in 1954 for profiteering off of public contracts, not least by overestimating his Beach Haven building charges to the tune of US$3.7 million.

What Guthrie discovered all too late was Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of the FHA’s guidelines for avoiding “inharmonious uses of housing”-- or as Trump biographer Gwenda Blair puts it, “a code phrase for selling homes in white areas to blacks.” As Blair points out, such “restrictive covenants” were common among FHA projects-- a betrayal, if ever there was one, of the New Deal vision that had given birth to the agency.

...For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing-- both public and private-- out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project ....

And as if to leave no doubt over Trump’s personal culpability in perpetuating black Americans’ status as internal refugees-- strangers in their own strange land-- Guthrie reworked his signature Dust Bowl ballad “I Ain’t Got No Home” into a blistering broadside against his landlord:

Beach Haven ain't my home!
I just can't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain!
And my soul is sadly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

In 1979, 12 years after Guthrie had succumbed to the death sentence of Huntington’s Disease, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett published a two-part exposé about Fred and Donald Trump’s real estate empire.

Barrett devoted substantial attention to the cases brought against the Trumps in 1973 and 1978 by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. A major charge was that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” had “created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.” The most damning evidence had come from Trump’s own employees. As Barrett summarizes:

According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the central [Trump] office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. Three doormen were told to discourage blacks who came seeking apartments when the manager was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A super said he was instructed to send black applicants to the central office but to accept white applications on site. Another rental agent said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to rent to blacks. Further, the agent said Trump wanted “to decrease the number of black tenants” already in the development “by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere.”

Guthrie had written that white supremacists like the Trumps were “way ahead of God” because

God don't
know much
about any color lines.

Guthrie hardly meant this as a compliment. But the Trumps-- father and son alike-- might well have been arrogant enough to see it as one. After all, if you find yourself “way ahead of God” in any kind of a race, then what else must God be except, well, “a loser?” And we know what Donald Trump thinks about losers.

One thing is certain: Woody Guthrie had no time for “Old Man Trump.”

We can only imagine what he would think of his heir.

Does The GOP Have A Future? Not All Republicans Who Go Cruising Are Lindsey Graham, David Dreier And Aaron Schock

Reagan would definitely rejoin the Democratic Party today

Joe Hagan's New York article, Blues Cruise has nothing whatsoever to do with Muddy Waters, Sonny Joe Williamson, Bessie Smith, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush or even Duane Allman or Derek Trucks. Nope, this cruise was a National Review scheme to make some money from a bunch of white reactionaries seeking solace after the GOP debacle in November. The cruise to the Cayman Islands-- "a kind of ark of American alienation," albeit a comfortable one-- featured right-wing operatives like Ralph Reed, John Yoo, Cal Thomas, Scott Rasmussen, Jonah Goldberg, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter and GOP propagandists on what was billed as the “conservative cruise of a lifetime... Nostalgia and loss hung in the air, with much talk of endings, both personal and national." They were worrying that the dominant culture has painted Republicans badly. “[W]e’re the stupid people, we’re the yokels, we’re the dumb, we’re the racists, we’re the hicks, we’re against everything that’s hip and cool.” And old, wealthy, very wealthy, very privileged and very, very, very entitled.

“Minorities came out like crazy,” said Hassett [a Romney campaign staffer], sighing. “White people didn’t get to the polls. There are far more African-­Americans voting than they expected.”

“In Tampa,” noted Bobbie, a petite woman from Vero Beach, Florida, “they had lots and lots of lines.”

Hassett, with an oddly cheerful, Oh-What-My-Country-Has-Done-Now mien, predicted economic doom under Obama, the most likely scenario being another Great Depression, which would make 2008 look like a joyride.

That prompted a tall, extremely tanned blonde named Kay, from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to ask Hassett, the co-­author of the 1999 book Dow 36,000, “So what do we do with our money?”

He recommended investing in real estate in another country, maybe in Central America somewhere. A woman to Kay’s right wrinkled her nose: How about a Western country? “Okay, if Europe is what you want, go to Poland,” he said optimistically. “Go to Krakow, buy a house for $50,000, and it’s going to be like Paris in a few years.”

As we drained the Pinot Noir, Hassett gave his audience the insider’s view of the Romney campaign, describing how its election-monitoring software crashed on November 6 and Obama was probably behind it, “because those guys are so evil.”

The table grumbled in assent.

“The thing we have to understand is, these are people who don’t have any morals,” said Hassett. “They’ll do anything. I’m one of their No. 1 targets. I mean, they really want me bad.”

“Well, you’re safe on this ship!” said Bobbie boldly.

Then Hassett pivoted to the liberal media. “I actually think that Goebbels was more critical of Hitler than the New York Times is of Obama,” said Hassett, tucking into a piece of strudel. “I was in the middle of the fight against the propaganda, and I have stories like you wouldn’t believe. These people are so evil. They’re basically Fascists. It’s unbelievable.”

...It was hard to lose. And losing didn’t always bring out the best in people. They were struggling to comprehend the rejection, to understand how it had come to this... [A] sense of fear was everywhere on the ship, fear of an impending debt crisis that would crush all fortunes, fear that the Anglo majority was now marginal for the first time in their adult lives, fear that the country the cruisers once knew had fully given way to something more … diverse, foreign, incomprehensible.

Are these the people Republican strategist Mark McKinnon was trying to appeal to in his Daily Beast post this week, All I Want For Christmas Is A New GOP? If so... good luck! He says he's "tired of the Republican Party being the Stupid Party.” He's painfully aware, unlike most of the National Review cruisers that the GOP has become simply "the party is against everything and for nothing. That’s not governing. That’s just lobbing hand grenades."

All sanity seems to have left the ranks of those in charge of the GOP—or, more accurately, those who want to be in charge. Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) demonstrated in a jaw-dropping performance Thursday on Morning Joe the depth of the problem and why we are bound to go over the fiscal cliff. He made it clear he won’t vote for a tax increase on anyone, no matter how much they make. So, by his logic, we will end up going over the cliff, and raise taxes on everybody, because he and too many others like him in the party are unwilling to raise taxes on anyone. This intransigence will also make a core Republican tenet of broader tax reform more difficult to pursue because the new Congress will then be fixated on smaller bore issues like fixing the rates.

And so voters look at the “negotiations” and see on one side the president--the guy who just won the election by a substantial margin--willing to compromise by lowering his revenue target from $1.6 trillion to $1.2 trillion and moving the goalpost for tax-rate increases from $250,000 a year to $400,000 a year. And on the other side, they see Republicans like Huelskamp responding with a one-finger salute to everything.

But there’s more. Huelskamp’s response to the Newtown tragedy? No need to change any gun laws. (Not even better enforcement of the laws we have?) And those who suggest any changes are simply “politicizing” the situation to fit their political agenda. Was George W. Bush “politicizing” 9/11 when he created the Department of Homeland Security? If so, then by all means shouldn’t we “politicize” in the wake of a national tragedy?

Other Republican elected officials said they wanted to wait to see what the National Rifle Association had to say. On Friday, Wayne LaPierre delivered. No new gun laws, but how about an armed guard in every school, because “the only answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Then LaPierre went on to blame every other facet of our culture for the problem. Now, I don’t disagree that much goes into the cultural equation causing violence, and much needs to be considered to address the root causes, like mental health and violent media. But in 2008, the U.S. reportedly recorded 11,000 gun-related deaths, and Japan recorded 11-- and I believe the Japanese play video games. So maybe we should at least include guns in the discussion.

...It’s a very odd situation when the losing party is the party refusing to negotiate. It may be how you disrupt, but it is not how you govern, or how you ever hope to regain a majority.

And so, we have a Republican Party today willing to eliminate any prospect for a decent future for anyone, including itself, if it cannot be a future that is 100 percent in accordance with its core beliefs and principles. That’s not governing. That’s just lobbing hand grenades. If you’re only standing on principle to appear taller, then you appear smaller. And the GOP is shrinking daily before our eyes.

Ronald Reagan was long thought to be the most conservative of Republicans. And by any standard today he is the most popular Republican in modern history. Yet he raised taxes 11 times, supported a ban on assault rifles and the Brady Bill, which mandated background checks, and established amnesty for 3 million undocumented workers.

No one questioned Reagan’s principles or values. But he was seen as great because he had the ability to maintain his principles while adapting, evolving, and negotiating as the world around him changed. When I raise these issues, many of my Republican friends respond, “We will not become a stronger Republican Party by acting more like the Democratic Party.” And I say, “No, we become a stronger Republican Party by acting like reasonable human beings who acknowledge reality.”

The world is still changing. Faster than ever. And so should the Republican Party. Or condemn itself to a smaller and smaller base of core supporters and permanent minority status. The cruisers, at least, have already spoken, And that chose the latter. You think the Fox-brainwashed base is going to make a smarter choice?

In the wake of his Obama endorsement, Christopher Buckley exits National Review, and the right-wing blood-letting is on

“You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.”

-- the late William F. Buckley Jr., as recalled by his son Christopher last week in his endorsement of Barack Obama

"The only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless. . . .
"I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal. . . .
"I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of 'conservative' government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case."

-- Christopher Buckley, in a new column on The Daily Beast reporting his resignation as back-page columnist for the magazine founded by his father

by Ken

On Friday Howie passed on the news of Christopher Buckley's endorsement of Barack Obama on Tina Brown's Daily Beast webzine. Finding himself the object of a "tsunami" of online hatred at the National Review's website, Buckley has explained why he offered his resignation as back-page columnist to the current editor and publisher of the magazine that was founded by, and through most of its history was synonymous with, his father, the late William F. Buckley Jr., who as much as anyone deserves to be called the godfather of the modern American conservative movement.

But then, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in his Obama endorsement, the present-day version of that movement bears little resemblance to anything his father envisaged. In his Obama endorsement, Christopher recalled: "Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, 'You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.'”

Buckley Bows Out of National Review

by Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley, in an exclusive for The Daily Beast, explains why he left The National Review, the magazine his father founded.

I seem to have picked an apt title for my Daily Beast column, or blog, or whatever it’s called: “What Fresh Hell.” My last posting (if that’s what it’s called) in which I endorsed Obama, has brought about a very heaping helping of fresh hell. In fact, I think it could accurately be called a tsunami.

The mail (as we used to call it in pre-cyber times) at the Beast has been running I’d say at about 7-to-1 in favor. This would seem to indicate that you (the Beast reader) are largely pro-Obama.

As for the mail flooding into National Review Online -- that’s been running about, oh, 700-to-1 against. In fact, the only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless.

I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen’s mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. I didn’t want to put NR in an awkward position.

Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it’s pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review -- a friend of 30 years -- emailed me that he thought my opinions “cretinous.” One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have “betrayed” -- the b-word has been much used in all this -- my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, “Cancel my subscription,” I was able to quote the title of my father’s last book, a delicious compendium of his NR "Notes and Asides": Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.

Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted -- rather briskly! -- by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.

My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman. One of his closest friends on earth was John Kenneth Galbraith. In 1969, Pup wrote a widely-remarked upon column saying that it was time America had a black president. (I hasten to aver here that I did not endorse Senator Obama because he is black. Surely voting for someone on that basis is as racist as not voting for him for the same reason.)

My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much. My father was also unpredictable, which tends to keep things fresh and lively and on-their-feet. He came out for legalization of drugs once he decided that the war on drugs was largely counterproductive. Hardly a conservative position. Finally, and hardly least, he was fun. God, he was fun. He liked to mix it up.

So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

Thanks, anyway, for the memories, and here’s to happier days and with any luck, a bit less fresh hell.

By the way, you'll recall that Rich "Little Starbursts" Lowry, the National Review editor who accepted Buckley's resignation offer "rather briskly," is the selfsame imbecile who responded to the vice presidential debate with what may be the most achingly, humiliatingly imbecilic gibberish ever written by a human being who claims to think serious thoughts about, well, anything:

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

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