Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

This fight is for everything.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

When I was faster i was always behind.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Petty moves from a petty man.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

You are here: Home / Shoot ’em down, turn around

Shoot ’em down, turn around

by | 137 Comments

This post is in: 

This is kind of nuts: apparently Mona Charen (who writes for NRO) criticized Dear Leader and Roy Moore at CPAC and here’s what happened.

How is this different from the kids at Pitzer College who won’t attend talks by Milo, though?

Reader Interactions

137Comments

  1. 1.

    Corner Stone

    Speaking of good:

    Stephanie Ruhle
    ‏Verified account @SRuhle
    21h21 hours ago

    While Ivanka is leading the Olympic Closing Ceremony, Bob Mueller may be leading Jared’s

    pwned, as the yoots say these days

  5. 5.

    JPL

    @Corner Stone: Stephanie Ruhle is great. The best hour on msnbc is when Ruble/Velshi interview conservative republicans about economic policies. It doesn’t happen as much now, because they are afraid of looking like the idiots they are.

  7. 7.

    trollhattan

    Escorted to protect her from the mouthbreathers or to rebuke her and cast her out of the cult? Inquiring minds….

  9. 9.

    Doug!

    @Baud:

    I changed it a bunch of times. I originally didn’t want anything gun-like in the title but then none of the other lyrics from Mony, Mony identify the song via google search.

  10. 10.

    EveryDayIHaveTheBlues

    It is immoral and unlawful to criticize Der Fuhrer.

    The difference is, Milo is only saying things the kids need to hear. Else, how will they learn the truth when being brainwashed by all the left wing propaganda their professors spew?1!!!

  11. 11.

    Corner Stone

    @JPL: I think it was yesterday when Velshi was commenting on Trump’s CPAC “performance” and he said something like, “so I guess all immigrants are snakes from shithole countries now”. And Ruhle didn’t bat an eye. I thought that was glorious. I also like their show but it wears me out.

  12. 12.

    Chet Murthy

    @trollhattan: We all wish it were the latter, but in our hearts, our sinking hearts, we know it’s the former. B/c they’re that awful. Even CPAC doesn’t want a lynching on their premises.

  14. 14.

    Amir Khalid

    I suspect we may learn early next week of a change in Mona Charen’s employment status at National Review.

  16. 16.

    Corner Stone

    This David Hogg kid. I wonder how much Soros is paying him not to take his superb acting skills to Hollywood.

  22. 22.

    Doug!

    @Amir Khalid:

    She wrote pretty much the same thing on the NRO website a week or two ago. I was checking out the NRO website to see if it had more or less criticism of Trump on it than the City Journal website (it had a good deal more, though not that much).

  23. 23.

    Ruckus

    @Amir Khalid:
    If she said anything not 100% supportive then yes, she crossed the line. CPAC is where they go to profess their love of all things horrible.

  24. 24.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    What the fuck? What the everlasting, everloving fuck?

    When are the Very Serious people going to just come out and say it? The Republican Party is just flat fascist now. I can’t see any other way to look at it. They’re fascists. What do they have to do? Begin shooting reporters? Putting Hispanic people in camps? What has to happen before David Broder’s heirs are willing to call these people what they are?

  25. 25.

    trollhattan

    O/T for the next time a Republican tells you it’s the middle class who got the tax bill benefits.

    Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company of US billionaire investor Warren Buffett, received a stunning $29 billion check last year from the US government, thanks to a new tax law that massively lowered corporate tax rates.

    In his much-anticipated annual letter to shareholders, Buffett explained that the company’s net gain of $65.3 billion in 2017 was only partly due to his employees’ efforts.

    “A large portion of our gain did NOT come from anything we accomplished at Berkshire,” he wrote. “Only $36 billion came from Berkshire’s operations. The remaining $29 billion was delivered to us in December when Congress rewrote the US Tax Code.”

    The new law lowered the tax rate paid by US companies from 35 percent to 21 percent, allowing many to undertake major new outlays and others to book significant fiscal gains.

  30. 30.

    Chet Murthy

    Something I think about from time-to-time. These young activistts, they’re all amazing. These next few years are going to be seminal training for a life in activism and politics. I wonder how many of them really didn’t want that for their lives — how many just wanted to be something else, but won’t get to be that something/somebody else, because of these tragedies that they’ve now set their futures aside, to abolish.

    Hope I’m making sense. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t do what they’re doing. I’m saying that the FACT that these children (and they really are children) are giving up their futures, to fight this fight, is ALSO a travesty, ALSO a tragedy.

    The POINT of civilized society, of reducing the amount of violence, was to allow people to devote their energies not to learning how to fight&defend themselves, but to …. making horseshoes, discovering how to stitch up wounds, learning about sepsis, … (centuries pass) medicine, biology, physics, mathematics, logic, music, play-writng. I mean, *dentistry* ffs.
    The point was to allow people to INVEST in society and in their productive potential. Because investment in fighting skills, taken as a whole across a large-enough segment of the human race, is a deadweight loss. A deadweight loss. And so, in a way, is investment in activism, when viewed across both right-wing and left-wing. Sigh. Again, I’m 100% for these folks — I gave ’em a big chunk of $$ a couple of days ago. But I can’t be 100% ecstatic that the next few years of their lives, the years when they might be learning and investing in other things, those years are more-or-less written in stone for them.

    And all this is our fault, not theirs.

  35. 35.

    trollhattan

    @Chet Murthy:
    Californians can “pre-register” to vote at 16. Since I didn’t need the registration form that arrived with my driver license renewal I gave it to my kid who’s now pre-registered, Democrat style.

    2020, watch out.

  36. 36.

    Tom Q

    For those of us who watched Charen on Capitol Gang back in the 90s, this is truly amazing. She was the Heritage Foundation come to life: held every reactionary position possible. Bill Kristol turning into a dissident isn’t as strong an illustration of just how far over the edge the GOP has gone.

  39. 39.

    Mnemosyne

    @Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady):

    There are a few Republicans who were either honestly deluded or deliberately shut their eyes to what Trump and the Republican Party actually stand for, and are genuinely shocked at how quickly they embraced Nazis.

    It sounds like Charen may be one of them. Hope she’s mentally prepared for the barrage of abuse that’s about to be directed at her from her own side.

  40. 40.

    Ric Drywall

    Tim Alberta clarified in a later tweet that she was escorted out for her own safety, not kicked out. Not sure if that reflects better or worse on CPAC.

  41. 41.

    Corner Stone

    @Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): And something else we should never let anyone forget:

    Sahil Kapur
    ‏Verified account @sahilkapur
    1m1 minute ago

    Donald Trump gets 93% approval in the CPAC straw poll, up from 86% last year.

    “The conservative movement has found a new leader,” says the announcer.

  43. 43.

    Mnemosyne

    @Tom Q:

    I’m assuming that, like Kristol and Jennifer Rubin, Charen is Jewish and only just realizing that she was merely tolerated by American conservatives for as long as she was deemed useful, not actually accepted.

    A lot of conservative Jews are finding out the hard way that anti-Semitism still runs deep in the US and was only awaiting an opportunity to pop out. Maybe allying themselves with Holocaust deniers on taxes and deregulation wasn’t such a great idea after all.

  44. 44.

    Corner Stone

    Northeastern U.
    ‏Verified account @Northeastern
    Feb 23

    We want to reassure students who have applied or have been admitted to Northeastern University that disciplinary actions associated with participation in peaceful protests will not jeopardize your admission.

  45. 45.

    Wag

    @Ridnik Chrome:

    I’ve been feeling really disoriented lately when I read the WaPo opinion page and find myself nodding in agreement with everything that Jennifer Rubin is writing about Trump. Up is down and in is out. Trump is shaking up the country, in more ways than he knows.

  46. 46.

    NorthLeft12

    @GVOR08: The conservatives that attend that kind of clown show would never sully their hands by committing any kind of violent act. They are all about talking “tough” and encouraging others to do the actual dirty work.

  51. 51.

    Yarrow

    @Mnemosyne: From the cheap seats over here it’s kind of funny when they realize “conservatism” was really just white supremacist Christianism and all those claims about it being about principles, small government and lower taxes were nothing but a cover. They sure do get mad.

  55. 55.

    Greg in PDX

    People like Charen, everybody at NR, horrible gasbag Erick son of Erick, and all of the other so-called “intellectual conservatives” who egged these people on for years deserve what they are getting. They are like the people that trained pit bulls to kill and then are horrified when that pit bull turns on them and tries to rip their face off. A sure sign of this is how now at Red State, NRO, and Hot Air readers have turned against the front page posters and vilify them if they even dare to criticize the party of Trump.

  56. 56.

    Yarrow

    @schrodingers_cat: Wikipedia says Brooks’ first wife converted to Judaism when they married, so it sounds like he’s Jewish. Also that his son was in the Israeli Defense Forces

  60. 60.

    Jager

    I was going around and around one night with an old college buddy, who magically became a “conservative” when he got a tax cut from Reagan. Our wives were chatting in the other room at the time. He got all riled up and yelled at me, “When did you get to be such a fucking liberal!” His rather wise and gentle wife came into the room and said, “No Honey, we’re trying to figure out when you became such a fucking conservative!” He shut up after that and I said, “How about them Red Sox?”

  61. 61.

    MattF

    @Greg in PDX: They want the ‘elevated’ bits of right-wing political ideology, but not the parts that actually appeal to the thugs. It’s worth bearing in mind that there was a lot of right-wing admiration for Mussolini in the ’30s. Hitler kind of spoiled all that.

  62. 62.

    M. Bouffant

    @schrodingers_cat: WIKI:

    Brooks was born in Toronto, Ontario—his father was working on his PhD in Canada at the time—and spent his early years in the middle-income Stuyvesant Town housing development in Lower Manhattan. His father taught English literature at New York University, while his mother studied nineteenth-century British history at Columbia University. Brooks is Jewish but he rarely attends synagogue

    Jewish, & a dirty furrin-born interloper like Obama. Deport him now!!

  63. 63.

    Nelle

    @Chet Murthy: This can’t be emphasized enough. A functioning government allows the rest of us to learn, to create, to do, without having to watch it like a hawk. And that, particularly, applies to those on the cusp of choosing their paths in life. You put i t well.

  64. 64.

    JPL

    The democratic memo was released according to MSNBC. I guess it’s redacted with lots of footnotes, but does refute the Nunes memo.
    fyi I heard that Gates lied because he thought the Nunes memo might throw out the case.

  68. 68.

    hellslittlestangel

    Mona Charen has been failing to be vicious and stupid 100% of the time for several years now. CPAC has no one to blame but itself, for inviting her.

  69. 69.

    GregB

    Seeing the entire American body politic being consumed by these fascists is grotesque. Even more grotesque are the both sides do it amen corner who see students pushing back against this massive, unified tide as a time to call out the students.

    Talking to you Brooksie and Sully.

  70. 70.

    Corner Stone

    This fucking asshole:

    Julie Davis‏Verified account @juliehdavis

    Father of Meadow Pollack, 1 of the 17 killed in Parkland, told me Trump couldn’t have been more empathetic at WH. Even signed son’s MAGA hat

  82. 82.

    JPL

    @Corner Stone: They were Trump supporters before and they are Trump supporters now.
    I read that he was impressed by all the security in the White House and was disappointed the high school didn’t have the same.

    I’m not going to pile on because honestly he lost a love one.

  84. 84.

    JPL

    There was a Sandy Hook dad, I can’t remember his name, who had read all types of conspiracy things and bought into there crackpot theories on 9/11 and such. Then his daughter was murdered and she because one of the conspiracy theories.

  86. 86.

    JPL

    @Gin & Tonic: Cool! Did Nunes mention that the dems are mean to him? I’m curious about Carter Page and his role in the Trump campaign. He hasn’t been charged with anything but there was enough concern about him, that he was wire tapped. hmmm

  88. 88.

    Ohio Mom

    @Mnemosyne: Skipping ahead, maybe someone else has already said this: David Brooks is Jewish.

    I’d long assumed he wasn’t but years ago, in one column he mentioned his son’s bar mitzvah and I had to reluctantly come to terms with the fact that he was my co-religionist.

  90. 90.

    Corner Stone

    HAHAHAHAHA!:

    TBogg – Totally King of New New California
    ‏ @tbogg
    17h17 hours ago

    It is entirely possible that one day Marco Rubio will be the first politician to say “I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids” in a concession speech.

  91. 91.

    Mike in NC

    While Ivanka is leading the Olympic Closing Ceremony

    Maybe they’ll announce that her merchandise is moving from being manufactured in Chinese prison sweatshops to bigger, better ones in North Korea.

  93. 93.

    jonas

    @Amir Khalid: NR/NRO have more “Never Trumpers” on staff than not, so she’s probably good. I think they have to be a little gobsmacked, however, at how fast the soi-disant journal of the intellectual right became so utterly irrelevant in the age of Trump. A bit like Dr. Frankenstein was surprised when his monster started rampaging.

  94. 94.

    Corner Stone

    @JPL: He lost someone, and while people all grieve differently and in their own way, the WH appearance, the interview at a funeral, him wearing a Trump 2020 t-shirt, his kid getting a MAGA cap signed. None of this speaks very well for him as a human being.

  95. 95.

    Tehanu

    @schrodingers_cat:
    Wikipedia also says David Brooks graduated from the U. of Chicago with a thesis on Robert Ardrey. I read Ardrey back in the ’60s when I was young and impressionable; he was a popular proponent of the theory that our ape ancestors only became human because they were the best killers. Luckily, I also read some far more convincing work from real scientists on how the archaeological record shows much more cooperation than “competition” in human history. I’m half Jewish (Daddy) and I already despise Brooks, but finding out he’s a shonda makes me despise him even more.

  96. 96.

    Mnemosyne

    @trollhattan:

    I’m slightly less down on her right now because she seems pretty committed to not compromising with the GOP on anything. Their antics about guns are only going to alienate her further, given her history with workplace shootings.

  97. 97.

    Ohio Mom

    Years ago, Mona Charen had one of those episodes where something happens to them, personally, and all of a sudden that conservative gains a teeny-tiny bit of insight.

    In her case, either one or both of her adopted kids has ADHD. Her kid(s) had behavioral and social issues, not because she was a bad mother and thus deserved it, but because there was a diagnosable developmental disability.

    She got a fair amount of flack from her colleagues and others in the conservative community for insisting upon all this.

  98. 98.

    unpopularopinion

    @trollhattan: The part about the check is incorrect. Berkshire Hathaway companies carry a deferred tax liability on their books. Since the tax rate was lowered, then the liability (deferred or otherwise) was removed (at least partially). Since the liability was removed, it had to go somewhere and that is into retained earnings. It was a balance sheet transfer; I am unclear as to what real world consequences there might have been. I suspect Mr. Buffet overstates the case somewhat. I doubt he was in favor of the tax cut even if it there were enormous benefits for him and his company.

  99. 99.

    Waldo

    Mona should know better than to provoke the ‘Daddy Party‘:

    Sept. 11, 2001 drew the curtain on our dreamy, unserious interlude and reintroduced us to fear. It also reawakened our appreciation for the more masculine virtues: determination and strength. Chris Matthews has usefully divided the parties into the “mommy party,” the Democrats, and the “daddy party,” the Republicans. When times are good, you turn to mom, who promises to provide more services and more compassion, and demands less personal responsibility. But when threats loom, Americans turn to dad, who takes no guff from us but also reaches for the Winchester hanging over the front door when hostile strangers approach.

  100. 100.

    sukabi

    @Amir Khalid: pretty sure there isn’t any line that hasn’t been crossed at cpac…unless she was advocating for sensible gun laws and equality for all…. Those are the lines you can’t cross.

  102. 102.

    opiejeanne

    @Chet Murthy: I disagree strongly that they are sacrificing their futures for this cause.
    Their focus may change when it comes to their major fields of study but they will be very focused on getting an education that will serve them in this cause, make them better to serve the cause. That’s how it worked with a friend who took a year+ off from college during the civil rights movement and when he had done all he could do as a very young man he returned to college and became a lawyer in order to better serve that cause.

  104. 104.

    trollhattan

    @Mnemosyne:
    DiFi and Jackie Speier could conduct a masters class on the effects of gun violence. It’s arguable that Feinstein wouldn’t even have a political career absent Dan White.

  106. 106.

    Bobby Thomson

    @Chet Murthy: organizing is a very important skill. I wouldn’t call it a deadweight loss. There will always be powerful people who abuse their power.

  107. 107.

    --bd

    @unpopularopinion: This is exactly right.The anticipated tax liability in future years for repatriating earnings or accounting standard changes or timing differences (accelerated depreciation, pension liabilities paid at a future date, capitalized leases, and the like), is booked as an income tax expense on financial statements subject to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). All publicly traded companies are subject to GAAP. This tax expense is almost always different than the actual cash paid on the tax returns. If the anticipated liability is suddenly reduced due to the reduction of the rates, you pick it up as non-operating one time charge as income from extraordinary items, which then flows directly into Retained Earnings. NO cash is involved. You’ve just been relieved of a future estimated anticipated Federal Tax liability, that’s all. Back to work. March 15 and April 15 are coming fast.

  108. 108.

    Rob Ll

    @Chet Murthy:

    Great comment, Chet. I’ve had thoughts along those lines for years. You can apply it to any struggle for what should be baseline justice. For example, with GLBT issues — just how much work and creative energy had to be diverted into fighting for equality that might have gone into other endeavors? How many great books not written, how many scientific advances delayed?

  110. 110.

    Ohio Mom

    @Mnemosyne: I can see why you thought he was a WASP because I did too.

    To my old-fashioned sense of it, there doesn’t seem to be much Jewish about him: no sense of humor, and no sense of irony, for starters.

    Learning on this thread that he spent his childhood in Stuyvesant Town in lower Manhattan means that he was surrounded by Jews and Jewish culture. He was within walking distance of the Lower East Side. You are a movie person, remember that movie about the single young women who falls in love with the pickle guy? That’s the milieu Brooks grew up in.

    I can’t help but think it was a conscious decision on his part to be as WASPY as possible.

  112. 112.

    Another Scott

    @schrodingers_cat: [ waves ] – We’re from the same class at Chicago. I didn’t know him there.

    University of Chicago Magazine (from 2004):

    Education. On the way to a bachelor’s in history, Brooks wrote a dozen or so papers on Thucydides.

    Turning point. Brooks, who arrived at Chicago as a liberal, penned an April 5, 1983, Maroon column, “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” that purported to be a biography of conservative pundit and National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr., including this scene from a typical day in the patrician’s life: “In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping.” As collegiate parodies go, it was a success. When Buckley arrived on campus to give a talk entitled “Reflections on Current Disorders,” he asked if Brooks was in the lecture audience—he wanted to offer him a job.

    But the parodist was in California, preparing to meet another famously conservative thinker, Milton Friedman, AM’33, in a local public-television debate, taking a socialist position against the free-market economist. As Brooks recalled in the New York Observer, “The show was essentially me making a point, and he making a two-sentence rebuttal which totally devastated my point, and then me sitting there with my mouth hanging open, trying to think what to say. That didn’t immediately turn me into a conservative, but….”

    Friedman was a smart guy and could come up with pithy arguments, but anyone taking History at Chicago should have learned that there’s more to the pathway to the truth than accepting pithy arguments from some authority figure. A Nobel Prize winner should have little trouble defeating an undergrad in a debate in his field – why Brooks was awed by the outcome is another sign of failure of his education, IMHO.

    FWIW.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  113. 113.

    Gvg

    @Chet Murthy: becoming an activist to correct a massive wrong occurring in a society is just as much of an investment in a civil society as becoming some profession. Msometimes it’s more value to society that someone do these things than becoming a doctor. Unless they otherwise we’re going to discover the cure for cancer, rolling back gun extremism in our society will probably benefit all of us more. Maybe George Washingtons father thought it was a shame he got side tracked from being the best plantation manager he could have been or something.
    I don’t think we are losing overall with this choice. Hope a few of them end up winning elected office in the future.

  118. 118.

    Mnemosyne

    @M. Bouffant:

    “Brooks” is a pretty common Jewish last name — it’s the one Melvin Kaminsky chose when he decided to go into show business. It was probably David Brooks’ father or grandfather who picked it.

  119. 119.

    J R in WV

    @Mnemosyne:

    “I think Brooks is a WASP, though, so he actually is an insider.”

    Well, actually – he was. His former wife converted to marry him, so his children are Jewish to Reform and Conservative Rabbis, and to some Rabbis in Israel.

    But he divorced her a couple of years ago. Lately he married his former assistant, and I think he converted to her religion, some kind of Christianity. I won’t bet my wallet on it, but that’s what it looks like if you Google Davie Brooks religions conversion.

    So, strange. Very strange. Perhaps Brooks has no real beliefs, just things he says to get paid? Or to get, well, other things.

  126. 126.

    Wallis Lane

    @Mnemosyne: Not to mention the comedian and director formerly named Albert Einstein.

    EDIT: Oops, I see Another Scott beat me to it.

    Albert’s brother is still named Bob Einstein, although we mostly know him as Super Dave Osborne.

  128. 128.

    Ohio Mom

    When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s in NYC, European Jewish last names were an occasional topic of conversation among our parents and grandparents’ generations.

    They would point out to us young uns that “With that name, they must have come from Poland” or Russia, or wherever. To a young child who knew only English and very little geography, this seemed very arcane.

    Names that had been Americanized were also topic of discussion, with guessing what it was originally, and also sometimes derision, unless there was an obviously good reason behind the change.

    A stage name for Hollywood’s sake was very acceptable. We were always told of these movie stars, “That’s his stage name, his real name is (something very Jewish).” Again, to a young child who wasn’t old enough for most movies, this concern of the adults was mysterious to me.

  130. 130.

    Brachiator

    @Chet Murthy:

    Hope I’m making sense. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t do what they’re doing. I’m saying that the FACT that these children (and they really are children) are giving up their futures, to fight this fight, is ALSO a travesty, ALSO a tragedy.

    I understand what you mean, but I don’t see it as giving up a future. I hope they have found a cause.

    People like to talk about the hippie era as though everyone from that time became an activist. Not everyone did, but I applaud those who did and tried to provide some small assistance where I could.

    Those who have survived and been witness to domestic terrorism have endured what no one should have to gi through. They make up their own special society. That some of them are deciding to bear witness and have said “Enough!” just thrills me to the core. And those who continue in this cause will forever have my admiration and respect.

  132. 132.

    Chip Daniels

    @Yarrow:

    Milo is selling supplements on Infowars.

    I don’t wanna know. I don’t wanna know, I really don’t wanna know what …kind of supplements, do I?

  137. 137.

    Nancy

    @Chet Murthy: You bring up a point I hadn’t thought of yet. You make sense and you are correct. Our civilization has devolved to the point that children are forced to defend themselves and their peers. They have seen the reality that so many try to avoid. I could list other defenders who are forced to adopt survival tactics in the US, but I think Ballon Juice readers and commenters know that I would be putting Black Lives Matter and Dreamers at the top of such a list. This is an immediate reaction and not a thought-out comment, but please know that I’ll be living with the thoughts you’ve inspired for much of today, trying to make sense of the senseless.

Comments are closed.