Ben Shapiro has some choice words about what the Republican Party has done.

The irony of Donald Trump’s nomination for president of the United States is that the same establishment that he supposedly opposes has been praying for a candidate of his ilk for decades: a social leftist, a secular materialist, a big government activist. In other words, the establishment has drooled about nominating a Democrat for years.

They finally did it.

Trump’s new Republican Party has nothing to do with the Constitution or conservatism – he mentioned the Constitution one time this week, conservatism zero times, freedom one time, liberty zero times, the unborn zero times, God zero times, and himself some 83 times. As he said, America is broken and “I alone can fix it.”

Trump promises to fix your problems; Hillary promises to fix your problems. Freedom means fixing your own damn problems. It’s their job to get government out of your way.

Or at least that used to be the conservative line.

No longer, in Trumpservative America.

Read the whole thing.

King Cheeto

Via David Solin:

“If having someone say ‘vote your conscience’ hurts a candidate then the problem is with the candidate, not with the guy saying that.”

———————–

Steve Berman:

The problem isn’t that Cruz failed to endorse a Constitution-loving conservative, it’s that most of Trump’s followers either don’t care about those things or know in their minds it’s not true yet support him anyway.

Mike Pence

Mike Pence was excellent last night. I had not really been familiar with him. Who knows every one-time Republican congressman? I don’t live in Indiana. So I was pleasantly surprised.

I’m not very happy with Newt Gingrich for selling out to Trump, but I could not suppress my personal preference for Gingrich as the Vice Presidential choice. Newt obviously has no real integrity, but he speaks well and delivers clear and cogent conservative ideas. Although Newt was in good form last night, I thought Pence, who followed him, actually outdid Newt as a performer, and I was able to understand, for the first time, exactly why Trump went with Pence.

Trump is not terribly intelligent and is intellectually lazy and self-indulgent, but he is not totally brain dead. If you watched episodes of “The Apprentice,” you’d find that Trump typically made what looked like the appropriate decision, he fired the contestant you and the rest of the audience thought deserved to be fired… most of the time. It is true that, occasionally, The Donald slipped into Third World Tyrant mode and arbitrarily decreed “Off With His Head!” capriciously, but by-and-large Trump’s choices made sense.

In the case of Pence, he clearly chose wisely. Pence speaks intelligently with self-deprecatory humor and projects Midwestern decency all over the place. If Trump wins, and then goes off cutting ribbons, banging White House interns, and playing golf with celebrities all day, leaving the Vice President to run domestic and foreign policy as has been predicted, things may actually work out pretty well.

If Trump wins, and then rapidly dies in office, it could be downright splendid.

However, I was reflecting on these happy thoughts, and I began to have a powerful feeling of déjà vu. Where had I had the same kind of thoughts before? I wondered. And it didn’t take very long, even at my age, to remember: every bloody election since 1988, in fact.

What is happening this year is really just another replay of the same deal we’ve been getting for more than a generation, for 38 years actually.

The winner of the GOP primaries is always some kind of less-than-really-principled-conservative, a Country Club Republican (George H.W. Bush), a moderate (Bob Dole), a compassionate conservative (George W. Bush), a consistent sell-out and democrat ally in the Senate (John McCain), a moderate Republican creator of Romneycare (Mitt Romney) and he always gets a hard-core, dyed-in-the-wool real conservative running mate (Dan Quayle, Jack Kemp, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan), in order to induce the GOP’s conservative base to come on board and support the ticket. Now it’s utterly non-conservative Donald Trump with Dudley-Do-Right conservative Mike Pence.

I kind of feel like I’ve been-here-done-that before, time and time again. You know the definition of insanity, don’t you? Doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting a different result.

Political commentators have been speaking of the Trump takeover of the GOP, and conservatives have been worrying about the redefinition of the Party by the amateur outsider who ran away with the presidential nomination this year.

I think last night’s convention showed that there isn’t much to worry about with respect to an ideological remodeling of the GOP by Donald Trump. Convention speakers have been conservatives and the speeches they’ve been delivering have all contained basically nothing but standard current conservative talking points.

Trump has not really added or subtracted anything, which should probably not be surprising. Trump’s candidacy isn’t about ideas. It was never about ideas. Trump hasn’t got any ideas. It has always been entirely about Trump. Just as Mexican bandits don’t need no stinkin’ badges, Donald Trump doesn’t need no ideas or theories. Trump will simply Trump his way to victory using his appetites and oversized personality to get where he intends to go.

Though I think now that we haven’t got any future ideological contamination of Republican purity to fear as the result of the ascension of The Donald, the Cleveland Convention does make evident the existence of one future consequence of all this. There were all those Trump offspring giving speeches, praising and endorsing their father.

Donald Trump deliberately arranged to put one Trump child after another on center Convention stage in prime time, their speeches scattered at intervals between speeches by various national figures. This, I’m sure, was not an accident. In one evening, Donald Trump turned his obscure and unaccomplished sons and daughter into nationally-recognized celebrities.

Donald Trump may not understand, or care much about, the Constitution, but he does understand and cares deeply about branding. Trump has been branding his children. You can bet on it. There is going to be a Trump political dynasty with one Trump after another running for public office, and breezing in on the strength of membership in an American royal family.

Twitter has banned Milo Yiannopoulos for life.

Angela Merkel (then Kasner), age 17, in 1972, marching happily next to an East German Officer in her FDJ uniform.

Angela Merkel was embarrassed when newspapers all over Europe published photos of her marching and smiling in the uniform of East Germany’s Young Communist Movement as a teenager.

Daily Mail:

She denies she was close to the Communist rulers in East Germany, where she grew up.

So this 1972 photo of her in military-style uniform has left German Chancellor Angela Merkel ‘not amused’.

Then called Angela Kasner and aged 17, she is shown happily involved in a civil defence exercise under the gaze of an East German officer.

Drills included first aid and preparing for nuclear attack.

All children had to take part if they wanted to go to university, but Mrs Merkel is also alleged to have been a propaganda secretary for the youth movement, the FDJ*.

The photo was found by an old schoolfriend, Sonja Felssberg, 58, and handed to a German newspaper.

Her smile is easily recognisable and her forage cap is set at a jaunty angle as she strides along at the High School Hermann Matern in Templin, where she was brought up behind the iron curtain.

* Freie Deutsche Jugend [Free German Youth], East Germany’s version of Russia’s Young Communists or Nazi Germany’s Hitler Youth movements.

Pence will run domestic & foreign policy, while Donald naps.

The New York Times supplies another of those leaks indicating that Trump doesn’t really intend to do the job of being president.

One day this past May, Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reached out to a senior adviser to Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who left the presidential race just a few weeks before. As a candidate, Kasich declared in March that Trump was “really not prepared to be president of the United States,” and the following month he took the highly unusual step of coordinating with his rival Senator Ted Cruz in an effort to deny Trump the nomination. But according to the Kasich adviser (who spoke only under the condition that he not be named), Donald Jr. wanted to make him an offer nonetheless: Did he have any interest in being the most powerful vice president in history?

When Kasich’s adviser asked how this would be the case, Donald Jr. explained that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.

Then what, the adviser asked, would Trump be in charge of?

“Making America great again” was the casual reply. …

Ultimately, Trump chose Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, not Kasich, to be his running mate.

Some years ago, I was Chief Operating Officer of a (much smaller than Trump’s) inherited New York real estate company. My principal, I expect, very much resembled Donald Trump in operating style. He did not care to be actively involved in the business every day. He had management (me) for that. He had every intention of retaining absolute power, but he was normally King Log. Only when questions of credit and compensation came up or when the requirements of the business made unwelcome demands upon him did he turn into King Stork. Most of the time, he simply didn’t want to know about it.

This kind of personally-convenient delegating of responsibility, while retaining ownership, final authority, and –in the end– taking credit for what other people do, is quite typical of the way a New York real estate mogul would run his empire.

One wonders how it will work when applied to running the US Executive Branch. Good luck to Mr. Pence. I can tell you that being the COO in such a regime has a lot of drawbacks.

That clever Gerard van der Leun, despite being recently much too infatuated with the deep thinkers of the Alt Right trailer parks, sums up perfectly where we find ourselves right now.

First he quotes neo-neocon:

The deed…

…is done.

The fat’s in the fire.

The fat lady’s sung.

The bird’s on the wire.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

and adds:

gives you the finger.

Then Gerard writes:

I watch the formal nomination with a growing feeling of special dread. I watch it with a kind of sardonic awe as Fox splits its screen in two and on the right I see someone from Ohio proclaiming their surreal votes while on the left some aging supermodel working for WeightWatchers proclaims “Bye-bye bellyfat!” And thus the rising surreality of our current reality washes over me and gives me a sick, sinking feeling. Not about Trump. Not about that at all. Just the feeling that returns and returns, that echoes and echoes, that repeats and repeats the careworn mantra, “Events are in the saddle and ride mankind.”

Feeling the tectonic plates shift deep under the population….

Something moving deep in the mantle. Small tremors here, vibrations at slant there….

Like that movie with the burrowing monster worms roaming under the homes of men. Not the hellish island sized worms of Doom sifting sand mountains and devouring whole factories, but the smaller ones, the predators, the carnivores, the ones in the American grain, the ones that rise up and at most take down a Chevy with a couple of people in it as sandwich filling.

Over the passing months this saison en enfer fills me, more and more, with a kind of nameless dread regardless of the outcome. The more that I read from people who have it “all figured out” the more I feel that my only shelter is in staying stupid. Staying stupid and admitting that deep down I don’t have one single crisp clue as to what is really going on.

Read the whole thing.

I have had the same feeling that, as it did before back when Gerard and I were young, History has begun to awaken, the foundations of everything have begun to move, change is happening, and soon it will be happening faster and with less civility than anyone could ever have imagined. No one is in charge, except the noisiest, the craziest, and the stupidest.

The Business Insider argues it’s all Matt Drudge’s fault.

CNN couldn’t stop Donald Trump. Neither could Fox News.

Some of the nation’s most influential conservatives, from Glenn Beck to Bill Kristol, were powerless. Karl Rove and the Bush family had no effect. Scandal after scandal failed to put a chink in his armor.

And the 16 other GOP contenders, comprising some of the party’s brightest and budding stars, proved to be impotent.

But some observers say that one man may have had the power to prevent Donald Trump’s accession within the Republican Party: Matt Drudge.

“If Drudge had come out really negatively against Trump and had supported someone who would have played well with his reader base like Cruz, it would have been much harder for Trump to win,” BuzzFeed political reporter and editor Andrew Kaczynski told Business Insider, referring to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

The news mogul, one of the most mysterious individuals in the media industry, operates entirely outside the New York City and Washington, D.C., apparatus. He is seemingly accountable to no one. He is rarely spotted in public and holds close company with only a few select people. Reporters tip him off to stories through email or instant messages but never expect a reply, knowing he is unlikely to write back.

Yet despite his reclusiveness, Drudge holds a firm grip on the conservative news cycle. As the founder and operator of the Drudge Report, he influences and often creates news narratives.

“In a sense, the Drudge Report acts both as a waterfall creating a ‘trickle down’ effect within the right-leaning (and sometimes mainstream media) as well as a gravitational force drawing stories to its preferred narrative,” conservative talk-radio host John Ziegler said.

Read the whole thing.