Over at the National Review, Jonah Goldberg has a second, and more anguished, cri de cœur—I discussed an earlier one here—remarking, not simply on the horror that is Donald Trump, but on the horror one feels when one observes one’s friends proudly embracing that horror—if one has such friends as Kevin Williamson, Charlie Cooke, or Rich Lowry, or William Bennett or, God forbid, Newt Gingrich. Over at the Weekly Standard, William Kristol, referred to with forced cheerfulness as “the boss”, is similarly though less fulsomely both despondent and defiant—“If he’s a serious menace to the country, people need to fight him to the end.“
Beyond Trump lies Hillary, of course, who, as Glenn Greenwald recently pointed out, seems to be running for president as Netanyahu’s daughter. So what’s the problem, guys? Didn’t Dwight Eisenhower, waxing strangely nautical, say “Never nail your flag so tightly to one mast that it can’t be taken down and moved to another?”
Well, yes, he did, and I’ve always wondered why neocons like Jonah and Bill, who, to put it rudely, only really care about Israel, have been such passionate Democrat haters from the get-go. In 1992, for example, were Jonah and Bill really looking forward to four more years of Jim “Fuck the Jews. They never vote for us anyway” Baker as secretary of state? More recently, can they really see any difference between Hillary Clinton’s record as secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice’s?
Well, no, they can’t, because there isn’t any. Yet they’ve repeated the line that Bill Clinton’s eight years in office were a “holiday from history” and that Obama’s have been “America’s retreat” so often that their brains have stopped working. For decades, they’ve been telling their kids and grandkids “If you don’t be quiet Hillary will come and eat you!” Their kids don’t believe it, and neither do their grandkids. But Jonah and Bill do believe it. And therein lies their agony.
Afterwords
It’s “amusing”/pathetic that Jonah, in his long list of Trumpian horrors, fails to list the worst, and the one that must ring most heavily in Jewish ears—Trump’s earnest threat, now most vigorously seconded by Ted Cruz—to ship 12 million “illegals” out of the U.S. That’s because the National Review has attacked Trump not for threatening to tear 12 million innocent people from their homes but for promising to consider allowing some of them back in.
Trump will surely arrive at the Republican convention with more delegates, and more votes, than any other candidate. In today’s atmosphere, it sounds like suicide to deny the front-runner the nomination. If they do deny Trump, they will have to give it to Ted Cruz, as both the runner-up and the obvious “compromise”, even though Terrible Ted has trumped Trump on the “illegals”, promising that he won’t allow any of them back in. Nice choice!
