Playing Scrabble in the Thunderdome
Playing Scrabble in the Thunderdome
Plus: Peggy Noonan's wishcasting
“Witty prose, colorful anecdotes, and copious insider details make this a worthwhile dissection of how Republican ‘Never Trumpers’ got pushed aside.” Publishers Weekly on Tim Miller’s new book, Why We Did It.
Today is Tim’s official pub date, so if you haven’t ordered his book yet, you know what you need to do.
Speaking of what happened to the GOP, I was, unfortunately, the first member of our Aspen Ideas panel on the “Future of the Republican Party,” to drop an f-bomb. I wasn’t the last one.
Our panel actually had a pretty diverse range of viewpoints — it included the NYT’s Jane Coaston, AEI President Robert Doar, pollster Frank Luntz, data guru Sean Trende, and former GOP Congressman Charlie Dent. I was there to bring the darkness.
I can’t summarize the whole discussion here, but suffice to say that I mentioned that the arc of history may or may not bend toward justice, but the arc of the GOP is definitely bending toward crazy, reckless, and extreme. In my delicate way, I also suggested that maybe we no longer understand what the rules of politics are, because there are no rules. As a result, it’s no longer simply a matter of bringing a knife to a gunfight — Democrats and their allies are playing Scrabble… in the Thunderdome.
I tortured the analogy for a bit. Democrats think they are playing a game of chess, and agonize over whether to move their rook or their king, while their opponents simply bring a f**cking axe to smash the board.
I wasn’t just talking about Trump. The GOP is now a party dominated by its entertainment wing and unable/unwilling to rein in its metastasizing Crazy Caucus, represented by bigoted grifty lunatics like this woman.
Really, do yourself a favor and read Bill Lueders’s piece in today’s Bulwark: “It’s Not Easy Being Marjorie Taylor Greene.” It’s pretty hilarious, until you realize that she’s likely to be even more powerful and influential if and when the GOP takes control of the House.
So this is bad, but I didn’t want to let the Democrats off the hook. We ran out of time, but I wanted to say something like this: