Commentary: Establishment Republicans Snatch Defeat from Jaws of Victory Yet Again with the ‘Infrastructure’ Boondoggle

Adam Kinzinger

Having been in the D.C. area for over 20 years now, I’ve come to live by the maxim, “Always bank on the GOP snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.” I was proved right again this last week when 13 Republicans in the House helped pass the $1.2 trillion “Gateway to the Green New Deal” otherwise masquerading as an infrastructure bill. 

As I wrote back in August, only 23 percent of this bill is really for infrastructure. The other 77 percent is for things like the $213 billion “allocated for retrofitting two million homes and buildings to make them more “sustainable,” whatever that means. Or the $20 billion for racial equity and environmental justice. Or the mileage tax, as in yes, they want to explore taxing you for every mile you drive in your car.

In the wake of an absolutely stunning clean sweep for Republicans in Virginia from governor to House of Delegates—in a state Republicans hadn’t won statewide in a dozen years and where they’ve lost the last four presidentials—Republicans in D.C. just couldn’t find the nerve to simply say “No.” They couldn’t “Just say no,” kids. It is one of the most beautiful and underused words in the English language, but Republicans appear simply incapable of using it. 

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Commentary: The Pale Pastel Republicans for Socialism

The man was a walking political disaster.

He was “a minority of a minority” who “has been taking some extreme positions.” His positions were “so extreme that they would alter our country’s very economic and social structure and our place in the world to such a degree as to make our country’s place at home and abroad, as we know it, a thing of the past.” He was horrifyingly “foolhardy,” and a Republican Party in his hands was headed for a certain “crushing defeat … that could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American political life.” The man was putting the GOP in “an impossible situation” because he was a “sure-loser in November” who held “extreme and too simple views.”

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Commentary: An Open Letter to the D.C. ‘Right’

I’m addressing this to several of you whom I know in Washington, D.C. Not all of you, but some of you.

I’ve known you for decades. You’re think-tankers, government officials, political journalists, and pundits. Some of you have been all these things.

For a long while, I thought you were the good guys. You talked about individual liberty. Some of you identified as conservatives, others as libertarians, still others as classical liberals. None of you are outright leftists.

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Commentary: Will the Republican Establishment Survive the Coronavirus?

President Trump will run whatever campaign he likes, but the playbook has practically been written for him: double down on the pro-worker, anti-globalization politics that won him his first term. Joe Biden, a barely conscious, Wall Street plutocrat – and a stooge for China, no less – is an obvious and easy foil.

Whatever happens this November, it is questionable whether the establishment politics that came before Trump will survive an unprecedented pandemic that is already testing the GOP’s commitment to “limited government.” The coronavirus has unleashed an enormous bi-partisan appetite for spending that is not likely to subside when the immediate health threat goes away.

The meltdown is only just getting started, but the signs of devastation are sobering.

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Commentary: Just Like 2016, NeverTrump Republicans Would Rather Lose Than Face Another Term with President Trump

Donald Trump’s chances for reelection in November have never been higher. The latest Gallup poll puts his approval rating at 49 percent, other polls have measured even higher, and he just gave the speech of his life in his 2020 State of the Union address. But watch out. Without Republican control of the Senate in 2020, much less recovering control of the House of Representatives, the impact of a second Trump term will be profoundly diminished.

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Commentary: The Elites Have Learned Absolutely Nothing

Donald Trump’s presidency has done a lot of things, but perhaps one of its most striking effects has been unmasking the contempt with which the elites view the rest of us.

By “elites,” I mean the group of people who, for decades, have rested comfortably in their Hollywood mansions, New York brownstones, and D.C. rowhouses, confident in their ability to control the media and cultural discourse, groom and anoint the “right” politicians, and occasionally tut-tut about the rubes in middle America, but who otherwise give little thought to the vast swaths of land and people outside of the wealth and privilege in their upper-class urban bubbles

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Commentary: Trump vs. the ‘Stepford Wife’ Republicans

When the protagonist in Ira Levin’s novel, The Stepford Wives, begins to suspect that other women in her Connecticut town are robots, she surmises:

That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

Which brings to mind the viral video of Mitt Romney reacting to his Twinkie birthday cake. Lack of ample bosom aside, Mitt is a great example of someone playing a housewife unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real. He is a Stepford-Wife Republican.

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