Jonah Goldberg:
If understatements were a capital offense, I’d hang for saying, “Things are not going well for the GOP.” (If some of the trolls in my Twitter feed have their way, I will hang regardless.)
So, congrats to those of you deserving congratulations. Operation Destroy the GOP and Salt the Earth upon Which It Stood is going swimmingly! Technically, that would be ODGOPSEUWIS, but let’s call it ODGOP (pronounced “Odd-Gawp”) for short.
The final phase of ODGOP kicked into high gear on Thursday. Prior to last night’s speech, President Obama had largely played along with the Clinton strategy of isolating Trump from the rest of the GOP. Obama in early August:
This is different than just having policy differences. I recognize that they profoundly disagree with myself or Hillary Clinton on tax policy or certain elements of foreign policy, but there have been Republican presidents with whom I disagreed with but I didn’t have a doubt that they could function as president. I think I was right and Mitt Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought that they couldn’t do the job.
But Thursday in Ohio (of course), Obama turned the knife like it was a Phillips-head screwdriver wielded by Otto von Tendorp, a fictional serial killer who kills his opponents with a Phillips-head screwdriver he turns very slowly.
“You claim the mantle of the party of family values, and this is the guy you nominate,” Obama said.
From there, it got worse.
From the Washington Post:
“But so the problem is not that all Republicans think the way this guy does. The problem is, is that they’ve been riding this tiger for a long time,” Obama said, referring to those who questioned whether he was born in the United States, those who called him “the antichrist” and subscribers to other conspiracy theories. “They’ve been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years, primarily for political expedience.”
“People like Ted [Strickland]’s opponent, they just stood by while this happened,” Obama said, referring to [Republican senator Rob] Portman. “And Donald Trump, as he’s prone to do, he didn’t build the building himself, but he just slapped his name on it and took credit for it.”
“This is in the swamp of crazy that has been fed over and over and over and over again,” Obama said to applause. “So the point is, if your only agenda is either negative — negative is a euphemism, crazy — based on lies, based on hoaxes, this is the nominee you get. You make him possible.”
Now, I’m happy to disagree with some — and just some — of this. It’s not like the Left’s base isn’t fed its own brand of crazy from time to time either. It’s not true that birtherism is all the GOP has been about. It’s not like Obama is exempt from blame for this sorry state of affairs after spending his whole presidency trolling his political opponents and defying constitutional norms. And it’s certainly not true, as he said last night, that the “central principle” of the Republican party is to “make it harder to vote.” That’s ridiculous, irresponsible rhetoric.
But the point here isn’t to rebut Obama on the merits. Less than a month out from the election, arguing with Obama makes about as much sense as challenging my cat to a game of Battleship (first of all, she cheats, as befits her feline nature). The point is it’s all fair game.
WAHHH, THE MEDIA
But let me concede a few things. Yes, the Mainstream Media (MSM) is biased against Republicans. This has been true since, if not the Mesozoic Era, then at least 1960. Yes, the media is particularly biased against Donald Trump. But this is not quite the outrage Trump’s spinners want to make it. Not only is Trump an exceptionally unworthy presidential candidate on the merits, but he does everything he possibly can to maximize the endemic problems of liberal-media bias. Thanks to his lizard-brain narcissism, he would rather have awful headlines about himself and be the center of attention than have Hillary Clinton steal the limelight. LBJ liked to say, “Let’s not step on our d**ks” on this or that issue. Trump is like one of those Italian barefoot peasant women who make wine by stomping on grapes all day, except instead of grapes it’s d**ks as far as the eye can see and Trump is wearing very expensive shoes.
Yes, absolutely, the WikiLeaks e-mails provide countless vulnerabilities that might have destroyed Hillary’s candidacy if she were running against any conventional Republican. But it’s not liberal-media bias per se that causes the press to pay outsized attention to tales of sexual misconduct; the press always pays attention to sex. The Lewinsky scandal got a lot of media attention. You could look it up.
It was inevitable and obvious that this lecherous adulterer who bragged in print about cheating on his wife would have these skeletons in his enormous, gold-and-velvet-lined closet. But no one needed to be a master sleuth or even a run-of-the-mill opposition researcher to know this. You know why? Because this guy said so! When accused of being a sexual predator by Howard Stern, Trump said, “That’s true!” — and then he laughed (in front of his daughter, whom he has affectionately called “a piece of ass”). Trump has told little girls that he would be dating them soon. If you want to write that all off as jokes, fine. Well, he also said that he couldn’t run for political office because of his attitude toward women: