The Conservative Political Action Conference: The Cult Of Personality Supporting Donald Trump Without Question Or Qualms

The Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend was a telling example of where conservatism has gone—to a cult of personality supporting Donald Trump without question or qualms.

It is very clear that intelligent conservatives, many who write commentary, and those conservatives, many who worked for Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and for GOP nominees Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, are horrified by the utterances, actions, and personality of Donald Trump.

But the “mob” of ignorant “groupies” who worship Donald Trump are clearly mean spirited, and as racist, nativist, misogynist, and white supremacist as their leader, and their and his behavior at the CPAC conference was shocking, terrifying, and disgraceful.

Trump put on a show of more than two hours, ranting and raving like a maniac, in his longest speech in office. He hugged the American flag twice in a lunatic manner, and attacked every imaginable critic and “enemy”, and cheers were heard for his continued attacks on John McCain months after his passing, totally reprehensible. And through it all, there were cheers from people who sound like the next generation of Nazis and Fascists.

One would think this was a rally of Nazis at Nuremberg, and was similar to the rally at Charlottesville, Virginia, that led to violence and the murder of one young woman, an event in which Donald Trump claimed that “both sides” had good people at that rally.

There were no good people at CPAC, none, and it is a sign of how Donald Trump has promoted hatred, fear, violence, and is intent on destroying everything good and decent ever promoted into law by responsible Republicans, as well as Democrats.

The threat of Donald Trump to American democracy is real, and the movement to take action against the 45th President is in full gear, with the hope that future damage can be prevented, but we are at a turning point that is crucial for the future of the American republic and for democracy.

5 comments on “The Conservative Political Action Conference: The Cult Of Personality Supporting Donald Trump Without Question Or Qualms

  1. D March 6, 2019 6:00 pm

    This recently came to my attention:

    ‘Pharma & Insurance Gave $43M to the 130 House Democrats Not Backing Medicare for All’

    By Carl Gibson (03.05.2019)
    http://gritpost.com/pharma-insurance-43m-house-democrats/

    Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) recently rolled out House Democrats’ version of a Medicare for All proposal that would ensure all Americans have guaranteed healthcare.

    The bill (H.R. 1384) has an impressive 106 co-sponsors…

    …

    “We will be pushing it as hard as we can and as fast as we can,” Rep. Jayapal said. “Enough nibbling around the edges. We really need to transform the system.”

    Should the House bill become law, the system that would replace Medicaid and Medicare (healthcare programs for veterans and Indigenous peoples would remain) would provide even more coverage than the universal healthcare system in Canada, as Jayapal’s plan would cover long-term care services for nursing services. Americans would no longer have to come up with emergency room co-pays or fees for doctor’s visits. The only out-of-pocket spending would be on prescription drugs — which would come at a lower price due to the government negotiating on patients’ behalf.

    However impressive 106 House Democrats co-sponsoring the bill may be, that number falls short of the 218 votes needed for a bill to pass the House of Representatives with a majority vote. Even though there are 235 House Democrats, 112 of the 130 House Democrats currently not listed as co-sponsors on Rep. Jayapal’s bill would need to come on board in order for the bill to be able to pass the chamber and go to the Senate.

    As Grit Post reported last year, private health insurance companies (and pharmaceutical drug manufacturers) were spending big on making sure that Senate Democrats up for re-election in competitive races would allow the for-profit system to remain in place. And according to new research, it appears that the healthcare industry’s robust election spending also benefited House Democrats.

    Using campaign finance data made publicly available by the Center for Responsive Politics, Grit Post calculated that donors in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries gave a combined $43,740,947 in career campaign donations to the 130 House Democrats who have not yet signed on as co-sponsors to Rep. Jayapal’s bill. House Democrats received anywhere from $9,570 in financial support from pharma and insurance to $3.2 million, depending on the member.

    Of those 130 House Democrats not yet co-sponsoring the Medicare for All Act of 2019, 48 of them were elected in the “blue wave” of 2018. Additionally, not one member of House Democrats’ leadership has co-sponsored the bill. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland), House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina), and House Democratic Caucus chairman Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) have all received generous donations from pharma and insurance (Hoyer alone received more than $2.5 million in career donations) throughout their Congressional careers.

    …

  2. Princess Leia March 6, 2019 7:16 pm

    The Pathway to Medicare for All

    https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/01/23/the-pathway-to-medicare-for-all/

    I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to issue polling. That’s because most of the time the questions are asked out of the context of political messaging and many respondents are not well informed about the specifics. For example, people always like things like tax cuts, new programs, or government reforms. But when specific legislation is proposed, the conversation gets heated and opinions change.

    However, no one does a better job of polling on the issue of health care than the Kaiser Family Foundation and they just published one that Democrats should pay close attention to when proposing further reforms.

    On Medicare for All, when the question is framed to eliminate confusion, the good news is that 56 percent of Americans favor it either strongly or somewhat.

    But notice that there is even stronger support for Medicare buy-in for those over 50 (77 percent), Medicaid buy-in for those who don’t have employer-provided coverage (75 percent), and something similar to Medicare as an alternative available to anyone (73 percent).

    Anticipating some of the issues that would be raised by a national Medicare for All proposal, Kaiser found some interesting results.

    Let’s start at the bottom because KFF included two lies about Medicare for All that voters are sure to hear from Republicans: (1) it would threaten the current Medicare program, and (2) it would lead to delays in receiving care. Hearing either of those arguments causes support to plummet. But Democrats should keep in mind that any health care reform they propose will be subjected to lies, so it is simply a matter of being prepared to address them.

    The suggestion that Medicare for All would require Americans to pay more in taxes also causes support to plummet. But it is unfortunate that KFF didn’t ask that question in a more responsible way, for example: Would you support a Medicare for All plan if it meant no premiums or out-of-pocket costs, but would lead to higher taxes? That would have provided us with some useful information.

    The major issue Democrats would face in proposing a Medicare for All plan is captured by the question about eliminating private insurance. That also causes support to plummet, which is what Dylan Scott identified as the major barrier to single-payer health care.

    [In a great historical irony, the evident faults of employer-sponsored insurance are helping fuel a new appetite for Medicare-for-all, a single-payer system where everybody gets health coverage from the government. But the work-based system, for all its flaws, could also be the biggest barrier to enacting single-payer. Shifting 160 million people from the coverage they currently get through their jobs to a new government plan is a lot of disruption — and disruption, especially in health care, makes a lot of Americans nervous.
    If Medicare-for-all is ever to become more than a campaign slogan, its proponents must solve that riddle.]

    Disrupting the health care of 160 million people is too big of a hurdle to clear in one leap, especially when it will be combined with major changes in who pays for what. Proponents will argue that outlining the benefits of such a change will win support, but the KFF polling is a good indication that that is not the case.

    That is why Democrats would be smart to engage the journey towards Medicare for All by proposing one or more of the options above that garner over 70 percent approval from voters. As those programs grow and begin to replace private insurance, the hurdle to single payer gets smaller and much more manageable.

  3. Princess Leia March 6, 2019 7:30 pm

    Donald Trump Is an Utter Failure as President

    https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/03/06/donald-trump-is-an-utter-failure-as-president/?fbclid=IwAR2K_AwjHUD3Hyv0wt43GytyljMseHP59NS4V7CZWAu3JHNJLwptrKLV1z0#.XH_nndgxeNs.facebook

    There is nothing normal about a president being judged by the overwhelming number of lies he tells. But with the Oval Office currently occupied by the Liar-in-Chief, that has become one of the major stories of the Trump era. Here is the latest from the fact-checkers at the Washington Post.

    [Powered by his two-hour stemwinder at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 2 — which featured more than 100 false or misleading claims — President Trump is on pace to exceed his daily quota set during his first two years in office.
    The president averaged nearly 5.9 false or misleading claims a day in his first year in office. He hit nearly 16.5 a day in his second year. So far in 2019, he’s averaging nearly 22 claims a day.]

    It is also not normal for a president to be evaluated by the number of investigations underway about his potential criminal activities both before and after he assumed office. And yet, that is one of the major stories about this administration. Here’s the latest on that.

    [Nearly everyone in Donald Trump’s world just became a potential witness.
    House Democrats are laying down a vast net as they ramp up their investigation into deep tracts of the President’s personal, business and political life, with a breathtaking document request from a list of 81 people, agencies and entities.
    They went after the Trump Organization, Trump employees, the Trump presidential campaign, the Trump transition team, the Trump inauguration committee, the Trump White House and blood members of the Trump clan.
    The intent of the sweeping oversight offensive designed to encircle the President, launched by Rep. Jerry Nadler, the New York Democrat who’s the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is clear. Democrats are eyeing a case that Trump is not fit to continue in his job.]

    Under normal circumstances, a president would be evaluated based on his domestic and foreign policy accomplishments. So let’s pretend that Trump isn’t the Liar-in-Chief who is constantly triggering criminal investigations and take a look at what else is in the news.

    Legislatively, the president is experiencing one of his only successes since Republicans eliminated the filibuster for nominations to the federal courts. The most recent example is Allison Jones Rushing.

    [The Senate voted Tuesday to confirm Allison Jones Rushing, 37, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, making her the youngest federal judge in the country.
    The Senate voted 53-44 to put Rushing into the lifetime court seat. Every Republican present voted for her. Every Democrat present opposed her.
    Democrats raised a number of concerns with Rushing, who is a partner at the D.C.-based law firm Williams & Connolly. She worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian organization that has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. She has argued that there were “moral and practical” reasons for banning same-sex marriage. And some lawmakers said she simply lacks the experience or legal ability to be a federal judge.]

    That will count as a success for the president’s supporters in the white evangelical community.

    The road will be a bit more rocky when it comes to Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to pay for his border wall. With several Republican defectors in the Senate, it is clear that Congress will use their authority to deny the president’s declaration, but Trump has promised to veto the measure and there aren’t enough votes to override him. However, there are still several court challenges to be dealt with.

    Beyond the president’s obsession with building a wall, his policies at the border have proven to be a colossal failure.

    [The number of migrant families crossing the southwest border has once again broken records, with unauthorized entries nearly doubling what they were a year ago, suggesting that the Trump administration’s aggressive policies have not discouraged new migration to the United States.
    More than 76,000 migrants crossed the border without authorization in February, an 11-year high and a strong sign that stepped-up prosecutions, new controls on asylum and harsher detention policies have not reversed what remains a powerful lure for thousands of families fleeing violence and poverty.]

    When it comes to something Republicans used to pretend they were concerned about, the news isn’t any better.

    [The federal budget deficit ballooned rapidly in the first four months of the fiscal year amid falling tax revenue and higher spending, the Treasury Department said Tuesday, posing a new challenge for the White House and Congress as they prepare for a number of budget battles.
    The deficit grew 77 percent in the first four months of fiscal 2019 compared with the same period one year before, Treasury said.
    The total deficit for the four-month period was $310 billion, Treasury said, up from $176 billion for the same period one year earlier.
    “It’s big tax cuts combined with big increases in spending when they already had big deficits,” said former Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). “So guess what, it’s craziness!”]

    On the foreign policy front, Trump seems to have reached some kind of trade deal with China. Here are Kevin Drum’s conclusions after looking into what that means.

    [I’ve now read several stories purporting to outline President Trump’s new trade deal with China. All of them point in the same direction: nowhere. Trump will eliminate his tariffs, China will eliminate its retaliatory tariffs, and China will also agree to buy a few billion dollars worth of stuff it wanted anyway (LNG, soybeans, etc.). There will also be some vague movements in the direction of opening China’s economy, but mostly things that were already in progress two years ago before Trump derailed them.]

    I’m sure that Trump and his enablers will hail this as a major success. But it is merely another example of the pattern identified months ago by Brendan Nyhan.

    1. Present distorted version of status quo.
    2. Create crisis over distorted version of status quo.
    3. Restore status quo (often at substantial cost).
    4. Take credit for status quo.

    Finally, after getting played like a fiddle by Kim Jong Un at their recent summit in Vietnam, we’ve learned more about what the Korean dictator has been up to all along.

    [North Korea is pursuing the “rapid rebuilding” of the long-range rocket site at Sohae Launch Facility, according to new commercial imagery and an analysis from the researchers at Beyond Parallel.
    Sohae Satellite Launching Station, North Korea’s only operational space launch facility, has been used in the past for satellite launches. These launches use similar technology to what is used for intercontinental ballistic missiles.
    “This renewed activity, taken just two days after the inconclusive Hanoi Summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, may indicate North Korean plans to demonstrate resolve in the face of U.S. rejection of North Korea’s demands at the summit to lift five U.N. Security Council sanctionsenacted in 2016-2017,” the analysts said. As NBC News reported, Beyond Parallel, a project sponsored by the defense think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, recently identified 20 undisclosed missile sites in North Korea.]

    I thought it would be helpful to review all of this because, under normal circumstances, a president who ballooned the federal deficit, created crises, took credit for merely reinstating the status quo, and got played by a tin pot dictator would be judged rather harshly. His only real “success” has been to place right-wing ideologues on the federal courts. So even beyond all of the lies and investigations, Donald Trump is an utter failure as president.

  4. Princess Leia March 7, 2019 12:14 pm

    For Republicans, a 23-Point Gender Gap Isn’t Enough

    https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/03/07/for-republicans-a-23-point-gender-gap-isnt-enough/

    In the 2018 midterms, 59 percent of women voted for Democrats and 40 percent voted for Republicans, which adds up to a record margin of 19 percentage points—nearly double the margin by which they voted for Democrats in 2016. Coupled with the four point advantage Republicans had among men, that translates into a 23-point gender gap.

    Based on what we’re seeing from Republican men lately, it sure looks like they’re doing everything possible to widen that gap. On the national level, they are accusing women who issue a “do not resuscitate” order for their babies of committing infanticide.

    But not to be left out, Republican men at the state and local level want to get in on the action of widening the gap as well. For example, Florida House Speaker José Oliva referred to pregnant women last week as “host bodies.”

    [It wasn’t a simple slip of the tongue, either – Oliva, R-Miami Lakes, referred to pregnant women as “host bodies” five times throughout the interview.
    “It’s a complex issue because one has to think, well there’s a host body and that host body has to have a certain amount of rights because at the end of the day it is that body that carries this entire other body to term,” said Oliva, a self-described small government-enthused conservative.]

    This week, Republican men in the New Hampshire House of Representatives took their shot during a hearing on a “red flag law” that would allow family members and law enforcement agencies to obtain court orders that restrict gun access for individuals who may pose an immediate risk to themselves or others. That is the kind of thing promoted by NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch after the Parkland shooting—even as the organization she represents has fought passage of similar laws in most states.

    Testifying before the committee in New Hampshire were members of Moms Demand Action, who recounted their stories about the role of guns in domestic violence and death by suicide. It was in that context that this happened.

    [Of the 13 person ERPO hearing committee, 10 of the lawmakers are men; half of them are wearing pearls to mock @MomsDemand volunteers. Meanwhile, their constituents are in tears as they testify about gun suicides and domestic gun violence in their families.
    — Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) March 5, 2019
    Moms Demand Action founder says male GOPers wore pearls to mock her group
    — Talking Points Memo (@TPM) March 5, 2019]

    The men who wore the necklaces have refused to explain their decision, which leaves the rest of us to speculate. While there is a time and place for sartorial statements, I would suggest that this was not one of those. The message they sent to the women who made the difficult choice to share their grief was to mock them as “pearl-clutchers.”

    I recognize that men whose identities are bound up in patriarchal notions of masculinity will feel threatened when women stand up with Oprah Winfrey to say: “Your time is up!” But honestly, how big does the gender gap need to get before Republicans recognize that pandering to that fear is a losing strategy?

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