Post
by Forty Two » Fri May 26, 2017 5:04 pm
Gerson is a never-Trumper, and neoconservative, Heritage Foundation guy. He's been writing articles like that since 2015.
Remember - Trump is President despite the Republican establishment, not because of them. That's part of the reason Trump is under siege these days. What Gerson is lamenting here is that his "conservatism" is not what the common man voting Republican believes. Will Gerson thinks tariffs and trade barriers to help US workers is a bad thing, but the common man thinks it's high time we protected against the "giant sucking sound" that we've been hearing since H. Ross Perot grabbed a big chunk of the Republican vote in 1992.
There has been an underlying split in the Republican party for going on 30 years now. What Gerson sees as the "diseased" conservative mind is people with a radically different idea of what it means to be conservative. Some chunk of the population may even call themselves conservative without even really being conservative. After all, they voted for Donald Trump despite the fact that for the most part - in large part - Trump is not conservative at all. That's why the Republican establishment still loathes the Donald. He is not a neocon. He does not follow their lead and he does not subscribe to their ideology.
The people that believed the Seth Rich conspiracy were not "diseased" minds that are adopting some theory - they're doing what both sides of the political spectrum do - they look for suspicious connections and draw the worst possible conclusion about their enemies. It was that way with the diseased left wing or liberal minds of the early 2000s when they were quite content in drawing conclusions that George W. Bush was actually knowingly behind the orchestration of the 9/11 attacks, and knowingly caused the death of those 3,000 people, all in a blood-soaked bid to grab oil. The thinking in the Seth Rich thing is that a guy was inexplicably murdered, shot in the back, in a robbery attempt where he was left with all his valuables, and it came at a time when lots of information was leaking out to Wikileaks, and it is seen as "possible" that an insider did the leaking. Now, none of that is proof. But the suspicion, to political opponents, is very often enough to draw nefarious conclusions.
the wording in the article is weird - Hannity "accused" Rich of being the leaker? Not exactly - if Rich was the leaker, then it wouldn't be an accusation, it would be essentially dubbing him a Whistleblower, exposing wrongdoing. Rich wasn't exposing state secrets. He was exposing improper election tactics and improper interference with the Democratic primaries, among other things. This highlights a key feature of Gerson's thinking - he's an establishment, neocon, Republican -- he thinks it's bad that the information we learned from the Clinton campaign emails should not be leaked. The average Republican voter, I think, would differ on that.
Also, the average Republican voter - the average voter who thinks of himself as a conservative - has had it with establishment conservatives. That's why Trump was so popular. Such a huge portion of the American electorate simply could no longer believe a word these people were saying. How many times do we have to hear "I'm the candidate for smaller government" and we get exactly the opposite from the people saying that?
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar