MAGA isn’t serious… or conservative
Plus The Marines lose an F-35
I’ve said for years that Trump was no conservative. He proved me right once again over the weekend in an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC.
In the interview, Trump shed his conservative mask and abandoned another of the traditionally Republican positions that the former Democrat adopted to run for president. After being touted as an uberconservative fighter, The Former Guy is now seeking to become a deal maker who can unite both sides. After watching Trump deepen partisan divides since 2016, pardon me for being skeptical.
The subject at hand was abortion, a Republican sacred cow. After noting that many Republicans "speak very inarticulately about this subject,” Trump called for compromise with a ban at a specific number of weeks. He did not specify where he would place the cutoff.
"We’re going to agree to a number of weeks or months or however you want to define it," Trump said. "And both sides are going to come together and both sides — both sides, and this is a big statement — both sides will come together. And for the first time in 52 years, you’ll have an issue that we can put behind us."
Sounds easy. Why didn’t anyone else think of that?
Well, part of the reason is that nailing down where the cutoff should be has proven impossible. Another part is that extremists on both sides don’t want to compromise. That includes the Republicans who backed Trump for years because he was a pro-life hardliner. Or so they thought.
Now Trump calls six-week bans "a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.“ Trump said a 15-week ban is "a number that people are talking about right now,” but then denied he would sign such a bill. Does he want higher or lower numbers? Who knows?
Trump’s flip back to a more pro-choice position comes just over a decade after his conversion to a pro-life stance in 2011 as he began to position himself for a presidential run. Now, sensing the political winds have shifted, he flips back as he campaigns in a different election.
Trump has flip-flopped numerous times before. Some of his most egregious policy changes have involved the holy trinity of the modern Republican Party: Abortion, guns, and immigration. During the 2016 campaign, Trump “softened” his immigration policy and expressed an openness to a pathway to legalization for illegals. This shift was also followed by a quick shift back. Trump also flip flopped on whether high or low numbers of immigration arrests at the border were a good thing. He took credit for both.
But Trump’s biggest flip flop was on guns. Trump infamously ordered his Justice Department to unilaterally ban bump stocks, a ban that was blocked by a federal court earlier this year. Trump also waffled on background checks, red flag laws, and “assault rifle” bans while maintaining his NRA endorsement. Try that as a Democrat who had just enacted an executive gun ban! Just ask New Mexico’s Gov. Grisham!
None of this ever mattered a whit to his supporters. That’s because Trump’s supporters claim to be conservative but in reality follow Trump because of his personality.
“I think they’re all going to like me,” Trump said of his abortion proposal. “I think both sides are going to like me.”
And that’s true of of Trump’s MAGA base. They’ll accept his new position as some sort of 4-D chess master plan. And that’s true of his next position when he flip flops back too.
And speaking of unserious faux conservatives (or “fauxservatives™” to coin a phrase). Lauren Boebert was ejected from a live-action presentation of “Beetlejuice” at a Denver theater over the weekend. The incident was caught on video which showed the Colorado congresswoman and her date groping each other in public. Boebert was allegedly also vaping in her seat near a pregnant woman.
“Do you know who I am?” Boebert reportedly asked as she was thrown out.
That sort of behavior sounds… swampy… for lack of a better term.
To make matters even more awkward, Boebert’s date reportedly owns a bar that frequently hosts drag shows, which have been major Republican bogeyman. Boebert has been very critical homosexuals, drag shows, and “groomers,” but I guess her new strategy is “make love [in public{ not [culture] war.”
Isn’t combating elites who think they are above the law what a big part of the MAGA movement was supposed to be about? For that matter, isn’t morality and stopping public displays of lewdness a big part of the current Republican talking points? Boebert, like Nancy Mace of South Carolina who recently regaled a prayer breakfast with tales of sleeping with her fiancé, is an unmarried and self-professed Christian who paints herself as a defender of the faith and morality.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, last week we received word that we were losing one of the good ones when 76-year-old Mitt Romney announced his retirement at the end of this term. I was a reluctant supporter of Romney in 2012 because I didn’t consider him conservative enough.
I was wrong.
Romney may be a moderate but he turned out to be one of the most stalwart conservatives in the party. I watched with dismay over the past few years as, one by one, the people that I had admired as conservatives jettisoned their principles to get on the Trump train.
Comparing those who followed Trump, the closet liberal and waffler, to people like Romney, who were derided as RINOs, it seems that those who claimed to be conservative superpatriots were often the ones whose principles shifted most quickly.
Who turned out to be the real RINOs?
But it turns out that Republicans don't mind RINOs. They don't really want a conservative, a constitutionalist, or a fighter. It doesn't matter if Trump flips on core issues and then flips back again. Republicans want Trump, whatever he happens to be at the moment.
There is no longer a conservative party because Republicans didn’t want their party to be conservative. There are only differing degrees of liberalism, craziness and corruption, and Republicans aren’t necessarily on the best end of the scale.
I WANTED A STEALTH JET BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS: The Marines lost an F-35 fighter jet this weekend. It didn’t just crash. They couldn’t find it for days. As I write this, the debris field has apparently been found northeast of Charleston. Here’s the story so far.
Per Forbes, the F-35B Lightning II was flying near Charleston, SC on Sunday afternoon when an undescribed “mishap” occurred. The pilot ejected safely after the “mishap,” but then the military couldn’t find the $80 million jet.
How can the Marines lose a fighter jet? The story brings to mind images of Bond villains scooping up unsuspecting military planes from a giant aircraft, but the truth is probably more mundane.
The F-35 is designed to be stealthy, which means that primary radar that reflects off the aircraft skin is of limited use. Beyond that, domestically most air traffic control radars are secondary radars, which track aircraft through use of a transponder. The ATC radar sends a signal and the transponder on the plane sends a reply. For some reason, the transponder on the missing plane was not working. This could be related to the “mishap” that led to the pilot’s decision to part ways with his jet.
A big question in my mind is why the airplane kept flying after the pilot punched out. It isn’t common for military aviators to leave an airplane that isn’t in imminent danger of crashing. We don’t know why the pilot ejected but he probably thought he had no choice.
Having said that, there have been cases of airplanes that stubbornly refused to crash after their pilots left. In one example from the Cold War, a Soviet jet flew 500 miles after its pilot ejected in 1989. The plane ultimately crashed into a house in Belgium, killing one person.
If the autopilot was engaged, the plane would probably either fly its last heading or follow a preprogrammed course until its fuel ran out. We don’t know how much fuel was on board, but the F-35 has a range of about 1,000 miles. With the last known position near the coast, the odds are pretty good that the plane could have ended up in the ocean. If it had, it would have been very difficult to find. Remember Malaysian Flight 370?
The military is pretty tight-lipped, especially when the story is embarrassing, so we may never know the full story of the errant F-35, but we can be thankful that it apparently went down without causing additional damage or loss of life.