I’m not familiar with Nichols but it’s interesting that him as a republican his post wasn’t quickly flooded with attacks and insults. The comments are surprisingly civil. Whereas someone considered a liberal had posted that would be dumped on by hateful righteous conservatives almost immediately.
Nichols is a pretty smart guy overall (professor at Boston University and the Naval War College, author of The Death of Expertise), and tends to be very respectful in his posts (though sometimes snarky), even with liberals who he disagrees with so long as everyone remains polite and civil.
The thing is, I think a lot of his followers tend to be liberals or moderates and not the hard-core troglodyte conservatives because he’s a respectful and thoughtful center-right conservative (he was born and raised in Massachusetts and lives in Rhode Island – most of the Republicans up here tend to be quite moderate) as opposed to alt-right wackos and their ilk. The far right doesn’t have time for intellectualism and expertise, whereas he thinks society needs to seek advice from experts in relevant fields in order to function properly.
The fact that he’s not even voting for Republicans on the local level did come as a surprise to me though. A lot of local Republicans in New England, as mentioned previously, tend to be on the moderate side and are often quite progressive on many social issues. The GOP governor of Massachusetts even told the MA National Guard not to deploy to support Trump’s border patrol. The fact that he’s lumping even the local ones, whose only thing in common with Trump may be the “R” that appears after their name in the news, says a lot of what he thinks of the current state of the GOP.
More from Tom Nichols:
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse laying into the Supreme Court and the “Robert’s Five”
"When does a pattern prove bias?..When [the Robert’s Court’s] Republican majority goes off on partisan excursions through the civil law. That is when all five Republican appointees…go raiding off together and no democratic appointee joins them. Does this happen often? The Roberts 5 has gone on almost 80 of these partisan excursions since Roberts became chief…and there’s a feature to these 80 cases: they almost all implicate interests important to the big funders and influencers of the Republican Party. When the republican justices go off on these 5 justice partisan excursions, there’s a big Republican corporate or partisan interest involved 92% of the time…Is there a pattern to these 73 cases? ,…Every time a big republican corporate or partisan interest is involved the big republican interest wins. Every. Time…
Thus the mad scramble of big Republican interest groups to protect a Roberts 5 that will give them wins. I note that when the Roberts 5 saddles up, these so-called conservatives are anything but judicially conservative. They readily overturn precedent, toss out statutes passed by wide bi-partisan margins, and decide on broad constitutional issues that they need not reach. Modesty, originalism, stare decisis, all these supposedly conservative judicial principals all have the hoof prints of the Robert’s 5 all across their backs wherever those principals got in the way of those wins for the big Republican interests.
The litany of Roberts 5 decisions explains why big republican interests want Judge Kavanaugh on the court so badly. So badly that Republicans trampled so much Senate precedent to push him through."
–Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse
Nothing new. He’s proclaimed how much he admired various dictators’ ability to shutdown protests on numerous occasions.
Everything is stupid now. 4chan somehow successfully made the OK hand signal into an actual white supremacy sign.
Occupy Democrats ran with that as well.
Someone posted that on a friend’s FB page and I couldn’t believe it.
That’s been a thing for about a year now. Saw it a lot more last year when alt-right icons like Cernovitch and Fairbanks and Wintrich were adopting it as an in-joke.
It was never on my radar for whatever reason until now. It’s classic 4chan and friends though. They tried/are trying the same false flag things attempting to tie pedophilia into the LGBT/Pride movement.
Wow…
/fifteencharacters
Jesus fucking christ…
“Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.”
While I’m glad that this anonymous official is writing an op-ed (although it seems extremely counterproductive), what he/she (and all the others) should really be doing is testifying before Congress.
I had to look up who Baltar was I only watched the first season of BSG. But I get the reference!
I find this person who wrote this Opinion piece is, in short, a shit lord.
They specifically claim they think some of the agenda pursued by the administration are good. Good!
Deregulation and such. They think it’s good!
They have all but tacitly admitted that they know Donald Trump is incapable of performing his duties but they keep him there to further a Republican agenda.
They are complicit.
I’d bet a signed dollar (RIMSHOT!) that this is fake just like the twitter user claiming to be a staffer from the early days of the presidency.
I honestly doubt the NYT would publish something if they didn’t have their own confirmation it was real. The embarrassment of being caught in that would completely destroy them.