The GOP cockpit
By John Kass
November 12, 2023
It’s been a long week, with plenty of heavy lifting, there was the Ed Burke column and the “Ship of Fools” column. Too many metaphors can ruin the soup. So can we make this one easy? Not as easy as smoking a hookah at a cockfight back in the 1890s, in England.
But easier, nonetheless.
Vivek “won” the Republican debate and it’s time Republicans realize they’re not only fighting for their way of life, and for the republic, but everything. It’s time to take out the tomahawks.
The one standout moment, the one political warrior out there with the necessary sand was Vivek Ramaswamy. He denounced the GOP bosses to their face. He denounced corporate media for constantly lying to the American people. And he specifically called out NBC News debate moderator Kristen Welker to her face for spreading the Russia-collusion hoax.
I’d have to agree with The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson about the Republican debate. Vivek won hands down.
Nicole Wallace of MSNBC and the rest of that simpering and woke MSNBC panel were outraged. And I assume that the corporate Republican types pretending to be conservatives sniffed their noses up at Ramaswamy’s alleged lack of tact (see National Review) but I appreciated Ramaswamy’s political bloodlust and cock-of-the-walk demeanor. He knows what’s at stake. The other Republicans save Trump just don’t get it.
Perhaps Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gets it. But he holds it close. Vivek is all out there.
What Republican voters want is candidate who’ll reach for the tomahawks like Magua from “Last of the Mohicans.” And NBC’s Welker had that same look in her eyes that gentle forest creatures get when they’re standing in the middle of the road at night, they’re frozen in the headlights and the sound of a Charlie Daniels fiddle playing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” is the last thing that doe would hear.
“Kristen I’m gonna use this time — because this is actually about you and the media and the corrupt media establishment — to ask you about the Trump-Russia collusion hoax that you pushed on this network for years,” said Ramaswamy as RNC chair Ronna McDaniel clutched her pearls and got sympathy points from MSNBC vermin. “Was that real, or was that Hillary Clinton made-up disinformation? Answer the question, go.”
Welker froze, with that same look in her eyes that forest creatures get when they’re standing in the road at night. But deer don’t have an idiotic smirk playing on their lips as a truck bears down on them.
But Ramaswamy wasn’t shy. He reached for the tomahawks with (politically) murderous intent. Because that’s where we are now. And he escalated his feud with RNC chair McDaniel. Naturally, Republican establishment types like neoconservative Nikki Haley and never-Trumper Chris Christie are upset. They see Vivek as something of a vulgar attention grabber. I see a neo-con war hawking witch and a fat man with a big mouth.
When Haley wants attention, I suppose she can get put on another defense contractor board and applaud another endless foreign war. And Christie can serve up another dozen krispy kremes, that is, if he can just remember to wipe his chin afterward. But the rest of us, the conservatives sick of the establishment and the Bush Republicans and the Combine destroying the party are none too pleased.
“We’ve become a party of losers at the end of the day,” Ramaswamy said. “Since Ronna McDaniel took over as chairwoman of the RNC in 2017, we have lost 2018, 2020, 2022, no red wave, that never came. We got trounced last night.”
Nikki Haley, the neo-con Bushie doesn’t like him, Mitch McConnell the Combine Republican of the Senate won’t address him out of contempt, but the people hear Vivek Ramaswamy loud and clear. And after the party’s poor showing in Virginia and McConnell’s Kentucky last week they want someone to reach for those warclubs.
On Saturday I sat in on a roundtable discussion at Salem broadcasting’s “Freedom Summit” with Dan Proft, host of “The Morning Answer,” Scott McKay, author of the new Obama book “Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama” and Charles Thomas, the respected former WLS TV political reporter. We talked about the tomahawks. And the consensus among the conservative rank-and-file in the packed hotel grand ballroom was that it’s long past time to reach for those tomahawks.
An unnecessary fourth debate on News Nation will be moderated by Megyn Kelly, host of The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM, Elizabeth Vargas, the Peabody award-winning anchor of News Nation’s Elizabeth Vargas Reports, and Eliana Johnson, Editor-in-Chief of The Washington Free Beacon. Trump has teased he might show up for the Dec. 6, debate in Alabama.
Doers it matter?
Trump or no, the Republican voters want him as their presidential nominee.
What you see on the debate stage are the leavings of the cockfight. The people either have tuned this out, or they’re just waiting for the campaign with Biden, so they can exact some measure of revenge against the smarmy pundits from MSNBC and the rest who cast them as deplorables.
They’re done debating. And they want him to swing the tomahawks.
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