The Great Republican Hope

Douthat has his debut over at the New York Times, whose motto seems to be "We're going to push newspapers into irrelevancy as fast as we can!" I mean, don't get me wrong. It's a far better paper than a lot of others, but well, it's hard not to question its sanity when it publishes this:

Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.

Actually, Asshat, I find that quite EASY to not believe that, but, then, I'm not completely fucking insane.

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation. (Italics in original... for some reason.)

Um, hmm, interesting point. I think it may have something to do with how shitty McCain's campaign was. It might have been because of his absurd choice of running mate. Now you could argue that Palin was a maverick reformer, or you could say something relevant to reality. Something like "Palin was an idiot first class of the extreme insane right-wing style. People hated her because of everything of GWB that they saw in her." I dunno, that might have explained why even Peggy fucking Noonan said it was over after she was picked.

[Cheney] was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.

If only McCain hadn't been so "pro-torture" and "pro-foreign war." What would've been much more successful was Cheney. The public clearly wanted someone who was PRO-torture and PRO-foreign war. Yup, people love those things. People are all like "tax cuts and war are awesome! That's what's done America so well these past few years!" By people I mean the retarded 29-percenters who have more paint chips in their veins than blood.

I'd go on, but what's the point. Rossie does a bit of backtracking, trying to state that the debate about torture should have happened during a presidential campaign so that we could reach a consensus. Yeah, that would've been awesome. A two point torture and foreign wars campaign. The public benefit from that kind of discourse would be immeasurable. It is, after all, hard to measure ridiculously small quantities.

So glad Rossies around. It makes the flailing death of the Republican Party that much more amusing.

What's the over-under on him having misattributed a quote or something equal ridiculous in his very first column? I feel that should become a tradition.

Update: Because I realize this post is as vague as Douthat's: it's true that Douthat's point is that a Cheney loss would jolt a conservative reawakening, but he posits that so vaguely and halfheartedly, it's as if he's afraid to just come out and say that Cheney is a monster. He wants conservatives to get away from the pro-torture and pro-foreign wars stance and writes an entire article about that. In that article, he fails entirely to actually decry torture and foreign wars. Instead he thinks we need to "discuss them."

Maybe if he forgot his fairy tales of a Cheney presidential run and instead dreamed fairy tales of getting Cheney and his evil minions of all the fucking TV and newspapers blasting people with their lies and aggression, it might make him appear less like a wannabe-contrarian idiot.