OPINION:
OK, this is really boring, but it’s time to eat some vegetables. Together, let’s try to stay awake.
Remember back in 2016 when we suffered through endless, tedious lectures from a magazine called National Review about how former President Donald Trump was such a threat to the Republican Party? He was not really conservative, they insisted, and he was a grave assault on the values and beliefs of regular Americans.
Of course, you don’t remember. Because you love your family, you love America, and you have better things to do than read tedious screeds from a cruise ship lecture circuit that publishes a goofball magazine as a failed side hustle.
But boy, did they spend a lot of time huffing and puffing all about what we really believe and what is best for us. They even did a whole big edition of their failed magazine listing all the great intellectual luminaries on the cover who would stand athwart Trump for the rest of time.
We, meanwhile, happily ran off with Mr. Trump, who proved to be more conservative, more American and more loyal to our values than any president since at least Ronald Reagan.
In the years since, many of those National Review luminaries, I am delighted to report, have pulled up their stakes athwart Trump forever and joined our jolly circus. Nowadays, National Review publishes articles titled “Never Trump Revisited,” and its editors write books titled “The Case for Nationalism: How it Made Us Powerful, United and Free.”
It is always wonderful to have new allies fighting to save our country. It is also delightful when hopeless nerds entertain us with their pretzel logic and fancy words.
But, alas, not all the nerds in the New York City literary/cruise ship industry have joined our joyous band. And many of the holdouts are even dumber than the last lot.
This is where this column gets even more boring. But please bear with me.
Now comes the war-monger magazine, a monthly publication known in literary circles as Commentary. It is like National Review for even bigger nerds. And it has an even smaller circulation. It is so small that if they launched a cruise ship lecture series, they would just need one small rowboat.
Isn’t there, like, a pond in Central Park?
Anyway, I have seen the magazine. It is a little bit larger than the old Reader’s Digest. I speak for 340 million Americans (and 50 million illegal immigrants) when I say that I have never actually read the magazine.
Until today. And boy was it delightful — though I can assure you I still have no idea what the article was trying to say.
It was written by a guy named Noah Rothman, who is the warmonger magazine’s associate editor. It was titled: “Now Who’s Out of Touch?”
Self-awareness is generally not the strong suit of the intellectual, literary rowboat cruise ship set in New York City.
Anyhoo.
Oh, dammit. I have hit refresh on my computer so many times trying to comprehend this incomprehensible article that I used up my five free articles this month, and now the article I wanted to tell you about is behind a paywall. So we are flying blind now. I am going to try to finish the column without notes.
Basically, what Mr. Rothman said was that this new breed of so-called “populist” Republican candidates who have risen in the wake of Mr. Trump are terribly “out of touch” with regular Republicans and normal American voters because these candidates are not sufficiently ecstatic about going to war with Russia over the territorial integrity of a country called Ukraine.
Dear Lord.
As proof — and, again, I am winging it here — I think Mr. Rothman cited a post on the internet by Axios. This deeply incestuous political website has taken D.C. navel-gazing to bionic new levels. It’s more like kidney stone-gazing.
Oh wait, I wrote this down from the article before the paywall went up.
“GOP operatives working on 2022 primary races tell Axios they worry they’ll alienate the base if they push to commit American resources or troops to help Ukraine fight Russia,” Mr. Rothman writes.
“It is entirely unclear what ‘base’ they’re talking about,” he goes on. “All evidence suggests the populists are courting a Republican voting ‘base’ they’ve made up in their own minds.”
And there you have it. If you are not sure of America’s vital interest in Ukraine’s territorial integrity, then you are “out of touch.”
Thank God for the view from a rowboat bobbing around in the pond in Central Park.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
