Commentary: Trump vs. the ‘Stepford Wife’ Republicans

When the protagonist in Ira Levin’s novel, The Stepford Wives, begins to suspect that other women in her Connecticut town are robots, she surmises:

That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

Which brings to mind the viral video of Mitt Romney reacting to his Twinkie birthday cake. Lack of ample bosom aside, Mitt is a great example of someone playing a housewife unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real. He is a Stepford-Wife Republican.

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Ross Perot Has Died

by Evie Fordham   Texas billionaire and two-time independent presidential candidate Ross Perot died Tuesday at 89 after a five-month battle with leukemia. Perot is probably best known for his presidential runs in 1992 and 1996, reported the Dallas Morning News. Perot garnered 19% of the popular vote but no electoral college votes in 1992 and was viewed as a spoiler who helped then-candidate Bill Clinton defeat President George H.W. Bush. Perot nearly died from an infection in March following his leukemia diagnosis, his family said. But he recovered and continued going into the office almost daily. He celebrated his 89th birthday in June with family, according to the Dallas Morning News. Perot campaigned as a populist who stood against government waste. He turned his eye toward politics after becoming a self-made billionaire ranked as the 478th-richest person in the world by Forbes. His estimated net worth was $4.1 billion. Perot was born in Texarkana, Texas, in 1930 and went from paper boy to entrepreneur by age 32. He founded two pioneering computer services companies, Electronic Data Systems Corp. and Perot Systems Corp., according to the Dallas Morning News. Perot will also be remembered for being endlessly quotable, both on politics and general success…

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Commentary: The Only Thing ‘Unprecedented’ About Donald Trump is His Refusal to Stand Silent in the Face of Attack

by Victor Davis Hanson   Peggy Noonan, apparently like many, believes that Trump’s occasional callousness and crassness are unprecedented. And they have so befouled the political landscape that he has spawned rude and crude leftwing imitators. The result allegedly is the vile language of the “mean girls” such as the anti-Semitism and foul speech of Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib: I think we all know where this started, the political brutishness, the ignoring of traditions and norms. Donald Trump is both origin and rationale . . . The mean girls of Congress have learned at his knee. They have taken their tactics from him. They claim to be his reluctant imitators but I think they admire his ferocity. They have a taste for it, and a talent. Collective Amnesia  With all due respect, I don’t think we “all” know that this started with Trump, however crass he can be. Rather, we know all too well the political landscape a decade before Trump. Do we recall the recent deranged talk of 2004-8 from the Democratic Party, the popular culture, and the media – or the relative passivity of the wounded Bush administration in response to such venom? Why, after all, did Alfred…

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Commentary: The George H.W. Bush Obituary You Won’t Read In The New York Times (Part Two)

by Richard A Viguerie   As the establishment media rushes to make the late President George H.W. Bush a saint of bipartisanship conservatives ought to remember the real George H.W. Bush and heed the political lessons available from an honest review of his record. Patriot, a public servant in the sense that the old Republican establishment viewed politics, and a paragon of old-fashioned public decorum and virtue he most certainly was, but he was, just as certainly, not a conservative. Those of us who have been around conservative politics for a while remember the smirk on Democratic senator George Mitchell’s face when he conned George H. W. Bush into abandoning his “read my lips” promise to oppose new taxes. If “Read my lips: no new taxes,” was the most memorable line of the 1988 campaign, George H. W. Bush’s decision to abandon that commitment was, politically, the most momentous act of his presidency. The decision to go back on his pledge not to raise taxes didn’t take place until well into his term. But Bush’s betrayal of the Reagan Revolution started the minute he took the oath of office. Within hours of Bush’s inauguration establishment Republicans, such as James Baker III,…

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Commentary: From Bush to Trump, the Hard-Left Deep State Alliance Endures

by Joseph Duggan   A future American history exam will ask students to recall a U.S. president who relied heavily on the political intelligence-gathering and counsel of one or more of his adult children. This president bypassed the foreign policy and diplomatic bureaucracy and practiced a notably personal style of international deal making. He also invested what some considered an inordinate amount of trust in his direct relationship with a controversial Saudi Arabian sheikh and the strategic importance of the Desert Kingdom’s oil resources. One acceptable answer would be Franklin Roosevelt. The White House during his era had no one styled “chief of staff.” Jefferson’s White House with Meriwether Lewis, and Lincoln’s with John Hay, had top aides known as “private secretary” or a similar title. For part of FDR’s presidency, his de facto chief of staff was his eldest son James, snarkily described by Henry Luce’s Time magazine in 1938 as the “Assistant President of the United States.” FDR famously conducted direct diplomacy with Churchill and Stalin to guide the Allies to victory over Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. His personal chemistry and understandings with the British statesman and the Soviet dictator were essential both to the war’s success…

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