@RameshPonnuru @McCormackJohn @Timodc @Peggynoonannyc Until this moment, I did not know how you voted. All I can say is that this was a time that seemed to me full of moral clarity, and I do not fully grasp how anyone else didn't see it that way. /1
@RameshPonnuru @McCormackJohn @Timodc @Peggynoonannyc As for for an approach to politics, I think fudging moral differences is how we got here. I thought one of the things we used to agree on as conservatives was this kind of moral clarity about people like, say, Bill Clinton. I thought that notion united us, once upon a time. /2
@RameshPonnuru @McCormackJohn @Timodc @Peggynoonannyc I also thought we were the people who had the courage to say "yes, 47 percent of the public can be totally wrong and I don't need to go figure out how to split the difference with them so that they don't feel bad about being wrong." /3
@RameshPonnuru @McCormackJohn @Timodc @Peggynoonannyc But maybe I misunderstood what we were as conservatives. /4x

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More from @RadioFreeTom

7 Jan
A thread on how much you should be worried.

You guys always tease me about not letting you panic. Don't panic. Panic is a useless emotion. But after yesterday, you should be very, very alarmed right now. /1
I have said for a while that we're at the political version of DEFCON 1. Trump is doing what a lot of us knew he would do, attacking our institutions while leaving us nearly defenseless: The Capitol was breached last night, with the VP and Congress having to run for safety. /2
To protect the Capitol itself, the VP and the Acting SecDef had to go around the President - who, by many reports, has now become completely detached from reality. This is a government breakdown of the kind we usually only think of happening in other countries. /3
Read 8 tweets
29 Dec 20
I realize I am starting generational warfare by criticizing this piece today in @TheAtlantic about how the "Simpsons" life is no longer attainable, but the writer just didn't watch enough of The Simpsons and this is shoehorning some nostalgia about 1990 into a *cartoon* /1
@TheAtlantic When I say that younger people are whining about a life that didn't exist, this is what I mean. The writer is (by my math) about 39? The Simpsons *wasn't real and it was predicated on being a 1950s life and that was the joke, you see*

/2
@TheAtlantic Yes, Homer had a good job with a high school diploma. That was the joke. In a 1993 episode, it's revealed that he was SUPPOSED to have a college degree. He was a fake. He was incompetent. He shouldn't have had that job. /3
Read 6 tweets
16 Dec 20
I *do* like Pete! That's the point! I think he's a talented man who should, you know, win a statewide seat, or at least a seat in Congress, or run something bigger than a city before heading to the Cabinet. That's my only position on it but I forgot that Pete has a nutty cult. /1
The reason, apparently, that no one came at me nearly this hard about my objection to Lloyd Austin - a far more consequential pick and far more worrisome than Pete - is because Lloyd Austin doesn't have a cult of TV-addicted celebrity worship out there plumping for him. /2
But in the end, what I'm really pleading for here with a subset of Twitter Democrats is to *be consistent and hold your party to the standards that matter, not the shitty standard of the Trump era.* Don't engage in lazy "but he won Iowa" or "Elaine Chao was awful arguments. /3
Read 4 tweets
12 Dec 20
I am sorry to see a man whose writing I have very much enjoyed - Joseph Epstein - descend to this kind of crap in the @WSJ.

Especially because on his main point - about the honorific - I mostly agree with him. But this piece is cringe-inducing and dripping with resentment. /1
@WSJ Epstein wrote a wonderful book on resentment and its uglier brother, "ressentiment," and it is amazing that he is completely unaware of the degree to which something he understands so well now afflicts him so mightily. This piece is not only resentful, but self-pitying. /2
Epstein attempts to dress that resentment and self-pity behind a breezy style for which he would have likely clobbered a hapless student in his own classes. The lack of self-awareness is remarkable in a writer whose candidness was part of his appeal. /3
Read 4 tweets
8 Dec 20
Liberal friends, over the past few years many of you said "I plan to be consistent on basic principle when it's our guy in office!" Well, here's your chance. If you think a general running the DoD is a bad idea, it can't be a *good* idea now just because Biden did it. /1
This has zero to do with Lloyd Austin. Yes, he's qualified. Yes, the president should have his team. But this requires Congress - for the second time in four years - to pass a law saying "we didn't really mean it about that other law we passed prohibiting this thing." /2
If you voted for Biden to restore norms, saying "yeah, but Trump did worse, and this isn't so bad, and Trump something something," then you're not restoring norms. You're making a special pleading that your norm-breaking is better than the other guy's norm-breaking. /3
Read 4 tweets
7 Dec 20
So, this is a teaching story I often tell on the road, and a kind of teaching we should get back to. In 1985, after working my way through college and an MA, I finally got a PhD scholarship. I thought I was the cat's ass for that. /1
And I swaggered into Intro to Political Philosophy (my PhD minor was in political theory), taught by tall, stern, crew-cut Jesuit named Father James Schall. Schall was tough as nails and I fought with him about...wait for it... Plato.

Because I was, you know, smart. /2
Jim had read Plato in Greek and all that, but hey, I was 24 and wicked smart. Anyway, at the end of it all, I manage to get an A. I feel like Superman.
So I run into Father Schall at the dept Christmas party, and I am totally full of myself. /3
Read 6 tweets

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