If you’ve ever read my blog, you may know that I’m a big fan of Bill Whittle and his series of Afterburner videos from PJ Media.
In his newest video, titled Time to Go, Bill looks at Mitch McConnell and John Boehner with an eye to strong loyal opposition in history.
Bill’s problem with the current Republican leaders is not that they’re disloyal but that they’re simply ineffective. He makes a compelling case for a fresher, more aggressive style and offers one particular senator as an example but you’ll have to watch the video to find out who it is.
Here’s the official description of the video from YouTube…
Whatever happened to a loyal opposition? Boehner and McConnell just seem to be loyal, without the fervency and drive to oppose Obama’s recklessness. Bill Whittle is tired of seeing our country’s oldest tenets left hanging from a thread with no major leadership there to save them. It’s time for a new group of young leaders to takeover.
So is Bill Whittle correct? Watch the video and leave your thoughts in a comment.
Featured image via YouTube.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
No, in this case the esteemed Mr. Whittle is not correct. They are TRAITORS. Period.
McConnell and Boehner both need to go.
Both of them are part of Washington. They pay lip service to their base but are just waiting for their turn to drive the beast of government.
McConnell especially has zero balls to challenge Reid on ANYTHING. Reid has gotten away with an absurd amount of BS over the past 5 years simply because McConnell refuses to challenge him.
I think that at this point that Republicans offer no opposition says everything about the parties themselves.
I am libertarian, so I can go either way, but neither party appeals in anyway because honestly they are the same.
Both parties stink on ice. The current GOP can’t stand its base. It can’t win an election unless the dems lose. I keep waiting for members of either party to live up to the oath they take to the Constitution or to keel over because they lied through their teeth saying the oath. The massive debt and the constant dog and pony show that is DC is beyond disgusting. I’m tired of the stupid and incompetent running the show in DC.
Which is why my wife – who is probably smarter than I – has vowed never to vote again.
Not a winning tactic. Throwing in the towel not only doesn’t get you a win, it doesn’t even get you out of the game.
Things are the way they are because there are more “voters” like you waiting for GOP heroes to secure your liberty and rule of law than there are individuals like Jacobson taking the necessary trouble to become one.
There can be no quality leadership in our Republic when individual Republican citizens are not leaders themselves. And whose idea of fighting is limited to voting, lamenting their defeat and belaboring the obvious.
A video with an actionable recipe is more useful at this stage than one that just reminds us of our ever present agita, stokes defeatism and resignation.
Nonsense. We have these incompetent and unwilling leaders because people will, for whatever reason, vote these losers into office.
Love that guy. Whittle, that is. McConnell & Boehner are to courage what warm piss is to cold beer.
As much as I like my Senator Cruz, I think he needs a little longer in the senate before he’ll be ready for senate leadership.
6 months ought to be about right.
Since Boehner won his primary, it is time to deploy the nuclear option. Every Patriot in his Ohio district needs to show up to the polls in November and vote for his Democrat challenger. There is no danger whatsoever that we’ll loose the House, so we can easily afford to sacrifice his seat for the greater good. As an avid chess player, I will gladly give up a pawn to save my queen. This is a no brainer, folks!
You’re making me want to move to Ohio.
Thumbs up. Bin sayin’ the same thing since Boehner got re-upped as Speaker after the last election.
Kick him to the curb.
Yep. And think what an attention-getter that would be for the GOP congresscritters who’d otherwise blow the Tea Party off.
I think elected Republicans have the most knowledge, the most to gain and the most to lose, when it comes to picking their leadership.
Neither has ever seriously been challenged since first being elected to leadership. That says something.
Why would anyone take advice from a bunch of loonies on the internet who back the likes of Brannon in NC: a convicted fraudster who thought the 9/11 “Truther” conspiracy nuts had a point, who would have lost to Hagan badly – much like Akin and Mourdock did last cycle?
LOL, you’re just making a fool of yourself anymore. Here, I’ll prove it:
Please name the crime of which Brannon was “convicted”.
You never answer challenges – too cowardly – so I’ll answer it for you. None. No crime. He lost a decision in civil court, which is on appeal.
Keep it up, though. You’re the Tea Party’s best salesman.
I’ve been reading lately about how serving incumbents who have somehow wronged Boehner, like Rep. Justin Amash, are being subjected to well-funded, well-supported primary challengers backed by the party leadership, just as Ben Sasse is being subjected to a witch hunt by allies of Mitch McConnell because he has dared to accept support from a group that supports McConnell’s own primary challenger.
I mean, so much for it being about supporting who’s more likely to win. If the leaders are much more interested in settling scores and buffing up their caucus power bases than in challenging the President, why support them? Ah, not that they require your support, they’re too awesome to require your consent or approval in any way, right?
“I’ve been reading lately about how serving incumbents who have somehow wronged Boehner, like Rep. Justin Amash, are being subjected to well-funded, well-supported primary challengers backed by the party leadership…”
Happened in NC District 3 against a GOP incumbent of 20 years Walter Jones. Jones always votes conservative, but he failed to obey GOP leadership on some budget-type votes, choosing instead to vote as his constituents wanted, and was promptly punished by Boehner, who stripped him of his committee assignments. That not being enough for Jones’ crimes of less than 100% obedience to the GOP leadership, Boehner, et al, dumped hundreds of thousands of $$$ against him – he’s a Republican! – in Jones’ just completed primary run. Boehner, et al, also solicited GOP PACs to contribute more, the total going over $1 million dollars in NC D-3 TO UNSEAT A REPUBLICAN WHO’D WON TEN ELECTIONS IN A ROW. Jones won anyway.
“Support the Republican with the best chance of winning,” we are told. Oh BULLSHIT.
PS: Time for ‘new’ leadership? No. Time for leadership period, ’cause you get none of the current bunch. Boehner will fight, and fight hard, but only against his own party members, and worst of all – he still loses. Amash and Jones are still in.
Jones was the other case that vividly stood out, yes. I’m sure there’s other, less celebrated attempts, or attempts that simply haven’t ended because the primaries are still ongoing.
There’s also been some very prominent spiking of the football when tea party people have been defeated. Funny, you never see such talk tolerated when Democrats are defeated.
““Support the Republican with the best chance of winning,” we are told. Oh BULLSHIT.”
See: McCain, John and Romney, Mitt
Bill Whittle is a national treasure.
If you’ve never seen them, watch his “virtual president” series.
I’d be delighted if he was the ACTUAL president!
I couldn’t agree more.
“New leadership” implies that there has been any leadership in recent years. I would challenge that assertion.
Boehner and McConnell need to be put out to pasture. They’ve been in DC far too long and have “gone native”. We need people who view DC as the enemy, not the savior of the citizens.
Bill Whittle cogently says everything that needs to be said about the current ‘insider’ Washington elite.
The current morass of “moral, ethical and philosophical” ambiguity is further muddled by Super-Pac money, glad-handing cronyism across the aisle, feckless and withering decision making and power drunkenness. The current establishment GOP on our front line is not much different than the folks in President Feckless’ Idiocracy administration.
The political quicksand created by these ne’er do wells is dragging our country way down.
Please, no one throw Boehner and McConnell a rope. Instead, let’s give Ted Cruz and the Tea Party plenty of rope. They can lasso the diseased cattle, round them up and put them out to pasture where they can live happily ever after in their autobiographies
Yes, Bill Whittle as leader of the opposition in any capacity.
He speaks from principle with clarity. He’s v smart. Charismatic? Check. He’s witty and funny — entertaining and enlightening. Add fearless.
He’d get press coverage and give air to right thinking. He’s fully capable of eviscerating the snarks. With help, he’d change the course.
Contrast and compare BIll Whittle with Reince Priebus. Depressing, that the Priebus is the current personification of a Republican.
I’ve read a little bit about how the Reform Party started in Canada back in the late ’80s/early ’90s. As I understand it, it started in western Canada as a protest party espousing ideas similar to the Tea Party in the U.S. today. Individual liberty, property rights, and less government intrusion in everyday life was what it stood for. It became more successful as it stood on those principles and started to expand eastward. And as one moves eastward in Canada, the ideology becomes more liberal. So the Canadian establishment felt threated by the success of the Reform Party and maligned it as extremists blah, blah, blah. But the Reform Party never waivered from its principles and kept winning. Then after a couple of mergers with smaller parties, it became what is today the ruling Conservative Party.
Today in England the current “conservative” prime minister, David Cameron, very well could lose to the upstart, populist conservative UKIP party headed by Nigel Farage. UKIP has been described as Britain’s Tea Party. A year ago Cameron referred to UKIP as a “bunch of fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists”. The British establishment are pulling out all the stops to try to prevent a UKIP upset, going so far as getting UKIP sympathizers jailed for insulting Islam and what not. It’s ugly. And American progressives have taken notice and are now writing stories maligning UKIP the same way they’ve done to the Tea Party. But UKIP seems to be getting stronger. Whether UKIP wins or not, they’ve stood on principle every step of the way and are a very real threat to Cameron’s rule as Prime Minister.
When you stand on principles of individual liberty and less government, you may be called extremists and fruitcakes and racists by the establishment, but at least you’re standing on principle. And the electorate knows where you stand and THEY get to decide.
Thanks for the history lesson, Maggot. Much appreciated.
The Democrat Party and the Republican Party are in a race to see which party can become defunct first. Whoever wins gets to take the country with it.
Sorry; not impressed.
Sure, he’s right about the obvious. Reid is a petty man and a crook, Obama is steering the American experiment onto the rocks (and one need not agree about exactly which rock is the one which will poke a hole in the hull to recognize that the nation has a fundamental navigation problem), and the Republicans leading the party are evidently total non-entities and will doubtless stay that way.
But how can those near-banalities be padded out to eight minutes? Whittle’s always been a bit of a windbag, but in his early days in print it was easy to speed-read past the more airy persiflage to get to the point; now that he’s gone video, it’s a chore to get through the dross. And dross there is a-plenty, not least about Disraeli, Gladstone, and Sir Winston.
People knew what Disraeli and Gladstone stood for? Not an easy claim to credit. The differences between the Liberal and Conservative parties (neither of them having much to do with what we’d call Liberal or Conservative today) were, from our vantage point, trivial – the big ones being divergence of details of tariff policies, and how best to abuse poor tenant farmers in Ireland. Disraeli was a bit more energetic than Gladstone when it came to reinforcing alliance structures so as to keep Russia restrained, and Gladstone was more reluctant to spend government money. That was about it. Neither was a champion of any political philosophy, though both dominated parties named after political philosophies. The substantive divergences were so slight that, rather than debate their nebulous policy differences, the principals themselves were reduced to childish (though oh-so-Parliamentesque) personal gibes, as Whittle illustrated via anecdote. And the differences there were that Disraeli was the wit, but Gladstone had all the class. (Women liked Disraeli better, though.)
And Churchill? Just what did Churchill stand for? A detailed examination of his career shows a succession of policy reversals from which it’s hard to determine exactly what he did stand for. But it’s explicable; the key is that Churchill was an unusually energetic and enthusiastic man, positively assaulting any job he held at the moment. When he was Lord of the Admiralty, he pushed hard, and generally successfully, for mountains of money for dreadfully expensive dreadnoughts. (Note that modern battle fleets were the major government expense of the era, at least for those countries with serious navies.) But after the Great War, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and had the problem of paying down huge war debts, he was obsessed with savage cost-cutting. (And very sensibly, too – the idea of living on perpetual deficits wasn’t yet in vogue.) Most, then as well as now, would consider these to be contrary philosophies.
Though he doesn’t state it explicitly, Whittle is probably thinking that Sir Winston’s almost rabid distrust of both the Bolsheviks and the Fascists is what he “stood for”, and although Churchill was right about both, he wasn’t the only one of the political class to think so; other prominent British politicos, such as Eden, recognized the dangers of those evil twins, but were not really willing to go to great lengths to fight them. Churchill was a unique combination of suspicion, energy, stubbornness, aggression, and ideas, a combination – mainly the “ideas” part – sorely lacking in early 20-century Europe (and it is perhaps not coincidental that he was half-American). Anyone studying the history of that period must be struck by this; the Old World was simply out of ideas, most obviously at the end of 1914, when it behaved like a cow stuck in the corner of a corral with no idea of how to back up and set another course. Winston had ideas, though even his contemporaries recognized that while some of them were real corkers, others were pretty bad, and Winston himself had no idea which were which.
But comparing the midgets of today with the single most important man of his century seems futile. Obama, Reid, Boehner? Obama will have his framed photos taking up space in the back rooms of post offices nationwide for a while before somebody gets around to pitching them onto the rubbish heap of history, but the others will never appear anywhere but the footnotes. Midgets they are and midgets they will remain.
So, leaving out the lessons we can’t really extract from Gladstone, Disraeli, and Churchill, what does Whittle have left? The gross inadequacies of Boehner and McConnell.
But I think we knew about those.
When he gets to numbers, Whittle has never been particularly good. I noted only one number here –
… a nation spending 10 billion dollars a day (and most of that is debt, by the way) …
I don’t know what “The Nation” spends, but the federal government is spending around 3.8 trillion annually, which is indeed pretty close to an average of 10 billion dollars a day. But what’s with that “debt” claim?
Currently something around 6 percent of federal spending is interest on the bonds financing the current debt. And of the 3.8 trillion annual spending, about 3.2 trillion is money the feds have (or will have by the end of the fiscal year), leaving a deficit of about half a trillion. That’s about 13 percent of spending. So, together, something on the order of 20 percent of today’s federal spending is money the government doesn’t actually have, or interest on money it spent in the past but didn’t have then, either. So I see the percentage of spending which can be chalked up to “debt” being around 20 percent, which is ridiculously high but still nowhere near Whittle’s “more than half”.
This is not a mere detail, this is an important and even fundamental philosophical difference between fiscal conservatism and modern liberalism – one can handle numbers, and the other can only ignore them.
Let’s stay on the correct side of that intellectual chasm.
There is irony in your post.