The Weekly Standard RIP

It seems that the Neoconservative Weekly Standard has shut down. There are many opinions about this.

David Brooks over at NYT Says:


I’ve only been around Phil Anschutz a few times. My impressions on those occasions was that he was a run-of-the-mill arrogant billionaire. He was used to people courting him and he addressed them condescendingly from the lofty height of his own wealth.


I’ve never met Ryan McKibben, who runs part of Anschutz’s media group. But stories about him have circulated around Washington over the years. The stories suggest that he is an ordinary corporate bureaucrat — with all the petty vanities and the lack of interest in ideas that go with the type.


This week, Anschutz and McKibbin murdered The Weekly Standard, the conservative opinion magazine that Anschutz owned. They didn’t merely close it because it was losing money. They seemed to have murdered it out of greed and vengeance.


John Podhoretz, one of the magazine’s founders, reports that they actively prevented potential buyers from coming in to take it over and keep it alive. They apparently wanted to hurt the employees and harvest the subscription list so they could make money off it. And Anschutz, being a professing Christian, decided to close the magazine at the height of the Christmas season, and so cause maximum pain to his former employees and their families.

Thanks for the swing at Christianity, you piece of crap Jew. 😮 😡

However, Ace over at Ace of Spades HQ says something different:


There’s a lot of whining by NeverTrumpers that this is terrible because we need dissenting voices in media, and the closing of the Weekly Standard means that we must all “kneel” to one rich arrogant man’s ego.


Well, you know who might agree with that? Lee Smith, who was fired — purged — from The Weekly Standard last October immediately having offered them an article exposing FusionGPS, the firm that Bill Kristol hired to try to take out Trump and Cruz, for those who like to forget that last name.


I know a lot of NeverTrumpers pretend they were Cruz supporters but funny, when I was supporting Cruz, I didn’t see them anywhere near me. They were taking snarky shots at Cruz and seemed to be rather enamored of Ruuuuubioooo.


Anyway, Lee Smith offered a rich (well, at least he lives richly off other people’s money) arrogant man whose ego cannot bear to hear any dissenting voices a story about the company he paid (or rather, used his donors’ money to pay) for dirt on Trump and Cruz, and was canned.


I have repeatedly brought this up and I have not seen a single NeverTrumper, or one of the people eulogizing this magazine which supposedly fostered a spirit of contrarianism and dissent, so much as mention it, let alone condemn it.


So to all of those Weekly Standard people upset about losing your jobs — Lee Smith lost his job last Christmas (he was fired in October, but generously paid through Christmas), and none of you said a goddamn thing.


If you want some advice on how to recover from an unexpected firing, write me and I’ll give you his email; he went through all this (and is still going through some of this) himself. Maybe he can help.
So spare me. As usual, you’re all in favor of deplatforming and scalphunting, so long as it’s people you don’t like being deplatformed and scalphunted.


Another claim being made is that there were buyers but mean old Clarity Media put an end to that.


The grossly fat John Podhoretz, for example, wrote “There were buyers. Potential buyers.” But he claimed that the search party for buyers was told to stand down in September.


So that Clarity Media could strip The Weekly Standard for the few assets it had which were actually valuable, like its subscriber list.
Dealing with this one at a time:


Obviously, potential buyers are not actual buyers. Or we’d just say “buyers.” So once again, we have a cuck claiming that there were “buyers” but then when you ask, “so why was it not bought?,” they start talking about potential buyers.


Well, Kurt Schlichter is a potential buyer. So are commenters here, who talked about putting together an IndieGoGo buyout fund.


But none of this is serious, is it?


Furthermore, Hayes and his search party were permitted to seek buyers for months, and found none. Further beyond that, whether or not they stop actively looking, People have known that TWS was buyable since the search began. They could have made offers at any time.


They didn’t. Because there are no buyers. Just… potential buyers.
Lastly, this shit about Clarity wanting to shut down an unprofitable, money-losing biilionaire’s vanity project and recover something valuable from it:


When you decide to rely upon the kindness and generosity of a billionaire donor, and are not actually profitable — when your “business model” is to be a charity forever — well, sorry, but that means you have an Audience of One. If Phil Anchultz thought that his Vanity Project was no longer boosting his vanity, because, let’s say, it was a moribund, low-influence afterthought, well, you lost your audience of one.


You were being kept afloat to make his estimation of himself larger; if you produced dreck, and precious little of it to boot, that’s on you.


Next, and finally: This idea that if the rest of the magazine is failing and valueless, but one aspect of it has value (the subscriber list), then it is immoral and terrible to “strip” the company for its “assets:”


Isn’t this part of the cycle of creative destruction of capitalism you defend and claim is central to conservative identitarianism? Wasn’t the candidate you loved in 2012, Mitt Romney, a practitioner of just this sort of wring-inefficiencies-out-of-the-market-by-breaking-down-nonperforming-companies-and-selling-their-useful-parts capitalism?


You’re not very good capitalists if you suddenly start whining “Oh no, capitalistic profit-seeking and inefficiency-eliminating hurts when it happens to you! No fair, no fair! Make the bad men stop!”


You guys can’t talk like Gordon Gecko when it’s someone else getting a pink slip but then whine like Michael Moore when it’s you.


There are bad guys here — but they’re not Clarity Media, who kept this sinking ship afloat with bales of money for a long time.

Ouch.

Now, I am not really crying about the fact that the Weekly Standard is going belly up. They were decidedly Neoconservative, and I found them to be mildly annoying at their least and vomit provoking at their worst. 

However, I would remiss, as someone who very highly disagrees with Neoconservative foreign policy and as someone who came onto the blogging scene, as a left of center type blogger in 2006; just as the Iraq War was turning into a meat grinder —- that it was The Weekly Standard that promoted the idea of going into Iraq, it was The Weekly Standard that propagated the Bush Administrations bald faced LIE, err, um, I mean, bad intelligence report that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

So, No, I will not weep for the demise of the Weekly Standard. However, I will use it as an example of what happens when political ideologies fall out of favor with the American People and with the Republican Party.  That is the ideology of the neoconservatives.  Which is basically big Government conservatism and fight for Israel to the death of the Nation.

It is a political ideology that is on it’s deathbed and I am quite happy for it! 😀


Chuck Baldwin minces no words about Paul Ryan

I have to like Chuck Baldwin, he does not mince words:

It has happened again. We go through this every four years, and every four years the vast majority of “conservatives” fall for it. This is such a broken record. What did Forrest Gump say: “Stupid is as stupid does”? And wasn’t it P.T. Barnum who said, “There’s a sucker born every minute”? Well, here we go again.

Neocon RINO George H.W. Bush picks “conservative” Dan Quayle. “Conservative” G.W. Bush picks neocon RINO Dick Cheney. Neocon RINO John McCain picks “conservative” Sarah Palin. Now, neocon RINO Mitt Romney picks “conservative” Paul Ryan. As long as there is one “conservative” on the ticket, mushy-headed “conservatives” across the country will go into a gaga, starry-eyed, hypnotic trance in support of the Republican ticket. I’m convinced that if Lucifer, himself, was the GOP Presidential candidate, he would get the support of the Religious Right and Republican “conservatives” as long as he selected a reputed “conservative” to join his ticket. And, by the way, the notable “conservative” wouldn’t think twice about joining such a ticket, either, I’m convinced.

Let’s just get this on the record: since 1960, there have only been two Presidential nominees (from the two major parties) who were not controlled by the globalist elitists. One was a Democrat, John F. Kennedy; the other was a Republican, Ronald Reagan. Kennedy was shot and killed; Reagan was shot. Every other President, Democrat or Republican, has been totally controlled, which is why none of them have done diddly-squat to make a difference in the direction of the country. On the issues that really matter, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are just more of the same!

via Chuck Baldwin — Paul Ryan: More Of The Same.

He goes on to say that Ron Paul is the only one; and I disagree with that. However, I will say this; he is right about Romney and Ryan. Which is I am voting for:

Goode/Clymer in 2012

He will not win the election

But voting for anything else is simply Anti-American

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Are the GOP’s Nomination Rules Are Rigged Against Grassroots Conservatives?

Jay Cost seems to think so:

Republicans all across America like to think of their coalition as the “party of Ronald Reagan,” but have you noticed how frequently the party nominates somebody who opposed Ronald Reagan in 1980?Since Reagan’s last nomination in 1984 the GOP has nominated four men to lead the Republican party into the presidential battle. Three of them were aligned against Reagan in the 1980 presidential nomination and the other was . . . John McCain.

Once again, the GOP appears set to nominate such a candidate. Mitt Romney strikes me as a very capable and competent person, possessing many qualities needed in a good president and most definitely superior to the current one, but he is not a Reagan conservative.

So, here’s the question of the day: why can’t the party of Reagan ever seem to nominate a Reaganite?

My answer: because conservative Republicans are not actually in control of their own party. Though they are its animating force – they give it policy ideas to implement, they turn out regularly to support the party in good times and bad, they advocate the party and its ideology to their friends, neighbors, and relatives – they are not in charge, and have not been since the 1970s (arguably the 1920s, but that’s another story altogether).

The lefty do-gooders who spearheaded the reforms of the 1970s thought that they were saving the parties from the machine hacks, but in fact they threw out the baby with the bathwater. They effectively destroyed the party at the grassroots level, and handed the nominating power over to candidates, strategists, donors, the news media, and ill informed voters who dominate the primaries. The biggest losers in this scheme were the kinds of committed citizens who took the time to participate in local party affairs, and on the GOP side that inevitably meant the conservatives. — Morning Jay: The Nomination Rules Are Rigged Against Grassroots Conservatives | The Weekly Standard

It is truly an interesting piece; what is even more interesting is where it is published. Seeing an article talking about “lefties” and “Reagan Conservatives” in a Neoconservative magazine like the Weekly Standard is very interesting to say the least. 😀