Trump Pulls Veterans Campaign Ad That Depicted Russian Soldiers

Jordan Sargent · 01/22/16 05:25PM

Donald Trump put a new veteran-focused campaign ad up on Facebook today, but it was pulled down before most anyone could see it after commenters pointed out that the footage clearly depicted Russian veterans wearing the distinctive St. George ribbon and pins with the Communist hammer and sickle.

The National Review Makes Its Case Against the Republican Party

Tom Scocca · 01/22/16 03:00PM

Donald Trump, the National Review tells us, is a huckster, a dangerous demagogue, and an irresponsible fool. The first voice that the National Review brings out to tell us so, in the anti-Trump blurb collection that the magazine promoted to the New York Times yesterday and released to the bedtime internet last night, is the voice of Glenn Beck.

Trump, Beck warns us, is the latest avatar of “ever-expanding government,” a proven sympathizer with the Obama Administration’s tyrannical goals. “While conservatives fought against the bank bailouts,” Beck writes, “Donald Trump called them ‘something that has to get done.’” This is an interesting reconstruction of the politics around the question of whether to let the finance industry collapse; “it needed to be done,” was also how the Republican presidential nominee at the time described the bailout of AIG. (The bailout “was, unfortunately, necessary,” Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina said.)

The more notable historical oddity, though, is that the National Review should give that space to Glenn Beck at all. The magazine originally defined its place in the conservative intellectual world through William F. Buckley’s bold attacks on the John Birch Society and the paranoid conspiratorialist wing of the Republican Party. Beck is a neo-Bircher who built his career by weeping on television about the wicked machinations of America’s hidden enemies. Yet there he is, leading off Buckley’s magazine’s effort to explain why Donald Trump doesn’t belong in the conservative movement.

The further one reads through the National Review’s anti-Trump pleadings, the more sense Beck’s participation makes. If Buckley declared that his magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” the Trump package stands alongside history muttering “History? History, history... Hmm, nope, doesn’t ring a bell.”

There are, at this point, two fairly straightforward thoughtful arguments that a conservative publication could make against the rise of Donald Trump. One would be a pragmatic or tactical one: Despite his theatrical contempt for liberal elites, Trump is unpredictable and insufficiently committed to the conservative movement’s plans and goals. Where a President Ted Cruz would fill the federal bench with names from a Federalist Society spreadsheet (or a spreadsheet Cruz himself had prepared for the Federalist Society), for all anyone knows, a President Trump might appoint Nancy Grace to the Supreme Court. That would surely make liberals mad, but it wouldn’t get the big job done.

The other argument that a conservative publication could make against the rise of Donald Trump would be an unsparing self-examination and self-criticism, reckoning with the currents of brutish populism that have run from Nixon through Reagan through George W. Bush to the present-day circus, and humbly apologizing for its role in creating them. Any real attempt to write Donald Trump out of the Republican Party needs to engage, head on, with the fact that Donald Trump is currently polling far ahead of the field with people who identify as Republican voters. What is the conservative movement if it is not the way that voters who identify as conservative are moving?

Always, Always Walk Down the Escalator

Hamilton Nolan · 01/22/16 02:12PM

It has come to our attention that some trolls and anarchists have been spreading false information about urban transportation efficiency—right when people need the truth the most. We are here to assure you that is always right to walk down an escalator.

Drunk Guy Accidentally Shoots Woman During Benghazi Movie Screening

Ashley Feinberg · 01/22/16 01:55PM

During an evening showing of 13 hours yesterday, a theater full of Benghazi enthusiasts in Renton, Washington bore witness to a different sort of disaster when an allegedly drunk 29-year-old dropped his gun, accidentally shooting one of his fellow theater-goers in the chest. As of this morning, the 40-year-old woman was listed as being in “serious condition.”

Who Keeps Killing the World’s Oldest Men and Women?

Ashley Feinberg · 01/22/16 12:17PM

In June, the world’s oldest woman Jeralean Talley died at a mere 116. On Tuesday, official world’s oldest man Yasutaro Koide died at 112-years-young. Then on Tuesday again, the unofficial world’s oldest man, Andrew Hatch, died at the ripe age of 117. And now, as we pass the wizened, old man crown to 112-year-old Holocaust survivor Yisrael Kristal, we must ask ourselves: Who’s murdering our oldest men and women?

Free the Art

Hamilton Nolan · 01/22/16 11:50AM

What good is a work of art that sits in a storage space, unseen by anyone? No good at all!!!