Steve Hayward of Powerline Snaps At NeverTrumper Paul Mirengoff, Notes He Keeps Writing the Same Anti-Trump Column Over and Over (Lot of That Going 'round), Threatens to Punch Him In the Face

Internal drama at Powerline as Steve Hayward says he'd punch Paul Mirengoffin the face over his nonstop Trump Derangement Posts and "equivocal" Covid Karen posts.

On Sunday, Paul Mirengoff wrote a very stupid post in which he attacked Trump for violating the "Official Records Act," by, supposedly, according to noted partisan hack Maggie Haberman, flushing papers down the toilet.

Steve Hayward rebutted in the same post.

STEVE adds (in what might well turn out to be my final post on Power Line):

I am appalled at how bad this post is. It may be the worst post ever to appear here, and there's lots of competition for that dishonor.

First, are we really supposed to believe that the media reports about this "seem to be accurate"? Like the media reports two years ago that Trump ignored an intelligence finding that Russia had paid bounties to the Taliban for killing American troops in Afghanistan? The media ran with it--until even the new Biden Administration admitted it was bogus.

Second, does anyone over the age of six believe that the strict reading of the Presidential Records Act means that presidents actually keep intact every single scrap of paper put in front of them? The total BS angle of this story, which I expect will be exposed as false or distorted, is that National Archives staff have taped documents back together. This is the most stupid thing I've ever heard in the 21st century. Every White House document, going back to the 1980s if not earlier, is composed on a computer. Why would the Archives need to tape documents back together when a computer backup is surely available? Do you seriously want us to believe that Trump destroyed the only copy of a document? Do we think Trump or his minions were hacking the computer system and deleting the computer records? (This is likely impossible in any case.)

He also took on Mirengoff for his constant Covid Karenning:

Finally, Paul, on your post the other day about the "Johns Hopkins Study" [the study which showed lockdowns did not reduce deaths by more than 0.2%] in scare quotes as if to insinuate (quite wrongly) something disreputable, let me just say that the next time you attack my friend Steve Hanke (whom I've written about numerous times on Power Line), let me just say that you'll want to follow Harry Truman's famous advice about stocking up on beefsteak, because a certain former "Akin Gump lawyer" is going to get socked in his fucking face.

Mirengoff then replies, and says, among other things, that Trump is a narcissist, provoking this response:

STEVE retorts: Oh, I'll look forward to that. So Trump is a hypocritical narcissist. Got it. You have any other breaking news from 1988, Paul? I'm sure there's one reader out there somewhere thinking, "Gee--I had no idea Trump was a narcissist who will say anything and everything. And I wouldn't have known if not for Paul Mirengoff being on the job at Power Line. Somehow I missed this the first 20 times he wrote the same thing. Gosh."

Yes they do tend to say the same thing. And I don't get the attacks on Trump being a narcissist, given that almost all politicians are narcissists, and given the fact that anyone who seeks the spotlight and tries to show off what erudition he thinks he has is almost always a narcissist too.

In other words: All of these NeverTrump preeners are narcissists. What's the problem with Trump? That these other narcissists don't think he went to a Good Enough College to be properly narcissistic about?

Today, Steve Hayward admits the "family drama" and writes:

I'll also be blunt. Paul has no clue how much he gratuitously pisses off so many of our readers with his repetitive posts on Trump. He costs us readers, with the Trump posts and also his inscrutably equivocal posts on COVID. (And there are other issues I won't air here.) More: Paul has no clue how much he pisses off his fellow Power Line writers. Sorry to say this publicly, but it is necessary.

There. There's our dirty laundry, for everyone now to see. I'm sorry to do this, especially to John and Scott, the founders of the site who certainly don't deserve this drama. They'd be entirely within their rights to kick both me and Paul off the site, and I'd owe them no ill will at all if they decide to. Paul is a drag on the site, and I crossed a line. In the meantime, not sure whether I'll continue posting articles here or not, because I share Scott's struggle with anger management issues when it comes some of Paul's posts. But I'll keep up with TWiP and the podcast, which has a growing audience.


Note to Paul: Please don't comment on this post, and add "WITH COMMENT FROM PAUL" in the headline. You'll just fuck it up worse than it already is. In fact I think it better if you don't comment at all, anywhere. Don't email me either. I won't open it.

Seems to me that several of us are now reaching the "That's it, I'm done" phase with the NeverTrump neoliberals. They're clearly Democrats, and clearly just "occupying enemy ground" on the right in order to assist the Democrats; it's time for the fucking Endless Masquerade to end.

When NeverTrump thought they'd win the internal fight for party control, they began compiling a "blacklist" of Trump supporters to be purged from the party.

Commentary's Noah Rothman suggested a less dramatic approach -- Oh we shouldn't have a blacklist, he said. Instead, we should just require everyone on the blacklist to renounce their support of Trump and their extremist beliefs, and announce their loyalty to neocon principles, or else face a purge.

Ah, I see, Noah. So different from a blacklist. Just a demand to denounce one's beliefs, sign a loyalty oath to political beliefs under coercion, or else face expulsion.

But now that they've lost, they're whining about a "Big Tent."

Yes, Liz Cheney previously endorsed a primary opponent to Freedom Caucus member Thomas Massie -- when she was Number Three in the GOP House leadership, note!!! -- but all the NeverTrumpers are shrieking about the gross impropriety of Kevin McCarthy endorsing Liz Cheney's primary opponent.

See, these people are liberals, and like all liberals, they are sure that they are Better People, and that they should have Special Rules favoring them. Thus, Liz Cheney can endorse a primary opponent against Thomas Massie when she's in leadership, but Kevin McCarthy can't endorse a primary opponent against her when he's in leadership.

Special Liberal People get Special Liberal Rules.

These are liberal Democrats, they have always tended towards the liberal Democrat line, they absolutely despise conservative Republicans (and Christians most of all!), and it's time to send them packing.

They must be purged.

As they demanded we be purged, when they thought they would win this fight.

They're liberal Democrats, and political parties, more than any other group, have a recognized constitutional right to decide their own membership.

Otherwise, members of an opposed party could just "join" your party, subvert it, and turn it into a copy of their original (and actual) party.

Like the neocons did 30 years ago, and like they're still fighting to do now.

They will never stop fighting to make the conservative party the liberal party. They do not accept that the Republican Party is fundamentally conservative. They have never accepted it before, they refuse to accept it in the current moment, and they will never accept it in the future.

They will never stop fighting to make the Republican Party into the Democrat Party with just the one tweak: lower taxes for wealthy suburban liberals such as, coincidentally enough, themselves.

And it's time for us to decide to patrol our membership lists, and kick them out of the movement and out of the party, and to have no qualms about doing so, or any pity, either.

Because they will never stop trying to pervert the conservative movement into a slightly-modified liberal movement.

It's time to Make Liberal Democrats Liberal Democrats Again. It's time to stop playing along with their Jen Rubin fiction that they're "conservatives."

Six years of deranged bad-faith temper tantrums is enough. Six years of nonstop smears and insults is enough. Six years of sabotage and collusion with the Democrats are enough.

Enough.

Enough.

posted by Ace at 01:37 PM

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