Conservatives Blast JD Vance's 'Dumb-as-Rocks' Rhetoric
By: Mediaite
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
A pair of commentators at National Review held back nothing in their criticism of Senator and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance's recent attacks on former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY).
In a recent interview with Charlie Kirk, Vance accused Cheney of being "a person whose entire career has been about sending other people's children off to fight and die for her military conflicts and her ridiculous ideas that somehow we were going to turn Afghanistan, a country that doesn't even have running water in a lot of places, into a thriving liberal democracy, and for that, Liz Cheney was willing to kill thousands of our children."
"Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney make very, very interesting partners. They get rich when America's sons and daughters go off to die. They get rich when America loses wars instead of winning wars. And they get rich when America gets weaker in the world," he continued before suggesting the United States "bring peace back to the world."
"This is not serious talk. It's a species of the empty pugilistic bombast that passes for discourse among people who spend too much time behind keyboards," argued National Review senior writer Noah Rothman in assessing the outburst. "None of this makes much sense if you think about it too hard about it. That's probably because Vance isn't talking about Liz Cheney. He's talking about Dick Cheney. Republicans of a certain age are old enough to remember the baseless charge that the former vice president's relationship with the oil services company Halliburton rendered the Bush administration's post-9/11 wars suspect. It was a vulgar Marxian analysis of geopolitics, which boiled all events down to their presumed profit motives. Vance has exhumed this line of attack from its deserved grave and rebooted it for a right-wing audience."
Rothman observed that Vance "has made it very clear that this Republican ticket doesn't want to be saddled" with "humiliating constituencies," including pro-lifers, hawks, and "free market fundamentalists."
"Well, message received. Maybe the Trump camp's addition-by-subtraction theory is right, and for every conservative they jettison, they earn two more votes from the disaffected Democrats to whom this sort of rhetoric appeals," he concluded. "Best of luck."
Executive editor Mark Wright followed up in even harsher terms, accusing Vance of not only injecting "pure poison into our national political discourse," but of employing "smooth-brain political messaging."
"Can we talk about just how dumb-as-rocks stupid this was as political messaging?" asked Wright before doing so.
"I am aware that conservatives like me, who care about a traditional approach to national security, are not calling the shots in today's GOP. But Trump and Vance still need millions of normie-style Republican votes if they want to win the big swing states. Millions," he wrote. "Many of these people are somewhat reluctant to vote for Trump because they don't trust him on national-security issues and would prefer a more Reaganite approach. Throughout the primaries, even after the contest had been decided in Trump's favor, something like 10 percent of Republicans continued to protest the current direction of the party by pulling the lever for Nikki Haley."
"Big coalitions tend to win. Small coalitions tend to lose. Good politicians welcome people who agree with them 51 percent of the way. Crappy politicians tell them to get lost," finished Wright. "You tell me which kind of politician J. D. Vance was acting like on that stage."
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There are millions of "normie" Republicans like me who know that national security is not a primary issue of the democrats, our open southern border, and making the military woke and weak being the best examples, and who won't vote for Harris
'normie'
lol
JD "The Juggalo" Vance
Rocks just called. They want it known Rocks are smarter than Vance!
Wouldn’t that have been something? A Kamala Harris vs. Nikki Haley campaign would have been really interesting.
I have an extended family member (married to my wife's cousin) who is a stauch Republican, but he told me a few years ago that the one thing he doesn't like about Trump is his isolationist policies.