The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin calls herself a conservative blogger, but the Obama days are over. Now, Trump is president and she appears to be exhibiting symptoms of Trump derangement syndrome. It’s led to a lot of rake-stepping moments. Her tweets over Iran didn’t age well at all. And now, as we enter the final days of this Trump impeachment fiasco on the Hill, she mocks the president’s legal team. She chuckled at the notion of Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s attorneys, arguing a case before a real judge. Amy Swearer, Senior Legal Policy Analyst for the Heritage Foundation, had an answer and it was rather blistering.
“Can you imagine not bothering to do a basic Google search before tweeting this, only to find out from your ratio that [Pat] Cipollone [White House Counsel] spent two decades litigating complex cases for major law firms and Sekulow is something like 9 for 12 in front of the Supreme Court?,” she responded on Twitter.
can you imagine if Sekulow and Cipollone had to try a case in front of a real judge? bhahaahhahahahaha
— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) January 28, 2020
Can you imagine not bothering to do a basic Google search before tweeting this, only to find out from your ratio that Cipollone spent two decades litigating complex cases for major law firms and Sekulow is something like 9 for 12 in front of the Supreme Court? https://t.co/zcbkYRjUG2
— Amy Swearer (@AmySwearer) January 29, 2020
Can you imagine tweeting this without conducting a basic Google search, only to find out via Twitter that Cipollone spent twenty years litigating complex cases for some of the best law firms in the country and Sekulow is like 9 for 12 in front of SCOTUS? And then not deleting?
— Amy Swearer (@AmySwearer) January 29, 2020
Oh, she wasn’t done. Rubin didn’t even delete the tweet.
“Can you imagine tweeting this without conducting a basic Google search, only to find out via Twitter that Cipollone spent twenty years litigating complex cases for some of the best law firms in the country and Sekulow is like 9 for 12 in front of SCOTUS? And then not deleting?,” Swearer added.
At the same time, pretty fitting for a WaPo ‘conservative’ to say that the GOP should be burned to the ground. At National Review, Charles Cooke had a lengthy and brutal post that took Rubin to the woodshed for now opposing positions she had supported in the past. The only difference is that Trump is actually implementing them:
Rubin is not the only example of this president’s remarkable talent for corrupting his detractors as well as his devotees, but she is perhaps the best one. Since Donald Trump burst onto the political scene, Rubin has become precisely what she dislikes in others: a monomaniac and a bore, whose visceral dislike of her opponents has prompted her to drop the keys to her conscience into a well. Since the summer of 2015, the many acolytes of “MAGA!” have agreed to subordinate their true views to whatever expediency is required to sustain Donald Trump’s ego. Out has gone their judgement, and in has come their fealty; where once there were thriving minds, now there are just frayed red hats. During the same period, Jennifer Rubin has done much the same thing. If Trump likes something, Rubin doesn’t. If he does something, she opposes it. If his agenda flits into alignment with hers—as anyone’s is wont to do from time to time—she either ignores it, or finds a way to downplay it. The result is farcical and sad; a comprehensive and self-inflicted airbrushing of the mind. How, I have long wondered, could Trump’s unprincipled acolytes do what they do and still sleep at night? How can Jen Rubin?
If Trump is indeed a tyrant, he is a tyrant of the mind. And how potent is the control he exerts over Rubin’s. So sharp and so sudden are her reversals as to make effective parody impossible. When President Obama agreed to the Paris Climate Accord, Rubin left her readers under no illusions as to the scale of her disapproval. The deal, she proposed, was “ephemeral,” “a piece of paper,” “a group wish,” a “nonsense” that would achieve “nothing.” That the U.S. had been made a party to a covenant so “devoid of substance,” she added, illustrated the “fantasy world” in which the Obama administration lived, and was reflective of Obama’s preference for “phony accomplishments,” his tendency to distract, and his base’s craven willingness to eat up any “bill of goods” they were served. At least it did until President Trump took America out of it, at which point adhering to the position she had theretofore held became a “senseless act,” a “political act,” “a dog whistle to the far right,” and “a snub to ‘elites’” that had been calibrated to please the “climate-change denial, right-wing base that revels in scientific illiteracy” (a base that presumably enjoyed Rubin’s blog until January 20th, 2017). To abandon the “ephemeral” “piece of paper,” Rubin submitted, would “materially damage our credibility and our persuasiveness” and represent conduct unbecoming of “the leader of the free world.” One is left wondering how, exactly, any president is supposed to please her.
Or, rather, one is left concluding that Rubin doesn’t have policy positions so much as she has protean cheerleading instructions, the details of which are set by whoever happens at that moment to be her coach. Take Jerusalem, a subject on which Rubin has rather run the gamut. In 2010, she praised Marco Rubio for arguing that “Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, as the U.S. Congress has repeatedly recognized” and lauded the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 as the concrete on which Republicans should walk. Two years later, in the midst of her self-appointed tenure as the president of Mitt Romney’s fan club, she reversed herself, hitting Newt Gingrich for holding precisely the view she had previously recommended, while endorsing Romney for his relative “judgment, restraint and . . . good sense” in opposing her. “It really is time,” she submitted, “to stop promising something that the U.S. can’t and shouldn’t deliver unilaterally.” A few weeks later, when Romney began to sound more hawkish, she endorsed his new position, too, holding it up as “a blow to the Obama campaign’s frantic efforts to defend the president’s hostile stance toward the Jewish state…”
[…]
This stance lasted into the Trump era. In June, Rubin complained angrily that the White House was “delaying its move of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,” a delay, Rubin wrote, that was not only pointless—“presidents come to believe that the move would somehow prejudice peace talks (of which there are none presently) or inflame Palestinians, perhaps causing an increase in violence,” she caviled—but that was indicative of Trump’s tendency never “to keep his word.”
There is no popcorn limit here. It’s Trump derangement at its finest from someone who probably was never a conservative. I know, she from The Washington Post—no kidding, right. Still, she’s treated as one of us when she does a media hit. Yikes.
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BRUH:
The GOP is now the pro-totalitarian party. It is a clear and present danger
— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) January 30, 2020
After 3 glasses of the Franzia: https://t.co/ZeSKVDRSqP
— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) January 30, 2020
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