David Limbaugh

It is a GREAT book. Congratulations.

Some are talking as though the Iran war almost single-handedly resulted in a generational shift in the balance of power from GOPs to Dems -- that this one alleged Trump misstep guarantees GOP defeat in perpetuity. Am I overstating their case? If not, isn't this preposterous?

Which, begs the question (in the common but incorrect use of that phrase): would that be a good thing in your view?

Thank you for your encouragement. This is moving, actually. I feel important, having aroused your ire.

Let me try this post again, since the link didn't work in the original. I'm just pasting the answer instead. Last night I was listening to some music in my office on Sonos. I had launched a "station" based on a song I liked. My wife asked me why I was listening to sad music and it got me thinking about this. I have always loved beautiful harmonies and other pretty music and am aware that it is sometimes sad. But, though sad, it doesn't always make me sad -- if that makes any sense at all. Having been subconscioiusly aware, I suppose, that there is often for me, at least, a connection between sad music and beautiful music I thought I'd ask Claude (I usually ask Grok but one of my law partners yesterday was raving about Claude so I tried it) and I find the answer interesting so thought I'd share. I suppose only Boomers, if even them, will be interested. LOL. Please don't tell my main man@elonmusk Here is Claude's answer: This is one of the oldest observations in the literature on music and emotion, and it has a few different layers. Poets and philosophers have been noting it for centuries. Shelley wrote that "our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought" (from "To a Skylark"), which is probably the most quoted version of your idea. Aristotle's concept of catharsis, though about tragedy in drama, points at a related notion: that dwelling in sorrow through art can be pleasurable and purifying. And the Portuguese concept of saudade, the Welsh hiraeth, and the blues tradition all treat longing or sorrow as a source of beauty rather than something to avoid. Researchers have studied it directly. There's a well-known puzzle in music psychology sometimes called the "paradox of sad music": why do people deliberately seek out music that makes them feel sad, and why do they often describe it as beautiful or moving rather than unpleasant? Researchers like David Huron have proposed that sad music may trigger a mild comfort response, possibly involving the hormone prolactin, without the actual threat or loss that real sadness involves. Others, like Tuomas Eerola and Jonna Vuoskoski, have found that people experience sad music as pleasurable partly through nostalgia, empathy, and a sense of being understood. You get the emotional depth without the real-life cost. There's also some musical mechanics behind it. Minor keys, slower tempos, descending melodic lines, and lingering dissonances that resolve slowly all tend to read as sad, and they also happen to be ingredients that make music feel tender or aching in a way people call "pretty." A suspension that leans on a note before resolving, for instance, creates exactly the bittersweet tension that makes a phrase memorable. One caveat: it isn't universal. Plenty of beautiful music is joyful or serene, and "sad" and "pretty" aren't identical. But the overlap is real enough that your instinct is shared by a long line of listeners, writers, and scientists. Is there a particular piece or genre that got you thinking about this?

It's too bad that many are so bitter on here that they want to perpetuate conflict and not resolve it. With leftists we can't resolve conflict. With antisemites we can 't resolve conflict. But with others -- those who opposed the war in good faith and those who supported it in good faith, is there no room for reconciliation? Or are we required to be forever enemies? Sad.

OK, then. I did not make this up. I've known this for decades. Age has its advantages. You may apologize to me, but I would prefer money. Here you go, abbreviated from Grok: “Neocon” (short for neoconservative) began as a descriptive term for a specific intellectual and political shift, then broadened into a foreign-policy label, and in some circles later acquired an antisemitic edge. . . . Antisemitic turn The term did not start as an antisemitic slur. However, because a disproportionate number of the original neoconservative intellectuals were Jewish, some opponents—particularly on the far left and certain paleoconservative or isolationist circles—began emphasizing that ethnic background. This produced claims of dual loyalty, “Israel-first” conspiracies, or control of U.S. foreign policy by a Jewish cabal. In those contexts, “neocon” functions as a dog-whistle or explicit antisemitic epithet, substituting for older tropes about Jewish influence.Mainstream critics of neoconservative foreign policy (on Iraq, democracy promotion, etc.) can and do use the term without ethnic animus. The antisemitic usage is a later, ideologically driven distortion that treats Jewish identity as the explanatory core rather than the ideas themselves.

Am I the only one who believes the term “Neocon” has been grossly distorted by those who, for a host of reasons, opposed the strike against Iran? “Neocon” used to be code for “Jew” or Jew-friendly, I suppose. Even for those who intend no ethnic or religious slur, the implication is that everyone who supported the strike is an over-the-top, jingoistic, military-industrial-complex, nation-building fanatic who doesn’t give a da** about anything else—including domestic policy. The further implication is that we’re all Bush/Cheney establishment elitist squishes who have abandoned Trump’s defining campaign promise of no foreign wars. Well, the large majority of us reject that generalizing smear. We do not favor forever wars. We do believe in the pragmatic preservation of our national security through offensive military action when necessary—but always as quickly, effectively, lethally, and non-permanently as possible. This is who Trump is. He is not an isolationist. We don’t support military action for sport, for our own amusement, or for a gratuitous demonstration of power. We genuinely believed—and still believe—that Iran was on a fast track to nuclear capabilities and missile delivery systems. That is why we, along with almost all Republicans and other sane patriots, opposed Obama’s sham Iran nuclear deal. We are being consistent. We did not favor, and we did not get, a forever war with Iran. We did not put boots on the ground, and we still do not have boots on the ground. You can rightly criticize Trump’s fits and starts, the bizarre MOU, and the rest of the execution. But he did not violate America First principles by striking Iran, and it is simply false to claim he intended to embroil us in a permanent quagmire there. Because we think it is clear that the murderous jihadist Iranian regime cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons—mutually assured destruction does not reliably deter religious zealots who believe their eternal reward is assured by murdering infidels—and because we believed Iran was well on the way to acquiring them, we concluded it was imperative to take out their nuclear program. You can argue until you’re blue in the face that we were factually wrong about Iran’s intentions and capabilities. What you cannot do is extrapolate from our support for the strikes that we are “Neocons,” whatever that term is supposed to mean. To the Woke Right it has come to mean people who dance to Israel’s whims and subordinate America’s interests to Israel’s. I admittedly and unapologetically support Israel and the Jewish people. But I would never advocate acting against America’s national interests. I do not believe we were duped or coerced by Israel into attacking Iran. We acted because we believed—and continue to believe—it was in our national interest to eliminate their nuclear capability. Period. The fact that some of you are convinced there was no serious threat leads you to assume we had ulterior motives—chiefly obedience to Israel. It is hard for us to understand your indifference in light of the Iranian regime’s nature and its half-century of direct and proxy terrorism, along with the clear evidence of its nuclear program and the herculean efforts to conceal it. And while this does not apply to everyone who opposed the strikes, some of you recognize that Iran posed an existential threat to the United States and the wider West yet appear not to care. Do those malefactors hate Israel and Jews more than they love America? Are they in bed with foreign interests as some have alleged? I am speaking only to those for whom the shoe fits and I believe this is a minority of those who opposed the Iran action. But are some of the rest of you opponents really incapable of distinguishing between establishment, war-friendly elitists and those of us who simply want to protect the security, liberty, and prosperity of the United States? Some of those loosely throwing around the term “Neocon” are people I consider friends. I have to believe they are not using it in bad faith and are not anti-Israel, but are genuinely frustrated by what they see as an abandonment of America First – as much as I disagree with them. I implore them to reconsider. We are not warmongers. We simply disagree—radically—on what America’s national security interests require. We believe we are the true champions of America First because there will be no America as we know it if Iran or any other jihadist regime acquires deliverable nuclear weapons. Why is that so difficult to understand? Why insist on conflating our position with that of the war aggressors of yesterday? Some have framed this as a choice between fighting communism at home and striking Iran. That is a false choice. Had we gone in, not vacillated in the prosecution of the war, and finished the job decisively, the picture today would look very different. But failures in execution and messaging do not retroactively invalidate the decision to act. Moreover, if some of you had not begun undermining Trump the moment the operation started, we might not have been shellacked this week. Indeed, your relentless naysaying, personal attacks and opposition contributed to much of Trump’s vacillation. The relentless charges that Trump and the rest of us were warmongers and Israeli puppets damaged the coalition. As it turns out, the bad-faith podcasters and other cynics did more harm than I expected. This is not to say these grifters are solely responsible for our electoral defeat. We all bear responsibility. But it was a real factor in the magnitude of the loss. Worse, it fractured the conservative coalition, at least for a time. Maybe MAGA as a personality-driven movement was never going to outlast Trump. But MAGA largely represented mainstream conservatism, and the end of MAGA should not mean the end of the conservative coalition. Preserving that coalition will be far harder if people who claim to be conservative and America First continue attacking from inside in ways that aid Democrats and anti-American interests. Not everyone who opposed the Iran strikes is in league with Tucker and his circle. But too many are making their work easier rather than harder. We need to reunite, or one side will eventually purge the other. For that to happen constructively there must be intellectual honesty on both sides. From our side, that means acknowledging that not everyone who opposed the strikes is antisemitic or reckless though too many are. From the other side, it means acknowledging that those of us who favored the strikes did so in good faith, pursuing what we believed were America’s interests. Instead, we mostly get caustic insults. Absent some reconciliation among people of good faith who agree on most other things, the conservative movement is headed for continued trouble. As noted, there are bad-faith actors among those who opposed the Iran strikes, and they inflicted outsized damage. Their motives should be obvious from how quickly they turned on Trump on issues having nothing to do with Iran, abandoned conservatism itself, and aligned with the left. Those of you who opposed the strikes in good faith should wake up to the nature of the Tucker movement and separate from it—yesterday.

Do you ever have people contact you wanting to talk -- email or text -- and you respond, only to be ghosted? It seems like a trend these days. Why did you contact me to talk if you didn't want to talk. LOL.

If this is true, which I believe it is, how could we have failed so thoroughly in getting out this message?

Of course we must remain optimistic and not lose heart. Among other things, our attitude affects our ability to fight. But -- one thing makes our challenge more difficult. While some write off this midterm disaster as hardly unprecedented in some respects, it might be disturbingly different in others. Democrats offered nothing positive. What they did offer beyond Trump hate and demonizing conservatism was an overt endorsement of socialism and Communism and a defiant refusal to condemn Islamism even inside our borders. They were not only not punished for these things but were rewarded. Moreover, allegedly war-induced inflation was still far from Biden levels, and Democrats, by any sane analysis, will make prices higher across the board because that's what socialism does. (I do realize that opposition to the war was grounded more than just inflationary issues, but still). So either the voters were so mad at Republicans that they don't care that on some of the very things they're mad about, Democrats will be worse. Or, they are profoundly ignorant of the inevitable economic consequences of the Democrat agenda. While you can point to the war and tariffs and their uneven prosecution and implementation, (and the related and unrelated affordability issue), there were also many positive things about Trump's record -- such as overall economic and jobs growth, as today's numbers further demonstrated. Voters, especially young ones, have been convinced that Israel was the major reason for the war and they mightily resent it. They have been made to believe through heinously deceptive arguments that Israel either deceived or coerced us into launching the war -- by lying about the nuke intelligence or through some Vulcan mind meld process or Bilderberg/Glitterati manipulation. Has this really been a foreign-born psyop? Are the antisemitic podcasters and influencers that influential? There's so much more. But we have our work cut out for us.

Apart from the reasons for the shellacking, my foremost concern going forward, which is what matters most anyway, is the apparent radical discontentment and disaffection of far too many young people, and their -- at minimum -- receptiveness to socialism and worse. Uber alarming.

What thing is painfully clear. If we didn’t have a ripened internecine battle going on for control of the party, it’s raging now. And it’s ugly and getting uglier.