TOWNHALL'S SCHLICHTER: HEY, YOU'RE FORGETTING ALL THE TIMES TRUMP DIDN'T TOTALLY FACEPLANT!

I'm savoring the headline of the column posted Monday by Townhall's Kurt Schlichter:



Yeah, Trump really had Nancy Pelosi on the run:

Nancy Pelosi made the mistake of buying her own hype and thinking she could go troll-to-troll against him. Big mistake. She thought she could high-hat him by kinda/sorta rescinding her State of the Union address invitation. “Take that!” sneered the mainstream media, pretending that her concern for security during the shutdown was the motivation and not her terror at the thought of the President having a huge audience hear him explain why the Democrat position of letting murderers, rapists, drug dealers and welfare cheats flood into our unprotected country is a bad idea.

So, Trump waits until she and the rest of her pals are on a bus ready to jet off to party in Europe with a fig leaf stopover in Afghanistan and then he pulls the plug. We get delightful footage of dejected ugly Americans filing off the bus, their boondoggle delayed until they do their damn job. Glorious.

Whoa, that sure finished her off, didn't it? After that, she barely had the strength to double down on her State of the Union refusal while maintaining a unified and unbreakable caucus even as an air travel meltdown erupted just before the Super Bowl. Trump really crushed her, didn't he?

We all know what really happened, but Schlichter's not spending a lot of time licking his wounds. He has a fallback position: Hey, think of all the times Trump didn't fold like a cheap suit!

So we lost this round? So what? We’ve lost before, and we’ll lose again. This is for the long-haul folks. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. There’s no magic wand where one term of Vitamin D cures a century of progressive pathology.

Trump’s instincts have been right all along. We doubted he could win. He did. We doubted he would actually remake the courts. He has. We doubted he’d fight for the wall, but he did, and he paid a price. Who else would have withstood the heat this long? Who would have even picked the fight?

So, on the shutdown, "Trump always wins!" is now "Trump really deserves an A for effort!"

Besides, ending the shutdown wasn't a retreat, it was Alinskyan strategy!

I’m not ready to even accept that we’ve lost the battle – let’s see what happens in three weeks. But what was the better plan for the shutdown skirmish? Keep it going? Friday morning was bringing reports of airport shutdowns. That might have made it real to the Normals. See, we political types were watching and caring, while they weren’t. But it looked like they were about to start. Maybe Trump’s instincts, which you have to admit have been remarkable ... told him it was time to cut his losses. Remember Alinsky Rule No. 7?

“A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”

Did any of you see any indication at all that the shutdown tactic was about to deliver us victory, that it was not becoming a drag? Me neither. Cut your losses. Pull back here, counter-attack there.

And the counterattack is ... what exactly, Kurt?

More:

We’ve been attacking for two years, racking up conservative triumphs you’ve never experienced unless you were one of us who was of age during the Reagan years. Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh – what other GOP president would have held course and made them happen?

The correct answer: literally every Republican candidate who ran in 2016, because they all would have been working from ther same Federalist Society list.

(Some of the others might have bailed on Brett Kavanaugh -- though it's hard to say; remember that it was the now reputedly wussy George H.W. Bush who stuck it out with Clarence Thomas. But even if another GOP president had withdrawn Kavanaugh's nomination, he or she would have realized that Fed Society judges are like slices of pie in the old Automat -- remove one and the next one's virtually identical. Under any of those would-be presidents, the court would be indistinguishable from the current court.)

Trump’s remaking the courts and rebuilding our military. He gutted Obamacare and Obama’s regulations.

Yup, and that's exactly what every other 2016 Republican would have done, with a lot less drama.

... Remember that in the days before the shutdown truce, we had won a huge victory over the garbage mainstream media by exposing their lies about the Covington kids and the drum-banging Frigidaireborne ranger. Buzzfeed first had its lies about the president exposed and then had to make massive lay-offs. HuffPo Opinion died. Even the SWAT raid on Roger Stone turned out to have zilch to do with collusion, as usual.

And all that is Trump's doing? Roger Stone gets arrested on national TV and it's a win because he wasn't arrested for being handed a suitcase full of rubles by Vladimir Putin personally? Trump is personally responsible for the economics of digital media?

(And I'm as baffled by "Frigidaireborne ranger" as you are.)

I dunno Kurt -- I think you and your readers all need to clap louder. But nice try.