Ben Sasse Is Everything Wrong With Elite Conservatism

Guest Post by Kurt Schlichter

We’ve nearly won the battle for the Republican Party, having kicked out most of the grifters, weasels, weenies, and dorks of Conservative, Inc. They spent decades dunning us for donations while conserving not very much at all, so we elected Donald Trump and remade the GOP. Now there’s no place left for them, and they’re pouting on the Lido Deck among the unsold cruise cabins, sipping Zima and muttering about how ungrateful we are.

As I explain in my hilarious and obnoxious new book, Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy, the sissy squad from Conservative, Inc., is going away. We’ve evolved from cliché-spewing, soft Bushie Eloi into focused and fearsome Trumpian Morlocks.

Jeff Flake? That pompous poser’s gone in a couple months. So is Bob Corker. They’ll be missed, but only by liberal cable bookers looking for a senior Republican to trash their colleagues.

The hangers-on are getting hung-off. Jennifer Rubin’s a hysterical joke in all senses of the term. Bill Kristol? No one with any conservative heat will return his calls. He’s still lobbing the occasional tweet repeating liberal talking points and receiving a tsunami of cruise ship emojis in response from disgusted Normals. When the clueless donors he milks finally wise up, he’s toast.

Only Ben Sasse is left, the new poster child of not merely Never Trump but of Never GOP Base. Sasse (R-Sanctimony) is a senator from Nebraska who has carved out a niche for himself complaining about how his fellow conservatives fall short. Think of him as Evan McMullin with a job.

Well, until he gets primaried.

Donald Trump horrified Sasse, partly because Trump doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty and partly because Trump scores with Playboy Playmates. Real conservatives aren’t supposed to do either – they are supposed to shake their heads more in sorrow than in anger as the Democrats pummel them. They are the Fredocons, tiresome and inept fringies who will eventually sell out the family to the Hyman Roths of liberalism.

Trump gets results. He’s from the Doer Faction.

What’s Sasse do? Nothing but run his cliché-hole. Sasse is from the Poser Faction.

What exactly has he done in the Senate? Nothing concrete. Nada. Zip. But he does get a lot of attention – from our enemies. He went on with Bill Maher, grinning along as the host uttered a racial epithet. On the plus side, that self-own is probably the only thing keeping him from declaring to the WaPo that all (other) Republicans are racist.

MSNBC and CNN reward him generously with coverage whenever he attacks his own, which he does frequently. He recently attacked Sean Hannity, because Sean Hannity fights and that’s unseemly for some reason. Hannity dissed and dismissed him as Benny bleated for a debate – like Hannity would lend that twit a spotlight. Hannity will still be a round long after Sasse is opening for Tom Nichols and the Experts on the Monsters of Never Trump tour in 2028.

One wonders if Sasse realizes that those leftist cable jockeys who eagerly book him to fill the male Ana Navarro slot think he’s as big a dork as we do.

Remarkably, Sasse has conservative fans. Why? That’s a mystery. He’s inexplicably managed to sucker in a bunch of legit conservatives with his amazing ability to restate basic conservative concepts as if he invented these profound insights, and to thereby blow otherwise sane cons’ minds. He’ll tweet some inane mush along the lines of “Americans should work together for a better tomorrow,” and normally sensible righties will swoon.

I don’t get it. This is a guy who is wrong even when he says something arguably right.

What he has done is write books, which should all be titled Tsk Tsk Tsk: How You Conservatives Have Disappointed Me and How You Can Redeem Yourself By Henceforth Obeying My Prissy Commands. They appear to be lengthy scolds; in another life, Sasse was no doubt an uptight schoolmarm spreading his fussy repression to bored prairie children.

No, I have not read his books – nor would he ever read mine, since mine have swears and would make him cry. But the title of his latest tome sums up his problem – it’s called Them: Why We Hate Each Other – and How to Heal. It assumes his usual above-the-fray pose, as if he’s looking down on us unruly ruffians. We simply need to stop all this unseemly disagreement and – what was it? – oh yeah. Heal.

I don’t want to heal. I want to crush the leftist creeps who hate me.

And where does this doofus get off loitering outside of the Octagon? He’s a Republican senator in the midst of the greatest partisan struggle since the Civil War. This isn’t a “both sides are the same” situation. The Dems are neo-socialists whose announced goal is to undermine and eliminate the First and Second Amendments and to ensure we lose our ability to participate in our own governance. They have to be stopped, not hugged. We’re in a cold civil war that they started and that they intend to win, and Sasse is pouty at us because we’re fighting back.

He never fights the left. Never. When Brett Kavanaugh was getting slimed by the Dems, Sasse was on the Judiciary Committee and he…disappeared. He did nothing. Oh, he eventually voted the right way – his defenders point out that Sasse always ends up voting the right way, as if that was some sort of noteworthy achievement instead of merely meeting the bare minimum standard for a GOP senator.

But he never fights the enemy. He only fights his alleged allies. The one time Princess Miracle Whip shut his nag-hole was right when we were in the middle of a fight when we needed all hands on-deck. And after the smoke cleared, he got back on Twitter and announced that he had checked out of social media for a while and was so glad he did because it was good for his soul. The battle was joined and he went AWOL.

Oh, but then he popped up like a sanctimonious Whack-a-Mole to trash the President for defending Kavanaugh – Trump refused to pretend that the accusers weren’t full of it and, oh well I never! And, of course, he got lots of media hits off his conservaHamlet act – will he or won’t he leave the GOP? Gee, how the hell could anyone tell if he did?

Sasse’s act is to aim his outrage not at the left but at us Normals. We refuse to be as submissive and useless as he is, and we’re failing to meet his exacting standards by not being as equally unhappy that Trump is succeeding. Trump wins by virtue of his glorious refusal to lose like a gentleman, as all good Republicans should do. But Sasse’s savvy schtick was never about winning for conservatism. It was always about staking his claim as a future headliner on some Weakly Standard cruise after he gets primaried out of his Senate gig.