内容摘要：Today in Conservative Media is a daily roundup of the biggest stories in the right-wing press.The Am

Today in Conservative Media is a daily roundup of the biggest stories in the right-wing press.

The American government was back in business Tuesday, as the latest federal shutdown was relegated to the history books, but that didn’t stop media of all stripes from picking through the (mostly Democratic) wreckage. Rich Lowry argued in National Review that the “short, mostly weekend shutdown shows the limits of the resistance.” Yes, there appears to be a Democratic wave forming, he wrote, but the shutdown shows that even a highly motivated left “doesn’t mean that Democrats can act with impunity so long as they are fighting under an anti-Trump banner.”

National Review’s David French examines Democrats’ favorite fear/justification when on the wrong end of things: the we’re too niceexplanation. French asks “does the Left lose because it’s too civil?” The short answer is: no. While liberals think of themselves as valuing inclusion, civility, and dialogue, “this is precisely the opposite of the way conservatives experience and perceive progressive culture.” Democrats often deploy a “different kind of mean” whether on radio or late night or on cable news, French surmises. “[Democrats are] losing in part because their own incivility and rage drive millions of Americans to the polls to vote in perceived self-defense.” In fact, French sees Trump’s ascendancy as the direct result of many Republicans “down to the very marrow of their bones” believing that the Republican Party was itself “too nice” and “was unilaterally disarming in a no-holds-barred political war.”

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How will that political war play out in the midterms? At the Federalist, Jordan Gehrke sees House Republicans “headed for a bloodbath in our nation’s suburbs in 2018” for the same reasons many other observers see losses coming, namely that Trump is “deeply unpopular among millennials, minorities, and college-educated women.” Gehrke, however, sees a way out of midterm GOP carnage: make the election about impeachment. Gehrke says impeachment is the “one big card” the GOP has to play. “Trump needs to start tweeting the following words: If Republicans lose the House, Democrats will impeach Trump,’ ” he writes. “Republicans everywhere should follow his lead and echo this message every time they leave home.”

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Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller checks in on the #releasethememo crowd and finds Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee “are warming up to the idea of voting to release a four-page memo that alleges FBI and Justice Department abuses related to the infamous Steele dossier and secret surveillance warrants obtained by the Obama administration.”

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‏At National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that in an era of hyperpartisan, nationalized politics, a Supreme Court that truly has a swing justice, allowing it to dole out good and bad verdicts to each side, could be the glue holding the republic together. And the swing vote on a swing court, Justice Anthony Kennedy, “may be the one man preventing the United States from political breakdown,” he writes.

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The Supreme Court’s role in this scene, with Kennedy as the swing justice, has been to moderate and restrain the ambitions of each party. Kennedy deals out victories and defeats to each side—giving slightly more defeats to social conservatives. In effect, he constrains what each side can do to the other. His mercurial jurisprudence replicates and even gives the savor of legitimacy to a closely divided country … I’ve begun to think that what’s left of our constitutional regime relies on the impression of legitimacy given to it by a swinging Supreme Court, the Kennedy Court.

Breitbart picked up an Army Timesstory about the veterans group AMVETS, which says the NFL approached the group about buying a print ad in the gameday program for the Super Bowl—before the league then rejected its ad which included the hashtag #PleaseStand. Breitbart writes that the reversal came “because [the ad] criticized the league’s widespread protests against the country during the playing of the national anthem.”

In more esoteric corners, right-wing site Judicial Watch says it has court documents showing that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was part of an FBI cover-up of a “connection between a Florida Saudi family and the 9/11 terrorist attacks” that could “further rock” the Russia investigation. And John Daniel Davidson at the Federalist takes aim at those on the left who blame mass shootings in America on “toxic masculinity,” writing that that argument “can only be described as bigoted.”

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• Today in Conservative Media