In Conservative Shocked to Discover Obama Doesn’t Hate White People, @ NYMag.com, Jonathan Chait addresses the reaction of a different kind of conservative than neo-con type of which Boot always was, similar to Bill Kristol, which sort of illuminates a crucial difference for me. 

This Jim Geraghty guy, "senior political correspondent" at National Review appears to be a street-fighting political type of guy who participated a lot in helping to create the false caricature of Obama so that Fox News and conservative talk radio would have a liberal bogeyman. And now they are false freaking out that the Obama caricature they made for political propaganda purposes wasn't real

The former president’s defense of liberalism included a defense of universalism, in contrast to a tendency in left-wing thought to essentialize all thought by its level of privilege. “Democracy demands that we’re able also to get inside the reality of people who are different than us so we can understand their point of view … ” he argued. “And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you — because they’re white, or because they’re male — that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.”

The way for conservatives to acknowledge the appeal of Obama’s speech was to insist it somehow contrasted with his behavior as president.

“Of course … this is the president who made Al Sharpton his ’go-to man on race’ and who said Latinos needed to ’punish’ their ‘enemies,’” writes National Review’s Jim Geraghty. “It’s great that Obama realizes that identity politics can be corrosive to civil society and that they can Balkanize a once-thriving, relatively harmonious society. It just would have been good to hear this wisdom from a president instead of an ex-president.”

In fact, Obama said the same things many time during his presidency. (For examples, see here, here, here, and here.)

Geraghty’s examples hardly establish that Obama devoted his presidency to stoking hatred against white people.

I think serious Neo-cons like Boot and Kristol always knew this and didn't participate in making the false bogeyman Obama, they knew this:

Obama, of course weaved universalist themes into his appeal from the very outset, beginning with his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote speech, through his address about race in 2008, to his 2015 speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Selma, which placed the civil-rights struggle at the heart of the American story. The whole idea that Obama was elected twice, and left office with a 60 percent approval rating, by attacking the racial group that accounts for 70 percent of the electorate is absurd on its face. What possible logic would there be for Obama to attack the constituency that supplied the majority of his votes in both 2008 and 2012?

They just disagreed him on some points of foreign policy and maybe economic policy. I.E., Obama says he's not against all wars, just stupid wars, and they disagreed, they thought some of those wars not so stupid.

What comes to mind for me is one of my favorite topics, how the current political parties don't really seem to me to serve our body politic correctly. It has always seemed  to me that true neo-conservatives and neo-liberals have a lot more in common than neo-conservatives have with like Fox News/talk radio conservatives. And paleo conservatives like populist pitchfork Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul have a lot in common with angry Bernie Sanders types and other lefty types. And the first group is proudly elite and the second populist.

I'm reminded of how back in the early TPMCafe, the Bush years, Josh Marshall had a section for neo-liberal foreign policy wonk friends to blog. And how much the lefty part of the audience hated them. Who were also the same people who hated the choice of either Obama and Hillary....(not to mention there was a group of those type of people who just loved them some pitchforks..some members even made up a pitchfork avatar.)

I guess all I am saying is that I am not surprised by Boot's op-ed. And that's because I've always seen a link between intellectual neo-cons like him and neo-liberal types like Obama and Hillary. It's always seemed to me that the natural big tent two-party divisions should be "elite internationalist globalist neos" vs "pitchfork America's-problems-first" populists. 

An unrelated point. I think this is a real prescient point to remember for Nov. 2018 elections:

What possible logic would there be for Obama to attack the constituency that supplied the majority of his votes in both 2008 and 2012?

I just don't think bashing white people for falling for voting for Trump is a smart way to go, it feels like a mistake to me. I am thinking how before he was elected I always liked Obama's potential precisely because he was very much bi-racial, as in being able to get in and understand the minds of "flyover" suburban whites because his grandparents partly raised him.

WaPo  "Right Turn" columnist Jennifer Rubin, back from vacation, in her July 20 piece, Four reasons we’ve reached a tipping point on Trump, among other things:

calls on Pompeo and Bolton to resign,  

They are plainly enabling a president to betray American interests. Their obligation is to quit and share all they know with the American people

and calls the current Republican party anti-American

It is not an exaggeration to say a party that continues support for Trump is anti-American.

and says that Congress should not confirm Kavanaugh or any other judges now

refraining from confirming any new judges or executive officers until the cloud over the presidency is removed

and says it's imperative that Dems win in November

Finally, it is more essential than ever that the GOP lose heavily in November’s midterms.

As a conservative, I despair at Republicans' support for Trump. His vision is not conservatism

By Charles J. Sykes @ TheGuardian.com, July 22

It is hard to refute those who say Trumpism is a product of conservatism but refute them we must. We are better than this

(Charles J Sykes is a contributing editor for the Weekly Standard and the author of How the Right Lost Its Mind.)