Jesus Fucking Christ, please put giant pics of Ted Cruz behind spoiler tags kthx.
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"Her eyes in certain light were violet, and all her teeth were even. That's a rare, fair feature: even teeth. She smiled to excess, but she chewed with real distinction." - Eleanor of Aquitaine
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
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"Her eyes in certain light were violet, and all her teeth were even. That's a rare, fair feature: even teeth. She smiled to excess, but she chewed with real distinction." - Eleanor of Aquitaine
Trump either just blew his Troll cover or leveled up in brash trolling.
After being praised by Liberty U and speaking at the conservative think tank university, he outed himself as having barely discussed the bible. Given most of his supporters have never read it, I doubt it will affect his total numbers but it did either out him as a troll, Falwell as a fake christian, or perhaps both.
Either way, Trump is making the conservative party great again!
I thought Trump (and Palin, the human bobble-head) was going to appear in Oklahoma today, but apparently, they got routed to Bosnia-Herzgovina instead.
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Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink.--W.C. Fields
I love how Palin's son Tread had to punch his girlfriend in the eyeball and kick her while she's down, before threatening to kill her with a gun because.......OBAMA.
Once Obama leaves office the US trailer trash will be able to settle down and finally live in peace.
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Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.
All Americans long for the day when dumbfuck wingnut snowbillies can get drunk, beat up women and brandish loaded assault rifles just because it's the right thing to do rather than because Obama forced them.
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"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis D. Brandeis
"Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don't give a fuck how crazy they are." ~ S. Gecko
I have to say, the GOP primary is just blowing my mind right now. I am bewildered to say that I think Trump might be the favorite to be the GOP nominee. If you had told me this a year ago, I would've laughed. There's no way. Early in the summer, I was looking with horror at Scott Walker and Marco Rubio and thinking Jeb! was the favorite. (I also wouldn't have predicted Cruz to be as strong as he's been, mostly because I figured the utter failure of his government shutdowns would've cost him support among both party insiders and ideologues who presumably want to see something get done... apparently flailing ineffectually is more appealing to them than I thought because hey, flailing takes effort and shows you're a fighter).
At first, we all dismissed Donald Trump. He has no chance. The Party will destroy him and go back to business, or he'll implode. It was clear after the first debate that the establishment wanted him gone, by the way the moderators attacked him repeatedly. Trump declined a little bit, but he bounced back with more outrageous statements. "He'll still fizzle out", people thought. Every time, people thought "Surely, this outrageous thing he's said is beyond the pale."
Then Carson rose, further increasing the crazy quotient. Fortunately* for the GOP, his surge has collapsed and his campaign only becomes more dysfunctional by the day and his debate performances ever more bizarre.
Scott Walker, while being a loyal tool of the Koch brothers, lost his mojo as soon as Trump began surging, and dropped out.
Rand Paul was an intriguing choice that the GOP voters briefly flirted with as a contender, before the libertarians realized he wasn't his dad, and the rest of them remembered they loved war and overt racism.
We don't need to talk much about the also-rans and the has-beens, Oops Perry and Huckabee and Santorum, and Fiorina, Graham, Jindal, Pataki and Gilmore.
Then you have the remaining "establishment" foursome.
But Jeb! (or more accurately, "Jeb...") has petered out like an elderly man's piss stream. Christie hasn't been able to shake off his Obama hug, Bridgegate or his dismal NJ approval rating. Kasich has made the mistake of running as a moderate despite being a pro-life loony and only a little more liberal than Dubya. And finally, Rubio, the supposed great establishment hope is, well... somehow still unable to overtake Jeb in endorsements and while at the front of the establishment pack, he's not breaking away from it. They're not rallying behind him as the obvious choice. As it turns out, he'd actually be the most conservative nominee since Goldwater and he's not that establishment anyway... so maybe they just don't like him that much. Either way, those four are tightly packed in New Hampshire, and none of them seems to be able to get the "moderates" to rally behind them. The Establishment can't seem to make up its mind. I believe their heart is with Jeb! (look at that $100 million haul), but they have grave concerns about his debate performances and electability (that Bush brand) and those dismal poll numbers.
Anyway, this background sets up the two that are the top now: Trump and Cruz. And for a long time, it was assumed that Cruz's strategy was to let Trump's dominance continue and then surge enough to make him the clear non-Trump choice... and the rest of the party would go along with it, because Trump is crazy. But Cruz is apparently SO hated by the people who know him, and his ideology is so extreme (unlike Rubio, he'd actually be significantly MORE conservative than Goldwater) that it seems a large portion of the party have the exact opposite reaction Cruz was hoping for: It's anybody-but-Cruz, not anybody-but-Trump and the establishment knives have finally come out... to stab Cruz, not Trump.
And so as we approach the beginning of voting in the GOP primary... I am left thinking... How the fuck did this happen?
On the upside, I am much more optimistic that the long-awaited implosion of the GOP is coming. After the Tea Party and the birthers rose up, I thought these crazies would backfire on the GOP eventually. And it took six years, but it seems it may finally be happening.
*Or is it? If no-chancer Carson was still capable of blunting Trump or Cruz's success in Iowa, they'd probably be pretty happy about that. Of course, the very reason they would be less concerned about him is the thing that undid him anyway. They probably wish the inevitable articles focusing on his craziness had only come out after Iowa, giving them a mulligan.
I have to say, the GOP primary is just blowing my mind right now. I am bewildered to say that I think Trump might be the favorite to be the GOP nominee.
I have come to feel that Trump not only is going to win the G.O.P. nomination. I now think that he is likely to be elected president.
And if he is, it will be because he will usher in a sweeping political realignment, one that is long overdue. This realignment will forge a new majority based on previously antithetical voting blocs: such as, for example, left wingers who join with right wingers in deprecating trade deals that have screwed the middle class, deals supported by both wings of the Demopublican (or Republocrat) Party that has dominated the country for decades.
Trump opposes (or now says he opposes) these deals. Bernie Sanders definitely does. Sanders, I think, can defeat Trump. And if he does, he will initiate his own political realignment. But first he has to get the nomination. The Democrat wing of the Demopublican Party will do whatever it takes to thwart him, just as (until recently) the Republican wing of the of the Republocrat Party has been working overtime to undercut Trump. There are now signs that the Republican wing of the One Party State under which we live is making its grudging peace with the inevitability of Trump. It is funny to see how the National Review founded by Bill Buckley has made itself irrelevant with a singe-issue rant against Trump. Memo to NR: the Republican base doesn’t give a fuck what you think, if it ever did. Yours is a Potemkin publication.
If the polls are to be believed, the Republican base of the Republocrat Party is serving notice on the Bush dynasty: Your time is up. I have a feeling the Democrat wing of the Demopublican Party is about to do the same with the putative Clinton dynasty: No to Billary. The Bush/Clinton era is history, if my reading of the tea leaves is right.
We had the Andrew Jackson realignment, the Lincoln realignment of the 1860s, the T. Roosevelt Progressive Era realignment, the FDR/New Deal realignment of the 30s, with the most recent realignment being the Nixon/Reagan realignment: the so-called Reagan Revolution. History suggests we are overdue for another realignment. Such realignments are characterized by a new consensus, a consensus on policy ultimately driven by New Majority voting blocs. Such eras move beyond gridlocked government, as we have now. That we do have gridlock attests to the fact that Obama was not a realigning president, and hence was not the transformational president he aspired to be.
Here is the heretical kicker. Trump, if elected, may not be as bad as you think. He is NOT stupid, even though he pretends to be a moron for the stump jumpers he is currently courting. And the fact that he can get the entire editorial board of the National Review to inveigh against him is to his credit. Really. I applaud him for that! Also, David Brooks hates Trump. Kudos to Trump!
No, I do NOT like Trump (obviously) and do NOT want him to be elected. Nevertheless, I think that he is a person who may have the ability, if elected, to reverse all his stated positions, and make his base like it. Let’s remember that this is a guy who was once in favor of universal health insurance. Maybe he still is? And maybe he will push that through and make his base like it, because his base likes him? As outlandish as that sounds, there is historical precedent for such reversals. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt campaigned on a platform of cutting spending and balancing the budget to fight the Depression. He threw that platform out on Day 1 and made his base like it.
FDR went to Keynes. Nixon went to China. Lincoln went to Emancipation. He freed the slaves after promising, in his first Inaugural Address, to support a constitutional amendment guaranteeing southern slavery no matter what. And in each case, these presidents made their bases like it when they did a policy U-turn.
If elected, Trump is not going to build a wall against Mexico. He is not going to repeal Obamacare unless he has a better idea. (I hope he does!) He is not going to kick all the Muslims out of the country. He may put Sarah Palin in his cabinet, but only in the newly created position of Secretary of Dumbassery. She would be his sop to the rubes.
Get ready for President Trump or President Sanders. The ground is cracking open under the house of cards that is the Republocrat/Demopublican Party, and good riddance to it. The party’s over. I hope so, anyway. We’ll soon see.
At least he has some experience in government, I guess. I dunno; I can't see him being any more obnoxious than your average Republican, and maybe he'll cause the Republicans harm with vote-splitting, but I'd still unquestionably prefer any of the Democrats still running to him.
I hope David's right about what Trump would do in office, but I still don't want to see him elected to find out.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
I agree that I suspect a realignment is afoot, but I'm not quite as Pollyanna about it as is David. Unintended consequences are in the offing. Big time. And most of them unsought and unwanted. And I in no way whatsoever trust Trump.
I've basically come to the conclusion that Trump is a troll. Especially when he pulls things like Two Corinthian or tells people he could shoot someone dead and not lose any votes.
Everything that I've seen and read about him puts him as a classic Narcissist, he will literally say anything if it gets him attention and he's happy to rewrite his history to always keep himself as the hero. NBC has abused this to keep him popular while handlers do the grunt work. He is basically a puppet to whoever is willing to stroke his ego. So long as you pretend he's not actually a puppet because of course feeling superior to others is his second operating motive.
This makes him great as a celebrity but a pain to handle since he's always right, which has caused him to run most of his companies into the ground while writing books about how great a businessman he is.
As a Californian my election vote doesn't count, but I've been debating on whether I should register Dem to support Bernie or Rep to support Trump.
Unsurprisingly, Noam Chomsky thinks Bernie Sanders is the best candidate among the major party candidates.
Perhaps surprisingly, even he is willing to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election.
At this point I'm mostly just throwing my hands up and saying whoever can win the Democratic primaries is probably the best candidate. Hillary is favored to win, but if Bernie can win, it would represent enough of a bungle on Clinton's part and enough strategic acumen on Sanders's that it would be in itself evidence that Sanders is the more electable candidate. I don't understand feeling so strongly about it, although as I've said before, I'm leaning towards Hillary primarily because I think she has a better chance of winning.
Re: 2016 Presidential Race
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") has petered out like an elderly man's piss stream. Christie hasn't been able to shake off his Obama hug, Bridgegate or his dismal NJ approval rating. Kasich has made the mistake of running as a moderate despite being a pro-life loony and only a little more liberal than Dubya. And finally, Rubio, the supposed great establishment hope is, well... somehow still unable to overtake Jeb in endorsements and while at the front of the establishment pack, he's not breaking away from it. They're not rallying behind him as the obvious choice. As it turns out, he'd actually be the most conservative nominee since Goldwater and he's not that establishment anyway... so maybe they just don't like him that much. Either way, those four are tightly packed in New Hampshire, and none of them seems to be able to get the "moderates" to rally behind them. The Establishment can't seem to make up its mind. I believe their heart is with Jeb! (look at that $100 million haul), but they have grave concerns about his debate performances and electability (that Bush brand) and those dismal poll numbers.
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