Thursday’s Republican presidential debate made us all dumber.
It was a disgrace. As people wake up in capitals around the world Friday morning, in London and Addis Ababa and Riyadh and Beijing and Seoul, newscasters will be forced to find a way to discuss, in their local euphemisms, Donald Trump’s dick size.
The exchanges on the stage at the Fox Theater in Motown centered around erstwhile reality television star Donald Trump, who found, as usual, a way to be even more outrageous than he has been in previous debates.
Sen. Marco Rubio—a 44-year-old U.S. senator! A grown man! With children!—had made fun of Trump’s hand size, implying that his manhood was not so large.
“I have to say this. He hit my hands. Nobody has ever hit my hands. I have never heard of this. Look at those hands. Are they small hands?” Trump responded, on a nationally televised debate to become leader of the free world.
“And he referred to my hands, if they are small, something else must be small,” Trump deadpanned. “I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee you.”
There was shouting inside the debate hall and out. As a light snow fell on Woodward Avenue across from Ford Field, progressive protesters growled about their issues of the day: their objections to “racist” Trump; their demand for a higher minimum wage; calls for an immediate solution for the lead-poisoned people of Flint.
But the shouting and chanting was statesmanlike compared to the childish theatrics indoors. You could practically hear your brain cells crying out in pain as they died out, answer after answer.
There were insults, and Donald Trump defending war crimes, and Cruz treating the businessman like a small child. Trump called Rubio “little Marco,” and Cruz “lyin’ Ted.”
It was beyond satire. The first question, to Trump, was about former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who had delivered a scathing speech challenging Trump’s fitness to become president.
“He challenged you to answer with substance, not insults. How do you answer Mitt Romney, sir?” asked Fox News moderator Chris Wallace.
“He was a failed candidate,” Trump shot back. “He failed miserably, and it was an embarrassment to everybody.”
When Rubio challenged Trump on whether he’d answer a policy question substantively, the businessman responded like an adolescent: “Don’t worry about it, little Marco.” Rubio fired back: “Let’s hear big Donald.”
It was like a kindergarten brawl: a lot of cheap insults, a lot of whining, culminating with the need for everyone to have a time out. Sen. Ted Cruz—a 45-year-old U.S. senator! A grown man! With children!—treated Trump much like he would his two young daughters.
When Trump tried to interrupt him during an answer, Cruz responded patronizingly, “Donald, learn not to interrupt. It’s not complicated—Count to 10. Count to 10.”
“Yelling and cursing people doesn’t make you a tough guy,” Cruz said, as if lecturing an infant on the playground.
Meanwhile Trump one-upped everyone by defending torture, and insisting that the military would follow through with illegal orders if he gave them. Trump had previously said that his national security policy would involve targeting the innocent family members of terrorists and the use of interrogation methods even more extreme than waterboarding.
“They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse me. Believe me,” Trump said. “We should go for waterboarding… and tougher than waterboarding… I’m a leader, I’ve always been a leader… if I say do it, they’re going to do it.”
And on targeting the family members of terrorists, a potential war crime? “I have no problem with it,” Trump said.
The businessman struggled to square these authoritarian instincts with one of his key selling points: that he’d be the man who could make a deal with Congress, with China, with Vladimir Putin. He has a “strong core” that is also “flexible,” he said.
“You can breathe,” Cruz told Trump, during yet another shouting match. “I know it’s hard.”
“When they’re done with the yoga, can I answer a question?” Rubio butted in.
“I really hope we don’t see yoga on this stage,” Cruz responded.
“Well he’s really flexible, so you never know,” Rubio quipped.
On a day that former governor Romney gave a speech in Utah decrying Trump’s excesses, the dumbest presidential debate of all time took place. It must have made much of the American public yearn for a less stupid time—when the biggest controversy of the day was Romney’s car elevator and awkward word choices. How quaint that all was.
By: Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, March 4, 2016
March 5, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, GOP Presidential Candidates, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz | Congress, Flint Water Crisis, Foreign Policy, Mitt Romney, Racism, Terrorists, Torture, War Crimes, World Leaders |
Leave a comment
“If he was for it, we had to be against it.”
— Former U.S. Sen. George Voinovich quoted in “The New New Deal” by Michael Grunwald
The “he” is President Obama. The “we” is the Republican Party. And it is not coincidental that as the former pushes toward the end of his second term, the latter is coming apart.
The GOP is an incoherent mess. Republican-on-Republican rhetorical violence has become commonplace. Party members find themselves mulling whether to break away and form a third party or unite behind a coarse, blustering bigot whose scapegoating and strongman rhetoric has Holocaust survivors comparing him to Hitler.
The situation is so objectively and transparently grim that many on the right no longer even bother to spin it. “I’m a lifelong Republican,” tweeted historian Max Boot last week, “but (the) Trump surge proves that every bad thing Democrats have ever said about GOP is basically true.”
“It would be terrible,” wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens last week, “to think that the left was right about the right all these years.”
But it can be argued that Trump is less the cause than an inevitable effect of the party’s looming disintegration. It can be argued that what’s really destroying the Republican Party is the Republican Party.
The popular storyline goes that voters are seeking political outsiders this year in their frustration over a government where the legislative gears are frozen and nothing gets done. What that storyline forgets is that this gridlock was by design, that GOP leaders held a meeting on the very evening of the president’s first inauguration and explicitly decided upon a policy of non-cooperation to deny him anything approaching a bipartisan triumph.
The party followed this tactic with such lockstep discipline and cynical disregard for the national welfare that in 2010, seven Republican co-sponsors of a resolution to create a deficit reduction task force voted against their own bill because Obama came out for it. They feared its passage might make him look good.
In the book quoted above, Michael Grunwald distilled the GOP’s thinking as follows: “As long as Republicans refused to follow his lead, Americans would see partisan food fights and conclude that Obama had failed to produce change.”
Republicans and their media accomplices buttressed that strategy with a campaign of insult and disrespect designed to delegitimize Obama. With their endless birther stupidity, their death panels idiocy, their constant budget brinksmanship and their cries of, “I want my country back!” they stoked in the public nothing less than hatred for the interloper in the White House who’d had the nerve to be elected president.
And the strategy worked, hobbling and frustrating Obama. But as a bullet doesn’t care who it hits and a fire doesn’t care who it burns, the forces of ignorance and unreason, grievance and fear the Republicans calculatedly unleashed have not only wounded the president. No, it becomes more apparent every day that those forces have gravely wounded politics itself, meaning the idea that we can — or even should — reason together, compromise, form consensus.
There is a sense of just deserts in watching panicked Republicans try to stop Trump as he goose-steps toward coronation, but it is tempered by the realization that there’s far more at stake here than the GOP’s comeuppance.
This is our country we’re talking about. This is its future we choose in November. And any future presided over by “President Trump” is too apocalyptic to contemplate. Yet, the possibility is there, and that’s sobering.
It is bad enough the Republicans may have destroyed themselves. One wonders whether they will take America with them.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, March 3, 2016
March 5, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, GOP Presidential Candidates, Republicans | Bigotry, GOP Leadership, Governing, Gridlock, Holocaust Survivors, media, Racism |
1 Comment
For a decade we have seen article after article, study after study, comment after comment on the death of civility in our politics. Politicians, pundits and academics worried that gridlock and the paralysis of Washington was heavily due to the nastiness of the political culture and the vitriol inherent in today’s politics.
Well, as Donald Trump might say – you ain’t seen nothing yet!
My friend, Ira Shapiro, wrote a terrific book, “The Last Great Senate,” about the accomplishments of the civil and functional U. S. Senate that we were both privileged to be a part of a few decades ago. Whether it was the Panama Canal treaties, passage of environmental legislation or social security reform, Republicans and Democrats actually worked together, forged compromises and got the people’s business done.
But as Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann chronicled in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” published in 2012, the rise of tea party extremists and hard-right ideologues has polarized and paralyzed our constitutional system of government.
And now in 2016, we have Donald Trump, who would make Ornstein and Mann’s world of just a few years ago look like patty-cake. Trump, and many of his colleagues in this race who have followed his lead, has debased the dialogue and engaged in trash talk that would make a pro football player blush. It has truly spiraled out of control.
Facts and logical argument are cast to the wind like confetti; nasty statements about body parts are common and invective like “stupid,” “idiot,” “lightweight,” “choker,” “loser” are used by Trump in nearly every speech and press conference.
No one is writing about a return to civility so long as Trump has seized the stage, forcing a dialogue that has taken American politics even further down into the gutter. In fact, Trump has left many people who should be speaking out speechless instead. Now Republicans and conservative columnists are shaking their heads and wondering why the other candidates and Republican Party leadership have kept their heads in the sand for so long. A flood of pieces by the likes of David Brooks and George Will spell it out perfectly: talking about “the governing cancer” and Trump’s “demagogic cynicism and anti-constitutional authoritarianism.”
But I fault those Republicans and conservative pundits who clearly should have been focusing on this transformation from a government that governed and legislators who legislated into a collection of talking heads whose constant desire is to be on gladiator-TV. Or to give a speech that incites a crowd. Many of them embraced the tea party and chose demagoguery over dialogue.
What has happened to words such as thoughtful, wise, substantive, open-minded and even educated, learned and knowledgeable to describe those in the arena of politics and government? Why are those not the standards we use to judge our leaders?
I am left with the enduring cover image from The New Yorker a number of weeks ago, showing a television set with Donald Trump raging and Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy and Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt looking on in horror.
This is no longer amusing nor something that should be passed off as entertainment. This is not “The Apprentice” or some reality television show. This is real.
If we allow a person like Donald Trump to capture the Republican Party, let alone the country, the price we will pay will be lasting, and the damage will be serious and permanent. This is so far from anything we have experienced; that it has no parallel in our history. He is not, as he says, building a new expanded Republican Party. This “movement” is based on fear and loathing, racism and prejudice, xenophobia and hatred. It is based on our basest instincts, not on our best instincts. It is destructive, not constructive.
With a Trump ascendancy, common courtesy and civility will be considered weaknesses and the politics of irrationalism and fear will triumph. That must not happen.
By: Peter Fenn, Democratic Political Strategist and Head of Fenn Communications; U. S. News and World Report, March 3, 2016
March 5, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, Fearmongering, GOP Presidential Candidates, Governing | Civility, Conservatives, Gridlock, Racism, Republicans, Right Wing Ideologues, Tea Party Extremists, Xenophobia |
Leave a comment
Just as Donald Trump did a Super Tuesday stomp on the Republican establishment, the establishment showed why it deserved the rough treatment. The Republican Senate leadership yet again announced its refusal to consider anyone President Obama nominates for the Supreme Court until after the presidential election.
It is the job of the U.S. Senate to hold hearings on, and then accept or reject, the president’s choice. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said they will not take on the work — while showing no inclination to forgo their paychecks.
Talk about “takers.”
Yes, talk about “takers.” That’s how Mitt Romney described Americans benefiting from Medicare, Social Security, Obamacare and other government social programs during his failed 2012 run for president. Never mind that most of the “takers” have also paid for some of what they have received.
Working-class Republicans have finally rebelled against the notion that everything they get is beneficence from the superrich — and that making the superrich super-duper-rich would drop some tinsel on their grateful heads. They were done with quiet protest and ready to take down the Republican bastille, stone by stone. And the angrier Trump made the establishment the happier they were.
The Bastille was the symbol of France’s Old Regime. The storming of the prison in 1789 kicked off the French Revolution.
Republican disrupters from Newt Gingrich on down liked to talk about a conservative revolution. They didn’t know the first thing about revolutions. This is a revolution.
Back at the chateau, Republican luminaries were calmly planning favors for their financiers. They assumed their party’s working folk would fall in line — out of both hostility to Democrats and through hypnosis.
So you had Jeb Bush amassing an armory of campaign cash over bubbly and hors d’oeuvres at the family estate in Maine. You had Marco Rubio devising a plan to do away with all capital gains taxes — the source of half the earnings for people making $10 million or more. You had Ted Cruz concocting a plan to abolish the IRS. (Without the IRS, only the working stiffs would be paying taxes, the money automatically deducted from their paychecks.)
Not much here for the alleged takers, who actually see themselves as “taken from.” Unlike the others, Trump wasn’t going after their benefits. He even praised Planned Parenthood, noting it provides a variety of health services to ordinary women.
Trump would be a disastrous president, of course. But he knows how to inspire the “enraged ones.” In the French Revolution, the enraged ones were extremists who sent many of the moderate revolutionaries to the guillotine. (The enraged ones also ended badly.)
As the embers of Super Tuesday still glowed, The Wall Street Journal published the following commentary by one of its Old Regime’s scribes:
“To be honest and impolitic, the Trump voter smacks of a child who unleashes recriminations against mommy and daddy because the world is imperfect,” Holman Jenkins wrote. Take that.
No responsible American — not the other Republicans and certainly not Democrats expecting strong Latino support — would endorse Trump’s nasty attacks on our hardworking immigrants. But large-scale immigration of unskilled labor has, to some extent, hurt America’s blue-collar workers, and not just white ones.
Democrats need to continue pressing reform that is humane both to immigrants already rooted in the society and to the country’s low-skilled workforce. Do that and the air comes whooshing out of Trump’s balloon.
Back in Washington, the Republican leaders will probably continue to avoid work on this issue or a Supreme Court nominee or anything else Obama wants. They should enjoy their leisure. After Election Day, many may have to look for real jobs.
By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, March 3, 2016
March 4, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, Establishment Republicans, GOP Presidential Candidates, Senate Republicans | Chuck Grassley, French Revolution, Immigrants, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, Planned Parenthood, Super Tuesday, Supreme Court Nominees, Working Class |
2 Comments
Since the seventh anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – the “stimulus” – was this week, it was a good time to ask, “Who Do You Want In The White House When The Next Recession Comes?”
On Friday, Ed Dolan, writing in Nouriel Roubini’s EconomMonitor, answers: Definitely not Marco Rubio.
Dolan fleshes out the argument that our post made earlier this week about the kind of economic decision-making any rational person would want to have in the White House in the event of an economic downturn. And he concludes that in the case of Rubio (and other Republicans, for Dolan notes Rubio’s views are “widely shared” within the GOP), “the federal government would be legally bound to allow the economy to drift rudderless onto the rocks.”
That’s because Rubio – and for that matter all of the Republican presidential candidates – don’t have a firm grasp of Economics 101.
If you remember your basic college econ course, you’ll know that the first line of defense against a recession is fiscal policy. When the economy goes into a slump, spending rises on unemployment compensation, food stamps, and other benefits. At the same time, tax receipts, which are linked to income, decrease. Because the spending increase plus the tax decrease automatically cushion the slump, economists call them automatic stabilizers.
If you’re a true Keynesian, automatic stabilizers aren’t enough. You add some discretionary fiscal stimulus in the form of road projects and maybe a temporary tax rebate. If the timing is right, that softens the recession even more and speeds the recovery.
But Rubio, as Dolan notes, is a staunch supporter of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. (So is Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson and John Kasich.)
It sounds like a sensible idea, until you think about it. But then, you see that the idea of balancing the federal budget every year is nuts. It would mean that when the economy went into a slump, pulling tax revenues down, Congress would have to enact across the board emergency spending cuts to keep a deficit from emerging. The cuts would quickly hit jobs and household budgets. Consumer spending would fall, firms would cut output to fight ballooning inventories. Without the automatic stabilizers, a mild recession would turn into a tailspin.
But Rubio would not stop there, Dolan goes on to write. Rubio also wants to constrain the ability of the Federal Reserve to stimulate job creation – one half of its dual mandate to keep both unemployment and inflation low.
Here is what [Rubio] said about the Fed in this week’s South Carolina town hall:
That’s not the Fed’s job to stimulate the economy. The Fed is a central bank, it is not some sort of overlord of the economy. They’re not some sort of special Jedi Counsel that can decide the best things for us.
The Fed is a central bank. Their job is provide stable currency and I believe they should operate on a rules based system. They would have a very simple rule that determines when interest rates go up and when interests rates go down.
So just what is this “simple rule” Rubio is talking about? He provides the details elsewhere. His rule would replace the Fed’s dual mandate with a single mandate to prevent inflation. The Fed would be required to raise rates to stop inflation during a boom, but it would be barred from doing anything when unemployment soars during a recession.
That is why it behooves us to ask pointed questions of the presidential candidates about what they would do if the U.S. faced an economic downturn on their watch. Chances are, if they are reading from the same economic playbook that Marco Rubio uses, they would turn the next recession into the next Great Depression.
By: Isaiah J. Poole, Editor of OurFuture.org, Campaign For America’s Future, February 19, 2016
February 22, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Balanced Budget Amendment, Economic Policy, GOP Presidential Candidates, Marco Rubio | Automatic Stabilizers, Depression, Economic Recovery, Federal Reserve, Fiscal Discretionary Stimulus, Inflation, Jobs, Recession, Wage Stagnation |
Leave a comment
mykeystrokes.com 