Well, that was all kind of…interminable. For a time there in the middle, I thought Ben Carson had strolled out to perform some elective surgery. I guess we kind of agree that Carly Fiorina won, since she did manage to convey some real or at least manufactured-real passion on about three or four occasions.
But you wanna know who really won that debate? Hillary Clinton. Go ahead, go ahead, laugh all you want. Yes, her stock is selling awfully low right now. Nate Silver says, accurately, that she is in a “self-reinforcing funk” right now and that there’s no obvious way out for the time being.
But consider. She is still the overwhelming favorite to be the Democratic nominee. She still leads the Republicans in a strong majority of the general election head-to-head matchups. And that’s after two horrible media months in which, by Silver’s count, she has endured 29 negative news stories while enjoying just one positive one. All that, and she’s still mostly ahead.
And being the Democrat, she has the Electoral College advantage that any plausible Democrat has these days because the GOP has just positioned itself too far right to win states that it regularly won back in the Nixon-to-Bush Sr. era. That advantage is either 257 electoral votes that tilt strongly Democratic, or 247, if you put Iowa and New Hampshire on the fence as, for example, Larry Sabato does. I do not, because those two states have both gone Democratic five of the last six times, which is trend enough for me. The comparable Republican number, the “natural” Republican Electoral College vote, is 206. If Clinton holds every state that’s gone Democratic in five out of the last six and sneaks by in Virginia, boom, Madam President. She doesn’t even need Ohio or Florida.
All that speaks to the advantages she still enjoys, even with the quicksand she’s been stuck in lately. But all that isn’t why she won the debate. She won the debate because these people are jokers. Donald Trump, come on. I mean, look: I’ve come to believe here lately that he’d be a better president than most of them in some ways. I could picture the Trump whom Jonah Goldberg detests nominating someone to the Supreme Court who is not a knuckle-dragger. But that doesn’t erase the fundamental and self-evident preposterosity of the idea of President Trump. He slipped Wednesday night. That moment when he said he’d know plenty about foreign policy in good time was embarrassing.
Ben Carson. Yes, he seems like a nice enough man. But he had nothing interesting to say. Carly Fiorina had good lines. She’s well prepped for these things. But if she actually did call “the supreme leader”—did you notice how she called him that, just like the quisling Obama does?—on her first day in office and change the terms of the Iran deal as radically as she suggested, Tehran would have a nuclear weapon in about four months. She was also well prepped on her Hewlett-Packard tenure, how to answer the disaster charge (she walked away with a $40 million parachute, by the way). But that doesn’t change the fact that it was bad, and not just because of the economy. Her Compaq decision, among others, had a lot to do with it. If we’re sizing up business people, she is less qualified than Trump.
As for the “serious” ones, Jeb Bush and the others, they are in their way even worse. Unlike the outsider triumvirate, they know actual facts about governmental policy, and yet they still persist in uttering this fantasy gibberish to assuage the hard right base. It’s one thing for Trump to say he can bully the Ford Motor Company in one day to keep a plant in Michigan. He probably truly believes he could. But it’s quite another for Bush to say his brother “kept America safe.” Yes, he did. Except for 9/11. Well, whatever. And what were those brainwashed idiots doing applauding that line? This is the kind of thing that only conservatives believe, because it’s just obviously not true, and everyone else knows it.
There were a few moments of quasi-reality. Rand Paul and John Kasich were sort of interesting on foreign policy, which we can assume hurt them badly. But basically, the whole thing was ridiculous. The jokers are ahead, and they haven’t offered a serious proposal among them. The allegedly serious ones are mostly just doing what Mitt Romney did, to his peril, in 2012, jumping up in front of the base saying, “See, I can be crazy right-wing, too!”
Meanwhile, Clinton has offered serious policy proposals one after the other. No Republican even comes remotely close, with the partial exception of Paul, who has been rewarded for his quasi-seriousness with what, 3 percent support. Compare, for example, Clinton’s tax proposal to Bush’s. Yes, they both want to end the carried-interest loophole for hedge-fund managers, which is the headline.
But look beyond the headline. In a July 12 speech, Clinton paired that announcement with a series of other steps that would do what eliminating the carried-interest loophole is designed to do: try to alleviate inequality. Bush, in contrast, tossed elimination of the loophole in there as a look-good sop in a package of tax proposals that otherwise will exacerbate inequality and continue the party for the 1 percent that his brother so diligently advanced.
I could go on, and on. But suffice it to say: Clinton is putting forward policy after policy that address America’s great problems. These people are just making stuff up. Eventually, issues will matter. And voters will see what they saw in 2008 and 2012, two elections when Republicans couldn’t believe they lost to such a lightweight. In 2016, they’ll say we can’t believe we lost to such a corrupt blah-da-de-blah, and the answer will be the same as it was then: You people aren’t in the real world where most Americans live.
The best line of the night? Rick Santorum, at the JV debate. When he said his party is all about business owners but won’t talk to workers. The 11 on the main stage failed Santorum’s test, except with respect to government workers who feel their religious beliefs are being violated. Clinton passes his test, and by Election Day, it will matter.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 17, 2015
September 18, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2016, GOP Primary Debates, Hillary Clinton | Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Donald Trump, Economic inequality, Electioral College, GOP, GOP Base, Iran Nuclear Agreement, Jeb Bush |
3 Comments
Watching the second Republican presidential debate on CNN and its aftermath, millions of Americans learned again what we already know about the candidates: These people embellish, prettify, and fabricate their own biographies without hesitation, from Donald Trump’s much-parodied boasting about his business acumen to Carly Fiorina’s super-selective accounting of her tenure at Hewlett-Packard to Chris Christie’s highly romanticized account of his appointment and record as U.S. Attorney to Jeb Bush’s wildly inflated claims about the Florida economy when he was governor.
But as Christie himself pointed out – in a remark targeted at Trump and Fiorina – why would anybody even pay attention to the tall tales told by these politicians (or the self-styled political “outsiders,” who sound exactly like politicians) about themselves? While the bickering is sometimes amusing and mostly annoying, does anyone believe that it matters?
For these characters to prevaricate endlessly about their résumés and achievements is neither surprising nor important. Of much greater consequence are the bat-winged lies they emit about issues that affect all of our lives, as well as the future of the United States and the world.
Evidently all of the Republicans on the stage at the Reagan presidential library wanted us to believe that Planned Parenthood should be shut down everywhere because its clinics sell post-abortion fetal body parts for profit. That is a false and outrageous accusation, disproved in the same videotapes that they cited as proof. Attacking the venerable women’s health organization, Fiorina went even further, furiously describing a scene in those videos supposedly showing a “fully formed fetus” with legs kicking and heart beating while someone prepares to “harvest its brain.”
Such horrific practices, she declared, “erode the character of our nation.” What erodes the character of our nation, in fact, is Fiorina’s blatant chicanery, repeated by her the next morning on ABC News. The video she claims to have watched does not exist, according to Vox.com reporter Sarah Kliff, who viewed all 12 hours of those videos.
What exist in reality are hundreds of thousands of women who will lose access to health care if fanatics like Fiorina and her fellow Republican candidates ever succeed in wrecking Planned Parenthood. Having “harvested” tens of millions of dollars from Hewlett-Packard for nearly wrecking the company, however, she doesn’t need to worry about medical care for other people.
Nearly every Republican on that stage brayed his or her opposition to the Iran nuclear agreement – and every one of them falsely described that deal. Typical was Senator Ted Cruz, who warned, “We won’t know under this agreement—there are several facilities in Iran they designate as military facilities that are off limits all together…the other facilities, we give them 24 days notice before inspecting them.”
None of what Cruz said is true or relevant. All of Iran’s designated nuclear facilities will fall under continuous video and electronic monitoring in addition to physical visitation by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who will also monitor any movements of nuclear materials or equipment there. Hostile to scientific facts as they are, Cruz and his fellow Republicans are probably unaware of how easily as little as a billionth of a gram of radioactive dust could be detected by IAEA inspectors, as the Center for National Security at Fordham University noted in a factsheet.
These examples represent only a few of literally dozens of mendacious statements about crucial public issues, usually bordering on absurdity, broadcast by CNN with little contradiction on Wednesday evening. Senator Marco Rubio insisted that we can do nothing about man-made climate change without destroying the economy, when every reputable study shows that the economy and the world will be destroyed if we do nothing. Christie promised to “save” Social Security from insolvency by denying payments to wealthy recipients, when that won’t significantly improve the system’s finances – and the “crisis” he touted is overblown anyway. Trump insisted that life-saving vaccines cause autism, complete with anecdotal “proof” from an “employee” whose “beautiful baby” contracted a fever and then “became autistic” after being vaccinated.
Not only did Trump concoct that sad story, but there is little doubt that his own children, including little Barron Trump, have received proper vaccinations. (Manhattan private schools don’t accept the unvaccinated.) Disgracefully, neither of the two physicians on stage, Rand Paul and Ben Carson, had the guts to forcefully contradict him.
Try as they will to reject Trump, he fits in perfectly among Republicans – and not only because he worships money, spews xenophobic nonsense, and encourages callous bigotry. Like them, he relies on fabrications and falsehoods, manipulating the prejudices of ill-informed voters.
The Republican rejection of reality – which these candidates will act out in debate after debate for months to come – inflicts grave costs on this country every day. It is hard to imagine the damage that will be done if one of these deceivers comes to power.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editors Blog, The National Memo, September 17, 2015
September 18, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Carly Fiorina, GOP Primary Debates, Planned Parenthood, Women's Health | Climate Change, CNN, Conservatives, Donald Trump, Iran Nuclear Agreement, Republicans, Ted Cruz, Vaccinations |
2 Comments
The Republican Party is in total chaos. Democrats aren’t there yet but may be approaching the neighborhood. It’s time to acknowledge that our political system simply isn’t doing its job.
Once again, following Thursday’s debate and its messy aftermath, the GOP establishment confidently predicts that the Donald Trump phenomenon is over, done with, finished, kaput. Why, he picked a fight with popular Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly! He bluffed his way through the debate with rhetoric and showmanship rather than policy positions! His campaign organization is in turmoil! He wouldn’t even pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee!
By any traditional measure, Trump is not a viable candidate. Yet he continues to dominate news coverage of the campaign, and thus far there is no indication that his transgressions have caused the plunge in his poll numbers that party pooh-bahs so eagerly anticipate.
As Buffalo Springfield once sang, “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” (Ask your parents, kids.)
By one early measure — an online poll for NBC News conducted by the SurveyMonkey firm — Trump maintained his big lead following the debate, with Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson vaulting into second and third place; businesswoman Carly Fiorina, who dominated the undercard debate, reportedly leapt into the middle of the pack. The numbers in the SurveyMonkey poll are less important than the trend lines: So-called “protest candidates” are capturing voters’ imaginations in a way that establishment candidates are not.
Trump, Fiorina and Carson have never held elective office; the basis of their appeal is that they are not professional politicians. Cruz has spent his time in Washington ostentatiously declining to play politics as usual, recently going so far as to call his own majority leader a liar.
At this point, it is fair to say that a significant portion of the party has lost faith in the GOP establishment. It’s also fair to say that this has little or nothing to do with where candidates stand on the issues.
Trump made his initial mark in this campaign with demagoguery about illegal immigration. But with the exception of Jeb Bush, the other GOP contenders have basically the same position: Seal off the border with Mexico, if necessary by erecting a physical barrier.
Carson has compared the Affordable Care Act to slavery. No other Republican in the race uses such over-the-top language, but they all pledge to repeal Obamacare. Cruz vehemently opposes the Iran nuclear agreement. All the Republican candidates feel the same way. Fiorina wants to shrink bloated government. Everybody else does, too.
The irony is that the Republican field includes several candidates who, in theory, could be formidable in the general election. Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio are both from Florida, a state the GOP basically must win to have any chance in the Electoral College. Ohio Gov. John Kasich or Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker theoretically might be able to pry one or more of the Midwestern industrial states out of Democratic hands.
But the process of quelling the Trump-led insurgency is already boxing the whole field into absolutist positions that will be difficult for the eventual nominee to soften. The longer chaos reigns, I believe, the less room the GOP candidate will have to maneuver.
All of this should make Hillary Clinton very happy. But the Democratic Party and its likely nominee have problems of their own.
To be sure, I’d much rather be playing Clinton’s hand than anybody else’s in either party. In the RealClearPolitics polling averages, she leads her closest opponent for the nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, by 35 points — and beats every one of her potential GOP opponents in hypothetical head-to-head matchups.
One problem, however, is that her favorability has been going down, according to polls. Another is that while Sanders has made few discernible inroads with key parts of the Democratic Party coalition — especially African Americans and Latinos — he is within striking distance of Clinton in the first two caucus and primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire.
Sanders is drawing big, passionate crowds, and I believe one reason is that he, too, is kind of an anti-politician — a man who unabashedly labels himself a socialist and refuses to tailor his views to please a given audience.
Significant numbers of voters seem to be demanding authenticity, passion and rough edges from a nominating process designed to produce none of the above. To state the obvious, this could be a wild and unpredictable ride.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 11, 2015
August 12, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Donald Trump, GOP Primary Debates, Hillary Clinton | Bernie Sanders, GOP Establishment, GOP Presidential Candidates, Immigration, Iran Nuclear Agreement, ObamaCare, Political System, Republicans |
3 Comments
A couple of weeks ago, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) presidential campaign launched a new television ad, condemning the international nuclear agreement. The funny part, however, was Christie’s argument that Obama should have followed the example set by … Ronald Reagan.
The subject came up again last night, when Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was asked whether he’s prepared to abandon the U.S. commitment to the diplomatic deal on the first day of his imaginary presidency. The senator replied:
“I oppose the Iranian deal, and will vote against it. I don’t think that the president negotiated from a position of strength, but I don’t immediately discount negotiations. I’m a Reagan conservative.”
Paul went on to note that Reagan negotiated with the USSR, which is proof that the United States can engage in talks with our foes, though Paul opposes the Iran deal anyway for reasons he didn’t specify.
A little later in the debate, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) also added a dash of Ronaldus Magnus and Iran. Responding to a question on cyber-security, the Republican senator said, “It is worth emphasizing that Iran released our hostages in 1981 the day Ronald Reagan was sworn into office.”
It’s worth emphasizing that Cruz’s story is based on a GOP fairy tale.
Regardless, the underlying point remains the same: when it comes to U.S. policy towards Iran, the current crop of Republican presidential candidates keep pointing to Reagan as the model for contemporary leaders to follow. Perhaps they haven’t thought this through.
Let’s again set the record straight: the Reagan White House illegally tried to sell weapons to Iran in order to help finance an illegal war in Central America. It was one of the biggest scandals in American history. Much of Reagan’s national-security team ended up under criminal indictment.
At one point in 1986, Reagan delivered a nationally televised address in which he looked at the camera and promised Americans the scandal wasn’t true. Four months later, he was forced to deliver another televised address, conceding the fact that his claims in the first one weren’t true.
I can appreciate why Republicans find all of this quite inconvenient now, and why the right may prefer to wipe the scandal from the party’s collective memories, but when the subject of U.S. policy towards Iran comes up, pointing to Reagan as some kind of Platonic ideal is ridiculous.
By: Steven Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 7, 2015
August 8, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Chris Christie, GOP Primary Debates, Rand Paul, Ronald Reagan | Conservatives, Foreign Policy, Iran Contra Affair, Iran Nuclear Agreement, Republicans, USSR |
2 Comments
“Playing the Hitler card” is an infallible sign that a politician has run out of intelligent, substantive and plausible ways to criticize an opponent. This would be amusing (Mel Brooks made Hitler amusing), except “playing the Hitler card” is also an infallible sign that a politician has run out of amusing ways to criticize an opponent.
So goodbye to you, Mike Huckabee.
Claiming that the President of the United States “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven” is not a cogent critique of the Iran nuclear deal, however bad the deal is. Nor is it an insightful thing to say about the administration that made the bad deal.
And, Mike, it is not a Christian thing to say about Barack Obama.
I’m a Christian too. Maybe I’m not a hard-shell Baptist ordained minister dog-in-the-manger-at-Bethlehem Christian like you are. But I think you could use a refresher course in Christianity.
“Whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council,” said our Lord. “Raca” and “council” are Aramaic for “playing the Hitler card” and “New Hampshire primary.”
And it’s not just your “march them to the oven” comment that makes me think you need a come-to-Jesus moment.
I believe the Bible is the word of God. And you believe in creationism. “God created man in his own image,” says Genesis.
Mike, look in the mirror. This is obviously God’s way of telling you to lay off the biblical literalism.
You’re a smart man. You graduated magna cum laude from Ouachia Baptist University. which has a “Department of Worship Arts.” So, Mike, you know about God. Do you think God is smarter than we are?
I’m a god to my dog. When I say to my dog, “It shall be an abomination unto you to run into the street chasing a squirrel,” what does my dog hear? “Squirrel!”
Maybe you should consult I Samuel, verses 1 through 4. “…the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David… Then Jonathan and David made a covenant… And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him…” And here you are trying to get in between them.
Mike, you’re against gay marriage and gay adoption. Once people get married and have kids they don’t have the energy for any kind of sex. And then, pollsters tell us, they become Republicans.
Having you trying to convince people to vote for the GOP is like having Mahatma Gandhi on U. S. Marine Corps recruiting posters.
You call for “civil disobedience” to halt gay marriage. And you compare this to the actions of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Mahatma and MLK would walk down the street in assless chaps at the Gay Pride parade before they’d join you in a sit-in.
And you don’t like immigrants coming to America and making money. When people come to America and make money, what do they become? Again, Republicans.
You want 10 million illegal immigrants to return to their countries of origin within 120 days. Otherwise they’ll be banned from coming to America, where they already are.
Lights on in your head, Mike.
You say displaying the Confederate battle flag is “not an issue” for a presidential candidate. Not an issue, if you don’t want any black person to ever vote Republican in this dimension of the universe. You’ll have Clarence Thomas putting up Bernie Sanders yard signs if you don’t stop talking smack.
Mike, my Republican friends would rather hoist the Jolly Roger than fly the rebel flag like a bunch of cement-head biker trash with Nazi face tattoos.
To what political party do you think Abraham Lincoln belonged? We won the Civil War.
And my Republican friends aren’t worried about LGBT rights or undocumented aliens. Who do you think decorates Republicans’ houses? The guys from the Moose Lodge? And who mows Republicans’ lawns? Lincoln Chafee?
You’re nuts, Mike. You were on John McCain’s short list for running mates and he picked Sarah Palin for her comparative sanity.
Furthermore, Mike, as a hard-shell Baptist, you are accused of tea-totaling until proven innocent. I don’t want any damn sweet tea in my stemware when you invite me to a State Dinner at the White House. And you may have to. I’m the only inside-the-beltway type who’d come.
Because you wrote a book called, God, Guns, Grits and Gravy. It’s a great title and—between saying Grace, the Glock I’m cleaning, and the bacon, sausage and scrapple—that’s pretty much what was on my breakfast table this morning.
“Marriage as an institution is not so much threatened by same-sex couples as it is by heterosexuals’ increasing indifference to it.” That’s you in your book. Maybe you should re-read GGG&G as well as the Bible.
Mike, you think God is involved in politics. Observe politics in America. Observe politics around the world. Observe politics down through history. Does it look like God is involved? No. That would be the “Other Fellow” who’s the political activist.
I suppose your candidacy won’t disappear immediately—not until the Holy Rolly Pollys, amen snorters, snake handlers and flat-earthers have met at their Iowa caucus tent revivals and born witness to your divinely inspired campaign.
Then, however, as is foretold in Revelation, you will look around at the field of other candidates and realize that “without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters” and go back to Fox News and AM talk radio.
But even there you aren’t the “In-the-beginning-there-was-the-Word” that you once were. Mike, national opinion is flowing so fast against your brand of conservatism that you look—even to God-fearing Republicans—like a man trying to row up Class 5 rapids on a standing paddleboard.
Yes, you have your base. There are the no-account redneck gospel-grinding, pulpit-hugging evangel-hicks who think that the answer to every question including “What to wear to the prom?” is found in Leviticus, Chapters 17 to 26, in English like God spoke to Moses.
But, as I said, it’s the “Other Fellow” who’s involved in politics. And he’s helping you reap what you’ve sown, which is, in the case of your ridiculing Obama, a bunch of dried up old “corn” stalks.
For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven: and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble.
— Malachi 4:1
By: P. J. O’Rourke, The Daily Beast, August 1, 2015
August 2, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Christianity, Christians, Mike Huckabee | Adolph Hitler, Confederate Flag, GOP, Immigrants, Iran Nuclear Agreement, Israel, Marriage Equality, Nazi's, Republicans |
2 Comments
mykeystrokes.com 