What a lot of people like KE are ignorant of, is what really goes on in this country. But then again, we can all blame the media and public education for that.

You might want to reconsider the assertion that, today’s GOP-dominated Congress bears any ideological resemblance whatsoever, to the GOP-dominated Congress of Coolidge’s time…

Once you’ve done that, it forces a reconsideration of what a Pres. Cruz could actually accomplish with a bunch of self-promoting ‘Vichy’ style collaborative ‘legislators’.

If the GOP never even considered ending the filibuster rule it wouldn’t make a particle of difference to the democrats. As soon as they have a 51% majority in the Senate and another democrat President, they will end the cloture/filibuster rule for as long as it suits them.

So, the GOP has nothing to lose because the only question is whether the republicans will match the democrats or continue to operate at a self-imposed disadvantage. Whether they do or not, the democrats will ignore the prior cloture/filibuster rule.

The GOP is refusing “to hit below the belt”, while the democrats have a field day in, for them, an anything goes fight.

The “trash the establishment” crowd would not criticize the GOP members of the Senate who sent Obama a bill whose sole provision was funding the military. Followed by individual bills to fund the vital functions of the government. Another bill that brought severe criminal penalties against employers who hired illegals. A bill that abjured benefits for illegal immigrants. A bill that halted H-1B visas for foreign workers. And a bill that severely restricted Muslim migration into America.

When Obama vetoed all of those bills, where the GOP stood on those issues would be beyond dispute. And, the responsibility for any shutdown that resulted would, in the minds of those inclined to vote for Cruz AND Trump… be clearly upon Obama’s head. That would hold true for those voters regardless of the predictable MSM propaganda. And, had the GOP done all of that, Trump never could have gotten his foot in the door.

Just try having a GOP-dominated Congress and a conservative president, something that hasn’t occurred since Coolidge, before dismissing it and doing the “burn it down” thing, especially with someone as unreliable (and liberal) as Trump.

The left’s gains will never be rolled back through incrementalism. Only through cataclysm.

I say you people because we in the Peoples Soviet of Washington get no real say in candidates or winner. I’ll never forget listening to Carter’s concession speech while enroute to vote. Thanks to all mail balloting, now if you vote on Election Day your vote won’t even be counted for two or three days.

Maybe I should go back to “Now, …”

Well, that’s something I’ll have to think about.

I have never heard Bush referred to as “conservative,” although I suppose someone somewhere has. He was clearly the “establishment” choice, and only “conservative” as in “compassionate conservative,” like his father.

This was all quite explicit during the campaign:

Texas Governor George W. Bush, son of George H. W. Bush, the most recent Republican president, took an early lead with the support of much of the party establishment and a strong fund-raising effort…

Bush’s campaign focused on “compassionate conservatism,” including a greater role for the federal government in funding education and large reductions in the income and capital gains tax rates.

The conservatives in the race were Alan Keyes and Gary Bauer, and Forbes was doing his flat tax thing.

Bush was the establishment candidate par excellence.

neo-neocon Says:
March 1st, 2016 at 1:13 pm

DNW:

The “establishment”could not make Jeb Bush into a winner because they wanted to, nor could they make Cruz into a loser just because they wanted to.

If Trump wasn’t there, I believe Cruz would have been the nominee. He would have drawn all of Trump’s voters PLUS many conservatives who don’t like Trump. And the establishment could not have stopped it.”

Well, that was not my argument. My assertion is merely that the “establishment” was so hostile to Cruz, that they (insofar as we have some supposed insiders on record) themselves prefer Trump or Hillary to Cruz.

So, your analysis actually concedes the point, yet contends that 1. The establishment K-Street teat suckers alone are not enough to stop Cruz; and 2, that an authentic and organic Republican insurgency minus the Trumpsters invasion of Republican territory and their sucking up the oxygen with their emotionalism could, or should, have left Cruz as the last man standing; since under that scenario the enraged and the emotionalists (those attracted to personality) would have had nowhere else to go.

Well then, we don’t actually have an argument, because we don’t have a settled question between us.

As far as I can see the Trumpsters, are in significant measure, still non-ideological “invaders”, who are using the Republican Party to express their rage at the fact that the social welfare system which they were satisfied with, has been wrested away from them and turned against them.

They have a point. Just as those who describe McConnell and Boehner as flaccid surrender-monkeys, concerned above all to make sure they don’t have to fight the press in an Armageddon like battle (which they believed could not be won) over a so-called “government shutdown” have something of a point as well.

Well, see what their ongoing moral cowardice and perhaps ulterior motivations and loyalty to financial corporations has bought them, and us?

Trump!