Bot’s got a way with words:
Your favourite justification seemed to be on the internet the simplest thing to keep in mind of. I say to you, I definitely get irked while other folks think about issues that they just do not realize about. You managed to hit the nail upon the top and outlined out the whole thing with no need side effect.
I always try to hit the nail upon the top. It would be rather hard to hit it on the bottom, wouldn’t it?
Yesterday Mitt Romney said some interesting things about Donald Trump and his tax returns, and they got picked up by a lot of news outlets and pundits. This is the way his remarks were generally reported:
There might be a “bombshell” revelation to be discovered in Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s tax returns, 2012 party nominee Mitt Romney said Wednesday.
He also called on the entire GOP field to release their tax returns.
“I think there’s something there,” Romney said of Trump’s returns, “Either he’s not anywhere near as wealthy as he says he is, or he hasn’t been paying the kind of taxes we would expect him to pay,” Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on “Your World.”
Trump supporters felt that this was a low blow, and unsubstantiated as well. Also, coming from Romney—the guy many judge as having been insufficiently hard on Obama in 2012—it seemed uncharacteristic.
As usual, though, it’s always instructive to look at the transcript, and then to do a little digging into the background. In the full transcript Romney went into more detail than that. He went on to say:
…[P]erhaps [Trump] hasn’t been giving money to the vets or to the disabled like he’s been telling us he’s been doing…The reasons that I think there’s a bombshell in there is because every time he’s asked about his taxes he dodges and delays and says, well, we’re working on it. Hey, we’re not talking about the taxes that are coming due this year…We’re talking about taxes already filed, back taxes, my back taxes when I ran in 2012, my back taxes I put out in January of 2012.
Then Romney called for the other candidates to do so as well, something he had said at the beginning of the interview, too, before he made the “bombshell” statement about Trump.
Romney added:
Donald Trump likes to tell you how wealthy he is, how he’s worth billions of dollars. The first time he was asked about his taxes on the “Today” show he said, you know, they’re beautiful. They’re big and they’re, well, great, let us see them.
Romney made it clear he has no hard evidence about Trump, but is suspicious because of Trump’s dragging his feet. Many other people who are discussing this assume there was no evidence for Romney’s claim, either. But—whether Romney has seen it or not (and I have no idea whether he has or hasn’t)—there actually is some evidence from the past, originating in a defamation lawsuit Trump filed in 2009.
Please take a look at this NR article by Ian Tuttle entitled “The Litigious—and Bullying—Donald Trump.” The following Trump exchange took place during a suit Trump lodged against Tim O’Brien, the author of a biography that claimed Trump’s worth was far far less than Trump claims:
In 2004, O’Brien had co-authored a piece for the Times detailing Trump’s financial woes ”” he had recently filed for the third of what would be four Chapter 11 bankruptcies ”” and quoted anonymous sources who reported that Trump’s wealth was not nearly what he claimed; in fact, it was in the hundreds of millions, they said…Trump, meanwhile, notoriously unreliable in his own estimates, offered figures ranging from $1.7 billion to $9.5 billion. In [his biography] TrumpNation, O’Brien cited those numbers, alongside “three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances” who estimated his wealth was “somewhere between $150 million and $250 million.” Trump denied it, in his usual colorful fashion: “You can go ahead and speak to guys who have four-hundred-pound wives at home who are jealous of me, but the guys who really know me know I’m a great builder.”
Trump filed a lawsuit asking for $5 billion damages. It’s really worth reading the whole Tuttle article, but here are some excerpts [emphasis mine]:
Those who think Trump is a “winner” ought to take a close look at Donald Trump v. Timothy L. O’Brien. Because Trump didn’t just lose the case. He was humiliated…
“The case dragged on for as long as it did because he wouldn’t comply with discovery requests,” says O’Brien. “He wouldn’t turn over the tax returns, then the tax returns came in almost so completely redacted as to be useless.”…
And, of course, Trump himself was deposed, leading to the following exchange, a crystallization of the Trump ethos:
Q: Now, Mr. Trump, have you always been completely truthful in your public statements about your net worth of properties?
A: I try.
Q: Have you ever not been truthful?
A: My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings, but I try.
Q: Let me just understand that a little bit. Let’s talk about net worth for a second. You said that the net worth goes up and down based upon your own feelings?
A: Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day. Then you have a September 11th, and you don’t feel so good about yourself and you don’t feel so good about the world and you don’t feel so good about New York City. Then you have a year later, and the city is as hot as a pistol. Even months after that it was a different feeling. So yeah, even my own feelings affect my value to myself.
Q: When you publicly state what you’re worth, what do you base that number on?
A: I would say it’s my general attitude at the time that the question may be asked. And as I say, it varies.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy to estimate the worth of an individual like Trump, whose single main asset appears to be his “brand”—in his case the name “Trump”:
Donald Trump’s net worth is $2.9 billion ”” far less than the $10 billion the real estate mogul and GOP presidential hopeful claims he’s worth, according to a new Bloomberg analysis.
Trump, who has made his personal wealth part of his pitch to voters, released a 92-page rundown of his net worth last week. He calculated his fortune at $8.7 billion, including $3.3 billion for the value of his name, in the federal disclosure form.
Bloomberg tallied up Trump’s real estate holdings, including his share of several skyscrapers, golf courses and resorts, based on the current income generated by those properties, which is its standard approach for valuing such assets.
Bloomberg estimated Trump’s golf and resort properties at a combined $570 million, while Trump pegged the properties’ value at $2 billion “without disclosing his methodology.”
So I cannot help but wonder how much of the Trump story is self-constructed myth and how much truth. When it was just Trump the celebrity out there in the world, I really didn’t care at all. But if he’s asking to be president, and it’s based at least in part on his record in business (not to mention his veracity), I think we all need to care.
I have said that I have no idea whether Romney was aware of the Trump lawsuit against Tim O’Brien when Romney made his statement, which was couched within a blanket request by Romney for all the candidates to release their tax forms. Nor do I know if Romney has seen articles such as this one, which discusses Trump’s philanthropic activities in some detail, and finds his donations wanting for a man of his wealth (see also this).
[NOTE: Here’s O’Brien’s side of the story.]
[NOTE II: By the way, I had done a significant amount of the research for this post before Romney made his statement. It was in connection with a post I was planning about the extent of Trump’s wealth. This information has been in the public domain for quite some time and is actually rather easy to find.]
Apparently the social justice warriors have come to police twitter, via something with the quasi-Orwellian title of the Trust and Safety Council. I suggest you follow the link to learn more about it, but it seems to be some sort of attempt to “ensure that people feel safe expressing themselves on Twitter.”
But I thought the whole point of Twitter was verbal combat in an unsafe place.
I don’t use Twitter and don’t like Twitter. In my few forays there, the best I can say about the best of the Tweets I saw was that they were fleetingly amusing. Aside from the fact that I find the format visually distracting, there’s all of this:
I’ve not only not been drawn to [Twitter], but something about it repels me. I used to think that “something” was just that I prefer lengthier, more fleshed-out thoughts, although I do understand the value of conciseness, and I like a short and witty bon mot as well as the next person, maybe more. Funny quips are great, and often quotable, but too steady a diet of them is like eating nothing but M&Ms.
To me, that’s what Twitter always was””a lot of people being snarky together, trading barbs to see who could be the most clever. Like a bunch of teenagers getting together after school in someone’s basement, having fun at everyone else’s expense.
Yes, some information is imparted now and then through Twitter, but it is usually of the “here’s a great thing I just did!” variety.
My complete indifference to Twitter has apparently ensured I’m unlikely to ever rise much higher in the blogosphere:
Twitter is the new blogosphere.
Twitter helped destroy the conservative ecosystem of small blogs by replacing it with something easier to use and more effective…
There is no viable alternative to Twitter at this moment. The sheer breadth of membership and ease of use is not available elsewhere. Facebook is not a substitute, with its islands of pages and likes.
That’s a problem. A big problem.
Sure, you can quit Twitter, but good luck getting your message out without it, or hearing the messages of other conservatives. Twitter is the modern phone wire system, without which individual phones are isolated and irrelevant.
The marketplace for conservative communication better find a Plan B, and fast.
Oh, did I mention that conservative blogger and author Stacy McCain was recently banned, and several conservative bloggers have also quit in protest?
I have an unusually busy day today, so here’s an open thread.
You can even take your mind[s] off politics, if you like. Or not.
Last night before I went to bed I did some surfing around the blogosphere and noticed the happy-dances of Trump supporters.
Sometimes the comment was just the triumphant shout of “TRUMP!!!!” Sometimes it was more formal: “President Trump!” Sometimes, of course, it was a longer message—variations on “let it burn” or about his inevitability, and fantasies of what he’d do as president and how awful all his opponents would feel. But the messages all seemed to assume that his nomination would result in victory over Hillary and his taking the office of president.
My own assumption is different. I think a Trump nomination would be pretty much the same as a Hillary victory, because the first would be very likely to lead to the second.
Now, of course I could be wrong. But that gives me scant comfort, because to me “President Trump” is only marginally better than “President Hillary Clinton,” and that’s Trump on a good day. Again, I find that I have to focus on things like “Well, his SCOTUS appointments would have to be better than hers, wouldn’t they?” And “Well, maybe he’d pick some good advisers; she almost certainly won’t.” Or “Maybe he’d be considered a ‘cowboy’ type by the rest of the world, so maybe they won’t test him too much because they’ll think you just never know what a guy like that might do.”
You just never know what a guy like that might do.
Neither of the two alternatives—President Trump or President Hillary—feels the least bit good to me. And yet this election cycle started out with more hope about the political prospects than I’ve had since—well, since I can remember. I thought there was a good chance that the GOP might keep Congress, and with someone like Walker or Cruz or even Fiorina as president we could reverse some of the ills of the last eight years and even earlier. There was an excellent chance of it.
Then the Trump phenomenon picked up steam and here we are.
Here we are.
I can only hope that I’m underestimating Trump—both his chances for winning it all and what kind of president he’d be. Because without my being wrong about both, the prospect of his being nominated is one I cannot stomach, and would be another example of the GOP voters snatching defeat from the jaws of victory—this time in one of the most (perhaps the most) important elections of our time.
So I have to root against my own powers of judgment and prognostication.
On October 2, 2012, about a month before the 2012 election, I made the following prediction. It gives me no pleasure to report that I was spot on with this one:
One thing I believe is that, if Romney loses this election, the right will start tearing itself apart in anger…I already see some evidence of it in articles and comments from the right that accuse Romney of not wanting to win, of not going on the attack enough…of not doing whatever it might be that the brilliant armchair strategists would be doing if they were running for president, an election they of course would win by dint of their brilliant strategy. If Romney loses, the RINO theme will rise again undiminished, and the hatred of the “Republican establishment.”
I’ll just leave it there.
[UPDATES below]
I’m starting a new thread, because the old one was more of a post about other things.
Results are not in yet, but some frightening and ominous features have been reported (these are tweets):
Recap:
1. 11 names on ballot despite dropouts
2. Counting system w/texted ballot photos
We are done mattering.
https://twitter.com/juliaritchey/status/702297762256154624 ”¦
8:07 PM – 23 Feb 2016
Man here says “it’s a disaster.” No one is checking in or checking IDs. They’re handing out ballots willy nilly. Some guy voted trump twice
8:24 PM – 23 Feb 2016
Says caucus volunteers are wearing Trump gear (they’re not allowed to show preference). “Actively bullying folks. Not checking IDs.”
8:39 PM – 23 Feb 2016
Read more at the link.
I seem to remember Hillary supporters citing something similar from the Obama campaign back in 2008. Ah yes, found a link.
UPDATE 12:20 AM:
Although I’m seeing only 4% of the votes in, the results so far are pretty much as predicted. Trump around 40%, Cruz and Rubio are each in the 20s (Rubio ahead with 25 at the moment, but my guess is that all the scores will shift somewhat and Cruz/Rubio may tighten). Carson and Kasich are around 7 and 4 respectively; they merely confuse things and should drop out.
It’s becoming more and more clear—and it was already clear—that if Cruz and Rubio stay so evenly matched it will benefit Trump. For a while I thought that a three-way race would allow one of them to dominate, and then the real picture would become more clear. But no. And in the meantime, they are working hard to destroy each other rather than Trump. This is very hard to see, since I think either of them would be a thousand times better than Trump.
Now, it’s certainly possible that if it were a two-way race, Trump would continue to win. At least then the GOP voters’ preference for Trump as candidate would be clear. I’ve thought for quite a while (long before the Trump phenomenon) that there should be no open primaries, no winner-take-all states, and a runoff if no candidate gets 50% of the total popular vote. That could extend the primary season, but it would be worth it. People are always grumbling that the conservative vote was split, and that’s why a RINO got nominated. Well, that’s not quite the situation this year, since Trump is no conventional RINO (although I believe he actually is a Republican In Name Only). But the principal is the same.
Pretty soon, either Cruz or Rubio must drop out unless one can start dominating in the primaries. But I wonder if either would give up that easily, or if they’d ride that horse to the end—and to a Trump nomination (and IMHO a probable Hillary victory).
This sort of thing is one of many, many reasons not to support Trump, if you care at all about liberty vs. tyranny:
[Yesterday Trump threatened] the Ricketts family, the owners of the Chicago Cubs, over their support for Our Principles PAC, a super PAC run by former Mitt Romney advisor Katie Packer with the goal of beating Trump. Trump tweeted:
“I hear the Rickets family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $’s against me. They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!”
…The Republican frontrunner is now threatening private parties for contributing to a campaign against him. This follows on him threatening Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) with a lawsuit for running an ad using old footage of him talking about abortion. And that follows on him threatening to sue a reporter who wrote about the failure of the Taj Mahal Casino. All of this has happened within the last four weeks.
We already have a president of the United States who uses the FBI and the Department of Justice to target his political opponents, who has utilized the IRS to harass and punish private parties ranging from nonprofits to Mitt Romney donors, who threatens to put his “boot on the throat” of private corporations who don’t do what he wants.
Do we really want to elect a Republican Obama?
Some people do indeed want to do just that—they long for it and would celebrate it—right up until the moment the crocodile eats them. The human desire for tyranny knows no bounds, left or right, and people delude themselves when they say it won’t or can’t happen, or that it will be okay if it’s used in the interests of their own pet causes.
And by the way, this isn’t some anomaly on Trump’s part; it’s a deep and abiding character trait and favorite weapon. This is the pattern of his entire adult life: threaten, threaten, threaten; insult, insult, insult; sue, sue, sue. Anything he can to hurt his enemies. He makes Nixon and Obama look like pikers.
The article continues:
The phenomenon of the right joining the left in its desire for a Great Man to “win for them” represents a frightening moment for those who cherish freedom from government. Freedom from government requires a government free of Great Men with great power.
The Founders knew that, down to the marrow of the bones. Some conservatives know it. Others who call themselves conservatives have forgotten it.
[ADDENDUM: Hat tip commenter “Wooly Bully.”
Time to wonder which “old days” Trump was talking about here:
The real-estate tycoon said [at a rally yesterday] he’d like to punch a protester in the face and fondly recalled the “old days” when “guys like that” who disrupted a political rally would “be carried out on a stretcher.”…
…the demonstrator who drew Trump’s ire emerged toward the end of the rally as the Republican talked about unemployment and slow GDP growth.
“He’s smiling. See, he’s having a good time,” Trump said before going on the offensive. “Oh, I love the old days, you know? You know what I hate? There’s a guy, totally disruptive, throwing punches, we’re not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days, you know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out in a stretcher, folks. Oh, it’s true.”
And while Trump explained that “the guards are very gentle with him,” his own reaction would’ve been different. “I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you,” Trump said to cheers. It’s unclear, however, if the protester was actually throwing punches, though he was smiling as guards escorted him out.]
[ADDENDUM II: Did you know that Trump is being sued for fraud in connection with Trump University? Why isn’t this a top headline?
Oh, and does this sound familiar?:
On Dec. 10, 2015, during a day he was making international headlines over his pledge to ban Muslim immigrants from the United States, Trump managed to escape any press attention and give a closed-door pretrial deposition in the case, according to court filings reviewed by Yahoo News. Exactly what he said in the deposition remains under seal, but lawyers for Tarla Makaeff, a California yoga instructor who is the lead plaintiff in the case, cited portions of his testimony (blacked out in her pleadings) to support their contention that Trump has threatened to ruin her financially for bringing the lawsuit and that she needs protection from his “retaliation.”
Now, what could possibly go wrong?]
This was a creatively diabolical thing to do:
Amazingly, the victim still seems to be alive, all these years later, although her health has declined according to parole hearing testimony.
Heart of darkness.
There is no question that the Janice Trahan’s behavior was far from exemplary. But I think you’ll agree it was small potatoes compared to what happened to her.
That Forensic Files program aired in 2003.
This article at the conservative website ricochet suggests a novel approach to the RNC’s Trump problem: disown him. Exactly how that could be done is unclear, but the reasoning is that the party can’t support a candidate who holds so many views that are diametrically opposed to what the party stands for. The article ends this way:
According to most polls, Trump will lose to a Democratic nominee. More and more party faithful are announcing that they cannot in good conscience pull the lever for an anti-conservative like The Donald. After dithering for months, waiting in vain for Trump to fail on his own, the RNC has a decision to make.
The only way the party has a future is for them to cut Trump loose so he can fall on his own. Otherwise, the entire organization will go down with him.
Of course, Trump could easily run third party if that were to happen. I have long thought that the Trump phenomenon has probably already destroyed both the GOP and the conservative movement, although conservatives who support Trump don’t see it that way. But my sentiments run along the lines of this commenter on the thread:
Taking him out now will destroy the GOP. His disciples will burn the party down and he will go 3rd party, taking them with him.
Having him as the nominee will destroy the GOP. Lots of principled conservatives will stay home or vote 3rd party. I know I will. He’s toxic to independents and Democrats, and that’s before the media onslaught that will come as soon as he’s picked.
There are lots of moderate Republicans and swing voters who are going to take one look at this train wreck and bolt and say “No way.” His crazy anger, which is what his fans love about him, turns off so many people. The media will amplify it.
The thing is, even if, by some miracle, Trump loses fair-and-square his supporters will burn down the Party and he will go third party.
All scenarios lead to President HRC. Unbelievable. It’s almost like it was engineered this way.
Actually, though, not all scenarios. In polls of two-man races between Trump and Cruz or between Trump and Rubio, Trump does not win. Somehow, this has to become a two-man race. I don’t know how it can be done, but one way is that it could happen naturally, as one candidate rises and the other falls; so far they’ve been roughly equal and split the non-Trump vote. I’ve been a Cruz supporter, but Rubio is okay with me and were I voting in a primary right now I would vote for whichever one of them I thought was doing best. Momentum builds momentum, and time is of the essence.
Another day, another primary. This primary season has felt like a runaway train to me, hurtling down the tracks with no brakes on.
Another thing that’s become clear this year is that the members of the GOP “establishment” are not all-powerful puppet masters pulling all the strings. The Trump phenomenon proves to me that they can’t even really control their own primary process, because I have little doubt they did favor Jeb Bush and don’t like Trump (although I think they hate Cruz even more). They couldn’t make the Jeb! phenomenon happen because voters actually have minds of their own, and because Jeb was a bad candidate for this time and place.
That doesn’t mean that the establishment doesn’t have its own interests and candidates it supports and pushes. But I ask you, why shouldn’t they? Why should they be immune from promoting what they see as their own interests, which they may even see as being in everybody’s interests? What’s more, even though I consider myself a conservative, over the years I have grown tired of the constant carping of much of the conservative wing of the party that they are insufficiently listened to. The reason is that conservatives actually don’t make up the majority of the GOP.
So maybe the main reason Cruz isn’t doing all that well is that—in addition to the Trump phenomenon, which is definitely a factor—is that he’s very conservative and also non-charismatic. And I say this as a person who supports Cruz (in fact, he’s been my frontrunner for some time) and who thinks he would make a good president.
Sometimes I think Reagan spoiled conservatives. A myth was engendered that said the country really wanted a conservative. First of all, the country in 1980 was a very different country than it is today, and I’m not sure Reagan could have been elected in say, 2008 (I think he could now, but only because the Democrats’ field is so weak). But second of all, Reagan didn’t win in 1980 because the voters suddenly decided they had become conservatives, he won because there were enough voters like that and because of his winning (literally) personality.
Oh, and if conservatives run off and form a third party, that’s the best way to assure that the left wins.
And don’t forget that it’s the culture—particularly education and its leftward pull, in my opinion—that has created this set of affairs in the first place. Many things have paved the way for this possible (probable??) Trump vs. Hillary battle, involving the worst two presidential choices in a single year in American history, but some are cultural and include the glorification of celebrity and of symbol and chatter over substance. Just as Obama was not about Obama but about the American people, so Hillary and Trump are not about Hillary and Trump, they are about what the American people are willing to accept and even admire.
Weimar comparisons abound. You may need a good stiff drink when you’re done.
When I think about Weimar compared to today, one of the biggest parallels I can find is the degradation of popular culture and also of what used to know as high art. If Andrew Breitbart was correct when he said that politics is downstream from culture—and I think it was a brilliant observation—then what’s going on today politically is to be expected, if you consider our long Gramscian march towards the decline of our own culture.
About two years ago I wrote a post making some of this cultural Weimar comparision, and I’m going to reproduce a portion of it here.
This is what the well-dressed starlet/model/whatever is wearing lately:
Dresses that leave so little to the imagination seem to me to have almost nothing going for them except their power to shock (then again, perhaps the men in the crowd would disagree). And we’ve grown so accustomed to the display of more and more skin that such things have lost some of that power, so it’s necessary to escalate to get the requisite effect.
As in long ago Rome:
In lifestyle Roman actors did not enjoy a good reputation and their morals challenged even the decadence of Roman society. Their performances could be lewd, highly sexual and offensive, even going as far as to appearing naked on stage and engaging in sexual acts. They could also be highly critical of the political status quo and so ran the gauntlet of emperor and senator…Far from being great dramas most Roman plays were whimsical, more mimes and pantomimes; the classics we know and respect were in the minority…in the Imperial period a number of women emerged as famous actresses, earning reputations as infamous as their male counterparts…Over the years a number of actors became quite influential, counting among their friends men of high standing within Roman society.
And musn’t forget the ill-fated Weimar Republic:
Apart from the new tolerance for behaviour that was technically still illegal, and viewed by a large part of society as immoral, there were other developments in Berlin culture that shocked many visitors to the city. Thrill-seekers came to the city in search of adventure, and booksellers sold many editions of guide books to Berlin’s erotic night entertainment venues. There were an estimated 500 such establishments.
If you’re not familiar with Anita Berber (and I certainly wasn’t until I did the research for this post), her performances and life may retain their ability to shock, even now.
The Weimar Republic and decadence—makes me think of the Sally Bowles character in the musical “Cabaret,” which itself was a somewhat-cleaned-up version of the real Weimar goings-on. Sally was based on a British actress and writer by the name of Jean Ross, who lived with writer and playwright Christopher Isherwood in Berlin in the 30s (just as Bowles did with the highly fictionalized Isherwood character in “Cabaret”).
Unlike the apolitical Sally, Ross was a lifelong Communist, and possibly even an undercover agent for the Comintern. She latter married the British Communist journalist Claud Cockburn, one of whose three journalist children from his third marriage was Counterpunch’s leftist editor Alexander Cockburn.
That’s the end of the excerpt.
I’ll close—as I have several times before—with this poem by W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming.” Written in 1919 in the disillusion and desolation following World War I (the year the Weimar Republic began in Germany, and a time I believe to have been the beginning of the modern era in which we are still living), it goes like this:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I’ve noticed that all of a sudden post-SC primary there are a ton of “Trump is inevitable” posts and articles. There are also a few “no, he’s not!” pieces, too, but the former predominate.
The whole thing is odd, but I suppose that’s what sells. Frighten people or please them, depending on their attitude towards Trump, but make it sound like you know what you’re talking about and can see into the future in a campaign season notable for the fact that “unprecedented” actually seems applicable here.
So I am not going to say what’s going to happen. I simply will say that Trump keeps getting a third of the vote, and that for a while there have been two other leading candidates (Cruz and Rubio) who split the non-Trump vote of 2/3 evenly enough between them that even if Kasich and Carson drop out, or fade to even lower numbers than their currect 7% (as sometimes happens when candidates stay in the race despite waning-to-nonexistent prospects), the results may end up with no candidate over 50% in any primary, and even with a brokered convention.
We just don’t know, It’s not just the unusual nature of the Trump candidacy, which has so many people in what passes as his own party—the GOP—saying they can’t stand him and will never vote for him. It’s the strange evenness of the rival candidates Cruz and Rubio (who are already somewhat unusual as two prominent Hispanic GOP senators) that makes it difficult for either to get traction against Trump, although each of them beats him in two-way polls.
“Strange” doesn’t even begin to cut it. And it’s frustrating for those of us who most definitely do not trust or agree with much of what Trump says, and who also believe (I am basing this on polls of all kinds) that he is the weakest GOP candidate in the general and that his nomination would probably lead to the election of Hillary Clinton.
It has also been very frustrating to me to watch Cruz and Rubio tear each other apart. Their real enemy is Trump, and if they don’t see it they ought to. In the thread about the SC primary there was a long long discussion in the comments section that is well worth reading, and soon I may write a post about some of the issues discussed there. For those of you who didn’t follow the discussion I’m referring to, it begins around here with a comment by “Bob_CA” and continues for many many comments back and forth between Bob and me. Please read all his comments and all of mine; other people chime in, too.
The main issue there was how to decide what’s true and what’s false about a politician. Hard task. During a political campaign the mud flies fast and furious. Then blogs and periodicals that are for this candidate and against that one (not to mention such larger disagreements as liberal or conservative) will amplify the stories that reflect badly on the enemy, and even sometimes lie and certainly distort, while doing the opposite for their favored one.
It’s not just one candidate who does this, it’s the whole wretched business of politics. To ask candidates to stop doing this is like asking the sun not to shine (or perhaps, to ask night not to fall).
The task of the reader and the voter is to sort through it as best he/she can, and I don’t make light of that task, because it takes time and is seemingly endless. It a version of the same undertaking, by the way, that led me to my political change so many years ago. I followed the story trying to get to the truth, knowing that truth is knowable but that my goal is to get as near to it as I can.
That process led me to my political transformation, which was absolutely not what I thought would happen when I started on that journey merely out of curiosity, sparked by the terrible events of 9/11. But that’s where that pursuit led me—to this blog, dear readers. I’m still trying to get as close as I can to the truth, knowing I can never really reach it in the absolute sense.