Some Further Instruction for Donald Trump Why hasn’t he yet responded to the Ben Rhodes Iran Deal scandal? Every presidential campaign has milestones that tell candidates they have to turn their skills to different tasks. Donald Trump has reached one of them but he isn’t making the course corrections he needs. Trump had political skills […]
Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew
While millions of Republican primary voters have chosen Donald Trump as the party’s nominee, Bill Kristol and a small but well-heeled group of Washington insiders are preparing a third party effort to block Trump’s path to the White House.
Their plan is to run a candidate who could win three states and enough votes in the electoral college to deny both parties the needed majority. This would throw the election into the House of Representatives, which would then elect a candidate the Kristol group found acceptable. The fact that this would nullify the largest vote ever registered for a Republican primary candidate, the fact that it would jeopardize the Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, and more than likely make Hillary Clinton president, apparently doesn’t faze Kristol and company at all. This is to give elitism a bad name.
One would think that the Trump opponents would have substantial reasons for pursuing such a destructive course. But examination of their expressed reasons shows that one would be wrong. Their chief justification for opposing Trump is that he is not a “constitutional conservative” and in fact is “without principles” and therefore dangerous. The evidence offered is that he has supported Democrats in the past and changed his positions on important issues.
Yet in seeking a candidate to carry their standard, the Kristol group has approached billionaire investor Mark Cuban, a figure uncannily similar to Trump. During the presidential election year 2012, the Hollywood Reporter noted that, “in February, billionaire sports and media mogul Mark Cuban was seen hugging Barack Obama at a $30,000-a-plate fundraiser for the president’s re-election bid.” Cuban was also a visible campaigner for Obama four years earlier. A fan of Obamacare, Cuban wrote a column for Huffington Post just before the 2012 election titled, “I would vote for Gov. Romney if he were a Democrat.”
Now it is true that Mark Cuban eventually had second thoughts about Obama, and perhaps even about Democrats. But what these facts show is that Kristol and his allies are willing to elect anyone but Trump, even if they have even fewer principles than the man they hate.
A second charge against Trump is that his character is so bad (worse than Hillary’s or Bill’s?) that no right-thinking Republican could regard him as White House worthy. “I just don’t think he has the character to be president of the United States,” Kristol declared in a recent interview:
It’s beyond any particular issue I disagree with him on, or who he picks as VP or something. The man in the last five days has embraced Mike Tyson, the endorsement of a convicted rapist in Indiana… He likes toughness, Donald Trump, that’s great, he likes rapists.
This would be fairly damning if the facts were as black and white as Kristol presents them. But as anyone familiar with the sports world would know, Mike Tyson had a dramatic change of heart following his release from prison — rejected the life he had led, repented his past, and committed himself to a course of humility and service to others.
Here is an online news summary of the transformation: “Former boxing champ Mike Tyson has dedicated the rest of his life to caring for others – because he considers himself a ‘pig’ who has ‘wasted’ so many years of his life.”
One of the main areas of contention between Donald Trump and Paul Ryan is the question of Muslim immigration. In early December, when Trump first made his proposal (now a “suggestion”) to stop all such immigration until we “understood what was going on,” one of the first to react in high dudgeon was Ryan, who declared: “This is not conservatism.”
He was applauded for his four-word pronouncement by those “conservatives” at the Washington Post, who called his response “near-perfect.” Actually, to me it seemed morally narcissistic and had little to with conservatism, pro or con. Ryan wanted to disassociate himself as quickly as possible from the ugly and seemingly racist Trump.
But let’s look more closely at what the speaker said during that response:
When we voted to pause the refugee program a few weeks ago, I made very clear at the time: there would not be a religious test. There would be a security test. And that is because freedom of religion is a fundamental Constitutional principle. It’s a founding principle of this country.
Aside from the obvious — if people are fighting and killing you in the name of a religion, how do you ignore the “religious test” — what about that “security test”? Is it really happening or are people slipping into the country by various means, including an open border, with no test whatsoever? What about reports of an ISIS camp eight miles from El Paso?
And, perhaps more importantly, did that “pause” Ryan voted for actually take place in any meaningful way? According to the New York Post a “surge operation” bringing Syrian refugees to America was already in operation this past April. By “surge operation,” Gina Kassem — regional refugee coordinator in Amman — told reporters, it was meant the resettlement process that normally took 18 to 24 months would be sped up to 3 months. (Some pause!) And the figure of 10,000 refugees that has often been proffered by the administration was a minimum, not a maximum.
What is the maximum and how will they be vetted? And just how do you “vet” during a “surge”? Is that what Ryan really meant by a “security test”? I doubt it, but Trump should ask him at their next reconciliation meeting. As they say, Paul’s got some “xplainin” to do.
Now this isn’t a simple question. The Syrian people have suffered mightily at the hands of various psychotic despots, secular and religious. Trump has called for supporting more extensive refugee camps in the region, an idea that makes more sense than bringing them here. (He has also called for the Gulf states to pay for them — good luck with that.) CONTINUE AT SITE
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2016/05/media-massage/
Obama’s ratings remain astonishingly healthy, given eight years of foreign-policy debacles, a wan economic ‘recovery’ and a nation more deeply divided than when he took office. His secret, as a White House spinner explains, is having grasped that voters know little and reporters even less
How do you account for this: Obama report card: Approval up, economy down? In fact, Obama’s approval rating remains well up into his eighth year in office despite of the wreckage not just to the economy, but to the American health care system, the refugee crisis across the Middle East and throughout Europe, the open borders on the American south (and increasingly its north), continuous reductions in living standards, worsening racial relations, and an all-round deterioration in every aspect of American life.
You account for it by understanding that the average American knows less about America than you do and lives in a media bubble almost as tight as the bubble that once surrounded the Soviet Union.
Which is why this remains the single most important story of the Obama years because it explains everything else that would otherwise be inexplicable:
In the New York Times Sunday Magazine, David Samuels details how Ben Rhodes, a script writer, author of the Beloit Journal fiction piece titled “The Goldfish Smiles, You Smile Back,” and brother of CBS president David Rhodes, a man with zero foreign policy experience, shaped and promoted the president’s foreign policy narratives.
Samuels observes: “His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.” (In this respect, of course, he matches the president’s foreign policy background: None.)
The article details how these two shaped and spun make-believe about the facts and their policies and with the aid of a supine press and a number of think tanks and social media outlets helped propagate the false narratives these two wove out of their fantasies.
Paul Ryan and Donald Trump are the two leaders in the Republican Party’s Cold War. Which one is the U.S. and the other the Soviet Union is beside the point. What matters is that Republican Party factions—once again—are on the nuclear brink. On Thursday the two men will hold a summit meeting at a neutral site, with the Republican National Committee headquarters serving as Reykjavik.
Mr. Ryan has said he isn’t ready to endorse Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump replied that if the Speaker can’t support him, so what?
Suffice to say that before now, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that a party platform of mutually assured destruction was a strategy for winning the presidency.
Anyone who went through the U.S. education system before it fell apart is familiar with the saying: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The man who said that was talking about the human compulsion to repeat national nightmares.
Stepping back from a nightmarish brink is precisely what House Republicans did mere months ago, when they elected Mr. Ryan as House Speaker. Some seem to have forgotten what a corrosive, destructive and potentially self-annihilating mess that was for the Republicans. And here they go again.
Last September, under siege from the most conservative members of the Republican House Conference, John Boehner announced his intention to resign as Speaker.
His presumptive successor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, abruptly ended his candidacy to succeed Mr. Boehner, and House Republicans descended into chaos.
The House’s 40 or so conservatives, the Freedom Caucus, seemed unappeasable. Insults and threats of retribution were rife. The White House and indeed pretty much everyone mocked the Republicans as ungovernable and incapable of governing. CONTINUE AT SITE
#NeverTrump movement laments that a President Trump, with his authoritarian instincts, lack of interest in policy details, and populist demagoguery would be disastrous for the country. But there’s a silver lining, and an aspect that has largely been ignored by all-too-confident Democrats: A Trump victory in November would destroy the legacies of Hillary Clinton and President Obama.
Right now, Clinton is still the favorite to win the presidency. But the first general-election surveys are showing a sudden drop in Clinton’s once-huge polling lead. A Harvard poll finds Clinton ahead only 46 percent to 40 percent nationwide and 45 to 41 in swing states; Quinnipiac finds Clinton leading by one point in Florida, leading by one point in Pennsylvania, and trailing by two points in Ohio.
Trump has defeated one consistent conservative lawmaker after another in the GOP primary, and Democrats would be foolish to underestimate him. If it wasn’t obvious already, they have just as much to lose as Republicans in November.
Start with Clinton. On paper, she should be able to mop the floor with Trump. She’s experienced; he’s not. She knows and understands policy details; he makes it up as he goes along and contradicts himself frequently. She should be able to appeal to the African-Americans, Latinos, and Millennials, who propelled Obama to office; Trump’s numbers are toxic among those demographics. She starts with an Electoral College map heavily favorable to Democrats; he’s got to figure out how to win a bunch of states that Obama won twice, despite being literally the least popular, least liked, least trusted major-party presidential nominee in the history of polling.
And yet there remains the possibility that Clinton could collapse. A Trump victory in November would affirm every criticism lobbed her way since she appeared on the national scene in 1992: too dishonest, too arrogant, too cold, too calculating, too out of touch, too vindictive for the American people. Democrats would suspect, with justification, that they dodged a bullet in 2008: If Clinton can’t beat Trump, how would she have fared against John McCain and Sarah Palin, even amid the economic meltdown?
Writer Bruce Kesler is a veteran who served our country with honor in the Vietnam War…..rsk
I am from the school of loyalty belonging to God, family, country, in that order. When it comes to voting, my loyalty does not belong to any individual or political party. My vote belongs to me. And, I have an obligation to behave responsibly and sensibly with my vote.
In that vein, whether I am a lifelong Republican or conservative is important, but only in so far as my deeply held beliefs are furthered or protected. Many Republicans or conservatives are disaffected or in pique by the apparent triumph of Donald Trump. However, for me, Trump does not get my vote because I am a Republican or conservative but because the alternatives are far worse in a continuation of the Democrats’ ongoing literal destruction of our ethics, our economy, and our national security, while in actuality doing relatively less to upraise the unfortunate than to tie them into being lackeys of the central government instead of their own initiative, compounded by our citizen poor being undercut by uncontrolled inflows of foreign competitors for jobs and public funds. To not vote is to vote for the continuation of the past 8-years of the outright assault on the very fiber of the United States.
I cannot accept with any respect any Republicans or conservatives who will now support Hillary Clinton. They do not deserve it. They exhibit themselves as rent-seekers, to profit from her probable election to the presidency due to the lock that Democrats have on a near majority of the electoral college. Or, they exhibit their overriding loyalty to their liberal social circle in New York or Washington. They do not exhibit the judgment to choose the lesser of evils, and they increase the probability of loss of Republican control of the Senate and House, which only increases the damages from a leftist administration.
The Republican caterwauling over Donald Trump reminds me of the lyric from “That’s Entertainment”: “There’s no ordeal/like the end of Camille.” Jeb Bush, Lyndsey Graham, and Mitt Romney have announced that they will snub the GOP convention. GOP big donors are closing their wallets. Some pundits and politicians are contemplating a third-party candidate to prove the purity of their conservative principles, even if it means Hillary Clinton will end up appointing 2-3 Supreme Court Justices. The litany of Trump’s sins is recited over and over, with the implication that such a vulgar blowhard is an unprecedented blot on American history.
Meanwhile, the country’s looming fiscal disaster, the most important issue the new president will face, continues to be sidelined.
But first I can’t resist one last reminder to the angry Republicans about how they played a role in creating Donald Trump. Why weren’t the party pundits and politicians as aggressive and vociferous when Barack Obama burst on the scene? I wish the McCain campaign had as loudly hounded Obama over the gaps in his biography, the fictions in his “memoirs,” his obvious lack of experience and achievements, his pastor Jeremiah “Goddam America” Wright, his terrorist buddy Bill “free as a bird” Ayres, and his jail-bird real-estate facilitator Tony Rezko. I wish the Republicans had exposed, emphasized, and publicized, as relentlessly as they did Donald’s coarse bluster and policy incoherence, Obama’s long record of leftist ideology. Instead they were buffaloed by Obama’s “unifier” rhetoric during the campaign. Sure, all those troubling connections were mentioned and tut-tutted, but then were quickly buried in policy sound-bites coupled with obligatory encomia to Obama’s brilliant oratory, his “gifted” writing, his lovely family, exotic upbringing, and the perfect crease in his trousers.
Why? We all know why. Because Obama is “black.” Fearful of being branded racist, the Republicans pulled their punches. They ignored the Jeremiah Wright scandal and Obama’s blatant lies about his relationship to the racist pastor, pretending they were too high-minded for such bare-knuckle politics. They weakened themselves by accepting the Democrats’ old double standard that allowed them to demonize Republicans as racist for raising concerns that would have buried a Republican. The McCain campaign should have known that the “post-racial” rhetoric was a lie, and that no matter how faithfully they played by the Dems’ rules, they would get bludgeoned by accusations of racism anyway. And so it went in 2012 too, when Romney allowed the Dems to portray him as a heartless capitalist pirate, even as Obama lived it up in 1% splendor, far from the mayhem and disorder millions of blacks have to endure every day. This caving in to political correctness helped make Trump’s attack on it so successful.
An ocean of conventional wisdom is telling us that an independent conservative candidate, should one emerge, will go nowhere fast. But a short while ago, an ocean of conventional wisdom was telling us that Donald Trump at the top of the Republican ticket violated the basic laws of the universe. This is plainly a moment in American politics in which the extraordinary can happen.
Here are five reasons why the #NeverTrump movement might provide the only serious competition to the Democrats this November — and could even siphon off a few who are themselves looking for an alternative:
The greatest asset of the #NeverTrump movement is Trump himself. It has become obvious by now to almost all that the GOP presumptive nominee cannot change his spots. Trump promised that after knocking out John Kasich and Ted Cruz, he would tone down his act. “I will be so presidential,” he pledged, “you will be so bored.” But his antics continue — the insults, the tweets, the recycling of tabloid trash that might endear him to his die-hard supporters but mystify or repel almost everyone else. Either Trump does not know what the concept of “presidential” means or, more likely, he is inextricably stuck inside the same cartoonish character he has been all his life.
During the primaries, Trump’s Republican adversaries mostly held fire, trembling in fear lest they offend Trump voters. Typical was Cruz, who only unloaded on his tormentor on the day he pulled out of the race. Hillary Clinton (assuming she will be the Democratic nominee) will not be so constrained, and neither will her surrogates. Indeed, the Democrats are already having a field day auditioning a cornucopia of ridiculous and offensive pronouncements generated by Trump over decades. To be sure, these negative attacks will do nothing to dampen the fervor of Trump’s fans. But they will inevitably have a discernible effect on everyone else.
Then there’s the news media. They were relatively gentle to Trump in the primaries when there were 17 GOP targets to scrutinize. Now there is only one Republican standing, and journalists everywhere are entering the operating room suiting up for a vivisection. In 2012, mild, moderate, respectable, sane Mitt Romney got a taste of what it means to be under the journalistic knife in a general election. The liberal press is now going to cut out Trump’s liver, fry it up and eat it out of a taco bowl.
Which brings us to Trump’s taxes. He says he cannot release any of his returns from the past decade because they are all under audit. According to tax professionals, that is almost certainly either a fib, a falsehood, or a lie, and in any case is hardly a reason why they cannot be made public. Whatever Trump is trying to conceal, the news drumbeat to release the returns will now grow louder and more insistent. Eventually, it will reach a volume that will cause political pain.
A parallel deficit of substance, yet much more important, goes for policy. The proposals Trump has put forward appear to be based almost entirely upon imaginary thinking. His plan to reduce the national debt to zero in eight years while leaving entitlement spending untouched is about as realistic as manufacturing gold out of seawater. His promise to create a deportation force to ship out America’s 11 million undocumented aliens is no more feasible. Trump got away with this and more in the primaries. In the general election, he will be held by journalists and by his opponents to a standard that he shows no signs of being able to meet.
“The Reagan horse left the 2016 conservative barn many months ago, and it is coming to be time to pause and assess whether we are really left with only two bad choices — or with a bad Trump and a far, far worse Clinton. If it is the latter, then it is an easy choice in November.”
I watched Donald Trump serially blast apart all my preferred candidates — Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz — as if for sport they were sent up in succession as clay pigeons. And now the November Rubicon — vote for Donald Trump, or stay home and de facto vote for Hillary Clinton — is uncomfortably close. Most of the arguments pro and con have been aired ad nauseam.
The choice is difficult for principled conservatives, because no sooner should they decide to vote for Trump than Trump will surely say something outrageous, cruel, or crude that would ostensibly now have their imprimatur on it. And note, this matters to conservatives much more than it does to liberals. Few Obama supporters at Harvard or the Ford Foundation or the New York Times worried much in 2008 that their candidate had dismissed his own generous grandmother as a “typical white person” or that he tried to get away with airbrushing out the obscene Reverend Wright and mythologized his close friendships with reprobates like Bill Ayers and Father Michael Pfleger.
Aside from his dubious political loyalties, Trump persists in being mean-spirited. He seems uninformed on many of the issues, especially those in foreign policy; he changes positions, contradicts himself within a single speech, and uses little more than three adjectives (tremendous, great, and huge). But the problem with many of these complaints is that they apply equally to both the current president and the other would-be next president. When Hillary Clinton, playing to the green vote, bragged that she would put miners out of work, and then, when confronted with an out-of-work miner, backtracked and lied about her earlier boast, we had a refined version of Trump’s storytelling. The Clinton Foundation’s skullduggery and Hillary’s e-mail shenanigans seem to trump the Trump University con — and involve greater harm to the nation. Her combination of greedy Wall Street, for-profit schmoozing and paint-by-the-numbers progressivism is repulsive.
Trump’s cluelessness about the nuclear triad is a lowbrow version of Barack Obama’s ignorance, whether seeking to Hispanicize the Falklands into the Maldives (wrong exotic-sounding, politically correct foreign archipelago, Mr. President), or mispronouncing “corpsman,” or riffing about those Austrian-speaking Austrians; or perhaps of Hillary Clinton’s flat-out lie about the causes of Benghazi, hours after she had learned the truth. I don’t think reset, Libya, Benghazi, red lines to Assad, step-over lines to Putin, and deadlines to Iran attest to Clinton’s foreign-policy savvy. It is easy to be appalled by crude ignorance, but in some ways it is more appalling to hear ignorance layered and veneered with liberal pieties and snobbery. The choice in 2016 is not just between Trump, the supposed foreign-policy dunce, and an untruthful former secretary of state, but is also a matter of how you prefer your obtuseness — raw or cooked? Who has done the greater damage to the nation: would-be novelist and Obama insider Ben Rhodes, who boasted about out-conning the “Blob” D.C. establishment, or bare-knuckles Trumpster Corey Lewandowski?
