#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Primaries today in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Pennsylvania is the big one. If Trump does well there, it’s all but in the bag.
I wouldn’t be shocked if either Cruz or Kasich finally give up after today, if Trump does well enough.
This is an open thread to discuss the primaries and report results as they come in.
Ted Cruz demonstrates his anti-establishment bona fides by siding with John Kasich against Donald Trump:
Senator Ted Cruz and Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio have agreed to coordinate in future primary contests in a last-ditch effort to deny Donald J. Trump the Republican presidential nomination, with each candidate standing aside in certain states amid growing concerns that Mr. Trump cannot otherwise be stopped.
In a statement late Sunday night, Mr. Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, said that the campaign would “focus its time and resources in Indiana and in turn clear the path for Governor Kasich to compete in Oregon and New Mexico.”
Minutes after Mr. Roe’s statement, the Kasich campaign put out a similar message. The Ohio governor’s chief strategist, John Weaver, said that his campaign would shift its resources to states in the West and “give the Cruz campaign a clear path in Indiana.”
Both campaigns said they expected allies and third-party groups to follow their lead, and a representative from the “super PAC” supporting Mr. Kasich confirmed late Sunday that it would not advertise in Indiana.
I very much doubt this is going to help them stop Trump. They’re operating in 2D while Trump is moving around in 3D. But it demonstrates my point about how Trump is on track to reach 1,237; his big win in New York has boosted him in Pennsylvania and California, the two states in which he needs to do well in order to go over the top.
While it’s true that Cruz hasn’t played nicely with the GOP establishment, it’s always been clear that he wants to be a part of it. Now he’s not bothering to pretend otherwise. He’s a smart guy, and he would have been a pretty good candidate several election cycles ago. But he’s still playing the game, and the time for playing the game is over.
Conservatives United Cruz Kasich. C.U.C.K.
Perfect.
A take on Trump that is entirely more interesting than my own on the man:
Trump is probably the least qualified candidate who ran for the Republican nomination this year. If you didn’t know that, you’d have to be a hermit to avoid finding it out. He also has far more delegates than any other candidate. I would think that would send a clear message to the Republican elite, particularly the country club establishment; but like the Bourbon kings of France restored after the Revolution, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Wouldn’t I want a more qualified, somewhat more experienced candidate? Well, of course. But the establishment wasn’t about to let anyone not within its ranks to get anywhere close to the nomination. In 1956 the goal was “anyone but Reagan” among the Republican elite. Now it’s anybody but Trump. Before Trump they made it clear to all: it’s going to be one of us, like it or lump it. We can deal with upstarts.
But they didn’t intimidate Trump, and now he’s laid all of their compliant candidates low, and they’re turning to an old enemy, Cruz, in despair. The notion is that he’ll “grow” in office; it’s for sure that Trump won’t grow under their definition of grow.
But in fact he’s likely to. He has some good advisors and he has a definite point of view that may be hard to discern because it’s masked by his blatant – loudmouthed and irritating, if you like – tactics. But he has never wavered on his desire to fill the Supreme Court with Justices as near in scholarship and view to Scalia as possible; that alone would be enough to get me to the polls for Trump if he’s nominated.
He has consistently said we need to turn control of the schools to the local districts and stop dictating to them from Washington. This has been taken as meaning that he doesn’t know what to do on a nation al scale. Well, I have news: neither does anyone else, and the attempt, even with the best of will, will always fail. The schools worked better, over all, when they were paid for by local school district taxes and run by local school boards elected by the people who paid those taxes. If you don’t believe that, get a copy of the California Sixth Grade Reader from a hundred years ago and compare it to your child’s present day ninth grade reader. Then weep.
No, he’s not a “movement conservative”, but I’m not sure I still am, and I was a protégé of Russell Kirk and Stefan Possony, and a friend of Bill Buckley and Willmore Kendall. I’ve been in that “movement” a long time. Long enough to see National Review use the egregious Frum to read most of us out of the movement.
Trump is not a movement conservative, but his inclination is to set goals and get people working on them, not to jail and fine them for not doing so. He understands that being served by mindless minions is not the path to glory or wealth. Compared to Hillary or Sanders or anyone in Obama’s train, I’ll take Trump any day. I would prefer someone with government experience – some, not one whose only experience is in government – but we seem to be fresh out of those. I suppose I’d rather have establishment country club Republicans than anyone likely to be nominated by the Democratic establishment even if a plague took all the present candidates; we tried that with Bush I, who cleared the White House of Reagan people the day after inauguration, and proceeded to saddle us with the Americans With Disabilities act and a new Federal bureaucracy; but that’s another story.
Trump is a pragmatic populist. I can live with that.
Considering the manifold failures of what we’ve been told are principled ideology, pragmatic populism is sounding pretty good right now. Whatever gets the borders closed and starts the respections. Say what you will about Dr. Pournelle, but he’s not only smart, he has accumulated a fair bit of wisdom along the way.
At the Heat Street editor’s request, I wrote an article explaining why I support Donald Trump for the Republican nomination and the U.S. presidency:
I am often asked why I, a Christian libertarian and intellectual, would publicly support Donald Trump, a man of no fixed ideology, no apparent religious beliefs, multiple marriages, visible ties to the Clintons, and whose taste and sophistication tends to resemble that of a nouveau riche rhinoceros. It is a reasonable question. After all, how can anyone support a candidate whose public statements are, to put it mildly, inconsistent—when they are completely self-contradictory.
The answer is as simple as it is conclusive and convincing. Donald Trump is the only candidate in either major party whose personal interests are aligned with those of the American public rather than with the interests of the anti-nationalist elite who see America as nothing more than lines on a map and Americans as nothing more than 300 million economic units in the global economy.
The reason I trust Donald Trump, despite all his rhetorical meanderings, is that he is a traitor to his class. Unlike Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz, both ordinary people who sold their souls in order to be granted a seat at the table of the Great Game, Donald Trump was born a member of the elite and he has always been welcome in the inner circles of both political parties. When I met him in 1988, it was at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, where he was the personal guest of George Bush in his private suite there. Like the Bushes, like the Clintons, Trump is truly neither Republican nor Democrat. He is a lifetime member of America’s bi-factional ruling party.
Read the rest of it at Heat Street. And much respect for Louise Mensch, who could not be more opposed to Trump, but nevertheless asked me to make what I considered to be the best case for him.
60.5 Trump
24.8 Kasich
14.7 Cruz
From the Decision Desk results, it looks as if Trump will take as many as 94 of the 95 delegates. So, obviously, the most important consequence is that it puts Trump back on track to win the 1,237 delegates he needs.
But the primary result also makes clear that Cruz is not a serious national candidate. No one who has observed the way he is attempting to lawyer himself into the nomination while getting repeatedly destroyed at the polls can possibly conclude that he is a viable Republican nominee, considering how he can’t win in either the more liberal northeastern states or more conservative southern ones.
His core constituency appears to be cuckservatives in states with sufficiently low immigration who are still unaware of the realities of the great issue of our day.
“New York will award 95 delegates on the GOP side, and 247 on the
Democratic. If Trump wins by one vote over 50 percent, both statewide
and in every congressional district, he will take all 95 delegates.”
Trump needs a big performance here to regain his momentum. This is an open thread to discuss the New York primary.
Whose elections are less legitimate? Paul Craig Roberts points out the irony of American politicians decrying a purported lack of democratic legitimacy in Syria.
Today (April 14) Syria held parliamentary elections at 7,000 polling stations, keeping the voting open an extra five hours to accommodate the massive turnout. All were allowed to vote, even displaced Syrians from the two provinces still terrorized by Washington and Israeli backed ISIS.
Washington is angry, because Syria held elections before Washington had time to purchase its slate of politicians and organize Washington-funded NGOs to take to the streets to protest and to claim that Assad had stolen the election.
Despite the massive voter turnout and extended hours for voting, the US State Department set the tone by declaring that the elections are not legitimate in Washington’s eyes and do not represent “the will of the Syrian people.”
Washington’s two-bit punk vassals in London and Paris chimed in with both claiming that the war conditions in Syria to which London and Paris have contributed mean that the idea of elections is “totally unrealistic.”
The New York Times lied, characteristically, that the elections, which seem to demonstrate nationwide solidarity against the Western-backed overthrow of the Syrian government, “highlight divisions and uncertainty.” The Washington Post added its lies and misrepresentations to the propagandistic reporting.
The Western governments are far out on a limb with their lies that the Syrian people prefer to be governed by the Washington supported terrorists who were overrunning their country and conducting with Western supplied weapons mass murder on the Syrian people until Russia put a stop to it. Now the Western liars are exposed yet again by election results, and so the liars must pretend that the election lacks validity.
So, Republicans are in the fascinating position of arguing that Syria’s elections, which actually allow people to vote, are illegitimate and do not represent “the will of the people” because “war conditions”, whereas the Republican nomination in Colorado, where no one is even voting, is legitimate and does represent “the will of the people” despite the people having no voice because “rules”.
And people wonder why Americans support a quixotic outsider like Donald Trump. I vote for a blind and incontinent basset hound before I’d vote for any member of the Republican establishment, which now observably includes Ted Cruz. Of course, if I lived in Colorado, I wouldn’t be able to vote at all.
This isn’t that hard. Yes, we all know America is not a democracy. The point is that if you’re going to repeatedly go to war for democracy, then the first place you should do so is in the USA.
Phyllis Schlafly alerts the media:
“At 2:00 pm today, 6 directors of Eagle Forum met in an improper, unprecedented telephone meeting. I objected to the meeting and at 2:11pm, I was muted from the call. The meeting was invalid under the Bylaws but the attendees purported to pass several motions to wrest control of the organization from me. They are attempting to seize access to our bank accounts, to terminate employees, and to install members of their own Gang of 6 to control the bank accounts and all of Eagle Forum.
“The members of their group are: Eunie Smith of Alabama, Anne Cori of Missouri, Cathie Adams of Texas, Rosina Kovar of Colorado, Shirley Curry of Tennessee, and Carolyn McLarty of Oklahoma.
“This kind of conduct will not stand and I will fight for Eagle Forum and I ask all men and women of good will to join me in this fight.”
Always be wary of those who are eager to help. And don’t give them power simply because they are useful. Entryism takes places in various forms and in every organization, from the children’s church to the Catholic hierarchy. SJWs are the worst entryists, but they are not the only ones.
It is interesting to observe that the Eagle Forum entryists are all female.
Ted Cruz wins what is, at best, a Pyrrhic victory in Colorado:
It was last August when officials with the Republican Party in Colorado decided they would not let voters take part in the early nomination process.
The Denver Post reported Aug. 25: “The GOP executive committee has voted to cancel the traditional presidential preference poll after the national party changed its rules to require a state’s delegates to support the candidate that wins the caucus vote.”
The Cortez Journal reported: “Cruz had 17 bound delegates ahead of the Republican state convention. Another four delegates are unpledged but publicly expressed support for the candidate, who hopes to curb momentum seen by front-runner Donald Trump.
“Cruz declared victory in Colorado, pointing out that he won all 21 delegates from the state’s seven congressional assemblies. Another 13 delegates were awarded at the state convention on Saturday. An additional three delegates in Colorado’s 37-member national delegation are unpledged party leaders.”
Remember, this is the same Republican party who said we had to invade Iraq to bring democracy there and waxed ecstatic over purple fingers. Now they’re running with the “it’s a representative republic, not a democracy” line. And if you still believe that they care about anything but maintaining their own power, you’re a fool.
Of course, given that he is ineligible for the presidency anyhow, Cruz probably doesn’t care that he is now regarded as an illegitimate candidate for the nomination.
A few people have asked me what is wrong with Trump lately, given his recent media missteps and his bigger-than-expected loss in Wisconsin. I think the answer is very simple. He’s tired. This nomination campaign is a marathon, not a sprint, and it is an exhausting process. In every human endeavor, we see the pattern of ebb and flow, the fractal Elliott Wave pattern of 1-3-5 with the 2-4, the back-and-forth swing of the momentum pendulum.
Trump has had two big surges, one that began in New Hampshire and carried through Super Tuesday, the other that carried him through big victories in Florida and Arizona. The question is if he can summon up the energy required for the final push to victory.
The last two weeks have been what happens when a candidate who depends upon his high energy to carry his campaign through finds himself flagging. And, as usual, all the short-term linear thinkers who look only at the present assume that it’s all over and his trajectory is downward.
I suspect that being back home in New York will energize Trump and he’ll roar back into aggressive action after he is remotivated by a landslide win over Cruz there. Whether that will be enough to carry him through California, I don’t know, but remember, what he absolutely needs to win before the convention are: a big win in proportional New York, solid wins in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, a minor state win, and then a clinching victory in California.
That’s not certain, but it is far from being impossible, or even unlikely. April 26th looks to be an interesting day, as Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware will vote and the finalists for the Hugo Awards will also be announced.
UPDATE: Nate adds an important observation:
I think this is a fair assessment. but you’re also ignoring Trump’s weak spot, which is also one of his strengths. Trump doesn’t handling failure well. Oh, he’s fine losing one or two while winning 10. But he’s had a bad couple weeks and it is clearly showing. You can see it in his temperament. Looking back at the debates where Cruz and Rubio were ganging up on him he was clearly off-his game in the post debate interviews.
When he’s winning he appears to have a better grasp on what attacks to address and what attacks to ignore. When he isn’t winning he appears to lose that ability and lash out at everything and everyone that says anything negative about him.
This is an excellent point, and it is one reason why I’ve been saying New York is so important even though it’s not winner-takes-all. Trump is a high-energy front-runner who feeds on momentum. He’s a steamroller, he’s not a counterpuncher who is energized by finding himself on the ropes, a die-hard who will fight until the bitter end, or a comeback kid who needs to be knocked down once or twice before he even starts to get serious.