Tag: politics

It’s all but over for the Republican campaigns:

Republicans gather for their eleventh debate on Thursday amid growing consternation from those in the GOP establishment that Donald Trump is unstoppable.

In the hours since Trump’s Super Tuesday romp, Republicans have intensified their push to defeat him, with GOP groups digging into their bank accounts for an air assault in Florida. Top operatives are laying groundwork for primaries on March 15, perhaps the last chance to defeat the billionaire mogul. And Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, under growing duress, are getting ready to deliver harsh attacks on the front-runner in Thursday’s primetime debate in Detroit.

The flurry of activity underscores what many concede is a central reality: The window for halting Trump may soon be closed for good.

“Trump is the presumptive nominee,” said Christian Ferry, who served as Lindsey Graham’s campaign manager. “I think anyone who cannot see that today needs to start working through the stages of grief.”

Operation Mitt was a bust today, so it should be interesting to see if an overstressed Rubiot implodes on stage. This is an open thread for live-commenting the debate, if you are so inclined.

The Littlest Chickenhawk declares himself in the Jewish Journal. It’s a pretty good article, but perhaps revealed more than he intended.

Even the revolt against political correctness wouldn’t be enough to put Trump in position to break apart the Republican Party, however. Republicans have railed against political correctness for years — Trump isn’t anything new in that, although he’s certainly more vulgar and blunt than others. No, what truly separates Trump from the rest of the Republican crowd is that he’s a European-style nationalist.

Republicans are American exceptionalists. We believe that America is a unique place in human history, founded upon a unique philosophy of government and liberty. That’s why we’re special and why we have succeeded. In his own way, Trump believes in American exceptionalism much like Barack Obama does — as a term to describe parochial patriotism. Obama infamously remarked in 2009, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Obama meant that dismissively — American exceptionalism is just something we do because we’re American, not because we’re actually special. But Trump means it proudly. His nationalism is a reaction to Obama’s anti-nationalism. It says: “Barack Obama may think America isn’t worthy of special protection because we’re not special. Well, we’re America, damn it, even if we don’t know what makes us special.” According to Trump, we ought to operate off of the assumption that Americans deserve better lives not because they live out better principles or represent a better system, but because they’re here.

This sort of nationalism resembles far more the right-wing parties of Europe than the historical Republican Party. The Republican Party has stood for embrace of anyone who will embrace American values; extreme European right-wing parties tend to embrace people out of ethnic allegiance rather than ideological allegiance. Trump uncomfortably straddles that divide. His talk about limiting immigration has little to do with embrace of American values and much more to do with “protecting” Americans from foreigners — even highly educated foreigners willing to work in the United States without taking benefits from the tax system. It’s one thing to object to an influx of people who disagree with basic constitutional values. But Trump doesn’t care about basic constitutional values. He simply opposes people coming in who aren’t us. There’s a reason so many of his supporters occupy the #altright portion of the Internet, which traffics in anti-Semitism and racism.

It’s not an accident that Ben Shapiro sounded like an SJW when he said that racists should be hunted down and their careers destroyed. Shapiro is no friend to the right. He’s as cuckservative and anti-right as anyone at National Review. He’s not stupid, and he’s not on our side. At the end of the day, he’ll line up with the globalists in the bifactional ruling party and against the American nationalists.

I never thought much about his columns at WorldNetDaily back when we were both writing for them; my readership there was literally ten times his own. But they were harmless, little more than parroting whatever the received wisdom of the conservative movement happened to be at the time. If they weren’t the best columns there, they weren’t the worst either. I was mildly amused when they were picked up by Creators Syndicate for syndication.

Since then, Shapiro has observably raised his game. He’s not bad, either in print or on television. But he isn’t genuinely of the right at all. He’s actually part of the Fake Right, the Neoconservatives, the self-appointed heirs to William F. Buckley, who have appointed themselves Republican “opinion leaders” in order to keep the respectable right from departing too far from what they deem to be acceptable. If he is correct, and the Republican Party is dying, he’s not going to join the American nationalist successor party.

An ally does not attack you. An ally praises your good points and remains silent in public about what he perceives as your defects. An ally always looks to benefit you rather than harm you. An ally comes to your defense even when he believes you are wrong. An ally takes shots for you that he knows he can withstand more readily than you.

And that is how we know that Ben Shapiro, for all his legitimate merits, is neither a friend nor an ally of the Alt Right.

This is your open thread for posting them here and discussing them. It sounds like the only real question is if Cruz can hang onto Texas, but we’ll see. The best live results site is Decision Desk.

The Lone Star State has the biggest cache — 222 Democratic delegates and 155 for Republicans. 

And perhaps no candidate is fighting harder for that prize than Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. The senator went all out on Monday, holding rallies in voter-rich Dallas, Houston and San Antonio in hopes of at least defeating national front-runner Donald Trump in Cruz’s home state.

“We are going to have a very good Super Tuesday,” Cruz assured the Dallas crowd. Cruz has maintained a polling lead in the state, but knows a surprise loss there could doom his campaign. 

For Republicans, the second-biggest prize is Georgia, with 76 delegates at stake. Both Trump and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio put in face time with voters Monday in the final hours before polls open, while Cruz stayed rooted in Texas.  

If you voted in the primary, feel free to mention what the general impression of your local polling place was.

UPDATE: Trump very nearly swept. They’ve now called Virginia, so Rubio isn’t going to win anything. Cruz couldn’t grab Oklahoma, but he did hang onto Texas.

The general impression is that this endorsement should finish off Ted Cruz once and for all:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) endorsed Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Huntsville Sunday evening. Sessions promised a “Gang of Eight” type of immigration reform bill would not will be passed in a Donald Trump presidency.

“There is an opportunity this year, Tuesday, and we have the opportunity — we have an opportunity Tuesday. It may be the last opportunity we have for the people’s voice to be heard. You have asked for 30 years, and politicians have promised for 30 years to fix illegal immigration,” Sessions said.

“The American people have known for years these trade agreements have not been working for them,” Sessions stumped. “We now have and will soon have a vote on the Transpacific Partnership TPP), Obamatrade, and it will damage America. It will create a commission that undermines our sovereignty, and it should not pass. Donald Trump when he gets elected president will see it does not pass.”

Sessions said Trump is not perfect, but nobody is and endorsed the candidate.

“This movement, he doesn’t take money from political groups and lobbyists. He is committed to leading this country in an effective way. You know, nobody is perfect. We can’t have everything, can we, Mr. Trump? But I can tell you one thing, I think at this time in my opinion, my best judgment, at this time in America’s history, we need to make America great again!” Sessions said, repeating Trump’s campaign slogan.

“I am pleased to endorse Donald Trump for the presidency of the United States,” Sessions endorsed.

Given that Sessions is supposed to have written Trump’s immigration plan, this is hardly a surprise. But combined with Christie’s endorsement and Maine Governor LePage’s endorsement, it means that the preference cascade among officeholders has started and it’s only going to increase.

All of the conservatives nattering and bitching about how Trump isn’t a conservative are behind the times and missing the point. It doesn’t matter what your national policies are if you don’t have a nation. First things first. Sen. Sessions recognizes that.

Does that mean Trump can be trusted to build a wall, to deport all the illegal immigrants, and severely reduce the flow of immigration? No. But a) he’s the only candidate who might, and b) he’s the Republican nominee.

Deal with it and decide if you prefer President Trump or President Hillary. Because those are now your two choices.

The only reason gun rights aren’t being swept away with everything else in the cultural wars is that the NRA did not give in to its moderates:

The moderates felt rejected by both the NRA hard-liners and the Washington elite. “Because of the political direction the NRA was taking, they weren’t being invited to parties and their wives were not happy,” says Jeff Knox, Neal’s son and director of the Firearms Coalition, which fights for the Second Amendment and against laws restricting guns or ammunition. “Dad was on the phone constantly with various people around the country. He had his copy of the NRA bylaws and Robert’s Rules, highlighted and marked. My father and a lot of local club leaders and state association guys organized their troops.”

Theirs was a grass-roots movement within the NRA. The solution was to use the membership to make changes. The bylaws of the NRA gave members power on the convention floor to vote for changes in the NRA governing structure.

“We were fighting the federal government on one hand and internal NRA on the other hand,” Aquilino says.

In Cincinnati, Knox read the group’s demands, 15 of them, including one that would give the members of the NRA the right to pick the executive vice president, rather than letting the NRA’s board decide. The coup took hours to accomplish. Joe Tartaro, a rebel, remembers the evening as “electric.” The hall’s vending machine ran out of sodas.

By 3:30 in the morning the NRA had a whole new look. Gone were the Old Guard officers, including Maxwell Rich, the ousted executive vice president. The members replaced him with an ideological soul mate of Knox’s named Harlon Carter.

Never, ever, permit a moderate in a position of influence, let alone leadership. They will ALWAYS bollix it up for one reason or another. Always. That is the fatal mistake the churches have made, and it is the reason the Republican Party is undergoing its present meltdown.

If you believe your role in the organization is to temper or restrain others in the organization, that’s fine, there is a need for that sort of advice, but understand that you CANNOT be a leader. You are not suited for it. You will make a hash of it.

That doesn’t mean that the most extreme individual will be the best leader. There will always be competing visions. But “making nice” and “finding common ground” are not strategic visions. They are nothing more than tactics that may or may not be relevant at the moment.

It’s a bit ironic, but most people understand that someone who always wants to surrender or to fight is not to be trusted in leadership. And yet, somehow, they readily fall for the idea that someone who always wants to split the difference is a reasonable person to follow.

The South simply doesn’t go in for socialists. And blacks really don’t like the creaky old man:

She has won South Carolina by a wide margin, most likely exceeding Mr. Obama’s own 29-point victory in 2008, based on early exit polls and results. She did it the same way that Mr. Obama did: with overwhelming support from black voters, who favored Mrs. Clinton over Bernie Sanders by a stunning margin of 87 to 13, according to updated exit polls — a tally that would be larger than Mr. Obama’s victory among black voters eight years earlier. They represented 62 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls, even higher than in 2008.

The result positions Mrs. Clinton for a sweep of the South in a few days on Super Tuesday and puts the burden on Mr. Sanders to post decisive victories elsewhere. If he does not — and the polls, at least so far, are not encouraging — Mrs. Clinton seems likely to amass a significant and possibly irreversible lead.

Sanders didn’t have to win, but he had to avoid getting curb-stomped. He didn’t. It’s all but over. And come Super Trumpsday, the Republican race should be over too.

I do wonder what blacks have against Sanders. I genuinely have no idea.