Tag: politics

Why Ted Cruz needs Trump

This analysis of the GOPe road map suggests that every Republican who isn’t part of the Republican Establishment should be supporting Donald Trump, as he may be the only thing standing in the way of a third Bush coronation.

The pathway the RNC/GOPe constructed to elect Jeb Bush specifically was designed to eliminate/defeat Ted Cruz.

Stop.  And re-read this reality:

    The GOPe road map was specifically and intentionally created by scheme and construct, to intentionally block any possibility for Ted Cruz to achieve 2016 presidential victory.

As a direct and factual outcome there is nothing Ted Cruz can do to overcome the structural dynamics currently in place which block any possibility of him achieving electoral victory.  Period.

We have laid out the rules, laid out the road-map, and laid out the primary contests -REPEATEDLY- and we continued to asked anyone who finds themselves refusing this reality to outline a path for Cruz victory.

Unfortunately, it simply does not exist.

The RNC rules are now in place; the RNC primary dates are now all confirmed; the RNC delegate distributions all now set in stone;  and there’s enough key state polling data for anyone to use who wants to prove this false.

We have studied this road-map intensely.  We have explored the district-by-district level possibilities within each of the pre-March 16th 2016 states a hundred different ways, the numbers for anyone other than Trump just don’t add up.

The GOPe road-map was specifically created to block Ted Cruz, or anyone like Ted Cruz, from achieving victory.

Team Jeb is: Rubio, Fiorina, Christie, Huckabee, Kasich, Perry, Graham, Pataki and Gilmore. (10 establishment candidates all part of the RNC/GOPe machine)  We have outlined it all HERE.

If, for the sake of intellectual exercise, you remove Donald Trump from the race and apportion his supporters in a reasonable manner, what you will find is that the GOPe road map kicks back into play – and no non-jeb is able to pull enough support to defeat Jeb.

Remove Trump and Ben Carson becomes Herman Cain 2012; Cruz becomes Gingrich, Jeb replaces Romney and the 2016 outcome becomes 2012 ground-hog day.  Just as designed.

Here’s the kicker…. As previously mentioned, Ted Cruz is a smart guy, and therefore Ted Cruz also is aware of this.

Ted Cruz is fully aware of this – he picked up on it months ago.

That explains why Jeb still hasn’t dropped out despite the fact that his campaign is practically road kill after his inept debate performances. In other words, it isn’t Trump who is Jeb’s stalking horse, it is all the other candidates except Cruz.

So Cruz needs Trump to knock Jeb out of the race in order to have a chance himself. Or he might team up with Trump and offer a Trump-Cruz ticket, which is something that a lot of conservatives could live with. If I were in Cruz’s shoes, the latter is something I would be looking very hard at right now.

The anti-nationalist enemy

Even the mainstream Right is beginning to recognize that things have irretrievably changed and there is no going back to a sane and reasonably unified America:

A globalized faux cosmopolitanism — simultaneously tribalist and anti-national — seems to have taken much greater hold in the current administration (and perhaps even among some of its supposed political opponents). Yet the Left’s allegiance to the comfortable pieties of the Sixties seems part of the reason for its many failures.

This worldview sees a rural good ol’ boy clinging to his guns and his religion as the greatest foe of “progress.” Thus, it is woefully unprepared to confront the reality of black-robed fanatics beheading religious minorities, enslaving villages, and setting fire to the Middle East. Because of its limited moral imagination, it also struggles to persuade a heterogeneous body politic. Early proponents of Great Society welfare policies might not have foreseen how, too often, well-intentioned government dictates could destroy communities, tear apart families, and destroy the foundation of economic opportunity. Experience has — or should have — disabused us of this naïveté. And say what you will about the dangers of central planning, the technocrats of the past were at least able to do things like put a man on the Moon. The mandarins of today struggle to get a health-care website up and running. Outside the narrowly political realm, as the Far Left claims a resurgent voice in cultural affairs, we have increasingly seen how radical progressive politics are a cultural dead end: Rather than a spirit of creativity, exploration, and accomplishment, radical leftism gives us only the petty tyranny of a Maoist struggle session.

The fact that the globalist Left fails to understand its enemy is a feature, not a bug. We know them. They don’t know us. That means we will win, but only if we show up everywhere they are and refuse to continue to concede any ground, intellectual or otherwise.

That means NOT adopting their social justice ideals or their rhetoric. And that may be the hardest thing for many of us, conditioned as we are to avoid speaking our true thoughts and expressing our true feelings out of a misguided sense of imposed decency.

For the love of all that is good, and holy, and true, if we lose, we lose, but let us at least not lose due to a foolish sense of etiquette.

The Republican Final Four Three

According to the Weekly Standard, anyhow:

Tonight’s debate showed that the GOP field is smaller than it looks. Technically, there are still fourteen people running, but the winnowing is far along. We probably have a final six and possibly a final four.

The three winners of the night were pretty obvious: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump.

Rubio ended Jeb Bush’s campaign with the kind of body shot that buckles your knees. That’s on Bush, who never should have come after Rubio in that spot for a host of strategic and tactical reasons. But what should scare Hillary Clinton is how effortless Rubio is even with throwaway lines, like “I’m against anything that’s bad for my mother.” Most people have no idea how fearsome raw political talent can be. Clinton does know because she’s seen it up close. She sleeps next to it for a contractually-obligated 18 nights per year.

Cruz was tough and canny—no surprise there. He went the full-Gingrich in his assault on CNBC’s ridiculous moderators. He did a better job explaining Social Security reform than Chris Christie, even (which is no mean feat). And managed to look downright personable compared with John Harwood, whose incompetence was matched only by his unpleasantness. If you’re a conservative voter looking for someone who is going to fight for your values, Cruz must have looked awfully attractive.

Then there was Trump. Over the last few weeks, Trump has gotten better on the stump. Well, don’t look now, but he’s getting better at debates, too. Trump was reasonably disciplined. He kept his agro to a medium-high level. And his situational awareness is getting keener, too. Note how he backed John Kasich into such a bad corner on Lehmann Brothers that he protested, “I was a banker, and I was proud of it!” When that’s your answer, you’ve lost the exchange. Even at a Republican debate.

And Trump had a hammer close: “Our country doesn’t win anymore. We used to win. We don’t anymore.” I remain convinced that this line (along with his hardliner on immigration) is the core of Trump’s appeal. But he didn’t just restate this theme in his closing argument. He used it to: (1) beat up CNBC; and (2) argue that his man-handling of these media twits is an example of what he’ll do as president. It was brilliant political theater.

Those were your winners.

Carson is irrelevant. He’s just the usual Republican Maybe-This-Will-Get-Me-Out-Of-Racism-Free card, the role previously played by Alan Keyes and Hermann Cain. He’s also anti-gun, so he’s a non-starter.

Cruz and Rubio are competing for the same Establishment dollar as well as the Unicorn vote, also known as the Hispanic Natural Republican. Cruz is tougher than Rubio and he also looks less like an overweight frat brother, so I think he knocks Rubio aside without too much trouble.

The real question is Establishment vs Grass Roots rebellion. And there, the verdict is far from in. And not that anyone here didn’t doubt that Jeb Bush was already cooked, but his epic fail raises some genuine questions about the idea that he is the smarter brother.

It’s hard to see how Jeb Bush recovers from his self-inflected wound at Wednesday’s CNBC Republican debate in Boulder when he went after Marco Rubio just after the young senator had hit one out of the park.  Rubio was defending himself from an editorial in the Sun Sentinel calling on Marco to stop “ripping off” the public and quit the Senate because of his poor attendance record.  Rubio responded that John Kerry and Barack Obama had been even more truant from the Senate while running for president and the paper had not only ignored that, but given these men their endorsement.  It was an example of  liberal media bias at its most obvious.  The crowd erupted in its first ovation of the night.  Advantage Rubio.

Clueless, Bush jumped in as if nothing had happened, taking the paper’s side and schoolmarmishly doubling down on Marco.  He got his head handed to him by Rubio (politely) and the audience.

Bush should just quit now. He’s an embarrassment.

Out of date and out of touch

For once, the Washington Post is correct about the complete cluelessness of the Republican establishment:

The dirty little secret in Republican politics these days is that the longtime pillars of the party — politicians and ex-politicians, major donors and the consultant class — are further removed from the views of the GOP base than at any time in modern memory. They simply do not understand what the heck is happening within and to their party.

John Sununu, a former New Hampshire governor and longtime GOP hand, is one of the few who is willing to admit just how clueless he is about, among other things, the rise of Donald Trump and Ben Carson. Here’s what Sununu told the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin:

    I have no feeling for the electorate anymore. It is not responding the way it used to. Their priorities are so different that if I tried to analyze it I’d be making it up.

Sununu is far from alone in GOP  ranks. Think about how most establishment Republicans saw this race playing out: Jeb Bush gets in, raises a ton of money and blows everyone else out of the water. By this point in the year, most of the consultant class would have predicted that Bush would be solidly in first place in most of the early states and simply polishing his policy résumé for the general-election fight to come.

But the truth that Martin exposes via Sununu is that the old ways of doing things in the Republican Party have changed significantly since even George W. Bush was elected in 2000 — running, it’s worth noting, essentially the same campaign his younger brother is right now. Strategies — get big (in terms of organization), tout electability and inevitability, keep yourself close enough to the center that you can be viable in a general election — that once were fail-safe just don’t work in this electoral environment where the dominant sentiment of voters is anger about everything.

The social mood has shifted. What works when the voters are generally optimistic does not work when they are increasingly fearful, angry, and desperate. It’s fun to speak knowledgeably of Ricardo and wax eloquent about how immigrants are enriching the economy when you’re pulling down six digits at the office, but the cruel realities of supply and demand are a little more likely to strike home when you’ve been out of work for 18 months and haven’t had an interview in your last ten job applications.

What we’re seeing is an establishment that is out of sync with reality because they believe the false media narrative about the state of the union, whereas the grass roots has been forced to confront it.

The impracticality of pragmatism

Canada’s voters taught the political pragmatists the same lesson I’ve been telling Republicans for over a decade: pragmatism in politics is ultimately self-defeating:

Unless the culture (of the Conservative party) changes, it should not count on being returned to power any time soon. We should be clear where the roots of that culture lie. The nastiness of Tory politics under Harper, the mindless partisanship, the throttling of backbench MPs, are not outgrowths of conservatism. They were born, rather, of its repudiation: of the decision to sterilize the new party of any ideological convictions, the better (it was supposed) to remove any obstacle to its electability.

Politics fills a vacuum: in the absence of substantive differences with your opponents, partisanship takes its place. If, what is more, a party no longer stands for much as a party, then its policies will default to whatever the leader decides. And the leader, having been given that power and that assignment — win at all costs — can tolerate no deviations from MPs still under the impression that the party harbors some lingering principles.

There has been much talk of how Red Tories were made to feel unwelcome in the party. But the truth is no sort of conservative could really feel the Harper government represented them: not fiscal conservatives, $150 billion in debt later; not social conservatives, forbidden even to say the word “abortion”; certainly not old-time Reformers, the sort of people who went into politics to make governments and leaders more accountable, not less.

The only party faction that was really served was the yahoo faction, the “toxic Tories” as a friend calls them, to whom this government truckled and whose loyalty was rewarded in turn. MPs who were willing to say the opposite of what they believed, or believe the opposite of the facts, were promoted; those who were not found themselves out of cabinet, or indeed out of the party.

The people around Harper, always convinced of their own cleverness, grew drunk on their own cynicism. Having made the initial compromise with their principles — on policy — they found the next much easier, and the next, until they became contemptuous of anything resembling a principle, or anyone still able to discern a line — political, personal, ethical — he would not cross.

Ideological principle is the lifesblood of a political party. The more a party focuses on “electability” and “pragmatism”, the more it cuts its own wrists and drains its own blood. Eventually, the point is reached that the party exists for no reason but to profit the party elite, which is understandably not of interest to anyone outside that elite.

What do the Republicans stand for today?

Pragmatism in politics is like cocaine. A little bit goes a long ways. You not only win, but you feel like an all-conquering tiger. But gradually, you start needing more and more to achieve the same affect, until finally, you overdose and your heart stops.

Amazon goes after the fakes

I’ve been expecting them to take action to shut down fake reviewers for some time now, but apparently it took being embarrassed in public to make it actually happen. More than a few SJWs should be shaking in their shoes.

AMAZON, the world’s largest online marketplace, is suing more than 1,000 people suspected of selling fake reviews in one of the biggest legal actions to uncover hidden identities on the internet.

The web giant is mounting the unprecedented court action to strip 1,114 alleged fake reviewers of their anonymity and force them to pay damages for the “manipulation and deception” of Amazon customers, according to court documents filed in America on Friday.

It is the first time any company has taken action against its own reviewers on this scale, according to legal experts, and could have far-reaching implications for privacy and the way consumer websites are policed.

The clampdown comes after an undercover Sunday Times investigation, in which a ghostwritten ebook was published on Amazon and fake reviewers were paid to push it to the top of one of the online retailer’s bestseller charts.

I’ve spoken to two Amazon executives about the problem, and they both agreed that fake reviews are a real problem that strikes at the legitimacy of their entire review system, and therefore, their business. They didn’t necessarily agree that anyone who leaves a fake review should have their ability to review permanently removed and have their account suspended for 90 days, but they agreed that some form of negative incentive would be in order.

Amazon is full of SJWs, but they are mostly at the lower levels. The mid-level and higher executives aren’t much interested in politics, they are interested in selling. Anything that gets in the way of that is likely to get steamrolled.

The challenge of SJW entryism

Brian Niemeier points out the fundamental flaw in the conservative strategy of permanent retreat:

We also agree that the opposition’s numbers are small relative to greater fandom and the general population. Yet despite being vastly outnumbered, look what they’ve achieved.

They halved the Big Five’s SFF sales, took over SFWA, and dominated Worldcon–all in 20 years.

You correctly argue that these institutions are irrelevant. But they weren’t prior to that 20-year march. I’m all for discussing which hills we’re ready to die on, but before we can have that discussion, everyone needs to understand how the enemy operates.

They’re experts at infiltrating and subverting organizations–especially when they’re at a numeric disadvantage. San Diego, SLCCC, and Gen Con have lots of thankless scut jobs that Morlocks will gladly take to get their feet in the door and multiply.

How many of those cons have codes of conduct? All it takes is one infiltrator on a committee and the other members’ complacency to weaponize the rules against normal fans.

Larry posted a while back about a guy who complained that Gen Con isn’t safe for minorities. That’s how it starts.

I’m all for starting new awards and moving on to greener convention pastures. But unless the unequivocal message is sent that entryism will not be tolerated, anything we build will look just like Worldcon and trad publishing inside of 2 decades.

Conservative strategy is guaranteed failure. Conservatism is the prevent defense of politics. It doesn’t always fail, but it fails often enough that anyone who advocates it as a strategy should be assumed to be inept and incompetent.

I am working on developing a proper Code of Conduct designed to not only keep out entryists, but eject them as soon as they reveal themselves. If you want peace, prepare for war. If you want freedom of thought and speech, prepare to police the would be policemen.

The only sane candidate

It’s rather remarkable, astonishing really, that Donald Trump is the only candidate in either party whose public statements aren’t either completely a) irrelevant, or b) insane:

Donald Trump, the Republican Party presidential front-runner, was talking about Mrs. Merkel’s invitation to migrants on the American political interview show, ‘Face The Nation’.

Mr Trump said: “I do not like the migration. I do not like the people coming”. Instead he favours “a safe zone for people”, an idea on which he expanded.

He said: “Frankly, look, Europe is going to have to handle — but they’re going to have riots in Germany. What’s happening in Germany, I always thought Merkel was like this great leader. What she’s done in Germany is insane. It is insane. They’re having all sorts of attacks.”

Mr Trump was talking about the decision to throw open Germany’s doors to Syrian migrants taken by Frau Merkel in August, which Breitbart London previously reported. The ‘open doors’ policy is an idea for which she has come under attack, even from those within her own political ranks.

“What they should do is get all the countries together, including the Gulf States, which have nothing but money. They should all get together and they should take a big swath of land in Syria.

“They should do a safe zone for people where they could live. And then ultimately go back to their country, go back to where they came from.”

And then start sending the Somalis and every other group of “refugees” back to safe zones in their own countries. Because they are rapidly and actively transforming the USA into the very third world hellholes from which they came.

I don’t care what any candidate has to say about any issue except immigration. There is no longer any other issue that matters.

Feminism is a loser’s game

It has always been observable that feminism is a loser’s game, but many have not understand exactly why. This commenter at Heartiste does a nice job of explaining why failure is inevitable.

Peter Drucker, in his famous essay Managing Oneself, advised strongly
the need to understand your strengths and weaknesses, and observed that
you can never win by improving your weaknesses, only by improving your
strengths. In broader socio-economic terms, feminism has pressured women
to build on their weaknesses (ability to compete against men) and
discouraged them from capitalizing on their strengths (youth and
fertility). Young women have taken up this mantra to the extreme as
their innate herd behavior has driven millions of them dominate
universities and commit to a life of cubicle drudgery over hearth and
home. They would rather have a crappy job with vicious co-workers that
provides them money to spend on frivolities than a humble home domain
where they rule and experience the joy of children. It is unfortunate
that so many of our most intelligent and well-bred women are buying into
this lie only to discover just 10 years after starting that they have
missed the boat on marriage and childbearing opportunities.

Adding to
this cruel feminist hoax inflicted on impressionable women, some
companies make a spectacle of offering to freeze their female worker’s
eggs so they can devote their youth to the corporation and attempt
childbirth long after the ideal window for this has passed. This is not
to imply that women should not be educated; a woman should have an
education as a financial backup and to use after child-rearing.

As a general rule, if you’re fighting a) your own biology, b) history, and c) Mother Nature, you should not be terribly surprised when the results are less than entirely triumphant.

Decalifornication

Glenn Reynolds advises preemptively decalifornicating the low-tax destination states being invaded by high-tax migrants:

The world is in the grip of a vast migration. Seeking a better life for themselves and their families, people are abandoning their benighted homelands and moving to places that offer them more opportunity. But are they bringing their homelands’ problems with them?

No, I’m not talking about Mexicans coming to the United States, or Middle Easterners and Africans flooding into Europe. I’m talking about Americans moving from blue states to red states….

There are two things that might get in the way here. One is that high-tax, high-benefit states might lower their taxes and reduce their benefits. That does happen, though it’s difficult: Politicians extract a lot of power from high taxes (and from selectively reducing high taxes for favored constituencies) and high benefits are an effective way of buying votes. Generally, the situation has to be absolutely desperate (think Greece) before they’ll change.

The other thing that might happen is that the migrants from high tax states might bring their political attitudes with them, moving to new, low-tax states for the economic opportunity but then supporting the same policies that ruined the states they left. This seems quite plausible, alas, and I’ve heard Coloradans lament that the flow of Californians to their state involved a lot of people doing just that. (I suppose that migrants from lower-benefits states to higher-benefits states might support change the other way, but people who live on the dole seem to have pretty similar voting patterns regardless of location, which is why the dole is so popular with certain politicians).

If I were one of those conservative billionaires (hello, Koch brothers! hi, Sheldon Adelson!) who are always donating tens of millions to support Republican candidates, I think I might try spending some of the money on something more useful: A sort of welcome wagon for blue state migrants to red states. Something that would explain to them why the place they’re moving to is doing better than the place they left, and suggesting that they might not want to vote for the same policies that are driving their old home states into bankruptcy.

What I find encouraging about this is the way it shows how the Right is increasingly understanding that it has been routinely defeated for decades in a multi-generational cultural war, and is finally beginning to develop tacticians and strategists who think in multi-generational terms.

Generation X is far less susceptible to being influenced by Boomer rhetoric and our thinkers, under the influence of the few older mavericks who were able to successfully resist the siren song of social justice, are beginning to develop defensive strategies and even some basic counteroffensives.