Suicide on the Bounty and other matters before us

Conservative/Tea Partiers who are supporting life long crony leftist Donald Trump to "teach the establishment a lesson" are like the mutinous sailors on the Bounty -- except that these modern mariners have elected to depose the Captain Blighs running the GOP ship by sinking the ship -- in mid-ocean, with all hands aboard.



Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush must be incredibly frustrated by now.  Being called a liar by a known liar is bad enough (rather like having Bill Clinton call you a faithless husband), but to have so many believe the liar when he lies about you is intolerable.  For all of Trump's screaming that Ted Cruz is a liar, it is striking that he has yet to point out even one actual lie.

(And yes, Donnie Truther, there were WMDs in Iraq.  We found them.



I may have to hedge my bets.  So far the only campaign donation I've made has been to Ted Cruz.  From now on I may be donating to organizations supporting my views, like perhaps CatholicVote or the Susan B Anthony List.  If you can't find a candidate you're comfortable supporting, I think this alternative approach may be worthy of your consideration.



It's embarrassing being a Republican sometimes.  Every November and December of every presidential election year, I hear and read GOP leaders and allied pundits announcing that next time we can't afford to make the same mistakes that just cost us so dearly this time.  Despite the declarations, it is the safest bet in America that the Pachyderm Party will forget their resolutions in plenty of time to blow the next election the same old way.  Consider:

After the 2000 primaries, in which John McCain openly urged Democrats to pretend to be Republicans so that they could vote for him to be the nominee, many of us hoped that the GOP leadership would dump open primaries, since obviously (to us, anyway) only Republicans should help select the Republican nominee.  16 years later we're still waiting.  I'm glad we weren't holding our breath.

(Democrats, who are more sleazy-smart than we are, are now using their assets to nominate the worst GOP nominee for their candidate to run against.  Have you already forgotten Todd Akin?)

Another reform I am wishing for would be the elimination of winner-take-all primaries, in which a candidate who receives a plurality of the vote (a majority is not necessary) receives all of the state's delegates.  This silly practice is said to prevent slugfests and backroom deals at our sedate (if not somnolent) conventions.  Given that we have lost four of the last six presidential elections, maybe a knock-down drag-out at the convention is what we need.  At least it would give people something to watch at our quadrennial Party party.  At any rate, this practice usually results is making a very beatable candidate opposed by 60-75% of the party faithful look like an unstoppable force, just before the election stops him (and us).

Can you name one state that has eliminated winner-take-all primaries?  Me, either.



After 2012's election I remember a veritable chorus of pols and pundits declaring that we must never again have so many GOP debates, in which our candidates would make each other look like villains and dunces.  We certainly won't book so many debates on hostile networks, since their immoderators would vie with each other to make every Republican look like he belongs in an asylum or a prison.  (He or she, actually, since Sarah Palin and Carly Fiorina certainly haven't received favorable treatment from the MLM*)

The more things change,...

Of course, some of the pundits haven't been much better.  Ann Coulter was just one of many conservatives scribblers to insist that we HAD to nominate a governor or "at least a Senator" this time around.  We started this process with several fine governors and senators (current and former) in the running, including Bobby Jindal and (my first choice) public union tamer Scott Walker of Wisconsin,  Then Donny Sue Trump entered the race, and the smartest girl in school fell in love with another troglodyte.

There are others.  Radio host Jim Quinn spent 3+ years insisting that the perfectly capable Mitt Romney had lost the election because he didn't inspire confidence in the "conservative base", and now he's plainly supporting the Megyn Kelly fearing Trump, who makes Romney look like Barry Goldwater.

Ditto self-hating Catholic Sean Hannity, who all but called for the crucifixtion of Pope Francis for daring to slander the prophet of Sean Hannity.

Yessir, it's my party and I'll cry if I want to.

*  Media Lynch Mob

Post South Carolina Primary Hangover

Q:  How can you tell who defeated or finished second to Donald "I am a GOD!" Trump in the last  primary?

A:  He's the candidate whose eligibility to be President is being questioned by Donald Trump.

Has anyone else noticed that Trump appears to have borrowed the strategy by which Obama became Senator from Illinois?  From the invaluable DiscoverTheNetworks.org:

But in November 1995, Jesse Jackson, Jr. defeated Palmer in a special election for Reynolds’ empty congressional seat. At that point, Palmer filed to retain the Democratic nomination for the state senate seat she had encouraged Obama to pursue; that seat would be up for grabs in the November 1996 elections. She asked Obama to politely withdraw from the race and offered to help him find an alternative position elsewhere.

But Obama refused to withdraw, so Palmer resolved to run against him (and two other opponents who also had declared their candidacy) in the 1996 Democratic primary. To get her name placed on the ballot, Palmer hastily gathered more than the minimum number of signatures required. Obama promptly challenged the legitimacy of those signatures and charged Palmer with fraud. A subsequent investigation found that a number of the names on Palmer’s petition were invalid, thus she was knocked off the ballot. (Names could be eliminated from a candidate's petition for a variety of reasons. For example, if a name was printed rather than written in cursive script, it was considered invalid. Or if the person collecting the signatures was not registered to perform that task, any signatures that he or she had collected likewise were nullified.)

Obama also successfully challenged the signatures gathered by his other two opponents, and both of them were disqualified as well. Consequently, Obama ran unopposed in the Democratic primary and won by default.

...

U.S. Senate Campaign (2004):
In 2004 Obama ran for one of Illinois’ two seats in the U.S. Senate. The Chicago Tribune endorsed Obama’s campaign. More importantly, the Tribune persuaded a Democrat-appointed judge in California to open the sealed divorce records of Obama’s Republican opponent to the media. The resulting sex scandal, based on allegations in the divorce records by a Hollywood actress eager to prevent her ex-husband from getting custody of their children, prompted the Republican to resign from the race.

Human Events magazine provides the details:

One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader. But then the Chicago Tribune leaked the claim that Hull’s second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.

Those records were under seal, but as The New York Times noted: “TheTribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had ‘worked aggressively behind the scenes’ to push the story.” Many people said Axelrod had “an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial story.”

Both Hull and his ex-wife opposed releasing their sealed divorce records, but they finally relented in response to the media’s hysteria — 18 days before the primary. Hull was forced to spend four minutes of a debate detailing the abuse allegation in his divorce papers, explaining that his ex-wife “kicked me in the leg and I hit her shin to try to get her to not continue to kick me.”

After having held a substantial lead just a month before the primary, Hull’s campaign collapsed with the chatter about his divorce. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.

Obama then used similar techniques to win the general election, as Human Events again explains:

As luck would have it, Obama’s opponent in the general election had also been divorced! Jack Ryan was tall, handsome, Catholic — and shared a name with one of Harrison Ford’s most popular onscreen characters! He went to Dartmouth, Harvard Law and Harvard Business School, made hundreds of millions of dollars as a partner at Goldman Sachs, and then, in his early 40s, left investment banking to teach at an inner city school on the South Side of Chicago.

Ryan would have walloped Obama in the Senate race. But at the request of — again — the Chicago Tribune, California Judge Robert Schnider unsealed the custody papers in Ryan’s divorce five years earlier from Hollywood starlet Jeri Lynn Ryan, the bombshell Borg on “Star Trek: Voyager.”

Jack Ryan had released his tax records. He had released his divorce records. But both he and his ex-wife sought to keep the custody records under seal to protect their son.

Amid the 400 pages of filings from the custody case, Jack Ryan claimed that his wife had had an affair, and she counterclaimed with the allegation that he had taken her to “sex clubs” in Paris, New York and New Orleans, which drove her to fall in love with another man....

Ryan had vehemently denied her allegations at the time, but it didn’t matter. The sex club allegations aired on “Entertainment Tonight,” “NBC Nightly News,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” and NBC’s “Today” show. CNN covered the story like it was the first moon landing....

Four days after Judge Schnider unsealed the custody records, Ryan dropped out of the race for the horror of (allegedly) propositioning his own wife and then taking “no” for an answer.

Alan Keyes stepped in as a last-minute Republican candidate.

And that’s how Obama became a U.S. senator. He destroyed both his Democratic primary opponent and his Republican general election opponent with salacious allegations about their personal lives taken from “sealed” court records.

With a $10 million campaign war chest from contributors, and with no Republican opponent who could garner much support, Obama had an open road to become the next U.S. Senator from Illinois. His friend and political supporter, the longtime Chicago alderwoman Dorothy Tillman, helped him win the voting in Chicago’s predominantly black wards. He also received valuable backing from the Jesse Jacksons, Junior andSenior, and Rev. Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.

Donald Trump and his Brownshirts

The disagreement between Pope Francis and Donald Trump has again aroused Trump's many venomous followers to heights of fury and (sadly) anti-Catholic bigotry.  Those Americans who wonder at how an Adolph Hitler raised an army of brown-shirted thugs need only look at Trump and his brutal followers today.  Not every Trump supporter is a thug; far from it.  But it seems that all of the thuggish behavior in this campaign has been provided by the Trumpzis.

When Donald Trump declared he was running for President, many of us thought "Well, I guess every circus needs a clown."  It never occurred to us that this perpetual braggart, sleazy businessman, and reality-TV "star" could possibly be taken seriously by the Republican voters.  We failed to understand how many Republicans were willing to let their anger with the leadership of the Republican Party short-circuit their brains.

Harsh, you may say?  How else can you explain the support for a man as personally disreputable as Bill Clinton, as vain as Barack Obama, and as dishonest as Hillary Clinton?  A man who has in the past and perhaps in the present supported single-payer health care, which would end liberty in America, because if the government controls your health care, they control you?  A man who viciously and falsely slanders the last GOP President, the thoroughly honorable George W. Bush?  A man who is only wealthy today because he was born that way?  Didn't we detest that about Ted Kennedy?

The man is a juvenile and a lout, who reacts to every criticism with vile insults and cringe-worthy name-calling.  From Megyn Kelly to the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, from Hugh Hewitt to the National Review, anyone who dares to point out the flaws in Trump's character or his statements will be met not with refutation, but with simple abuse.

Consider this - perhaps the reason Trump never refutes the actual statements of his critics and opponents is because he can't.

When Megyn Kelly asked Trump if his knuckle-dragging troglodyte past treatment of women would make a too-easy target for Democrats in the fall campaign (an entirely reasonable question), Trump stayed up until 4:00 AM sending out loutish, filthy tweets about Kelly.  Is this an action of an adult?

What about his followers?

Many are decent people, but the Trump for President movement has a disproportionate number of vicious, nasty venom-spewers.  They see every attack on their idol the way Mohammedans see criticisms of their prophet.  The critics must be vilified, ostracized, destroyed!  Not by logic, mind you, but by means of foul epithets, falsehoods, and Internet abuse.

Do you not believe me?  Go to any political site that permits comments on their articles, find an article critical of Trump on any issue, and then scroll down to the comments.  Read the pro-Trump comments.  You will find very few well-reasoned arguments. You will find nasty, often obscenity-laced posts demeaning the author, their character, their intelligence, and other characteristics not germane to the article or the discussion thereof.  Supporters of the other Republican candidates will carry on a reasonable discussion with you.  Trump's followers would rather throw verbal bricks at you.  (They're verbal at the moment, anyway.)

My sister in Florida saw a man on a news broadcast say that he's supporting Trump because he's "voting with his middle finger."

There are no brains in middle fingers.

Another Republican mistake

Of course it should surprise no one that the Senate Republicans (both the leadership and the rank-and-file) screwed up in the matter of nominating a replacement for our dear departed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.  They should not have announced their belief that President B.O. should leave the nomination to his successor, whoever that may be.  Truth be told, they have no legal or Constitutional footing to make such a demand.  Of course Mullah Obama can nominate someone.  That doesn't mean that a Republican Senate is under ANY obligation to approve the nominee. They are under no obligation to treat the nominee with any more courtesy than Robert Bork and Charles Pickering received from the Democrats.

What the Republicans should have said was nothing.  This of course is a lost art these days, so an acceptable alternative would have sounded like "We will treat any nominee with the same scrupulous objectivity with which our Democratic colleagues have treated past candidates nominated by Republican presidents."

And we all know what THAT would mean...