Tag Archives: GOP

Yes, the world is laughing at us, Mr. Trump

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Donald J. Trump keeps repeating a number of mantras as he campaigns for president of the United States.

“I’ll build a wall.”

“I will make America great again.”

“I love Hispanics.”

“I cherish women.”

“The world is laughing at us.”

There’s more of ’em, certainly. But of the five listed here, only one of them has a grain of truth to it. It’s the last one, about how the world is “laughing at us.”

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee is right. The world is laughing at us. They’re in stitches over in the Kremlin, at 10 Downing Street, at Los Pinos in Mexico City. In Ottawa, New Delhi, Beijing, Tokyo, Ankara, Berlin, Rome, Paris, Jerusalem, Canberra and Brasilia, they’re all howling, man.

However, the object of their derision — I would venture to speculate — isn’t the current government of the United States. They are laughing at the idea that a once-great American political party would be on the verge of nominating someone as reckless, ill-informed, bombastic and narcissistic as Donald J. Trump.

I am not going to walk you through the interminably long list of absolute foolishness that has poured out of this guy’s mouth. You need to see them all to understand what I’m talking about.

Those other world powers are laughing at us because somehow this clown has persuaded a strong plurality of Republican primary voters to back his candidacy. He’s gathered enough delegates to win the GOP nomination this summer. Then he’s going to campaign against a former secretary of state, a former U.S. senator and a former first lady for the presidency.

And all along the way, he’s going to continue hurling insults and will continue to hang childish labels on his political opponents — many of them from within his own political party.

President Barack Obama has joined the battle against Trump. The president said the other evening that “this isn’t a reality TV show. This is serious business.” He’s talking, of course, about the job of statecraft, of running the massive federal government, of being commander in chief of the most powerful military force in world history.

Is the world laughing at us? You bet it is.

That laughter would stop immediately, though, if hell were to freeze over and Donald J. Trump becomes the next president of the United States.

Aww, what the heck. I found this link:

http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/Donald-Trump/a/Donald-Trump-Quotes.htm

Take a look for yourself. Then we can all join the rest of the world in the laughter.

Unity usually wins these elections

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It’s almost a lead-pipe cinch that the political party that’s unified going into a presidential election is the one that wins.

The two major parties now have presumptive nominees for the presidency.

Donald J. Trump reached that milestone first in the Republican Party primary. It’s been, shall we say, a rocky ride ever since. Republicans in Congress are offering all kinds of qualifiers in suggesting that they’ll vote for Trump, but they cannot yet “endorse” him.

Hillary Rodham Clinton then clinched the Democratic Party nomination. The chatter all across the nation has been that the party is now ready to rally behind her. Bernie Sanders says he’ll keep fighting, but bet on this: He won’t take the fight all the way to the finish line. Not only that, the president of the United States today endorsed Clinton, as did progressive champion U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Ladies and gents, we have a serious fight on our hands.

We keep hearing things about the disarray within the Trump campaign team. Clinton delivered that blistering foreign policy critique of Trump the other day, but Trump didn’t respond in any significant way.

Today, Warren delivered an equally ferocious attack on Trump’s fitness for the job. The GOP candidate’s response once again was muted.

It’s a political truism that unity wins elections. Republicans and Democrats both have learned that lesson the hard way. Democrats in 1968 and again in 1972 were split between hawks and doves; Republicans united behind their ticket and won both times, with the 1972 election being a 49-state blowout. Republicans in 1976 found themselves split at their convention, while Democrats rallied behind Jimmy Carter; Democrats won that campaign.

We’ve still got 150-some days before the 2016 election. The dynamics might change. Then again, the unified party — the Democrats — might ratchet up the pressure beyond Republicans’ ability to withstand it.

I’m betting, though, that everyone’s other prediction about this campaign will stand.

It’s going to be negative … in the extreme.

Obama endorses ‘most qualified’ candidate for POTUS

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I admire President Barack Obama.

His two terms as president of the United States will be judged ultimately as a success, no matter what his critics keep harping at today with statements of his alleged “failed presidency.”

Thus, I accept his endorsement today of Hillary Rodham Clinton as a potentially decisive event in the upcoming election.

He called his fellow Democrat Clinton the “most qualified” person ever to seek the presidency.

Right there, Mr. President, I will beg to differ.

The most qualified individual ever to seek — and hold — the office is a Republican … in my humble view.

That would be George H.W. Bush, the 41st president.

I’ve taken note before about President Bush’s sparkling pre-presidency credentials: Navy combat aviator during World War II; successful businessman; member of Congress; special envoy to China; CIA director; Republican Party chairman; U.N. ambassador; vice president of the United States.

I don’t want to quibble too much with the president over this. Indeed, Hillary Clinton is supremely qualified to be president and commander in chief. Her resume includes first lady of the United States, U.S. senator and secretary of state.

“Most qualified,” though, is a stretch. Her record is stellar, but not as stellar as the one compiled by President Bush.

Partisan politics being what it is, though, a Democratic president isn’t going to offer credit to someone from the other party while endorsing a member of his own party to become the next president.

The credit that extends across the aisle is left to be handed out by those of us out here in the proverbial peanut gallery.

Thus, I am doing so here.

Anti-Trump movement gains more ‘talk’

Donald Trump speaks during the National Rifle Association's annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee April 10, 2015.  REUTERS/Harrison McClary  - RTR4WVBQ

It’s all talk at the moment.

That talk, though, is getting a bit louder … apparently.

Some Republican kingmakers are floating the idea that the GOP is going to seek a replacement nominee to push Donald J. Trump aside at the party’s presidential nominating convention this summer.

They’re scared that Trump leading the Republican ticket this fall is going to steer the party into a meat-grinder in the form of Democratic Party nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/talk-grows-replacing-trump-convention-000000790.html

What I’m not hearing or seeing is precisely how this coup would occur in Cleveland.

Honestly — and it pains me to say this about Trump — the party needs to swallow hard and accept that Trump is its nominee. He’s the guy who won more votes than anyone else. He won them fairly and squarely. He has enough delegates now to secure the nomination on the first ballot.

I don’t know where the anti-Trump forces think they’re going to collect enough convention delegate votes to overturn the primary election process.

If the nominee keeps enraging constituent groups with continued insults, then the GOP is doomed to be handed its head at the ballot box this November.

Then it well could be time for the Republican Party to begin a long-term restructuring aimed at returning it to the mainstream of political debate. They did it after the 1964 debacle with Barry Goldwater’s crushing defeat at the hands of Lyndon Johnson. Democrats did as well after George McGovern got steamrolled in 1972 as Richard Nixon cruised to re-election.

Trump has won his party’s nomination on the up and up.

Let him now lead the party to whatever fate awaits it.

 

Come back, Republican Party

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I share Barack Obama’s concern for the Republican Party.

Yes, the president of the United States — the nation’s leading Democrat, at least until January — is concerned that the GOP is fading away, it is morphing into something that cannot join in the act of governing.

That’s what he told late-night comic Jimmy Fallon in an interview to be broadcast tonight.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/282812-obama-im-worried-about-the-republican-party

Spoiler alert: The interview is a scream.

Obama said his party is delighted at the prospect of facing Donald J. Trump in this year’s presidential election. Trump’s fellow Republicans, though, aren’t so thrilled.

The president said the Republican presidential nominee should be someone who can do the job, understands the issues at hand, and “ultimately can still move the country forward.”

Does that sound like Donald Trump?

I’ve seen dominant political parties here in Texas. Both of them — Democrats and Republicans — have at times abused their dominance over the other side.

I came to Texas in the spring of 1984 and settled in the Golden Triangle region, which at the time remained a strong “yellow dog Democrat” stronghold. Local Republicans felt disrespected and dismissed by Democrats who held tightly onto virtually every office in three counties — Jefferson, Orange and Hardin.

The political landscape has shifted dramatically in Texas. Republicans now are the top dogs. They have clamped vise grips on every statewide office in Texas.

I moved to the Panhandle in January 1995 — and into the heart of GOP Country.

The Democratic Party virtually doesn’t even exist here, no matter what the few of them around the Panhandle would say.

Has it been good to have one party so dominant? No.

The president’s point, though, is that the national GOP has become something unrecognizable from the party that used to take pride in being able to govern.

As the president told Fallon: “But what’s happened in that party culminating in this current nomination, I think is not actually good for the country as a whole. It’s not something Democrats should wish for. And my hope is, is that maybe once you get through this cycle, there’s some corrective action and they get back to being a center-right party. And Democratic Party being a center-left party. And we start figuring how to work together.”

Work together. I believe that’s how government works best.

 

Here’s a ‘Dave’-like solution to picking nominees

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In the film “Dave,” Kevin Klein portrays the owner of an employment agency who bears this startling resemblance to the president of the United States.

Fate thrusts Dave into the role of filling in for the incapacitated president.

During a Cabinet meeting, the “president” — Dave — must find ways to cut the federal budget sufficiently to pay for some needed programs. He whips out a pencil and tablet and goes through the budget department by department and — presto! — finds the money.

Cabinet officials are stunned.

How might such a seemingly simple approach to problem-solving work in the real world of rough-and-tumble politics?

News organizations Monday night tallied up the delegates that Hillary Rodham Clinton has amassed and declared her to be the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States. She joins Donald J. Trump, who already had become the Republicans’ presumed nominee.

Here, though, is the rub. Sen. Bernie Sanders isn’t going quietly into the night. He vows to continue fighting Clinton for delegates all the way to the party nominating convention.

Why? He doesn’t like the “super delegate” system used by the Democratic Party. The supers are those party big wheels — elected officials, mostly — who get to vote for whomever they wish. Sanders, who only recently joined the party after serving in the Senate as an independent, thinks it’s unfair to count those super delegates prior to the convention. They can change their minds and he intends to persuade enough of them to do exactly that.

The Republicans don’t have that problem. They don’t have super delegates. Frankly, I prefer the GOP method.

What might Dave do?

Let’s try this out.

Call a meeting of the two major political parties’ top brass, GOP boss Reince Priebus and Democratic chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Put them in a room along with their parties’ lawyers and pose the question, “How about making this process a bit more uniform?”

Priebus and Schultz aren’t close. Imagine that, right? They have serious disagreements.

It seems totally within reason, though, for the parties to adopt more uniform delegate-selection processes. To be frank, the super delegate system used by the Democrats seems a bit weird. Sanders is hoping to change enough minds between now and the convention that he could “steal” the nomination from Clinton. I think that, by itself, is unfair and underhanded.

If both parties’ leaders believe in developing fair and even-handed methods of choosing their nominees, is it too much to ask them to hammer out an agreement that works for both sides?

I get that none of this nominating process is prescribed in the U.S. Constitution. It’s strictly a party matter. Heck, the Constitution doesn’t even mention political parties.

I’d even prefer to see the national parties lay down rules simplifying the method of apportioning delegates. Do they prefer to award them on the basis of the candidates’ share of the popular vote? How about winner take all? It makes no never mind to me. Just make it uniform.

The hodge-podge we have now makes me crazy.

Politics need not be this complicated, man.

Judge Curiel: hard-charging American lawyer

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Gonzalo Curiel was born in Indiana to parents who came to this country from Mexico.

He graduated from high school, went off to college, got his law degree and became an aggressive prosecutor.

He’s now a federal district judge. He’s an all-American guy, from what I know of him.

That, however, hasn’t stopped the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee, one Donald J. Trump, from launching a scurrilous attack on Judge Curiel. The reason for his attack? Trump called Curiel “a Mexican.” He called him a “disgrace,” and said other judges need to examine Judge Curiel.

Curiel, of course, is not “a Mexican.” He’s as American as Trump, whose own mother also was an immigrant.

That didn’t stop Trump from shouting from a campaign podium that Curiel needs to recuse himself from a case he is hearing involving the now-defunct Trump University. It seems that Curiel’s ethnicity disqualifies him from hearing the case because, according to Trump, he “hates” the nominee-to-be because of Trump’s inflammatory statements about Mexican immigrants.

Y’all, this is the latest in an interminable line of insults and provocation that have poured out of Trump’s pie hole ever since he announced his intention to seek the GOP presidential nomination.

Judge Curiel’s standing as a federal judge hearing this case is as solid as it gets. Trump’s suggestion that he cannot judge this case fairly is yet another attempt to denigrate someone solely on the basis of his ethnicity.

Trump’s accusations against Curiel are going to remain unchallenged by the target, the judge himself. As the Atlantic magazine noted: “Corrosive personal attacks aren’t new behavior for the presumptive Republican nominee. But unlike other targets of Trump’s ire, Curiel cannot defend himself in any forum. He acknowledged in an order last Friday that Trump had ‘placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue,’ but will almost certainly go no further than that observation. Curiel is bound by the judicial code of ethics, which says that federal judges ‘should not make public comment on the merits of a matter pending or impending in any court,’ including their own. The code also says judges ‘should not be swayed by partisan interests, public clamor, or fear of criticism.’”

Here’s the rest of the article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/donald-trump-gonzalo-curiel/485636/

If only another disgraceful exhibition of intemperance would gain traction among those who keep standing behind this guy. Who’s to say what effect, if any, these latest remarks are going to have?

From my perch in the middle of what’s going to be called Trump Country, it’s just one more example of a presumptive presidential nominee’s unfitness for the job he is seeking.

 

Trump voter offers a reason

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I had a conversation this morning with a friend, who announced to me she’s going to vote for Donald J. Trump this fall for president of the United States.

She is likely among a majority of Texas Panhandle voters who’ll do so. That’s no surprise, given this region’s strong Republican ties and its apparent intense loathing of Democratic nominee-to-be Hillary Rodham Clinton.

OK, so the conversation progressed.

I took a deep breath, looked over my friend’s shoulder at the TV screen in the lobby — which always is turned to the Fox News Channel — and said without offering specifics, “But Trump is not fit for the office.”

“Neither is Hillary,” my friend said.

I could feel my eyebrows lift.

“What has she done” to make her unfit for the presidency? I asked.

“I don’t know,” my friend said. “All I know is that I cannot vote for her.” She said she intends to vote for someone for president, it just won’t be Hillary Clinton.

I mentioned Gary Johnson, the recently nominated former New Mexico governor who’s going to run for the second election in a row as a Libertarian candidate for president.

She was unaware of Johnson’s candidacy. I encouraged her to take a look. She said she would.

We then agreed that we won’t talk politics from this day on … until after the election in November.

We’re still friends. I hope she still considers me a friend.

I took a profound feeling of non-acceptance away from that brief conversation this morning. I don’t get the sense that there’s anything in Trump’s alleged “platform” that appeals to my friend. She’s just not going to vote for Clinton because, I presume, she doesn’t trust her.

As for Trump, he’s tapped into some unknown reservoir of something among voters.

I know that he’s reeled in at least one Texas voter who’ll cast her vote for him.

My sense, though, is that the my friend has revealed more about the general electorate’s mood going into this presidential campaign than perhaps she realized.

There’s a lot negative karma in the air.

Really … a Sanders-Trump debate a bad idea

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I feel compelled to make an admission.

I was kidding when I sent out tweets that cheered the thought of a potential debate between Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and presumptive Republican nominee Donald J. Trump.

Yeah, I know. I shouldn’t kid about such serious matters.

One of these guys will be nominated by his party to run for president. It won’t be Sen. Sanders. It’s going to be the showman/carnival barker/rumor monger Trump.

The very idea of one guy who won’t be nominated debating the other guy who will is frankly preposterous — were you to ask me for my opinion.

Trump backed out, if you believe one version of how it came unraveled. He supposedly wanted Sanders to pay several million bucks up front. I’m not sure who would have gotten the dough.

But these debates ought to be reserved now — at this point in the campaign — for the individuals who’ll be nominated by the major parties. And, yes, if a third-party candidate gets enough public support, then invite that individual to take part, too.

So many conventional rules have been broken during this primary campaign. They start with the fact that Trump has survived this far into the GOP primary, given his unending string of insults, innuendo, lies and hourly flip-flops on controversial public policy statements.

The Republican and Democratic debates have been watched by the public not so much for the information one can glean from them, but for the entertainment value they bring to the serious process of nominating a presidential candidate.

Trump now has enough delegates in his pocket to be nominated in Cleveland. Clinton will have enough in her pocket very soon to get her party’s nomination in Philly.

Let’s focus now on how these two individuals are going to prep for what promises to be a series of barn burner debates.

 

How do you campaign against a moving target?

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So much about this presidential campaign is a puzzle and I’m having trouble finding the pieces to complete it.

I’ll start and finish with Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.

He has tossed every single bit of conventional wisdom into the Dumpster. Trump has no public service experience; he has demonstrated zero understanding of how government works; he has blustered, bullied and bloviated his way to this point in the campaign; his insults and innuendo should have doomed his candidacy months ago; his personal history is, well, checkered.

To my way of thinking, the most confusing element of this campaign is the absence of any philosophical grounding for this individual.

In normal election years, Democrats nominate a candidate who stands for a set of principles; Republicans do the same.

Hillary Clinton is about to become the Democratic nominee. She, too, has switched positions on occasion as she battles Sen. Bernie Sanders for her party’s nomination.

But one gets a general idea of Clinton’s world view: It seems to tilt left, with a more hawkish view of the use of military power than her more progressive political brethren.

Trump? Where does this guy stand? On anything?

He changes his positions almost hourly. Women should face punishment if they obtain an abortion; on second thought, he didn’t mean that. He would ban Muslims from entering the United States; oh, wait, that’s just a “suggestion.” He once was pro-choice on abortion; now he’s pro-life. He once called Hillary Clinton “great”; now he calls her “Crooked Hillary.” He said Mexico is sending drug dealers, rapists and killers into this country: but he says “I love Hispanics.” He has boasted about his philandering; now he seeks to woo the evangelical voters who comprise much of the GOP “base.”

How is Clinton going to campaign against any of that? How is she going to pit her ideas against his ideas, when he doesn’t seem to stand on a single principle — other than furthering his own ambition?

The late Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, Calif., that “there is no ‘there’ there.”

I’m sensing that Trump lacks a “there.”