Tag Archives: CPAC

Pence to skip CPAC?

How interesting, eh? Former Vice President Mike Pence, who well might run for president in 2024, is going to skip the annual Conservative Action Political Conference that is set to begin this week.

Why? Oh, wait! It’s because many of the CPAC ranks of right-wing political radicals actually wanted to hang him when the 1/6 insurrection erupted on Capitol Hill.

They carried signs and shouted out their desire to kill the VP because he wouldn’t do what they demanded, which was to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and hand the result to Donald Trump … who encouraged them to do what they did on that terrible day.

Instead, Pence decided to follow the U.S. Constitution and simply preside over the counting of the Electoral College results that determined that Joe Biden won the election — and that Donald Trump lost it!

CPAC is thought to be a sounding board for conservative GOP presidential candidates. Not all of ’em, not this year!

Pence is staying away.

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Trump gets support from CPAC … imagine that!

This is likely the biggest non-surprise of the current political season, but it’s still worth a comment or two.

It comes in the form of the endorsement of Donald J. Trump’s continuing presence on the political scene by the Conservative Action Political Conference, which met this past weekend in Dallas.

I cannot help but shake my noggin.

The CPAC faithful want Trump to run for president in 2024. They have decided, I reckon, to ignore the two impeachments during his term in office, the stunning pile of evidence that mounts from the House select committee’s probe into the 1/6 insurrection and perhaps the possible indictments for criminal activity that might come from the Justice Department.

Oh, and never mind that Trump has yet to lay any sort of agenda for the future. He continues to wallow in The Big Lie that he keeps alive by suggesting the 2020 election was stolen from him.

That’s leadership? That’s moving toward the future?

At CPAC, conservative Texans show Donald Trump loyalty | The Texas Tribune

The “conservative movement” has been hijacked, along with the Republican Party, by the cult of personality led by Donald J. Trump.

The Texas Tribune summed up nicely the theme of Trump’s keynote speech: Trump stuck to a familiar script and repeated the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even as those claims have repeatedly been debunked by even his own former aides. He painted cities run by Democratic leadership as hellscapes awash in crime and lamented what he described as an open southern border with Mexico.

The Texas crowd ate it up. ā€œIā€™m over the moon, Iā€™ve been trying to see him for years,ā€ said Therese Boehnlein, who drove from Waco to Dallas to see Trump.

Well … OK. The ex-POTUS dropped a hint or two that he’ll run again in 2024. That will be his third attempt at the White House. Just remember something: He got fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016 and a lot fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020.

Truly astounding.

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CPAC paints us as ‘enemy’

There they go again. The Conservative Political Action Conference, holding its annual meeting down the highway from me in Dallas, is labeling those of us who oppose its right-wing agenda as “the enemy within.”

Good grief, man! The particular epithet came from U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, the Florida loony bin Republican, who says all liberals are “socialists” who want the entire country to march in lockstep with their agenda … or else!

I don’t know what the “or else” is, other than to presume that it must involve some form of punishment.

Hey, but here’s the really bad news: Donald J. Trump is going to soil the CPAC stage on Saturday. Oh, he’ll feed the attendees more Big Lie crapola. He might drop another hint or two about whether he intends to run for POTUS in 2024.

He might … if he isn’t under felony indictment by the Justice Department for conspiring to commit sedition after the 2020 presidential election — which Trump lost!

Yep, in the CPAC world of Us vs. Them, those who hold different views are the “enemy within.”

Sickening.

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CPAC loons stand out

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

If only this message could get to a former Texas congressman who retired at the beginning of the year and has been succeeded by a certifiable nut case.

I will post this rebuke anyway in the hope that Mac Thornberry sees what one of his former constituents thinks of the lunatic who took his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Ronny Jackson, a Republican (of course), attended the Conservative Political Action Conference festivities this weekend in Dallas. He then promptly made a case — from my vantage point — for why he should be stripped of his medical license.

The doc decided to offer a “diagnosis” of President Biden that, shall we say, was unflattering in the extreme. He asserted — without ever examining the president — that Joe Biden suffers from cognitive decline; that he has dementia; that he is unfit for office.

Jackson is now the 13th Congressional District representative in Congress. He tweets what he calls his brains out daily. Then he shows up at these right-wing feeding frenzies and says patently untrue things about the commander in chief.

Why mention Mac Thornberry? Well, I know Thornberry pretty well. I covered him while I worked as editorial page editor of the Amarillo Globe-News from 1995 until 2012. He took office the same week I reported for duty in the Panhandle. Not one time did I ever see or hear Thornberry use the kind of incendiary language that pours forth from Ronny Jackson’s pie hole. Did I agree with Thornberry? No. I didn’t. My point is that Thornberry conducted himself with a certain quiet dignity that clearly is missing in the loon who succeeded him.

Ronny Jackson, the former Navy rear admiral, is appealing to the same rabid fanatical base that supports the disgraced 45th POTUS. What’s more, he is offering medical diagnoses without any basis for them. For that reason alone this nut job needs to surrender his medical license.

Mac … are you out there? Speak to us! Tell us that your successor — not the current president — is unfit for his job!

Just a hunch about Trump

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Hunches usually aren’t very reliable barometers of political trends and Lord knows my own hunches have let me down a time or three.

However, I am going to toss one out there for you to ponder. It is that Donald John Trump will not run for president in 2024.

He stood before the Conservative Political Action Conference crowd over the weekend and said he won’t form a third political party. Trump wants to remain active in GOP politics. They took a straw poll of CPAC attendees and Trump finished first with 55 percent of those attending who said they wanted him to be the Republican Party presidential nominee in ’24.

The ex-president no doubt took all of that to heart. He might run again for the office he lost bigly after a single term to Joe Biden.

But … why? How? To what end?

Trump is facing multiple crises unrelated to politics. They are totally related to whether he will face criminal charges regarding his business “empire.” How in the name of rational thought does someone run for president if he is indicted by a grand jury for, let’s see, campaign finance violations? Or income tax fraud?

How does even someone as slippery as Donald Trump do that?

Trump once boasted that he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.” A lot of us laughed when he said it in 2016. His acquittal in the Senate trial of inciting an insurrection wiped that smile off my face.

None of that means he will be able to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Yeah, he’s got that faithful base. Is it sufficient to carry him to victory in the primary with the potential crises exploding all around him?

That hunch of mine says, um, “no.”

I just hope it doesn’t let me down again.

Die, Big Lie … just die!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Some lies take on lives of their own.

The Big Lie from the 2020 presidential election is one of them. It won’t die. It can’t die. It lives in what passes for the hearts and minds of millions of Americans who are willing to swill the poisonous notion that Donald Trump actually won that election despite the numbers that tell us he lost it … bigly!

President Joe Biden beat Trump soundly. Trump, though, keeps feeding the Big Lie to those who are willing to swallow it. He did it again at the Conservative Political Action Conference this past weekend.

Trump repeats false claim he won 2020 election, teases potential future White House bid during CPā€¦ – YouTube

He recited the Big Lie. The faithful cheered him on. He kept it up. They cheered some more.

The Big Lie lives on for as long as there are people among us who believe it.

Trump talks to CPAC

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Well now … that was no surprise. Or was it? Nah. Not even close.

Donald Trump strode to the stage in front of the Conservative Political Action Conference and tore into President Biden and his critics within the Republican Party.

As The Hill reported: “We all knew that the Biden administration was going to be bad, but none of us even imagined just how bad they would be and how far left they would go,ā€ Trump told a crowd of enthusiastic supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Fla.

Sigh …

Trump tears into Biden, GOP critics in first post-presidency speech | TheHill

The ex-president also let it be known that he won’t form a third political party and that he plans to remain active in Republican Party matters well into the future.

I think I’ll just sigh again.

The twice-impeached, the defendant in multiple lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct and the target of potential criminal indictments vows to be a GOP player.

What is undoubtedly most astonishing to me and others is that the GOP faithful appear to be lining up behind this clown. Good luck with that.

My favorite line from Trump’s speech? “If Republicans do not stick together, the RINOs that we’re surrounded with will destroy the Republican Party,ā€ he added. Yep, he called his critics RINOs, Republicans In Name Only.

Wow, man!

I won’t predict it, but I have difficulty understanding how someone so deeply flawed at every level possible can be a factor on the American political stage. It surely must speak to the nature of the modern Republican Party, which is that it is totally without any moral compass.

That fits Donald Trump to the letter. Don’t you think?

Ted Cruz: ‘sniveling coward’ of the year

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Ted Cruz takes the grand prize as the “sniveling coward” of this still young year.

I kind of like the term “sniveling.” It’s so, um, descriptive. You can draw a mental picture of someone cowering in a corner, sobbing while crouched in some sort of fetal position.

It’s an epithet that the Texas U.S. senator threw at a fellow Republican presidential candidate in 2016. Yep, that would be Donald John Trump, the guy who eventually won the presidency that year. You recall the moment, yes? Trump tweeted an unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz, Ted’s wife. Ted went after Trump with ferocity, calling him a “pathological liar,” a guy with “no morals,” and yes, he called him a “sniveling coward.”

Trump is all of that. So, too, is Ted Cruz … I mean the sniveling coward part.

You see, after Trump got elected Cruz began sucking up to The Donald. They became best friends. Cruz became afraid of the damage Trump might cause were he to remain committed to his earlier view of Trump’s morals, his lying and his lack of courage.

He cowered in the face of potential payback. Thus, he became a “sniveling coward.”

I suppose you could say he burnished his “sniveling coward” credentials by jetting off to Cancun while Texans shivered in the dark during that horrible winter storm. Oh, and get this: Cruz then decided this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference to mock Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York progressive member of Congress, who came to Texas and raised $5 million in storm relief … while Cruz was hightailing it to the beach in sunny, balmy Mexico.

All of these examples I have cited offer plenty of evidence to suggest that Ted Cruz is very much the “sniveling coward” he once said of an ex-president to whom he now professes blind fealty.

Cruz makes me want to puke.

What has happened to conservatism?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Someone a whole lot smarter than I am will have to explain what in the name of political sanity has happened to the modern U.S. conservative movement.

I am sitting out here in Flyover Country looking at the parade of goofballs, lunatics, seditionists and cult followers traipsing onto the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. I am shaking my head in utter disbelief.

These loons stand before the adoring CPAC crowd and denigrate actual conservatives and true-blue Republicans. These are the folks who have had the gumption to be critical of the Loon in Chief, Donald Trump. That’s it. That is their mortal sin, in the eyes of these morons.

The real conservatives aren’t invited to attend this event. They are basically booed in absentia off the stage whenever someone, such as Ted Cruz, mentions their names out loud.

I am not a conservative, so I have no particular dog in that fight. I am just a spectator and a blogger who wonders — as is my right — about the health of a once-vibrant political movement.

Were I to diagnose the well-being of the conservative movement, I would declare it to be taken over by body snatchers. They are no longer a viable political movement, a governing philosophy. They are loyal to an imbecile who in the course of four years as president of the United States managed:

To run up the greatest national debt in history, alienated this nation from our most valuable international allies, destroyed the decorum associated with the highest office in the land, took dead aim at ethnic and racial minorities, was impeached twice by Congress — the second time for inciting an insurrection — and then lied to the nation and allowed many hundreds of thousands of Americans to die needlessly from a killer virus that has swept over the world.

However, the cultists at CPAC have invited Donald J. Trump to speak and for him to declare that some phony “revolution” he proclaims to lead will continue into the future.

I believe with all my soul that Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald W. Reagan are spinning their graves … and that were they around today none of them would be allowed to speak at today’s perverted gathering of so-called conservatives.

Ya gotta watch this … really!

Ted Cruz speaks at 2021 CPAC: Full speech – YouTube

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The link I have attached to this very brief post is of Ted Cruz, Texas’s infamous junior U.S. senator, the guy who sought to flee to Cancun while the state he represents shivered in bitter cold weather.

I just don’t have anything to add to this video, other than it is about 17 minutes long. Cruz is speaking to fellow fanatics at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla.

He is one of the warmup acts, I suppose, for Donald John Trump, whose speech Sunday night will bring CPAC’s meeting to a close.

Cruz is just truly despicable.

That’s all I have. B’bye … for now.