Tag Archives: GOP primary

national news, political news

Christie earns praise

Chris Christie likely doesn’t give a crap that a blogger from North Texas is going to say something nice about him.

But … here goes anyway.

I didn’t watch the four-person GOP presidential primary “debate” the other night. I have seen plenty of clips from it, such as the former New Jersey governor’s tirade against the one Republican candidate who was missing from the joint appearance: Donald J. Trump.

He spoke the unvarnished truth about Trump. He called him “unfit” for public office, said he is a “bully” and a “tyrant,” and predicted he would be ineligible to vote for president in November next year because he’ll be a convicted felon.

If only Christie could generate enough interest and support among GOP primary voters. He’s going to likely languish in the middle of a shrinking gaggle of candidates seeking to stave off Trump’s assault on our government.

I am not yet clear on what I think of Christie’s policy positions. I am crystal clear, though, in supporting his effort to hold Trump accountable for the dastardly things he has muttered about “everyone.” The supposed GOP frontrunner has vowed to sic the Justice Department on all the critics who have dared speak ill of him … and that includes members of the media!

What the hell are Republican primary voters buying here by supporting this tinhorn autocrat?

Gov. Christie is calling him out. He’s also calling out his GOP foes for refusing to join him in calling Trump what he is: a lying, slandering, crooked fraud.

I applaud Chris Christie.

national news

Ronnie, we hardly knew ye

Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign appears to be imploding. Dude can’t get traction in a Republican Party dominated by the MAGA morons dedicated to the demagoguery fomented by Donald J. Trump.

DeSantis seeks to out-Trump Trump, but only the one-time POTUS and carnival barker is able to deliver the message … whatever the hell it is to his cult followers.

The Florida governor has dismissed his campaign adviser; he remains a distant second in all the GOP primary polls in key early voting states.

Trump, meanwhile, remains the prohibitive favorite among GOP primary voters despite being indicted thrice for felony crimes, with a fourth one on the way and despite spending campaign cash to pay off his legal bills. Think about this, too, for just a moment: A presidential candidate with his own Boeing 757 jetliner to fly him from place to place needs to dip into his contributors’ cash to pay legal fees? What in the hell is wrong with that picture?

Oh well. Let ’em stew in the GOP.

Looks like the GOP is going to nominate — yet again — an individual who simply is unfit for public office.

Isn’t this just a blast?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump

Cheney appears doomed

Liz Cheney is facing the mother of all conundrums as she seeks re-election to another term in the U.S. House of Representatives from Wyoming.

You see, Cheney serves on that select House committee searching for the truth behind the 1/6 insurrection. She has been highly critical of Donald J. Trump and his role in revving up the crowd to assault the nation’s Capitol Building on the day Congress was certifying the Electoral College results from the 2020 presidential election.

Cheney has managed, therefore, to anger many of her constituents for simply speaking truth to power.

I fear we are going to witness in a few days a political bloodletting that will occur for all the wrong reasons.

Cheney appears headed for defeat in the GOP primary in Wyoming. Trump has endorsed a fellow cultist to defeat Cheney. Never mind that Cheney voted with the Trump administration more than 90% of the time during Trump’s term in office. Or never mind that she remains as fervently conservative in her views as ever.

Her “sin” is that she believes Trump was wrong to rile up the crowd, sending them into battle to take down our government on 1/6.

“She’s done us dirty,” said Sharon Tuggle, who identified to CNN as a Trump supporter. “Look at how she’s done Trump.” Tuggle added that Cheney lost her vote because of the congresswoman’s work on the Jan. 6 committee.

“She’s supposed to be supporting him,” said Tuggle. “She’s a Republican for crying out loud.”

“I find her work on the Jan. 6 committee just repulsive,” said another female voter.

OK. Let me spell this out one more time. Cheney’s oath didn’t mention Trump. She took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, not Trump. That is what she is doing. She isn’t loyal to Trump. It’s the Constitution that deserves the undivided attention of all 535 members of Congress.

Be strong, Rep. Cheney. You have plenty of allies — such as yours truly — out here beyond your state’s borders.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

medical news, national news

Now it’s Trump vs. Pence

A weird political back story is being pushed to the forefront on the eve of the Georgia Republican Party primary election.

Donald J. Trump endorsed former U.S. Sen. David Perdue’s effort to win the party’s gubernatorial nomination. Former Vice President Mike Pence endorsed Gov. Brian Kemp’s bid for re-election.

The smart money at this moment says that Kemp is going to roll to an easy victory over Perdue. Which means that Pence is going to trample Trump in the fight for whose candidate gets Republican voters’ nod.

Trump vs. Pence, therefore, is going to end in a technical knockout — for the former VP … and possible rival to Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

This is really rich, man.

Trump got angry with Kemp because the governor wouldn’t buckle under Trump’s pressure to “find” enough votes to turn the state’s electoral result from Joe Biden’s column to Trump’s. So now the ex-POTUS is backing Perdue … sort of. You see, he now has washed his hands of Perdue’s bid because the ex-senator is trailing so badly that Trump doesn’t want to be associated with the losing candidate.

All Gov. Kemp did in the wake of the 2020 election was follow the law. He refused to pressure the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensberger, to do Trump’s bidding. Trump doesn’t believe in the rule of law; he believes instead in the “rule of keeping himself in power.”

If my voice mattered in Georgia — which, of course, it doesn’t — I would be pulling for Mike Pence’s guy over the dipsh** Donald Trump has endorsed.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

GOP: party of liars

It pains me to say this, but I feel as though I must get something off my chest. Whatever is left of the Republican Party has become a haven for liars.

The Texas Tribune, for instance, points out that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and one of the challengers in the GOP primary set for Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, happen to agree on a specious contention, that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald J. Trump.

As the Tribune reports: “The majority of Republican primary voters are very likely open to the argument that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the election,” said Jim Henson, a pollster and director of the Texas Politics Project. “It’s not a fringe position in the Republican party. It’s become orthodoxy.”

That “orthodoxy” suggests a narrow-mindedness I never thought I would see in what used to be considered one of the nation’s great political parties. It suggests a gullibility among a bloc of voters that portends danger ahead. Those who adhere to what everyone calls The Big Lie put our democratic process in dire peril of unraveling.

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/24/texas-attorney-general-election-integrity/

This is scary stuff, man.

Paxton has drawn the endorsement of Trump, even though Gohmert has been every bit the Trumpkin while representing East Texas in Congress. Indeed, Gohmert also has promoted another bit of “fake news” by suggesting that Barack Obama wasn’t qualified to serve as president because — you guessed it — he was “born in Kenya.”

You see, the once-Grand Ol Party has become an organization populated by ignorant cultists. It’s sickening in the extreme.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Watch for phony heroics among GOP candidates

Clearly it has become open season on the Joe Biden administration among Texas Republican candidates for public office. They all seem intent on positioning themselves as the polar opposites of the Democratic president … even if the office they seek has little to do with anything related to federal policy.

The Texas comptroller of public accounts provides an interesting example of what I am talking about.

The GOP incumbent Glenn Hegar is running a TV ad in which he declares that he is going to fight the Biden administration over protecting our southern border. How is he going to do that?

Hegar’s ad proclaims that he spent $3 billion on border security. I was wondering about an issue related to that bit of braggadocio: Does the comptroller have the discretionary authority to just send $3 billion in that manner, or must he do what the Legislature and the governor tell him to do?

I asked someone who covers state government extensively about that matter. He responded that government agencies have limited authority in some cases to exercise discretion in spending money, but the border money to which Hegar referred isn’t one of them. I have posed the question to the public information officer for the comptroller’s office and haven’t heard back from him.

I am left to wonder whether Hegar is misrepresenting his authority on that border security issue so he can muster up some anti-President Biden anger among Republican primary voters.

I will report back to you the response I get from the comptroller’s media flack.

Meantime, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the state’s top bean counter — Glenn Hegar — might be, um, overstating his role in “keeping Texans safe from illegal immigrants.”

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

 

national news

Most chaotic post-POTUS, too?

REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

Jeb Bush warned voters during the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary campaign about what we would get were Donald Trump elected to the nation’s highest office.

It would be “chaos.” The former Florida governor called it. He was spot on.

Of course, he didn’t last long during the GOP primary battle that year. However, his prediction has carried over into the post-presidency of the man who would serve a term as POTUS before being defeated for re-election in 2020.

The man’s post-POTUS time has been as chaotic as his time in office.

Who woulda thunk it?

He is trying to throw chaos into the search for the truth behind the 1/6 insurrection. He seeks to muck up the congressional inquiry through delay tactics. He is succeeding … so far!

There well could come a day when the chaos will expire. When order and reality will take hold. When we can learn the truth behind the riot that Trump incited.

I am hoping.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news, State news

Fruitcake fringe loses an AG candidate

Well, now. It looks as though Louie Gohmert is going to have the fruitcake fringe of the Republican Party electorate to himself as he challenges Ken Paxton in next year’s GOP primary for Texas attorney general.

Why is that? Another GOP fruitcake, Freedom Caucus member state Rep. Matt Krause of Fort Worth is going to run instead for Tarrant County district attorney. He had sought to run in the 2022 primary for Texas AG, but switched races.

Gohmert is still in. He joins Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush and former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman as challengers to the felony indicted Paxton, who is awaiting trial in state court on a charge of securities fraud.

Bush and Guzman are campaigning specifically against the corruption that Paxton brought with him to the AG’s office in 2015. I don’t know what U.S. Rep. Gohmert’s platform will be; he might want to push Paxton even farther to the right than he already stands.

There might be more entries, given the trouble that keeps swirling around Paxton. The FBI is conducting an independent investigation into allegations of corruption with his office; several top legal assistants quit earlier this year while citing allegations of improper behavior by the attorney general. Imagine that, will ya?

The waters are still roiling.

It’s gonna be fun to watch this race play out.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

local news

That’s why they’re called ‘exploratory committees’

What do you know about this? Texas state Sen. Pat Fallon, a Republican from Prosper, has decided against running for the U.S. Senate in 2020.

He had formed an exploratory committee to, um, explore the possibilities of challenging U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP primary.

He’s decided to stay in the Texas Senate and not expose his wife and young sons to the rigors of trying to pull Sen. Cornyn even farther to the right.

It’s a smart move, Sen. Fallon.

For starters, Sen. Cornyn is pretty far right already. He is a reliable opponent of gun control measures, of abortion rights, of the Affordable Care Act. That’s just three issues.

Trust me on this: Pat Fallon didn’t need to seek to make Texas’s senior U.S. senator even more conservative. So he’ll forgo a race against Cornyn.

It just goes to show that these efforts occasionally produce the kind of result that Pat Fallon has found. It’s why they’re called “exploratory committees.”

national news

Where are the GOP challengers with ‘heft’?

Joe Walsh has joined William Weld and Mark Sanford as actual and potential challengers to Donald Trump in the president’s quest for nomination by the Republican Party for another term in office.

A friend of mine wonders where the GOP challengers with “heft” are hiding. He believes Trump will “swat” any of the three challengers being discussed “like flies.” I fear he is right.

Who, then, are the hefty GOP heavyweights who might stand a chance of giving the president the primary campaign scare he so richly deserves?

I am having difficulty coming with names.

Former Secretary of State/Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell more or less comes to mind. He won’t walk onto the field. He had his chance leading up to the 1996 election when Bill Clinton was running for re-election. Gen. Powell begged off, citing the lack of support from his wife, Alma. I doubt Mrs. Powell has changed her mind. Besides, Powell’s time has passed.

I think also — are you reading for this? — of Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. Naww. He won’t do it, either.

I fear the GOP is left with three men who don’t stand a serious chance of inflicting any meaningful damage on Trump, who is raising many millions of dollars toward his re-election effort.

Mark Sanford is grievously damaged already. He once was South Carolina’s governor who messed around with a woman other than his wife; he skulked off to South America for a fling, while telling his staff to lie to the media about his whereabouts, instructing them to say he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail.” No good, Mark.

William Weld ran for vice president in 2016 on the Libertarian ticket headed by former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. Weld does have political experience, having served two terms as Massachusetts governor. But he ain’t gonna make the grade, either.

Joe Walsh served for a term as a congressman from Illinois. He’s a firebrand, a TEA Party advocate. He is ultraconservative. He also cannot stand the idea of Trump serving as president. He says things about Trump that many of us have said to each other at dinner tables and living rooms around the country.

I fear the GOP pool of challengers is thin, given the state of politics in the country at this moment. History shows that intraparty challenges against presidential incumbents have proven politically fatal to the incumbent. Sure, Trump is likely to have someone run against him, but he has rewritten the playbook and installed strategies that few “traditional” politicians can recognize, let alone emulate.

The GOP primary campaign will contain plenty of fiery rhetoric. Of that I am sure. Will it matter? I am thinking it won’t.

We’ll have to await the main event to commence sometime in the late summer of 2020 when Democrats nominate their candidate and Republicans swallow hard and send Donald Trump back into battle.

Oh … boy!