Whatever Trump Chooses To Say!
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Henninger said, in somewhat more words but better, what I have been alluding to. I just used different phraseology.
Yes, Republicans would rather tear each other apart because they are undisciplined, poorly led and more interested in self-deception. They also do not know how to stay in front of and employ technology.
The only benefit Repubs might receive, should they lose everything, is that whomever The Demwits turn into our next president will finish the destruction of America that Obama helped hasten and perhaps this will bar them from office for decades but then they always have the hapless Republicans to insure that may not happen because the Repubs have more Trumps and Cruz's lurking in the wing lusting to be president. (See 1 below.)
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As for Trump, his abortion comment was classic proof he is totally capable of self-destruction and taking a lot of others with him.
He is like that battery bunny, he just keeps on giving! Trump is a living abortion.
Donald reminds me of that old corny joke about the guy sitting on the beach and a hooker comes by saying "I am selling." They go off and have their session and he later gets a social disease.
Six months pass and he is on the same beach and the same girl comes by and says "I am selling." He asks, "what are you selling this time, cancer?"
Trump has proven to be a cancer on the body politic but American voters are perhaps still dumb enough to elect him out of anger and protest and Obama's two terms remain my evidence and yes, I might be dumb enough to believe this.
I must admit, with the passing of each day Trump, using his brain and tongue, does lower the bar making his defeat/rout easier. (See 2 below.)
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Will Republicans, led by Cruz, resort to employing Rule 40 and turning the Cleveland Circus into a three ringer? Stay tuned because the contestants seem to have more bullets left to aim at each other.
I wonder what Christie must be thinking now about his endorsement? Like a used car? (See 3 below.)
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Now let's go foreign: "With Europe its like the frog being boiled in a kettle ... They may wake up one day and find themselves cooked ..."
and
Nasrallah speaks and say nothing particularly new. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Obama’s Greatest Triumph
He is six months away from destroying both the Republican Party and Reagan’s legacy.
Barack Obama will retire a happy man. He is now close to destroying his political enemies—the Republican Party, the American conservative movement and the public-policy legacy of Ronald Reagan.
Today, the last men standing amidst the debris of the Republican presidential competition are Donald Trump, a political independent who is using the Republican Party like an Uber car; Ted Cruz, who used the Republican Party as a footstool; and John Kasich, a remnant of the Reagan revolution, who is being told by Republicans to quit.
History may quibble, but this death-spiral began with Barack Obama’s health-care summit at Blair House on Feb. 25, 2010. For a day, Republicans gave detailed policy critiques of the proposed Affordable Care Act. When it was over, the Democrats, including Mr. Obama, said they had heard nothing new.
That meeting was the last good-faith event in the Obama presidency. Barack Obama killed politics in Washington that day because he had no use for it, and has said so many times. The Democrats survived the Obama desert by going to ground. But frustrated Republicans outside Congress eventually started tearing each other apart.
After Mr. Obama won in 2008, Democrats controlled the Senate and House with large majorities. Normally, a party out of power is disabled but not destroyed by the presidency’s advantages. Democrats, when out of power, historically remain intact until the wheel turns again. Their ideology has been simple: tax and spend.
The minority Republicans began well. In 2010, ObamaCare passed with zero Republican Senate votes, and Dodd-Frank with only one Republican Senate vote. It was a remarkable display of party discipline.
In the first term, Republicans and conservatives fought Barack Obama. In the second term, they decided it made more sense to fight each other.
Among the reasons is that the Republican leadership missed the messaging force of social media until it was too late. Congressional politics is mostly process. Modern politics is mostly message. The Obama message machine, “tax cuts for millionaires,” never stopped.
With no party spokesman for conservatism, an ideological vacuum existed. Freelance operators filled it.
They included two hyper-ambitious Senate freshman, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. They also included a movement to purge and cleanse conservatism, led by groups such as Heritage Action and by talk radio hosts. Together they conjured an internal enemy—the Republican Establishment.
Conservatives complain constantly about the bias of the mainstream media. With the bar so low on website entry, members-only media alternatives emerged, such as RedState and Breitbart News.
But the hated MSM is essentially a Roman phalanx. It stays in formation and protects the progressive castle. The conservative alternatives showed no such discipline. Early into the second Obama term, they commenced an internecine political war.
The right began demanding that congressional Republicans conduct ritualistic suicide raids on the Obama presidency. The MSM would have depicted these as hapless defeats by presidential veto, but some wanted the catharsis of constant public losses—on principle.
By early 2015, when the primary season began, virtually all issues inside the Republican Party had been reframed as proof of betrayal—either of conservative principle or of “the middle class.” Trade is a jobs sellout. Immigration reform is amnesty.
With his Cheshire Cat grin, Barack Obama faded into the background and let the conservatives’ civil war rip. For Republicans, every grievance, slight or loss became a scab to be picked, day after day.
In time, the attacks on “the establishment” and “donor class” became indiscriminate, ostracizing good people in the party and inside the conservative movement. The anti-establishment offensive created a frenzy faction inside the Republican base. And of course, it produced Donald Trump.
The Trumpians and Cruzians, who of late have been knifing one another in a blind rage, say this is a rebirth. So was Rosemary’s baby.
The New York Times this week published a lead piece by Nicholas Confessore called “How the G.O.P. Elite Lost Its Voters to Donald Trump.” It is a gleeful, disingenuous and malign burial of the one thing the Democratic left never thought it could kill: Ronald Reagan’s conservative legacy.
The piece, which mostly transcribes the opinions of “some conservative intellectuals,” is a road map to Republican self-destruction, delegitimizing everything Ronald Reagan stood for—tax cuts, deregulation, entitlement reform, even economic growth. (Archaic footnote: Reaganomics produced an historic economic boom, for everyone, from 1983-90.)
Conservatives, it says, instead of challenging the economy Barack Obama rendered half-dead for two terms, now favor “wage subsidies, relocation aid” and “even targeted infrastructure spending.”
And Citizens United merely enabled the “donor class,” identified as Paul Singer and Charles and David Koch, who favor the discredited “Ryan budgets,” a proxy for Reagan.
In early 2015, Republicans were one election away from defeating a weak Democratic opponent and controlling both houses of Congress. Barring a miracle in Cleveland, they likely are six months away from losing two of those three plus the Supreme Court.
Barack Obama should frame the Confessore piece and hang it in the Obama Library. His presidency produced a moribund U.S. economy for eight years. In a response so bizarre that future historians will gape, the Republicans decided to destroy each other.
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2) Trump’s Abortion Gaffe
His campaign will be a daily political adventure from here to November.
Some months ago we wrote that Republicans who nominate Donald Trump for President would be diving off a cliff without knowing what’s at the bottom, and Wednesday was the latest illustration. The first-time candidate showed how little he understands about the politics of abortion by suggesting that “there has to be some kind of punishment” if abortion were made illegal.
“For the woman?” asked progressive partisan Chris Matthews of MSNBC. Mr. Trump: “Yeah, there has to be some form.” He added that men who impregnate women who have an abortion should not be punished.
The remarks caused an uproar—on the right and left—when the network released them Wednesday. Not even the most fervent abortion opponent favors punishing a woman who has one. IfRoe v. Wade were overturned, opponents would try to pass laws that punish abortion providers or the clinics where they take place. Mr. Trump’s remarks were thus a political gift to Democrats and the left, who would like nothing better than to stereotype abortion opponents as misogynists who want to put women in jail.
The Trump campaign realized the mistake and he soon reversed himself. “If Congress were to pass legislation making abortion illegal and the federal courts upheld this legislation, or any state were permitted to ban abortion under state and federal law, the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb. My position has not changed—like Ronald Reagan, I am pro-life with exceptions.”
All candidates make mistakes, and we’ll credit the campaign statement as Mr. Trump’s genuine belief. But the gaffe is nonetheless telling because it shows how much the Republican front-runner’s campaign is a daily policy adventure. As he likes to say, he’s his own best adviser, and he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. The result can be a refreshing sense of political candor, but as often as not he also hands his political opponents a sword.
Mr. Trump’s loyal GOP partisans have been willing to ignore his rhetorical mistakes and excesses, but Democrats will be merciless. So will the media if he secures the GOP nomination. His abortion blunder is doubly troubling because it will reinforce his growing unpopularity among women voters in both parties. Imagine his Wednesday remarks playing as part of a national advertising loop from June to November. His talk-radio chaperons are going to have their work cut out.
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By Jonathan Tobin
How frustrated is Ted Cruz with John Kasich? We already knew that the Texas senator is unhappy with Kasich’s somewhat inexplicable decision to try and split the votes of those Republicans that don’t want Trump in states where Cruz is giving the front runner a run for his money. But yesterday, Cruz showed that he might be willing to use some arcane rules to keep Kasich’s name from being placed in nomination in Cleveland. Perhaps Cruz will think better of the infamous rule 40(b) of The Rules of the Republican Party that was revised before their 2012 national convention. But the dustup illustrates the ongoing tension between the two campaigns that reduces the chances that Trump can be stopped from winning the nomination that both covet.
The rule in question was a product of the 2012 convention that was controlled by the Mitt Romney campaign. Like every national convention since the last contested one in 1976, the 2012 edition was a lengthy infomercial for the nominee. Romney’s people got to write the script for the convention and choose the speakers. But while they were sloppy enough to let New Jersey Governor Chris Christie give a keynote address about himself rather than Romney and to allow Clint Eastwood to give a bizarre rambling talk to an empty chair, they were very concerned about letting Ron Paul’s acolytes steal the show. In particular, they wanted to prevent Paul from stealing some of Romney’s thunder on the evening the convention would nominate him. So they cooked up a rule that said a candidate had to have a majority of the votes of eight state delegations in order to have their name placed in nomination and to then get votes. Since Paul was the only GOP contender that hadn’t stood down before the conclave, it was solely directed at stopping his fervent libertarian supporters from getting any airtime.
It was a petty measure that further alienated Paul’s crowd and didn’t do much to ensure the GOP’s Romney lovefest got more of an audience. But it’s still on the books and could conceivably play a role in this year’s edition at Cleveland. As it happens, as Politico points out, even though Cruz has won nine states to date, he only holds a majority of the delegates in five. Kasich has won just one, in his home state of Ohio. But while Cruz has a chance for more wins, it’s not clear whether Kasich will wind up winning another, leaving him, in effect, a modern-day version of a staple of the conventions of the past: a favorite son candidate.
If Trump fails to get the 1,237 delegates he needs for a majority and the nomination, the Cleveland convention will be the most dramatic Republican gathering in 40 years, and no one can say what the outcome of such an open battle will be. But the drama will start even before it opens as a GOP committee writes new rules that will all be aimed at giving one side or another an advantage.
It’s not clear to me that Cruz would actually help himself by telling his representatives to join forces with the Trump crowd to keep rule 40 on the books. If so, then Kasich’s delegates, which might be enough to put Trump over the top, will be up for grabs rather than committed to the governor and force a second ballot when anything might happen. But while he ought to be thinking that far ahead, the mere mention of it (in spite of the fact that some of the earliest picks for the rules committee, are, as Politico reports, inclined to spike number 40 indicates that Cruz and Kasich are locked in a fight that is every bit as nasty as the one they are both conducting against the front runner.
That fight was made obvious yesterday when the Cruz camp began a $500,000 ad buy in Wisconsin attacking Kasich as a “liberal governor” that will air in the days before that state’s primary. Given the stakes in Wisconsin, it’s hard to blame Cruz for focusing on him rather than Trump. If we assume that Trump voters are unpersuadable and that the 60-70 percent of the electorate that wants someone other than the billionaire to be the nominee is in play, then ensuring that Kasich doesn’t get enough votes to let Trump win another plurality is Cruz’s priority.
For those in the GOP that have longed for the field to winnow to the point where the majority that doesn’t want Trump will not be beaten by the rock solid plurality of Trump voters, this is very discouraging. Polling in Wisconsin is all over the place. One of the recent surveys actually gives Kasich second place to Trump in what is virtually a three-way tie. The other two polls out in the last week give the lead to Cruz with Kasich far behind.
Cruz’s path to an overall majority of delegates or something close to it is narrow. Kasich doesn’t have one but is counting on an open convention giving him the nomination because he’s the most electable candidate. But if the pair of them spend the next few weeks battling each other, then Trump’s already likely victory becomes certain.
The point here is that all the talk of rule 40 is not only premature, it will be moot if the two last standing non-Trumps in the GOP race are fighting rather than cooperating in a desperate battle to keep the reality star from getting to 1,237. You can blame it on Kasich’s outsized ego or his fantasy scenario about the nomination. Or you can fault Cruz for sounding as if he’d like to deny Ohioans the right to vote for their governor on the first ballot in Cleveland.
But no matter where the blame falls, what we are witnessing is the crackup of the stop Trump movement. It’s obvious that any day that Cruz and Kasich are fighting each other is a day that Donald Trump gets a little bit closer being the GOP nominee. What isn’t obvious is why both Kasich and Cruz don’t realize this.
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4)
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Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah recently made two media appearances in close proximity. The first, a recorded speech aired on February 16, 2016 in memory of the organization’s soldiers killed in combat, included his threat that Hezbollah was capable of targeting the ammonia tanks in Haifa Bay. The second speech was a March 21, 2016 interview on Hezbollah-affiliated al-Mayadeen network, in which Nasrallah referred again to the threat posed by Hezbollah to Israel’s sensitive facilities, including its nuclear facilities. Nasrallah, who customarily speaks to the political and public discourse in Israel, here too referred to issues on Israel’s security agenda. However, although he addressed Israel directly and devoted a large portion of his remarks to it (in contrast to his speeches in recent years, which have been focused primarily on the war in Syria), his remarks were not aimed solely at Israel, but elsewhere as well: first and foremost to the Lebanese public, followed by the greater Arab world. Despite the possibly fateful meaning of his words in the Israeli context, Nasrallah’s appearances and the meaning of his statements should be examined in the greater light of events on the strategic level. Overall, Nasrallah’s remarks can be seen as directed at his various enemies and referring to different dimensions. The first dimension, which affects Nasrallah to the greatest extent, is the war in Syria. Nasrallah has naturally taken the side of his allies (Assad, Iran, and Russia) while assuming an aggressive stance toward his enemies in this theater (the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the many factions opposing Assad). The February 16 speech came at the height of the international effort in the Geneva talks to reach a ceasefire arrangement in Syria. Predictably, Nasrallah praised the Assad regime and its importance to the integrity of Syria, and tried to exert pressure on the negotiators to reach understandings that would safeguard Hezbollah’s interests in in Syria. By the second media appearance, the larger picture had changed, with the ceasefire entering into effect, Russia’s surprise announcement that it was (partially) withdrawing its forces from Syria, and the withdrawal of certain Iranian forces. The Russian move prompted the United States and its regional allies to question the future of the fighting by the Shiite axis in Syria. Nasrallah addressed that point, stating that he had been briefed in advance about the measure, as he had been briefed when Russia entered the campaign. He thereby attempted to demonstrate the strength and unity of the Hezbollah-allied axis, as if a chain of well-orchestrated and carefully timed steps had been planned to achieve positive results in the war in Syria. He stressed the effectiveness of the Russian move, and the fact that an important advantage was achieved for Assad and his allies, thereby again portraying Hezbollah’s involvement as contributing to the defense of Lebanon. The second dimension focuses on the actions of Hezbollah’s enemies, which in Nasrallah’s perspective are linked with each other: the United States; the Sunni Arab world, with Saudi Arabia and Turkey playing the key roles; and Salafi-jihad organizations led by the Islamic State and al-Qaida. Aside from familiar accusations of subversion by Saudi Arabia and Turkey and their support for terrorism, and criticism of the United States for not realizing that the alternative to Assad is the Islamic State or Jabhat al-Nusra, a new factor was added to the equation, namely, the measures against Hezbollah led by Saudi Arabia: Riyadh’s decision to withdraw its financial support for the Lebanese army and threats to take further measures in this direction; restrictions on citizens of the Gulf states visiting Lebanon; and the Arab League’s classifying Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. The Saudi measures were designed to punish Lebanon for its inability to take Saudi Arabia’s side, or in other words, Riyadh’s view of Lebanon as a country completely controlled, politically and militarily, by Hezbollah and its interests. Saudi money carries great weight in the Lebanese economy, as do the local Sunni financial magnates whom Saudi Arabia supports, and thus the slashed support constitutes a dramatic step, and requires Nasrallah, as the accused party, to refute the domestic criticism. Moreover, the idea among Hezbollah’s opponents in Lebanon that the organization’s involvement in the Syrian civil war will bring the war into Lebanon itself has only become stronger. In response, Nasrallah clung to his defiant posture of “business as usual.” The third dimension, closely related to the previous levels, involves the internal Lebanese sphere. Despite Hezbollah’s dominance and the gradual weakening of its opponents in the country, the organization has not yet succeeded in bringing about the election of a president by the Lebanese parliament. May 2016 will mark two years since President Michel Suleiman left the presidential palace, and the presidential vacuum remains. The March 14 movement, dominated by the Sunnis and led by Saad al-Hariri, is supporting Suleiman Frangieh as its candidate for presidency. For its part, Hezbollah persists in its support for Michel Aoun, and was helped by the withdrawal of his bitter enemy, Samir Geagea, who decided to throw his support to Aoun. The deadlock has not been broken, however, and no solution is in sight, which for Hezbollah highlights the limitations of its political power within Lebanon, despite the strengthening of its position. Realizing this, Nasrallah is trying to reach understandings that will pave the way towards a sustainable solution in the presidential palace. It is by no means certain that a head-on collision with Saudi Arabia, as consistently reflected in his remarks, is the right way for him to bring about an end to the presidential crisis. Finally, there are Nasrallah’s comments to and about Israel. Nasrallah’s threats are presumably sincere and reflect his intentions, as illustrated on more than one occasion in the past. In any event, it appears that there is little dramatically new in the substance of what he said. Hezbollah’s firepower capabilities in range and accuracy for reaching these targets are well known to the military and political echelons in Israel, and it is hard to believe that his words took anyone by surprise. Nasrallah’s statements do not necessarily mean, however, that Hezbollah will be in any rush to hit the targets he mentioned, and it is clear that he will have to take Israel’s response into account. Hezbollah’s firepower should not, of course, be taken lightly, and military preparations (offensive and defensive) are needed to reduce the potential damage. Israel should also prepare for other strategic surprises hinted at in the past, such as underground infiltration and/or seizure of an Israeli community in northern Israel. Most important at present, however, is not only the question of whether Hezbollah is able and wishes to damage sensitive installations in Israeli territory when a major conflict with Israel develops, but why Nasrallah is mentioning it now. As is clear from an array of contexts, Hezbollah is engaged in both a battle for survival in the regional campaign and in power struggles on its home territory. Nasrallah’s threats to Israel are designed to remind the organization’s supporters and critics that the bedrock of its existence is the principle of resistance, i.e., the struggle against Israel. Flaunting the organization’s military capabilities reminds constituents of Hezbollah’s success against Israel during the Second Lebanon War, when it succeeded in disrupting daily life in northern Israel with ongoing rocket fire for more than a month. Nasrallah has good reason to mention this, since that war was not only the most recent significant success of the Arab world against Israel on the battlefield (at least so it was perceived at the time), but also the last time that the Arab consensus favored Hezbollah and the organization enjoyed overall support from the Sunni countries – an achievement that appears unimaginable in the current situation. As the tenth anniversary of that war approaches, it appears that Hezbollah is trying to remind itself and other actors in the Middle East of this fact, thereby restoring to Hezbollah some of the legitimacy it gained in 2006. In addition, although Nasrallah emphasized in his latest speech that he does not foresee a conflict with Israel in the near future, it is entirely possible that he senses that Israel is bound to initiate a conflict with Hezbollah. He is trying to erect a solid wall of deterrence in order to convince Israel not to attack. Thus when Israel tries to understand Nasrallah’s remarks, it is important to consider the overall context in which his statements were made. It therefore follows that his speeches constitute not only a warning to Israel about the damage it can expect in the next war, but also, and chiefly, the absence of any desire for escalation, and a wish to postpone the next conflict through deterrence against Israel. ============================================================================================== |
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