1854 poster: “Uncle Sam’s youngest son, Citizen Know Nothing.”
Don Surber says:
Trump won. Get over yourself
Republican Governor Rick Scott of Florida stood up like a statesman today and said what had to be said.
Trump won.
Donald Trump is ahead by 250 delegates with about 1,000 delegates left to pick. If he gets half those delegates, he is at 1,200 — 37 shy of a majority. The party will not deny him the nomination if he is ahead by 100.
The neocons at National Review and the Weekly Standard should suck it up and admit defeat. In the marketplace of ideas, they lost. Their utopian ideal failed. Americans no longer want to invade countries. It is time for the Robert Taft wing of the party to steer the party — and the nation — back to the middle.
Sorry, Don. There seems to be some confusion here.
Trump won a plurality of delegates. That’s all. He has been getting the most votes of any individual candidate in a field of 17 GOP candidates that gradually reduced itself to 4. But he has nothing resembling a majority. He certainly has not won.
In order to secure the nomination, he needs 1237 votes. Trump actually has 678. Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich together have 718.
Donald Trump has done well at winning the most individual support in a big-field-of-candidates race, but now things are changing. It is becoming a Donald Trump or Not-Donald-Trump (meaning Ted Cruz) proposition. If all the Not-Donald-Trump Republicans come together (and they have to. It is either that or swallow the indigestible, unelectable Donald Trump), then Trump loses.
Moreover, the primary contests are moving West, out of the Rust-Bucket East and the Fever-Swamp South to the American West, natural Cruz country.
Don argues that all Trump has to do is get half the remaining delegates to be up to 1200. But Trump is a natural minority candidate. His support is coming from cross-over democrats, from low information voters (who previously voted for Obama), and from (alas!) our loudest-Paleocon-in-the-bar lunatic Nativist fringe. (I like Ann Coulter, but, really! Ann…) Trumplestiltskin has a ceiling. That ceiling has been reliably less than 50% so far, and I think it is going to stay that way.
Trump will arrive at the convention with some low 40% of the delegate count, blustering and making threats about Trumpshirts rioting if he isn’t automatically given a majority. And the Republican Party is not going to listen. The polls show Trump losing to Hillary (who could probably be beaten by your average box turtle), and the Republican Party wants to win. Republican political operatives often look like the Washington Generals playing the democrats as the Harlem Globetrotters, but even GOP operatives ought to be able to deal with the Convention maneuverings of a spoiled narcissistic millionaire whose preferred political counselor is a three-way dressing mirror.
sound awake
“Suicide Of The GOP… Or Rebirth?â€
Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
Republican wailing over his prospective nomination aside, Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton like a drum in November.
Indeed, only the fear that Trump can win explains the hysteria in this city.
Whatever one may think of the Donald, he has exposed not only how far out of touch our political elites are, but how insular is the audience that listens to our media elite.
As the Wizard of Oz was exposed as a little man behind a curtain with a big megaphone, our media establishment is unlikely ever again to be seen as formidable as it once was.
Those Republicans who assert that a Trump nomination would be a moral stain, a scarlet letter, the death of the party, they are most likely describing what a Trump nomination would mean to their own ideologies and interests.
Republican strength today, on Capitol Hill and in state offices, is at levels unseen since Calvin Coolidge. Turnout in the GOP primaries has been running at levels unseen in American history, while turnout in the Democratic primaries is below what it was in the Obama-Clinton race of 2008.
This opportunity for Republicans should be a cause for rejoicing, not all this weeping and gnashing of teeth. If the party in Cleveland can bring together the Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich forces, the White House, Supreme Court and Congress are all within reach.
A Trump campaign across the industrial Midwest, Pennsylvania and New Jersey featuring attacks on Hillary Clinton’s support for NAFTA, the WTO, MFN for China — and her backing of amnesty and citizenship for illegal immigrants, and for the Iraq and Libyan debacles — is a winning hand.
The Trump campaign is not a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. It is a rebellion of shareholders who are voting to throw out the corporate officers and board of directors that ran the company into the ground.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-18/suicide-gop-or-rebirth
sound awake
Krauthammer: I Was Wrong for Laughing at Trump… Democrats Are Worried (VIDEO)
Jim Hoft Mar 17th, 2016 6:10 pm 190 Comments
Charles Krauthammer finally admitted tonight that he was wrong when he laughing at Donald Trump six months ago.
The FOX News pundit has been one of Donald Trump’s leading GOP Beltway detractors.
Krauthammer: He’s demonstrated the ability to bring out people who aren’t regular voters, aren’t regular Republicans, and he could alter the map. I think Democrats who thought six months ago, who thought he was a joke, I thought he was a joke for a nominee for the Republican Party, and a lot of people thought as well. We were all wrong. So he has a capacity to appeal. So we have no way of knowing. But I do think Democrats are beginning to think that this is not a slam dunk and this guy he doesn’t play by the rules. He makes them up. And under a new set of rules she could lose to him.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/03/krauthammer/
JDZ
I agree with David Brooks (this time, which is pretty unusual).
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/opinion/no-not-trump-not-ever.html?_r=1
No, Not Trump, Not Ever
March 18, 2016
David Brooks
The voters have spoken.
In convincing fashion, Republican voters seem to be selecting Donald Trump as their nominee. And in a democracy, victory has legitimacy to it. Voters are rarely wise but are usually sensible. They understand their own problems. And so deference is generally paid to the candidate who wins.
And deference is being paid. Gov. Rick Scott of Florida is urging Republicans to coalesce around Trump. Pundits are coming out with their “What We Can Learn†commentaries. Those commentaries are built on a hidden respect for the outcome, that this is a rejection of a Republicanism that wasn’t working and it points in some better direction.
The question is: Should deference be paid to this victor? Should we bow down to the judgment of these voters?
Well, some respect is in order. Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.
Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.
And yet reality is reality.
Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.
Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.
This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes.
“His remarks represent an extraordinary mix of inaccurate claims about domestic and foreign policy and personal and professional boasts that rarely measure up when checked against primary sources,†they wrote.
He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12. He surrounds himself with sycophants. “You can always tell when the king is here,†Trump’s butler told Jason Horowitz in a recent Times profile. He brags incessantly about his alleged prowess, like how far he can hit a golf ball. “Do I hit it long? Is Trump strong?†he asks.
In some rare cases, political victors do not deserve our respect. George Wallace won elections, but to endorse those outcomes would be a moral failure.
And so it is with Trump.
History is a long record of men like him temporarily rising, stretching back to biblical times. Psalm 73 describes them: “Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. … They scoff, and speak with malice; with arrogance they threaten oppression. Their mouths lay claim to heaven, and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance.â€
And yet their success is fragile: “Surely you place them on slippery ground; you cast them down to ruin. How suddenly they are destroyed.â€
The psalmist reminds us that the proper thing to do in the face of demagogy is to go the other way — to make an extra effort to put on decency, graciousness, patience and humility, to seek a purity of heart that is stable and everlasting.
The Republicans who coalesce around Trump are making a political error. They are selling their integrity for a candidate who will probably lose. About 60 percent of Americans disapprove of him, and that number has been steady since he began his campaign.
JP
Natural Cruz states like Cali? Seriously. You guys need to take something. You are becoming delusional.
Steve Gregg
The Donald is not winning a battle of ideas. He doesn’t have any. All he brought was a bushel of bumper stickers.
hrefn
David Brooks doesn’t yet have a clue, but I am happy to provide him with one, and it is this. Trump’s supporters are aware of his flaws, his tendency toward bombast and the sweeping generalization. They don’t care.
They prefer his damn the torpedoes approach.
Trump is correct on illegal immigration, and was the first to defy the sneers of the politically correct to speak the plain truth. He is correct on Islam. He is correct on trade. He has harnessed the frustration of the Republican voters who handed both houses of Congress to the GOP, but found
nothing changes.
Who should we vote for? A Jeb!? A Mitt? McCain? Kasich? A bunch of ineffectual milquetoast losers who are indistinguishable from the Democrats? (If you doubt me, try to name some important political principle any of these careerists has sincerely espoused AND FOUGHT FOR, which is clearly different from his Democrat colleagues.)
On the other side of the ballot we have Uncle Bernie the tax-happy socialist, and the failed Sec. of State, serial prevaricator,
and pedophil rapist apologist (IMHO).
The Donald has flaws, but they pale in comparison.
Failure to do all one legally can to keep Hillary from the presidency is the height of civic irresponsibility.
John Meyer
I agree that Trump is a misfortune, first because a reasonable republican candidate would be odds-on to defeat Hillary who as already earned a 60% dishonest and untrustworthy rating. Furthermore, Trump. while not a Fascist or anything like it, is not a gentleman and not the man one would want as president.
But the truth is that Trump ran over 40% in Super Tuesday II, that his polls are in the 40’s and that he is going to be tough to stop. I was for Rubio, am now for Cruz and would wilingly support Kasich over Trump.
It is perfectly legitimate to have an open convention and ally to nominate another candidate. But a third party or just sitting home pouting if Trump wins is surrendering the republic to Hillary and her certain takeover of the Supreme Court for a generation. Trump may be distasteful and an uncertain gamble, but with Hillary we know what we are getting and it is guaranteed awful!
vanderleun
“The Donald is not winning a battle of ideas. He doesn’t have any. All he brought was a bushel of bumper stickers.”
Like “Hope and Change”?
It works. Sad but true.
JDZ
Remember Obama as “a blank canvas upon which voters are intentionally free to project their own fantasies and desires”? Trump is an even blanker canvas.
GoneWithTheWind
Trump may indeed be a ‘blanker canvas”. So what is the choice? Elect one of the other candidates who intend to harm us and the country or elect Trump who at least is saying the right things? I actually favor Cruz in this but I reject the idea that if Trump is the candidate that somehow Hillary would be a better choice simply because Trump is too plain spoken and honest and hurts your feelings or that he is a billionaire and that hurts your senseabilities. If Trump is the nominee I will vote for him.
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