That freedom of speech and thought stuff is all very well, but nowhere near as important no how as the ultimate Victory of the Glorious People’s Revolution.

Kos himself is consequently laying down the Party Line. Hillary is going to be the democrat (aka communist) party nominee. You will all support Hillary, and you will all refrain from criticizing Hillary, or else!

[O]n March 15:

I will no longer tolerate malicious attacks on our presumptive presidential nominee or our presidential efforts. What does that mean?

No attacks on Hillary Clinton using right-wing tropes of sources. She’s had 30 years of bullshit flung at her from the Right, there’s no need to have Daily Kos give them an assist.

Constructive criticism from the Left is allowed. There’s a difference between constructive and destructive criticism. Do I need to spell it out? It’s the difference between “We need to put pressure on her to do the right thing on TPP” versus “she’s a sell-out corporatist whore oligarch.” In general, if you’re resorting to cheap sloganeering like “oligarch” or “warmonger” or “neocon”, you might want to reframe your argument in a more substantive, issue-focused and constructive matter. Again, I’m not interested in furthering the Right’s hate-fueled media machine. If that’s what you want, might I suggest Free Republic?

Saying you won’t vote, or will vote for Trump, or will vote for Jill Stein (or another Third Party) is not allowed. If that’s how you feel, but have other places in which you can be constructive on the site, then keep your presidential feelings to yourself. Those of us who care about our country and it’s future are focused on victory. If you aren’t, then it’s a big internet, I suggest you find more hospitable grounds for your huffing, puffing, and stomping of feet.

If you are going to be pessimistic, you better support it. There’s a difference between “Clinton can’t beat Trump” and “Clinton can’t beat Trump in Alabama”. There is also a difference between the blanket “Clinton can’t beat Trump” and “Looking at the polling, I’m worried that Clinton is falling behind Trump because X, Y, and Z”. Obviously, that also applies to races and issues down the ballot, not just the presidential. If you are going to be a Debbie-Downer, you better have a damn good reason to justify your pessimism. Rank, unsupported pessimism is anathema to our data-driven, reality based culture.

No re-litigating the primary. I don’t give a shit what Clinton or Sanders said in the primary anymore. It’s over. Move on. Again, if it’s not over on March 15 because Sanders has narrowed his delegate deficit, then this doesn’t apply. But once this primary is over, it’s over. Anyone who is interested in keeping our primary divisions open and festering can go do that somewhere else (and be as relevant as the 2008-vintage PUMAs were).

Battle “the establishment” where it makes sense. So you are angry at the establishment? Go stick it to the man in downballot races where there good anti-establishment candidates on the ballot, like the Maryland Senate race and
Donna Edwards. To be clear, Daily Kos will depart from recent practice by endorsing all Senate candidates that want our help, because the Supreme Court is just that important. But you, as individuals, have choices, and you can direct your energy and money to those candidates who are more closely aligned with your values. And we will battle the establishment together on things like the primary calendar and superdelegates. But we pick our battles, and in many places, the establishment will be our allies. Or to paraphrase some dumbfuck, we go to election season with the party we have, not the one we wish we had.

We are really in this together. I know there have been rough fights, and some community members have been terrible to each other. But consider this a sorts of amnesty period. Let bygones be bygones. Don’t bring in comments from past battles into new ones. Wipe the slate clean, and let’s move forward together as allies, not enemies or, at worst, frenemies.

When Kos and his friends really win, deviationists will be taken to State Security Headquarters and executed with a pistol shot to the back of the neck.

Tom Nichols argues quite persuasively, and on the basis of good precedent, for the unthinkable in the event that the election comes down to Trump versus Hillary.

A few years ago, The Federalist’s publisher, Ben Domenech, suggested that conservatives consider dumping the “Buckley Rule,” the late William F. Buckley’s admonition always to choose the most conservative candidate who can win. As Ben pointed out, things have changed since Buckley first issued this advice, including that the elite determination of “who can win” is often flawed. The Buckley Rule, for example, might have led to supporting Charlie Crist—you may shudder at will—instead of Marco Rubio in the 2010 Florida Senate race.

In its place, Ben raised the possibility of a “Hamilton Rule,” named after Alexander Hamilton. Although both were Federalists, Hamilton despised John Adams and his coterie among his own party to the point where he was willing to lose the election of 1800. “If we must have an enemy at the head of government,” Hamilton said in exasperation, “let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible.”

In other words: Better to lose to a true enemy whose policies you can fight and repudiate, rather than to a false friend whose schemes will drag you down with him. This is a painful choice, but it also embraces realism while protecting the possibility of recovery in the future. The need to live to fight another day is why conservatives should adopt a Hamilton Rule if, God forbid, the choice comes down to Hillary and Trump.

My hands almost could not type those words, because I think Hillary Clinton is one of the worst human beings in American politics. She has few principles that I can discern, other than her firm conviction that she deserves the Oval Office for enabling and then defending her sexually neurotic husband. She lies as easily as the rest of us breathe. She has compromised national security through sheer laziness at best, and corrupt intent at worst. If elected, she will enrich Wall Street and raid the public coffers while preaching hateful doctrines of identity politics to distract America’s poor and working classes.

But Trump will be worse. Morally unmoored, emotionally unstable, a crony capitalist of the worst kind, Trump will be every bit as liberal as Hillary—perhaps more so, given his statements over the years. He is by reflex and instinct a New York Democrat whose formal party affiliation is negotiable, as is everything about him. He has little commitment to anything but himself and his “deals,” none of which will work in favor of conservatives or their priorities.

His judicial appointments will likely be liberal friends from New York. His Great Wall of Mexico will never be built, and employers will go right on hiring cheap labor and outsourcing jobs, just as Trump does with his made-in-Mexico suits. His China Smoot-Hawley Tariff will never be implemented. His administration, led by a vulgar, aging man-child who is firmly pro-abortion, who jokes about having sex with his daughter, and brags about his wealth, will hurt the poorest and most vulnerable among us—including the unborn.

Trump, of course, will dissemble and whine about all these eventual failures. His fans will excuse him, as they do now, but they have short attention spans and will vanish in later midterm elections and future presidential contests. His white nationalist supporters, clinging to him like lice in the fur of an angry chimp, will shake their fists along with him for a time, until they too eventually slink away. By 2020, his core constituency will be a tiny sliver of what’s left of the white working class, pathetically standing at the gates of empty factories they thought Trump would re-open.

More to the point, after four years of thrashing around in the Oval Office like the ignorant boor he is, voters will no longer be able distinguish between the words “Trump,” “Republican,” “conservative,” and “buffoon.” He will obliterate Republicans further down the ticket in 2016 and 2020, smear conservatism as nothing more than his own brand of narcissism, and destroy decades of hard work, including Ronald Reagan’s legacy.

Read the whole thing.

I must admit that he has a point.

The normal operations of American two-party politics fail to protect the country from crooks, scoundrels, liars, and complete shits. In 2004, the democrats nominated a traitor for the presidency. In 2008, they elected a totally-unqualified community organizer, i.e. a professional agitator. We have had worthless playboys (JFK), vulgarian shit-kicker crooks (LBJ), a lachrymose neurotic (Nixon), a wholly incompetent prig (Carter), and an amusing scoundrel (Clinton) as presidents in my lifetime. We have elected plenty of egotists, but we have never elected to the chief magistracy any spoiled and unhinged egomaniacs not reliably connected to reality. The system at least saw to that.

In the case of Donald Trump, we are dealing with a completely unprecedented phenomenon. Every past president, however unethical, deluded, or malevolent, could be relied upon to operate within certain broad bounds of conventionality. None of them, for instance, was ever going to cancel the next election and remain in office.

Hillary is a crook and a liar, to be sure, but Hillary in the final analysis is just a corrupt, left-wing democrat. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is something out of the nation’s Hollywood nightmares. Donald Trump is Willie Stark from “All the King’s Men” (1949). Donald Trump is “Lonesome” Rhodes from “A Face in the Crowd” (1957). Donald Trump is the barbarian outsider swept into power by popular emotion, operating completely outside conventional norms, mores, and expectations. Donald Trump talks happily of forcibly deporting 12 million people. No normal American politician would try to do something like that. Trump might. And there isn’t really any telling what else someone like Donald Trump might do.

Trump candidacy predicted by Gilbert Shelton in 1967.

P.J. (in 2016) sends a letter to Pat (in 1968) instructing him how to save America from the disaster looming in the former’s time.

You can get next to these people.

The awful Republican is named Don Trump. He’s a senior at Penn.

The awful Democrat is named Hillary (two l’s) Rodham. She’s a junior at Wellesley—exactly the same age as us.

It’s possible we know Hillary already. She went to Maine East High in Park Ridge outside Chicago, right up Harlem Avenue from Oak Park where we went to high school. She was in a Methodist Youth Group. We were in a Methodist Youth Group. We may have dated her. And erased the memory.

So I have a plan. I’ve enclosed money. (No, you didn’t get rich. A buck is only worth 15 cents in 2016.)

This Don Trump is the easy part. Skip some classes. I seem to recall you’re ahead of me on that part of the plan. But (I checked our transcript) your grades are shit this semester no matter what. Fly Youth Fare standby to Philadelphia.

Trump is the campus loud mouth New Yorker. You won’t have trouble finding him. Tell him you’re part of a commune that wants to pay too much rent for a crappy place in a bad part of town.

He’ll be glad to have coffee or a mu tea or whatever with you. (You’ll have to pay.) Slip the STP in his java. He’ll freak. He’s on the verge anyway. The cat’s been a space case since birth. Skip town before he starts peaking.

Way to go!

I just checked the mental hospitals in New York. A “Donald Trump Jr.” has been an in-patient in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue since January 1968. Good karma, man.

Getting rid of Hillary Rodham is more complicated.

Read the whole thing.

Via Morning Joe: Ted Cruz’s latest anti-Hillary ad, 0:51 video.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

-—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby