Friday 17th of May 2024
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panic in the GOP....

 

panic

The sky-is-falling panic that has gripped the Republican establishment and the conservative movement over the impending nomination of Donald Trump as the party’s standard bearer and 2016 presidential nominee is misguided. Trump is not the problem; trumpism is and will increasingly become so.

If Donald Trump dropped off the face of the earth today, the basic facts would not change. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, nor any other national Republican figure can – or want to – stem the tide of bigoted outrage that has gathered around Trump and defines today’s GOP. The hard and inconvenient truth is that the Republican electorate in significant numbers wants a candidate that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, and war mongering. The polls show it. Certainly the votes show it. All three of the top remaining contenders – and throw Dr. Ben Carson in that pile – fit the profile.

Their voters, according to polls, believe in large numbers that Obama is a Muslim, that he was not born in the United States, think slavery should have continued, believe all Muslims are terrorists, think whites are more victims of racism than people of color, see homosexuality as a crime against nature and the bible, want the U.S. government to torture suspected terrorists, believe women should not have control over their bodies, and deny human-driven climate change as a fact. Who in the Republican Party has stood up against this wave rather than jump on it?

Trumps differs from Cruz and Rubio in degree and decorum, not in substance, not in policy, not in political opportunism. To the degree they do differ with Trump, as Cruz and Rubio have aggressively attempted to demonstrate, it is that they want to be seen as more extreme than he is on domestic, economic, and foreign policy.

While the party is willing (out of political desperation) to declare that there is no room in the GOP for Trump, it is not willing to say the same in clear, bold and unambiguous terms of his supporters. And neither are Cruz and Rubio. Where is the logic in calling Trump every name in the book and then saying you are willing to accept his supporters who essentially hold the same views? Where is the integrity in saying, as Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich did at the most recent debate, that they would support Trump if he is the nominee despite their characterization of him in the worst terms imaginable? So much for #nevertrump.

The country cannot move forward as long as the Republican Party remains and grows as a party of bigots, bullies and extremists. And that is exactly what it has become in the main. These tendencies are not just expressed in the name-calling, detention room atmosphere presidential race, but in Congress, governors’ mansions and state legislatures across the nation. Is Trump’s behavior more egregious than dozens of wasted votes to repeal or gut the Affordable Care Act or refusal to consider a nominee to the Supreme Court? Is Trump any worse than Michigan’s Rick Snyder, Maine’s Paul LaPage, Kansas’ Sam Brownback, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, or Indiana’s Mike Pence? It is a national surge of far-right Republicans that are launching policy bombs at working people, communities of color, the gay community, and women.

read more: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/07/trumps-greatest-contribution-to-the-nation-would-be-to-destroy-the-gop/

 

the xtians fight over trump...

Trump is a fake Christian, but he knows how to bullshit with Christian mumbo and jumbo. Some Christians can see through the crap. They are. But others, possibly through receiving goodies from Trump, directly or indirectly support Trump — as a Christian. They are of course completely deluded by religion and then deluded by Trump... The problem here is that two delusions don't cancel each others. They add up into a worse state of delusion which will end up in massive delusionment.

Here we see the President of "Liberty Christian University", Jerry Falwell Jr, going with Trump... WHY? We don't really know why, but I guess the President of this university sees cash at the end of the tunnel. Not only that he poopooes the other Christians who are against Trump:

"that, when it comes to Christians who will not vote for Trump, I think the Bible has a word for people like that — it's fools".

 

Obviously he has not done his homework. His wife, Becki Falwell, mind you, goes for the jugular:

 

"they come out with their fangs, or Edward Scissorhands or something. Even people that claim to be Christian, they have been the cruelest"...

 

 

So some other Christian namely the moustachioed Michael Brown tries to tone things down a bit: 

"There are many other Christians ... who cannot imagine pushing the button or pulling the lever in support of Trump, a man who has managed to bring the Republican party to all-time lows and who has made a mockery of the campaign process."

 

And despite claiming to be a "Christian", Trump is only toying with people's fears and allegiances. Trump is as Christian as my left show after a spit and polish. Still a piece of fake leather on top of a sole of rubber.

 

rejected by bloomberg...

Michael R. Bloomberg, who for months quietly laid the groundwork to run for president as an independent, will not enter the 2016 campaign, he said Monday, citing his fear that a three-way race could lead to the election of a candidate he thinks would endanger the country: Donald J. Trump.

In a forceful condemnation of his fellow New Yorker, Mr. Bloomberg said Mr. Trump had run “the most divisive and demagogic presidential campaign I can remember, preying on people’s prejudices and fears.” He said he was alarmed by Mr. Trump’s threats to bar Muslim immigrants from entering the country and to initiate trade wars against China and Japan, and he was disturbed by Mr. Trump’s “feigning ignorance of white supremacists,” alluding to Mr. Trump’s initial refusal to disavow support from David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader.

“These moves would divide us at home and compromise our moral leadership around the world,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a column published Monday on Bloomberg View, his opinion site. “The end result would be to embolden our enemies, threaten the security of our allies, and put our own men and women in uniform at greater risk."

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/us/politics/

the marches stand as a lasting monument to human folly?...

 

...

It was serious, but no one in Europe took it seriously. The unbearable lightness of being. A week ago, the Spanish government actively encouraged all Spaniards to go to the streets and join dozens of very large marches for gender equality. When asked about the infection hazard, one minister publicly laughed. The images of those marches have acquired a tangible, pungent horror. You see them against the backdrop of the hundreds of dead since and the laughter, the hugs and the claps from the marches stand as a lasting monument to human folly.

Spain was not alone in this. Also a week ago, a French municipality organized a large convention of Smurfs, the little blue creatures who live in mushroom-shaped houses in the forest, made famous by a Belgian comic series. According to the mayor of the small town where the convention took place, the people of Landerneau got all their costumes from all the shops in the area. “We figured that a bit of fun would do us all good at the moment.” More recently, after President Macron publicly advised the French to be more cautious in their daily lives, nothing changed and the images of the crowded esplanades in Paris forced his government to coercively enforce their closure.

At the time of the Madrid marches and the Smurf convention, I was returning from a long journey in Asia and could not help noticing the contrast. In India or Singapore or Vietnam, people were dramatically changing their behaviour to adapt to the coronavirus. They were going out less, avoiding large groups, taking turns on the elevator and, of course, wearing masks everywhere, even if perhaps they looked less elegant in them. The idea that they would organize a Smurf convention to have a little fun is enough to make you laugh.

All this is well and good. It might be a cultural difference. The problem, of course, is that it probably explains why Europe and not Asia is now the epicentre of epidemic. And it carries a dark foreboding for the future of a continent which seems to be poorly prepared for a world beyond normal times.

 

Read more:

https://quillette.com/2020/03/14/conceit-and-contagion-how-the-virus-sho...

 

Read from top.

 

Note: If I remember well, Quillette is a moderate right wing website...

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Note: Even Paris was not shut down during WW1 and WW2... See:

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34605