George Will Leaves the Republican Party; Calls for Defeat of Republicans

In my view America is at a point where each individual needs to make the decision as to whether or not they will support or be complicit in evil or instead work to oppose it. While his supporters may shun me or unfriend me, in my view, Donald Trump and the policies he is pursuing personifies evil, "childgate", if you will being only the most blatant example of the man's immorality.  I strongly reject Andrew Sullivan's argument that Democrats need to give Trump his border wall in order to address the irrational fears of his base that they are "losing their country" - a country stolen from Native Americans.  Appeasing irrational fears and outright racism and bigotry is not a solution.  Moreover, Trump's promised wall would likely never be completed given the decade or more of condemnation lawsuits that would be required to acquire the land on which it would be built. Thus, the true way to oppose the immorality of the Trump/Pence regime is to flee the GOP and work to defeat EVERY GOP candidate until the Party either rejects Trump and Trumpism or dies as a political force.  As Fortune reports, George Will - a long time GOP stalwart - has left the GOP and is calling for opposition to Trump.  He is not alone.  Here are article highlights:

George Will, a longtime political commentator and staunch defender of the conservative movement, chided the Republican Party Friday, citing the party’s support for Donald Trump in the upcoming 2020 presidential election. Will mentioned that he had switched his voter registration from Republican to “unaffiliated” in the state of Maryland. He told the Washington Post, where he writes a column, that he made the change several weeks ago, after House Speaker Paul Ryan endorsed Trump for the 2020 election. The move follows the departure of other notable conservatives from the Republican Party, such as Mary Matalin, a longtime strategist for the party.

On Friday, Will published a column in the Washington Post that further explained his view, using the kind of excoriating language his columns are known for. The column, titled “Vote against the GOP this November,” argued that the number of Republicans in Congress “must be substantially reduced.”

Quoting from a variety of works, such as Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons and The Federalist Papers, Will also found caustic words of his own for Republican leaders, notably Ryan. The House Speaker, Will wrote, “sold his soul… for a tax cut” and had become one of “the president’s poodles.”

Although Will has been a vocal critic of President Trump in the past, his statements and actions on Friday surprised many political observers on social media.

Will was a contributor to Fox News between 2013 at 2017. In May 2017, he became a political contributor for NBC news and MSNBC. Previously, he served as editor of National Review and wrote a back-page column for Newsweekbetween 1976 and 2011.

Will's Washington Post piece is something I never thought I see come from him.  In the end, Will puts morality and decency ahead of party.  Here are excerpts:

Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of misrule, clarified something. Occurring less than 140 days before elections that can reshape Congress, the policy has given independents and temperate Republicans . . . . fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote. The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers. They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them. Consider the melancholy example of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with [Trump] today’s president, this Vesuvius of mendacities, without being degraded. . . . . Ryan traded his political soul for . . . a tax cut.
 Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president’s poodles, not because James Madison’s system has failed but because today’s abject careerists have failed to be worthy of it.  Recently Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is retiring , became an exception that illuminates the depressing rule. He proposed a measure by which Congress could retrieve a small portion of the policymaking power that it has, over many decades and under both parties, improvidently delegated to presidents. Congress has done this out of sloth and timidity — to duck hard work and risky choices. . . . But the Senate would not vote on it . . . .
 The Republican-controlled Congress, which waited for Trump to undo by unilateral decree the border folly they could have prevented by actually legislating, is an advertisement for the unimportance of Republican control. In today’s GOP, which is [Trump’s] the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him. . . . And to those who say, “But the judges, the judges!” the answer is: Article III institutions are not more important than those of Articles I and II combined.

George Will: Pence, the Worst Person in Washington

Over the years at times I have seen political pundit George Will as more and more extreme and damaging to the concept of "conservative" political thought.  That said, compared to pretty much all of the Republican Party and the racists and religious extremists that now comprise the bulk of the GOP base, George Will nonetheless comes across as a true conservative of the old mold.  Mr. Will reflects a time when honor, honesty, and a measure of decency still counted for something within the Republican Party.  As Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell drag the Republican Party and conservatism in general further and further into the moral and ethical cesspool, a small rear guard of conservatives of the old mold struggle to resist the moral disintegration of conservatism.  Part of this effort involves calling out  those doing incalculable harm to the nation and society.  In a Washington Post column, Will calls out a man in some ways more sinister and dangerous that Trump himself: Mike Pence, a man who feigns piety yet turns a blind eye to immoral and illegal conduct.  Two telling sentences:  "Trump is what he is,  . . . . which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying."  Here are more column highlights: 

Donald Trump, with his feral cunning, knew. The oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness, could, Trump knew, become America’s most repulsive public figure. And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.

Last June, a Trump Cabinet meeting featured testimonials offered to Dear Leader by his forelock-tugging colleagues. . . . . The vice president chimed in but saved his best riff for a December Cabinet meeting when, as The Post’s Aaron Blake calculated, Pence praised Trump once every 12 seconds for three minutes . . . .

Between those two Cabinet meetings, Pence and his retinue flew to Indiana for the purpose of walking out of an Indianapolis Colts football game, thereby demonstrating that football players kneeling during the national anthem are intolerable to someone of Pence’s refined sense of right and wrong. Which brings us to his Arizona salute last week to Joe Arpaio, who was sheriff of Maricopa County until in 2016 voters wearied of his act.

Arpaio, a grandstanding, camera-chasing bully and darling of the thuggish right, is also a criminal, convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge’s order to desist from certain illegal law enforcement practices. Pence’s performance occurred eight miles from the home of Sen. John McCain, who could teach Pence — or perhaps not — something about honor.

Henry Adams said that “practical politics consists in ignoring facts,” but what was the practicality in Pence’s disregard of the facts about Arpaio? His pandering had no purpose beyond serving Pence’s vocation, which is to ingratiate himself with his audience of the moment. 

[O]n Jan. 27, 1838, Lincoln, then 28, delivered his first great speech, to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. Less than three months earlier, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Alton, Ill., 67 miles from Springfield, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. Without mentioning Lovejoy — it would have been unnecessary — Lincoln lamented that throughout America, “so lately famed for love of law and order,” there was a “mobocratic spirit” among “the vicious portion of [the] population.” . . . . Pence, one of evangelical Christians’ favorite pin-ups, genuflects at various altars, as the mobocratic spirit and the vicious portion require.

It is said that one cannot blame people who applaud Arpaio and support his rehabilitators (Trump, Pence, et al.), because, well, globalization or health-care costs or something. Actually, one must either blame them or condescend to them as lacking moral agency. Republicans silent about Pence have no such excuse.

There will be negligible legislating by the next Congress, so ballots cast this November will be most important as validations or repudiations of the harmonizing voices of Trump, Pence, Arpaio and the like. Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.

As dangerous as Trump is, Pence is perhaps the more sinister evil.  BOTH Trump and Pence need to be taken down by the Russiagate/obstruction of justice/Michael Cohen investigations. 

Clueless Straight White Males Make Excuses for "Religious Based" Homophobia

George Will and David Brooks - clueless straight white guys

A Facebook friend and fellow LGBT activist shared a piece from Slate that underscores to me the most maddening thing about far too many heterosexual white males - and many heterosexual white Christians in general.  NONE of these individuals had one iota of input on their being white, being heterosexual or being born into right wing Christian families.  That had NOTHING to doe with the winning hand that they were dealt. Yet far too many act as if their random luckiness somehow invests them with special virtue and excuses them from any responsibility to hold even a shred of empathy or respect toward those who through no fault of their own happened to be born black, LGBT, Hispanic or born into non-fundamentalist Christian families.  Worse yet, they expect those not dealt such lucky hands in life to quietly accept the bigotry and discrimination targeted at them by, you guessed it, the white, heterosexual Christians.  The hypocrisy and self-centered nature these folks is simply stunning.  The Slate piece blasts those who attack gays for wanting non-discrimination laws enforced and once again would place toxic, hate based religious belief over the civil rights of others. One of the targets of the piece in New York Times columnist David Brooks who is lamenting what the GOP has become, yet continues to engage in the mindset that helped turn the Republican Party into a toxic cesspool that it is today.  Here are excerpts from Slate:

Why does it seem that, every time a national debate erupts about the place of minorities in American life, a gaggle of Straight White Guys with little connection to or understanding of these minorities holds forth on how they should or shouldn’t resolve their grievance about unequal treatment? This week’s version came in response to Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Division, the Supreme Court case of Jack Phillips, a Christian baker who refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple . . . Phillips is seeking a license to discriminate based on artistic and religious freedom.

This week’s featured culprits: David Brooks writing in the New York Times, and George Will and political scientist Greg Weiner in the Washington Post. Each of their pieces made some reasonable points. But each betrayed a galling inability or unwillingness to truly consider what it might feel like to be a disfavored minority in modern America—to enter a store and be stamped for rejection based on a stigma you’ve already endured your entire life. In other words, they refused to let empathy shape their thinking.

This appeal to empathy is not a plea for powerful men to feel sorry for minorities; it’s about creating the moral habits of mind that involve putting yourself in others’ shoes so you can better understand the many sides of an issue that disproportionately affects people who aren’t you. If decent white men should have learned anything from the Trump election, Charlottesville, the police killings of unarmed black men, and the nationwide sexual harassment scandal, it’s that we have a special responsibility to better learn and practice empathy so we can make more informed decisions and wreak less havoc across the world.

With that in mind, I present five arguments advanced by Clueless Straight White Guys about religious-based anti-LGBTQ discrimination and explain why they’re clueless:

Argument No. 1: It’s just cake; buy it somewhere else.

Why it’s clueless:  . . . . “go elsewhere” entirely misses the point of this case. The feeling seems to be that if a major material hardship is not at issue, LGBTQ people should just suck it up and not fuss about such ethereal things as seeking dignity and avoiding the humiliation of exclusion from the public realm. As I’ve argued, full access to both commercial accommodations and marital recognition is a basic matter of equal dignity. For black Americans, standing a few feet further back on an Alabama bus was, yes, a material hardship for toiling housecleaners and waitresses on their feet all day; but just as important, it was an affront to dignity and it was deemed, quite properly, a constitutional affront. . . . . This case is about equality, not shopping.

Argument No. 2: It’s not like we’re condoning something as bad as racial discrimination.

Why it’s clueless: This is a fundamental failure of understanding history—itself a failure of empathy because history requires putting yourself in the worlds of others. The argument here is that when religion was used to justify slavery and racial discrimination in the past, those people were obviously being disingenuous. But today’s use of religion to defend other forms of prejudice is, just as obviously, sincere.

But the Christian explanations for segregation really were deeply felt. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly thrown this rationale out. . . . . The trial judge in the case that later outlawed bans on interracial marriage declared in his decision that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents … The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

These judges stated or conceded that the religious beliefs propping up racism were sincere. Fortunately, that didn’t hold up in court as a justification for segregation. Meanwhile, religious justifications for racial segregation are hardly a thing of the past, but have been bubbling up again for decades and have broken into the open as part of Donald Trump’s ennobling of white nationalism.

Clueless Straight White Guys seem to feel at the end of the day that, while racism is bad, homophobia really just isn’t that awful and so religious conservatives should just get a pass.

Argument No. 3: It would have been so much kinder if the gays had just been neighborly and courteous about all this, even though the baker wasn’t.

Why it’s clueless:  Really? The gays behaved “abominably”? Dragging out the actual word the Bible uses to condemn gays as disgusting threats to civilization? Will berates a gay couple for having the audacity to ask the government to enforce the law, and derides them as essentially fetishizing their own rights. This can only be said by someone who has never had to defend his rights against those who would repeatedly trample them. I’ve no doubt it’s annoying for Will to hear black, brown, female, gay, and trans people always clamoring for their rights; imagine for a minute what it feels like for them.

Telling minorities who have suffered a history of discrimination that it’s unneighborly, unseemly, or discourteous to fight for rights that they’re being denied but you’re enjoying is shameless . . .

Argument No. 4: Be patient and let the political process of persuasion and compromise run its course; the courts are the wrong place to go when your rights aren’t being protected, and it will only spur backlash.

Why it’s clueless: Has anyone else noticed how well the “political process” has been functioning lately, particularly with protecting the rights of vulnerable minorities? And are Clueless Straight White Guys aware of the tens of millions being spent by conservative religious groups pushing hundreds of state bills and lawsuits seeking to undercut the reality of marriage equality and other gains toward LGBTQ equality?

The political process did not secure marriage equality; the courts did. And the brilliance of the LGBTQ movement, as those who aren’t clueless about LGBTQ history and the long struggle for marriage will tell you, was that its advocates did engage in persuasion, conversation, and appeals to the public—for decades. One result was that Colorado passed a duly enacted law through its democratically elected legislature banning anti-gay discrimination in public accommodations.

Yes, pushing for LGBTQ equality in court spurred backlash, as Weiner notes. But it then generated a public dialogue around empathy and equality, and swept full marriage equality into being nationwide—including places like Alabama. If going to court for racial equality was the right course, it’s also the right course here.

Argument No. 5: The baker is only asking that his sincere religious beliefs and artistic freedom be respected; he is not harming anyone.

Why it’s clueless:  The prevalence and harms of discrimination are not abstractions, but have been extensively documented, including in this amicus brief signed by three dozens scholars. You could just spend some time speaking with LGBTQ people who have faced it, and you’d know this.

Most people seem to take Phillips at his word that, as a Christian, his opposition to participating in a same-sex marriage is a “sincere belief.”  . . . Yet while Phillips may experience his beliefs as sincere, it’s simultaneously possible—indeed likely—that bias and even animus are really at play. Consider this consistency test: The Bible clearly teaches not only that marriage is for straights, but that it’s for life and that divorce is a sin equivalent to adultery. Yet no one has sued for the right to refuse service to customers on their second or third marriage. Will accepts Phillips’ claim of religious belief on faith, as if the baker’s only choice is to stop selling his beloved wedding cakes entirely. But if that’s true, he would have made the same fuss over mounds of other Biblical transgressions. Courts can’t look into the minds of the parties to a case. But there is enough evidence that bias, often unconscious, is the overwhelming factor in anti-gay discrimination to take claims of religious sincerity with a grain of salt.

Even if we take religious-based anti-LGBTQ sentiment as sincere, there’s no question that refusing service to minorities causes harm. And where the wish to harm others by imposing your religion on them collides with the state’s interest in ensuring the dignity of access to public accommodations, the courts have already sided with the latter.

The last point scores a home run.  Evangelicals are in general the most anti-gay - and often equally racist - of any Christian denominations yet have the highest divorce rate (the Bible Belt also has the highest teen pregnancy rate and the highest use of Internet porn).  Obviously, only selective passages in the Bible are cited for the basis of "deeply held religious belief" - usually those that are useful in condemning others - while others are literally ignored, including Christ's purported prohibition on divorce.   Bigots like Jack Phillips need to be called out.  If they are going to cite the Bible for the basis of their belief, they'd better damn well be following every aspect of it.  And if they are not, let's be honest and call them what they are: modern day Pharisees.  And the New Testament is VERY clear on what Christ thought of the Pharisees. 

George Will: Roy Moore and His Evangelical Supporters Are an Embarrassment

Elect Doug Jones on December 12, 2017

Like many conservative columnists, George Will largely lost favor with me when he became largely an apologist for failed Republican Party policies and a cheerleader for reprehensible Republicans and Christian extremists.  It took Donald Trump, and now Roy Moore, to seemingly finally wake Will up to the ugliness he has been helping to support.  I guess, it's better to wake up late to reality as opposed to never like so many in the Republican Party base, but so much damage could have been avoided had people like George Will had ceased to be enablers years ago.   In his latest column, Will goes after Roy Moore and his evangelical Christian supporters and makes the case why Democrat Doug Jones should win the Alabama special election next month.  Here are column highlights:

But for the bomb, the four would be in their 60s, probably grandmothers. Three were 14 and one was 11 in 1963 when the blast killed them in the 16th Street Baptist Church, which is four blocks from the law office of Doug Jones, who then was 9.

He was born in May 1954, 13 days before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. . . . . As a second-year law student, Jones cut classes to attend the 1977 trial of one of the church bombers, Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss. In 2001 and 2002, as U.S. attorney, Jones successfully prosecuted two other bombers. Was there resentment about this protracted pursuit of justice? No, he says as he nurses with tea a voice raspy from campaigning, because after 9/11 intervened, punishing domestic terrorism was not controversial.

Moore campaigns almost entirely on social issues — National Football League protests, the transgender menace — and the wild liberalism of Jones, a law-and-order prosecutor and deer and turkey hunter who says he has “a safe full of guns.” Jones’s grandfathers were members of the mineworkers’ and steelworkers’ unions. . . .

Evangelical Christians who embrace Moore are serving the public good by making ridiculous their pose as uniquely moral Americans, and by revealing their leaders to be especially grotesque specimens of the vanity — vanity about virtue — that is curdling politics. Another public benefit from the Moore spectacle is the embarrassment of national Republicans. Their party having made the star of the “Access Hollywood” tape president, they now are horrified that Moore might become 1 percent of the Senate. Actually, this scofflaw, twice removed from Alabama’s Supreme Court, once for disobeying a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, is a suitable sidekick for the president who pardoned Joe Arpaio, Arizona’s criminal former sheriff. Even after Donald Trump conceded that Barack Obama was born in the United States, Moore continued rejecting such squishiness.

It has been 21 years since a Democratic Senate candidate won even 40 percent of Alabama’s vote. It has, however, been even longer — not since the George Wallace era — that the state’s identity has been hostage to a politician who assumes that Alabamians are eager to live down to hostile caricatures of them.

Nothing about Moore’s political, financial or glandular history will shake his base, unless the credible accusations of serial pursuit of underage girls are suddenly overshadowed by something his voters consider serious, such as taking sides in the Alabama-Auburn game. Jones’s hopes rest with traditional white Democrats (scarce), Republicans capable of chagrin (scarcer) and African Americans. They are 27 percent of this state in which “civil rights tourism” (the 16th Street church, Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Montgomery church, and more) is economically important.

This month, Virginia’s African Americans turned out for Gov.-elect Ralph Northam, a Democrat who, like Jones, invited voters to take a walk on the mild side. Approximately a quarter of Alabamians live in the metropolitan area of Birmingham, which has had an African American mayor since 1979.

Next month’s election will occur during many distractions, midway between Thanksgiving and Christmas and, more important, 10 days after Armageddon — the SEC championship game. Perhaps an Alabama victory would make the state hanker for a senator worthy of its football team. If so: Roll Tide.

Conservative Columnist George Will Leaves the GOP

It has been sickening to watch one Republican after another swear fealty to Donald Trump and, in the process, jettison their last shreds of decency and morality.  The Republican Party has been increasingly morally bankrupt for years what with John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008 and the increasingly visible efforts of the party to bring back a new Gilded Age with all of the abuses and inequities of the first one.  A time when the lives of most Americans were counted for nothing even as the wealthy indulged themselves in lives of shocking excess and greed. Yes, many like myself and virtually all of my extended family left the GOP rather than sell our souls, far too many were content to close their eyes and deny the growing ugliness all around them.  For these people even the rise of a dangerous narcissist with fascist desires like Donald Trump proved insufficient to make them open their eyes.  Thankfully, a few now seem to be belatedly doing so.  A case in point is George Will, a man I generally have come to disagree with.  Will, in an effort to retain some shred of decency has resigned from the Republican Party and is now registered as an independent.  Huffington Post looks at Will's defection.    Here are highlights:

Longtime conservative columnist George Will is wiping his hands clean of the Republican Party. 

“This is not my party,” Will told PJ Media on Saturday. The Washington Post writer said a Democratic presidency would be better than the alternative offered by Donald Trump — who once called Will a “major loser.”

Will, who writes for the Washington Post, acknowledged it is a “little too late” for the Republican Party to find a replacement for Trump but had a message for Republican voters.

“Make sure he loses,” Will said of the presumptive GOP nominee. “Grit their teeth for four years and win the White House.” 

His voter registration in Maryland has now changed from Republican to “unaffiliated,” PJ Media reported. The final straw was House Speaker Paul Ryan‘s (R-Wis) endorsement of Trump, he said. 

In the meantime, Trump continues to fumble over himself. Just this week, he fired his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski before setting off to Scotland to promote his golf resorts. 

“He had one good day because he didn’t vomit all over himself and gave a decent speech,” GOP consultant Matt Mackowiak said of Trump. 

I find it interesting that it was Paul Ryan's endorsement of Trump that was the final straw for Will.  I have long found Ryan to be morally bankrupt and an utter hypocrite as he claims to be a deeply religious Roman Catholic even as he pushes an agenda that is the antithesis of Catholic social teaching.  Taking from the poor and giving to the rich has no place in the Gospel message.  Ditto for leaving poor working families to slowly die in the gutter.  In his own way, Ryan is every bit as evil as Trump.  The only difference is that unlike the ego driven Trump who has a tempestuous love affair with himself each day, Ryan knows what he is doing and simply doesn't care about the less fortunate or those who the GOP finds to be "other." 

Being Trump's VP Choice - Like Buying a Ticket on the Titanic?

For the better part of three decades or more the Republican Party has coddled, pandered to and embraced Christian extremists and those most motivated by hatred of others being it based on race, national origin, or sexual orientation.  The goal?  Short term election victories based on voters motivated by animus towards others.  Yet now, the so-called GOP establishment continues to display revulsion toward the natural outcome of the seeds that it sowed: Donald Trump.  In a column in the New York Times George Will - who seems to be becoming a slightly milder version of Pat Buchanan - is urging Republicans to do all they can to keep Trump out of the White House while striving to minimize the potential down ticket carnage he and others fear Trump would bring in November. Indeed, Will even speculated on who would be the best VP choice for Hillary Clinton to insure a Trump defeat (he likes Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio).

Now, a piece in the Times looks at the manner in which many in the GOP are fleeing from the prospect of being Trump's vice presidential running mate - something Senator Lindsey Graham equates to "buying a ticket on the Titanic."  Will in his column states that any Trump VP choice will be inherently unqualified because no one qualified would want the position and electoral doom.  Perhaps I am too much the cynic, but I am finding great pleasure in seeing the GOP reap the whirlwind of its own creation.  Here are highlights from the New York Times piece:

It’s a time-honored tradition for politicians to deny any interest in the vice presidency. But this year, with the possibility of Donald J. Trump as the Republican nominee, they really mean it.

“Never,” said Chris Schrimpf, a spokesman for Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who is still running against Mr. Trump. “No chance.”

Or, as Senator Lindsey Graham put it, “That’s like buying a ticket on the Titanic.”

A remarkable range of leading Republicans, including Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, have been emphatic publicly or with their advisers and allies that they do not want to be considered as Mr. Trump’s running mate. The recoiling amounts to a rare rebuke for a front-runner: Politicians usually signal that they are not interested politely through back channels, or submit to the selection process, if only to burnish their national profiles.

But Mr. Trump has a singular track record of picking fights with obvious potential running mates like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who has indicated a lack of interest in the vice presidency generally and has yet to reconcile with Mr. Trump publicly. Ms. Haley and another potential pick, Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, have sharply criticized Mr. Trump at recent party gatherings and do not want to be associated with his sometimes-angry tone, according to advisers and close associates who have spoken with these Republicans.

Several Republican consultants said their clients were concerned that Mr. Trump’s unusually high unfavorable ratings with all voters and his unpopularity among women and Hispanics could doom him as a general election candidate and damage their own future political prospects if they were on his ticket.

A cross section of leading Republicans agree that his most sensible choice would be an experienced female governor or senator, given that he would most likely face Hillary Clinton in November and need support from a majority of white women to offset her strong support among blacks and Hispanics. Yet Mrs. Clinton is currently ahead of Mr. Trump with white women by double-digit percentages, according to a recent CBS poll.

The pool of Republican women in major offices is relatively small, and Mr. Trump has already alienated some of them. Governor Haley denounced him for not quickly disavowing support from the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and Governor Martinez has criticized his remarks about Hispanics.

Will a Trump Nomination Kill the GOP?

In many ways George Will has become a warmed over version of Pat Buchanan, but once in a while he gets it right when he looks at the GOP's rush toward long tern political suicide as it increasingly allows the far right lunatic fringe, Christofascists, and white supremacists to take control of the party.  This trend is best personified by the rise of Donald Trump to the top of the GOP poll, with the very scary Ted Cruz in second place.  Sadly, Will himself has for too long failed to oppose the cancer metastasizing in the GOP.   But, as the saying goes, better late than never,  In a Washington Post column Will predicts the death of the GOP as a conservative party in the event Trump wins the GOP presidential nomination.  Here are column excerpts:

If you look beyond Donald Trump’s comprehensive unpleasantness — is there a disagreeable human trait he does not have? — you might see this: He is a fundamentally sad figure. His compulsive boasting is evidence of insecurity. His unassuageable neediness suggests an aching hunger for others’ approval to ratify his self-admiration. . . . . Now, panting with a puppy’s insatiable eagerness to be petted, Trump has reveled in the approval of Vladimir Putin, murderer and war criminal.

When MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Putin “kills journalists, political opponents and invades countries,” Trump replied that “at least he’s a leader.” Besides, Trump breezily asserted, “I think our country does plenty of killing also.” Two days later, Trump, who rarely feigns judiciousness, said: “It has not been proven that he’s killed reporters.”

Perhaps the 56 journalists murdered were coincidental victims of amazingly random violence that the former KGB operative’s police state is powerless to stop. It has, however, been “proven,” perhaps even to Trump’s exacting standards, that Putin has dismembered Ukraine. (Counts one and two at the 1946 Nuremberg trials concerned conspiracy to wage, and waging, aggressive war.)  

[B]y his embrace of Putin, and by postulating a slanderous moral equivalence — Putin kills journalists, the United States kills terrorists, what’s the big deal, or the difference? — Trump has forced conservatives to recognize their immediate priority.  

Conservatives’ highest priority now must be to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination in this, the GOP’s third epochal intraparty struggle in 104 years.  

In 2016, a Trump nomination would not just mean another Democratic presidency. It would also mean the loss of what Taft and then Goldwater made possible — a conservative party as a constant presence in U.S. politics.  

It is possible Trump will not win any primary, and that by the middle of March our long national embarrassment will be over. But this avatar of unfettered government and executive authoritarianism has mesmerized a large portion of Republicans for six months. The larger portion should understand this: 

One hundred and four years of history is in the balance. If Trump is the Republican nominee in 2016, there might not be a conservative party in 2020 either.

George Will Endorses Sarvis Over Cuccinelli

You know the Republican Party is in deep trouble when they typically right wing George Will endorses a libertarian candidate over a Republican standard bearer.  Yet that is precisely what Will does in a column in the Washington Post.  True, Will holds no love for Democrat Terry McAuliffe, but the fact that he cannot support Ken Cuccinelli speaks volumes about just how extreme - frightening might be a better word - Cuccinelli and his agenda are in reality.  Like many, I feel that neither major party candidate is ideal, but in the last analysis, one sometimes votes for the lesser evil.  Hence my support (and the support of most leading newspapers in Virginia) for Terry McAuliffe.  Apparently, Will cannot hold his nose and vote for McAuliffe, so he is encouraging a vote for Robert Sarvis, the Libertarian Party candidate for governor of Virginia.  Here are column excerpts:

Equanimity is his [Robert Sarvis'] default position and almost his political platform: Why be agitated when your frenzied adversaries are splendidly making your case about the poverty of standard political choices?

In Sarvis, the man and the moment have met. He is running at a time of maximum distrust of established institutions, including the two major parties. He has little money, but McAuliffe and Cuccinelli have spent millions of dollars on broadcast ads making each other repulsive to many Virginians, who surely feel as Will Rogers did: “You got to admit that each party is worse than the other.” Furthermore, the partial shutdown of the government especially annoyed Sarvis’s state, which has the nation’s second highest per-capita federal spending (Alaska is first) — Northern Virginia is a dormitory for federal workers and southern Virginia’s military installations include the world’s largest naval complex. 

During an intermission in the telecast of a notably disagreeable McAuliffe-Cuccinelli debate, viewers heard from their television sets a woman’s voice asking, “Can’t vote for these guys?” Then Sarvis’s voice:  “Like you, I can’t vote for Ken Cuccinelli’s narrow-minded social agenda. I want a Virginia that’s open-minded and welcoming to all. And like you, I don’t want Terry McAuliffe’s cronyism either, where government picks winners and losers. Join me, and together we can build a Virginia that’s open-minded and open for business.”

Cuccinelli is a stern social conservative, an opponent of, among other things, gay marriage. Marriage equality interests Sarvis (whose mother is Chinese) because his wife is African American, so his marriage would have been illegal in Virginia before the exquisitely titled 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia . 

Sarvis, who is 37 and may look that old in a decade or so, graduated from Harvard with a mathematics degree, earned a law degree from New York University and clerked in Mississippi for a judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. After a spell as a mathematics graduate student at Berkeley, Sarvis worked for a San Francisco tech startup, then earned a master’s degree in economics at George Mason University. In 2011, he ran as a Republican against the state Senate majority leader, a 31-year incumbent. Outspent 72-to-1, Sarvis got 36 percent of the vote.

He must scrounge for media attention because he fares poorly in polls that reinforce the judgment that he is not newsworthy. But he is.

Third-party candidacies are said to be like bees — they sting, then die. Still, Sarvis is enabling voters to register dissatisfaction with the prevailing political duopoly. Markets are information-generating mechanisms, and Virginia’s political market is sending, through Sarvis, signals to the two durable parties.

George Wiil - A Bigot Tries to Mask His Bigotry

UPDATED:  A comment was left on this post that takes on George Will's anti-gay bias head on and underscores the harm being done to the children of gay parents due to the prohibition against same sex marriage.  Here is part of the comment that deserves to be highlighted:

It seems that he has not read the policy statements by the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsing marriage for same-sex couples in 2006. After their exhaustive review of the published science, these nationally recognized child health experts affirmed that children’s outcomes were comparable in two-parent homes regardless of parental gender, and endorsed same-sex civil marriage to benefit the children by providing them with federal and local financial security. Children have a right to know and be cared for by their parents. The frequent assertion that children have a right to a mother and a father is as incorrect as saying that they have a right to rich or good-looking parents.

Does Mr. Will know that the National Association of Social Workers endorsed marriage equality in 2004? The American Sociological Association reviewed all the published scientific data on same-sex marriage effects on children, and filed an Amicus Brief asserting that “there is no evidence that children with parents in stable same-sex or opposite-sex relationships differ in terms of well-being. Indeed, the greater stability offered by marriage for same-sex as well as opposite-sex parents may be an asset for child well-being.” The Child Welfare League of America and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry both issued policy statements stating that gays and lesbians have equal parenting skills in 2006.

This raises one unaddressed aspect of Mr. Will’s support for restricting marriage: Gays, like straights can and do have children from prior relations, by adoption, or from assisted reproductive technology. The current status is harmful to today’s and tomorrow’s children in same-sex parented families by limiting them from having two legal parents, limiting their recognition in cases of disability or death of the non-biological parent, and telling them that their families do not count and are less valued. Just because gay folk cannot have children by accident, as heterosexuals often do, is not a reason to emotionally, socially, financially, and legally continue to harm and disadvantage these children.

What do George Will, Cal Thomas and Pat Buchanan have in common?  The fact that they are so-called conservative columnists and pundits is obvious.  But they also share an open bigotry - based on their Medieval religious beliefs - against gays and gay equality under the civil laws.  The only difference now is that Will is trying to mask his anti-gay bigotry in a column in the Washington Post by pretending that gay marriage should be opposed because "guidance from social science is as yet impossible."   (Thomas and Buchanan don't even bother trying to hide the basis of their bigotry.)  Like many of the religious extremists who are grappling for justifications for their opposition to marriage equality other than pure religious based animus, Will is acting as if granting marriage rights to same sex couples will somehow change heterosexual marriages and/or that we don't have enough clinical data to justify it.  Here's a sampling of Will's double speak:

[R]esearch about, for example, the stability of same-sex marriages or child-rearing by same-sex couples is “radically inconclusive” because these are recent phenomena and they provide a small sample from which to conclude that these innovations will be benign.

Today “there neither are nor could possibly be any scientifically valid studies from which to predict the effects of a family structure that is so new and so rare.” Hence there can be no “scientific basis for constitutionalizing same-sex marriage.”

In addition endeavoring to mask the religious belief roots of his own prejudice and bigotry, Will is intentionally ignoring obvious facts: (1) gays and gay relationships have existed throughout recorded history; (2) same sex couples have in the past, now at present and in the future will be parenting children and denying marriage rights will not change this reality; (3) millions of children will never be raised in homes headed by a stable heterosexual couples, and this reality will not change; (4) since gay marriage first emerged in Massachusetts divorce rates both in Massachusetts and nationwide are down. 

Given these objective reality truths, Will's opposition to marriage equality only serves to deprive same sex couples and their children of rights, stability and often financial security that heterosexual couples unthinkingly take for granted.Will's reason makes about as much sense as the rantings of the radical anti-abortion crowd that worships fetuses up until the time they are born and yet vote for GOP demagogues who seek to slash programs for poor children and who would leave millions of children without health care coverage.  The hypocrisy is palpable.

Let's be clear the real basis on Will's anti-gay marriage agenda rests on one thing: his clinging to a few passages on the Bible authored by those utterly ignorant of modern knowledge on sexual orientation, biology, medicine and virtually every other form of modern knowledge.  Will knows that admitting this truth destroys his credibility with a majority of Americans.  Hence the ruse that a denial of equal protection under the Constitution is justified because of a supposed lack of clinical data.  Two comments on Will's column summed things up well:  

Sound reasoning, Bubba Will. I suppose we better go back and get us some social science evidence for how black folk integrate into society before we allow that to go too far as well, right, Bubba?

The argument that we can't allow gay marriage because we haven't allowed it long enough to get any solid data points is too ridiculous to engage in.

George Will Predicts Marriage Equality Win in Supreme Court

Conservative columnist George Will has likely earned himself hate and derision from the Kool-Aid drinking set and many within the gay-hating elements of the Republican Party.  Why?  Because Will has said that he believes that the GOP appeal of rulings striking down the Defense of Marriage Act ("DOMA") will likely lose at the U. S. Supreme Court.  As often noted on this blog, DOMA has no reason for its existence other than religious based discrimination against same sex couples and the Christianist desire to keep LGBT Americans inferior under the civil laws.  And religious prejudice does not justify disparate treatment of citizens under the Equal Protection Clause no matter how strong the Christianist animus towards gays.  Here are highlights from an article in The Advocate that looks at Will's prediction: 

Conservative commentator George Will predicts that if the Supreme Court must decide on the legality of same-sex marriage, then it will side with equality.

"What about gay marriage?" host George Stephanopoulos asked Will. "I wonder if Justice Kennedy sticking with the conservatives this time around on health care means that he will free himself up to approve gay marriage."

Will said Justice Kennedy is "much misunderstood" because his rulings falsely appear to put him all over the idealogical map.

"People say he's somehow squishy or unprincipled," Will said. "I think he's driven in both directions by a constant compass, and that is he's a libertarian. And the libertarian dimension of him may cause him to be the fifth vote — there won't be six — but to be the fifth vote for gay marriage."

Will's opinions carry weight among a certain set of opinion-makers. He sparked headlines, for example, when he wrote a column in 2009 saying flatly that it was time for the U.S. to get out of Afghanistan.

The likelihood that the court will decide on marriage equality is increasing. For the first time, House Republicans on Friday appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. And the court could opt to hear the Proposition 8 case out of California if that is also appealed.

It goes without saying that I hope that Mr. Will's prediction proves accurate.

George Will Trashes McCain

Wow, it's always fun when the so-called conservatives turn on each other and engage in a bit of feeding frenzy. Thus, it was fun to read George Will's column in today's Washington Post taking McCain to task for his lack of knowledge on the economy and Wall Street debacle. Hopefully more in the public will catch on to the fact that John McCain is a warmed over version of the Chimperator who has voted with Bush 95% of the time according to Factcheck.org. No wonder McSenile/Palin are so busy lying in the hope that the voting public can be distracted from the real facts just as the Chimperator has done for the last eight years. Here are some highlights from Will's column:

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Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama. Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street. . . .

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To read the Journal's details about the depths of McCain's shallowness on the subject of Cox's chairmanship, see "McCain's Scapegoat" (Sept. 19, Page A22). Then consider McCain's characteristic accusation that Cox "has betrayed the public's trust."

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In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people.

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The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. . . remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?

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Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

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It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?