Sanders Campaign Slams HRC's Clinton Endorsement

Perhaps more than other constituency in America, the LGBT community recognizes the disaster that a Republican victory in the 2016 presidential race would be for much of the progress made under the Obama administration.  Thus, the stakes are high and organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (as self-serving as it can be) feel a need to endorse Democrat candidates that in their analysis rightly or wrongly can best protect LGBT gains.  In states like Virginia where the LGBT vote can be the deciding difference in a close election, a candidate with LGBT endorsements could "save the day."  Indeed, post 2012 analysis suggests that if Mitt Romney had not lost the LGBT vote so resoundingly, he might have won the presidency.  Given these realities, HRC has endorsed Hillary Clinton and Bernire Sanders has reacted.  The Advocate looks at the the Sanders reaction.  Here are excerpts:

The Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest and most influential LGBT advocacy group, formally endorsed Hillary Clinton for president Tuesday morning, and it didn't take long for her Democratic rival — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — to weigh in on the news.

“It’s understandable and consistent with the establishment organizations voting for the establishment candidate, but it’s an endorsement that cannot possibly be based on the facts and the record,” Sanders campaign spokesman Michael Briggs told the Washington Blade.

Briggs reiterated Sanders's LGBT rights cred, which includes voting against "don't ask, don't tell" and the Defense of Marriage Act in the 1990s as well as supporting civil unions in Vermont in 2000. Sanders supports marriage equality, but advised against it in 2006.

While Clinton currently rivals Sanders in support for LGBT equality, her record is more spotty, with support for DOMA in her 2000 Senate run and partial support for its repeal in her unsuccessful 2008 White House bid. Clinton's support for marriage equality wasn't cemented until last year. Clinton now supports a vast array of LGBT rights measures, including a national Equality Act, which would ban anti- LGBT discrimination in housing and employment, open transgender military service, and a ban on conversion therapy; Sanders supports all these things as well.

“So who knows what prompted the Human Rights Campaign to do what it does — I have trouble myself figuring why they do some of the things they do over the years — but I think the gay men and lesbians all over the country will know who has been their champion for a long, long time and will consider that as they make up their mind on support for his campaign,” Briggs told the Blade.

The HRC says its endorsement of Clinton was a unanimous decision among its 32 "community leaders" that stemmed from a questionnaire sent to all 2016 candidates (no Republican responded to the questionnaire).

As noted, I still have not made a formal decision of which candidate to support.   Given the support the husband and I have given to Democrats,  I am on every e-mail list and money beg list imaginable.   I have bumper stickers that I have yet to put on my car as I try to decide who to back. 

Palin Lunacy; Trump + Gollum; Trump Supporters Are 'Single Men Who Masturbate To Anime'

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are getting a bit rough and tumble in their primary race, but it is nothing compared to the lunacy surrounding the Donald Trump campaign which ranges from an incoherent Sarah Palin - what else is new? - to rants by GOP strategists who are venting over the elements of the insane GOP base that are supporting Donald Trump.  I find Trump's embrace of Sarah Palin's endorsement particularly interesting because it was John McCain's nomination of of Palin as his VP pick that drove my late mother to say "I'm done" to the GOP back in 2008.  Meanwhile, I find GOP strategist Rick Wilson's comments on Trump supporters to be both hysterical and likely 100% on point.   And then there is Ran Paul's equating of Donald Trump with Gollum.  First, some of the commentary on Trump is receiving via the New York Daily News for his embrace of Palin:

Just when you thought it was safe to take politics seriously again, gaffe-prone Sarah Palin stepped back on the presidential stage Tuesday to endorse her spotlight-loving, soulmate — Donald Trump.

Palin, the former Alaska governor turned vice presidential candidate turned political pundit, stood side by side with the billionaire business mogul turned casino owner turned Republican presidential front-runner to tell an Ames, Iowa, crowd how Trump will save America.

“I am here because, like you, I know it is now or never,” Palin told the cheering crowd.

Just when you thought it was safe to take politics seriously again, gaffe-prone Sarah Palin stepped back on the presidential stage Tuesday to endorse her spotlight-loving, soulmate — Donald Trump.

Palin, the former Alaska governor turned vice presidential candidate turned political pundit, stood side by side with the billionaire business mogul turned casino owner turned Republican presidential front-runner to tell an Ames, Iowa, crowd how Trump will save America.

“I am here because, like you, I know it is now or never,” Palin told the cheering crowd.

The match made in reality show heaven was a setback for Trump’s GOP opponents, especially Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who had closed the gap with Trump in recent weeks in Iowa.

The comments of GOP strategist Rick Wilson about Trump's white male supporters almost made me burst out laughing.  Crooks and Liars has the details.  Here are excerpts:

While explaining that he believes that Donald Trump's success in the Republican party does not mean that establishment conservatism is dying, GOP strategist Rick Wilson dismissed the "childless single men" who support Trump's presidential bid.

"The fact of the matter is, most of them are childless single men who masturbate to anime. They’re not real political players. These are not people who matter in the overall course of humanity," Wilson said of Trump supporters on MSNBC's "All In with Chris Hayes."

Then, lastly there is Rand Paul's equating of Trump with Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Here are excerpts from Politico:

Sen. Rand Paul has a new attack line against Donald Trump: The tycoon is Gollum from J.R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” 

In a Facebook post, Paul writes, “One candidate on this national stage wants you to give him power. He tells you he is rich, so he must be smart. If you give him power he claims he will fix America, but there is another tradition in America. A tradition that believes that power corrupts, and that our goal should be not to gain power but to contain power or limit Presidential power.”

Electing Gollum should not be our objective,” Paul continues. “This race should be about which candidate will best protect you from an overbearing government. I am the only one on this national stage who really doesn’t want power or dominion over you. I want to set you free, I want to leave you alone, and I want a government so small you can barely see it.”

A picture of the real estate mogul is at the top with the text, “Electing Gollum should not be our objective.”

As I said when Trump first entered the race, get out plenty of popcorn!!

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

The Cost of GOP Extremism and Obstruction

In the days of my parents and even my own days in the Republican Party, knowledge, logic, reason and acknowledgement of objective fact were respected and factored into responsible policy and legislative action.  Those days are gone and, to beat a dead horse, really began to die a quarter of a century ago when local GOP city and county committees began to vote Christofascists - many of whom are also racists and gun fanatics - into membership.  The mantra was to "grow the party" or expand the "big tent."  The result was the exact opposite as sane and rational members fled and religious and social orthodoxy became a prerequisite to party membership.  Indeed, continued party membership and participation demanded that one have the equivalent of a lobotomy.  A column in the New York Times looks at the obstruction and insanity that this foul transformation of the GOP has inflicted on America.  Here are excerpts:

Who could be against a bill to keep pistols, rifles, assault weapons and such commercially available explosives as Tannerite, ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder, and potassium chlorate out of the hands of those on the terrorist list?

The answer is 53 of 54 Senate Republicans and every one of the 241 House Republicans, who voted on Dec. 2 and Dec. 10, respectively, against taking up legislation to ban those on the F.B.I. list from buying explosives or guns. . . . . these votes illuminate a conservative orthodoxy that dominates Republican politics.

Not only are gun rights sacrosanct, there are conservative prohibitions against the acknowledgment of climate change; opposition to abortion is mandatory; immigration reform is rejected; and top priority goes to tax cuts.

In a successful effort to secure compliance, the right has institutionalized enforcement through such groups as Americans for Tax Reform, Freedom Works, the Club for Growth and the network of national and local Tea Party organizations. These watchdog groups ensure that Republicans toe the line, ready to foster — and finance — primary challenges against those who deviate from the party line.

There are adverse consequences for the nation in adherence to doctrinal conservatism.

A majority of economists surveyed in 2012 by the University of Chicago found that, despite Republican demands for austerity, the $831 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 stimulus legislation significantly reduced unemployment. Every Republican in the House voted against the bill on Feb. 13, 2009, as did 38 of 41 Republican senators on the same day.

Republican opposition to raising taxes, in turn, resulted in a decade-long delay before the enactment last year of long-term Highway Trust Fund legislation. During the delay, the nation’s infrastructure continued to decay, with one out of nine bridges considered structurally deficient; the Federal Aviation Administration estimated that airport overcrowding and delays cost the nation $22 billion annually; and 42 percent of major urban highways were congested.

Republican rejection of climate change and global warming is having a substantial impact at both the national and state levels.

In two votes on Nov. 17, 2015, for example, Senate Republicans voted by identical 49 to 3 margins to disapprove a proposed E.P.A. regulation of carbon pollution emissions and an E.P.A. regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Two weeks later, House Republicans voted 231 to 10 to disapprove the greenhouse gas regulations and 231 to 2 to disapprove the carbon pollution emission guidelines.

In Florida, present and former state employees contend that the words “climate change” have been banned from state documents, although Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, denies any such edict.

In North Carolina, where communities along the Atlantic are threatened, the Legislature voted in 2012 to bar the state Coastal Resources Commission from defining “rates of sea-level change for regulatory purposes” before July 1, 2016. 

In many ways, the Republican strategy of huge resistance has backfired on the party itself.

As recently as 2001 to 2003, Gallup found that Republicans in Congress had favorability ratings in the high 40s to mid-50s, consistently better than their unfavorable ratings.

By 2015, the Polling Report, which tracks all public surveys, found that in five polls taken between August and the end of the year, the favorability rating of congressional Republicans had fallen to 14 percent, and the unfavorable ratings had risen to 79.4. Ratings of congressional Democrats at the end of 2015 were also negative, but significantly less so  . . . .

The American political system could use a candidate who possesses a good faith desire to address aggrieved voters who believe they have been shortchanged. But for this to be legitimate, such a candidate would have to have greater integrity, range and moral capacity than Donald Trump.

More Tuesday Male Beauty

Franklin Graham: Keep Satanic Gay People Away From Your Children

Franklin Graham, a professional Christian who would be a complete no one but for his famous - or infamous, depending on one's view of those who have made themselves wealth peddling religion -  is continuing his relentless denigration and demonizing of LGBT individuals.  In his latest message of hate, Graham is urging "Christians" to keep gays away from their children and away from their churches.  Like so many of the self-anointed "godly folk," instead of furthering the Gospel message of Christ, Graham's message is one of pure hate and judgment of others.  Right Wing Watch looks at the latest poison Graham is disseminating.  Here are highlights:

Last year, Franklin Graham joined James Dobson at an event in Colorado where the two warned against allowing gay people into churches because, according to Graham, they are representatives of "the Enemy" who wants to "devour our homes" and "devour this nation." 

On his radio program today, Dobson played excerpts from his discussion with Graham at the event, in which called for Christians to keep their kids away from gay people and to take over school boards across the nation in order to remove gay-friendly programs. 

"We have allowed the Enemy to come into our churches," Graham said. "I was talking to some Christians and they were talking about how they invited these gay children to come into their home and to come into the church and that they were wanting to influence them. And I thought to myself, they're not going to influence those kids; those kids are going to influence those parent's children."

"What happens is we think we can fight by smiling and being real nice and loving," he continued. "We have to understand who the Enemy is and what he wants to do. He wants to devour our homes. He wants to devour this nation and we have to be so careful who we let our kids hang out with. We have to be so careful who we let into the churches. You have immoral people who get into the churches and it begins to effect the others in the church and it is dangerous."

Graham then went on to lament that "homosexuality is taught to be okay" in schools and "that is why I want to get the school boards back" before insisting that he loves gays and therefore feels obligated to tell them that "you cannot stay gay and call yourself a Christian."

That eventually promoted Dobson to rail against the entire LGBT agenda by once again absurdly misunderstanding bisexuality.

"You know what the 'B' stand for?" Dobson asked. "Bisexual. That's orgies! That is lots of sex with lots of people!"

Being gay is not a choice - I know this all too well having tried to deny reality and "pray away the gay" for 37 years.  However, being and ignorance embracing, bigoted asshole like Dobson and Graham IS a choice.  Sadly, these two men - and so many other professional Christians - put shaking down the ignorant and gullible for money so as to maintain their very comfortable lives ahead of truth, honesty and treating others as Christ commanded.  The Pharisees of the New Testament are exemplary individuals compared to Graham and Dobson.

 

The Case Against Bernie Sanders - and a Rebutal

The Hillary Clinton v. Bernie Sanders nomination contest is heating up as Sanders moves up in the polls against Clinton and the fall out is that opinion pieces that both make a case against Sanders and others that seek to rebut them.  Where the truth lies is likely open to debate, but it is important to try to get a handle on the competing arguments.  A piece against Sanders recently appeared in New York Magazine.  A countervailing piece appears in Commonweal that seeks to counter the New York Magazine piece.  First, here are highlights from the New York Magazine piece by Jonathan Chait:

Until very recently, nobody had any cause to regret Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Sanders is earnest and widely liked. He has tugged the terms of the political debate leftward in a way both moderates and left-wingers could appreciate.

Sanders’s rapid rise, in both early states and national polling, has made him a plausible threat to defeat Hillary Clinton. Suddenly, liberals who have used the nominating process to unilaterally vet Clinton, processing every development through its likely impact on her as the inevitable candidate, need to think anew. Do we support Sanders not just in his role as lovable Uncle Bernie, complaining about inequality, but as the actual Democratic nominee for president? My answer to that question is no.

Sanders’s core argument is that the problems of the American economy require far more drastic remedies than anything the Obama administration has done, or that Clinton proposes to build on. Clinton has put little pressure on Sanders’s fatalistic assessment, but the evidence for it is far weaker than he assumes.  

At the very least, the conclusion that Obama’s policies have failed to raise living standards for average people is premature. And the progress under Obama refutes Sanders’s corollary point, that meaningful change is impossible without a revolutionary transformation that eliminates corporate power.

Nor should his proposed remedies be considered self-evidently benign. Evidence has shown that, at low levels, raising the minimum wage does little or nothing to kill jobs. At some point, though, the government could set a minimum wage too high for employers to be willing to pay it for certain jobs.

Sanders’s worldview is not a fantasy. It is a serious critique based on ideas he has developed over many years, and it bears at least some relation to the instincts shared by all liberals. The moral urgency with which Sanders presents his ideas has helped shelter him from necessary internal criticism. Nobody on the left wants to defend Wall Street or downplay the pressure on middle- and working-class Americans. But Sanders's ideas should not be waved through as a more honest or uncorrupted version of the liberal catechism. The despairing vision he paints of contemporary America is oversimplified. 

Even those who do share Sanders’s critique of American politics and endorse his platform, though, should have serious doubts about his nomination. Sanders does bring some assets as a potential nominee — his rumpled style connotes authenticity, and his populist forays against Wall Street have appeal beyond the Democratic base. But his self-identification as a socialist poses an enormous obstacle, as Americans respond to “socialism” with overwhelming negativity. Likewise, his support for higher taxes on the middle class — while substantively sensible — also saddles him with a highly unpopular stance. 

Against these liabilities, Sanders offers the left-wing version of a hoary political fantasy: that a more pure candidate can rally the People into a righteous uprising that would unsettle the conventional laws of politics. Versions of this have circulated in both parties for years, having notably inspired the disastrous Goldwater and McGovern campaigns. The Republican Party may well fall for it again this year. 

Sanders has promised to replace Obamacare with a single-payer plan, without having any remotely plausible prospects for doing so. Many advocates of single-payer imagine that only the power of insurance companies stands in their way, but the more imposing obstacles would be reassuring suspicious voters that the change in their insurance (from private to public) would not harm them and — more difficult still — raising the taxes to pay for it. 

[H]ere is a second irony: Those areas in which a Democratic Executive branch has no power are those in which Sanders demands aggressive action, and the areas in which the Executive branch still has power now are precisely those in which Sanders has the least to say. The president retains full command of foreign affairs; can use executive authority to drive social policy change in areas like criminal justice and gender; and can, at least in theory, staff the judiciary. What the next president won’t accomplish is to increase taxes, expand social programs, or do anything to reduce inequality, given the House Republicans’ fanatically pro-inequality positions across the board.  

[I]t seems bizarre for Democrats to risk losing the presidency by embracing a politically radical doctrine that stands zero chance of enactment even if they win. 

Against this criticisms, the piece in Commonweal offers counter arguments.  Here are excerpts:

The leadership of the Democratic Party, which never took Sanders very seriously, is finally starting to worry. So are center-left pundits. In this morning’s New York Times, Paul Krugman takes a shot at Sanders’s single-payer health-care plan, while New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait has a blog post titled “The Case against Bernie Sanders.” One gets the sense that Krugman is slightly more sympathetic than Chait to Sanders’s underlying ideology, but both argue that Sanders’s leftist platform is unrealistic in the current political environment and may even threaten the important gains made by meliorist liberals in the past eight years.  

To their credit, both Krugman and Chait try to avoid condescending to Sanders and his supporters, but there is some unavoidable condescension in their claim that Sanders is naïve in imagining single-payer health care could ever get off the ground in the United States. The title of Krugman’s column, “Health Care Realities,” suggests that supporters of a single-payer system—or what Sanders often calls Medicare for all—are, well, not quite in touch with reality. Krugman reminds readers that it was all a Democratic Congress could do to push through Obamacare, which was modeled on proposals originally advanced by Republicans. 

I think it’s still too early to say how large Sanders’s grassroots campaign may yet become. But putting that point aside, I’d like to offer an answer to Chait’s question. Obama’s passionate volunteers were drawn to his personal charisma and to the general promise of change after eight years of George W. Bush. Of course, Obama ran with a set of detailed policy proposals, but it wasn’t his proposals that created most of the excitement around his candidacy; it was his image and his rhetoric. Sanders’s only charisma is a kind of anti-charisma.  

Like Trump, Sanders is an anti-establishment candidate, but unlike Trump and a lot of right-wing populists, he does not run on his personality or promise miracles of leadership that will somehow overcome structural constraints on executive power. He is always reminding his supporters that he cannot do what needs to be done alone—no president can. It will require a new movement that motivates people who have become cynical about politics to organize and to vote. 

Chait describes Sanders’s politics as “fatalistic” and “despairing,” but this gets it exactly wrong. True, Sanders despairs of any significant progress being made before we change the way political campaigns are financed (his perseveration on this point has become a joke among the Beltway commentariat). But he offers voters the hope that, even after Citizens United, such change is still possible if enough of them care enough to vote for it. It is the other candidates who are “fatalistic” about the role of corporate money in politics, which is why, unlike Sanders, they are willing to accept huge amounts of it.  

Political scientists have a word for that: oligarchy. This is the central fact of American politics today, and it is the focus of Sanders’s campaign. His dissatisfaction with this state of affairs does not amount to fatalism or despair. At least, that is not the way most voters have understood it; they have understood it as outrage or indignation—and the challenge for the Sanders campaign is to get them to understand and embrace it as righteous indignation. 

Chait is right that, in functional terms, the most a Democratic president can hope to do in the immediate future is to serve as a bulwark against Republican lawmakers. But the presidency cannot be understood only in functional terms; it is also a bully pulpit. If the next president will not be able to change the tax code or curb Wall Street unilaterally, he or she will at least be better placed than any other politician to steer the nation’s political conversation toward subjects of real importance. That is what President Obama has done with gun control and immigration, and that is what Sanders would do with wealth and income inequality. If you believe, as many Democratic voters do, that those are the issues the country ought to be most focused on, then Sanders is your candidate. As Krugman might say, it is a question of priorities. 

Which brings me to my main point about Hillary Clinton. If, as Krugman and now Chait have argued, what we need most in the White House is a dependable bulwark against Republican mischief, then we should be voting for a candidate whose record demonstrates consistent opposition to Republican policies. That candidate is Sanders, not Clinton, who has been all over the place on many issues.  

If Sanders’s campaign is less about personality than Obama’s was, it is also true that his appeal to voters who don’t trust Clinton has something to do with character. With most issues, including the ones that ought to matter most in this election, you know where Bernie stands: it’s where he’s stood all along. He may lack polish and aplomb, especially compared with Obama, but he’s solid. And that’s exactly what you want in a bulwark.  

Both arguments have some merits.  That said, I don't know which side I fall on because my number one worry is making sure that a Democrat - or someone running as a Democrat - wins in November.  That is the most important issue before us.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

Marco Rubio's Frightening Religious Beliefs

Like most of the GOP clown car, Marco Rubio has been relentlessly prostituting himself to the Christofascists in the GOP base who increasingly have a stranglehold on the nomination process of the party.  As is the norm, gays have been among the favored targets of such self-prostitution efforts.  But a piece in Salon makes the case that while Rubio is acting like many of his rivals, the difference is that he believes the batshitery that he is spouting.  The last thing that America needs is another president that clings to a simpleton religious belief system who then seekd to be guided by it rather than objective reality and facts.  Here are article highlights:

One of the most annoying things about religious folks is that they just cannot keep their “good news” to themselves.

Not two weeks into the new year, the frocked and beanied capo dei capi of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, chose to impose upon humanity a book of his own authorship, “The Name of God Is Mercy.”. . . . do we really want to hear about mercy from the Pope, who, phony liberal pretensions notwithstanding, oversees an organization whose “men of the cloth” have, for so long, and so mercilessly, subjected the youngest and most vulnerable of their parishioners to rape and other varieties of sexual abuse that they may well be guilty of torture? (A United Nations committee is investigating this.)

Yet we can choose to ignore such papal dreck. Not so with the theocratic strivings of members of our own judiciary, which may, depending on who wins the White House later this year, eventually impinge on our lives through Supreme Court rulings.

[F]aith-derangement syndrome afflicts the undeniably young and intelligent, and most notably, among the Republican contenders for the White House, Senator Marco Rubio. Rubio once converted to Mormonism but currently two-times with both the Catholic Church and the extremist, anti-gay, pro-exorcist Christ Fellowship. He has just put out a television campaign ad entitled “Marco Rubio on His Christian Faith.”

He uses his campaign ad to talk only about religion. Aren’t campaign ads supposed to at least have something to do with politics? 

Anyway, let’s dissect Rubio’s message line by line. He opens with a statement that is presumptive, irrelevant to the office he seeks, theologically contentious, and tritely tautological. . . . . Whether the senator believes in such nonsensicalities is really none of our business: Article VI of the Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” There’s no need for him to drone on about his faith to the electorate.

[M]ore to the point, though, why should “salvation” be a matter for discussion on the campaign trail? . . . .He is, after all, appealing for support to Christians alone – not Jews, not Muslims, not Buddhists or Hindus. The Founding Fathers, to thwart sectarian influence in governance, wrote the aforementioned Article VI. Sectarian pandering should play no role in running for public office. 

Next: “The purpose of our life is to cooperate with God’s plan.” . . . . Straightaway we can discount the Bible – a mishmash of texts authored during barbarous ancient times by unknown humans who knew nothing of biology, physics (Newtonian or quantum), the empirical method or a posteriori knowledge, or even why we should wash our hands after using the bathroom. We immediately reject “personal revelation” as unverifiable and subject to falsification.

The crushing banality, the overwhelming unoriginality of everything Rubio says in his commercial evokes something akin to astonishment. Absolutely any convinced Christ-worshipper could have uttered the exact same words, which are nothing but boilerplate pulpiteer’s patter. That Rubio chose to speak thus before the camera shows just how abysmally low the expectations of the faith-addled are: proffer mind-deadening insipidities and sit back and await the hosannas and hallelujahs that are sure to issue from the segment of the public that will not think for itself, but has to be told fairy tales to feel comfortable about voting for a candidate.

 

It’s time we point out a few things to the senator.

Rationalists, Senator Rubio, find themselves compelled to draw disturbing conclusions from your ad. Children eventually stop believing in fairy tales, yet you persist in accepting the veracity of a book of fables, and, more problematically, you conduct your life in accordance with them. You choose to address a similarly deluded portion of your electorate, ignoring reasonable people and discounting their sensibilities. You present your faith in said fables as buttressing your qualification for the highest office in the land, at a turbulent time in history when the United States needs a serious, clear-minded adult commander-in-chief. 

You have, Senator, a constitutional right to profess belief in whatever you want. But you have no right to do so unchallenged by those tasked with ferreting out the truth and conveying it to the public. Unfortunately, though, you can broadcast such views throughout the land with little fear of being called out by journalists, who will shy away from religion as too sensitive and personal a topic.

Times are now too perilous for such squeamishness.

Rubio, Scalia and Moore have thrown down the gauntlet. Journalists need to pick it up – and fast.

Religion, in my view, has no place in serious political discourse.  Indeed, the "deeply religious" by their own admission demonstrate that they are unfit for any elective office. We need leaders who are in touch with reality and will act and make decisions based on facts and not a belief in myths and fairy tales. Rubio seemingly cannot rise to this level.

More Republican Hand Wringing

Yesterday it was Michael Gerson in the Washington Post, today it is David Brooks in the New York Times.  All the hand wringing and lamenting from Republicans and conservatives who quietly stood by, if not secreting gloating, as the unwashed and insane elements of the Christofascist/Tea Party crowd took control of the GOP and gave it short term victories.  Now, the monster has turned on its self-appointed masters and threatens to doom the future of the GOP.  Better to have lost some elections rather than to have made hatred, bigotry, racism and religious fanaticism the hallmarks of the GOP as moderates fled the growing insanity of the party base.  In his piece, Brooks calls for a conspiracy to stop the rise of Trump and Cruz.  Here are excerpts:

Members of the Republican governing class are like cowering freshmen at halftime of a high school football game. Some are part of the Surrender Caucus, sitting sullenly on their stools resigned to the likelihood that their team is going to get crushed. Some are thinking of jumping ship to the Trump campaign with an alacrity that would make rats admire and applaud.

Rarely has a party so passively accepted its own self-destruction. Sure, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are now riding high in some meaningless head-to-head polls against Hillary Clinton, but the odds are the nomination of either would lead to a party-decimating general election.

The Tea Party, Ted Cruz’s natural vehicle, has 17 percent popular support, according to Gallup. The idea that most women, independents or mainstream order-craving suburbanites would back a guy who declares his admiration for Vladimir Putin is a mirage. The idea that the G.O.P. can march into the 21st century intentionally alienating every person of color is borderline insane.

Worse is the prospect that one of them might somehow win. Very few presidents are so terrible that they genuinely endanger their own nation, but Trump and Cruz would go there and beyond. Trump is a solipsistic branding genius whose “policies” have no contact with Planet Earth and who would be incapable of organizing a coalition, domestic or foreign.

So maybe it’s time for governing Republicans to actually do something. Yes, I’m talking to you state legislators, or local committeepersons, or members of Congress and all your networks of donors and supporters. . . . . What’s needed is a grass-roots movement that stands for governing conservatism, built both online and through rallies, and gets behind a single candidate sometime in mid- to late February. In politics, if A (Trump) and B (Cruz) savage each other then the benefits often go to Candidate C. But there has to be a C, not a C, D, E, F and G.

This new movement must come to grips with two realities. First, the electorate has changed. Less-educated voters are in the middle of a tidal wave of trauma. Labor force participation is dropping, wages are sliding, suicide rates are rising, heroin addiction is rising, faith in American institutions is dissolving.

Second, the Republican Party is not as anti-government as its elites think it is. Its members no longer fit into the same old ideological categories. Trump grabbed his lead with an ideological grab bag of gestures, some of them quite on the left. He is more Huey Long than Calvin Coolidge.

Given the current strains on middle- and working-class families, many Republican voters want a government that will help the little guy . . . .

Years ago, reform conservatives were proposing a Sam’s Club Republicanism, which would actually provide concrete policy ideas to help the working class, like wage subsidies, a higher earned-Income tax credit, increased child tax credits, subsidies for people who wanted to move in search of work and exemption of the first $20,000 in earnings from the Medicaid payroll tax. This would be a conservatism that emphasized social mobility at the bottom, not cutting taxes at the top.

Maybe it’s time a center-right movement actually offered that agenda.

And maybe it’s time some Republicans took a stand on what is emerging as the central dispute of our time — not between left and right but between open and closed. As the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams has found, the key trait that identifies Trump followers is authoritarianism. His central image is a wall. With their emphasis on anger and shutting people out, Trump and Cruz are more like European conservatives than American ones.

Governing conservatism has to offer people a secure financial base and a steady hand up so they can welcome global capitalism with hope and a sense of opportunity. That’s the true American tradition, emphasizing future dynamism not tribal walls. There’s a silent majority of hopeful, practical, programmatic Republicans. You know who you are.  Please don’t go quietly and pathetically into the night.

As noted before, where were Gerson, Brooks and many others when the so-called GOP establishment welcomed in the forces of insanity and extremism that are now threatening to kill the GOP?