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Trump aides: Don’t worry, he’s lying

Friday, April 22, 2016

I’m not alone in pointing out that we really have no idea what Trump would do if he were elected President. I don’t know if I’ve said it here, but I’ve often said to friends of mine that I could envision Trump, the day after his inauguration, telling the press: “You didn’t really believe all that stuff I said, did you? I just said that to get elected.”

Well, it looks like his people have jumped the gun:

Trump’s newly hired senior aide, Paul Manafort, made the case to Republican National Committee members that Trump has two personalities: one in private and one onstage.

“When he’s out on the stage, when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose,” Manafort said in a private briefing.

“You’ll start to see more depth of the person, the real person. You’ll see a real different way,” he said.

The Associated Press obtained a recording of the closed-door exchange.

via Associated Press via Daily Kos

You see, the message has been focus grouped, and he’s giving the Fox propaganda saturated people what they want. When the time comes, he’ll do an about face. It is sort of rare to see such a bald faced admission that a candidate is essentially lying his way into office. I mean, all Republicans do it, but most don’t admit it.

Now, if it came out that Hillary’s people were telling anyone this sort of thing, the press would go into a full throated outcry. But coming from Trump, they’ll welcome it, because it will enable them to continue to push the meme that the state of our politics is the joint responsibility of both parties, their being no qualitative difference between the two. Trump was making it hard for them to do that, to the point where they were having to come up with ways to make Cruz look like a moderate. Now that they know that Trump is lying his way into office, (which the rest of us already knew), they can take comfort in their tired bromides.

This will have no effect on Trump’s supporters of course. They purport to be tired of being played, as they have been over and over, but they’re true believers and, to amend the Who’s song a bit, “will be fooled again”. Sadly, we on the blue side are not immune from that disease. Witness the large number of Hillary supporters who just need to believe that she’ll be anything but a Wall Street shill once she gets into office.

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Stopped clocks, etc.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

It’s not often that I find myself in even partial agreement with Republicans from Texas, but I have only a few minor quibbles about this:

A handful of Texas Republican district or county conventions in March passed resolutions calling for a vote on secession, paving the way for a potentially awkward debate at the state GOP conference in May. 

A Nederland-based pro-independence activist group, the Texas Nationalist Movement, said at least 22 of the hundreds of conventions passed secession items. Texas GOP chairman Tom Mechler said he “would be very surprised” if that many had indeed passed the conventions.

via The Houston Chronicle

If they had done this 20 years ago, we wouldn’t have had to endure George W. Bush or the Iraq War, and we would not now be faced with the possibility of a Ted Cruz presidency. Only Texas could give us the worst president in history and then follow up by putting up someone even worse.

Long time readers (if there are any) know that I have advocated secession of the sane states myself. But if these Texas folks get their way, we accomplish the same result without having to lift a finger. Imagine a country unburdened by the idiocy of Texas. The great thing about this sort of secession is that it leaves us with possession of the U.S. Treasury and things like the Social Security Trust fund.

But, as I said, I have some minor quibbles. First, some provision has to be made for the people of color of that benighted land, as well as the persecuted minority of rational white people. There’s better than even odds that Texas would bring back slavery once it’s gone its separate way. Also, we don’t want them leaving alone. They have to take the rest of the old Confederacy with them, or they can’t go. We might consider letting Florida stay, given the number of snowbirds living there, but they would have to promise to be good, and they could start out by chaining Rick Scott to a pillar next to the ocean and let him drown in the rising sea.

This leads me to a related observation. Yesterday Ted Cruz got his ass whipped in New York, which was not surprising since he accused Trump of having “New York values”, which we are to understand are very very wicked values, which, presumably, he is accusing other New Yorkers of sharing. Isn’t it odd that politicians from the dark backwaters of our nation feel privileged to insult us here in the North, where we are expected to take no offense, while any negative comment about the brain dead denizens of the old Confederacy provokes outrage from the Southern yahoos? Personally, I think that Trump does not share the values of the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers, who by and large reject the politics of racism that he has borrowed from our Southern neighbors. If anything, Trump has simply shown the Southerners how to do it right. Sure, New Yorkers are reprehensible in some respects, but you really can’t blame them for being Yankee fans. That aside, they’re alright, and certainly far preferable to Texans.

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John Kasich is not a moderate 

Saturday, April 16, 2016

I’m a deeply disappointed guy. Today, the New London Day endorsed John Kasich for the Connecticut Republican primary, as I expected it would. I’m not disappointed by that, it was inevitable. What I am disappointed by is the Day’s failure to apply the term “moderate” to Kasich. When I saw they’d endorsed him, I figured I could write something fairly clever about the plasticity of the English language, using the ever shifting meaning of moderate as a point of departure. But the Day failed me. Rather than call him a moderate, they settled for implying that he was one, by engaging in cherry picking and historical revisionism, actions that have become the media norm when writing or talking about Kasich. You see, it is impossible for them to shed their religious faith that the Republican Party must contain some reasonable people, and if that means redefining the term “reasonable” then— well, we’re all reasonable people here, aren’t we, and allowances must be made. So the Day preferred to whitewash Kasich’s record, carefully avoiding the extreme right wing positions he has taken. I won’t go into great detail. All you need do is Google (or, as I do, “Duck-Duck-Go”) “John Kasich is not a moderate” and get all the details you like. The first hits on Duck-Duck-Go were here and here, and they pretty much cover the field. Anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-public education, anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-gay, pro guns, and pro discrimination disguised as religious freedom. What more could a right winger want?

If you put a gun to my head and made me choose among the three remaining Republican contestants, I’m not sure I’d pick Kasich, though it’s the conventional wisdom that he’s the more “moderate” of the three. Kasich has a track record. We know for certain that if he were elected, he would be the extreme right winger that he has been in Ohio. We can suspect, with reason, that on the national stage he would be even more extreme, since Ohio is not Mississippi, and there are forces which keep him from being too extreme. The only reason to prefer Kasich is that he couches his positions in language designed to appeal to people who are desperately seeking Republican “moderates”. That doesn’t make him one. Such people are on the road to extinction, even in their native habitat here in New England.

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Local Developments

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Recently my wife posted a mocked up newsflash on the Groton Democrats Facebook page, attacking local Republican state reps, John Scott and Andre Bumgardner, as “do-nothings”. That meme is in the news lately, as Groton has taken quite a hit on education funding, with both of them whining about how unfair it was that they could simply do absolutely nothing about it.

Oddly enough, the post itself caused John Scott to do something. He dashed off a Facebook comment to the effect that the attack was a “cheap shot”. This seemed like an odd riposte, coming from a guy whose 2014 campaign consisted of nothing but cheap shots. But while the shot wasn’t cheap, it pains me to say that the “do-nothing” charge was not quite accurate. As I’ve written before, as soon as he got into office, he sprang into action and tried to get a law passed requiring UConn students who are eligible for free health insurance to nonetheless buy health insurance through insurance agents who have contracted with the state to write such policies. Did I mention that John is an insurance agent who has contracted with the state to write health insurance policies for UConn students? So, as I’ve noted in the past, John has certainly tried to serve his constituent, though it didn’t work out so well. Andre, on the other hand, can honestly say that like any good Republican who believes that the government can do no good, he has done his best to prove it so, by doing–well, by doing no good.

While I’m on the subject of John’s self interested dealings, I must again express my utter astonishment (just kidding, I’m not astonished at all) at the fact that, with the exception of one article about John’s conflict of interest, the New London Day has been silent. Maybe it has something to do with all those ads John takes out in the Day. Dave Collins, a columnist who devoted at least 20 columns to criticizing Democratic senator Andy Maynard for having a disability, has been curiously silent about John’s blatant attempt to divert money into his own pockets. But it’s not necessarily the case that Dave is in the tank for John. He’s in the tank for all Republicans, so John just comes along for the ride. The Day once was a reasonably good local paper; it is rapidly degenerating into a Republican rag. Oh how I wish Kasich would drop out so we would get to read their rationale for endorsing either Donald or Ted Cruz in the upcoming primary.

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Lovin Cruz

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Today’s Boston Globe has a mock edition of the paper, a sort of preview of what we might expect to be reading should Donald Trump be elected president. (Full disclosure: my son works at the Globe and likely worked on the mock edition) This is a worthy endeavor, but we must remember that each and every one of the remaining candidates presents a clear and present danger to the future of the Republic, including the candidate the Globe endorsed in the Massachusetts primary (John Kasich). Each of them is extreme, Kasich having proven it in his present job as governor of Ohio.

The downside of the push to demonize Trump (and he should be demonized), is that the press as a whole (the Globe is not yet guilty of this) feels obligated to pump up his rivals. As I’ve written before, it’s a given that the press will sooner or later start selling the loathsome Ted Cruz as a reasonable alternative to the Donald.

In fact, that process has apparently begun. Time Magazine has fulfilled a prediction made by the Onion months ago, and put a picture of Ted Cruz on the cover with a supportive headline (“Likable enough”). Time noted that it’s headline was not identical to that posited by the Onion, but then, they would have been incredibly stupid to replicate the Onion’s satirical headline. The burden of the piece is to suggest that contrary to what everyone says about him, including many of his supporters, Ted Cruz is not one of the biggest assholes on the planet.

TIME’s cover story is headlined, “Likable Enough?” with a fetching portrait of Cruz with a mischievous look on his face and a lovely ice blue tie. He looks exceedingly likable and once you read the stories within, you’ll have to conclude that the man who virtually everyone who’s ever known him finds repulsive is terribly misunderstood. Where you might have thought the man was a doctrinaire right winger, steeped in religious fanaticism and radical free market extremism, you will find out that he’s actually a good old boy, salt of the earth populist. (One hopes for his sake that nobody leaves a copy lying around on the yachts of some of the billionaires who’ve been writing ten million dollar checks on his behalf. It could get awkward.)

via Hullabaloo

This is probably what we can expect on a wider scale as the convention approaches. Until and unless it becomes clear that Paul Ryan is the most likely beneficiary of a stolen convention, the media will be peddling some variant of this line. If that does become conventional wisdom, expect to see Cruz morph back into, well, into an asshole. There really isn’t a word in my Thesaurus that works as well.

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What’s your poison, Trump or Cruz?

Thursday, April 7, 2016

This is hardly a scientific poll, but I would be willing to bet that were one to poll sane, informed people the results would be similar to what I’ve concluded.

I have asked a number of people who they would choose if they knew that either Trump or Cruz would actually become president, moving to Canada being off the table, implicitly or explicitly. So far, no one has chosen Cruz. Not only have their responses been unanimous, but there reasons have been quite similar, and I must say I agree.

Don’t get me wrong. Either one would be a disaster. Let me articulate my own reasoning, which as I say, is roughly similar to what everyone else seems to think.

First, let’s start with the proposition that it is highly unlikely that Trump would, in fact, be any worse than Cruz would be. Sure, he sometimes expresses himself in ways that even Cruz avoids, but note that while Cruz puts rhetorical distance between himself and Trump, he is careful to avoid disagreeing with him on substance. So, even if Trump ended up being as bad as he promises to be, we are no worse off than if we had gotten Cruz, who is infinitely more likely to do what he says he will do than is Trump.

Along these lines, almost everyone agrees, there is little if any reason to believe that Trump would be as bad as he is promising to be. He really makes no bones about the fact that one can never take him at his word. He’s a businessman, and says and does what he needs to get what he wants, and that’s precisely what he’s doing now. There is no question that Cruz would do whatever he could, for instance, to restrict women’s access to abortion and even to birth control. In my own humble opinion, despite what he’s said, the Donald would do nothing on either score. If there’s one issue on which it’s absolutely clear that he’s pandering, it’s abortion. Similarly, it’s quite unlikely that he’d mount an all out assault on gay rights. It’s just not something he cares about. There are probably one or two right wing issues that he would push hard on, just by way of keeping his cred with his base. I’d say he’d pick immigration. But, for the most part, it is quite likely that he would walk away from his campaign rhetoric in the same way he walks away from responsibility for his business ventures.

It is perfectly possible that this analysis is wrong. Everyone I’ve spoken to agrees that’s a possibility. But the thing is, even if Trump was as bad as everyone expects, he would probably still not be as bad as Cruz would be. Even here, unfortunately, there’s a caveat, though it’s one that I’m less worried about now than I was a month or so ago. Back then there seemed the very real possibility that, were Trump elected, he might become an American Mussolini, something Cruz, given his personality, could never become. While this remains a distinct possibility, it seems more unlikely now, since Trump is no longer the dominant force he was a month ago, and will likely be weakened more as the election approaches.

Now, all this being said, it doesn’t answer the strategic question of which of them one would prefer as the candidate. Our candidate will no doubt (or almost no doubt) be Hillary. Which could she more easily beat? That’s a harder question. My gut tells me that once again, Trump is our man, but that’s really not clear. Cruz, by reputation, is a first class asshole, and it’s quite possible that the public would tumble to that. But that requires a press that reports about the real Cruz, and if he beats Trump to the nomination, it’s likely we won’t be hearing about the real Cruz. Rather, we’ll be hearing that he is the moderate “not-Trump”, the guy the Republican Party turned to after regaining its sanity after a flirtation with Trump.

In the end, though, both of these questions are totally academic, in that we will never be faced with this particular choice. If the Party establishment decides to steal it from Trump, they won’t gift it to Cruz. He is merely their convenient stalking horse. They’ve got Paul Ryan waiting in the wings. If there’s a brokered convention, the folks who decide will be the money men, and Ryan is their candidate, now that their other flunkies, (Jeb! and Marco) have crashed and burned.

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I detect a flaw in this argument

Saturday, April 2, 2016

Let me start this by saying that there are people on both side of the Hillary-Bernie divide that indulge in this sort of thing, but being as I’m in the tank for Bernie, I prefer to pick on those that are in the tank for Hillary. Besides, I really think I’ve managed to avoid descents into total absurdity, such as this one by D.R. Tucker, at Political Animal:

I fear Team Sanders will simply dismiss his woes with black voters as a consequence of black “loyalty” to the Clintons, despite the fact that the “loyalty” argument can’t explain why black voters ultimately supported Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary. (Hopefully Sanders’s supporters won’t try to blame the media again for his diversity deficit.)

via Political Animal

When I started to write this piece I had an explanation in mind for the reason “black voters ultimately supported Barack Obama”, but it has slipped my mind. I know it will come to me, as it seemed obvious right away after I read the above paragraph. It has something to do with some characteristic of Obama’s that Bernie doesn’t share. I’m sure it will likely pop into the mind of anyone who happens to read this piece, because like I said it seemed so obvious, and the only reason I’ve lost it is that I’m getting old and senile.

Political Animal is a widely read blog. Judging by the comments to the piece, its more avid readers are also old and senile, because none of them seem to have noticed the glaring problem with the paragraph I’ve quoted. As I said, both sides probably do this sort of thing, but this one is so blatantly absurd I had to highlight it.

The absurdities in the article don’t stop there, by the way. How’s this for presumption:

I’ve argued before that Sanders’s economic vision alienates African-Americans who believe well-regulated capitalism, not “democratic socialism,” can best advance their economic interests

I don’t know if Tucker is black or white, but I really question whether anyone can speak for the entire African-American community, particularly since most people, whatever their color, don’t speak or think in those terms. And what, pray tell, makes Tucker think that capitalism will be “well-regulated” under this Clinton, anymore than it was under the last one, who relieved the bankers of almost all regulation and set the table for the economic meltdown from which we have still not recovered.

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Hillary speaks, says nothing

Friday, April 1, 2016

So, I read here that HIllary got pissed at a questioner who asked her if she would stop taking money from the oil industry, when she doesn’t get any money from the oil industry, but it just so happens that lots of her contributors work there. The oil industry only gives to her PAC, and that’s entirely different.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the fact that, if we didn’t know her backstory, we could never haves the slightest idea, judging by what comes out of her mouth, what she will do as president. The linked article goes on to contrast her position on fossil fuel extraction on public lands with Bernie’s position on the same issue. Bernie is against it, by the way, and has said so. Here’s Hillary:

Public lands in Nevada and across the West provide a wide range of benefits, from open spaces for recreation to resources that support grazing, energy production, and other uses. It is vital that the priorities, needs, and vision of local communities help shape the management of America’s public lands, and I would work to improve and support local, state, and federal collaboration. – See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2016/04/clinton-goes-off-on-greenpeace-activist.html#.dpuf

Well, that tells us all we need to know, doesn’t it? This is the person who started her candidacy by conducting a “listening tour”, her way of telling us that we may know what we want, but she knows what we need. But she won’t be telling us until she’s safely elected. 

In a way she’s a bit like Trump. No one, perhaps even Trump, knows what he would actually do if he became president. He’s just keeping the customers satisfied until he closes the sale. With Hillary, it’s not that we don’t have an awfully good idea of what she’ll do as president, it’s just that we could never judge by listening to what she says on the campaign trail.

Having said all this, let me hasten to disabuse all of the notion that I may be one of those doctrinaire Bernie people who would refuse to vote for her if she’s the one left standing. I will, but I’ll do so knowing that I’m delivering the country once more into the hands of Wall Street and that she will do little to nothing to address the two most pressing problems we have: climate change and inequality. Unfortunately, this may be our last chance to get it right on both scores.

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Look on the bright side 

Thursday, March 31, 2016

There is a bright side to everything, or, if we must sink even deeper into cliche, a silver lining on every cloud. Donald Trump may or may not be an existential threat (who really knows what he would do if elected?), but he has proven useful in some ways.

When asked if he would punish women for getting abortions, the Donald allowed that he would. The other Republican candidates have been distancing themselves from his statement (without, of course, actually disagreeing with him in any meaningful way ), even though, at least in the case of Cruz, their stance on abortion is worse (no rape or incest exclusion for Cruz) than Donald’s. And, of course, their opposition to abortion is probably more intense, because it’s even odds the Donald wouldn’t lift a finger to stop abortion if he were elected.

This is yet another example of a salutary service the Donald is doing for the nation. He is saying out loud what Republicans have been telegraphing to their supporters for years. In the case of the abortion punishment question, Donald was just following the logic of his new found opposition to abortion. Of course if it is against the law to have an abortion, those that participate in an abortion must be punished. It logically follows. It especially follows if abortion is classified as murder, which is precisely the way they categorize it. How can you, at one and the same time assert that a woman who has an abortion is murdering an innocent life and, as Cruz is asking us to believe, that rather than punish we should instead “affirm their dignity and the incredible gift they have to bring life into the world”, whatever that phrase may mean in this context. It is to be hoped, though it is by no means certain, given the current state of our media, that it will, in future, be far more difficult for Republicans to use dogwhistles, now that Trump has made their meaning clear.

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Donald lets me down

Monday, March 28, 2016

This is rather disappointing.

Whoops. Turns out that running a campaign based on personality and free media, without much actual campaign organization, can turn around and bite you, something Donald Trump is starting to find out. Trump is winning primaries, but that’s not the whole ballgame. In many states, convention delegates are chosen after the primaries … and Ted Cruz’s campaign is swooping in and organizing, working to pick up every possible delegate while Trump’s campaign has been sitting back and assuming the delegates were in the bag. The big question is what happens if Trump doesn’t get to 1,237 delegates and the nomination goes to a second vote at the Republican National Convention:

via Daily Kos

As I understand it, the party apparatchiks get to pick the delegates, who will be duty bound to vote for Trump on the first ballot, but will then be free to vote for whomsoever they please. Or, whoever their party leaders tell them pleases them. So, looks like Paul Ryan may be nominated yet. For a guy who is a master of the Art of the Deal, a guy who will give those foreigners “what fer”, (as Georgie Russell advised Davy Crockett to do at the Alamo), and will even talk our friends to the South into building our wall for us, Trump has proven to be surprisingly inept. Well, not surprisingly. As Elizabeth Warren has pointed out, he’s really been somewhat of a failure as a business person, and has succeeded only by virtue of braggadocio. Not for him the serious work of learning the rules and figuring out the angles. He doesn’t even have people for that. He alone, he tells us, can put the rest of the world in its place, but he can’t even make sure he has loyal delegates.

But, back to my main point. This is disappointing for those of us rooting for a brokered convention, one that slowly descends into chaos as the ballots mount. Had Trump gone to the trouble to make sure he had loyal delegates in all the states in which he has pledged delegates, we could have expected a massive floor fight with much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Presumably he will still have some loyalists, but it would be so much juicier if there was a full complement. And, while we’re on the subject, am I the only person out here who’s slightly disappointed that the Secret Service ran interference for the RNC and put the kibosh on allowing open carry at the convention? The Republicans could have given a whole new meaning to the phrase “floor fight”.

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