Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Have they lost their minds?!

OK, so perhaps Trump won't win in November. Hillary has $1billion in bribes sitting in her bank account, so perhaps no Republican will win. But the solution isn't to undo the results of months of primaries.

The GOP electorate has spoken. They don't want another Bush. They don't want Mittens. They don't want any other member of the GOP Elite. The vast majority of the votes cast in the primaries went to the candidates that the elites didn't want: Trump, Cruz, Paul, and Carson. Slipping in at the last minute with a smoky backroom candidate will destroy the Party. And it should. If the Republican Party cannot abide by the results of elections, then it deserves its place on the ash heap of history.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Move the goal posts? How about erasing them altogether!?

Decius at the Journal of American Greatness writes about Speaker Paul Ryan and his plans for a new GOP initiative on poverty...
But the Trump campaign is vastly superior to Ryan in its core understanding of the core issues most urgent right now. Every new President can focus on three, at most four, such issues. Trump seems to have three: secure borders, economic nationalism, and interests-based foreign policy. We can have a debate about whether those are the most urgent issues just now. Indeed, the whole campaign may be said to be such a debate. We’ll see who wins. 

Obviously, we at JAG think these are the most urgent issues just now. Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t. But does anyone—other than Paul Ryan—believe that developing a new poverty policy is the most urgent issue right now? Perhaps Jack Kemp’s ghost?
The "why" of Ryan's priority has little to do with compassion for the poor. It has everything to do with compassion for his own political career.

The three Trump policy priorities Decius lists above have one thing in common: They can be measured for success or failure. Ryan's cannot. There is no metric by which you can judge an anti-poverty campaign. You can, however, determine whether or not a border is truly secure. You can judge whether or not an economic policy is helping or hurting the economy. You can decide whether or not our foreign policy is advancing or hindering our national interests.

Trump, unlike Paul Ryan or the entire Democrat Party, is putting his political capital where his mouth is. He's advancing policy priorities that can be used to judge his performance. Judging Ryan's performance with regard to the efficacy of his poverty program would be like nailing Jell-O to a tree. Since you can't say that he succeeded, you can't say that he failed.

There's an old Klingon proverb: bItuHlaHbe'chugh bIquvlaHbe'. "If you cannot be shamed, you cannot be honored." Paul Ryan turns that on its ear to become "If you cannot be honored, you cannot be shamed."

Wednesday, March 09, 2016

It's been a while

I just have to laugh at the GOP establishment (GOPe).

They've spent months battling The Donald. They've been expecting his implosion. They've been expecting the rise of an anointed candidate; preferable one who's the son of a former president and who's name rhymes with "Bush". They've been waiting for those other awful candidates like Cruz and Paul to go away. Everything was supposed to go their way again. They were supposed to get their milquetoast candidate, lose another election, and return to a comfortable life of complaining about the ruling Democrats.

But, none of that happened.

Bush tanked. Rubio tanked. Kasich tanked. Graham tanked. And now their last hope of stopping The Donald is Ted Cruz! The one guy they hate possibly more than they hate Trump is now their last hope.