Thursday Open Thread [12.17.2015]

NATIONAL—Monmouth: Clinton 59, Sanders 26, O’Malley 4

FLORIDA—St. Pete Polls: Trump 36, Cruz 22, Rubio 17, Bush 9, Carson 6, Christie 3, Kasich 2, Fiorina 1, Paul 1

Rush Limbaugh “lavished praise” on Sen. Ted Cruz for his debate performance on his radio show, Politico reports.

Said Limbaugh: “Ted Cruz speaks like a traditional powerful, well-versed proud — unabashedly proud — conservative. He is an articulate representative of conservatism and the conservative movement, and he is a happy warrior.”

Limbaugh has been careful to walk the tightrope with his listenership, most of whom love Trump. Sounds like he is trying to move them to Cruz, and that is huge. YUGE!!!

My friend Martin Longman shares my belief that the Republican Party has always been this evilly conservative, or conservatively evil.

The premise of my case was that it was really only the interlude of Eisenhower [and Nixon] that gave us the illusion that the Republican Party was a reliable partner on governance and that if the GOP had not had that experience, we would not have had a golden age of bipartisan consensus in Washington DC.

As proof, he reads us the 1952 Republican Platform. It sounds awfully familiar to today’s rhetoric from the GOP:

We assert that during the last twenty years, leaders of the Government of the United States under successive Democrat Administrations, and especially under this present Administration, have failed to perform these several basic duties; but, on the contrary, that they have evaded them, flouted them, and by a long succession of vicious acts, so undermined the foundations of our Republic as to threaten its existence.[…]

We charge that they have arrogantly deprived our citizens of precious liberties by seizing powers never granted.[…]

We charge that they work unceasingly to achieve their goal of national socialism.[…]

We charge that they have disrupted internal tranquillity by fostering class strife for venal political purposes.[…]

We charge that they have choked opportunity and hampered progress by unnecessary and crushing taxation.[…]

They claim prosperity but the appearance of economic health is created by war expenditures, waste and extravagance, planned emergencies, and war crises. They have debauched our money by cutting in half the purchasing power of our dollar.[…]

We charge that they have weakened local self-government which is the cornerstone of the freedom of men.[…]

We charge that they have shielded traitors to the Nation in high places, and that they have created enemies abroad where we should have friends.[…]

We charge that they have violated our liberties by turning loose upon the country a swarm of arrogant bureaucrats and their agents who meddle intolerably in the lives and occupations of our citizens.[…]

We charge that there has been corruption in high places, and that examples of dishonesty and dishonor have shamed the moral standards of the American people.[…]

There is a Molly Ivins quote to which I subscribe hefty importance to:

Things are not getting worse; things have always been this bad. Nothing is more consoling than the long perspective of history. It will perk you up no end to go back and read the works of progressives past. You will learn therein that things back then were also terrible, and what’s more, they were always getting worse. This is most inspiriting.

In other words, “This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.”

Jason330 has been unusually pessimistic lately, so since he puts a lot of stock (no pun intended) into these political prediction markets, I thought this might serve as an early Christmas gift.

The above graph is from PredictWise, happily now with trending available. With Ted Cruz rising and Donald Trump steady, the betting markets see that as a move toward an unelectable GOP nominee.

James Fallows on just how cowardly the GOP sounded on Tuesday night:

But the GOP’s overall goal was to replicate the tone on Fox News, and vice versa, which in both cases is essentially: risk, risk, risk; fear, fear, fear; ISIS, ISIS, ISIS; alien, alien, alien. All of this is toward the end of demonstrating Obama’s weakness and failure. Unfortunately, it is also at direct odds with U.S. strategic interests. A resilient nation seeks to minimize the effects of any terrorist attacks that, in a society that retains any liberties, will lamentably still occur. A nation that wants to magnify the effects of terrorism yells “The attackers are everywhere!” “We’re all going to die!!!” Because they consider it useful against the “feckless” Obama, the latter has been the 2016 GOP approach[.] It could box them into strategically foolish policies if they took office.

Ramp-up-the-fear was also the result of CNN’s approach tonight. Much more than half of the show was about ISIS / ISIL, Syria, and refugees. Here’s a promise: whoever becomes the next president will and should spend much less than half of his or her time on ISIS and Syria. The presidential topics that are not directly about ISIS—China, Russia, Mexico, the economic and political tensions in Europe, the entirety of Latin America and Africa, Iran, India, Pakistan, Japan, the South China Sea—any one of these, on its own, has a chance to occupy more of the next president’s time and attention than ISIS. Together they very certainly will. Not to mention: trade deals, the economy, job creation, budgets and deficits, medical care, and a thousand other issues.

Frank Rich on the debate:

The debate was almost solely focused on fear, and the main way the candidates tried to distinguish themselves from each other could be found in their race to determine who could best exploit and ramp up the audience’s worst nightmares of imminent Armageddon[.] The problem with this focus is that you can’t out-Trump Trump, who runs the table when it comes to sowing fear, preaching xenophobia, and projecting bellicosity. You can’t beat a platform that consists of (a) promising to “bomb the shit out of them” and (b) barring all Muslims from entering the U.S. This is why Trump’s lead (among Republicans) has been growing in national polls, and why it is likely to continue to grow after last night, no matter how many observers ritualistically say he’s a terrible debater (true) and that surely by now he must have peaked. According to a CNN/ORC International poll this fall, some 43 percent of Republicans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. Obama hatred is the parallel animus to Muslim hatred in the party’s base, and the genius of Trump is that he has fused them in a campaign that, let us not forget, began with his embrace of the birthers’ challenge of the president’s Hawaiian birth certificate.

[T]he candidates presented a gloom-and-doom worldview that is the antithesis of Reagan’s “Morning in America.” The takeaway from the night was that everything in America sucks.

I sometimes check in to Red State for some Schadenfreude. After Tuesday’s debate, Leon Wolf, a Cruz and then Rubio supporter, was very displeased.

…people who realize that Trump represents an existential threat to the credibility and future existence of the conservative movement as a political force have been forced to grind our teeth as Cruz – who really has been a champion for our causes – held fire on this charlatan for months. Now we are treated to the spectacle of Cruz treating Rubio in the same way many of us wish he had treated Trump from day one? It’s frankly galling.

A existential threat to the future EXISTENCE of the conservative movement. LOL. I agree. Go Trump!