Saturday Open Thread [12.5.2015]

NATIONAL—CNN/ORC: Clinton 58, Sanders 30, O’Malley 2

Ed Kilgore wonders when exactly Marco Rubio is supposed to start winning primaries:

At some point, you have to start winning caucuses and primaries to win the nomination. And it’s hard to identify right now where Rubio is supposed to claim his first victory.

Iowa does not look like Rubio Country; marginal candidates like Huckabee and Santorum will go for broke there; Cruz and Trump seem to be battling for the lead; the powerful nativist faction led by Representative Steve King will not let anyone forget Rubio’s immigration heresy; and for all his on-paper appeal, the Floridian doesn’t look like the sort of candidate who inspires the kind of passionate support necessary for a last-minute Caucus surge.

In New Hampshire, Trump is strong; the Iowa winner will get a bump; and even as the archconservative candidates fought against “winnowing” in Iowa, the remaining center-right candidates will go for broke, including Chris Christie, newly invigorated by his own strong debate performances, plus an endorsement from the Union-Leader.

Rubio’s running neck and neck with Ted Cruz in South Carolina polls, but the Texan probably has the higher upside in this profoundly conservative state. And Cruz has planned his entire campaign around winning the so-called “SEC Primary” on March 1. And on March 15, he will face the existential challenge of a winner-take-all Florida primary he cannot afford to lose. So far, in sporadic polling, Rubio has topped out at 18 percent in his home state.

His hopes for an early splash may depend on the unlikely venue of Nevada, where his early years as a an ex-Catholic Mormon in Las Vegas reportedly could give him an edge among the LDS voters whose mobilization for Mitt Romney played an outsize role in that state in the last two cycles.

Wait. Rubio is Mormon? How is it that I never knew that. And I wonder what motivated him to convert from Catholicism to Mormonism. I have never heard of a prior instance.

The point of this article though is that if Rubio does not win Florida, it is over.

When it comes to the anti-Muslim rhetoric we’re hearing from Republicans, Fareed Zakaria suggests it is unprecedented.

What is most bizarre is to hear this anti-Muslim rhetoric described as brave truth-telling. Trump insists that he will not be silenced on this issue. Chris Christie says that he will not follow a “politically correct” national security policy. They are simply feeding a prejudice…

This is the first time that I can recall watching politicians pander to mobs — and then congratulate themselves for their political courage.

On Thursday, Mein Fuhrer Donald Trump gave a pretty anti-semitic speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition. Here are some of the high(low)lights.

These are three real things that he said:

“Stupidly, you want to give money…You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money.”
“I’m a negotiator, like you folks.”
“Is there anyone in this room who doesn’t negotiate deals? Probably more than any room I’ve ever spoken.” […]

That wasn’t the end of Trump’s problems during the address. When asked about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the candidate whiffed. He refused to tell the strongly pro-Israel group whether he thought Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel, and was outright booed. He appeared to apportion blame to Israel for the failure of the peace process, and the room was dead silent. […] Trump […]: “I don’t know that Israel has the commitment to make it” You can hear a pin drop. […]

Again, there was some applause for other pro-Israel comments, as well as digs at President Obama and Bernie Sanders. But overall, it was an utterly baffling address to give to a group of Republican Jews. It suggests that Trump isn’t just “politically incorrect” when talking about Democratic-voting groups like Latinos and women; it’s that he actually can’t help himself from engaging in nasty stereotypes. […]

So to recap: Trump stood in front of an audience of Jews and called them money-grubbers. He stood in front of a pro-Israel crowd, and told them Israel was (at least partially) to blame for the failure to come to terms with the Palestinians. Despite the applause, it’s hard to characterize that as anything but a disaster.

What does Mein Fuhrer Donald Trump have in common Josef Stalin and Kim Jong-il, besides the fascism?

Donald Trump’s rhetorical escalation of the viciousness with which he will combat terrorism reached new and dizzying heights on Fox[,] as the candidate managed to say three times in one breath that America needs to “take out” the families of terrorists. […]

If Trump’s “idea” sounds familiar, that’s probably because a policy of collective family responsibility for political “crimes” is one of the reasons the North Korean regime is an international pariah. And it’s entirely probable the inspiration for that practice was the great if distant grandfather of North Korean Communism, Joseph Stalin, who routinely killed family members of state and class enemies and sent many millions of others to the gulag.

Missouri state Rep. Stacey Newman (D) has introduced a bill to apply “the restrictions placed on women seeking abortion services to all prospective firearm purchasers, such as a requirement that anyone buying a gun first watch a 30-minute video on fatal firearm injuries,” St. Louis Magazine reports.

Said Newman: “Since Missouri holds the rank as one of the strictest abortion regulation states in the country, it is logical we borrow similar restrictions to lower our horrific gun violence rates.”

“There’s not a lot of depth there.” — Gov. Chris Christie, on Sen. Marco Rubio. That feels like the most accurate statement on Rubio. Pretty face. Not much else.

David Brooks: “When campaigns enter that final month, voters tend to gravitate toward the person who seems most orderly. As the primary season advances, voters’ tolerance for risk declines. They focus on the potential downsides of each contender and wonder, Could this person make things even worse?”

“When this mental shift happens, I suspect Trump will slide. All the traits that seem charming will suddenly seem risky. The voters’ hopes for transformation will give way to a fear of chaos. When the polls shift from registered voters to likely voters, cautious party loyalists will make up a greater share of those counted.”

He is half right. I feel like they will turn away from Trump, but they will not turn towards Rubio or Christie. They will go for Cruz. Because they want chaos. They do not fear it.

Chris Matthews slams Donald Trump – Tells… by ewillies

Chris Matthews did not mince words today. He justifiably hit Donald Trump in the jugular for his attempt to smear the president over the attack in San Bernardino, California.

“Let me finish tonight with Donald Trump’s suggestion that President Obama is behaving defensively regarding Islamic terrorism,” said Chris Matthews. “That as Trump put it today, ‘There is something wrong with him that we don’t know about. There is something wrong with him that we don’t know about.’ Well here we go again, back into that indictment Trump has been nursing for years, that the President somehow got to where he is, the White House, as part of a deep and dark conspiracy. One that brought him secretly to this country from overseas, that got him credit for graduating from various schools up to and including Harvard Law School even though no one Trump assures us at any of those schools can remember Obama.”

“Well, this is Trump’s trump card. It is his ethnic taunt to the worst of the Obama haters. It is his willingness to argue that the President isn’t really one of us. That he is on the contrary a mysterious interloper who snuck into our country, assumed an identity that wasn’t his, and smuggled himself all the way to the American presidency never once being the person he claims to be. Well this is the original Trump sin back again. This is the trumped up libel that our front running candidate is willing to sell whenever he finds an audience as he did today willing to swallow it only because they hate Obama personally, hate his progressive politics, hate most of all his open tolerant world view. I have from the beginning seen Trump as a mixed bag. But this birtherism which he exhumed today is the bad he carries with him, refuses to dump, and is so willing to sell.”

“For those who applauded him today, cheered at his insinuation that the President hides himself as a defender of Islamist terrorism, I can only say this,” Chris Matthews said. “You should be ashamed. None of us should applaud this 21st century McCarthyism, this cheap insinuation against a fellow American backed up by nothing but hate.”