Delaware Dem

Monday Open Thread [7.13.15]

The Washington Post’s Robert Costa had a bizzare interview with renowned bankruptcy and divorce expert Donald Trump on his private plane following his seventy-minute rant of a speech in Phoenix during which he used the Nixonian phrase “the Silent Majority.” Costa was wondering if Trump was concerned that he had borrowed the phrase from a disgraced President. Trump replied:

Nah. Nobody remembers that. Oh, is that why people stopped using [the phrase]? Maybe. Nobody thinks of Nixon. I don’t think of Nixon when I think of the silent majority. The silent majority today, they’re going to vote for Trump. Remember, many Republicans didn’t vote for Mitt Romney. He didn’t inspire people. They’re going to vote for me.

Actually, Mr. Trump, Republicans and conservatives did come out to vote for Mr. Romney. The reason why you lost is because Democrats and Independent also showed up. And the reason you Republicans were so surprised on election night that year is because you thought the turnout would be closer to 2010 percentages, and not 2008 percentages. Yes, the turnout would be higher, but the percentage breakdown between Democrats and Republicans and Independents would be the same.

You were wrong. And then you cried. And we smiled. Some of us laughed and pointed.

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Sunday Open Thread [7.12.15]

Dana Milbank says that when you want to know who’s responsible for the Republican follies over that ugly red flag, look to the man permanently wearing orange.

The Confederates launched a surprise attack, under cover of darkness.

It was 8:30 Wednesday night, and the House was plodding toward its 20th hour of debate on a little-watched appropriations bill, when Rep. Ken Calvert (Calif.), who had been leading the Republican side of the debate, rose. “I have an amendment at the desk,” he said.

Yes he did: A proposal to protect the sale and display of the Confederate battle flag at national parks and cemeteries. …

In the Speaker’s Lobby off the House floor, Rep. Lynn A. Westmoreland (R-Ga.) … told reporters, including Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times, that the Confederate battle flag isn’t racist and that he didn’t think Confederate soldiers had “any thoughts about slavery.” …

Republican leaders, trying to end the humiliation they brought on themselves, pulled the appropriations bill from the floor. But how could such a fiasco occur in the first place? It’s not as if there’s a huge groundswell within Republican ranks to fly the Confederate flag — particularly after its association with the alleged killer in last month’s South Carolina black-church massacre.

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Saturday Open Thread [7.11.15]

Damon Linker at The Week says the GOP should be less worried about Donald Trump himself and more worried about why he appeals so much to the Republician base:

The GOP’s Trump problem goes all the way down to the roots of the party — the grassroots.[…] that faction’s roots go back much further than 2012 — all the way back to the origins of the modern conservative movement in the right-wing populism of the postwar John Birch Society and similar groups. They were a ragtag conglomeration of ideological radicals animated by rage against various actors, forces, trends, and policies in mid-20th-century American life: the New Deal, Big Government, communists, negroes, elites, decadent city folk, Catholics, Jews, immigrants, feminists, homosexuals, and secularists. Some feared them all, others focused on one or a few. All of them saw the world through a fog of paranoia and conspiracy.

The populists are the now base of the party — its most loyal and devoted members, surpassed only by super-rich donors for influence among the party’s leading politicians and strategists. Candidates for president have no choice but to woo this base, to legitimize its obsessions and flatter its prejudices. And the underdog candidates, meanwhile, pin their entire campaigns on these voters, hoping that the flattery will pay off in a surge of support, catapulting them to prominence.

That’s how we’ve ended up with a vulgar blowhard like Donald Trump riding high (almost certainly for a brief time) in the polls. Trump’s policy positions (to the extent that he’s bothered to articulate them) place him on the far-right flank of American political culture.

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Friday Open Thread [7.10.15]

A new Reuters poll finds that 63% of Republicans oppose the Supreme Court’s backing of gay marriage, which gives hope for conservative presidential candidates who have come out strongly against marriage equality.

“When asked in general whether they support allowing same-sex couples to marry, 51% of Americans say they do, while 35 percent oppose it. Forty-eight percent of independent voters back gay marriage, making it difficult for a conservative Republican to win general election votes on the issue.”

Indeed. These two issues.. gay marriage and immigration… will prevent the GOP from winning a presidential election until the party changes their stance on the issue.

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Do Your Jobs or Get Fired.

To every self righteous sanctimonious hypocritical county or court clerk that refuses to do their job and issue marriage licenses, pursuant to the Constitution, to gay and lesbian couples, that should be the message.

You either do your job, or you’re fired.

That is finally what Democratic Governor Steve Beshear did in Kentucky.

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Thursday Open Thread [7.9.15]

I love what Jeb Lund has to say:

The party has run so long on nativist anxiety about foreigners plundering lady liberty, stealing jobs and slowly strangling the republic to death that the next step is just calling immigrants rapists, thieves and murderers. And thanks to years of purity testing in Republican primaries, after trying to ignore the issue for weeks, the remaining candidates have only two options left: try to join or outflank Trump to the right or try to non-ignore ignore him by writing him off as “inappropriate.”

The rest of the world can just call Trump an idiot, a man with few ambitions outside of being Trumpy, whose remaining strands of what one might call policy are wisps of spun sugar extruded by hot air, reminding everyone of the tacky coif that sits atop his blanched Smithfield Ham of a face. The Republican Party can’t even luxuriate in ad hominem. Yeah, they could call him an empty suit and a bozo, but that stops working the moment anyone notices that he sounds like a slightly loaded version of themselves.

Donald Trump is everyone’s drunk belligerent uncle. That racist piece of shit that always ruins Thanksgiving.

I was traveling around yesterday on business, so I got to listen to CNN and MSNBC in the car. It was amusing to hear them all freak out about the three computer glitches at the NYSE, United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal. But then the Trump interview went up on MSNBC, and then it was all both networks could talk about. Trump is like catnip to the media.

One observation that I agreed with was that Trump always speaks in absolutes. Everything is the best, or the most, or conversely the worst. Everything is huge. The biggest. The largest.

My diagnosis: Donald Trump has a serious inferiority complex. And that explains the combover. Real, confident men accept baldness.

And he is still a birther. Which means he is insane, which explains comments like “I will win the Latino vote in 2016.” That’s like me saying “I am going to sleep with Gisele Bundchen in 2015.” Both statements are counter-factuals and will not happen.

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