Delaware Dem
Delaware Dem's Latest Posts
Sunday Open Thread [8.7.16]
“In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” — Former CIA Director Michael Morell, writing in the New York Times.
Saturday Open Thread [8.6.16]
When Speaker Paul Ryan was asked by Charlie Sykes whether there’s anything that would cause him to rescind his endorsement of Donald Trump. he said, “Of course.” But he wouldn’t say what that is. Said Ryan: “Where that line gets crossed, I don’t know where that is.”
So everything that has come before is endorsed by Ryan, the leader of the GOP. Which means all Republicans are just fine with banning Muslims, being racist towards Latinos and Blacks, dishonoring Gold Star families, and using nuclear weapons.
Friday Open Thread [8.5.16]
Jonathan Chait says Trump proves that I, Delaware Dem, was right all along about the nature of the right’s opposition to Obama: “As careful studies of the tea-party movement revealed, what animated Republican voters was a fear of cultural change. Their anti-statism was confined to programs that seemed to benefit people other than themselves. Racial resentment and ethnocentrism, not passion for limited government, drove the conservative base.”
“Almost alone within the party, Trump understood this. That is why his comically long list of ideological deviations never hurt him. Trump’s racism demonstrated to most Republican voters that he stood with them on the essential divide that ordered their political world — one defined by identity more than ideology.”
“In the conservative elite’s imagination, the romanticized history of the tea-party revolt — a story of liberty-loving Americans rising up against Big Government excess — still prevails. It is a story that attributes the party’s extraordinary opposition to the president’s policies, not to the primal fears he aroused. Trump has not only disproven the conservative movement’s theory of its own base. He’s disproven its history of the Obama presidency.”
They opposed him with such vehemence because they were and are racists. And being racist explains why Trump has won the GOP nomination. The GOP is racist. Trump is racist. It is a match made in hell.
Thursday Open Thread [8.4.16]
Let me start by saying I see no chance that Trump withdraws from the race, despite Republican wishful thinking to the contrary. Call it big game unicorn hunting. But unicorn studies is a perfectly respectable discipline. So I wanted to explore one aspect of this scenario. In the quite unlikely case of Trump leaving the race, who would replace him? My understanding is that in this all but unprecedented situation the Republican National Committee would convene and pick a replacement. Even if they wanted to canvas the views of Republicans nationwide there’s simply no practical way and no time to do that.
So who do they pick? Good luck. Trump isn’t an accident. His ascendence is tied to Republican voters who became a sort of frankenstein’s monster of the GOP elites’ own creation. Weened on decades of victim-speak, impossible goals, over-primed lust for revenge against various domestic bad guys and outsiders and perverts and all the rest, they finally rebelled and chose someone who at least said he could follow through on the political snuff films they see on Breitbart, Newsmax, WorldNetDaily and the rest.
Trump quitting and being replaced is quite impossible. If he is “voluntarily” forced from the race at this stage 40% of the GOP doesn’t show up to vote in November. This is a lose-lose situation for the GOP no matter what happens. So what is behind both Trump’s erratic behavior after the DNC and the panic among Republicans? It is not anything Trump has done or said, because the truth about Trump has been known for a year.
Wednesday Open Thread [8.3.16]
In his strongest denouncement of Donald Trump so far, President Obama said Mr. Trump was “unfit to serve as president” and urged the leaders of the Republican Party to withdraw their backing for his candidacy, the New York Times reports.
Said Obama: “The question they have to ask themselves is: If you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?”
He added: “This isn’t a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. This is daily. There has to be a point at which you say, this is not somebody I can support for president of the United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party. The fact that that has not yet happened makes some of these denunciations ring hollow.”
Ironically this type of condemnation from Obama may force the GOP to rally around Trump, or prevent those who would denounce Trump from doing so. Since the GOP always does the opposite of anything, and I mean anything, Obama says. And that might have been Obama’s intention.
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