If You Don't Call It A "Brokered Convention," Maybe No One Will Notice You're Stealing Trump's Nomination

Friday the Washington Post cobbled together a mini-National Review Against Trump OpEd featuring American right-wing luminaries-- overwhelmingly proven crackpots-- like Haley Barbour, William Kristol, the Newtster and Eric Cantor. It was a wide array of establishment GOP positioning on what to do about the existential threat a Trump nomination poses to their party, if not their nation.

Barbour, an RNC chair in the mid-90's and then governor of the Great State of some secessionist hell hole from 2004-2012. He got the OpEd off the ground by spouting the official GOP establishment party line on how to steal the election from Trump and hand the nomination over to Ryan. Utter bullshit: "As one who intends to support the Republican nominee, I recognize that this choice is in the hands of millions of GOP primary voters, as it should be. I expect a candidate to go to Cleveland with the necessary 1,237 delegates to be nominated on the first ballot. If not, we will have a contested convention, a rarity in modern U.S. politics. But it won’t be a 'brokered' convention. There is nobody who can 'broker' it. In the unlikely case of a contested convention, the delegates will have to work through the process; no wise men exist who can control or broker such a convention." There are no brokers; there is no one pulling the strings from behind the curtain. We is a democracy!

Before being kicked out of Congress and politics, Newt Gingrich rose from crackpot backwoods/backbench Georgia bomb-thrower to a spectacularly failed House Speaker, a miserable 2-decade sojourn. He pointed out faux-sagely that the two most likely nominees of the GOP lumpen-proletariat, Trump and Cruz, "represent a widespread rebuke to party elites" and posits that for those hated elites (who banished him from Washington to a career of book peddling and hucksterism) "it is time to accept that ordinary Republicans-- their own voters-- want an insurgent outsider." Predictably, he's perfectly content with Trump and the silly-historian inside warns them not to mess with him. "In the event of a Trump nomination, the question will be whether the party elites suicidally do to their nominee what they did to Barry Goldwater in 1964 or come around to supporting him, as they did with Ronald Reagan in 1980. It’s easy to forget that the establishment similarly disliked Reagan, whom they viewed as an outsider, before he became a Republican hero. In 1964, the anti-Goldwater elites at the top of the party not only caused the defeat of their own party’s nominee for president because they despised him so intensely; they also crushed House and Senate Republicans in the process. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) should hope that today’s elites consider how much better it was to work with Reagan than it was to destroy Goldwater." He demands the nasty, vitriolic Mitt walk back his unwarranted personal attack on poor Donald.

Irving Kristol's kid, Bill, who runs a website called the Weekly Standard, doesn't agree with Newt at all and doesn't share Barbour's greasy subtlety. "How should Republicans respond to having Donald Trump as our front-runner? With the determination to defeat him... [E]even if Trump were to be the official nominee, there would be no reason not to mount an independent Republican candidacy in the general election. Either way, we can prevail-- or go down fighting, with flags flying and guns blazing."

Jim Leach was an Iowa congressman for 3 decades, sandwiched between 2 exceptionally mediocre Democrats, Ed Mezvinsky, the bribe-taking, prison-bird father of Hillary Clinton's son-in-law, and the current disappointing nonentity, Dave Loebsack. Leach's unimaginably silly solution-- let Trump win but put in a military dictator as VP to control him.

The political establishment must begin by recognizing that it is responsible for the public cry for change. Americans are reaching out for new approaches to governance because we are still engaged in the two longest and most debilitating wars in our history and are still coping with a job-eroding recession. The lessons of these man-made events are self-evident. The case for going to war with a country that did not attack us and attempting to “finance” it with tax cuts was frail. Likewise, the case for allowing large financial institutions to overleverage and play Russian roulette with the economy was nonexistent. The point is that multitrillion-dollar misjudgments were made by a political-ideological complex that misunderstood the national interest and ignored the common good.

That doesn’t mean that all is wrong with the United States or that radical change is the answer. What is needed is better judgment: tax policy that emphasizes fairness rather than social splintering; foreign policy that highlights negotiation rather than military adventurism; politics that is based on shared convictions and mutual respect.

Dysfunctional governance is an American embarrassment. Donald Trump is a flawed candidate, but the establishment must look long and hard in the mirror as it attempts to carve out an alternative path. If Trump’s greatest strength is that he is not thee, perhaps the party would be wise to coalesce around balancing whoever is nominated at the convention with an element of non-political gravitas: a vice presidential choice from the outside, such as Adm. Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Cantor has nothing to say worth commenting on and Ari Fleisher, Bush's gay press secretary for most of his first term warns about the end of the GOP, which leased Trump it's name "so that he can temporarily affix it to the campaign he is building. He’s a wrecking ball, swinging through the Republican Party, destroying the GOP positions on entitlement reform, free trade and Planned Parenthood. But if he’s the nominee, his wrecking ball will swing through the Democratic Party, too. Republicans have long dreamed of growing the party with blue-collar, working-class Americans, and especially against Clinton, Trump has a chance to gain these new voters. Many low- and middle-income workers who know this economy isn’t working for them are Trump voters-in-waiting."

Thanks, Ari, for making our case: