Trump's Name Is Even Too Toxic For Azerbaijan, One Of The World's Most Corrupt Nations

I just got back from my first visit to Azerbaijan. I never expected to find such a wonderful place but it reminded me of a wealthier and more modern/Western Turkey. It's a little smaller than Maine and a little bigger than South Carolina with just over ten million inhabitants, more than New Jersey or Michigan and just about the same number as North Carolina. The rap on the country is that it's very wealthy but that all the wealth is concentrated in a few families' hands, cronies of the forever president, Ilham Aliyev, who first came to power in 2003 when his pop, Heydar Aliyev, died. The elder Aliyev had been a former First Secretary of the Azerbaijani Communist Party, a member of the Soviet Politburo and of the KGB before deposing Azerbaijan's first democratically-elected president Abulfaz Elchibey, and taking over.

Before that unpleasantness, Azerbaijan was the world's first Muslim-majority secular state and parliamentary democracy. That was before being overrun by the Soviets in 1920, Lenin saying he was sorry but the Soviets needed the oil. Azerbaijan lived under the Soviet yoke until it declared independence in 1991, as the Soviet Union was crumbling. Now it's a rich little country and Baku, the modern, bustling capital, looks-- architecturally-- like a cross between Paris and Dubai. And into this mix waddled Donald Trump a couple years ago.He smelled the opportunities inherent in one of the world's most corrupt countries a hemisphere away.

One of the mainstays of the kleptocratic regime, Transportation Minister, Ziya Mammadov, who went from a lowly railway worker to a billionaire/Mafioso, owns a lot of Azerbaijan. His son, Anar, is a shady character and a perfect fit for The Donald. It was only a matter of time before they found each other, which they did when Anar decided to rent Trump's name for his glitzy new hotel. He paid Trump between $2.5 and $2.8 million for the right to slap "Trump Tower" on his building and to get some "consultations" from Ivanka. In November, 2014, the Trump Organization announced that Trump Tower Baku was part of it's hotel empire and The Donald himself boasted that "Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku represents the unwavering standard of excellence of The Trump Organization and our involvement in only the best global development projects. When we open in 2015, visitors and residents will experience a luxurious property unlike anything else in Baku-- it will be among the finest in the world." Ivanka added that "This incredible building reflects the highest level of luxury and refinement, with extraordinary architecture inspired by the Caspian Sea and sophisticated interiors that seamlessly blend contemporary style with timeless appeal. We are looking forward to bringing our unparalleled Trump services and amenities to Azerbaijan.”

It sort of opened. Trump's partner, Anar, has been described by U.S. diplomats as "notoriously corrupt" and as working to launder money for the Iranian military. The hotel hired a full staff and started renting rooms but never had a promised grand opening. Everyone in the Baku hotel industry knows someone who worked there... briefly.

Trump often talks of hiring the best people and surrounding himself with people he can trust. In practice, however, he and his executives have at times appeared to overlook details about the background of people he has chosen as business partners, such as whether they had dubious associations, had been convicted of crimes, faced extradition or inflated their resumes.

...In the Azerbaijani case, Garten said the Trump Organization had performed meticulous due diligence on the company's partners, but hadn't researched the allegations against the Baku partner's father because he wasn't a party to the deal.

"I've never heard that before," Garten said, when first asked about allegations of Iranian money laundering by the partner's father, which appeared in U.S. diplomatic cables widely available since they were leaked in 2010.

Garten subsequently said he was confident the minister alleged to be laundering Iranian funds, Ziya Mammadov, had no involvement in his son's holding company, even though some of the son's major businesses regularly partnered with the transportation ministry and were founded while the son was in college overseas. Ziya Mammadov did not respond to a telephone message the AP left with his ministry in Baku or to emails to the Azerbaijan Embassy in Washington.

Garten told the AP that Trump's company uses a third-party investigative firm, which he did not identify, that specializes in background intelligence gathering and searches global watch lists, warrant lists and sanctions lists maintained by the United Nations, Interpol and others.

...Any American contemplating a business venture in Azerbaijan faces a risk: "endemic public corruption," as the State Department puts it. Much of that money flows from the oil and gas industries, but the State Department also considers the country to be a waypoint for terrorist financiers, Iranian sanctions-busters and Afghan drug lords.

The environment is a risky one for any business venture seeking to avoid violating U.S. penalties imposed against Iran or anti-bribery laws under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

...Garten said the Trump Organization had performed background screening on all those involved in the deal and was confident Mammadov's father played no role in the project.

Experts on Azerbaijan were mystified that Trump or anyone else could reach that conclusion.

Anar Mammadov is widely viewed by diplomats and nongovernmental organizations as a transparent stand-in for the business interests of his father. Anar's business has boomed with regular help from his father's ministry, receiving exclusive government contracts, a near monopoly on Baku's taxi business and even a free fleet of autobuses.

"These are not business people acting on their own-- you're dealing with daddy," said Richard Kauzlarich, a U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s who went on to work under the Director of National Intelligence during the George W. Bush administration.

"Whatever the Trump people thought they were doing, that wasn't reality," Kauzlarich said.

Anar Mammadov, who is believed to be 35, has said in a series of interviews that he founded Garant Holdings' predecessor-- which has arms in transportation, construction, banking, telecommunications and manufacturing-- in 2000, when he would have been 19. Anar received his bachelor's degree in 2003 and a master's in business administration in 2005-- both from a university in London.

Mammadov's statement that he founded the business in 2000 appeared in a magazine produced by a research firm in partnership with the Azerbaijani government. In other forums, he has said he started the business in 2005, though several of its key subsidiaries predate that period.

Now all the employees have been laid off and everyone around Baku says the Mammadovs want to wait a little while for people to forget the Trump taint before they re-brand the building and re-open it as something else-- anything else... even a Motel 6 would be a better bet than something related to Donald Trump at this moment. The stench attached to his name and his brand isn't going to wash off quickly, especially not in a highly educated, secular Muslim-majority country like Azerbaijan. Want to help save America from Trump and Trumpism? Tap the thermometer:

Is the Republican Party Already Circling The Drain?

Even Republican voters hate the assholes they elected to Congress. Most of the dumbed-down, Foxified party base is in full revolt against their own party's twisted establishment, whether or not they realize that they themselves put them in their positions. 

The Des Moines Register Iowa poll that came out Sunday shows that among the party's base, approval of Republicans in Congress is horrendous. 54% say they are unsatisfied, and on top of that another 21% say they are "mad as hell" at the Republicans in Congress. That makes 75%. Among Democrats, only 8% are "mad as hell" at their congressional delegation and another 43% are unsatisfied-- total 51%, not great... but not 75% either. (Also worth noting, 94% of Democrats and 91% of Republicans say they are either unsatisfied or "mad as hell" about the amount of money sloshing around in politics, a core Bernie Sanders issue.)

A Qunnipiac poll released Monday showed similar results. Neither party is well-liked, but the survey showed that "voters disapprove 81-12% of the way Republicans in Congress are doing their job and give the Republican Party a negative 31-58% favorability. Disapproval of Democrats in Congress is 66-27% and the Democratic Party gets a negative 40-50% favorability." The poll found that 69% of Republicans disapprove of the way the Republicans in Congress are handling their job. 37% of Democrats disapprove of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job.

Republican voters don't especially hate their congressmembers for the reasons normal people hate Republicans in Congress. Trump is certainly turning the Republican Party brand into more of a racist mess than it already is... but that isn't especially unpopular among Republicans. In fact, that's exactly what many of them want! White nationalist groups-- KKK freaks, neo-Nazis, the whole gamut of bigots and fascist misanthropes-- see Trump as leading their own last stand. Not only has Trump, whose daughter is an observant Jew, not seriously disavowed them, neither have the other Republican presidential hopefuls. Nor have Reince Priebus and the official Republican Party denounced the affinity that outright Nazis are now showing for their party's front-runner. 

But hedge-fund god Jim Chanos thinks the Republicans will lose the White House again next year-- only not because of the racists, Nazis, Trump, or even the contempt with which the base holds their own congressional leaders. Although he's a Biden guy who says even sane Republicans he knows will vote for Biden before they vote for the GOP clown car, his analysis of why the GOP will lose works across the board for Democratic candidates:

In 2016, barring any unforeseen things, we're going to have the stock market near record highs, corporate profit at record highs, gas prices very low. We're going to have mortgage rates very low, house prices at all-time highs. We're going to have universal healthcare. We're going to be at peace. This is not the worst record to run on if you're tied to the Obama administration. Eight years of peace and prosperity-- let's bring in the other guys?

And it isn't just Chanos predicting a Democratic win. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that their Moody's Analytics election model now predicts a Democratic electoral landslide in the 2016 presidential vote-- 326 electoral votes for the Democrats and only 212 for the Republican.

The primary factor driving the results further to the incumbent party in August is lower gasoline prices. Plummeting prices and changing dynamics in global energy markets from Chinese weakness and the Iranian nuclear deal have caused us to significantly lower our gasoline price forecast for the next several years. This variable is very significant to voter sentiment in the model, with lower prices favoring incumbents.

If Trump's Mission Is To Destroy The Republican Party, He's Certainly Succeeding Brilliantly

Note: this morning, a brand new Reuters-Ipsos poll of Republican voters showed only 3 top tier candidates left:

• Trump- 32%
• Jeb!- 16%
• Carson- 8%

Yesterday we saw how Trump has forced the GOP dangerously rightward on the anti-Hispanic racism that the party was determined-- after their 2014 autopsy-- to avoid. Trump may be able to fill half a football stadium in Mobile, Alabama, in the KKK heartland, but dozens of GOP congressional careers are now in jeopardy-- not to mention the eventual Republican presidential nominee-- because of Trump's cheap shots against millions of Latino Americans. 

Also yesterday, Emily Greenhouse, writing for Bloomberg, pointed out that this Republican lurch to the far right isn't helping them with the women voters that the autopsy concluded had to be appealed to. The gender gap is the biggest it's been in two decades, and thanks to Trump, Huckabee, Jeb, Rubio, Santorum and the rest of the weak Republican presidential contenders it's growing, not narrowing.

The last presidential election illuminated a stark gender gap; Mitt Romney was victorious among male voters, but lost among women by 11 percentage points. Among single women, he lost by 36 points. The following year, the National Republican Congressional Committee, wanting to improve on these numbers-- and avoid repeating damaging lines like former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin’s on “legitimate rape,” uttered three years ago this week-- held sessions with Republican aides on how to talk to and about women. Speaker John Boehner noted that, “when you look around the Congress, there are a lot more females in the Democrat caucus than there are in the Republican caucus.” He encouraged members of Congress to “be a little more sensitive.”

...Three out of four Americans say a woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion if she becomes pregnant as a result of rape. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, in 1973, not a single Republican presidential nominee has opposed exceptions to abortion in cases of incest, rape, or threat to the life of the mother.

And yet, as we roll toward the 2016 presidential election, the Republican Party seems to have undergone a vigorous rightward turn on the subject of abortion. Whether because of deeply held beliefs or the tactical imperatives of the GOP’s primary season, many of the candidates are taking surprisingly unyielding positions-- ones that are well out of the current American mainstream.

Perhaps Janell Ross got to the bottom of the GOP's self-inflicted-- or Trump-inflicted-- wounds, which are further damaging the Republican brand with wide swathes of voters. She pointed out in yesterday's Washington Post that Trump's appeal and surge is all about appealing to less-educated Americans-- people who get their news and opinions from Hate Talk Radio and Fox News. "Trump," she wrote,

has certainly distinguished himself as the candidate willing to express outrage and horror about the nation's immigration challenges. He has also espoused a range of demonstrably false, unproven and outright conspiratorial ideas about immigration. Those ideas might sound outrageous and even xenophobic to some Americans. But when you look at who told pollsters that they share at least some of Trump's concerns, that same pattern mentioned up above-- white, Republicans with more limited education-- shows up in a slightly more subtle way.

According to a recent ABC News poll, about a third of Trump's supporters come from a group of Republicans with high school diplomas but without college diplomas. Only 8% of Trump's supporters are Republicans with college degrees. "In a nutshell," Ross concluded,

the people pushing Trump to the head of the polling pack in the very crowded Republican field, the people who have assured Trump a position on the debate stage next month and the people fueling Trump's candidacy are-- overwhelmingly but not limited to-- white, Republicans with limited education.

These are people who are forced to compete with immigrants for low-skill/low-wage jobs. Hisham Melhem is the respected Al Arabiya correspondent in Washington, DC. His insights into American politics are insightful and worth paying attention to. Yesterday his column  explained the Trump Nation phenomenon to his readers back home.

In recent election cycles we briefly encountered the quick rise and the quicker fall of the candidate-de-jour phenomenon, particularly on the Republican side, represented by an assortment of eccentric, colorful, narcissistic scoundrels, usually charismatic, attractive and articulate men and women who control the early stages of the race by sheer aplomb and character. Think of Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich in 2012.These self-appointed saviors of Western Civilization always cast themselves as the outsiders holding the keys to quick fixes, or having the divine vision to deliver us from the political wilderness and put us on the righteous path. Never mind that most of them are the creation of the same political culture and the very economic system that they supposedly abjure. In America of late, every politician denounces ‘Washington’, while barely hiding his/her yearning to embrace it.

Trump is now one of them. His detractors say that he is this summer’s fling for angry and alienated Republican voters who will repent in the cold days leading to the first Republican Caucus in Iowa on February 1, 2016. It is very unlikely that Trump will be the next Republican nominee, but surely he has more staying power, than the previous shooting-star candidates because of his wealth, celebrity and his so far, masterful exploitation of the visceral fears that are weighing heavily on many Americans; a seemingly insoluble immigration problem resulting in more than eleven million undocumented immigrants, almost 15 years of unending wars abroad, rising racial tension and small scale riots in American cities that could turn into major ones , and what many see as America’s retrenchment in the world in the face of a rising China and the bloodiest terrorist entity in the modern world, the so-called ‘Islamic State’, a new threat driven by apocalyptic visions of End Time. Trump also is benefitting from the disillusionment of many voters over widening income inequality, stagnant salaries, and the disappearance of many jobs in the new economy, not to mention the squabbling professional politicians and a dysfunctional government in Washington and an election cycle that seemed only few weeks ago destined to be dominated by two candidates representing two political dynasties.

Enter Donald John Trump, once again. Americans have known Trump for decades. You could not ignore him even if you wanted to. He is loud, crass, bombastic, a mendacious swashbuckling tycoon and a misogynistic man who mastered the art of the scheme. This is the man who bragged that he used the laws of the land to amass huge sums of monies in tax breaks to finance his real estate holdings ( a whopping $163.775 million on Trump Tower, in New York according to a recent report in the National Review) The man, who wants to fix a broken wasteful government in Washington, has reneged on paying his debts because of the way he engineered four corporate bankruptcies, and he lived to brag about it. He tweeted recently ‘Stop saying I went bankrupt. I never went bankrupt but like many great business people have used the laws to corporate advantage-- smart!’

Of all the ‘outsiders’ and the career politicians who set their eyes on the prize of the White House in recent years, Trump, maybe because of his brusque and brash style, his celebrity status and wealth has the most formidable built-in immune system against blunders, gaffs and doublespeak. Any other candidate committing a fraction of the slips, half-truths and the outrageous answers born out of ignorance and arrogance, committed by Trump in the last few weeks, would have been history by now. Consider this: when the man who would be the Commander-in-Chief of the American Armed Forces was asked by veteran reporter and anchor of the Meet the Press program on NBC television network, ’Who do you talk to for military advice right now?’ Trump had no coherent answer, but he quickly recouped and blurted out,’ well, I watch the shows. I mean, I really see a lot of great-- you know, when you watch your show and all of the other shows and you have the generals and you have certain people that you like.’ However, when Todd pressed him gently ‘but is there a go-to for you?’, Trump began to fall apart and obfuscate claiming that there are two to three such advisors, including John Bolton, a well-known civilian neoconservative, who talks like a tough General, but he is certainly not one.

Then, maybe to please Todd, Trump mentioned retired Army Colonel Jack Jacobs, a highly decorated officer and one of NBC’s best military analysts. Trump, with a straight face continued ‘Colonel Jack Jacobs is a good guy, and I see him on occasion.’ The problem with this tale is that it is tall. Colonel Jacobs told David Corn of Mother Jones magazine that the claim is not true. ‘He may have said the first person who came to mind, I know him. But I'm not a consultant. I'm not certain if he has a national security group of people. I don't know if he does or if he doesn't. If he does, I'm not one of them.’

Candidate Trump, in his own mind and in the collective imagination of his supporters is the American equivalent of the awaited Mahdi, the restorer of American greatness and righteousness. The problem is that Trump is not the politically pure outsider destined to lead the nation out of the desert; he is in fact the quintessential insider, the very privileged product of the political-economic structure that he pretends to be railing against. Trump’s crass and intimidating persona has fortified him against serious and tough questioning not only from most of his rivals, but also from most journalists who are in a stampede to interview the pretender-performer-cum-candidate as if he is the sage of these bad times. Trump has yet to propose anything serious to increase American economic growth and narrow the income gap, or how to fight the Islamic State better than Obama’s limited war, or how to deal with China’s belligerence in the South China sea, or how to break down barriers preventing better trade deals with China and Japan or how to deal with an irredentist Russia.

Trump so far has given us one liners such as: If I am elected, I will beat China and Japan on trade, I will build a huge 2000 mile wall on the border with Mexico to be as huge and imposing as the great wall of China, chiming at once that ‘it will be known as the Trump Wall’, while he is forcibly deporting millions of ‘illegal immigrants’ but without telling us how. Trump, as President, will literally steal oil from Iraq as he told Chuck Todd ‘and I said you take away their wealth, that you go and knock the hell out of the oil, take back the oil. We take over the oil, which we should have done in the first place.’ And as president, he says he will demand protection money from Saudi Arabia vowing that ‘they should pay us.’ Trump thinks, that such foreign policy demands and grunts will achieve the elusive victories of a bygone era that he and his supporters yearn for, ‘we have no victories. I mean, we just don't have victories anymore. As a country, we don't have victories anymore’. I am hoping that during the next debate, one of Trumps competitors could muster enough courage and be able to memorize a simple question to be directed to the American people ‘do you trust a man like Donald Trump to be the next Commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces?’

It is not an exaggeration to say that the current large field of Republican candidates is shockingly weak particularly on foreign policy. Their first debate exposed their limitations and lack of experience. There were those like Senator Ted Cruz and governor Bobby Jindal who criticized President Obama because he talks about violent extremism but not ’radical Islamic terrorism.’ Jeb Bush continued to struggle with the war in Iraq, still unable to extricate himself from his brother’s war. He is still his brother’s keeper. Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, supposedly a healer, defended waterboarding. There were the usual ritualistic and obligatory lines about U.S. support to Israel, and Trump, was well, Trump. There were no serious proposals about any outstanding foreign policy challenge, from Iran, to Russia, to the Islamic State. No wonder the Republican candidates are in such disarray on national security issues.

This is not your father’s Republican Party. In the wake of the Tea Party and the rise of such luminaries like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, this is no longer the home of George Herbert Walker Bush, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker or Colin Powell. It is doubtful that Ronald Reagan would be welcomed by the current custodians of conservatism. Dwight Eisenhower need not apply. The old healthy skepticism of Republicans and others of centralized Federal powers, has given way to very corrosive antipathy and even hostility to ‘government’ in general.

Trump screwing with the ole Red, White and Blue

Has Trump Branded His Own Arsenic Yet?

I'm a casual guy, part of why I like living on the West Coast. I was never much of a slick dresser and avoided ties as much as possible. But when fate threw me into a TimeWarner presidential job, I wound up with offices in New York and London as well as L.A. and I had to represent our company in countries where suits and ties were important status symbols for executives. Over the years I tried to casualize the culture everywhere I could, but... I had to wear ties too. 

In Milan, where our Italian company was headquartered, I discovered Ermenegildo Zegna. Their ties were elegant and over the top at the same time, and I stocked up. People loved them, and I didn't mind them at all. But I never tried any other brands of ties-- except rock 'n' roll promotional ties for a couple of mod and skinny tie bands. The Jam had a good one with their logo. I still have it hanging in my closet with the rack of Zegnas I never wear any longer.

One brand I would never have in my closet-- or even touch-- is anything with the name Trump. He may claim that his brand is golden, and it may even be golden with a certain set of the world's most shallow and repulsive conspicuous-consumption addicts, but when I see a Chinese-manufactured Trump tie-- or Trump anything-- I think of a clue to someone who may wind up on a guillotine someday.

Trump claims-- with no valid documentation whatsoever-- to be worth $9 billion and to be a master negotiator and a top businessman. Fact of the matter is, he's wealthy... but not that wealthy. He rents his name (brand) out to hucksters trying to make a few bucks from pathetic people who find the brand attractive. One of the last certified accountings of Trump's wealth, after his 4th or 5th bankruptcy and taxpayer bail-out, was something like $200 million IN DEBT. He's made money since then-- a lot of it-- as a TV game show host and as a brand purveyor... but not a billion, let alone $9 billion. Estimates of his worth are more in line with $200-400 million. That's a lot richer than most people, but he's not a billionaire. He's a blowhard and a liar-- perfect for a Republican Party that has been utterly stripped of cognitive abilty by too much Fox and too much Hate Talk Radio.

Trump's brand may be posion among normal people, but the Republican base is eating it up. His polling numbers at this point show he is destined to be the Republican Party nominee, beating Jeb!, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Huckabee, Christie and the rest of the hideous clown car they've assembled this cycle. If the Clinton campaign wanted to wreck the Republican brand, there is no better way to do it than to marry it to the Trump brand. 

And many Republican officials are starting to catch on. George Will was warning about it weeks ago. Yesterday Dana Milbank was gloating in the Washington Post.

It has been amusing to watch the brands-- the PGA, NBC, Macy’s, NASCAR, Univision, Serta-- flee Donald Trump after his xenophobic remarks. Who even knew The Donald had a line of mattresses featuring Cool Action Dual Effects Gel Memory Foam?

But there is one entity that can’t dump Trump, no matter how hard it tries: the GOP. The Republican Party can’t dump Trump because Trump is the Republican Party.

One big Republican donor this week floated to the Associated Press the idea of having candidates boycott debates if the tycoon is onstage. Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham and other candidates have lined up to say, as Rick Perry put it, that “Donald Trump does not represent the Republican Party.”

But Trump has merely held up a mirror to the GOP. The man, long experience has shown, believes in nothing other than himself. He has, conveniently, selected the precise basket of issues that Republicans want to hear about-- or at least a significant proportion of Republican primary voters. He may be saying things more colorfully than others when he talks about Mexico sending rapists across the border, but his views show that, far from being an outlier, he is hitting all the erogenous zones of the GOP electorate.

Anti-immigrant? Against Common Core education standards? For repealing Obamacare? Against same-sex marriage? Antiabortion? Anti-tax? Anti-China? Virulent in questioning President Obama’s legitimacy? Check, check, check, check, check, check, check and check.

Does anybody suppose Trump really cares about illegal immigration (which helps his construction interests, by suppressing wages) or about defending traditional marriage (he’s had three)?

...Now Trump is the one talking about Mexico sending us drugs, crime and rapists. His shift is hardly surprising given his audience — and his competitors. Scott Walker talks about self-deportation, Graham talks about ending birthright citizenship, Ben Carson blames illegal immigrants in part for the measles outbreak, Rand Paul describes as lawbreakers those who were brought to the United States illegally as children, and even relatively moderate candidates such as Bush and Marco Rubio have hardened their immigration positions. Ted Cruz actually praised Trump.

Trump’s position also closely follows those that came from Arizona in 2010 when then-Gov. Jan Brewer and other Republicans attempted an immigration crackdown. They spoke about illegal immigrants on the border as a source of beheadings, kidnappings and police killings.

The previously tolerant Trump may be a phony, but he’s no dope: He recognized that, in the fragmented Republican field, his name recognition would take him far if he merely voiced, in his bombastic style, the positions GOP voters craved. The mogul’s broader basket of issues is also in tune with those of a slate of candidates who have compared homosexuality to alcoholism (Perry), likened union protesters to the Islamic State (Walker) and proposed elections for Supreme Court justices (Cruz), and who virtually all oppose same-sex marriage and action on climate change.

It worked. Trump placed second in national polls by Fox News and CNN, virtually guaranteeing him a place in the first debate, on Aug. 6-- unless the GOP persuades Fox News, the host, to dump Trump.

That would be hard to justify. Trump may be a monster, but he’s the monster Republicans created.

Now why would they want to do that? Trump is the ratings draw for the debates. No one other than the handful of true believers will be tuning in to see that dull, plodding Jeb! or the weasely, ugly little worm Walker or the rotund lying bully Christie or Ted "Tailgun" Cruz. I suppose Lindsey Graham would be a draw if he promised to come out of the closet on the night of the show... perhaps in a ball gown. But normal American TV viewers are going to give Fox a huge ratings spike because they want to see the horrific pileup of a train wreck starring The Donald. 

Elsewhere in yesterday's Post, senior writers Karen Tumulty, Philip Rucker and Bob Costa wrote about the fear (and loathing) from the serious GOP Establishment about the corner the clownish Trump has backed them into.

The head of the Republican National Committee, responding to demands from increasingly worried party leaders, spent nearly an hour Wednesday on the phone with Donald Trump, urging the presidential candidate to tone down his inflammatory comments about immigration that have infuriated a key election constituency.

The call from Chairman Reince Priebus, described by donors and consultants briefed on the conversation and confirmed by the RNC, underscores the extent to which Trump has gone from an embarrassment to a cause for serious alarm among top Republicans in Washington and nationwide.

But there is little they can do about the mogul and reality-television star, who draws sustenance from controversy and attention. And some fear that, with assistance from Democrats, Trump could become the face of the GOP.

Rather than backing down from his comments about illegal immigrants — whom he characterized as rapists and killers, among other things — Trump has amplified his remarks at every opportunity, including in a round of interviews Wednesday.

He insisted to NBC News that he has “nothing to apologize for” in his repeated remarks about Mexicans. But he also predicted that, if he secures the GOP nomination, “I’ll win the Latino vote.”

Few seem to think he has a chance of becoming his party’s 2016 standard-bearer, even though he is running near the front of the pack in some early primary states. Summer poll numbers for novelty candidates such as Trump tend to be as perishable as ice cream cones.

“I think he’ll self-destruct relatively quickly. The dynamic, I think, will change very dramatically, and Trump will be yesterday’s news,” said former senator Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah). “But if this does have legs, if Trump can keep this going, it will be very worrisome.”

The fear expressed by Bennett and others is that Trump will set back the party’s efforts to rehabilitate its image and broaden its reach. And it appears likely that he will be onstage in the presidential debates that begin next month-- a dissonant figure in what GOP leaders had hoped to present as a substantive, experienced and appealing field of candidates.

Priebus’s decision to reach out to Trump came after days of talks with Republican donors and officials about how best to manage Trump’s outsize presence on the airwaves. Many financiers who are influential at the RNC have been fuming about Trump’s ascent and told Priebus that he must ensure that the RNC’s efforts over the past year to win more of the Hispanic vote is not harmed.

Reluctant to engage publicly and having developed a friendship with Trump in recent years, Priebus decided to call the candidate and quietly ask him to soften his pitch, said GOP donors familiar with Priebus’s thinking. Trump had left a voice-mail message for Priebus over the weekend asking if they could catch up, making the call’s context less confrontational, the donors said.

The call lasted about 45 minutes, the donors said, and Priebus was cordial, updating Trump on the party and the primary calendar while also urging him to “tone it down”-- a phrase used repeatedly by those with knowledge of the exchange. Priebus told Trump that making inroads with Hispanics is one of his central missions as chairman. He told Trump that tone matters greatly and that Trump’s comments are more offensive than he might imagine with that bloc.

...“The fact that he is rising in the polls has something to do with tapping into an angst and anger, especially on immigration, that the other candidates have been unwilling or unable to harness,” said Reed Galen, a Republican operative based in California.

Steve Duprey, a Republican National Committee member from New Hampshire, where Trump is running a strong second to former Florida governor Jeb Bush in some polls, said the tycoon’s “frustration with border enforcement is shared with lots of Americans, but I find his views on immigration to be contrary to what the party of Lincoln stands for.”

None of the Republican contenders, with the exception of Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), has defended Trump. But those who have condemned him were slow to do so, and it may ultimately be difficult for them to distance themselves from a celebrity candidate who commands a spotlight and a microphone wherever he goes.

Trump “could become the 2016 version of Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, who tarnished the GOP brand in 2012 with an offensive statement about rape,” strategist Karl Rove wrote in a column for Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. “Republican leaders from Mitt Romney on down immediately condemned his words, but swing voters were persuaded that every Republican believed what Mr. Akin said.”

One GOP state party chairman, speaking on the condition of anonymity so he could be frank, said of Trump: “He’s already done some damage, and it could be substantial going forward. He could be one of the reasons we lose. It’s that serious. There’s nothing we can do about it, and that’s what’s so scary.”

...His candidacy has created a sensation in Spanish-language media. On Tuesday night, Univision led its newscast with its own version of a Washington Post report on the large number of immigrants building the new Trump Hotel in downtown Washington. The same topic was Telemundo’s second story.

Earlier, the two networks covered a comment Trump shared on his Twitter feed saying that Bush “has to like the Mexican Illegals because of his wife,” Columba, who was born in Mexico.

Trump subsequently deleted the tweet, but defended it Wednesday on CNN: “Do I regret it? No, I don’t regret it. If he loves his wife and she’s from Mexico, I think it probably has an influence on him.”

The Old GOP Establishment pick may still be Jeb!, and the Adelson pick is certainly Rubio, while the Kochs are insisting on Walker. Trump has been bad-mouthing in the ugliest of terms all three of them-- and all the time. Perhaps it will help them in some circles. For one thing, Jeb!'s outrageous pro-austerity palaver for the Union Leader Wednesday about Americans needing to work longer hours was mostly buried under Trump's name-calling. He sounded like Merkel lecturing the Greeks, who, as everyone now knows, work much harder and longer than their German slavemasters. Even Tailgun Ted clobbered Jeb! on that one. He sent out his campaign spokesman to say, "It would seem to me that Governor Bush would want to avoid the kind of comments that led voters to believe that Governor Romney was out of touch with the economic struggles many Americans are facing. The problem is not that Americans aren't working hard enough. It is that the Washington cartel of career politicians, special interests and lobbyists have rigged the game against them."

Back to the Trump brand, via a new "Daily Comment" piece by New Yorker editor David Remnick, "The Trump Balloon," which begins by chronicling the Trump empire. His hustler father lived in my neighborhood, down the block from my first girlfriend, Doreen, and I certainly recognize the description of "Trump's ascent" that Remnick quotes from Mark Singer's famous 1997 New Yorker profile, "Trump Solo," as "a form of 'performance art-- an opera-buffa parody of wealth.' " 

Here's David Remnick:

For decades, the many institutions of the press-- high and low, left and right-- have fed off Trump’s unapologetic vulgarity, his willingness to say absolutely anything. What did it matter to Trump if Jon Stewart used him as nightly cannon fodder? It was, as we now say, good for the brand. And what is the Trump brand? Over the years, we have been treated to Trump hotels, Trump magazine, Trump Airlines, Trump apartment buildings, Trump golf courses, Trump reality shows, Trump University, Trump the Game, Trump Chocolate, Trump the Fragrance, Trump Model Management, Trump Ice, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka.

The personal brand is, depending on your inclinations, a gilded jackass or an up-from-nothing tell-it-like-it-is-type-a-guy (without the up-from-nothing part). But it’s always been more than buffoonish entertainment. The sheer number of people and peoples who Trump has managed to insult, bully, and mistreat is, in its way, awe-inspiring. He congratulated Alejandro González Iñárritu for winning numerous Oscars for Birdman with this gracious remark: “Well, it was a great night for Mexico, as usual in this country.” He once told Bryant Gumbel, in an interview for an NBC program on race, what he thought about affirmative action: “If I was starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I really do believe they have the actual advantage today.” In the seventies, the Trump real-estate company was sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination in its rental practices in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens. After settling the case with Trump, the Justice Department sued yet again for non-compliance. In 1989, Trump took out an ad in the Daily News, and three other newspapers, about the Central Park jogger rape case, in which he declared that the “criminals of every age” who had been arrested twelve days earlier-- five African-American and Hispanic teen-agers-- were “crazed misfits,” part of “roving bands.” “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY,” the ad read. “BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” Years after it turned out that someone else had committed the crime, and the young men had finally been released from prison, Trump wrote an unapologetic op-ed for the paper in which he called the city’s push for restitution payments to the men “a disgrace.” He made it plain that, to him, their lives were nothing, and, besides, “These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.”

Trump’s blithe moral contempt has many targets. Women? He once told Esquire, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” Climate change? Here’s a tweet, circa 2012: “It’s freezing and snowing in New York-- we need global warming!” Trump has been among the country’s foremost (i.e., loudest) “birthers,” constantly prompting the idea, against all evidence, that Barack Obama was born in some other country and, therefore, is constitutionally unable to hold the office.

Trump is now running for President of the United States. His platform appears, in the early stages, to be a smelly soup of billionaire populism and yahoo nationalism-- all flavored with a tangy dollop of old-timey racism. On Mexicans: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” (When challenged that a report he cited concerned immigrants who had been raped, he said, “Somebody’s doing the raping!”) Donald Trump is currently polling second among Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, Iowa, and nationally.

...Donald Trump is a joke, too, but of a different sort. His intention is not to inspire laughter or relief; his targets are not the powerful. He doesn’t punch up. He spews forth ugliness everywhere he goes. It would be nice, and maybe wise, simply to ignore him, in the hope that he will, after all these many years, just go away. But he never really does, and the most immediate concern is not that he will win the office he pursues but that he will get in the heads of the candidates around him. Trump’s father was a self-promoter who dispersed discounts in his balloons. The son offers only toxic gas.

Would you buy anything with the Trump brand on it? Would you even want to?

UPDATE: And The Inevitable...

Trump, hopped up on his ranking success among the Fox and Hate Talk Radio crowd, and furious that the GOP elders are belitting him and talking him to "tone is down," is now threatening to throw the race to the Democrats by running as, what amounts to a Know Nothing candidate. Perhaps he could get Jim Webb to run as his VP?

“So many people want me to run as an independent, so many people,” Trump said. “I have been asked by-- you have no idea, everybody wants me to do it.”

Pressed about whether he would back the Republican ticket if he fails to win the nomination himself, Trump left the door open for a third-party bid of his own. “I would have to see who the nominee is,” he said.

...The specter of an independent run by Trump has unnerved GOP power brokers, many of whom worry that such a campaign could draw substantial support from the party’s base, similar to how Ross Perot’s maverick 1992 presidential campaign won an enthusiastic following among frustrated conservatives.

How Far Right Plutocrats, With The Connivance Of Greedy Politicians, Have Succeeded In Disenfranchising The Middle Class

Yes, normal people hate Republicans-- but not enough to prevent them from taking over? This morning at the Washington Post, Aaron Blake didn't mince words: "People freaking hate the Republican Party. Poll after poll shows President Obama is unpopular and the Democratic Party is a little more unpopular. Neither, though, can touch the GOP, whose congressional contingent has  a whopping 72 percent disapproval rating in the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. Nearly half of Americans-- 47 percent-- say they 'strongly' disapprove of the GOP." So why do they control the House and why are they likely to win control of the Senate in November? Blake doesn't go into the Steve Israel problem or talk about Harry Reid's feud with Tom Daschle or any of the grotesque dysfunction that has come to define the Democratic Party in DC. His point is that party approval ratings are "overrated."

Yes, the GOP's brand definitely hurts it. But when voters head to the polls, are they really thinking about the practical impact of sending another Republican to empower the other Republicans who are already in Washington?

As it turns out, not really. The same WaPo-ABC poll shows strikingly few people are scared off by the idea of a GOP-controlled Senate. While 72 percent of Americans disapprove of the GOP, just 25 percent say it would be a "bad thing" if the GOP controlled the Senate. Significantly more (32 percent) say it would be a "good thing," while half (51 percent) say it would make no difference.

...And it's too bad for Democrats, because opposition to a GOP Senate is a very good motivator. Among those who say they support Democrats and also say that a GOP Senate would be a bad thing, 78 percent say they are absolutely certain to vote. Among Democratic supporters who don't fear a GOP Senate, that number drops to 58 percent.

The GOP certainly has its problems, but in a lot of ways, disgust with the GOP is like disgust with Congress. While people hate Congress, they are much more likely to hold a favorable view of their own member of it. And if a Republican candidate can run a good campaign and avoid being too closely associated with the less-savory elements of his or her national party, that "R" next to his or her name isn't really much of a burden.

Blake doesn't pretend to be anything other than a plain vanilla reporter and isn't known for being very analytical or profound... but, the NY Times' Thomas Edsall is. Tuesday night he came closer to hitting the nail on the head in exploring how a party brand so tarnished in the minds of most people can still come out ahead. Edsall delves into somewhat more abstract realms and heads off in the direction of the death of political transparency, engineered by the corrupt political elites and careerists. Follow the money:

Tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations, the new political weapons of choice, are widening the gap between the rich people who control campaign financing and the economically anxious voters targeted by their ads.

We don’t know who the contributors are to Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS because they can hide behind provisions in federal tax law designed to protect donors to “social welfare” charities, but we do know how much each gave, and we do know generally, from Crossroads’ annual 990 filings with the I.R.S., how the money was spent. In 2012, according to its own statement, Crossroads GPS spent $74.2 million not on commonly understood social welfare objectives but on direct political activities.

Crossroads raised the money for its 2012 tax-exempt activities from 291 unnamed men and women who wrote checks for a total of $179.7 million, an average contribution of $617,525-- nearly 12 times the 2012 median household income in the United States of $53,046, and 22 times the 2012 per capita income of $28,051.

The financial resources of the anonymous donors to Crossroads are striking, according to the organization’s 990 filing. Among the donors were 53 who contributed at least $1 million. Even more generously, one donor gave $22.5 million, another gave $18 million, and two gave $10 million each.

…The emergence since 2008 of politically adroit, highly partisan so-called social welfare organizations has resulted in qualitative changes in the system of campaign finance.

In its 990 filing for 2012, which describes its total expenses and receipts, Crossroads reported to federal tax authorities that it spent a total of $188.9 million, of which $112 million was “on activities related to social welfare,” including $35 million in grants to tax-exempt organizations “that share Crossroad GPS’s goals.” Crossroads also reported that it “spent $74.2 million on direct political activities.”

Jonathan Collegio, who was then the spokesman for Crossroads GPS, noted that the “ratio of social welfare spending to political spending was 60.2 percent to 38.8 percent,” putting the political spending well below the 49 percent level.

The lion’s share of grants made by Crossroads to other 501(c)(4)s went to Americans for Tax Reform, which got $26.4 million. Americans for Tax Reform describes its mission as working to see that “taxes are simpler, flatter, more visible, and lower than they are today.” Indeed, it advertises its goal as opposing “all tax increases as a matter of principle,” adding that “ATR was founded in 1985 by Grover Norquist at the request of President Reagan.” The Crossroads grant provided 86 percent of A.T.R.'s total funds raised, which in 2012, were $30.98 million, according to A.T.R.'s 990 filing.

…If the operations and financing of Crossroads GPS and Americans for Tax Reform are less than transparent, they fit well in the world of labyrinthine secrecy characteristic of the $400 million network of 17 interlocking advocacy groups that coexist under the aegis of the Koch brothers.

“The political network spearheaded by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch has expanded into a far-reaching operation of unrivaled complexity, built around a maze of groups that cloaks its donors,” the Washington Post reported at the beginning of this year.

“It is a very sophisticated and complicated structure,” Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School, told The Post. “It’s designed to make it opaque as to where the money is coming from and where the money is going. No layperson thought this up. It would only be worth it if you were spending the kind of dollars the Koch brothers are, because this was not cheap.”

…The steady deregulation of election financing has disenfranchised ordinary voters. Part of their disenfranchisement comes from the capacity of donors to remain unaccountable to the electorate at large. The combination of lax regulation by the F.E.C., weak oversight by the I.R.S. and a Supreme Court majority blind to the corrosive power of money in politics has created a system of campaign finance dominated by those with vast fortunes answerable to no one but themselves.

A two-class structure of election financing is emerging. The first is the traditional system of federally regulated individual contributions in which the small donor has become increasingly important. The second is the combination of “super PACs” and tax-exempt independent expenditure groups, including 501(c)(4)s, which together operate without limits and cater almost exclusively to those at the very top of the economic pyramid. Policing the hodgepodge of regulations, statutes and rulings governing elections has become virtually impossible. A kind of lawlessness prevails that is incompatible with the goals of democracy.

Why The GOP's Far Right Base Loves Fringe Lunatics Like Louie Gohmert

New polling from Pew, indicates that the Republican Party-- at it's core (so values, principles, policies, agenda)-- is woefully out of step with normal American voters. We're not just talking about the sad antics of Republican psychopaths and vaudevillians like Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann, Rand Paul and Steve Stockman; we're talking about the heart and soul of the GOP, their financial backers and the crackpot, Foxified base of the party. In short, the public disagrees with everything the Republican Party has been talking about for at least five years.

[A]s with previous conflicts over the debt ceiling and fiscal cliff, Obama holds the upper hand politically over congressional Republicans. If there is no deficit deal by March 1, 49% say congressional Republicans would be more to blame while just 31% would mostly blame President Obama.

Moreover, 76% say that the president and Congress should focus on a combination of spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the budget deficit. Just 19% agree with the current Republican position that tax increases should be off the table.

And while Obama’s 51% job approval rating is down slightly from a post-election high of 55%, it remains well above the 25% approval rating for GOP congressional leaders. The job rating for Democratic leaders is higher (37%), though more disapprove (55%) than approve of their performance.

The poll finds new evidence of the public’s concern over the federal budget deficit. Fully 70% say it is essential for the president and Congress to pass major legislation to reduce the federal budget deficit, including wide majorities across party lines. Last month, the Pew Research Center’s annual policy priorities survey found a sharp rise in the percentage rating deficit reduction as a top priority since 2009.

...By a wide margin (71% to 26%), the public favors increasing the minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 per hour to $9.00 an hour. But while large majorities of Democrats (87%) and independents (68%) favor raising the minimum wage, Republicans are evenly divided (50% favor, 47% oppose).

...Obama holds a sizable advantage over congressional Republicans on immigration. Half (50%) say that Obama has a better approach to dealing with immigration, compared with 33% who say congressional Republicans have a better approach. Obama’s job approval in handling the nation’s immigration policy, in negative territory for most of his presidency, also has improved.

As for gun control, Obama's #1 priority, universal background checks-- which is vehemently opposed by the gun manufacturers and their lobbying group the NRA as well as by the congressional lunatics they have in their pockets-- is favored by 83% of Americans and opposed by only 15%. Even most NRA members agree with the policy! 56% of Americans also favor banning assault weapons and 53% favor banning high capacity magazine clips.

Another poll, for Bloomberg, indicates that Republican Party approval numbers keep falling and are now lower than they've been any time since 2009, when Bloomberg started polling that question. Only 35% of Americans have a favorable view of the GOP. Most of them live in backward parts of the Old Confederacy.

But there is something if more toxic than the generic Republican Party-- the lunatic fringe Members of Congress who have been pulling it further and further to the right and happily tying the efficient functioning of government into knots. The crazies... no one likes them (except other crazies) and the more they're identified as Republicans, the more people get turned off to the whole party. Let's take Louie Gohmert, a clown from northeast Texas, hard up against Louisiana. Boehner and Cantor cringe when he opens his mouth in public. His perspective on everything comes straight from Hate Talk Radio. The guy doesn't have an idea in his head that doesn't come out of the mumbo-jumbo stew of a day of listening to Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. He's in his own cracked up, paranoid little world. When Gohmert, and a small vocal handful of other extremists talk about gun control, they're not interested in hunting or in people being able to protect their families from criminals. Gohmert is all about black helicopters, the tyranny of the U.S. Army and jackbooted thugs in law enforcement an, of course, the threat of Sharia Law. This is why normal people no longer see the Republican Party as a viable alternative to the less than ideal Democrats.

Tea Party Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX) told a conservative radio show on Thursday that the GOP must oppose gun regulations to protect the country from the threat of “Sharia Law.”

Appearing on The Voice of Freedom, Gohmert said he “hoped and prayed” that Congress rejects gun safety legislation, arguing that Americans may need to use the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment to avoid succumbing to Muslims:

[The Second Amendment] is for our protection and the founders’ quotes make that very very clear and including against a government that would run amuck. We’ve got some people who think Sharia Law should be the law of the land, forget the Constitution. But the guns are there… to make sure all of the rest of the Amendments are followed.

A friend of mine from Gohmert's part of Texas lives in L.A. now. He's in a band. He called the other day, confused and upset, to read me some letters from his very conservative parents, hard core Republicans from a Lufkin area trailer park. And sure enough, it was filled with a language you only hear on Hate Talk Radio about issues only consequent on Hate Talk Radio. And the danger of Sharia Law was repeated over and over. Really? This is what poor people in Lufkin, Texas choose to worry about... a takeover of Texas by Muslim extremists? Muslims are the largest non-Christian group in 20 U.S. states, including Texas (also Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota and Wyoming). Texas has 1,678 Muslims for every 100,000 people. About 2.4% of Americans are Muslims, around 6.7 million people. They're not taking over and imposing Sharia Law on anyone. Ironically, almost all of the GOP crackpots like Gohmert and Bachmann who scream the loudest about Sharia Law are advocates of very primitive, fundamentalist pseudo-Christian "law" that is the closest thing to Sharia Law anywhere in the world. Jesus, I don't want to know what these people's nightmares are like!

Can The Republican Party Destroy Themselves Further-- They're Trying

Yesterday a really funny poll came out from PPP, showing just how unpopular John Boehner's Congress has become.

Our newest national poll finds that Congress only has a 9% favorability rating with 85% of voters viewing it in a negative light. We've seen poll after poll after poll over the last year talking about how unpopular Congress is but really, what's the difference between an 11% or a 9% or a 7% favorability rating? So we decided to take a different approach and test Congress' popularity against 26 different things. And what we found is that Congress is less popular than cockroaches, traffic jams, and even Nickelback.

Here's what we found:

It's gross to have lice but at least they can be removed in a way that given the recent reelection rates members of Congress evidently can't: Lice 67 Congress 19

Brussel sprouts may have been disgusting as a kid, but evidently they're now a lot less disgusting than Congress: Brussel Sprouts 69 Congress 23

The NFL replacement refs may have screwed everything up, but voters think Congress is screwing everything up even worse: Replacement Refs 56 Congressmen 29 (the breakdown among Packers fans might be a little bit different).

Colonoscopies are not a terribly pleasant experience but at least they have some redeeming value that most voters aren't seeing in Congress: Colonoscopies 58 Congress 31

And you can make the same point about root canals: Root Canals 56 Congress 32

You might get a bad deal from a used car salesmen, but voters evidently think they're getting an even worse deal from Congress: Used Car Salesmen 57 Congress 32

Being stuff in traffic sucks, but voters are even less happy about being stuck with this Congress: Traffic Jams 56 Congress 34

Congress is also less liked than Genghis Khan, Donald Trump and cock-roaches, although people like Congress better than the Kardashians, ebola, North Korea, lobbyists and gonorrhea. The concerted effort by the congressional Republicans to obstruct and obstruct and obstruct is wearing thin for most Americans. Unreconstructed Confederates may approve but normal Americans are reacting angrily to GOP efforts to block everything Obama has been trying to accomplish-- even to the point of denying his legitimacy as president and his ability to govern. People notice that they are blocking all his cabinet appointments and judicial nominations and opposing everything he tries to do-- everything.

Last night we saw how big time GOP fundraiser Georgette Mosbacher is furious that the party has willfully sunk itself into a neo-Confederate cesspool of anti-American incoherence and how she's finished giving them any money. Warmonger and hopelessly delusional right-wing operative Danielle Pletka of the AEI has an uncharacteristically insightful piece-- inspired by panic-- in the new issue of Foreign Policy about how the Republicans have damaged their own brand in terms of foreign policy-- something that's getting worse as they make fools of themselves opposing Chuck Hagel. Her remedies are, of course, 100% wrong and ill-conceived, based on insane right-wing ideology instead of reality, which, of course, she detests as a liberal plot. She was astounded that Romney presented himself as little more than "his opponent's doppelgänger" in the last campaign and quotes Jon Stewart the day after the debate: "What the hell was that?"

It's a question the Republican Party needs to answer, and urgently, if it is going to reclaim its traditional place as the United States' leading voice on national security. To do so, however, the GOP will first have to settle dissension within its own ranks and recognize that the path back from its 2012 election drubbing lies in embracing the boldness and moral authority that has made it so successful in the past...

Instead of articulating a clear foreign-policy doctrine, the campaign relied on clichés ("I will not apologize for America") to hint that, somehow, Romney would lead more capably than Obama and the Democrats. This failure to define a vision suggested to voters that the Republican Party, for decades reliably dominant on national security, no longer knew how best to protect Americans at home and advance their values and interests abroad. Voters told exit pollsters by a significant margin that the Democrats were stronger. The fact that, presented with a target as fat as the Obama administration's foreign policy, Republicans not only lost the election but lost the confidence of the American people on the party's once-defining issue is a travesty.

But as bad as the Romney campaign was, the GOP problem goes way beyond that and way beyond the hapless Romney. "The first step toward recovery," she counsels her reactionary readership," is admitting you have a problem. And Republicans have a problem... [T]o move beyond last year's debacle, the Republican Party must convince the dissenters in its ranks-- and of course the American people-- that this is an enduring truth. It must forge a new Republican foreign policy recommitted to the idea that where the United States is able to identify a strategic and moral imperative-- as in the fight against the Soviet Union or the battle against Islamic extremism-- it is in America's interests to use its power to help shape a safer world." I know, I know... she's a babbling idiot, but what's interesting here is her read of her own party, not the fact that she's a clueless and bloodthirsty Australian. This is the advice she gave that McCain was touting yesterday when he insisted all his colleagues read her article:

One of the most substantial roadblocks to revitalizing Republican liberal internationalism is the financial and physical fatigue that naturally flows from a decade of war and a corrosive recession. We're tired; we've done too much; we've spent too much in blood and treasure; it's someone else's turn; let's rebuild here at home. Every candidate said it, I have said it, and the American people say it too. Support among independents for an active foreign policy has declined by 15 percentage points in the past decade, according to a poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and a recent Pew Research Center study found that most Americans think the United States should share global leadership with others.

Of course, Obama tried to take advantage of such attitudes. That is where his repeated emphasis on "nation-building here at home" came from. Obama made it clear that education, infrastructure, and manufacturing had to be the priorities going forward. Thus foreign policy was cleverly transformed into a domestic issue: For the United States to be strong abroad, he argued, Americans had to put their own house in order first.

Yet weariness remains one of the great shibboleths of U.S. foreign policy. In reality, Americans continue to support, usually with significant majorities, overseas military operations, at least at their outset. Support for Obama's 2011 decision to intervene in Libya was thinner, but still 10 percentage points above opposition. Even after more than 11 years of conflict, poll after poll finds that Americans support the notion of a U.S. strike to prevent Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon. A February 2012 poll had supporters beating opponents by 18 percentage points.

And it's not just Iran. Obama may want to focus on nation-building at home, but the slow-motion train wreck of the European Union, the fading of democracy in Russia, the war in Syria, the rise of China, North Korean weapons proliferation, the spread of al Qaeda, the continued strength of Chavismo in South America, the war in Afghanistan, and the failure of Pakistan still constitute major security threats.

Republicans understand that those problems aren't going to go away on their own, and so do most Americans.

But it's up to the Republican Party-- and particularly its leadership-- to articulate how it would do better than Obama, how a robust American presence can make a difference in the Middle East, how victory should be the goal in Afghanistan, and how U.S. leadership in the Pacific can constrain Chinese predations. Republicans need to explain how much can be done consistent with America's dearest principles but without the use of force, without threats, without protectionism, and without breaking the bank. They need to work to bring along the many even within the party who doubt the imperative of success against al Qaeda, who doubt the value of friendly governments, and for whom each penny spent on a new fighter for the Air Force or aircraft carrier for the Navy is a penny wasted. You cannot hope to persuade the country if you cannot persuade your own party.

The other objection, of course, is that the last decade of war has drained not only Americans' emotional reserves but their country's treasury, giving America little choice but to retrench. Recognizing the "limits of our power" has been one of the resurgent themes of the post-Bush years. But where has it left the country? Leading from behind -- an absurd notion that itself must be left behind. After all, neither France, whose presidents have led on both Libya and Syria, nor the U.N. Security Council can solve the thorny problems we now face. As Reagan put it, "Leadership is a great burden. We grow weary of it at times.... But if we are not to shoulder the burdens of leadership in the free world, then who will?"

The truth is the United States spends remarkably little on defense. The Pentagon's budget now represents about 4 percent of GDP, close to the lowest proportion in modern history. It is eminently affordable. Yet the country is on track to cut more than $1 trillion in military spending over the next decade. The lion's share of spending is not on operations or weapons systems, as some believe; nearly 50 percent of spending goes to veterans' benefits and uniformed and civilian personnel. So what can be cut? A better question is: What would America like to stop doing?

...Republicans are still deciding where they stand on the question. Among those who understand budgets, few believe military expenditures are contributing to America's economic woes. But far too many don't understand and haven't troubled themselves to do so. Are there savings around the margins? Of course. Senator Coburn is right when he says the Army doesn't need its own brand of beef jerky. But sustained and serious savings can only come from genuine cuts to the muscle of U.S. military might. Honest libertarians like those at the Cato Institute admit freely that they wish to cut defense in order to constrain U.S. foreign policy. Others hide behind the budget to cover their isolationist impulse. But the vast mass simply doesn't know. It's time for the Republican Party to remind the country what it gets for the money it spends and what it will mean for the country when it stops.

...So Romney failed to win the presidency and the GOP has no obvious foreign-policy leader. There's still an opportunity to articulate strategy for America's place in the world in the absence of clear ideas from the White House. Indeed, Republican stewardship of foreign policy was a hallmark of Bill Clinton's years, when the country had a Democratic president seemingly content to allow the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan, slaughter in the Balkans, genocide in Africa, terrorism against the United States in Africa and the Middle East, and clear steps toward a nuclear program in Iran. Back then, Congress led where the White House would not, articulating policy on issues like NATO enlargement. Can it happen again? What should Republican priorities be?

Let's start with American leadership. It is sheer malpractice to subcontract foreign policy to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, as the United States did in Libya, allowing those countries to choose whom to arm and whom to marginalize among various Libyan groups. The same is now happening in Syria. If America cannot arm the rebels, having waited so long that their ranks are now riddled with terrorists, it can surely identify who the terrorists are and work to marginalize them. It can set benchmarks for aid to Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen to ensure that it's supporting only those who are committed to free people and free markets. It can yet again force the president to tighten the embargo on Iran, as Congress has done multiple times.

The United States can provide its allies in Asia with the aid and military support they need to face challenges from China, while agreeing that everyone has a shared interest in Chinese prosperity. It can revive its lagging partnership with India and incentivize further economic reforms in New Delhi, recommitting to a long-term economic and strategic relationship. It can push the president to rationalize his strategy in Afghanistan and better explain his decisions about how many troops should remain and when the rest should leave. America can double down on Russia's neighbors, supporting genuine democracy in Georgia and providing a clearer path to integration with the West to Eastern and Central European countries that still fear Russian domination and manipulation. The United States can help allies like Taiwan and Israel defend themselves with aid, intelligence, and arms if need be.

Congress alone is capable of pushing each of these priorities. It will fail in some cases and succeed in others. But for the Republican leadership in the House and the powerful Senate GOP minority, now is a chance to reinvest in genuine American leadership that meets challenges before they become threats, asserts priorities with allies before they despair of America's leadership, and most importantly, reverses the catastrophic cuts to defense before the United States becomes a country that cannot adequately defend itself or deter enemies.

That is the right path forward not only for the country and for the world, but for the Republican Party. If the GOP is to stand for something more than lower taxes and smaller government, it must return to the moral vision of a world in which the United States helps others achieve the freedoms it holds so dear. There are some without a compass for whom America's moral purpose and strategic direction are a matter of continual course correction. But if there's no vision America stands for, then there's nothing worth fighting for. America can indeed nation-build at home-- and abandon the world it has shaped and led. It's up to Republicans to make sure that doesn't happen. Let's get to work.

Ever wonder where neo-cons and throwback imperialists like McCain, Lindsey Graham and Lieberman come up with their nonsense? Now you know.