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:

Oh no, make it stop! The 2012 campaign is under way!

Yes, it's 2008 GOP presidential hopeful-turned-2012 presidential hopeful "Minister Mike" Huckabee, trying his darnedest to figure out whether he's for or against cap-and-trade. Let's see, if it's a day with the letter "d" in it . . .

by Ken

Let's not misunderestimate, as Republicans like to say, how grim these next two years are going to be, with both Republicans and right-wing "centrist" Dems running as hard right in the face of the perceived national mood as their stumpy little legs will take them. We need to remember that President Obama isn't just a born capitulator when it comes to negotitation, although all the available evidence indicates that he is. A good portion of what he's "capitulating" to is stuff that in his heart of hearts he wants to see done anyway. He's just willing to carry it however much farther he has to in the face of those howling Teabaggers and other right-wingers he can feel gaining on him.

So with people like "Sunny John" Boehner and Eric "A Disgrace to the Jews" Cantor and Darrell "OK, I'm a Crook, but What of It?" Issa and a bunch of other committee-chairng hooligans occupying positions of actual governmental power, thereby amplifying their already wildly disproportional access to the infotainment noozemedia, not to mention Senate Minority Leader "Miss Mitch" McConnell commanding every obstructlier troops of obstruction, and an economy still in hell and a war with no end in sight, and so on and so on, it's not going to be pretty. Still, there are already indications aplenty that the New Order isn't going to be the ideological juggernaut it was cracked up to be -- mostly by those very same infotainment noozemedia, come to think of it.

The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson has (I dare say) some fun with the already-evident fractures in his column today, "Why so frightened, GOP?"

[D]uring the lame-duck session, it seemed to dawn on GOP leaders that they begin the new Congress burdened with great expectations -- but lacking commensurate power. It's going to be a challenge for Republicans just to maintain party unity, much less to enact the kind of conservative agenda they promised to their enthusiastic, impatient voters.

Robinson points to the possibility of increased defections from the formerly lockstep Senate GOP minority -- "there could be as many as 11 Republicans who might defect and vote with the Democrats, depending on the issue." He concludes: "The new Senate will be considerably more Republican than the old Senate, but whether it's more conservative remains to be seen."

Whereas the very fact that "the new House will be decidedly more conservative than the old House" may actually be "the problem." Can Speaker-apparent Boehner really handle his new Teabagging cohorts?

Republicans face what, for them, is an unpleasant but inescapable reality. Ideologically, most Americans describe themselves as moderate or conservative; but when it comes to getting assistance from the government, most Americans are moderate or liberal. Look at health care, the issue that won the election for the GOP. According to polls, voters clearly favor the benefits that Obama's reforms will provide. All they really oppose is the insurance mandate that makes those benefits possible.

The idea of small, limited government may be appealing, but this is a big, complicated country. As some Republicans already know, and others soon will learn.

MEANWHILE THE PUTATIVE GOP PRESIDENTIAL
CAMPAIGNS HIT SOME ROUGH PATCHES OF ROAD

As a report by the AP's Charles Babington is headlined in today's Post: "GOP hopefuls find some issues a hazard early on." So we've got:

* South Dakota Sen. John Thune (you mean to tell me this doodybag is a 2012 GOP presidential hopeful?!) has been caught making a precipitously quick conversion from compulsive earmarker to a scourge of earmarks -- er, "explaining" that "I support those projects, but I don't support this bill, nor do I support the process by which this bill was put together."

* Our old pal Willard Romney is caught joining in the right-wing jihad against the Obama health care package and its infamous "individual mandate" when that mandate is essentially identical to the one he incorporated into the health care reform he oversaw as governor of Massachusetts.

* Outgoing Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been caught telling whoppers about labor unions, which he could only back up with reference to a passel of lies upchucked by Veronique de Rugy a "senior research fellow" at George Mason University (which, it shouldn't be forgotten, has been permanently tainted by gobbling up those Koch Brothers millions; to quote the title of a post I wrote in October, "It's important that everyone associated with George Mason U. suffer the stigma of the Koch Bros.' Mercatus Center") on, as I live and breathe, Andrew Breitbart's website! Is there anyone in that chain of stupidities with a brain capable of even recognizing truth?

* Former Arkansas Gov. "Minister Mike" Huckabee, who this month claimed, with regard to cap-and-trade: "I never did support and never would support it, period," the only small, itty-bitty problem is that --

at an October 2007 meeting of the Global Warming and Energy Solutions Conference in New Hampshire, Huckabee said: "I also support cap and trade of carbon emissions. And I was disappointed that the Senate rejected a carbon-counting system to measure the sources of emissions, because that would have been the first and the most important step toward implementing true cap and trade."

In his post-facto weaseling he managed to drag the Chinese into his own poor-quality lying: Voluntary cap-and-trade, it appears, is OK, "but I was clear that we could not force U.S. businesses to do what their Chinese counterparts refused to."

* That sad hack Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour of course had his seemingly inevitable momentum toward 2012, er, sidetracked with his serially embarrassing blithering in defense of racial segregation.

Ha ha ha, see the bozos run. But that brings us to the true horror underlying all of these stories: Hide the children and the silverware, the 2012 campaign is upon us.

May God have mercy on our souls.

#