I really don’t like Ted Cruz, but I’m taking pleasure in seeing him expose Donald Trump as a fraud by showing that Trump is the furthest thing from a winner and that he can’t even make his own campaign great again, let alone do anything positive for the country.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
I heard a brief clip of Trump at some rally somewhere in the NYC area, maybe LI, on National Propaganda Radio. Granted that it was short clip from what was likely to have been a longer speech, but I must say that Trump didn’t sound much like the super braggadocio “I’m the Greatest” person anymore. Sounds a bit more knocked down to size… which has been the stated and overt goal of the RNC titans & other PTB.
So I guess the RNC’s goals are being met, as they GOTV for the Cruzer – who in many ways is probably worse than Trump!! but maybe not worse for the RNC if he loses the general.
I can report that my rightwing fundie family members have gone solidly into the Cruz camp. Not all that surprising, but there was a phase when they were more definitely on the line and considering Trump. Now, not so much. I guess the propaganda Wurlitzer has done it’s job. It’s looking less likely that Trump will win the nomination in Cleveland, and I’m guessing the propaganda Wurlitzer will spin overtime to convince the rubes that Cruz is really really really who they really really wanted all along. Or something along those lines.
Time will tell how this plays out. From where I sit, it looks a bit like the Trumpmentum is running out of gas.
Saw an interview with Kasich. He doesn’t sound like a nut – for a Republican. Not much of a slogan “Vote for me – I’m not a nut!”, but it might be sufficient. Hillary better hope for Cruz. He’s her best chance. And don’t think they won’t play the Canada card.
He may not sound like a nut but he certainly is if you look at his policies and what he’s done in OH. I’m sure Mike will have a lot of insight into that.
yes, he’s often warned us about K
Kasich is as evil, authoritarian, theocratic and misogynistic as all the rest of them, he just wears the mask better. fortunately, because he does he’s getting no traction in the primaries, because the howling mob the GOP proudly calls “Their Base” (funny, what is the english translation of ‘al qeada’ again?) won’t pick him.
Don’t drink booze at his events.
I find it somewhat mysterious that Kasich, simply by occasionally exuding this folksiness and aw-shucks, every-man persona, gets painted in the media and on many blogs as this rare and nearly extinct creature, The Perfect Republican Moderate. It is as puzzling to me as the whole Paul Ryan as Budget and Finance Wizard meme.
Yes, Kasich expanded Medicaid under the ACA. I applaud him for that. But if you put that one on the shelf and take a look at the rest of his record in Ohio and the legislation that he has promoted and signed, it is essentially a Tea Party/social Conservative’s dream. Throw on top of his continuing language in regard to women and women’s issues, and he comes across as a horribly sexist troglodyte.
People shouldn’t be deceived by these nuggets of seeming common sense that will occasionally come from his mouth. Our infrastructure here is crumbling, public school money continues to get siphoned off and fed to charter schools which are run almost exclusively by Kasich’s Republican cronies, he is a hardcore anti-labor guy and his assault on women’s health choices is as bad as anyone’s.
He is the textbook example of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Plenty of other people have done this as well, if not better.
Cruz spent the first half of his campaign sucking up to Trump in a transparent attempt to pick up his detritus. So they can both go fuck themselves as far as I’m concerned.
Hey Booman,
Your ” is the furthest thing from a winner and that he can’t even make his own campaign great again, let alone do anything positive for the country.”
Would not the above apply to all of the GOP candidates running for any office? It fits to me. I use to vote for GOP members sometimes after checking their records and seeing that they were more Liberal then the Democratic party candidate. Not any more, it has been years since that has gone away.
Cruz as a savior from Trump?
Be careful what you wish for.
You might get it.
AG
I would take trump over Cruz any day of the week. Trump is a negotiator and a hustler. He is also right about the trade imbalance and foreign wars, just for starters. Cruz, however, is a Christofascist monomaniac. Trump would never even think of pushing the nuke button, for instance. For one thing, that would be the end of negotiations, and that’s what he does.
Besides…it would mess up his hair.
Cruz? He’d push it in the full belief that God is on his side.
Bet on it.
AG
I really don’t think he sees Cruz as a savior from Trump. Just that he enjoys seeing Trump get cut down to size.
During the Wisconsin primary, I greatly enjoyed watching Trump do the same to Cruz (and Walker) — though Cruz beat him handily in the vote.
Basically, I just enjoy watching the two of them kick the crap out of each other.
If so, all I have to say is this:
Politics is not a spectator sport!!!
Lives are at stake here.
Our lives.
I imagine there were Germans who laughed as they watched Hitler crawl out of the woodwork and take over.
Look what happened there.
AG
This has been a subject of discussion here recently. Here’s an entertaining but pointed discussion of the subject:
OT: thus the main reason why the GOP wants to kill it.
Immigrants, the Poor and Minorities Gain Sharply Under Health Act
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ROBERT GEBELOFF
APRIL 17, 2016
LOS ANGELES — The first full year of the Affordable Care Act brought historic increases in coverage for low-wage workers and others who have long been left out of the health care system, a New York Times analysis has found. Immigrants of all backgrounds — including more than a million legal residents who are not citizens — had the sharpest rise in coverage rates.
Hispanics, a coveted group of voters this election year, accounted for nearly a third of the increase in adults with insurance. That was the single largest share of any racial or ethnic group, far greater than their 17 percent share of the population. Low-wage workers, who did not have enough clout in the labor market to demand insurance, saw sharp increases. Coverage rates jumped for cooks, dishwashers, waiters, as well as for hairdressers and cashiers. Minorities, who disproportionately worked in low-wage jobs, had large gains…
Until now, the impact of the law has been measured mostly in broad numbers of newly insured people — about 20 million by the administration’s most recent account. But the Times’s analysis of census data from 2014, the first year the heart of the law was in full effect, provides a finely detailed look at who the newly insured actually are — by race, education, occupation, immigration status, and family structure…
“From the vantage point of the poor and working poor, Obamacare has been profound,” said Jim Mangia, president of the St. John’s Well Child and Family Center, a federally funded health clinic in South Los Angeles that has enrolled 18,000 new patients under the law, nearly all of them Hispanic or black and the vast majority in Medicaid. The clinic reported a 44 percent increase in cervical cancer screenings, a 25 percent increase in tobacco cessation therapy, and a 22 percent increase in the share of patients with controlled hypertension since 2014, the result, he said, of more patients having insurance.
Having insurance does not necessarily mean better health, but experts hope it could start to ease some of the worst disparities that have kept the United States close to the bottom of health rankings of rich countries…
Uh huh
Uh huh
More Than Immigration at the High Court
The Supreme Court’s look at Obama’s executive action perfectly explains the Merrick Garland fight.
By Dahlia Lithwick
This same coulda, shoulda imperative is crucial for understanding the derangement that simmers beneath the GOP obstruction of hearings for Merrick Garland. You may think we are at war over what the court might become. But we are in fact at war over what should have been. And what should have been, for Senate Republicans, is quite simple: The 2016 term was meant to be the Supreme Court’s year to destroy Obama.
You could almost forget this, as the term fizzles into a bunch of sagging 4-4 ties and improbable unanimous decisions, but if Antonin Scalia had lived until July the docket was full of poisoned pills and silent time bombs that would have exploded in President Obama’s face this summer. Until and unless we reckon with what might have been at the high court this term, it’s impossible to understand why there will be no hearings for Judge Garland. GOP senators aren’t just angry about losing Justice Scalia’s seat. They are angry because the court as the weapon of choice to screw the president has been taken from them, and they want it back.
United States v. Texas, the case that will be argued Monday morning at the high court, is Exhibit A for this proposition. When the high court agreed to hear this lawsuit–which emerged from nothing more than a preliminary injunction placed on 2014 DHS regulations that outlined the creation of Obama’s Deferred Action for Parents of American Citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) and expansion of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)–Obama haters were dancing in the streets. The executive actions, which delayed deportation for 5 million undocumented immigrants by deprioritizing their removal from the country in favor of the deportations of felons, were blocked in Feb. 2015 by one very conservative district judge in Texas. That decision to enjoin the new rules was happily upheld by a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last fall. When the court agreed to weigh in on all this, it was because–as Solicitor General Donald Verrilli argued–this action by the appeals court was “unprecedented,” just as the high court’s decision to step in and block Obama’s climate change regulations last February was unprecedented. The whole term was meant to be unprecedented, except that Justice Scalia died.
It’s almost enough to make me believe there is a God after all, and she’s had enough of this shit.