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Month: September 2015

What if they really mean what they say?

What if they really mean what they say?

by digby

I wrote about Ben Carson’s rise in the polls today for Salon and how it tells us something about Trump and the GOP electorate. Here’s an excerpt:

There has been a lot of talk about why Trump is so popular, and the conventional wisdom at the moment is that it’s because voters are mad as hell and they are looking for an outsider to articulate their rage. Trump shakes his fist at the establishments of both parties and lays it all out on the line. This, it’s assumed, is the key to his success. Indeed, an entire beltway cottage industry has grown up around explaining the Trump phenomenon as an expression of America’s id.

Carson’s personality, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite of Trump’s. Where Trump is a bombastic narcissist, Carson is quiet and self-effacing. Where Trump rudely takes on all comers, Carson is polite and well-mannered. Trump is a street fighter, Carson a gentleman. So the fact that these two polar opposites are sitting at number one and two in the Republican primary polls right now must indicate that they represent two different strains in the GOP, right? If the histrionic Trump’s popularity is simply an inchoate expression of rage, then Carson’s support might be assumed to be based upon a yearning among other Republican voters for a more thoughtful, polite approach to politics.

But what if neither Trump nor Carson are popular because of their personalities? What if the beltway consensus that Trump’s success isn’t based upon issues or ideology is wrong and voters are actually attracted to his crazy ideas on the merits? The fact that Carson is closing on him certainly lends credibility to that possibility, because despite his mild-mannered persona, Carson’s ideas are even more extreme than Trump’s.

The two top contenders for the Republican nomination have nothing in common in terms of style, but among a very big field they are the two with the most radical agendas, and, as Salon’s Simon Maloy pointed out recently, a common disdain for what they term “political correctness.” As uncomfortable as it may be to think about, maybe Republican voters aren’t just looking for someone to express their rage. Maybe they really are extremists.
[…]
I think everyone is familiar with Trump’s agenda. For starters he’s going to round up and deport all the undocumented immigrants, build a wall on the border with a beautiful door and make Mexico pay for it, start trade wars with China and Japan, and when it comes to ISIS he has said:
“They have great money because they have oil. Every place where they have oil I would knock the hell out of them. I would knock out the source of their wealth, the primary sources of their wealth, which is oil. And in order to do that, you would have to put boots on the ground. I would knock the hell out of them but I’d put a ring around it and I’d take the oil for our country.”
Carson’s ideas are no less out in right field: He would use drones on the border to blow up caves where he believes immigrants are hiding. He believes that Planned Parenthood was created to commit genocide on African Americans. He has said that Obamacare is the worst thing to happen since slavery. And he believes that prohibitions against torture and war crimes are P.C. foolishness:
“Our military needs to know that they’re not going be prosecuted when they come back, because somebody has said, ‘You did something that was politically incorrect. There is no such thing as a politically correct war. We need to grow up, we need to mature. If you’re gonna have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war. Other than that, we have to win. Our life depends on it.”
So, the two most popular candidates in the Republican race for president are as different as can be when in comes to personality and style. One is a monumental blowhard billionaire and the other is a diffident brain surgeon.  But it’s not the way Trump and Carson speak or the style with which they present themselves that has the base so dazzled. These voters agree with the substance of what these two are saying. And they are both certifiable extremists. Maybe it’s time for the political establishment to reconsider their view that this phenomenon doesn’t amount to anything more than a political tantrum and take these people seriously.

More at the link…

No-fee lunch by @BloggersRUs

No-fee lunch
by Tom Sullivan

“Alaska is the only state in the union besides New Hampshire without sales or income tax,” writes Alana Semuels in The Atlantic. The Granite State funds itself with one of the highest property taxes in the country, through excise and corporate taxes, and through fees. Lots of fees. The Last Frontier has $50 billion in its savings account and cannot pay its bills.

Alaska has funded nearly 90 percent of its operations for years with oil revenues, but, “For every $5 drop in oil prices, the state loses $120 million, according to Randall Hoffbeck, Commissioner of the Alaska Department of Revenue.” Now, things are getting tight:

“People are used to paying little or nothing for their government services,” Hoffbeck said. “It’s just going to be a change of mindset.”

But don’t expect that to happen without much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Facing a roughly $4 billion dollar deficit this year on a $6 billion annual budget leaves lawmakers in quite a pinch. To use an outdated phrase, shaving silver off the edges of quarters won’t solve the problem. There are only so many places to save pennies, and pennies don’t add up to billions. Touching the Alaska Permanent Fund that writes dividend checks to every state resident each year is a non-starter:

To an outside observer, it might be obvious that a state that doesn’t ask its residents to pay any taxes and is now experiencing a giant budget deficit should just stop writing residents checks, or at least use some of the earnings from its $50 billion in the bank to pay its bills. Since the Permanent Fund is projected to continue to make more and more money from its earnings, the state could still spend a portion of earnings and keep the reserve fund well-endowed. Or the state could put a cap on the yearly amount of Permanent Fund dividends (the amount of the dividend is currently calculated by a formula based on the average of the Fund’s income over five years).

But Alaskans are fiercely protective of their checks, and of their state’s savings. This might be the most tight-fisted state in the union.

Citizens of this proud, conservative state like getting something for nothing. And politicians don’t dare ask them to start paying for that no-fee lunch. “At some point in time, we’re going to have to have broad-based taxes,” says Hoffbeck. “We’re going to have to fund ourselves like everybody else does.”

Except everybody doesn’t. We seem prepared to strip America to the walls looking for places to cut pennies before we’ll own up to our responsibility and tax ourselves for what we get and to maintain it. Highways, water systems, good schools, endless wars. We expect them. We demand them. We just refuse to pay for them, and then blame the deficits on the poor. Or else on waste, fraud, and abuse, the inexhaustible zero-point energy of conservative pseudo-economics.

Or to clean up after ourselves. Barack Obama is in Alaska this week talking about climate change and the need to do just that:

I have come here today, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and its second-largest emitter, to say that the United States recognizes our role in creating the problem, and we embrace our responsibility to help solve it.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the personal responsibility crowd to accept any.

James O’Keefe bags another scalp

James O’Keefe bags another scalp

by digby

Here’s the latest pathetic attempt to stay relevant:

In a five-minute video compilation, Veritas showed senior members of Mrs. Clinton’s team appearing to accept a donation from a Canadian women at Mrs. Clinton’s campaign announcement rally in exchange for hats and pins bearing the candidate’s name. The staff members — Molly Barker and Erin Tibe — express awareness that they cannot except a donation from a foreigner but agree to allow the Canadian woman to give the money to an American citizen standing next to her who made the transaction on her behalf.

Although the American happened to be one of Project Veritas’s staff members who used a fake name, Mr. O’Keefe made the case that the video showed a willingness by the campaign to skirt laws that forbid taking donations from foreigners by using a conduit. The transaction amounted to $75, and Project Veritas has asked Mrs. Clinton’s campaign to refund the money.

“They have demonstrated a willingness to contravene the law,” Mr. O’Keefe said.

Blowing the lid off of this potentially nefarious Canadian foreign influence on Hillary Clinton the New York Times does go on to explain that foreign donations are a huge problem for her because foundation blah,blah, blah. (This is the same nonsensical stuff they did over the Johnny Chung and buddhist temple bullshit back in the 1990s which resulted in — zilch.) But this time it’s especially hilarious considering the tsunami of billionaire money flooding politics and the open practice by presidential candidate these days to prostrate themselves before rich old men to beg for money in return for a promise to fulfill their agendas. These candidates are literally being bribed before our very eyes. And it’s perfectly legal.

I’m going to guess that some low level volunteer foolishly allowing herself to be conned by James O’Keefe over 75 bucks isn’t going to make the front pages. But who the hell knows?

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Your startling chart o’ the day

Your startling chart o’ the day

by digby

Courtesy of Kevin Drum who writes:

It’s September! Hooray! The kids are back in school and Donald Trump’s reign over the silly season will soon be coming to an end. Finally, we can start to get serious about choosing our next presi—

Wait. WTF? Trumpmentum’s sagging fortunes have turned around? He’s now even further in the lead? Well crap.

Kevin speculates that everyone wants someone else to spend the money to attack Trump but I think that’s probably a minor consideration. There’s plenty of money rolling around out there. No, I think the CW is probably correct — they don’t want to insult Trump’s followers. As you can see, they represent a fairly large proportion of the GOP electorate and they are vocal and energetic. Whether it lasts is unknown, but with the field as large as it is, nobody can tell where these people are going to land if/when Trump flames out.

Either way,  it’s a problem. He was supposed to crater some time ago and it’s not happening.  Quite the opposite in fact.

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Beck is back!

Beck is back!

by digby

Well actually, he never went away.  I wrote about his successful cult for Salon today. Here’s an excerpt:

He was instrumental in the radicalizing of the same right wing that is now worshipping at the feet of a demagogic billionaire named Trump. They may have been extreme before, but Beck unleashed the beast. He has since recanted much of his behavior during the Fox years, much of which bordered on incoherent lunacy, by saying that he “made an awful lot of mistakes” because he “played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart.” You might say that.
His atonement has led him down a different path, one on which he’s less of a mass culture phenomenon and more of a cult leader. His transformation actually started before he left Fox News, when he began organizing rallies. The first big one was in 2010, the “Restoring Honor” rally. Originally conceived as a political event, Beck had some sort of revelation a few months before and changed it to a fundraising rally for veterans, as well as a quasi-religious meeting featuring some of the far-right religious crackpots with whom he would become increasingly involved over the next few years. This event was huge; according to some estimates it drew as many as 300,000 people. Sarah Palin was the star attraction.
As it came on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, it also led to Beck’s bizarre ongoing appropriation of Dr. King’s legacy for his own purposes. (He’s not the only conservative to do this, of course, but he’s one of the few to make a huge profit at it.) And he’s still at it. Last weekend, he really made it sing: He held his annual rally (yes, he does this every year) in Birmingham Alabama. Twenty thousand people showed up to march with him on the historic civil rights route from Kelly Ingram Park to Birmingham City Hall, holding all the same pre-made signs with pictures of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas, and the sayings “God Is the Answer,” “All Lives Matter,” “Unity,” “Justice,” “Courage” and “Right of Conscience.” T-Shirts were printed with the words “Never Again is Now” which apparently refers to Beck’s campaign to raise money for persecuted Christians in the Middle East.
Beck is now a holy man, spreading the good word of God, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, a racial healer and a stalwart defender of justice and equality. (All lives matter, darn it!) Needless to say, “right of conscience” refers to the God-given right to discriminate and “never again is now” is a pretty crude allusion to the Holocaust. It’s a perfect Beckian mishmash of appropriated liberal sacred cows and conservative bigotry wrapped up in sanctimony, vanity and intellectual dissonance. For some reason there are a substantial number of people who find that to be inspiring. And they’re willing to pay for it.

A theology professor explains that the Pope hasn’t changed anything on abortion

A theology professor explains that the Pope hasn’t changed anything on abortion

by digby

Well, not exactly.  But since women are assumed to not understand the evil that they do when they mercilessly murder fetuses, they can be forgiven if they properly repent:

As with other recalibrations announced by Pope Francis, the supposedly radical change in the Vatican’s approach to abortion is being dramatically overblown in the press.

In practice, it is very common to find in a church vestibule a poster asking women whether they are “hurting after an abortion.” And providing a contact to talk it over with a friendly pastoral adviser.

Women who have abortions are not hounded or shamed in Catholic churches; to the contrary, the attempt is made to communicate forgivenness and support.

And on doctrine, this is not a shift that is, in any way, shape or form, about whether or not procuring an abortion or performing one is an intrinsic, objective evil, the killing of innocent human life.

Instead, the Pope is emphasizing what is always true in Catholic teaching: that for an objectively evil act to be an actual subjective sin, besides being actually objectively and gravely evil, one must know it is objectively and gravely evil, and one must freely will to do it anyway.

The Pope is recognizing what most people in the pro-life community and many others already recognize. Namely, that sometimes an abortion doesn’t seem like much of a choice to the woman procuring it. People feel trapped by circumstances, and in such cases the guilt is not fully mitigated but somewhat mitigated, at least.

One can imagine such a person feeling even immediate regret and sorrow for the sin and also feeling victimized by circumstances. The Church wants to be there for that person, and the Pope is making it easier for the Church to be there.

The Pope is saying that the Church has an ordinary outlet for reconciliation and forgiveness, and that is the sacrament of penance or reconciliation.

So, the change proposed here is pastoral in nature, not doctrinal. It is intended to emphasize that the Church is an agent of mercy, primarily, and not an agent of condemnation.

In addition, all the usual conditions apply here. One must be truly sorry for one’s sins, all of them, not just this one, and make a firm promise of amendment of life.

he goes on to explain that all that’s happened is that now local priests can forgive the dizzy broads who made this horrible error without really knowing any better without be designated by a bishop to have the power to do it. That’s literally the only thing that has changed. Women who make the evil choice to have an abortion need to prove to a celibate male priest that she didn’t know what she was doing and then perhaps she won’t be excommunicated. So that’s nice.

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Chuck Todd can read minds

Chuck Todd can read minds

by digby

This morning he said upfront, without any obfuscation, that he believes that Clinton only had her separate email server in order to hide her correspondence. And since they haven’t found any smoking gun which could justify this,  the implication is that she is obviously a paranoid freak. See how that works? She is either a corrupt sell-out or a paranoid freak. Heads he wins, tails she loses.

Frankly, I think it’s perfectly sensible of her to want to keep her correspondence from Chuck Todd and his friends in the press when you observe the orgy of meaningless puerile gossip they’re engaging in this morning over the email release last night. They are obsessively interested in anything personal, which proves exactly why they wanted to get their sweaty mitts on them in the first place.

Andrea Mitchell former State Department spokesman PJ Crowley and analyst Steve Clemons on her show.  They both tried to talk about what was really interesting in the emails — the issues she was dealing with during her tenure and even the fact that there was a level of mistrust in the early days with the White House which fell away by the end of 2009 when the administration fully meshed.  Perhaps some day someone will take a look at the real story there. It seems as though it might be interesting. It is, after all, unusual to be able to see all this the correspondence of the Secretary of State.  Colin Powell destroyed all his emails, for instance, so we never will have that access to the inside story when he lied to the country and the world and helped take us into a war that destroyed the stability of the middle east and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. But who cares about that — it’s so 2003.

No, this morning what we got was excessive attention to any correspondence with Huma Abedin, in a desperate search for any evidence of something juicy, which they failed to find. And there was lots of breathless gossipy discussions of anything Clinton was talking about that was personal, like what TV shows she was watching and what she was reading.  This is obviously the only thing they care about. (Yesterday they were whining like babies because the government scheduled the release in the evening which apparently meant they would have to stay up all night long poring over them to search for juicy tid-bits. Why this would be such an urgent task is unknown.)

Chris Cillizza helpfully explained to Mitchell that despite the fact that these emails  contain no evidence of wrongdoing they are destructive to her because when they are released “everyone” will talk about them for days and days hour after hour anyway and overwhelm her desire to talk about things that are important. By everyone, he means the press. They simply cannot choose to cover anything else because — well, just because.

But we knew that. This is the Village. It’s what they do. It’s who they are.

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Earthquakes, the “Big One” & the Pacific Northwest, by @Gaius_Publius

Earthquakes, the “Big One” & the Pacific Northwest

by Gaius Publius

This is not quite a political story, but it’s an important one. Most people west of the Mississippi and many people east of it assume that the so-called “Big One,” the mother of all American earthquakes, will occur in southern California along the San Andreas fault.

Shaded relief map of California showing the location of SAFOD [San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth]. Major historical earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault are shown, with the creeping section of the fault in blue. (© USGS, click to enlarge) [source]

But scientists who study plate tectonics have come to a surprising, and relatively recent, conclusion — the “big one” is more likely to come in the Pacific Northwest, and it’s likely to be the “really big one.”

I can only give you a small part of this excellent recent article in the New Yorker by Kathryn Schultz, but if this interests you at all, the piece is worth reading through. There’s both good science and important warning here. And if you’re a resident of the region, it may qualify as a must-read.

The problem in a nutshell, from just after the start of the article (my emphasis):

Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing “the big one.” That rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does. Every fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan.

Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland. The “subduction zone” part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth’s continents and oceans. Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not.

Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.

Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”.

I’ve bolded the parts that describe the geologic stress and what’s likely to happen to the land when it releases. The upward bulge of the land includes the Cascades mountain region and land west to the sea (Mount Hood, in the Cascades Mountains, is only 80 miles east of Portland). A six-foot drop in elevation of land within “a few minutes” would destroy everything built on top of it. A similar drop beneath the ocean would create a tsunami that would wipe out everything living along the coast.

Here’s a picture:

The northern part of the Cascadia Subduction Zone (click to enlarge; source)

Here’s another, showing the extent of the affected area:

As the source states, “Subdiction of the Juan de Fuca plate beneath the North American
plate results in the formation of the Cascade Range.” Click to enlarge.

And another showing the elevations:

Portland sits between the Oregon Coast Range and the Cascade Range (click to enlarge; source).

If a full rupture occurs, the impact will be devastating: “that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America,” writes Schultz.

Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” Murphy says.

Devastation aside, the science on this is fascinating. Schultz writes, “Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever
produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it
existed.” If you want to skip to that part, find the sentence that starts, “Almost all of the world’s most powerful earthquakes occur in the Ring of
Fire” and continue from there. The study of the “ghost forest” on the banks of the Copalis River and the tale it told to alert researchers makes terrific reading.

There’s much more here than I can quote comfortably — the detective work that revealed the date of the last “really big one” (“approximately nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700”); the lack of preparation, and the cost of preparing properly to respond to an emergency of this scale.

FEMA, Disaster Preparation & Our Billionaires

Which is where I want to add a word of my own. Funding FEMA, of course, to an adequate level is a first priority. Yet we live in a time of pathological billionaires, rulers of both parties, who don’t want to spend the first spare dime on any class of people but their own. The arrogance of this class, from Donald Trump to Sheldon Adelson to Jamie Dimon, is astounding — I may have some comparison video shortly. Left or right, they’re mainly all the same. If you watched the Trump vs. Ramos video, you watched them all in action.

As with their arrogance, so their self-dealing. Americans are forced to use increasingly service-cutting, space-cutting airlines for long-distance travel because “our betters” say they can’t afford to raise Amtrak to anything close to European standards. (Have you ridden an American passenger train lately along any but the DC–New England corridor?) Yet here’s how the very very rich take to the air, financed, if they can get it, by corporate tax loopholes and compensation extras.

If they “can’t afford” to give us good trains, bridges, or roadways, how will this class ever allow us to prepare for an emergency on the scale described here?

We seem to be stuck, until we don’t want to be. Talk about a tectonic subduction zone — that we continue to be ruled by the global rich is a “sticking point” of monstrous proportions. The pressure, on them and on us, to keep things as they are is enormous. I’m afraid the consequences — political, social, environmental, climatological — of coming “unstuck” from our own ruling class will be monstrous as well.

I guess this was a political story after all.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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Weakness: The ultimate RW insult by @BloggersRUs

Weakness: The ultimate RW insult
by Tom Sullivan

If you want a perfect encapsulation of the conservative world view, you need look no further than “A Boy Named Sue,” a song made famous by Johnny Cash and (ironically) written by the late Shel Silverstein, a writer of children’s books.

“Son, this world is rough, and if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough…

It’s the name that helped to make you strong”

Not a good father. Not a good husband. Not a good citizen. But strong. It’s all that matters.

That’s why blustering manhood and guns and codpieces play so well on the right. It is also why weakness is both a cardinal sin and the ultimate RW insult. Weakness evokes the same makes-my-skin-crawl response the Nazi Shliemann had in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to “the thought of this — (spitting it out) — Jewish ritual.”

So Donald Trump dumping on Jeb Bush in a Horton-esque new attack ad and on the Bush family in an interview is an especially low (and potentially politically fatal) blow:

On Jeb Bush: “I mean, this guy. I don’t think he has a clue.”

On George H.W. Bush: “I really liked the father — really like him as a person. But I hated his ‘read my lips, no more taxes,’ and then he raised taxes monstrously.”

On George W. Bush: “He didn’t seem smart. I’d watch him in interviews and I’d look at people and ask, ‘Do you think he understands the question?’ ”

And back to Jeb: “He’s not up to snuff. . . . Jeb is never going to bring us to the promised land. He can’t.”

Martin Longman writes at Washington Monthly:

There’s no doubt that Trump is a bully. But this is a case of a bully standing up to a bully and exposing the latter as a paper tiger. And this is really what GOP strategist Steve Schmidt was getting at when he said the following:

“Look, Jeb Bush was a very successful governor, he’s a thoughtful man, he was a good, conservative governor. But every day, Donald Trump is emasculating Jeb Bush, and Republican primary voters are not going to default to the establishment candidate who is being weakened by these attacks that go unresponded to.”

I don’t know how Jeb Bush thinks he is responding, but none of it is getting through. I hear nothing, and it’s basically like Trump has Jeb by the hair and is just dunking him repeatedly under the water while taunting him for being a weak and ineffectual and “low energy” loser.

The conservative base loves alpha dogs like Trump and banty roosters like Dubya. Jeb Bush is neither. What was he thinking? Longman continues:

This all might seem like playground stuff, but Jeb doesn’t compensate by going out and clearing brush on his ranch. He doesn’t even obsessively work out or go bicycling every damn where. He’s soft and doughy and low energy and non-threatening, and he just looks like a guy who wants to run the Pentagon but has been stripped of every last shred of toughness and masculinity.

It’s true that nine out of every ten things that Trump says are either untrue or insane, but when he goes after the Bush family what he says is generally accurate.

Reagan faced down an “evil empire” in cowboy hat. Dubya faced down an “axis of evil” in a flight suit (and a cowboy hat). Trump has no cowboy hat, but his Sikorskis and tough talk telegraph to the GOP base that he’s “tough.”