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Month: March 2016

The “outside agitator” meme is back

Published by digby on March 12, 2016

The “outside agitator” meme is back

by digby

The Trump people claim this woman is actually a Bernie “infiltrator.” The creepy endangered species murderer Trump Jr. retweeted the claim as did some idiotic supporters:

Here’s the real story.

They began circulating a rumor, on social media, that the woman pictured was not Birgitt Peterson of Yorkville, but Portia Boulger, a former Hillary Clinton supporter and current Bernie Sanders activist from Chillicothe, Ohio.

Twitter user @new_debis, who uses the hashtag #AlwaysTrump, posted Boulger’s picture. “It appears Portia works for Bernie. Promoting violence at Trump Rally,” she said.

Another user, @brassidio, wrote, “Hitler was a National Socialist. It’s unsurprising to see a Socialist giving a Nazi salute. #PortiaBoulger #trump.”

Boulger is 63 and a union carpenter by trade, though she says she now works part time as a teacher for at-risk children when she’s not volunteering on behalf of Sanders. According to a public records search, Peterson is 69. A call placed to the number listed for her was not answered, and the answering machine suggested it was outdated anyway.

I reached Boulger by phone on Saturday morning, a few minutes after Donald Trump Jr. tweeted her photo with the caption, “Big surprise. However, the media will never run with this.”
[…]
“I was at 4 North Bridge Street in Chillicothe, Ohio, at the IBEW union hall, making calls for Sanders,” Boulger told me of her whereabouts Friday night.
[…]
She said she didn’t realize she was being identified as the woman in the photo until her son called her, and then people started contacting her on social media.

“When my hair was long, there was a little bit of a resemblance with the hairdo, but my hair’s real short now,” she said. She pointed me to a photo she had posted, from March 9, that showed her bright white hair cropped close to her head.

Nice of Trump to tweet out this woman’s name to his millions of followers. But not worry. They’re all such mature, responsible individuals that I’m sure nothing bad could happen.

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The populist icing on the cake

Published by digby on March 12, 2016

The populist icing on the cake

by digby


Greg Sargent had an intresting piece the other day featuring some new data from Alan Abromowitz,Ronald Rapoport, and Walter Stone about “The Trump voter”. Sargent writes, “Abramowitz’s conclusion is partly that Trump support is driven heavily by a combination of nativism and support for Trump’s unorthodox (for Republicans, anyway) economic positions.”

The unorthodox economic positions are defined by Trump’s pledge not to cut social security (because he’ll root out the waste fraud and abuse and make the country so rich, rich, rich we’ll have money for everything.) He is also apparently considered someone who will raise taxes on those making over 250k but that’s not true. And there is his promise to bring back jobs by “beating” China and Mexico etc on trade.

The nativism is obvious. He is promising to ban Muslims, deport Hispanics and show those Chinese, Japanese, Indians overseas who are making all those cheap goods just who is boss. That argument all ties together.

There’s another factor they found as well: authoritarianism, which they defined this way and found the following results:

We measured authoritarianism by asking respondents to agree or disagree with the statement that “what this country needs is a strong leader to shake things up in Washington.” Fifty-nine percent of Republican voters strongly agreed with this statement and among that group, 50% ranked Trump first and only 14% ranked him last. In contrast, among the 17% of Republican voters who were classified as low on authoritarianism by either agreeing only slightly or disagreeing with this statement, only 20% ranked Trump first and 48% ranked him last.

So, what they concluded was that there was a strong relationship between authoritarianism, nativism, and economic liberalism among Trump voters. (I would argue that nationalism plays an extremely important role as well, but it appears they didn’t ask about that.)

I guess I don’t really understand why this is such a mystery. This the profile of Republicans who used to be called Reagan Democrats. They’ve been part of the GOP coalition or more than 30 years. And their views have always been the same. Nativism/racism, authoritarian/lawandorder, nationalist/militarist, economic populists. These are blue collar white people who used to vote for Democrats until Democrats became the party of civil rights, civil liberties and anti-war protests. In other words, the party of black and brown people, gays, and feminists, globalists and critics of authoritarian police agencies and military adventurism.

After that happened Democrats remained more responsive to economic populism although they foolishly muddied their message so that their differences with the GOP were obscured. But it wouldn’t have mattered, not really. People who hold that set of beliefs are Republicans because they do not want to be in multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition where “liberal peaceniks” and uppity feminists are equal partners. The GOP’s fundamental nativism and racism and “patriotic” militarism are the reasons they prefer the Republicans and they are the reasons they prefer Donald Trump. They love him so much because they’ve finally found someone who boldly expresses all those beliefs.

It’s just a fact that these voters stuck with the GOP for many decades when they were fetishizing free trade, promising to cut “entitlements” and obsessing over “tort reform” and “the deficit” because it was the white party and the war party.

It’s obviously necessary for Democrats to offer solutions to these voters’ economic woes. It’s long past time they started looking after their own working class constituency of brown and black folks, many of them women, who will benefit from a more populist approach. So no arguments from me that they shouldn’t try to appeal to everyone on this populist axis. But these people will not vote for them if they do that.

This new piece by Ron Brownstein confirms that these are standard issue Republicans, not independents or recent Democrats:

Though some conservative Trump critics have claimed that he has relied on a surge of non-Republican voters, the exit polls conducted so far in 15 states point toward the opposite conclusion. Overall, although turnout has soared from 2012, the share of the total primary votes cast by self-identified Republicans this year is virtually unchanged. And Trump has beaten his rivals among self-identified Republicans in every exit poll conducted in states that he has won.

Together these patterns suggest that Trump has built his coalition primarily from voters within the heart of the Republican electorate—a dynamic that could make it more difficult for the party leaders to deny him the nomination if he finishes the primaries with the most delegates, but less than an absolute majority. It also suggests that his rise could signal a lasting shift in the party’s balance of power toward the anti-establishment, heavily blue-collar voters who have provided the core of his support.

Trump’s consistent success with those voters has replaced many of the party’s traditional divides—such as religious identification and ideology—with a new fissure centered on class and alienation from institutions. In that sense, Trump this year has been as much a demand-side as a supply-side phenomenon. He is coalescing, and giving voice to, an increasingly important component of the existing Republican coalition—one that earlier blue-collar populists such as Patrick J. Buchanan in 1996 and Rick Santorum in 2012 also tried to mobilize, with much less success.

“It is a part of the coalition that has always been there,” adds Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist. “It’s just that he’s capitalizing on this anti-establishment anger within the party, that’s been directed toward the Democrats and President Obama, now he’s directing it inward. And the key issues he talks about, the nativist appeal that he has, is broadly popular among Republican voters.”

I’m sure these folks always believed that social security should be protected and that trade deals were bad and that taxes should be raised on rich people. But they weren’t the issues they voted on and they still aren’t the issues they’re voting on. It’s those “other” things they like about Trump — that he promises to “beat foreigners the old fashioned way” and deport millions of “illegals” and ban Muslims and let police take the gloves off against the “bad people” who have no respect for “law and order”. That he also promises to make so much money “for America”that we won’t have to cut entitlements is just icing on the cake.

Robert Mackey at the Intercept took a look at Trump’s demagoguery with respect to protesters and had this insight. After all, Trump is an old guy, a product of the 60s.  But he wasn’t a radical.

Mackey writes:

Given Trump’s obvious fondness for the presidency of Richard Nixon, though — the posters evoking “the silent majority” of Americans who support him, the decades of advice from dirty trickster Roger Stone — my own guess is that he might be harking back to a moment in early 1970, when dozens of antiwar protesters in Trump’s own city did indeed require stretchers, after being attacked and beaten by construction workers loyal to Nixon. 

The incident, which became known as “the hard-hat riot,” took place in May 1970, when a student demonstration against the killing of four protesters at Kent State University in Ohio by members of the National Guard was broken up with extreme violence by union members from nearby construction sites.

Bloodlust

Published by digby on March 12, 2016

Bloodlust

by digby

The Trump rally this morning may be the worst one yet. This was one of the uglier moments:

And he repeated this bogus story:

“They were having terrorism problems, just like we do,” Trump said. “And he caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood — you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem. Okay? Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem.”

He embellished it today with a story of burying the bodies with the pigs in a mass grave which was nice.

He added a new line to his stump speech — at least I’ve never heard it before:

“It’s payback time, it’s payback time!”

At the end they did the Trump salute.

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The new nullification by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 12, 2016

The new nullification
by Tom Sullivan


George Cruikshank illustration from “Oliver Twist,” 1911 edition

The M.O. of the extremist Republican Party: find the lines, cross them, dare people to push them back. Courts have. So now the GOP is going after the courts.

The new nullification expands on the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war. Republicans now claim the right to preemptively void any legal decisions they might not like. Rejecting President Obama’s yet-unnamed pick for the U.S. Supreme Court, for example. On Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned Judicial Committee colleagues that they were redrawing the lines and setting a precedent, a new normal that will cut both ways.

Senate Republicans have stonewalled Obama’s other judicial appointments. Republicans have refused to hold confirmation votes on presidential nominees to federal agencies they would like abolished. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee wants states to be able to effectively nullify Supreme Court rulings he doesn’t like. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas proposes amendments to the U.S. Constitution that would allow two-thirds of the states to override a U.S. Supreme Court decision or a federal law or regulation they don’t like. As Iowa’s 2014 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, Joni Ernst told the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition that Congress should not pass any laws “that the states would consider nullifying.” Don’t even think about it.

What’s not the matter with Kansas?

Gov. Sam Brownback’s Kansas is considering a bill to use impeachment to pressure state Supreme Court justices into toeing whatever new lines the GOP-controlled legislature draws:

A bill declaring that Kansas Supreme Court justices can be impeached for meddling too much in the state Legislature’s business cleared its first big hurdle toward passage Thursday.

The Republican-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee approved the bill on a voice vote, sending it to the full chamber for debate. It’s the latest in a series of measures from GOP conservatives in recent years that have put Kansas at the center of a national effort to remake state courts.

The bill supplements a provision of the state constitution that says Supreme Court justices can be impeached and removed from office for treason, bribery or “other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The bill outlines a list of misconduct covered by the latter phrase, including attempting “to usurp the power” of the Legislature or executive branch of state government.

Other new grounds for impeachment in the version passed in committee include “attempting to subvert fundamental laws and introduce arbitrary power” and “exhibiting wanton or reckless judicial conduct.” In the vernacular: Nice robe you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.

Republicans are miffed that the Supreme Court insists that, however intent they are on slashing taxes and budgets in their T-party tantrum, the state’s constitution requires them to fund public education, not starve it like Oliver Twist. Clearly a socialist court:

Four of Kansas’ seven Supreme Court justices were appointed by Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who served from 2003 to 2009, and two by her predecessor, Bill Graves, a moderate Republican. Only one was appointed by Brownback.

Replacing the justices through elections is difficult in Kansas because they don’t run in contested races. Instead, they face a “retention election” every six years, remaining in office unless more than 50 percent of voters vote against them. No justice has ever been voted out.

Conservative groups are expected to mount a major effort to vote out four of the Supreme Court justices on the ballot this fall. But critical lawmakers also hope to make impeachment a tool.

Currently, the state constitution allows impeachment only for treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. No public official has been impeached since 1934.

Charlie Pierce observes:

The experiment in Kansas is nearly complete. Government has been refashioned to work splendidly for the wealthy and connected, and not at all for the people who need it most, who then develop within their hearts and minds contempt for it at the ballot box, and contempt that perpetuates itself with every new atrocity, which has been the plan all along. As we point out often here at the shebeen, the problem with lab rats is that most of them die.

Changing the rules

As a corollary to ignoring the rules, the GOP has decided if it cannot win under existing rules, then more favorable rules must be written. One gets the impression the extremist Republican Party does not really like the idea of democracy if it cannot pre-select winners and losers, however it may oppose that when the topic is business. Requiring identity cards to vote and erecting other barricades to voting comes from the same frustration that they and their ideas are not well-liked. Heaven forfend Republicans should have to moderate their positions to appeal to a saner electorate (although Donald Trump puts a yooge question mark on that).

It bears repeating:

In nonpartisan judicial elections in 2014, North Carolina Democrats also took three out of three contested Supreme Court races and won two out of three contested Appeals Court races. And those, in a sweep election where the GOP should have won it all. Republicans in the North Carolina legislature responded in 2015 by changing the way North Carolina elects judges.

Earlier this month, a three-judge Superior Court panel struck down that new law as unconstitutional under North Carolina law. The state has appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court, naturally.

What North Carolina Republicans legislated after their 2014 judicial losses was a switch to “retention elections,” the same system that has not worked for Republicans in Kansas.

Friday Night soother

Published by digby on March 12, 2016

Friday Night soother

by digby

Who knew a penguin could take the title of man’s best friend?

But that is just what a Brazilian man has found with a little Magellanic South American penguin nicknamed Dindim.

Joao Pereira de Souza a 71-year-old retired bricklayer, found Dindim off the coast of Rio de Janiero covered in oil and starving on a beach. De Souza nursed the penguin back to health. And they formed an inseparable bond.

As the Wall Street Journal reported in October, Dindim disappears into the ocean for months at a time. But for the last four years, the penguin has been coming back to see De Souza, the man who saved his life.

“I love the penguin like it’s my own child and I believe the penguin loves me,” said De Souza in an interview with Globo TV.

It is believed Dindim travels thousands of miles to visit De Souza. Magellanic South American penguin’s are known for migrating thousands of miles each year. According to the WSJ, they migrate between breeding colonies in Patagonia and feeding grounds further north. Despite their reputation as cold water animals, the birds have been known to turn up in the warm waters of Brazil.

De Souza said everyone told him the penguin wouldn’t return after he first left, but he continues to come waddle back to De Souza’s home. He arrives in June and leaves again in February, the Independent reported.

“He becomes more affectionate as he appears even happier to see me,” De Souza said.

Making their peace with Ted

Published by digby on March 12, 2016

Making their peace with Ted

by digby

You can tell they don’t really want to do this. But they have to:

National Review, one of the country’s leading conservative magazines, will endorse Ted Cruz on Friday in a blow to Marco Rubio after its top editors and publisher decided that the Texas senator is the only candidate left who can defeat Donald Trump, POLITICO has learned. 

“Ted’s the only one with a plausible path to stopping Trump,” National Review editor Rich Lowry told POLITICO, “either by getting a majority himself or denying Trump a majority and finishing close behind and getting it to convention.”

I  spotted Lowry making his peace with Cruz sometime back in Salon. 

It looks as though some of the mainstream conservative pundits are starting to make peace with the idea that Cruz may end up as the establishment candidate by default. Rich Lowry made this case in Politico by calling into question the conventional wisdom that Cruz is another Goldwater extremist who will necessarily go down in a massive general election defeat. And instead of finding parallels to his aggressive ambition in the repellant Joseph McCarthy, he compares him instead to another awkward, unlikeable politician who nonetheless got millions of people to vote for him for president in one very close loss, one very close win and one huge landslide: Richard Nixon.

Obviously and most importantly, Cruz is not a paranoiac. He is more ideological than Nixon. And he has none of Nixon’s insecurity, in fact the opposite. Nixon went to tiny Whittier College and resented the Northeastern elite; Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard and could be a member of the Northeastern elite in good standing if he wanted to be.

But Cruz is cut from roughly similar cloth. He wears his ambition on his sleeve and is not highly charismatic or relatable. In high school, he could have been voted most likely to be seen walking on the beach in his dress shoes. If Cruz wins the nomination, it will be on the strength of intelligence and willpower. He will have outworked, outsmarted and outmaneuvered everyone else. 

He has a point. Say what you will about Nixon — and there’s plenty to say — he was a very smart politician. In particular, he overcame the political disability of having an extremely unpleasant personality to win the White House twice.

I hope the Democrats don’t get complacent about this guy. He’s repellent. But he wouldn’t be the first repellent Republican to win.

Trump the uniter

Published by digby on March 11, 2016
Trump the uniter

by digby

Trump said this earlier today:

“Part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long [to kick them out] is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore,” Trump said during a speech at the Peabody Opera House — around 12 miles from Ferguson, Mo., the site of racially charged mass protests in 2014. 

“There used to be consequences. There are none anymore,” Trump said. “These people are so bad for our country. You have no idea folks, you have no idea.”

For the better part of 10 minutes in the middle of Trump’s speech, individuals shouted and interrupted.

“These people are so bad for our country, folks. You have no idea,” Trump continued during a longer break in the action. “They contribute nothing. Nothing. And look at the police, they take their lives in their hands.”

“We don’t even win here, with protesters anymore” he complained. “The protesters end up taking over. And frankly, I mean, have to be honest: From my standpoint it makes it a little more exciting, and it gives me time to think about where I want to go next. It’s beautiful. It’s like intermission. And the guys that are near the event, they see some pretty good stuff.” 

Trump then trained his fire at the media, forecasting how “dishonest” reporters would portray the situation.

“And these people in the media, the most dishonest human beings on Earth. They are the worst. They are the worst. So what they’ll do is they’ll take 10 minutes worth of clips of that and if one policeman accidentally moves a finger and touches this wiseguy, it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.’ And yet the police are being abused for 10 minutes, OK? ” he said.

“Give me a break. Give me a break. We better toughen up, we better smarten up, and we better stop with this political correctness because it’s driving us down the tubes.”

He’s always extolled the police.  But now he seems to be recruiting them. For something.

Raw Story reports:

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a massive crowd of thousands waited in line to hear the former reality television star and real estate mogul speak downtown at the Peabody Opera House. But protesters were also in attendance, as become commonplace at Trump rallies.

Go to the links to see a number of videos showing some very intense confrontations outside the rally.

This shows a bloodied protester being led away by police.

This shows a series of videos which illustrate how ugly these confrontations were. Not all white vs black, but mostly.

Trump is headed to Chicago now:

After departing St. Louis, Trump heads eastward to Chicago later in the evening, where thousands of fans and throngs of protesters have been reported to be ready to greet him. It also happens to be a day after a North Carolina man was charged with assaulting a protester being led out of a Wednesday night Trump rally.

Oh boy.


Nate Silver tweeted this Peter Bergen piece about Trump’s fascism from last December:

Let’s start with the classic 2004 study “The Anatomy of Fascism” by American historian Robert Paxton, who examined the fascist movements of 20th-century Europe and found some commonalities among them. They played on: 

• “A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions.” 

Trump’s ascendancy outside the structures of the traditional Republican Party and his clarion calls about America’s supposedly precipitously declining role in the world capture this trait well. 

• “The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason.” 

Trump’s careless regard for the truth — such as his claims that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks, or that Mexican immigrants are rapists and murders — and the trust he places in his own gut capture this well.

• The belief of one group that it is the victim, justifying any action. 

Many in Trump’s base of white, working-class voters feel threated by immigrants, so Trump’s solution to that, whether with Mexico (build a wall) or the Islamic world (keep them out), speaks to them. 

• “The need for authority by natural leaders (always male) culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny.” 

This seems like quite a good description of Trump’s appeal. 

In Paxton’s checklist of the foundational traits of fascism there is a big one that Trump does not share, which is “the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will when they are devoted to the group’s success.” 

There is no hint that Trump wishes to engage in or to foment violence against the enemies, such as immigrants, he has identified as undermining the American way of life. 

One is therefore left with the conclusion that Trump is a proto-fascist, rather than an actual fascist. In other words, he has many ideas that are fascistic in nature, but he is not proposing violence as a way of implementing those ideas.

Uhm…

Also this, from Perlstein which I posted before. It’s important to understand where the “populism” fits into all this.

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“He was evil and his mouth was filthy”

Published by digby on March 11, 2016

“He was evil and his mouth was filthy”

 by digby

David Gergen was on with CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield this morning talking about Trump and saying that we need to see him more as a three  dimensional figure. He says that people say he’s delightful in person but very, very tough to do business with.  Gergen said he’d had him into one of his classes and said “he mesmerized me” and said it was apparent to him that the public Trump is just “a theatrical persona.” Ok.

 Banfield also knows him and said this:

He was delightful to me personally for years until the one time I asked him a tough question and he turned into a viper. And he was evil and his mouth was filthy. And it was a real telling moment. It was frightening. I mean I truly was frightened and I was taken aback by it. 

Gergen then said, “we need to know the complexity of the man.”

Yes, I think we understand the complexity of him very well. They went on to discuss this morning’s press conference  in which Trump lied again about protesters “taking swings” at people in the audience and defended his supporters’ violence:

We’ve had some violent people as protesters.  They’re not just saying “oh…” These are people that punch, these are violent people. I get the biggest crowds. By far. It’s not even a contest. You know, you people don’t like to report it.  Actually the one good thing about protesters is you have to go into these massive stadiums with 25 and 30 thousand people because the cameras never turn.

Hey Ben, the cameras never ever turn and show the stadium. I always say turn and show the stadium and they don’t.  But when there’s a protester up in the corner it’s great because the cameras all turn.Because it’s a negative as opposed to a positive so they turn.

But we’ve had a couple that were really violent and the particular one when I said to bang him, that was a very vicious  guy who was swinging — was very loud — and then started swinging at the audience. And you know what? It swung back.

And I thought it was very, very appropriate. He was swinging. He was hitting people. And the audience hit back. And that’s what we need a little bit more of.

Now, I’m not talking about just a protestor. This was a guy who should not have been allowed to do what he did. And frankly, if you want to know the truth, the police were very, very restrained.

The police have been amazing.

Banfield played that footage and said they went back to the Las Vegas rally where the protester was allegedly “swinging” and they didn’t see any such thing.

Gergen said Trump needed to stop defending this violence or he would be unqualified to be president.
 
That’s funny.

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Blessedly, the GOP debates are done

Published by digby on March 11, 2016

Blessedly, the GOP debates are done

by digby

I wrote about it for Salon:

Last night, GOP held its 547th presidential primary debate, once again featuring the final four, Trump, Cruz, Rubio and Kasich. It was a debate like no others we’ve seen,  Shocking, in fact. Trump didn’t call anyone a nasty name. Nobody called anyone a liar. There were no fireworks at all. But that wasn’t what was shocking. It was the substance of their allegedly civilized commentary that sent chills down the spine. It turns out that if they aren’t yelling at each other like schoolboys they’re talking about what they would do as president. And it’s terrifying.

In some respects Trump was the least surprising. Yes, he was restrained and even somewhat subdued. But according to pollster Frank Luntz’s focus group  he was just terrific. It seems he can do no wrong. Because his speeches have been covered so relentlessly, however,  for the most part his answers to the moderators questions weren’t anything we haven’t heard before. He is nothing if not predictable.
For instance, he said he’d make really, really, really good trade deals, the best deals. And because he’s a businessman and has taken advantage of all the laws that favor businessmen he was the only one on the stage who knows how to change those laws. One wonders why one of his rivals didn’t point out that two U.S. senators and one sitting governor were on the stage with him and they might know a little something about lawmaking. But everyone was playing nice so they let him preen ludicrously about his non-existent talent for governance.
The others all said they would make trade deals that would be better as well, although they each suggested in their own ways that maybe free trade was something they also thought was a good thing. And there are issues with work visas at Disneyworld that need attention apparently.
Then they talked immigration. Everyone knows what Trump thinks — a big, beautiful wall, deportation, the usual.  John Kasich said that if we didn’t have immigration in this country that he might be running for the president of Croatia and declared that he would easily pass a reform bill in the first 100 days. (You may have heard him mention once or twice that he’s been involved in virtually every political fight since the Civil War and has a very long record of achievement so he’s the guy who can get that done because he’d done it. )
Cruz laid out a long list of things he’s going to do to ensure that immigrants don’t take advantage of good hardworking Americans anymore — end sanctuary cities, build Trump’s wall, triple the border patrol and deny federal money to anyone who doesn’t agree with him. He also pointed out that the only reason Democrats care about immigration is because they “view those illegal immigrants as potential voters.”
Actually, they view Hispanic Americans as constituents and think being xenophobic and racist toward their families and communities is a bad way to serve them. But this trope about “creating voters” is a popular view on the right and his “very-conservative” base (the only ones who like him) is sure to notice.
Rubio told his parents’ heartwarming life story about how they immigrated and worked their way up from the bottom with very little education. And then he explained that now that their kids are doing well it’s time to shut the door because there are no more opportunities left to go around.
They all agreed that Social Security is going bankrupt but they have different ways to deal with it. Rubio believes in the standard GOP orthodoxy of cutting away at it until it is drowned in the bathtub. Kasich wants to means test it. Trump said he would cut all the waste, fraud and abuse in the system (of which there is actually very little) but mainly is going to make this country so rich and so great that we’ll be able to afford anything we want.
Ted  Cruz, meanwhile, wants to put privatize it. Apparently the Wall Street insiders he demonizes for buying politicians in “the Washington Cartel” can be trusted with the entire retirement income of every American. And then he made this bizarre statement:
“Listen, we’ve got lots of challenges in the world. But the answer can’t just be wave a magic wand and say problem go away. You have to understand the problems. You have to have real solutions.It’s like government spending. It is very easy. Hillary Clinton says she’ll cut waste, fraud and abuse. If only we had smarter people in Washington, that would fix the problem. You know what? That is the statement of a liberal who doesn’t understand government is the problem.”
Apparently, he didn’t want to attack Trump, so he attributed Trump’s puerile nonsense to Hillary Clinton. It would be a neat trick if it made any sense at all. He did it more than once and it was just as weird each time.
Foreign policy was where it got scary, though. Trump reiterated his recent comments that “Islam hates us” and babbled something about how they treat the women terribly. Rubio tried to explain that it’s not only incorrect but that we need the help of Muslims to fight terrorism so maybe “ixnay on the atehay” stuff.
Cruz said he’d tear up the Iran deal and proclaimed that he could never be neutral on the subject of Israel, at which point Trump pointed out that his son-in-law was Jewish and that the Jews had no greater friend than him, which is proven by the fact that he was Grand Marshall at the Israeli Day Parade. Kasich said he didn’t think there would ever be peace between the two peoples so we just have to keep giving Israel weapons and back them 100 percent. Forever apparently. Or until all the Palestinians evaporate in a cloud of dust.
And then they all agreed that we need to send in troops to defeat ISIS. Cruz said we have to abandon the rules of engagement and according to John Kasich we need to use “shock and awe” to defeat them.
If any of these people win the election, we are going back in. And if we go back in, they are determined to be as brutal as possible, war crimes be damned.
Trump proved that he knows absolutely nothing about Cuba but insists that he would have made “a better deal” with them. There’s no word on what deal he’s talking about, but apparently he believes that the U.S. should have gotten something material in exchange for a return to normal diplomatic relations. (Maybe he wanted a hotel or two?) He said he would make a “good strong deal” because “right now, everything, every single aspect of this deal is in Cuba’s favor…all we do is keep giving. We give and give and give.”
Rubio is against the rapprochement because he’s running in Florida and that’s just what you do. Ditto Cruz, who said that Hillary Clinton makes bad deals. She wasn’t in government when this done but evidently she’s left some sort of ghostly presence that still guides all policies.
But all of that was nothing compared to mild-mannered John Kasich, who let fly with this assessment of current foreign affairs:
I think the problem with the administration, if you talk to our friends around the world, they say what is America doing? You know, you don’t support us, we can’t figure out where you are.
You won’t arm the freedom fighters in Ukraine, we let the Russians trump up some excuse in the business of Russian-speaking people. You had a red line in Syria. You walked away from it. You refused to fund the Syrian rebels, you undercut Egypt and we ended up with the Muslim brotherhood for awhile.
And then we turn our back on Netanyahu when he comes to Congress to talk about his concerns of the Iranian deal. Look, I know in human nature sometimes there’s a sense that you make better with your enemies than you do with your friends. And you know what happens when you do that? You make a terrible mistake.
You need to support your friends, you need to hold your enemies out here and you need to negotiate tough deals. The fact is, they need to understand who we are. The Chinese understand. They don’t own the South China Sea. They have to stop hacking everything we have in this country or we’ll take out their systems. We will arm the Ukrainians so they have lethal defensive aid.
We will destroy ISIS and Mr. Putin, you better understand, you’re either with us or you’re against us. We’re not rattling a sword. You’re not our enemy but we’re not going to put up with this nonsense any longer.
And a strong America is what the entire world is begging for. Where has America gone is what many of our allies say around the world. When I’m president, they’re going to know exactly where we are because we’re coming back.
In case you forgot, that’s the nice establishment moderate in the race.
They actually asked a question about climate change, and Marco Rubio said he doesn’t think humans contribute and that we can’t pass laws to change the weather anyway. Besides, if there was anything we could do, India and China wouldn’t do it too so why ever bother? It was one of the more depressing exchanges of the night.
Ted Cruz offered up yet another slimy misdirection when he was asked whether foreign countries were right to be alarmed by the tone of this election, and pretended they were alarmed by Clinton and Obama.
Meanwhile, Trump defended his appalling appreciation for authoritarian dictators Putin and Kim Jong Un by acting as if his compliments weren’t value judgments. And then there was this, which was a new one on me:
TAPPER: Mr. Trump, some of your Republican critics have expressed concern about comments you have made praising authoritarian dictators. You have said positive things about Putin as a leader and about China’s massacre of pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square, you’ve said: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it, then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”
How do you respond…
TRUMP: That doesn’t mean I was endorsing that. I was not endorsing it. I said that is a strong, powerful government that put it down with strength. And then they kept down the riot. It was a horrible thing. It doesn’t mean at all I was endorsing it.
There was no riot. And of course he was endorsing it: He said “they almost blew it” until they “put it down with strength.” That’s Trump.
Jake Tapper then raised the question of violence at the Trump rallies, including an incident yesterday in which someone was slugged in the face by a Trump supporter. He read off a number of Trump’s comments egging them on, wishing they’ve be carried out on a stretcher, lines that get huge cheers from his audience. It’s a daily refrain. Trump said he doesn’t condone it but his followers are angry and that the protesters are often “bad dudes” who are allegedly swinging at people.
There were a few questions about the delegate math and Trump said he thought that whomever came to the convention with the most delegates should win. They then sparred a bit about whether or not Trump’s self-declared “flexibility” is a problem. Needless to say he believes that he is such a great deal maker that he will always get everything he wants and the other side will get nothing but everyone will be happy. That’s the “art of the deal.”
Most of the post debate punditry seemed to think this one would change nothing which means the advantage stays with the frontrunner. Cruz was even more unctuous than usual — confidence doesn’t become him. Rubio was the best he’s ever been. (Maybe Trump was right about him, no grace under pressure.) Kasich will make a big speech at the convention. Trump was said to look “presidential” simply because he didn’t discuss his penis. And that, mercifully, was that.

Thank God it’s over …

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