Noxious ideas of Trump, Cruz

American presidential politics are often hugely entertaining. They can at times be equally demoralizing. This year's primary contests are certainly no exception. Speaking of this primary season, The Economist opined that "it has rarely been so ugly, uncertain or strange." What makes it so is the relative success enjoyed by candidates on the far right or far left of their parties -- Donald Trump and Ted Cruz for the Republicans and Bernie Sanders for the Democrats. This seems to belie the old nostrum that the presidency is won from the centre. It also seems to ignore a couple of important lessons of history.

The Democrats should reflect on the fate of Sen. George McGovern in the 1972 presidential campaign. He was soundly defeated by Richard Nixon. The Republicans should learn an even more telling lesson from the experience of Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona in the 1964 election. Goldwater was an extreme fiscal conservative who railed against the liberal policies and programs pursued by the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater was also widely viewed as a trigger-happy Cold Warrior likely to precipitate a military confrontation with the Soviet Union. When Goldwater adopted the slogan "In your heart, you know he's right," the Johnson campaign responded with the devastating riposte "In your guts, you know he's nuts." And, of course, Johnson went on to demolish Goldwater in the election, winning in 44 out of 50 states.

But if Republicans are displaying poor political judgment in supporting Sen. Cruz and the Democrats are doing the same in supporting Sanders, the real elephant in the room is Trump. The billionaire real estate magnate has become the star attraction of this election. With no political experience whatsoever, he hopes to parlay his success as a businessman and television personality into a viable run for the White House. And he appears to be making some headway.

Trump appears to appeal most to white working-class Americans, many of whom feel that they have been short-changed by globalization and by the political and business elites running the country. Trump wallows in pessimism about the current state of affairs. In launching his campaign he declared: "We're dying. We're dying. We need money. "Â¦ Sadly, the American dream is dead." And, of course, Trump promises to change all that without ever explaining exactly how he would do it. This line of attack gives rise to two fairly obvious questions. First, if things are so bad, how is that the United States enjoys the highest rate of economic growth and the lowest rate of unemployment among major western countries? Second, if the system is so totally dysfunctional, how was Trump able to amass an enormous fortune in business? Neither of these questions ever seems to be raised by The Donald's adoring fans.

If much of what Trump has to say can be dismissed as amusing populist nonsense, some of what he has to say is truly detrimental to the interests and image of the United States.

Early on in the campaign, Trump chose to describe Mexican immigrants as thugs and rapists. This was viewed as a gross insult by Mexicans. It can only feed into the latent anti-Americanism that has long been evident in Mexico. But Mexico is an important country for the United States. After Canada and China, it is the United States' third-largest trading partner. It is home to many American industrial interests. The Mexican government's active co-operation is essential to the United States in its efforts to stem the flow of illegal immigrants and illicit drugs. To gratuitously insult Mexico is not only counterproductive, but downright dumb.

Trump also causes a fervour with his promise to bar all Muslims from entering the United States. This promise not only gave rise to questions as to its legality under the constitution of the United States, but also to serious doubts about its consistency with well-established American values. (The practicalities went largely unexplored. Would a President Trump forbid Muslim diplomats to join their embassies in Washington or their missions to the United Nations in New York?) But these concerns were relatively minor compared to the damage done in the Muslim world at large. By implying that all Muslims are potential terrorists, Trump gave offence to 1.5 billion Muslims and to some 50 Muslim countries. Many of those countries are important political and economic partners of the United States, not least in the struggle against Islamist extremism and terrorism. Another serious gaffe on the part of Mr. Trump.

Then there is Trump's campaign of China bashing. He gets rave reviews from his followers by blaming China for all of the United States' economic problems, including particularly the loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector. He accuses China of underhanded economic practices and proposes to impose a 45 per cent tariff on all Chinese imports. Such a measure would constitute a declaration of economic warfare against China and would certainly not be in the best interests of the United States. The Sino-American relationship is so complex and so delicate that it is one best approached with scalpels, not sledgehammers. In his search for popular acclaim, Trump chooses to ignore this reality.

If Trump's attacks are offensive to those he targets, they also tend to cause dismay among close friends of the United States. Thus a committee of the British House of Commons seriously debated a resolution to bar Trump from ever entering the United Kingdom. Although the resolution was not adopted, it was a close thing. And in Canada there are some who take offence to the fact that in his attacks on his rival Cruz, Trump seems to imply that being born in Canada is equivalent to having a dreaded disease.

What is alarming in all of this is that, according to the polls, some 35 per cent of Republican voters do not see through Mr. Trump's flim-flam. On the contrary, they applaud him loudly when he puts forward the absurd idea of building a tall wall along the full length of the border between the United States and Mexico. And they applaud him even more loudly when he suggests ever more absurdly that he would have the Mexican government pay for the construction of the wall. It is enough to make sane men and women weep.

The only other candidate who comes anywhere close to Trump in recklessness is Cruz, the darling of the evangelical Christian wing of the Republican party. He proposes that the United States should launch a campaign of "carpet bombing" against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Now aerial bombing is at the best of times a fairly blunt instrument, frequently resulting in what the military call "collateral damage," or in layman's terms civilian casualties. Carpet bombing would ensure that numerous civilians were killed or wounded, and civilian infrastructures destroyed. To propose it is the height of irresponsibility.

The historical record and the common sense of the majority of the American people suggests that candidates like Trump and Cruz will go down to defeat, but not before having injected some thoroughly noxious ideas into the campaign.

Louis A. Delvoie is Fellow in the Centre for International and Defence Policy at Queen's University.

This is the average argument advanced here ...

Trump (or Cruz) believes X.

I do not believe X, nor does any other tenured liberal college professor.

Therefore X cannot be true.

Furthermore, therefore X is dismaying and disgusting.

-————————— (cut here) ————————

okay, now let’s review the logic of this:

Trump or Cruz may actually not believe X.

X is almost sure to be some idiotic fallacy such as this, “Mexicans cannot be con-men or rapists because I say they are not.”

X can damn well be true and often is, whether it makes a liberal happy or not. Most obvious example, well if in the northeast just take a walk around the block tonight.

Even if everything else held together, that does not make a belief in X dismaying or disgusting. It could just be common sense. Perhaps that is what dismays most liberals. Their usefulness in our world diminishes to almost nothing if we insist on common sense.

after 8 years of the Kenyan, the Brits are worried about Trump and Cruz.

With all the trouble we face from ill-educated nominal Americans - say nothing of outright scofflaw invaders - what we see in Britain may be worse. Here this writer wrings his hands about whether offense might be taken by Mexican who he admits do not like us - but there is no possibility of his taking offense when an American politician dismisses Churchill, patronizes the head of the British state, and “leads from behind” when actual international leadership is needed if he is not outright sabotaging American international prestige.
It is too much, apparently, to expect The Economist to comprehend that feckless “leadership” has delegitimated the “establishment” of what has traditionally been the more stabilizing party here. While the incumbent POTUS behaves more like “Nixon” than Richard Nixon himself actually in fact did.
The Economist betrays an utter lack of understanding of what was until recently the American constitutional system. There are things which black letter constitutional law says must not be tolerated - and the Democrat party (and its tens of millions of loyal voters!) simply blows them off. Calling them - with the full backing of so-called “objective” journalism - “political” charges. The disgrace of all is that they do so while overloading the sense with their venal behavior, making the body politic susceptible to the belief - the big lie - that where there is that much smoke, there cannot possibly be fire.
“Surely,” The Economist will reply, “you exaggerate greatly.” Ah, if only. The Democrat establishment is firmly behind a person who:

boasted that she was co-president during the period 1993-2001. The letter of the Constitution does not prevent her from being selected president on account of the 22nd Amendment - but the spirit of that amendment certainly would be evaded were she to be elected. A Brit who is dedicated to an unwritten constitution should certainly understand why that would arouse a certain sensitivity. But it is known that literally hundreds and hundreds of counts of a felony - illegally accessing sensitive private information without legitimate cause - were perpetrated in the basement of the White House itself. On Mr. - and Mrs. - Clinton’s watch. No one was held to account criminally for that production-line abuse of Americans’s rights. It is no stretch at all to assume the worst of anyone in the White House while that was being done. Least of all Mrs. Clinton, who fairly oozes scandal from her Arkansas days right up to the very present.

Speaking of misuse of information which is legally required to be closely guarded, Mrs. Clinton has, by all reports, utterly disregarded all safeguards on vulnerable transmission of highly sensitive information via her - or is it actually her husbands’s - personal server. At a minimum, she used this insecure system to evade other legal transparency requirements. It seems certain that - very much like the “FBI Filegate” case I alluded to above, only worse if possible - highly sensitive information was made available to eyes to whom, legally, it was on no account to be exposed. By law, this disqualifies Mrs. Clinton from being hired for any U.S. government position. Let alone the office which she now seeks. And in her book, Hard Choices, Mrs. Clinton is at pains to make clear that when it comes to security measures, she is no babe in the woods - no sir, not her!!

The Constitution prohibits U.S. government employees from accepting payments or gifts of any sort; foreign dignitaries who give the US president gifts must understand that he (as has to date always been the case) accepts them on behalf of the US government and must buy them from that government if he wishes to keep them. But Secretary of State Clinton is far too important to be limited in that way; foreign government money has been laundered into her control by fabulous honoraria for speeches paid to her husband, and via donations to the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. Note, in the latter case, that it does not matter whether the Foundation actually (contrary to all cynical expectation) spent all its money in legitimately charitable, disinterested ways. Even if that were so, Mrs. Clinton would gain from the constructive results, thanks to the largess of foreign governments. Sheer effrontery.

As Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton went home - abandoned the helm - at a time when she did not know how many people under her authority had died, or would die that night. Four, including a US ambassador, in fact died - but it could have been much worse, for all she did to succor them. But even that does not plumb the depths of the depravity involved in the incident, in that incident; Mrs. Clinton conspired with Mr. Obama to lie the the public, blaming an internet video which was utterly unrelated, and leading to the president damning the US Constitution with faint praise in a speech before the United Nations. BTW, as regards the incumbent president’s deference to a particular religion in preference to all others, by executive decree the NASA agency was tasked to flatter muslims. Which, put baldly, is a direct violation of any conception of government religious neutrality stipulated in the Constitution. Its “virtue” being that it disadvantages the religions traditionally respected in the country.
This post is already overlong, and it is yet very far from exhausting its subject.

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