Excel Scoresheet: Who Should Republicans Nominate for President?

...We know [Trump's] a BS'er. The question is whether the BS'ing is a conscious act or an unconscious one. I'm pretty sure it's conscious, which means he doesn't believe his own BS, rather, he wields it.

I think your hunch is correct. The guy is the definition of pride in workmanship. For 40 years he's been delivering for customers and has built a $10 billion empire of trust.

And he sure is bold, especially in the last week taking on the Bush Iraq legacy and even the Pope! LOL.

Today we'll find out how good or bad a gambit these tactics were.

I think he's honestly trying to unite the country -- conservatives, moderates, and working class blue collar. So it will be interesting to find out exactly how many Democrats in South Carolina jumped over to vote for Trump. It they do, that will be very telling.

When you come right down to it, none of the candidates is a 100% bet. So it's a crapshoot, but I like the better odds of winning that Trump's table gives me.

"The guy is the definition of pride in workmanship."

That's a really really important thing to point out ... because it has zero, but should have a, place in political debates: What have you ever produced, that people can use? Were you able to sell it ... i.e. convince freely acting people that your product's purpose was not to separate a fool from his money?

And if you've never worked a job where you actually make something, or contribute to making something ... understand how hard it is to do that and in addition to building quality ... actually making money convincing people not obligated to buy your product to do so ... then you probably have a hard time finding anything about Trump impressive. If you can't understand that part of his career and life, then I guess I can't blame someone for never having produced a product that was successful on the free market.

In addition to a mandatory year of military, we should have a mandatory year of running a lemonade stand - or any widget stand.

The political discussion is entirely 100% void of 'have you ever produced anything other than something that authorizes the government to go into someone else's home with gun and initiate the use of force if they don't comply with your 'product.'

...In addition to a mandatory year of military, we should have a mandatory year of running a lemonade stand - or any widget stand.

Yes, excellent. If you look at where we are going with the economy, we really need entrepreneurs. So yeah, having kids run a lemonade stand is not such a bad idea at all!

Entrepreneurs are crucial because at some point a lot of the computer software is going to be written in places like China and India where they pay workers one tenth what they do in America. You can make trade deal all you want, but in the run, you can't beat those kinds of numbers.

So there's no choice but to create jobs within the country by Americans. Big business is not going to do that. We need people out there creating services and products that don't now exist.

And guess who's one of the leading authors writing books to help entrepreneurs? Trump.

Preaching to the choir. The things that would set this country on a good path that would benefit everyone including the poor and hopeless (as much as is humanly possible) are not exactly complex, once you accept that no matter how much freedom and opportunity, mankind will continue to suffer to some extent. Some will be lazy, some will be criminals, some will just be unlucky.

But so long as we look at someone else's bad luck as a moral claim upon another's life, a claim that can be enforced at gunpoint without his consent so long as a majority (mob) votes in favor of it, we will continue to have 100 times the war, hatred, poverty and misery that is simply an un-eliminatable part of the imperfections of mankind acting in groups even at his best.

I'm enjoying our dialogue, tiny owl, because we're hitting at the root cause of the problems our nation faces today.

Surprise. Maybe Free Republic is more than just another Trumpkin vs. Cruzbot donnybrook :- ) Hope others will get involved here.

Yes, you hit the key issue:

No matter how much freedom and opportunity, mankind will continue to suffer....

Maybe 40% of the voters of this country believe they are "victims" and that the rest of society owes them something. And so they make that bogus moral claim for retribution you talked about.

Clearly we have arrived at Ben Franklin's tipping point: the moment Ben predicted when Americans would become so corrupt that they would need despotic government (my tagline).

Now I'm going to say something controversial: a bit of temporary despotism from our next President may actually be required to save the nation.

When we studied American history in high school, we were taught that the only acceptable form of government is a pure democracy or representative republic.

But if you look at successful businesses, they are often run by tyrants. A guy like Steve Jobs rubbed lots of people in the Apple organization the wrong way. He was a despot who bent Apple to his will. And yet he was extraordinarily successful.

In government, there's the FDR example. FDR ruled the U.S. with an iron fist during WWII. For instance, he interned Japanese Americans in camps for the duration of the war. Looking back through today's politically correct lens, FDR is considered evil for that. Yet, the move may have protected Japanese Americans from violence against them.

There's an interesting flipside too: the young men confined to internment camps complained to the point where FDR was forced to form the 442nd Infantry Regiment.

The 442nd was a unit composed almost entirely of American soldiers of Japanese ancestry. Fighting primarily in Europe, the 442nd Regiment was the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of American warfare. The 14,000 men served at one point or another in 442nd Regiment earned 9,486 Purple Hearts, eight Presidential Unit Citations, and twenty-one were awarded Medals of Honor. The unit's motto was "Go for Broke".

So here was a bunch of guys whose rights as Americans were violated, but instead of squawking, they set out to prove their honor as Americans.

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