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... one of the main reasons Carson stays in the race is to get back at Cruz. His Christian conservative support would gravitate to Cruz as much or more as to anyone else.

Very interesting insight, dear Brother xzins. It certainly makes sense.

Methinks Ted is toast. So is Rubio for that matter. Super Tuesday should tell the tale.... I've already voted, in Massachusetts. I'm recovering from a hip injury, so requested an absentee ballot, which I've already voted and returned. March 1st will be a late night for me!

There was an amazingly enlightening essay in today's edition of The New York Post, by Peggy Noonan. Now Peggy is no spear carrier for The Donald, to be sure. But I daresay she sees the "big picture" of this presidential election better than anyone else I've read thus far.

Here's an excerpt:

...I got to thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection....

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.
The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful -- those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time....
They are figures in government, politics, and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, their kids go to good schools, they've got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them -- in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union -- literally have their own security details.
Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They're insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.
One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and western Europe is immigration. It is THE issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for the distance between governments and their citizens.
It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump....
In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That's more or less how America used to be. Now it seems the attitude of the top half is: You're on your own. Get with the program, little racist.
Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must remoralize.
I don't know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.

Man, can that girl write!!!

Meanwhile, we have a kind of bidding war going on between would-be presidential candidates, regarding who has the best programs and policy prescriptions. As if we Americans are buying a new car, and so are comparing the features of various models to find the one we think "best."

To me, in this political year, that sort of thing is entirely beside the point.

I think Peggy Noonan is calling things just right. I certainly agree with her analysis. I care ever so much more about Joe Sixpack, who clings to his guns and his Bible, than I do the arrogant, elite ideologues and mover-and-shaker politicians and pundit class who are irresponsibly ruining our country.

And so does Donald Trump.

JMHO, FWIW

Thanks ever so much, dear brother in Christ, for your insights about that "meeting in the broom closet."