Posted on 03/05/2016 5:50:00 PM PST by Kaslin
The New York Times on Friday and Saturday let its readers know that the Republicans were getting what they deserved for pandering to right-wing extremism and xenophobia, while Hillary Clinton had successfully gained the sensible center. Friday’s lead editorial, “The G.O.P.’s Monster in the Mirror,” began with a little implied Trumpian vulgarity, then smeared the two Republican senators in the presidential race as extremist. Paul Krugman doubled down, calling the field racist, while Ted Cruz was heckled and Hillary Clinton hailed on Saturday's front page.
Holy Mitt, what a meltdown.
Add this one to Donald Trump’s lengthening list of firsts: He’s forced a Republican Party reckoning overdue for years, all in a few days. It took the Trump-dominated Super Tuesday contests to awaken Republican leaders to the fact that the darkest elements of the party’s base, which many of them have embraced or exploited, are now threatening their party.
Last week, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, elected to the Senate partly on their appeal to extremists, seemed to realize that they weren’t attractive enough to win Mr. Trump’s crowd.
That same day, columnist Paul Krugman’s "Clash of Republican Con Artists” also carried the idea that all the Republicans are as scary and racist as Trump. The text box: “Trump Isn’t the Only Fraud Running.”
So Republicans are going to nominate a candidate who talks complete nonsense on domestic policy; who believes that foreign policy can be conducted via bullying and belligerence; who cynically exploits racial and ethnic hatred for political gain.
But that was always going to happen, however the primary season turned out. The only news is that the candidate in question is probably going to be Donald Trump. Establishment Republicans denounce Mr. Trump as a fraud, which he is. But is he more fraudulent than the establishment trying to stop him? Not really.
Actually, when you look at the people making those denunciations, you have to wonder: Can they really be that lacking in self-awareness?
Mr. Ryan also declares that the “party of Lincoln” must “reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry.” Has he ever heard of Nixon’s “Southern strategy”; of Ronald Reagan’s invocations of welfare queens and “strapping young bucks” using food stamps; of Willie Horton?
Put it this way: There’s a reason whites in the Deep South vote something like 90 percent Republican, and it’s not their philosophical attachment to libertarian principles.
....
....the Trump phenomenon threatens the con the G.O.P. establishment has been playing on its own base. I’m talking about the bait and switch in which white voters are induced to hate big government by dog whistles about Those People, but actual policies are all about rewarding the donor class.
What Donald Trump has done is tell the base that it doesn’t have to accept the whole package. He promises to make America white again -- surely everyone knows that’s the real slogan, right? -- while simultaneously promising to protect Social Security and Medicare, and hinting at (though not actually proposing) higher taxes on the rich. Outraged establishment Republicans splutter that he’s not a real conservative, but neither, it turns out, are many of their own voters.
Just to be clear, I find the prospect of a Trump administration terrifying, and so should you. But you should also be terrified by the prospect of a President Rubio, sitting in the White House with his circle of warmongers, or a President Cruz, whom one suspects would love to bring back the Spanish Inquisition.
Another entry in the media’s “even Republicans hate Ted Cruz” file, Jonathan Mahler filed from Austin for Saturday’s front page, “Cruz Adopted Activist Vision As State Lawyer.”
From its start in 1999, the office of the solicitor general of Texas was run by a plain-spoken Mormon, a by-the-books lawyer known for mentoring young attorneys and defending the state, whatever the political consequences.
The young lawyers loved him. The state’s legal community hailed him as a man of dignity and integrity. And the office seldom showed up in the headlines.
But everything changed in January 2003, when Ted Cruz took over.
(Cue shudder-inducing music)
Within months of his appointment to the job, Mr. Cruz, then 31, set about transforming this under-the-radar, apolitical office into an aggressively ideological, attention-grabbing one. From a nondescript government building in the shadow of the Capitol, he inserted himself into scores of politically charged cases around the country, bombarding the United States Supreme Court with amicus briefs on hot-button issues like abortion and gun control.
His focus on gaining attention clashed with the sensibilities of many of the lawyers who worked for him and were accustomed to a more scrupulous and less publicity-minded approach. Before the end of his first year, half of the eight attorneys working in the office had left, raising concern inside the attorney general’s office about whether Mr. Cruz was the right choice for the job.
....
The focus on Supreme Court cases that did not directly involve Texas dismayed some of the lawyers on the staff, who felt the office was losing its legal and ethical rigor in favor of politics and seeking headlines.
One incident that a couple of Mr. Cruz’s lawyers found especially troubling arose during Medellín v. Texas, which he has described as the biggest case of his tenure. In a sense, it was a relatively minor issue -- one including a cartoon character -- but it was memorable to those who worked in the office.
The case involved two teenage girls in Houston who were raped and murdered. One of the victims was wearing a watch featuring Goofy, the Disney character. According to two lawyers who worked in the office at the time, Mr. Cruz wanted to describe it as a Mickey Mouse watch in his brief to the Supreme Court because he thought it would make for a more powerful image for the justices. The two lawyers requested anonymity because they remain active in the Texas legal community, where Mr. Cruz has great influence.
“People were really shocked,” said one of the lawyers. “He wanted to misrepresent the record -- to lie -- for rhetorical or dramatic effect.”
The office’s first brief before the Supreme Court, filed in 2005, describes the grisly scene of José Medellín and his fellow gang members dividing up the money and jewelry taken from the two dead girls: “Medellín’s brother kept one of the girls’ Mickey Mouse watch.”
When the case returned to the court two years later, Mr. Cruz apparently had a change of heart. The reference in his brief was now to a “Disney-brand Goofy watch.”
Mr. Cruz said through his spokeswoman that he had no recollection of the episode.
If the worse thing Cruz’s enemies can come up with is being overzealous in prosecuting the killers of two teenage girls...
Not even the Arts pages escaped anti-conservative politics, as Louis Bayard on Friday described Mr. Carson, the butler on Downton Abbey, as “further to the right than Ted Cruz.”
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, was blessed with a story on Saturday’s front page by Amy Chozick, “Clinton Offers Economic Plan Focused on Jobs,” which perfectly positioned Hillary as the happy medium between the angry populists on her right (Trump) and left (Sanders).
In an election year defined by angry populism, Hillary Clinton made an optimistic economic pitch on Friday, presenting a wide-ranging plan for job growth that would provide incentives for corporations that invest in employees and strip tax benefits from companies that move jobs overseas....But unlike Mr. Sanders, her Democratic rival, or Mr. Trump, Mrs. Clinton did not espouse a red-hot indictment of the private sector or offer a dire assessment of the state’s future. She provided a stark contrast with their messaging, which came on a day in which the government said job growth accelerated in February while wages had stagnated.”
It’s the only play they have left. They’re pulling out all the stops...racist, Nazi, Fascist, etc, etc, etc.
And it’s only going to get worse.
Understatement of the year
Of course, can you blame them? It’s not like they have eight years of success to point to
I didn’t read the article, but I did read (or notice) the “monster in the mirror” thingy.
I had a dream where I looked in the mirror and I saw that I had the head of a timber wolf. Actually, this “vision” has come up several times.
I have come to realize, that I like Trump because I am sort of a Timber Wolf.
But, that doesn’t mean I am a monster.
Just means, I am a Steppenwolf. Hey there Little Red Ridin’ Hood. You sure are lookin’ good. You’re everything, a big, bad wolf could want.
“Despite the fact that we do not like each others’ candidates at all for the length of the primary season”
Actually, Trump has always been my number two guy.
I have given his supporters grief mainly for attacking Cruz, not for supporting Trump.
My reason for preferring Cruz is I think he is more predictably conservative. There are a few policy issues I have disagreed with him on, such as some of his foreign policies. But for me they are minor differences.
Trump, I am afraid, is not so predictably conservative. I don’t think he is ideologically conservative. I don’t think he spent a lot of time studying the philosophy of the founders and arrived at conservatism as a core, non-negotiable belief. But he is running as a conservative and may be a man of his word.
The best thing about him is his ability to stand up to a relentless media onslaught. The MSM thought they could easily make mince meat of him early on and then pick off the rest of the more conservative candidates one by one. He stopped them in their tracks. Awesome. We owe him a debt of gratitude for that.
Without Trump in the race, I think Cruz might have easily won the nomination, OR he could have just as easily been destroyed by the MSM and GOPe. Probably the latter.
So, while I prefer Cruz as president, a Trump-Cruz team might be the best possible outcome for me.
“THIS.
ALL OF THE THIS.
HEAR FREAKING HEAR.”
Thanks.
"When it is cold at home, or he has a couple of weeks with nothing to do but write his Times column, or when something unexpectedly stressful happens...Princeton economist Paul Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, go to St. Croix. Here it is warm, and the days are longer, and the phone doesn’t ring much.First thing when he wakes up, he checks out a few Web sites, and if he’s not writing his column that day he and Wells will go for a walk on the beach, or they will stroll into Frederiksted and have breakfast at Polly’s, a little coffee shop that serves iced lattes and pretty good egg burritos. If he is writing his column, he will start it on the morning of the day it’s due, and, if the spirit is with him, he will be done soon after lunch. When he has a draft, he gives it to Wells to edit."
The party with two Hispanics in their top 3 contenders is “racist”, while the party running two rich old white people isn’t?
That’s right; they’ve moved the goalposts so a “moderate” from 30 years ago is now a right-wing zealot. A friend that visited Italy years ago described it as even worse over there; BJ Clinton would have been vilified as an extreme conservative.
Imagine that? Hopeless...
Trump has been going through the wringer and he’s still standing. They haven’t even started trying to take Ted down yet. Right now Ted is a useful tool to them. He’s not ad smart as he thinks he is.
to worship barack obama is the real racism
kissing black ass every minute of every day is true racism
many in the various black subcultures are going to make that fact known in November when the Democrats are deserted
Hillary Clinton has a problem. She has a race problem.
She can’t win an election where a large percentage of the voters are white Democrats. Bernie won Nebraska and Kansas yesterday, Hillary won Louisiana.
And, she’s not Barack Obama. So, to turn out enough black voters to overcome her white problem, she has to resort to the worst kind of race-baiting. After all, she ain’t no ways taaared.
So, assuming there really isn’t a secret Grand Jury about to drop the hammer on her, and assuming she’s the Democrat nominee, she’s going to have to run an overtly anti-white campaign.
But, Obama’s Ferguson/BLM intifada has taken it’s toll. How to lash enough whites with the #guiltywhitelies one more time?
Trump=KKK, that’s how. OK, so Cruz is up a little? OK, NYT, how about “all of them=KKK”?
Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Oh noessss, not a racist?
Race baiting is what demonrats do.
I listed the emotionally charged words used in Clay Waters’ piece and they are found here:
Bullying, belligerence, fraud, exploits racial and ethnic hatred for political gain, Trumpian vulgarity, racist, extremist, scary, complete nonsense on domestic policy, fraudulent, lacking in self-awareness, bigotry, He promises to make America white again, and terrifying.
I find all these words with only flimsy evidence to support them. Just because Mr. Waters says they are so, does not mean they are so. He is fraudulent, a bigot, exploits racial and ethnic hatred for political gain, and fabricates fault for political gain. There is nothing in all the words Mr. Waters wrote that are in anywhere factual. And he gives no factual evidence.
This is great. If the traitors at the NYT are doing this already, we have this election in the bag.
L
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