2016 Republican Presidential Clown Car Begins!

And now a conservative writer pens:

The lowest moment of last night — maybe the lowest of the election and in the history of the GOP — came before the debate, when Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus pledged that the RNC “is going to support the nominee, whoever that is, 100 percent.”

The RNC now stands for no principle and upholds no standard of conduct. It exists merely to win.

www.washingtonpost.com: Let’s scrap the GOP and start over​

 

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Unfortunately, the RNC has long been unprincipled. It's only principal has been to win and reward its financial sponsors at all costs. It's now stuck in a dilemma of its own making.

 

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Rubio withdraws from the race after losing his home state, and a contested convention becomes a very real possibility.

 

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well yes but Carson also stated that if he is bad we only have to deal with him for 4 years ( which bush the second showed us is enough to seriously fuck up a country). seriously the most messed up endorsement i've ever seen it is almost the perfect representation of everything wrong with the republican party. i think flat out mentioned the fact the reason he endorsed trump is because he was offered a job in his admin.

http://crooksandliars.com/2016/03/ben-carson-even-if-trump-bad-president

 

On the Republican side there are two viable candidates, Trump and Cruz. Both are very bad choices. But it appears the Cruz has now become the Republican establishment candidate because they feel Cruz is more likely to play ball with them. That's pretty damn desperate! Cruz's history is that he doesn't play ball with anyone. This is the guy who damn near put the US into a state of default! If anything, people, including the Republican establishment, should know Cruz is a very dangerous man and shouldn't be trusted with the fate of the nation.

Here is another thing, I've always found it odd that Republican leaders overnight always use the same words verbatim when referring to various issues. The "contested convention" is now the "open convention". It's funny. It's very apparent someone behind the scenes is telling Republican leaders what to say and they say it. It is funny in a sad sort of way.

 

Today, Romney announced his endorsement of Canadian Ted, which is kind of odd given both Canadian Ted and Trump have been anathemas to Republican establishment types like Romney. So one has to ask why. Why would a Republican establishment figure like Romney endorse someone like Cruz, the guy who has repeatedly led efforts to cause a US debt default?

The answer really isn't that difficult, it comes down to party loyalty and control. Romney and his Republican establishment fellows value party over country. While Canadian Ted would destroy the US economy with a debt default, he wouldn't destroy the Republican Party. Trump would, Trump would forever change the nature of the Republican Party. Trump would change the Republican brand. That's why establishment Republicans like Romney are so opposed to Trump. It's party over country, and it's despicable.

If I were to speculate a bit, I think the Republican establishment folks know Cruz would lose the general election. They are betting on it. So if they nominate him, Canadian Ted would run and fail and then go away. In essence they are betting Hillary will win the general election. But in exchange, the Republican establishment will retain control of the Republican Party. If Trump runs, if Trump becomes the Republican nominee, the Republican establishment loses no matter what happens in the general election. That's why Republican establishment types are meeting in secret and plotting Trump's demise. That's why Romney has endorsed Canadian Ted.

 

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This is the interesting part to watch this year; I'll have to find the article because I passed at the time owing to Rubio not having that many voters, but the proposition was that if Rubio didn't make it, his neoconservative hawk base would migrate to Clinton. Trump and Cruz might talk tough, but when even Democratic supporters are supposed to tremble at the mere thought of Clinton's talons, it's a safe bet that many neocon hawk voters who aren't otherwise entangled with the religious right will, indeed migrate. If Bill Clinton was the Best Republican President before Barack Obama, why not see if Hillary can bring that title home to the family again?

If this is, by a Clinton election, possibly the last of the old centrist presidencies, I wonder what the new center is actually going to look like.

In another context, I wouldn't use this one as a joke: Imagine that the new center manages to find a way to once again tell women to fuck off, and this time their excuse is ... Hillary Clinton. You know, because she's all we've ever heard and a bag of cowchips, too.

Okay, so now that we've chuckled at the idea, what of its device? In heated debates, even pretty regular people are starting to get down to, "Okay, well, I was going to explain it to you, but I don't like your tone, so, no". Our society has been getting a bit more superficially vindictive, lately, and that's kind of what people are hoping to exploit when talking about why Trump is attractive without admitting what's at the core of it. Because we could not achieve such petty vindictiveness without having twisted ourselves into painful knots in order to coddle the bigotries of our American heritage. How much of the GOP appeal relies on supremacism? How much more is that than, say, before the Dubya years?

(I know that's reaching back a bit, but it really is unfortunate we encountered this manner of war during the Stupid Period following the successful presidency of a Rhodes scholar.)

Still, though, the bigot wing was the quiet scandal in Republican circles; the Party crafted policies to pitch to Americans that helped distract from these aspects. But at the same time, conservatives widely used some of these tactics. It's one thing to point out that any social justice argument, no matter how correct it might be, will always lose at the ballot box against, "They're comin' for your Bible! They're comin' for your children!" But we also dug ourselves a hole of stagnant wages, regressive tax burdens, constricted class mobility, and even a more conformist than normal education system that eventually proved devastatingly inadequate even when it succeeded, on behalf of an idiocratic cry of, "They're comin' for your wallet!"

No, really. Consider that union representation is way down. Also that conservative politicians can from time to time be heard complaining about lavish, even opulent public compensation packages. (Opulent goes to police departments sometimes, and it's not conservatives who call it out.) The thing is that these compensation packages have followed the economy. They're not lavish, they are closer to correct compared to the economy. How does this happen? Collective bargaining. Conservatives are complaining about unions protecting their workers against wage stagnation.

We did all this to ourselves.

But we're going to blame the unions, aren't we? You know, societally.

Right now the political center is under siege; and, you know, to some degree well it should be. Centrism brings us torture and crime and bigotry. It brings us war and pollution. It brings us broken hopes because, hey, the first priority of centrism is always to compromise, and the first effect thereof is that we give away the prize.

Another way of looking at GOP bigotry: They are the Party of Figuring Out Whom to Exclude from the American Dream. I mean, centrism brings us a debate about oral contraception ... in the twenty-first century. I mean, even when it comes to health care, part of the compromise was that we needed to leave someone out. When it came to torture, we needed to find someone to leave out.

And that is, historically, the fundamental conservative mission. Do you know why we have Amendment XIX? Because we were determined to leave somebody out of the Equal Protection Clause. And we have. We've inched around it the whole time, creating disparate valences of test in order to hold this one group out and treat differently. It is the essence of our need to deliberately exclude someone.

Ask Governor Winthrop. It's our American heritage.

So what's going to happen? We've just broken ourselves with all this, and now the fairly unruly masses have finally gotten wind of how badly shit is fucked up. Okay, as dramatic or comedic as that line sounds, it's not exactly true, is it? Yet for all these years, it seems like the fucked up shit this crew is always worried about isn't actually what's wrong. But, you know, reality is, to a necessary degree, in the eye of the beholder. So if the guy who voted for union busting and no taxes is suddenly upset about wages and the deficit, obviously it's the fault of women and blacks and public schoolteachers; that it makes no sense makes no difference, as this is his reality.

And look at what is devouring the center.

So what do we get? A new center by the midterm? By the next presidential?

Meet the new center, same as the old center?

Or ... you know, what can Americans realistically come up with that could possibly be worse than what we've accomplished so far, and are we about to see it?

Because we can blame the parties all we want, but we voted for it the whole time. Sure, not me, because I voted for this when that other won; whatever. I live in a society where the center is a constant compromise with exclusion, and the things we're expected to take seriously in order to maintain that illusion are well past the insanity threshold. Coming up? Will the center entertain legislating ontology in order to have another go at women? Will center continue to wield "The Ferguson Effect" against blacks even though the thing doesn't actually exist? Will the center ever resolve its feelings about torture? Will the center ever stop lamenting the bad tax schemes it invents, or double down? Will the center eventually acknowledge that maybe equal protection does require supremacy under law?

Because this is all on the table now. It's stuff liberals have been fending off for years. It's becoming the mainstream of the GOP. And, you know, hey, this is a society that believes "both sides do it" is an axiomatic truth. You've been around long enough to watch it happen. Will the press point out the obvious? That something is torture? Or that it is supremacist? At what point will that become too activist, and not the job of the press? Will the center demonstrate critical thinking skills, so long bemoaned as lost unto the masses? How long before the polite, reasonable thing to do is compromise with the absolutist exclusionary argument? You've seen it before.

Torture?

Birth control?

Really?

After the 1992 election, the Republican Part of Oregon was in disarray. Faced with a potential extremist takeover by the rising Oregon Citizens' Alliance and their friends, Party officials did the only thing they could do.

They dissolved the Party.

And then they rebuilt, but the extremists won out eventually, so they're rebuilding again.

I wonder if the same thing is even possible on a national scale. There will be riots when Hillary Clinton is elected regardless of who the Republican nominee is.

And if you take out all the religious and other tinfoil infecting the Republican Party, and just focus on "defense" and "money", Hillary Clinton is the best shot Republicans have at the presidency.

Clearly, liberals know this, too. I just wonder if the Sanders movement even has sufficient base to properly oppose the right-wing tantrum pitched by hardliners once they realize that the RNC is just fine with President Clinton.

Right now it looks like she's going to win the nomination; we'll see if Bernie can muster the electoral force to take the two-thirds to three-quarters of the remaining primary and caucus votes he needs to accrue enough unpledged delegates; we'll see how hard he's willing to fight at the convention. I get this sick feeling, sometimes, that we're putting the Democratic Party through this right now because Republicans are holding their own tent revolution. It seems clear that, if elected, Hillary Clinton will be the last of this sort of centrist. Well, until eight years later when three Beltway elections have reiterated that voters on the ground want some manner of familiar centrism. Or is that how it's going to go? But something is about to happen. The GOP necessarily must start excising this base bloc, and why would anyone in the hardliners' position go quietly?

At this point, Hillary Clinton is the RNC's best hope.

Help them, HRC, you're their only hope.

The American people did this to themselves. The question is whether or not we're going to learn anything from this.

Personally, I'm more than simply sanguine with the prospect of her presidency. Besides, she would be a symbol, a marker; we have to break leftward, after, anyway. Also, it's just that time. The question for my bloc is, "One more go, or pitch it now and wait another twenty years?"

But the RNC? I don't envy them.

Still, though, they did this to themselves.

And We, the People, have done this to ourselves.

 

It's very apparent the Republican establishment is willing to sacrifice this election in order to retain control of the party. They have even gone so far as to suggest forming a 3rd party if they cannot defeat Trump. Ironically, in making that admission, in attempting to defeat Trump, they validate and strengthen Trump's support.

 

And this is where I want to have a drink with William of Ockham and ask him to revisit a principle.

What if I told you this was actually the GOP's plan?

No, I don't actually believe that, owing to Ockham; it's far too complex and stupid a plan.

But do you remember Turzai in Pennsylvania, a cycle ago, crowing that the new voter ID in Pennsylvania would deliver the state to Mitt Romney?

Or in Mississippi, when they got so excited about their new anti-abortion law that the Lieutenant Governor came right out and said they were going to end abortion in the state?

Or Missouri, when Todd Akin came right out and actually recited the Willke lie about rape and pregnancy?

In each case, the mistake in Republican political terms was coming right out and saying it.

But what could Republicans possibly be after with some manner of conspiracy by which Trump is somehow the centerpiece? Again, Ockham prevails; it's simply too crazy.

However, it seems almost inevitable in these kitchen-sink days of Republican rhetoric, that at some point a prominent Republican will come right out and try saying that this was the plan, anyway. If we're lucky, we won't hear that for about a decade. If there really was such a conspiracy, the GOP would simply be hoping to keep it under wraps until after Election Day.

Remember that no matter what happens, they're going to try to make something positive out of this. The one thing Republicans just don't do is say, "Er ... ah ... yeah, we kinda fucked that up. Sorry."

But watch for that one Republican, standing amid the smoldering wreckage of his party, who tries to tell you the process worked. That will be a milepost. Once they try that, the variations on a theme will include some notion that the damage was a necssary part of the plan, and there we'll have it.

If we're lucky, it will just be some idiot trying to boost his profile as a state legislator for a future congressional run. But even before Trump went after bowel control and Rubio attacked penile endowment, we had two Republican candidates blithering on about rubbing one out in the women's restroom↱. Right now these people don't know how to not embarrass themselves.

For years, I've marveled at an occasion in 2009 when Madanthonywayne tried explaining to me that the racist Obamanoia we witnessed wasn't really racism, but a policy argument. It was a desperate notion, but the underlying device had something to do with good and polite people wanting to have a policy discussion, and that scoundrel Obama being so terrible to them that they had no choice but to start lobbing flaming racist kitchen sinks.

Yet here we are in 2016, and that's pretty much where the argument is. Donald Trump is apparently Barack Obama's fault.

And now we find out this policy argument people want to have really is racism and other bigotries in and of themselves.

And, you know, it's not like I'm surprised. Or you, probably. But it's also true I'm reeling from the thought that after all these years of hearing about how this stuff is just pockets of bad seeds turns out to be the widespread phenomenon many of us thought it was, but were expected to not accept as real because, you know, that would be anti-American. It's one thing to say I knew we had a mean bigot streak in our society, but I actually wasn't expecting this big of a mess.

More fool me; I owe Republicans thanks for clearing that point up for me, but still, they could have just admitted it straight up and saved everyone the trouble.

But at some point, regardless of how this Trump spelunk turns out, some Republican somewhere, facing the prospect of admitting Republicans are out of control, will try to tell us this was the plan.

Especially if the "reluctant president"↱ maneuver nominating Paul Ryan works out. Somebody, somewhere, will pat his Party on the back for pulling off an incredibly complicated political maneuver, and suddenly the absurd question of Trump being the GOP plan the whole time will be on the table.

If I run with a more psychoanalytic meaning of history, I would simply note that we're headed toward riots, anyway, because regardless, the Republican Party is finally facing the dissolution of that strange marriage 'twixt economic and social conservatism. Sure, they'll try to stay together for the kids' sake, but a question I don't ask much, anymore, about why the "real Christians" don't tell the evangelical right to shut the hell up, is about to come to the fore. Any number of societal archetype sublcassifications are at stake right now. The GOP itself has become so polarized that much of our political future as a nation depends on whether Republicans excise the bigoted tumor they've been pretending to ignore, and even that metaphor doesn't work, because they've been cultivating their own sickness. But their ability to give cover to those whose best posture on justice is that they're simply okay with the fact that there is a bigot wing in their Party because, you know, what can you do, is at stake. If I say the GOP finally has to deal with it all, you might suggest they'll find a way to bury it, and I would be obliged to concur with the expectation. But that's the thing. How are they going to do it, this time?

And if the GOP tries to legitimize this movement post hoc, the question will be whether or not our discourse will customarily exclude that many good, Christian, patriotic Americans who want nothing more than to call off the Constitution for the sake of hatred and earthly empowerment. Can they pull it off? Then they very nearly must eventually get around to trying to convince us that nothing strange just happened, that maybe things got a little weird for a little while, but they knew what they were doing the whole time.

At which point, we're back to drinking with Ockham.

Somewhere in there, though, is someone who will eventually be stupid enough to try this argument, just like it's seven years later and Republicans are trying the bit about how racist nationalism is just a policy argument, and besides, it's Obama's fault because the black man in the White House didn't give a bunch of supremacists everything they ever wanted.

When do we want our riots, and how much damage do we want? After the GOP strips Trump of the nomination? After Hillary Clinton wins the election? After Trump wins the election and the Parties come together long enough to impeach him? Actually, that last won't happen; we see Republicans already "shifting" their principles in order to reduce their accountability.

This is a Romer v. Evans tantrum. They're pissed off that voters can't arbitrarily opt out of the U.S. Constitution. The Republican Party right now is after nothing less than the Republic itself. In the end, given a choice, do we really think they'll straight up admit they couldn't see this coming?

They are, after all, conservatives.

 

Cycles and Magnitude

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The only things about the Trump phenomenon that is new would be a question of magnitude and then a stylistic critique. Otherwise, as Lou DuBose↱ attempts to explain for the Washington Spectator, it's all pretty much the same. He recalls Richard Hofstadter, a lecture and essay called, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", and recounts a history of tinfoil and crackpottery in close orbit around American politics.

Read “The Paranoid Style”—eliding the references to the communist menace—and you’ll discover an insightful analysis of the overheated rhetoric and reckless posturing that is the 2016 Republican presidential primary.

Hofstadter quoted Harvard professor Daniel Bell’s description of “the modern right wing” of the 1960s. If Bell’s description weren’t so articulate, it could be passed off as briefing notes for Sarah Palin’s speechwriter.​

America has been largely taken away from them and their kind; though they are determined to try and repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; capitalism has been gradually undermined . . . the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen at the very centers of American power.​

The “modern right wing” of 2016? You can find it at a Trump rally in a Birmingham stadium or a Cruz caucus in Iowa—even with Palin on the hustings in New Hampshire—promising to take back our country from the intellectual elites who have dispossessed “real Americans.”

The American paranoids described by Hofstadter, like today’s MSM-averse Republicans, believed a political elite entrenched in New York controlled the media and “directed the public mind through managed news.”

Like today’s Republican presidential candidates, Hofstadter’s paranoids opposed the income tax and worked to repeal it. They were anti-intellectual and anti-cosmopolitan. They had a deep-seated aversion to “the democracies of Western Europe.” They harbored a “nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization.” They envisioned the enemy eroding our values and undermining our national security: “A perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman, sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury loving.”

Throw in “African-American”—which was beyond even the most febrile delusions of the hysterical conservatives of the 1960s— and you’ve almost got Rev. Raphael Cruz’s description of the sybaritic, foreign-born Muslim pretender to the American presidency.​

It's been with us the whole time.

Look, I know it sounds simplistic, but in the end this is what it comes down to:

Can we please―​

(1) ―get through this curent upwelling with some manners of decency and integrity remaining intact―

(2) ―and then at least promise that the next time this disorder flares up we can at least skip the part where we pretend it's somehow new and unexpected?​

Please?

We're always supposed to forget. We're always supposed to be surprised. Can we just, you know, be done with that ritual?

#NeverTrump?

What about, #NeverAgain?

I'll take that. I mean, we're going to get through this; Donald Trump isn't enough to break the Republic. But let's work on minimizing the damage and putting this outbreak to rest; and let us fashion a society so enlightened by and achieving of its American dream that it should be impossible this will happen again.

Yeah, I know. Ain't happening, even if we try. But at least, in that case, we will have actually tried.

(Note aside: Interestingly, the article also filled in a detail I hadn't picked up from anything else. During Clinton's sex scandals, I heard a Columbia professor on NPR recalling the Anti-Catholic League and describing a notion of 'Puritan pornography', an idea that one could feel righteous for being outraged at those Catholics while immersing oneself in the sordid, titillating details, you konw, as a matter of duty. I can't recall who that was, exactly, but of course he was from Columbia; so was Richard Hofstadter. And it was Hofstadter, as DuBose recounts in his historical consideration, who wrote that, "Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritans". It really is all wrapped up in the same basic psychoanalytic meaning of history: This is how these people seek empowerment. Or, in an existentialist context: This is how these people respond to the Absurd. And that perspective seems rather quite indicative.)
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Notes:

DuBose, Lou. "Paranoia’s Back in Style". The Washington Spectator. 10 March 2016. WashingtonSpectator.org. 19 March 2016. http://bit.ly/1R5Yxn9

 

I'm considering various aspects of the current American saga, and for instance, how much of it runs a lot like an HBO drama.

It definitely has aspects of The Sopranos, like, yeah, every time I hear Trump saying something I can't get over the Jersey accent. I keep waiting for him to say somethin' like: "Those guys in Washington? Get the fuck outta here, those pussies . . .". Which in the face of it is pretty much what he is sayin', y'know?

 

Well, its kind of funny and at the sane time sad to watch. The Republican base has been fed a constant stream of bullshit from Republican entertainers and politicians that hasn't worked nor will it ever work. It will never deliver the promised goods. Because it can't. First Republicans blamed the RINOs when their ideology didn't work, and now they are blaming the Republican establishment. They purged the RINOs and now they are purging the establishment. But the sad truth is that won't deliver the promised goods either. The problem is the bill of goods, the ideology they have been sold is deeply flawed. That's the problem.

That bill of goods benefits everyone but the Republican base. It benefits the Republican entertainers and it benefits the Republican establishment. It doesn't, nor will it ever, benefit the Republican base. Who does the Republican base purge after they have purged the Republican establishment? They are running out of groups to purge. Will they purge Republican entertainers from their party? I don't know. I have read the ratings for Republican entertainers have fallen and continue to fall, and I have notice a good portion of my local right wing radio programming has been replaced with sports programming.

The problems Republicans face isn't RINOs. It is to some degree the establishment. But mostly, it's with the ideology they have been sold by right wing entertainers and the Republican establishment. Their ideology is deeply flawed. It will never benefit the Republican base. It will never deliver the goods. It can't.

 

As I Was Stumbling Toward St. Ives ....

Any number of ironic considerations flicker through my conscience, but I think the general sketch they present suggests that our society needs to find some way to consider the question of public servant versus civic leader. I keep pointing to Romer v. Evans because it is convenient to do so, but along the way, how many times have elected leaders promised voters what they can't have? How many times have they failed to say, "Look, you know, this is America, after all"?

And, you know, plenty of politicians of all philosophies have failed at this, but our present consideration points to a particular and long abdication of civic leadership. How many times have they told the People that Constitutional authority is oppression? Every time they lose in court. Every time the opposition says, "You know, there's this thing called the Constitution." And that part has been going on and getting out of hand long enopugh to be born into it and also be old enough to vote.

Even as some Republicans came around in certain circumstances―was it Lindsey Graham and John Kasich who tried to warn their Party during the Kentucky Clerk Conundrum?―it was always about the basic politics. And, you know, that's actually pretty important. But at what point have they stood up and instead of saying, "You know, this looks pretty bad and is going to hurt us at the ballot box", have they actually said, "Hey, we're not going there; we cannot accommodate that antisocial character"?

A generation brought up to disdain the idea of the government telling them what to do: How, exactly, are civic leaders supposed to lead?

And they really have tried. Thirty-five years, at least, of stirring and stoking and tending this spectre.

This whole time Republicans have found success specifically by failing to lead. It's the damnedest thing.

 

Trump's success is connected to the analogy of David and Goliath. The establishment, from both the Democrat and Republican parties are analogous to Goliath. Both always began the election process with a large organized army of political leaders, money donors, lobbyists, national, state and local organization, large media propaganda organizations, etc. It is nearly impossible for any third party to battle against these huge organized armies.

Trump came in a David, a skinny competitor, dressed for herding, who had to fight the mighty Goliath. This is symbolism is why Trump and Sanders both have appeal. The establishment parties are part of the army of Goliath, and many people feel disenfranchised, since these armies do not work for them. They need a champion like David to battle in this impossible situation.

Trump, like David, would be no match if he fought Goliath on the terms of Goliath. These armies are organized and equipped for battle. David, needed to change the rules of engagement and fight Goliath in ways where David has some advantage. Trump used his sling shot and with deadly accuracy, hit Goliath's republican body with well placed stones; Bush is low energy, Little Marco, Cruz the liar, etc,. Goliath is not dead but is taking hits.

Trump did not try to fight Goliath in ways that benefit Goliath; pure policy discussions and use of ground organization. If you are 5'10" and 150 pounds and need to fight someone 6'10' and 300 pounds of muscle, who wants to fight with 20 pound battle axes, if you did that, you will quickly tire and die. You need to figure out how to level the playing field.

Now with Trump having bruised Goliath, the establishment is trying to manipulate the rules of engagement, so David can no longer use is slingshot but has use 20 pound battle axes. Trump is ignoring the game and is readying his sling shot and will hit Goliath in the temple. The democrat party; twin brother of Goliath, will also attempt to change the rules of engagement. David will not be fooled by this, but will hit Goliath II with deadly accuracy. The armies of both Goliaths with scatter and run for cover.

 

So are you saying David was an egomaniacal, hedonistic racist?

 

Well, that is the meme Trump and his supporters are promulgating. It's true enough that the Republican establishment has no love for Trump and has much enmity for the man. But that doesn't make Trump a David and establishment Republicans Goliath. I think Trump will be the Republican nominee - assuming the establishment doesn't do something underhanded like change the rules, and that's a big assumption. I wouldn't be surprised to see Republican establishment folks bring out the dirty tricks brigade. It's what they do. It's what they have always done.

 

Anyone ever notice the similarity between Canadian Ted and Grandpa Munster?

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http://www.bustle.com/articles/8970...ns-heres-9-times-they-looked-spookily-similar

 

Trump GOP Alternate Delegate to Stand Trial for Alleged Role in 2014 Bundy Standoff

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Does it feel strange to anybody else that I might open by promising that I'm not making this up?

Let's blame Ted Siefer↱ of Reuters, who also isn't making it up:

A U.S. judge has approved the extradition of a New Hampshire man to Nevada, where he is to face trial on charges that he helped organize a high-profile armed standoff with federal agents at the ranch of Cliven Bundy in 2014.

The transfer of Jerry DeLemus, 61, to Nevada may proceed since no order was received from the U.S. District Court in Nevada staying the transfer, according to a ruling issued late on Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Andrea Johnstone. No date has been set for the extradition.

DeLemus is a well-known conservative activist who co-chairs the New Hampshire Veterans for Trump coalition organized by the presidential campaign of Republican businessman Donald Trump. Earlier this month, he was named an alternate delegate for Trump at the Republican nominating convention in July.​

The federal complaint against DeLemus is not that he participated in the initial threats against law enforcement, "but that afterward he served as a 'gunman and mid-level organizer who joined in a conspiracy to commit an unprecedented and extremely violent and massive armed assault on federal law enforcement officers,' according to court papers", as Siefer reports.

It is also worth noting that Mr. DeLemus' wife is Rep. Susan DeLemus (R-11), who rallied some fellow Republican legislators to testify at her husband's bail hearing earlier this month.
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Notes:

Siefer, Ted. "New Hampshire man linked to Bundy standoff to face trial in Nevada". Reuters. 24 March 2016. Reuters.com. 24 March 2016. http://reut.rs/1LKMMm2

 

I'm not totally sure I understand your point - Republicans are complicit in a plot to overthrow the government that does not, cannot work? That they feel cozy being in bed with other fascists?

Unless the fascist in question is too scary - not for ideological reasons of course but rather because he may "trump" the established powers?

 

Fair 'nuff. Uh ... oh, let's try it this way:

Alternate delegate to GOP convention, Co-Chair of New Hampshire Veterans for Trump, and husband of New Hampshire legislator to stand trial for role in 2014 insurrection.​

It's one of those truth being stranger than fiction moments. I mean, at the point we have elected Republican legislators trying to convince a court that a man who took part in an armed insurrection has absolutely no history of violence, I really do feel like I'm describing a scene from a bad farce.

I think, technically, I'm working my way through stages of ... er ... ah ... something. To the one, I'm perpetually dubious about what social contract I'm living; to the other, this latest degradation of our political process, indicating that any number of us weren't totally clueless in youth when we fretted about the depth of bigotry in our society, just doesn't help. Yes, it sickens and dispirits.

Then again, reflecting on a certain point about how strange it all seems, I might well be overreacting. That is, it occurred to me earlier to wonder why this sort of thing doesn't damage one's political career; was a day when an insurrectionist spouse would have been a scandal.

Then I remembered Sarah Palin.

Whose husband was a separatist in a political party that once went before the U.N. to ask for recognition of Alaska as an independent nation; they did so under Iranian sponsorship.

As near as I can tell, that only helped the former Alaska governor's standing among Republican voters.

But "the way things are supposed to be"? I guess in the end it comes down to never mind, because I sometimes forget that the way things are supposed to be is exactly irrelevant to the way things are.

I'm forty-two; I've spent most of my life responding to "love it or leave it" saying, "Chase me out". Turns out that was a mistake. I should have left decades ago.

I need my country to pull through this. I don't ever want that day to come when I say I can't believe I was stupid enough to believe Americans.

I'm an American.

I want to believe.

These days, that desire leaves me feeling rather quite foolish.