The Republican Civil War Has Begun
You can't build a small-government movement on the backs of people you think are welfare cheats
The conservative intelligentsia have found themselves at odds with a significant portion of the Republican Party's base.
by Michael Maiello | March 25, 2016 | http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-republican-civil-war-has-begun-20160325
"The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles," Kevin D. Williamson wrote recently in The National Review, the stalwart voice of the right for more than 60 years.
The conservative intelligentsia — the collection of free traders, tax cutters and government shrinkers who have dictated the Republican Party's agenda since the Eighties — have had it with the losers of globalization who make up a significant portion of the party's base: the white males of modest education who have been most full-throated in their support of Donald Trump.
In the mainstream organs like the op-ed pages of The New York Times or the editorials of The Wall Street Journal, right-wing columnists might support using the Republican convention process to deny Trump the nomination, but they discuss it in language that offers some respect to the legitimate anger of Trump's supporters. Last week, David Brooks tried to play nice."
Brooks' niceties will prove too weak a dam to hold back the anger that conservative intellectuals indulge with every Trump victory. The Trump supporters might register Republican and have been counted on to vote the party's way in past elections (flirting for a while with Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, then voting for George H.W. Bush and Robert Dole against the hated Bill Clinton in the general) but they are, from the point of view of right-leaning think tanks, pretty lousy conservatives.
We saw a hint of this in 2005, when George W. Bush suggested reforming Social Security by partially privatizing the system. Even before the financial crisis, Bush couldn't unite Republican voters behind the idea. Even Republicans like Social Security checks. We got another hint of this during the early Tea Party days when Paul Krugman relayed the story of an angry conservative who told his Congressman "keep your government hands off my Medicare." It may well be that when Mitt Romney made his crack about the dependent 47 percent of Americans who would never vote for him that he was not talking only about liberal Democrats.
It's become a matter of public health record that death rates for middle-aged white Americans are rising, partially due to alcohol addiction, drug addiction and the economic stresses of underemployment. As these lives crumble, marriages are cracking up (or never happening) and communities are falling apart as the tax base can no longer support basic health and education services. In 2008 and 2009, as unemployment benefits reached their limits for many who lost their jobs since the financial crisis, applications for Social Security Disability Insurance spiked, up 8 percent in 2008 and 10 percent the year after. The rate of increase has since reversed, but in the last five years the government has received 16.2 million disability applications.
We know what Republican intellectuals said about the inner cities of the Eighties and Nineties: They called it a crisis of values and lectured black communities about the importance of temperance, hard work and fatherhood while not publishing books like The Bell Curve, which used phony eugenics to imply that black communities had it coming because they're just not as smart as others.
Republicans get testy when their mythos is tested — and in the Republican mythos, people are supposed to react to economic displacement with resourceful pluck and vigor. The National Review is aghast that reasonably able-bodied people on government assistance live in towns like Garbutt, New York, that have been in decline for more than a century, when there are jobs four hours away in the Pennsylvania gas fields. Another National Review writer (they devoted an entire issue of the magazine to beating up Trump supporters), comparing Trump to Buchanan, wrote:
"The Buchanan boys are economically and socially frustrated white men who wish to be economically supported by the federal government without enduring the stigma of welfare dependency."
That's Trump's pitch: His base is great but betrayed and need Trump to protect them and keep those Social Security checks coming. It doesn't seem likely that Trump voters are going to suddenly look inward and discover the causes of their problems. And a bunch of people already convinced that they're being ignored and ill-served by the think-tank elitists are not going to take well to seeing their chosen candidate denied the nomination.
Somebody has to leave the Republican fold because you can't build a small-government movement on the backs of people you think are welfare cheats. The Trumpeters probably aren't going anywhere. As The National Review argues, these people won't even leave destitute Garbutt, New York.
Trump Is the Most Offensive GOP Candidate, But Cruz
Would Be More Dangerous in the Oval Office
Ted Cruz is a conniving, uncompromising, power-hungry demagogue
whose policies would serve the richest Americans.
whose policies would serve the richest Americans.
by Steven Rosenfeld | March 7, 2016 | http://www.alternet.org/election-20...date-cruz-would-be-more-dangerous-oval-office
As the 2016 primary season continues, the notion that Ted Cruz might be the Republican Party’s last best chance to save itself from Donald Trump’s takeover is a spectacle all by itself. Cruz, the most mistrusted and reviled Republican senator, a serial liar who led the 2013 government shutdown and called Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a fraud on the Senate floor, is now the party’s great savior?
It may be that Republicans would prefer the right-wing devil they know rather than the one they do not. Their fears of Trump resemble wide swings of a pendulum. On some issues it’s his ugly, bigoted and juvenile rhetoric and strongman posturing that repulses. On the other extreme lurks a sneaking suspicion among GOP luminaries that he might be too liberal and malleable, not just unpredictable, for conservatives to stomach.
Trump is the more offensive presidential candidate, but Cruz is far more dangerous. As Eugene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist, wrote in December, “If Ted Cruz is the Republican Party’s cure for Donald Trump, the antidote may be worse than the poison.”
That verdict is not unique. Cruz is not just a serial exaggerator and liar. He’s a conniving, uncompromising, power-hungry demagogue whose antics and beliefs would be right at home in the crusades of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s America, many campaign fact-checking websites, longtime politicos and pundits have warily noted.
That’s why former president Jimmy Carter recently told the British House of Lords, “I think I would choose Trump… which may surprise some of you, but the reason is Trump has proven already that he’s completely malleable. I don’t think he has any fixed opinions that he would really go to the White House and fight for.”
Indeed, there’s much more to this than merely pointing out that Cruz is more extremist than Trump. Trump may pledge to order U.S. troops to torture any suspected enemy and break international laws of war, but Cruz implied he’d use nuclear arms to make the Middle East’s desert sands “glow in the dark.” Trump said he would defund Planned Parenthood as long as it provides abortions, though he notes it provides other valuable women’s health care. Cruz not only wants to defund and shut down Planned Parenthood, he wants to prosecute the organization. That’s what he said last summer after doctored videos appeared making allegations that Planned Parenthood was selling aborted baby parts. A Texas Court found this claim such a lie it indicted the videomakers on criminal charges.
The reasons Cruz is a bigger liar than Trump start with a basic fact noted by Robert Reich in January: “He’s more fanatical.”
“Trump is a bully and bigot but doesn’t hew to any sharp ideological line,” Reich wrote. “Cruz is a fierce ideologue: He denies the existence of man-made climate change, rejects same-sex marriage, wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, believes the Second Amendment guarantees everyone a right to guns, doesn’t believe in a constitutional divide between church and state, favors the death penalty, opposes international agreements, embraces a confrontational foreign policy, rejects immigration reform, demands the repeal of 'every blessed word of Obamacare,' and takes a strict 'originalist' view of the meaning of the Constitution.”
Cruz not only believes that and more, he eagerly embraces whatever rhetorical or political tactic he can to try to impose an ultra-right-wing social agenda and equally right-wing pro-corporate agenda on others. Trump says whatever seems to pop into his mind at the moment. Cruz, in contrast, has been a skilled debater since college and intuitively twists and exaggerates facts or spouts inflammatory lies, all in the service of promoting himself and his beliefs.
There are almost too many examples to categorize and count. After a mass shooting and killings at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic in November, by a man who reportedly told police he was motivated by the faked video, Cruz told reporters before the Iowa caucuses the murderer was a “transgendered leftist activist.” In this same category of toxically mistaken beliefs, Cruz told the Conservative Political Action Conference that Democrats threatened the Catholic Church to “change your religious beliefs or we’ll use our power in the federal government to shut down your charities and your hospitals.” Politifact called this remark “both incorrect and ridiculous.”
As the Nation noted, “Cruz said ISIS is ‘right now crucifying Christians in Iraq, literally nailing Christians to trees.’ It wasn’t, and Cruz wasn’t able to offer any evidence. Cruz described a "strong bipartisan majority" in the House that voted to repeal Obamacare; two Democrats had joined the Republicans. He bluntly claimed that “the jurisdictions with the strictest gun control laws, almost without exception… have the highest crime rates and the highest murder rates.” This is not true.
These examples were from the early days of his presidential bid. Since then, as Politifact.com has documented, it’s only gotten worse. Politifact shows he’s a serial distorter of anything inflamatory, such as Trump’s political contributions to Hillary Clinton’s past campaigns; Arizona’s social welfare cuts as a purported result of tougher immigration enforcement; Trump on supposedly supporting socialized health care; Cruz saying it’s a tradition that Supreme Court nominees don’t get confirmed in presidential years; exaggerating how much incomes rose under Ronald Reagan; or saying Obama’s 2013 immigration bill would ease up on background checks.
His outright lies have grown, too. According to Politifact, he lied about Ben Carson leaving the race just days before the Iowa caucus; that Obamacare is the biggest job-killer in the U.S.; that gun control proponents want to confiscate all guns; that Obama hasn’t bombed ISIL’s oil fields because he’s worried about global warming; that most violent criminals are Democrats; that under Obama the median wage for women fell; that Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal lets Iranians self-inspect, and more.
What’s notable is not how much Cruz lies, but how easily lying comes to him. As one Huffington Post columnist noted last September, “Can any other politician lie with the gall, the unflappability, and the effortlessness of Senator Ted Cruz?”
The biggest example from before the current campaign season were his calculated tirades that led to the federal government shutdown in late September 2013, primarily over the opposition to funding Obamacare, which he has called “the epic battle of our generation.” Readers may recall his 21-hour filibuster, in which he read Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor and encouraged the House Tea Partiers to join him.
But there was even more intentionally deceitful demogoguery from Cruz, who after the shutdown went to the Vietnam War Memorial and falsely blamed Obama for not allowing veterans and their family members to honor that war’s dead—even though it was Cruz's antics that were responsible for closing federal parks. If you watch Cruz flat-out lie in his remarks on the Washington mall, where he speaks with twisted candor and no shame and stands next to Sarah Palin and Sen. Mike Lee, R-UT, what you see is a politician who is as disturbing as he is dangerous. In other words, a demagogue.
Retired General Wesley Clark, who has run for president as a hawkish Democrat, told Fox News late last year that that’s exactly what Cruz is. “He’s a Princeton graduate, and a Harvard guy and a 150 IQ so something, he’s supposed to be a brilliant guy, he doesn’t know the first thing about military operations, or more disturbing is he’ll simply says whatever draws an applause, and that’s the definition of a demagogue,” Clark said.
Ruth Marcus, another Washington Post columnist, has also written that Cruz is “more dangerous” than Trump and gave further examples of his demagoguery, comparing his behavior in the Senate to one of the 20th century’s most notorious senators, Republican Joseph McCarthy, whose anti-communist crusade destroyed hundreds of lives.
“Where Trump needs the ego balm of adoring masses, Cruz couldn’t care less what others think of him, except to the extent it might interfere with his ability to achieve his end,” Marcus wrote. “Just ask the Senate colleagues who join in remarkable, scarcely contained bipartisan loathing of the man.”
She continued, “He revealed his true character even earlier in his Senate tenure when he went after former senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), President Obama’s nominee for defense secretary. In a manner that evoked the worst of Joseph McCarthy, Cruz smeared Hagel with unsupported insinuations that the nominee received money from foreign governments or extremist groups. There seems to be no argument too low for him to make—for example, his recent, four-Pinocchio claim that 'the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats.'"
Now He's the Party’s Savior?
The Republican Party’s establishment-led Stop Trump wing is now spending millions on TV ads in a desperate 11th-hour effort to block Trump from winning the next big states to vote for a GOP nominee: Michigan, Florida, Ohio, Illinois and North Carolina. But putting Cruz at the top of their ticket is as dicey as Trump—and more dangerous.
Trump, for all his ugly bluster, says he knows how to negotiate. That means compromise. That’s not the case with Cruz, whose views are far from the U.S. mainstream, believes Obama is the most radical president ever, and even though he was a clerk for a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, has railed against its rulings upholding Obamacare and same-sex marriage as “the very definition of tryanny.”
“Trump, at least, cloaks his unthinkable policies beneath a certain populist appeal,” wrote the Post's Eugene Robinson. “Cruz’s self-assured extremism tells whole classes of voters—independents, minorities, women—to look elsewhere. He would be like Barry Goldwater without the avuncular charm.”
What will unfold in coming days will determine the future of the Republican Party. Either way, Trump or Cruz, does not bode well. Trump may epitomize the worst impulses the GOP has been stalking for years—nativist, racist, vindictive and angry white men who will take others down to build themselves up. But Cruz is a darker character whose uncompromising warmongering, intolerances, vain pieties, chronic lying and eager embrace of scorched-earth tactics is a more toxic and ruinous brew for America.
As the Republican Party’s longstanding power brokers cheer for Trump’s demise and Cruz’s improbable ascent continues, the rest of America should remember that of the two, it’s Cruz, not Trump, who would be more dangerous in the Oval Office.
The 2016 RepubliKlan Party Is :
• Unapologetically proud RACIST
• Virulently HOMOPHOBIC
• Anti-Sex Education in schools
• Anti-Birth Control
• Anti- Immigrants
• Anti- ANY Minimum Wage increase
• Anti- Student Loans (big cuts in Pell grants; blocked interest rate cut on loans)
• Anti-Abortion Rights (republiklans were silent when Dr. George Tiller was murdered)
• Anti-Consumer Protection (pro-tort reform)
• Anti- Climate Change Science Reality
• Anti- Environmental Clean-Up (Piyush Jindal of LA blocked law mandating oil corp. clean up of gulf coast)
• Anti- Infrastructure $$$$ Replacement (U.S. bridges & roads are old & crumbling)
• Anti-Regulating The Banksters (want to repeal Dodd-Frank)
• Anti-Social Security Insurance (want to end it & send the existing money to Wall street)
• Anti-Medicare (want to send Grandma into the clutches of the "Health Care Mafia" with a coupon)
• Anti-Unemployment Insurance (want to end it)
• Anti- Healthy School Lunch for kids
• Anti-Education Standards (republiklans want to close the Dept. of Education & teach biblical creationism)
• Anti-W.I.C. (republiklan congress recently cut money for Women Infants & Children program)
• Anti- Environmental Conservation Laws (want to close the EPA & burn MORE coal)
• Anti-Food Saftey Inspections (republiklan congress recently cut US food saftey budget)
• Anti- Ingredient Labels on Food (republiklans don't want you to know)
• Anti-Progressive Taxation (republiklans against raising the 15% tax Millionaires & Billionaires pay)
• Anti-Banning the Death Penalty (278 innocent people released from Death Row since 1989)
• Anti- Restoring Habeas corpus (republiklans NOT against "disappearing" people)
• Anti-Separation Of Church & State (republiklans want to mandate Christian prayer ONLY in schools)
• Anti- Government Funding of Scientific Research (republiklans have slashed funding i.e. stem cell research)
• Anti-Feminism (woman should be submissive to men; it's in the bible)
• Anti-Affirmative Action (republiklans say "there is NO racism in AmeriKKKa)
• Anti-Department of Labor (republiklans believe overtime pay should be abolished)
• Anti-Small Business Administration (want to abolish it)
• Anti-Substantially Increasing Foreign Aid (republiklan congress just cut food aid to AFRICA)
• Anti-Government Student College Tuition Grants (republiklans want to dramatically cut PELL grants & other Education programs)
• Anti-ANY Gun Control
• Anti- Non-Christian Religion Tolerance
• Anti- Universal Health Care
• Anti- Ban Against Torture (republiklans support "rectal" feeding & slicing of genitals)
• Anti- ANY Cut In Military Spending
• Anti- Pay Increase For US Soldiers (republiklans consistently vote NO)
• Anti- Increase in Veterans Benefits (republiklans want to convert military pensions into 401K's)
• Anti- Equalizing Penalty for Crack/ Powder Cocaine Conviction
• Anti- Womens Health Care (republiklans vote to defund Planned Parenthood)
• Anti- Legislation Banning Outsourcing (republiklans voted AGAINST law prohibiting outsourcing by companies $$$$$ bailed out by U.S. taxpayers)
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