quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Elison, I do not need to respond to utter stupidity. That is all you liberal Democrats have. Your opinions are too dumb to even be interesting. Just because you call your comments "rebuttals" doesn't mean that they really are.
This is more brazenly dishonest and cowardly than you have been in the past this early in election cycles in the past, Ron. Though in a sense it is more honest for you to speak this way since you always end up there eventually. Kudos!
Also I'm not a liberal democrat either...
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I mean, guys, like, maybe I'm wrong and crazy but, could it be that Ron's objection to Obama on nativist grounds, was entirely reflexively partisan?
Truly it would be shocking and I want to be wrong. Posts: 12931 | Registered: Aug 2005
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It's not entirely PARTISAN. I mean, Cruz is at worst-case a CANADIAN infiltrator. What's he going to do, send a wave of moose after our maple syrup supply?
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: It's not entirely PARTISAN. I mean, Cruz is at worst-case a CANADIAN infiltrator. What's he going to do, send a wave of moose after our maple syrup supply?
You joke, but there have been large maple syrup heists.
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: It's not entirely PARTISAN. I mean, Cruz is at worst-case a CANADIAN infiltrator. What's he going to do, send a wave of moose after our maple syrup supply?
Cruz will have to pry our maple syrup from my sticky, delicious fingers.
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My father-in-law just shared this comic on Facebook along with this text:
quote:Dr. Ben Carson earned a week's worth of media scrutiny, but where was the media when it came to Hillary "I dodged sniper fire in Bosnia" Clinton's stretches...?
Also, are people still buying into the whole Clinton body count thing?
Also also, why are the candidates lives being visualized as dumpsters? Saying that Ben Carson is a clean dumpster isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
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It amazes me when people say, "Where was the media when it came to Hillary's: Clinton Foundation activities, foreign investments, Benghazi, email scandal, White Water, et al"
And you just want to look at them and say, "Tell me how you know so much about Hillary Clinton."
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Yup. I actually replied and pointed out that there was plenty of media coverage of that and many other issues. And then someone replied to me and said that while there was coverage, there wasn't any scrutiny.
"Where was the media when . . ." always means "The media isn't covering something as much as I'd like or in the way that I'd like." So then the question is, why do you think the media should cover things a certain way? Why, it's almost as if people have already made up their minds about certain things and just want the media to affirm their preconceived notions.
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The crowd of social justice types that I regularly have to encounter in a series I'm starting to call Progressives Behaving Badly also do that stuff and it makes me almost murderously annoyed
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quote:Originally posted by Jon Boy: My father-in-law just shared this comic on Facebook along with this text:
quote:Dr. Ben Carson earned a week's worth of media scrutiny, but where was the media when it came to Hillary "I dodged sniper fire in Bosnia" Clinton's stretches...?
have they completely forgotten the whole Benghazi investigations thing yet or what
like they do remember that this was a thing that was in the news constantly for forever right
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I tend to think "the media" doesn't include whichever outlet they actually use. And you can even have people on Fox News talking about liberal media bias with a straight face.
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quote:Originally posted by Jon Boy: My father-in-law just shared this comic on Facebook along with this text:
quote:Dr. Ben Carson earned a week's worth of media scrutiny, but where was the media when it came to Hillary "I dodged sniper fire in Bosnia" Clinton's stretches...?
have they completely forgotten the whole Benghazi investigations thing yet or what
like they do remember that this was a thing that was in the news constantly for forever right
Jeez I seem to remember the media being all over it.
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I alternate between hot and cold on this primary.
I am sometimes thoroughly enjoying it because it has hilariously broken through any reasonable poe's law holds and become a legendary farce, and I take great and sinister pleasure in marveling at the agonal breathing of a slowly demographically imploding party.
I am sometimes thoroughly tired and done with it because these people are just being total cretins — the otherwise decent elements are punted out to the very fringe and are themselves complaining about how insane the party has become, but they don't stand a chance and there's nothing ultimately good or encouraging, sometimes, about how it has been shown you can apparently only succeed in a republican primary by now if you are deliberately working the basest populist elements of a truly ignorant and bigoted core using the foulest elements of populist appeal — the end stage of what happens when you rally a base by training them to reject "elitists" of any stripe, be they scientific or social or economic or political.
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Mmm. I think 2015 will likely go down as the year when American politics thoroughly lost its S***.
But from what I've been reading about the polling problem that has been mounting more heavily with every cycle, we may now be *far* out of the time in which the GOP could muster a national popular vote. In fact, that time may have ended more than 10 years ago.
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To me, the only thing that's at risk so far is "2015: the year that the republican party showed that it was already too far gone"
which may or may not happen, depending on whether the GOP can push a more establishment character through and avoid the embarrassment of running trump or carson in a completely doomed general election
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: To me, the only thing that's at risk so far is "2015: the year that the republican party showed that it was already too far gone"
which may or may not happen, depending on whether the GOP can push a more establishment character through and avoid the embarrassment of running trump or carson in a completely doomed general election
but if trump or carson win the primary
that's it
they're done
This is why that won't happen. Even if they get the votes, which they won't, the party won't nominate them. It will destroy itself before it does that.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: To me, the only thing that's at risk so far is "2015: the year that the republican party showed that it was already too far gone"
which may or may not happen, depending on whether the GOP can push a more establishment character through and avoid the embarrassment of running trump or carson in a completely doomed general election
but if trump or carson win the primary
that's it
they're done
This is why that won't happen. Even if they get the votes, which they won't, the party won't nominate them. It will destroy itself before it does that.
So.... the country will be left with Cruz or Rubio. Great. Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: This is why that won't happen. Even if they get the votes, which they won't, the party won't nominate them. It will destroy itself before it does that.
The establishment is already seriously considering any and all ways it can provide a leading edge to Rubio, because it is at least vaguely aware of what is happening to them.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: This is why that won't happen. Even if they get the votes, which they won't, the party won't nominate them. It will destroy itself before it does that.
The establishment is already seriously considering any and all ways it can provide a leading edge to Rubio, because it is at least vaguely aware of what is happening to them.
This is why I'm so confident in a Dem victory. A Cruz nomination is a path to a 50 state dem victory. We're talking 1984 Reagan level for Hilary Clinton.
For Rubio, he'd lose, but he'd lose Dole/Kemp style.
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I don't believe Rubio would lose. I'm reasonably sure Cruz would lose, but not by the margins you seem to think. He'd still carry the South and chunks of the midwest and chunks of the west as well. But Hillary would sweep all the purple states and pick up a couple light red states maybe.
But Rubio would give her a serious run for her money. He's incredibly slick. He'd run into a bit of an ideas gap, but I don't feel like that really gets in the way of winning all that much if people really like you.
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quote:Originally posted by GaalDornick: 50 states?
I wish I could believe in your confident predictions, but IIRC, you were sure Jeb would not run.
I was. Now I'm only sure he shouldn't have run, that he didn't really want to run, and that he won't be running for long.
And I only said it was a path to a 50 state victory. It would depend on how badly he managed the campaign after nomination. I'm predicting it would be pretty bad.
And in response to Lyr, sorry but I just don't see it. There's really nobody on the right who can energize voters anymore. And Rubio is not the answer for them either. He'd do the best of anyone in the field, but he'll melt like a popsicle in the national spotlight. He's too young, too inexperienced, and lacks the chops that Obama had at the same point in his career (despite Obama having even less experience).
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quote: And I only said it was a path to a 50 state victory. It would depend on how badly he managed the campaign after nomination. I'm predicting it would be pretty bad.
I'm trying to imagine a screwup bad enough that Hillary Clinton would win Texas.
Maybe if Ted came out right before election day.
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Agree that Rubio would wilt in the national spotlight.
Carson hasn't been taking it so well, and that will undoubtedly get worse. Rubio is the flashy alternative right now for people looking for someone more "serious" than the clowns in the front of the clown car.
If he were the frontrunner, or the presumptive nominee, all barrels would be trained on him, and he'd begin to struggle. He just doesn't have any substance that makes any sense at this point (then again, no one in the current field really does)
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quote:Originally posted by GaalDornick: 50 states?
I wish I could believe in your confident predictions, but IIRC, you were sure Jeb would not run.
I was. Now I'm only sure he shouldn't have run, that he didn't really want to run, and that he won't be running for long.
And I only said it was a path to a 50 state victory. It would depend on how badly he managed the campaign after nomination. I'm predicting it would be pretty bad.
And in response to Lyr, sorry but I just don't see it. There's really nobody on the right who can energize voters anymore. And Rubio is not the answer for them either. He'd do the best of anyone in the field, but he'll melt like a popsicle in the national spotlight. He's too young, too inexperienced, and lacks the chops that Obama had at the same point in his career (despite Obama having even less experience).
The interesting thing about having Congressional Republican candidates is that the past 8 years have been about them deliberately not having a record to run on.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: This is why that won't happen. Even if they get the votes, which they won't, the party won't nominate them. It will destroy itself before it does that.
The establishment is already seriously considering any and all ways it can provide a leading edge to Rubio, because it is at least vaguely aware of what is happening to them.
This is why I'm so confident in a Dem victory. A Cruz nomination is a path to a 50 state dem victory. We're talking 1984 Reagan level for Hilary Clinton.
For Rubio, he'd lose, but he'd lose Dole/Kemp style.
Not even Trump would manage a '50 state dem victory' — we have a wide swath of states which are essentially guaranteed to be in the red.
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What I'm suggesting is that the Republican party would implode if it somehow nominated Ted Cruz. He is universally hated by the establishment in his party, most of his colleagues, and most of Washington generally. He is also just about the most reptilian, mercenary, machiavellian politician on the national stage since Nixon.
I would predict something like a Republican establishment rebellion given his nomination, a spoiler candidate, and a total abdication of responsibility for his candidacy by the Republican party. In effect, total panic and confusion.
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I will have to think on that, but I don't think that would happen. Cruz would lose, and it would be a fairly severe loss, and there would be plenty of discontent working its way through the party after the nomination, and Cruz would certainly have a great deal of (continued) antipathy to the establishment elements who would have raised hell trying to do everything in their power to prevent his nomination.
But I don't believe they would go into a full rebellion, given that if the GOP implodes now, they're done. They can't afford a full and significant schism.
Instead, my prediction is more muted. A remarkably bad general election campaign, an overwhelming defeat, the freedom caucus remains as ungovernable as they can manage, the tea party remains a pile of cavernously xenophobic dorks that dog the party for another cycle, and plenty of puff pieces trying to invent new angles to describe "What Went Wrong with the Republicans in 2016?"
(note that we're getting a thousand of those puff pieces no matter what happens, though, so)
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What exactly would the GOP imploding look like, if not like Donald Trump pinning a string of cans to the tail of the party, and Ben "Believe Me" Carson leading in national polls?
I think we're witnessing the end of days here for the GOP as a national party.
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I'm going to sound really arrogant simply supposing all this as though I'm a psychic, but I'll answer in regards to the theory I've been talking people's ears off about for about a decade now — namely that there are two widely observed consistent and overwhelmingly evidenced realities about how people vote that indicate that the Republican party will be entering a period of terminal decline which we literally don't know how they could get out of, where any scenario in which the GOP survives in anything like its present form would require something inordinately unprecedented.
But skipping all that, the first phase is where the GOP simply loses viability in the presidential election. First in the sense of "the republicans can't win the election, the democrats can only lose it." Then, later, it's just incredibly hard to expect a GOP candidate can do anything to hold nationally viable numbers. This necessarily has an impact on the judicial branch, of course. There's just no longer the viable raw numbers needed to hold any of today's swing states, because conservatives are literally dying off and the generations which are coming into the years that they are reliable voters are significantly more and more liberal, to an overwhelming degree. Eventually, there's a set of states which used to be competitive or which the republicans had to carry to hold the office of the presidency which they can't hold anymore. Like Colorado before them, they go blue.
The second phase is the collapse of their legislative national viability. By this time their demographic implosion is severe enough to render them unable to ever hold the Senate. As the decline becomes more severe, the House surpasses a threshold that Republican gerrymandering had successfully held off (or there's some dramatic event like a supreme court ruling against partisan districting). By that time, there's a significant total popular advantage to democratic candidates that blows by disproportionate representational districting and the Republicans lose the house.
This effectively turns the GOP into a regional party rather than a national one.
This is where their one strongest remaining legacy is confronted: today's republicans are excellent at locking down and completely controlling state governments, and they have taken a number of states and given themselves fairly complete control over the governance of these states, and they will likely have control of them for some time. They will be long running experiments in unhindered republican state government. This will represent the ultimate test of the speed of republican decline, to see both
1. how many of these states get broken out of controlled republican lockdown (watch Kansas and Michigan for these ones) and
2. how many states turn into places where the democrats respond to their expanding power by becoming similarly iron-fisted rulers of their states
within somewhere between one and two decades, the sorts of things we write off as "socialist" fantasy will become plausible or even unstoppable overhauls of our system. Universal health care, in particular, would start to seem inevitable.
... now all this comedic dysfunction is all just an oddly visceral surface response to a series of faustian bargains the GOP seems to have made, so I guess I can just enjoy all that on the side?
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Kansas won't rediscover their liberal roots. But they might toss Brownback out in a primary.
As for Michigan, I have no idea what my home state will do, but I'll tell you the current government is almost universally reviled.
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I'm interested Sam, in what happens in the national political vacuum left by the departure of the Republicans.
I would surmise that a split between Social Democrats (similar to Labor) and Conservative Democrats (Ie: Federalists), would emerge if the party were to essentially inherit total control of national government.
At that point, whatever is left of social liberal Republicanism would try to align with Conservative Democrat, to form a new center coalition.
I think what we'd be left with would be essentially the same two party system, only with the rabid Tea-Partier wing of conservatism relegated back to the fringe once again, and Socialism a more powerful force within national policy.
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The problem with State-side UHC is that there is a non-trivial upfront cost and Medicaid(?) reduces the size of their risk pools too substantially to make it viable.
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If it's a full blown collapse where the GOP doesn't just reform and become a fairly different party under the same general name (before they can crawl back up to much national relevance)
then, well, deprived of the spoiler effect, I would imagine you would get an eventual split to two parties, one resembling the establishment democratic party, one a Bernie sanders style left progressive party.
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It's interesting. We haven't had a party really die off for nearly a century. Seems overdue though- whatever philosophical ties Republicanism had to Lincoln and Blair seem quite distant indeed. Gone with the southern strategy- only the first of a series of such :ahem: Faustian bargains.
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You guys are nuts. There's no sign that the Republican party is collapsing any time soon.
I know there are warning signs in the near term years that look rough for them, but they aren't going to disintegrate any time soon. They still have a chance to win at national politics in 2016 if they play their cards right. And unless Dems can win back state houses they have a lock on Congress for another 15 years at least.
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I think a realignment is coming but I'm with Lyrhawn that such predictions are a little overblown. The lock on the States is a real thing that will persist.
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Yee of little faith. People forget that the Republicans had the Presidency 6 years after the founding of the party. If it can rise to dominate national politics in 6 years, it can fade just as quickly. Watch.
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The Republican party needs to significantly shift its positions on some things, or it's just going to demographically start to fade.
Its base is older, whiter, and more Christian than average... and all three of those populations are shrinking. As its voters pass away, it is not adequately replenishing its base with an equal or greater amount of younger voters. The racial demographics of the country are also shifting, and the country as a whole is identifying less with the various Christian religions (both non-Christian and "unaffiliated" are growing).
Its position on various issues is also growing more out of sync with the general public (e.g. public opinion polls now show 60% of Americans support gay marriage, up from 27% in 1995).
Without some significant changes to the platform, all the gerrymandering in the world isn't going to hold back that tide.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: You guys are nuts. There's no sign that the Republican party is collapsing any time soon.
I know there are warning signs in the near term years that look rough for them, but they aren't going to disintegrate any time soon. They still have a chance to win at national politics in 2016 if they play their cards right. And unless Dems can win back state houses they have a lock on Congress for another 15 years at least.
Remember that my prognostications are looking 20+ years into the future. The only parts of this that are likely to be a 'stark' or 'sudden' realization would be those points where pundits start saying "Now that <CONDITION X>, how can the Republicans ever win the Presidency again?"
(because they can't anymore)
(because the only demographic that floats the GOP to national viability is approaching an average age of 70)
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Everything else is going to be a general demographic wearing of the bastions. Their relevance in legislative will slowly wane, they will start losing some state governments here and there until the ones they have left are either the really red states and/or the ones that they have locked down the voting representation on.
None of this is really nuts as long as you understand exactly what my prediction is and what it is based on!
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