Busy at work, busy fighting this lingering cold, busy watching politicians....
I watched some of the Republican runners-up debate last night, the Island of Misfit Toys, and even in that group, Vivek Ramaswamy stands out as a jerk. Yes, in a profession of largely jerks, in a party that has embraced boorish jerkness, amid a collection of alpha jerks, he was still an outstanding jerk. I wouldn't accept a free sample of snake oil from him, let alone a political idea.
The rest of 'em were all just what it's been saying on the label. Chris Christie still wants to be The Man Who Learned Better but he comes off as insincere -- New Jersey politicians don't stay bought but they're usually on the hook for the duration of the lease. Ron DeSantis still looks to me like six chickens in a human suit, Tim Scott appears to be a tent-meeting revival preacher who has blundered into a political convention by mistake and is going with it, and that leaves Nikki Haley, who almost looks like an old-time normie Republican until she reels off a few paragraphs of carefully memorized touch-the-base stuff.
Present evidence is they're all running for a footnote in the history books, something kids will have to memorize for tests for a few years before they fade away like Thomas A. Hendricks and Schuyler Colfax. Few of them will be around and still in politics by the 2028 contest -- if there is one.
Meanwhile, the two most likely contenders for 2024 are also very much what it says on the label -- a label that for both of them starts with "elderly men," and continues unflatteringly. Mr. Trump is way worse than Mr. Biden but I keep thinking we could surely do better. Last night's GOP debate only showed that we could do worse.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
6 comments:
What they're running for is one of two things. One is to be the person who gets the honor of cleaning up the GOP's mess in 2028, assuming that one of the Spawn of Trump doesn't try for it. The other is to be the person who steps in if Trump is convicted.
I see the second path as not viable, though. He'll run, even if it's from a jail cell.
My suspicion is that Vivek is only in the running to become Trump's running mate.
And sadly, we can expect more of this sort of nasty, Own Da Libs hard Right palaver as long as Trump is the Key Man of the GOP.
I suspect that it will take a couple of majorly lost elections for his cult to realize the dood is a major loser, and to stop aping his style. Kind of like how Hollywood needs a string of major flops before they stop beating a genre into the ground.
Joe, a lot of it isn't even anything I recognize as "hard Right." My parents were Republicans and Dad was a pretty stern one. His Pop had been active in party politics. Mom was a longtime Township Assessor, a political appointee under the County Assessor. They weren't super-hawks or nutters, but they stuck by GOP orthodoxy and the Trumpified Republicans are pretty unorthodox, not to mention just plain mean. I suspect we're on the brink of yet another upheaval in the U. S. party system; the country has seen at least a half-dozen since it began and perhaps we are overdue for another. But I don't know whaat we're going to end up with.
To my eyes, it's the 'hard Right' more in the European sense, the sort you see in the illiberal governments of Putin, Orban, or Erdoğan.
Sadly, too many of the Republican rank & file have either rejected the classic GOP principles of small & limited government, or never understood them in the fist place.
Can’t win a culture war with a small & limited government that respects individual liberties, amirite?
I saw someone's tweet or blog post positing -- based on actuarial tables alone –– that there's an 11% chance that one or both of the lead candidates will not make it to election day alive, merely on account of the number of past birthdays recorded for each.
For all the competing primary candidates that remain this far in, I think that their thinking is that if something (undefined) happens, they want to be in the 'obvious next' spot -- and if they don't keep in the spotlight now such that someone-else gets it, that then pushes their 'chance' to potentially 2032 if the other new guy ends up being popular enough to get a 2 terms.
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