So, Donald Trump is sticking by the campaign manager Handsy McGrabber Corey Lewandowski (because at this point, who else could run Trump's campaign--pfft!) and has torn up his pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee if it for some crazy reason isn't Himself.
In other words, things are going quite normally for this primary, from the looks of it. After all, you can't expect a candidate with an intense loathing for journalists (except for the good-looking people, and you know who you are) not to stand by a fellow willing to throw himself on a pen grenade, and you can't expect a fabulous great deal-maker to stick to a contract he was always gonna wrangle out of.
Once again--the GOP knew what he was when they picked him up.
4 comments:
Greetings, Vixen. In fairness you have to admit that all 3 candidates have reneged on their promise to support the Republican candidate. As you know, I think both political parties should be scrapped, and the conduct of candidates on both sides only reinforces this view.
Remarkably enough, Democrats and the Republican establishment both seem to be temporarily on the same side when it comes to Donald Trump. This is the first time I can remember Democrats and Republicans being in concert on a candidate. This has got to be the strangest election I've had the ill fortune to keep at arm's length. The Republican establishment is now spending some huge sum to attack their own front runner. We have other candidates who no longer have a path to achieving the magic number, and they are acting as if they are every bit as viable as the front runner, who they also attack. It's really bizarre. When was the last time you saw the Republican Party attacking the favored Republican candidate?
But they also despise Ted Cruz, so simply because they are attacking their own front runner, it does not mean they mean to make allowances for the man in second place. In fact, there was a lot of talk of fielding a candidate arrived at through political manipulation at the convention. Is there any wonder I think political parties should be scrapped?
It should be mentioned that Hillary Clinton is an extremely lackluster candidate who already has all the delegates wrapped up while a facade of a race goes on with Bernie Sanders. And so the Democratic process is also completely bizarre.
This aggregate that we refer to as the “Republican establishment” seems to have enormous difficulty understanding Trump's popularity. This is strange. I live in a red border state, and no one has any trouble whatsoever understanding Trump's popularity. Frankly, a Democrat could have campaigned on the same ideas about the borders, and they would have been as popular as Trump.
And the “journalist class” doesn't understand why Trump has his popularity. They don't understand why people resonate to his message, and so they can only conclude that Trump supporters are stupid, malicious nutcases. And the Republican establishment is in agreement with them (about their own front runner).
You may recall who the beat generation were – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Bukowski, etc., etc. I can explain the Trump phenomenon by something that was said about them:
“Woe be unto those who spit upon the beat generation.
For the wind
Will blow it back.”
With Trump, I think the message he makes doesn't sail over the heads of the journalist class, but his efficacy as a messenger of it. That there is an anti-immigration strain on the right isn't a new thing--much of what Trump has said on a number of issues has an identifiable place in the values of a lot of folks.
What bewilders political observers I think is mostly that he doesn't seem to have a deep understanding of policy itself--he knows what his audience wants, but the devil is in delivering the details.
I have piece I've been batting about regarding Clinton/Sanders about the value of "outsider" cred and the language of revolution, but much of my jist is--the question before us really is whether there is a value in the political party or not. My basic premise is, even if we don't totally love it, democracy requires collective action, and gives the utility. It's up to the people of that party to give it meaning, though.
Vixen, my idea is for the parties to continue to exist, but I would assign them to a category just like any other political lobbyist or affection group. In other words, the parties could contribute to candidates and lobby them just as any other group. So I would not put them out of business; I would simply have a degree of separation between them and politicians. So your average psychopathic politician would not have to run as a Democrat or Republican and could stake out positions on issues that today would not be permitted because of the party system. In conversations I rarely find this mythical Republican or Democratic purist when they are asked their views on a wide range of issues.
I believe we will hear more policy speeches from Trump. I find some of his statements to be in entirely inclusive to the extent a person understands economics. I agree with them that taxes on corporate profits made overseas should be lowered to allow corporations to bring trillions of dollars back into the United States. At the moment corporate inversion forces a responsible CEO to keep anywhere from $2 to $6 trillion overseas to avoid taxes if they were to bring the money back home. I also agree that tariffs need to be put on American companies who wish to establish their factories in China or Mexico to take advantage of cheap labor. Every factory that leaves the United States kills jobs and opportunities for desperate American families. Trump has written a book in which he addresses a great many economic issuers more thoroughly than most politicians could grasp. Something like a 114 pages had to be cut simply to shrink the size of the book.
I am in agreement with Trump; there is no anti-immigrant sentiment. There is anti-illegal immigrant sentiment. Let me offer and example from my own experience. Where we live illegals are commonplace. So are the category of illegals called dreamers. Now we are as much in favor of cracking down on illegals entering the US as anyone you could talk with. At the same time, we have also intentionally intervened on behalf of some dreamers to try and help establish permanent residency in one form or another in the United States. One girl, Alina, came to the US when she was 6 years old. Finally her visa ran out. I even asked her when she was graduating from high school, “Alina, do you even speak Spanish?” Another time I gently and tactfully inquired, “Are you a Roman Catholic?” She replied, “I'm a Baptist.” We did what we could, and now she is a permanent resident.
We have to stop forcing labor costs down by allowing businesses to use illegals' labor. Corruption from the 7 drug cartels that are more ruthless than the early days of the American mafia is insinuating itself in border state towns. ISIS cooperates with some of those cartels in the same way the Shining Path used to cooperate with American street gangs. I am completely in agreement with Trump that this situation needs to be ended permanently.
So you can see even with the immigration situation it's not as simple as people make it who are looking to score political points through simplistic propaganda. We have talked with an educated Hispanic woman living in a border town who told us cartel members have come to her and said, “If there is anything you want done, let us know,” on the basis that her kids go to school with the children of cartel members. It is a dangerous, dangerous situation.
I will say, Formerly Amherst, that I'm sympathetic to any dialogue on immigration that gets beyond rhetoric and addresses that we are talking about people's lives--like the life of Alina and other young immigrants and the livelihoods of people in border states who feel threatened by an influx of cheap labor and the lives that are often carelessly wasted in both drug wars, and the war on drugs. I have always held that cracking down on industries like agriculture and meat packing that make a lot of exploitative use of undocumented workers to skirt US labor laws could only be better for workers' rights because it would create better openness about things like safety practices and wage theft--which undocumented people aren't going to raise a stink about because they are already in a precarious situation. This thing where businesses rely on cheap labor has always bothered me because it commodifies human life. Workers are people, and people aren't work units. Because we don't address immigration head-on, we allow exploitation to continue. Yes, immigrants are allowed here and make money and they come and go. But we need to question whether that is an overall good--for them and for US workers.
I'll admit that one of the things I somewhat rue is my early support of NAFTA--I believed then that a lifting standard of work and trade would be beneficial enough to Mexico to erase some of the problems with undocumented workers. If they could get good, livable wages there, why even come here? I thought the free market system, with just the right amount of regulation, would do more than it actually did. But as it is today, we have zero or negative net immigration--but that statistic strikes me as peculiar--does that just mean folks don't come up like they did before--or does that mean they come and don't stay? Are they actually, in Mitt Romney's words, already "self-deporting" because they aren't comfortable here? Because I know Obama stepped-up deportations for a very long while.
The current GOP propaganda makes me value GWB's attempt at comprehensive immigration reform a little better. He seemed to grasp that there was a "compassionate conservative" answer we just weren't getting at. What GWB was trying for would be a lot more acceptable I think to Democrats than what any presidential candidate would even try for today.
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