Quoting Craig Sanders (cas@taz.net.au):
I kind of hope that Trump does somehow win the Republican nomination.
Oh, from my own perspective, I _certainly_ do, as he's far more certain of defeat than are his two current rivals. (I say 'current' because, again, a contested convention would re-open the GOP selection process to include anyone at all.) For the past seven years of the Obama administration, the USA Republican Party has gotten so crazy that it's literally attempted, with partial success, to prevent the Executive Branch (i.e., the Presidency) from functioning. One hope for the 2016 general election is that a massive defeat might induce in the Republicans some introspection and reform, or alternatively a splintering of that party and electoral realignment. But if on the other hand they double down and get crazier, it'll be enough if they lose not only the Presidency but also their current Senate voting margin -- as appears likely according to polls. They would then have greatly reduced ability to sabotage the workings of government, and most critically no more ability to totally block US Supreme Court and other Federal judicial appointments. I'll happily settle for them sentencing themselves to four years howling in the outer wilderness. And all of this madness over Obama, who by a fair estimation of policy has been what one would normally call a moderate Republican -- rather like Bill Clinton before him. Mr. Clinton also drove them into irrational rage, as you may remember, but nothing like Obama. But then, Obama is black. My late mother warned me on that matter. In June 2007, she knew that my wife Deirdre and I were intending to vote for Obama in California's primary election, while she was voting for Hillary Clinton. She said, 'You don't understand. They'll never let him do the job.' She was quite right. We really didn't anticipate the depth of that. Opposing the duly elected President because he was the wrong race in 2008? Who knew? Well, Mom did, and Deirdre and I did not. It surely isn't just the race thing; the craziness is multifaceted. And I see that you got into a futile brief debate with Russell about the meaning of the word 'conservative'. It really _does_ have a fluid and highly contested meaning in USA politics. So does 'liberal', 'right wing', 'left wing', and a number of others.[1] I'll just leave these two links out here: http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2004/12/i-miss-republicans.html I Miss Republicans. No, seriously. Remember Republicans? Sober men in suits, pipes, who'd nod thoughtfully over their latest tract on market-driven fiscal conservatism while grinding out the numbers on rocket science. Remember those serious-looking 1950's-1960's science guys in the movies -- Republican to a one. They were the grown-ups. They were the realists. Sure they were a bummer, maaaaan, but on the way to _La Revolution_ you need somebody to remember where you parked the car. I was never one (nor a Democrat, really, more an agnostic libertarian big on the social contract, but we don't have a party ...), but I genuinely liked them. How did they become the party of fairy dust and make believe? How did they become the anti-science guys? The anti-fact guys? The _anti-logic guys_? [...] http://thefederalist.com/2016/04/04/yes-the-alt-right-are-just-a-bunch-of-ra... Yes, The Alt-Right Are Just a Bunch of Racists Hey, lefties, we finally found your racists for you. For as long as I can remember, people like me—by which I mean advocates of capitalism and free markets and freedom of speech—have been accused by the left of being secret racists who pine for the gold old days of the antebellum South. Tiresome stuff like this. [link] Then along comes a group of actual, declared racists who really do pine for the antebellum South, and who is one of the main targets of their invective? People like me. Kind of ironic, eh? I’m talking about the so-called “alt-right,” which stands for “alternative right,” though I can’t find anything particularly “right-wing” about them —- not in the American sense, which has traditionally meant advocacy of free markets, individual rights, and the ideals of our Founding Fathers. Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing that we even have to debate this, but by launching his campaign on a “Mexican immigrants are rapists” [link] platform, Donald Trump brought the alt-right out of the woodwork. And that has led to a couple [link] of efforts [link] recently to run interference for the alt-right, describing them in sympathetic terms. That’s not going to fly, for five reasons. [...] Meanwhile, keep an eye on http://fivethirtyeight.com/ . (This is Nate Silver's site. Ignore the sports neepery and heed the politics statistical analysis. The name FiveThirtyEight derives from the number of Electors in the USA Electoral College, calculated as: 435 for members of the House of Representatives, 100 for Senators, and three representing the District of Columbia. Silver is the man who has correctly modelled and predicted every major election since 2007, infuriating the pundits who consistently got predictions wrong and were paid to do so.) [1] It pains me that the term 'socialist', however, is seen as a kiss-of-death political shibbleth by people who cannot grasp the concept of a mixed economy and that the only fully 'capitalist' state on Earth is, perhaps, Somalia or some similar failed-state hellhole. I am, accordingly, voting for Sanders not in the expectation of him winning either the Democratic Party nomination nor the November general election, but rather in hopes he will have greater influence at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia in July -- and perhaps make Hillary's policies involve a tiny bit less warmongering and kowtowing to business interests.