Is anybody watching this republican debate?

That’s the first debate I’ve watched from start to finish. Brilliant theatre. I am surprised nobody threw an octopus onto the stage. I’m hearing that Jerry Springer is going to moderate the next debate.

This is bad for the Republicans. Boy, oh boy, I hope we get a floor fight at the convention.

zn wrote:

Zooey wrote:

This is bad for the Republicans. Boy, oh boy, I hope we get a floor fight at the convention.

Well, are you sure republican voters think that?

They could be fine with it.

I’m not sure I know what ANYBODY thinks. That’s why this election has more drama for me as a spectator compared to most of them, and why I’m on a message board trying to get into conversations about what other people are seeing.

The quote you put up is by a Trump supporter. A diehard supporter who saw Trump clean up in the debate. I have not hit the news yet this morning – coming here first as is my habit – but last night all the TH (Talking Heads) were saying Trump lost and that Bush was the victor. Which I thought was interesting in itself because I saw no difference between Trump last night and the Trump was declared a victor in previous debates. He wasn’t “exposed,” or embarrassed the way Rubio was last time. And the dude plastered Bush with several body blows on Iraq. And he got away with denouncing Cruz as a Fat Liar. Rubio was much better this time, Bush was okay, Carson is dead and basically forgotten, and it looked to me like….

Well, here’s where I speculate. Rob Proud American would be happy to have the convention look like that debate, I suppose. But the “establishment” Republicans certainly don’t. They want to win the White House, and I think the party is going to suffer badly if Trump wins the nomination, or if there is an ugly floor fight that ends with an establishment nominee at Trump’s expense. I think there is a possibility that there will be voter defections: either vote for someone else, or stay home. And so I speculate that the establishment is now starting to impose their establishment views without restraint. They are now starting to say that Trump lost. The establishment can’t let this continue. They can’t have a different candidate every time take first or second place while Trump stays up there in first or second place. They anti-Trump wing of the party has to coalesce quickly around somebody, or else. IMO, Trump doesn’t ever get more popular. Every possible Trump supporter is already on board. Nobody – imo – has Trump as their 2nd choice if their first choice drops out. That’s the thing. He has 1/3 of the Republican party, and that’s it. The people who want a bull in the china shop are already lined up behind him.

And independents…they aren’t going to support a bloody and bruised candidate that emerges from a messy convention.

I think the Republicans are in a very bad position right now, and here they are lining up to filibuster whomever Obama nominates to replace Scalia. They aren’t going to look good doing that if Obama nominates someone without some glaring vulnerability. It’s going to look like partisan politics – which it is – and I don’t think the Republicans have a shot at the White House anyway at this point. Fighting the appointment…I mean, seriously, I think this could have impact going well down the party. I think there is the possibility of wide defections, and significant defeat for the Republicans.

The Republicans are divided right now. You can say that the Democrats are divided, too, and you would be right. But they aren’t headed towards a gang fight like the Republicans are.

I am as “into” it as I have been since W finally left office. I have been taking a vacation from politics to a large extent post-Bush since I was worn out, and also because I pretty much expected mainstream Cruise Control under Obama which is what we got. But at least he wasn’t out doing abnormally sociopathic things like W.

But I am intrigued by this election. The establishment people are facing rejection by a large number of voters. This is the storyline. Both Rs and Ds are pissed at the establishment – as they have been for a long time – but this time is different. There are large numbers in each party that are demanding changes to the status quo. The shit-stirrers are the candidates with passionate followings. They may still lose out, but the threat is real, and I think is going to have consequences.

I had hoped with Obama – best case scenario – that he could be transformative in the way that Reagan was. That he could start the pendulum swinging back away from conservative excesses. He wasn’t. But he may have at least put brakes on the rightward swing.

The establishment Rs are getting zero love. One of them may still win, but it will clearly be because he is not Donald Trump more than because he is inspiring.

Hillary has some love, but there’s no passion. The only sign of passion coming out of her campaign is coming from her supporters attacking Sanders’ followers with all the petulance of someone who feels like some kids cut in line in front of her.

The passion squares up behind Sanders and Trump only. They are the ones promising changes in the system, and come across as honest rather than calculated. Hillary just isn’t able to fire anyone up with her rallying cry of “Hey, I can make incremental progress!” and the Rs are all just making each other look completely unfit for the Oval Office.

Something is happening here. And it may get swallowed up under the SuperPACs in the long run, but the establishment needs to take control of this by the first week of March, or there are going to be fireworks this summer and into the Fall.

I’ve never liked O’Rourke. Yeah, he’s a rightie libertarian, a group that as a leftie libertarian myself, I would think I would have more affinity for, but of all possibilities in the political spectrum, I find rightie libertarians to be the most annoying by far. I wonder where they are going this election with Paul long gone. Kasich, I guess.

To the rest of the world Donald Trump seems like a joke. And, please, let’s hope he is. Trump is a prank the American electorate is pulling on the American political establishment.

Like many jokes, Trump is a manifestation of discomfort and anxiety.

This is Karl Rove’s and Roger Ailes’ cynicism having now grown large enough to bite the Republicans in the ass. They have deliberately seeded anger, resentment, and fear through Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Beck, O’Reilly, and the FOX news network in order to line up this voting bloc, and guess what? They now have a fully grown angry, resentful, and xenophobic group of voters on their hands who are dissatisfied with all the empty promises. The hardline cultural conservatives are feeling the same way. For more than 30 years, the corporate politicians have been giving lip service to abortion and gays and illegal immigration and Big Government et cetera, and then not doing much of anything about it. Those people are pissed now. Trump isn’t a joke. He is the embodiment of the disenfranchisement of the uneducated white males who have been deliberately targeted with this propaganda and USED by the Republican party to support their money grab for the 1%. They seeded this monster, fertilized it, and used it for decades to consolidate their rigging of the economic system, and now that bloc is getting out of control and demanding delivery of these crackpot solutions they’ve been sold as reasonable solutions.

Interestingly, FOX News itself has a fault line trembling through the middle of it right now. Murdoch is trying to line up succession both to himself and to Ailes, and it isn’t going well. Ailes ended up getting a contract extension, but he is reportedly much more scattered these days, and FOX isn’t receiving a clear cut set of marching orders like it used to. That’s part of the reason why FOX hasn’t delivered a clear Trump message. FOX is for Rubio, evidently, but without a Trump plan, it is floundering. There is also a schism between the News side and the Programming/business side with the leaders of those two divisions openly hating each other and rarely speaking, and publicly exemplified by the little cat fight between George Will and Bill O’Reilly. FOX is more likely to repair their rift than the Republican party is, but the conservative branches in this country are starting to turn on each other, and that can only be good for the country.

TSRF wrote:

O’Rourke has always struck me as a raging alcoholic. Also, a “glass half full” type to be sure; a little prick who is never happy with anyone or anything. I just thought it interesting that he does Op Ed’s on BBC. I think it is important at times to get an outside view of what goes on here, not that he is an outsider, but he didn’t write this for us, he wrote it for the rest of the world.

I used to read “The Economist” whenever I could, and bought an issue before my trip to CA a few weeks ago.

If you think most Americans think the current race is loopy, you can only imagine what the Europeans think…

Zooey is right, this is a train wreck in slow motion…

Yeah, I think O’Rourke has always fancied himself to be the guy at the Exclusive Gentleman’s Club who is seen as the offbeat iconoclast with the witty bon mot. An Insider positioning himself as a Freethinking Outsider.