When Bros Turn Foes, It's a Sad Thing

Opinion | thepilot.com

You know, it’s always sad when guys who should rightfully be best buddies start feuding. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin. Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. It just breaks your heart, you know?

The latest bros-turned-foes tragedy happened recently when presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump fell out. Some of us remember the halcyon days when all of the appalling harlequins who’d recently staggered out of the Republican Klown Kar were sniping at each other. But not Ted and Donald.

As far back as last July, Cruz declined an invitation on “Meet the Press” to bash The Donald: “I like Donald Trump. He’s bold, he’s brash. … it seems the favorite sport of the American media is to encourage some Republicans to attack other Republicans. I ain’t gonna do it.”

Trump, for his part, reciprocated. “I like him,” he said of Cruz in September. “He likes me. He’s backed me 100 percent. Ted Cruz was out there and he really backed me very strongly, and I always respected that.”

Then the bromance began to unravel. The New York Times, like a troublemaking Mean Girl, reported that Cruz had questioned Trump’s “judgment” at a private fundraiser in December. Trump shot back on Fox News Sunday, claiming that nuh-UH, it was Cruz who lacked the “temperament” to be president and that he dealt with the Senate like “a bit of a maniac.”

Then he played the birther card by bringing up Cruz’s Canadian birth. Maybe it didn’t actually disqualify him, Trump said, but who wants a candidate who “could be tied up in court for two years” litigating the issue? Cruz shot back by noting that it was Trump whose Real Americanism was suspect because he represented “New York values,” to which Trump replied “9/11. So there.”

At that point, it was, as they say, on. A feud erupted that, for sheer intensity, rivaled the one between the above-referenced Fred and Barney when Barney voted for Joe Rockhead instead of Fred for Grand Poo-bah of the Water Buffalo Lodge.

I’d thought the mudslinging had reached its nadir when Trump responded to a Utah anti-Trump group’s publication of semi-nude photos of Mrs. Trump by taking to Twitter and threatening to “spill the beans” on Cruz’s wife, Heidi (whatever the heck that meant). Donald shot back by Tweeting a picture of Mrs. Cruz (who, for the record, is actually rather attractive) caught in a most unflattering grimace.

But, as with so many things about this election, just when you think they’ve hit rock-bottom, the GOP candidates call for the jackhammers. On the eve of the make-or-break Indiana primary, Trump basically claimed Cruz’s father (who, for the record, is actually bat-spit insane) was an unindicted co-conspirator in the death of John F. Kennedy. His source was a story in the National Enquirer that purported to show a picture of the senior Señor Cruz passing out pro-Castro pamphlets in New Orleans alongside Lee Harvey Oswald a few days before the assassination.

Cruz, as you might expect, completely lost what was left of his mind, raging that Trump is a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” and a “serial philanderer” who “describes his own battles with venereal diseases as his own personal Vietnam.”

All totally true, of course. But sadly, Cruz’s meltdown, however truth-based, availed him nothing. He took a drubbing of epic proportions in Indiana, leaving Trump nearly alone at the top of the smoldering garbage fire this primary process has reduced the Republican Party to. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a hardline right-winger who only looked sane and reasonable because of the whackaloons he was standing next to, exited as well.

So, with the contest all but over, the burning question is: Will these former pals be like Fred and Barney and make up by the end of the show? Or will they be like Martin and Lewis, not speaking for 20-plus years before coming to a surprise reunion and reconciliation on a telethon?

Well, the morning after the Indiana primary, I woke up to hear the New Face of the GOP talking about how his former enemy was no longer “Lyin’ Ted,” but was instead a “tough, smart guy” with a “great future.” So, hopefully, we’ll soon see the “serial philanderer” and the “maniac” hugging it out. Then they can get back to taking the Republican Party over a cliff.

The Return Of Lord Mitt

 Opinion | thepilot.com

It seems that Lord Mitt the Earl of Romney, that clumsily programmed candidate-droid who led his party to crushing defeat and cruelly denied Mitch McConnell his dream of making Barack Obama a one-term president, is now volunteering to save the Republicans from their rapidly escalating civil war.

First, Lord Mitt called upon front-runner Donald Trump to release his tax returns, suggesting there would be some sort of “bombshell” in there that would doom the Trump candidacy.

Ponder that for a moment. Mitt Romney, who fought tooth-and-nail to avoid releasing his own tax returns, is now demanding, apparently with a straight face, that Donald Trump release his. Irony isn’t just dead, it threw itself off a seaside cliff in despair.

The Earl then gave a scathing anti-Trump speech in Salt Lake City.

“Donald Trump,” Lord Mitt said, “is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing members of the American public for suckers.”

All completely true, of course, but again, Mitt Romney is charging someone else with being a phony? Upon hearing this, Irony raised its broken body from the rocks upon which it had thrown itself and dragged itself sobbing into the sea to drown.

Trump, for his part, immediately found the video of Romney thanking Trump for his endorsement and began declaring that Romney would have “gone down on his knees” if The Donald had demanded it as the price of his backing. 

That Donald. So classy. My Republican friends (and I do have some) are just so very proud that this man is the face of their party right now.

Actually, it should surprise no one that Romney has changed his position, both on Trump and on the issue of tax returns.

This is, after all, a man who, in 2012, demonstrated his ability to change his position on an issue literally within minutes, a man whose communication director said that a campaign was “almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again,” a man whose chief pollster said, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

Then came the news that “Romney for President Inc.” had filed paperwork with the FEC in February of this year. The Internet exploded with speculation, as the Internet is prone to do. Was Romney keeping his hand in with an eye toward stepping in to save the party from Trump at a so-called “brokered” or “open” convention?

After all, that kind of convention is looking more and more likely as Young Marco Robotto, Sen. Green Eggs and Ham and — oh, yeah, that Kasich guy — scrape together a few delegates here, a few there, and maybe enough to deny Trump a first-ballot victory, after which delegates will be free to vote for whomever they wish.

As always, if something on the Internet looks too perfect to be true, it most likely is.

Bradley Crate, the deputy CEO of the Romney for President campaign, went on Twitter to inform the curious that it was just a required change-of-address form filed by his company, Red Curve Solutions.

Romney himself says he has no plans to don the red nose, strap on the big shoes, and join the denizens of the Republican Clown Car in their Carnival of Buffoonery. Or so he says now. See “Etch A Sketch,” above.

Mitt has, however, recorded robo-calls for both Kasich and Rubio, which is sure to make him even more adored among the Republican electorate. Because, after all, who doesn’t love being robo-called at dinnertime by the guy who got his butt kicked last time?

To tell the truth, I don’t think a Romney Rescue will happen. For one thing, I don’t think the Lord loves the Democrats enough to give them Mitt Romney to run against again. If Mitt Romney is going to be the savior of the GOP, then they just ain’t making saviors like they used to.

Still, at the chaos that would be certain to ensue at a brokered convention, all bets will be off. Will we see elderly Republican delegates in funny state-themed hats brawling in the aisles of the Quicken Loans Center in Cleveland? Will there be a mass walkout of Angry Trumpistas as the desperate Republican Establishment tells the voters what’s good for them?

 Well, we live in hope.

Way Too Interesting

 Opinion | thepilot.com

So now Donald Trump, the red-faced, bellowing bully who’s taken the Republican Party by storm, has won New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — and now seems unstoppable in his quest to lead his party to the most crushing general election defeat in modern history this November.

It appears that all of us have fallen under the old curse “may you live in interesting times.” Because our nation’s political life has gotten way too interesting, and I’m thinking it’s going to get worse.

It’s already interesting that many of the same people who sniff disdainfully about liberals “calling people names” are cheering loudly for someone who’s made it the primary tactic of his campaign.

It’s already interesting that many of the same people who’ll have an attack of the vapors if someone says a swear word on TV or posts one on the Internet are supporting a man who says he’ll “bomb the [bad word] out of ISIS” and who gleefully repeats a vulgar slur over the microphone when one of this supporters uses it against one of his opponents.

It’s interesting that the people who have made Planned Parenthood their new bogeyman and who have demanded it be defunded and shut down are now lining up behind the man who said, out loud and in public, that that organization has done “some very good work.”

It’s interesting that the people who claim to honor the sanctity of marriage are so enamored of a man who left his first wife after a well-publicized affair with another woman, who then married and divorced said woman, and who is now married to a third woman 24 years his junior.

It’s interesting that the people who screech about Hillary Clinton’s “lies” are backing a man who claims that he wrote in 2000 that “we needed to take Osama bin Laden out” (he didn’t), a man who claims “our president wants to take in 250,000 from Syria” (the actual number is closer to 10,000), a man who claims the actual unemployment rate is “probably 28, 29, as high as 35. …. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent” (even the highest measure of unemployment isn’t a quarter of that, and that measure — the so-called “U6,” which counts even the people who are working part time as unemployed — is the lowest it’s been since 2008).

The fact-checking site Politifact reports that it looked at “more than 70 Trump statements and rated fully three-quarters of them as Mostly False, False or ‘Pants on Fire,’” a designation they use for “a claim that is not only inaccurate but also ridiculous.”

Frankly, I don’t know how anyone can listen to a Trump supporter talk about Hillary Clinton’s “lies” without laughing in their face. I certainly can’t.

But I suspect the interesting times have just begun.

It’s going to be interesting when the people who completely flipped out when First Lady Michelle Obama wore a dress that exposed her bare arms try to tell us that it’s no big deal when Mr. Trump’s prospective first lady’s nude and semi-nude pics from her modeling career begin popping up on the Internet. (Actually, it’s already begun. Or so I hear.)

It’ll be interesting when the people who’ve jeered at the idea that American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens died because George W. Bush lied about WMDs to get us into the Second Iraq War throw their support behind the man who got on a debate stage on Feb. 13 and said exactly the same thing.

It’s going to be interesting when the people who were outraged at the idea that the Dear Leader Dubbya didn’t “keep us safe” because 9/11 happened on his watch, people who demanded that anyone who said such a thing be silenced, start waving flags at the Republican Convention in support of someone who said exactly that.

What’ll be most interesting if and when the GOP nominates Donald J. Trump to be president will be watching that party finally reveal itself as the party its most strident detractors have always claimed it is: a party not of conservative values, but of authoritarian ones. A party of hypocrites with no principles whatsoever other than “Us Good, You Bad.” A party of bigots, racists, willfully ignorant know-nothings, war-mongering imperialists, rage-junkies, paranoids, and brutal thugs for whom Vladimir Putin’s “my way or the gulag” style of governance is something to be admired and emulated.

That’s more interesting than I’d like to see things get, actually, but it looks like those are the interesting times in which we’re living.

Trying to Make Sense of Iowa

 thepilot.com, Sunday Feb 7, 2016:

After months of hype and hoopla, after endless hours of bickering and balderdash, the first primary-ish contest of the 2016 elections is over.

The aftermath of the Iowa Caucuses provided political junkies with some surprises and caused the rest of the country (aka “the sane people”) to experience the terrifying realization that this horror show that’s been playing out on their TVs and the Internet for the past several months isn’t over. It has, in fact, just begun.

At least there was some winnowing of the crowded field of candidates, even if it there weren’t as many casualties as we might have hoped.

Before midnight, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (or as I affectionately refer to him, “Who?”) finally experienced a moment of clarity and dropped out of the race. He was soon followed on the Republican side by Mike Huckabee, who’ll probably be either returning to a spot on Fox News or touring with Ted Nugent; and by Rand Paul.

One of the night’s big surprises was the upset victory of former Canadian Ted Cruz over Donald Trump. Guess running away from a female anchor because she was mean to him didn’t work as well as Trump thought.

Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler told “The PBS Newshour” that the victory happened because Cruz was “the original outsider, the proven outsider” in the race, despite being a sitting member of Washington’s most elite club, the United States Senate.

Perhaps Mr. Tyler is confusing “outsider” with “outcast,” because the general consensus is that the majority of the people who have known Cruz personally, in or out of Washington, utterly loathe him. Forget working “across the aisle” — this guy can’t even work with his own party. How he expects to get anything done as president under these circumstances is a mystery.

The near-universal detestation of Sen. Green Eggs and Ham among his party’s establishment gave fellow senator Marco Rubio, who came in third, his opening to position himself as the non-crazy candidate who can beat Hillary Clinton.

Rubio, however, is vulnerable on the Republican hot-button issue of immigration, since he supported an immigration reform bill that was called “amnesty” by people who have no idea what that word actually means. Unfortunately, that group includes the entire right wing of the Republican Party.

It also apparently included Marco Rubio, as Fox News’s Megyn Kelly pointed out in the Trumpless Republican debate when she played a clip of Rubio saying, “An earned path to citizenship is basically code for amnesty” two years before supporting a bill that called for just such an earned path to citizenship. Pressed by Ms. Kelly, poor Marco was reduced to babbling, “I do not support amnesty, I do not support amnesty” over and over.

Ms. Kelly also pointed out that Mr. Cruz has a similar problem because he introduced an amendment to the bill that wouldn’t allow citizenship, but would allow some sort of legal status. In a party where hatred of immigrants is a litmus test, these may prove to be crippling flaws.

The night’s biggest surprise, however, came on the Democratic side, where Sen. Bernie Sanders narrowed Hillary Clinton’s once double-digit poll advantages to the point where some precincts had to be decided by coin toss. (Yes, that’s a thing in Iowa. Caucuses are weird.)

According to the Des Moines Register, the final tallies netted Clinton 49.8 percent of “state delegate equivalents” on Monday, while Sanders claimed 49.6 percent of “delegate equivalents.” Please don’t ask me to explain “state delegate equivalents.” I’ve been trying to read the caucus rules, and my eyes are still bleeding. Just take my word for it that the Clinton lead was unexpectedly razor-thin.

How did it happen? Was it Clinton fatigue? Were Iowa voters worried about the “damn emails” story blowing up in the general election? Or did the Sanders campaign manage to excite Iowa Democrats who’ve been disgruntled for years with the timid Republican Lite stance of the party establishment and are willing to embrace an honest-to-God liberal who doesn’t feel the need to “triangulate” their positions or apologize for caring about things like income inequality and Wall Street malfeasance?

Now the campaigns and the eyes of the nation (well, some of them) move to New Hampshire, where Sanders is expected to win the Democratic primary handily, since he’s practically home folks.

After that, however, things get a little dicier for Bernie. South Carolina and Nevada are widely regarded as a lock for Clinton, due to the large minority turnout in both of those states. But then again, there was a time when Iowa was a lock for Clinton, too. Stay tuned …

Scott Walkback's Comedy Circus

 The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Scott Walker hasn’t been getting a lot of attention lately, even from the people who once touted him as a serious contender for the GOP nomination.

No one’s really paid a lot of attention to what he has to say, because let’s face it, when the circus (i.e., Donald Trump) is in town, no one wants to go to a boring lecture on policy. His poll numbers have been slipping into the low single digits, so it seems that Walker decided he needed to strap on his own clown shoes, stick on the big red nose, and get some attention from the hoopleheads.

First, he began suggesting to NBC’s Chuck Todd that maybe we don’t just need a fence on the southern border, to keep out the Brown Horde the Republicans have been using as the bogeyman in this election cycle. We may need one along the even longer northern border with Canada, to keep out the terrorists.

Asked, almost facetiously, by Todd about the possibility of a northern wall, Walker suggested with a straight face that that might be a fine idea.

“Some people have asked us about that in New Hampshire,” he said. “They raised some very legitimate concerns. … So that is a legitimate issue for us to look at.”

Doggone right. We really should look at putting up 5,525 miles of concrete, barbed wire and guard towers to keep those syrup-sucking back-bacon-eaters from pouring across our sacred northern borders and forcing single-payer health care and Rush albums down our throats.

Confronted with widespread derision, even from his own party, on the issue, Walker, fresh off his performance a couple of weeks ago in which he took three different positions on birthright citizenship in two days, began the Romneyesque tapdance of denial and evasion that’s caused me to begin referring to him as “Scott Walkback.”

“I never talked about a wall to the north,” he claimed, two days after he’d done exactly that.

Then Walker fell back on the time-honored tactic of, “Let’s find something terrible and horrifying and try to blame it on Barack Obama.” He pointed to the murders of police officers Darren Goforth  of Texas and Charles Joseph Gliniewicz of Illinois, and blamed the “disturbing trend of police officers being murdered on the job” on Obama’s “anti-police rhetoric.”

It should be noted that, as usual, Walker failed to provide any specific statements from the president that are “anti-police” or any evidence whatsoever that these terrible crimes were a result of anything other than plain criminality.

“This isn’t the America I grew up in,” Walker claimed.

Thing is, though, the America Walker grew up in was actually more dangerous for cops than it is now. There have been fewer shooting deaths of police officers during the Obama administration than there were at this point in the George Dubbya Bush administration, just as there were fewer shootings of cops under Dubbya than there were under Clinton.

The trend has been going down, significantly, for years. The Washington Post’s Radley Balko analyzed the numbers and found that “between 1971 and 1975, when Walker would have been between age 4 and 8, an average of 125 police officers were feloniously killed per year. Between 2006 and 2010, the average was 50. In 2013, just 27 officers were feloniously killed. In 2014, it was 51. So far this year, the number of cops killed with firearms is down 16 percent from last year. Two of those officers were killed by other cops.”

So why does it seem like there’s a big jump in people killing police officers when the actual number is trending down? The same reason we have a huge shark scare every summer. The sensation-driven national media can make anything look like an epidemic if they report every single instance of it as part of a “disturbing trend” — where before, the individual stories would have been left to local news.

The national media profit hugely on fear. And, not coincidentally, so do Republican demagogues like Walker. His only problem is that Trump’s doing it bigger, and with a total lack of boundaries or shame.

Maybe Walker can pull himself out of his slide. But if you’re going to try to get the spotlight off Trump, you gotta go big. You’ve got to do something to get the rubes excited. Maybe he could remind us of his track record in Wisconsin by punching a teacher in the face. Wingnuts hate teachers, but they hate Mexicans more. So find a Latino teacher to clobber.

Do that, Governor, and you can get back in there.

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: As he does nearly every week, Pilot commenter "Lenny Bo" can't wait to tell everyone how uninteresting he finds the column he reads every week:

Walker won't last another couple of months as his poll numbers are dropping fast - he will simply go back to being governor of Wisconsin.

Hey Dusty - how about a similar piece on Hillery - her poll numbers are dropping fast too. Plus she imitates Walker by saying one thing, then doing another (learned this from Bill), she flip-flopped on the emailgate scandal, the list goes on an on. In fact Dusty, if you think about it, there is plenty of material for a dozen pieces on 'ol Hillery.

Well, I've done quite a few pieces on Hillary Clinton, and I've managed to spell her name correctly. This is yet more evidence that wingnuts suffer from that weird kind of brain damage portrayed in the movie "Memento" where they can't form memories, since they're constantly bitching "Why don't you write about [insert obsession here]" when I already have.  It's the same form of brain damage that causes then to demand why President Obama hasn't said anything about violence to law enforcement officers when he has done so, repeatedly. 

A Constitutional Inconvenience?

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Right-wingers love to talk about how much they love the Constitution. But while they may love it, sometimes it seems like they don’t like it very much.

Bring up the protections of the Fourth through Eighth Amendments, and they’ll tell you that “we give too many rights to criminals.” They’re not all that crazy about the 16th Amendment, which establishes the government’s right to levy income taxes.

In fact, the only Amendment they seem to like is the Second, and they treat the first half of that (about the “well-regulated militia”) as if it were an embarrassing relative whom they don’t like to talk about very much.

The latest thing the wingnuts don’t like about the Constitution is the 14th Amendment, which provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

That “all persons” provision means that if you’re born here, you’re an American. Period. This Constitutional principle, commonly known as “birthright citizenship,” has become problematic for people who spend most of their waking hours terrified of the tide of Scary Brown People Who’ve Come to Take Our Stuff.

Donald Trump, as the current de facto leader of the Republican Party, brought the issue to the forefront. Following up on his famous “they’re rapists” comment, he laid out his plan for dealing with the estimated 11 million people already here illegally: “They have to go.”

Asked about what happens to those whose children were born here, Trump, a good family man if ever there was one, claimed we’d keep families together, but “they have to go.” When Bill O’Reilly pressed him on the question of deporting actual U.S. citizens, Trump blithely hand-waved away 147 years of 14th Amendment precedent, telling O’Reilly that “very good lawyers” had told him calling them citizens is “not going to hold up in court.”

Yes, folks, you heard right. The 14th Amendment, which clearly states that if you’re born here you’re a citizen won’t survive constitutional scrutiny, according to unidentified “very good lawyers.” In other words, Donald Trump apparently thinks the Constitution itself is unconstitutional.

This is, of course, utter claptrap, and deserving of nothing but scorn and derision. But since the majority of the Republican field are like rudderless sailboats that blow hither and yon in the wind that emanates from Donald Trump’s wherever, they began rushing to assure us that they, too, either didn’t believe in birthright citizenship at all or that they thought it needed to be done away with.

“We need to end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants,” Gov. Bobby Jindal’s campaign declared on Twitter. Dr. Ben Carson told Breitbart.com that “it doesn’t make any sense to me that people could come in here, have a baby and that baby becomes an American citizen.” Sen. Lindsey Graham took a moment off from gibbering about Islamic terrorists under everyone’s bed to say, “I think it’s a bad practice to give citizenship based on birth.”

Former Sen. Rick Santorum insists that we don’t have to amend the Constitution to do away with birthright citizenship. We “merely have to pass a law.” I guess this is true if by passing a statute we can change the literal meaning of the words “all persons born” to “all white persons born.”

For his part, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker seemed to be vying for the coveted Mitt Romney Ribbon for Campaign Weaselry. Walker told NBC reporter Kasie Hunt in response to a direct question that we should “absolutely” abolish birthright citizenship. Later, however, he said to CNBC he is “not taking a position on it one way or the other.” Still later, he took a third stance with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, answering “no” when asked if we should “repeal or modify” the 14th Amendment—but only after Stephanopoulos had asked him three times.

But remember folks: Only Democrats flip-flop. Republicans “evolve.” Walker’s “evolving” before our eyes like something that came out of an egg in a bad horror film.

I well remember the screaming tantrum the Republicans threw when it was revealed that Barack Obama once called the Constitution as originally written “an imperfect document … that reflects some deep flaws in American culture, the Colonial culture nascent at that time.”

He was, of course, talking about the way the original document embraced slavery as an institution, but from the way Rush Limbaugh and others reacted, you’d have thought the president had proposed using the sacred text to line the White House birdcage before setting it on fire.

Amazing, though, how disposable the beloved Constitution becomes when it comes to getting at the Scary Brown People — and their children. Principles you discard when inconvenient to your prejudices are not principles at all.

Rand Paul Is His Own Worst Enemy

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

So, it looks like another clown has exited the Republican circus car.

This week’s entry is the junior senator from Kentucky, Dr. Rand Paul, son of Ron, who threw his hat into the ring in a rally in Louisville. There he promised, as every presidential candidate who ever took the podium has promised, to “take the country back.”

The campaign then showed its modern-day tech savvy by going live on the day of the announcement with a spiffy new campaign website, where you can peruse the candidate’s views on subjects like “Eductation” (that’s how they spelled it).

You can also buy that all-important Rand Paul merchandise, such as a Rand Paul cornhole game, a campaign poster in the form of an eye chart (Dr. Paul’s an ophthalmologist) for only $20.16 (get it?); a blanket with a picture of the Constitution on it (only $75!); and if you’re still craving some of that Constitution-y goodness after a night’s slumber underneath a representation of our nation’s founding document, you can get the senator’s signature on a copy of the Constitution for only a thousand bucks.

So much for the sizzle. How about the steak? Well, if Sen. Paul hews as a presidential candidate to the same positions he’s espoused in the past, he may end up in a spot of trouble with primary voters.

Oh, sure, he hits some of the talking points beloved of the far right, such as a constitutional amendment to balance the budget and a flat tax. He never, of course, fully explains how both of those things can exist at the same time. But then, the libertarian right is known for its embrace of “magical thinking”: If we just believe hard enough, we can make two plus two equal five.

Paul also likes cutting spending, particularly spending on Those People. You know, the poor (working and otherwise), the sick, and of course, children whose parents can’t afford to send them to private schools. He’s proposed budgets that, among other things, eliminate most of the Earned Income Tax Credit; eliminate Section 8 housing vouchers and K-12 education funding; and slash the budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

But certain other positions of Dr. Paul are going to be, shall we say, problematic with the GOP base. For one thing, those budget proposals we just talked about would eliminate or drastically reduce all foreign aid — including aid to Israel. “I just don’t think you can give other people’s money away when we can’t rebuild bridges in our country,” he said in 2011.

While the right is all for cutting money for starving black or brown people in furrin lands, they’d cut out one of their own kidneys before they’d deprive Bibi Netanyahu of a single F16 or Iron Dome missile.

Which leads us to Sen. Paul’s defense and foreign policies. His proposed budgets included cuts in defense spending of as much as 30 percent, saying he wants “to reduce the size and scope of the military complex … to one that is more in line with a policy of containment.”

This is going to be anathema to neoconservative hawks who never saw a world problem they weren’t chomping at the bit to “bomb back to the Stone Age” before throwing someone else’s children at it, and for whom the word “containment” is the same as “appeasement.”

(Other words they equate with “appeasement” are “treaty,” “agreement,” “dialogue” and “negotiation” — pretty much any word other than “air strike,” “invasion” or “war.”) His perceived dovishness has led some on the right to begin mobilizing against Dr. Paul. “A group calling for a more hawkish U.S. policy on Iran is prepared to launch a $1 million ad campaign casting him as weak on the issue,” says an article in Politico.

On the campaign trail and in the debates, the Honorable Gentleman from Kentucky is going to find that the GOP may flirt with the type of small-government, low-spending libertarianism he claims to embrace.

But when the last dance is called, they’re going to be in the arms of the defense and Israel lobbyists. And, if by some miracle, Paul survives the primaries and gets the nomination, his budget radicalism will doom him in the general election.

Rand Paul is going to be another candidate who flares brightly and makes it to front-runner status for a week or two, then sputters out when people start using that status to actually take a look at him.

Poor sad clown.

The First Clown Out of the Car

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

It has begun. And I couldn’t be happier.

By “it,” I mean the Republican primary season, which got a surprise start this past Monday when Toddler-Terrifyin’ Ted Cruz followed up his epic speech in which he yelled at a 3-year-old that “your whole world is on fire!” in the only way possible: by forgoing the usual “exploratory committee” fundraising dance and announcing that he’s running for the presidency.

Why does this make me so happy? Because when you write the type of columns that I write, you greet the first announcement of a Republican candidacy with the same glee a circus-loving child feels when the first clown dances and struts his way into the center ring, only to be sprayed with water and knocked on his keister by a big-shoed, red-nosed rival. You just know there’s going to be a hilarious multi-clown free-for-all and big belly laughs ahead.

The first hand holding the metaphorical seltzer bottle directed at Sen. Cruz belonged to the only man in the field of prospective candidates who’s nuttier than Cruz himself, by which I mean the Bellowing Baron of Birtherism his own bad self, Mr. Donald Trump.

Trump, in a phone interview with MyFox New York, used the classic dodge of “I’m not making accusations, I’m just wondering” to try to cast doubt on Cruz’s eligibility to run: “He was born in Canada. If you know, and when we all studied our history lessons, you are supposed to be born in this country, so I just don’t know how the courts will rule on this.”

He also accused Cruz of stealing his lines.

“The line of ‘Make America great again,’ the phrase — that was mine. I came up with it about a year ago,” Trump said, “and I kept using it, and everybody’s now using it. … Maybe I should copyright it. Maybe I have copyrighted it.”

I have certainly enjoyed a major chuckle watching the zombified corpse of birtherism raised from the Earth by a Republican and sicced on one of his own kind. And I look forward to the day when everyone who uses the phrase “make America great again” gets a “cease and desist” letter from The Donald’s lawyers.

That’s what made this country great in the first place, after all: the monetization of patriotic sentiment. Which reminds me: I need to beef up my investments in companies that make flag pins. Never mind that they’re all in China now. But I digress.

Meanwhile, in another ring of the circus, the JEB! Bush campaign slipped on its first banana peel as former Secretary of State James Baker, who’s been an adviser to JEB! on foreign policy matters, had the temerity to criticize the right’s latest poster boy, Our Friend Bibi.

Baker, who was secretary of state for JEB!’s daddy, called OFB’s recent moves “diplomatic missteps and political gamesmanship” at an event for the liberal Jewish organization J Street. Predictably, this did not sit well with the people who love America so much that they’d rather see a foreigner like Netanyahu or even Vladimir Putin in charge of it.

“Bush can’t let Baker’s appearance at the J Street event go unremarked upon,” wrote Jonathan S. Tobin in Commentary magazine. “He must either explicitly distance himself from Baker’s appearance and from J Street’s support for Obama’s threats against Israel, or ask Baker to formally disassociate himself from his presidential effort.”

Other critics of Baker’s words included Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard — who, as we all know from reading our history, is always, always wrong.

“OK, OK,” the JEB! campaign said, and tried to do what the Israel hawks asked. They sent a mass email stating that JEB! “disagrees with the sentiments he [Baker] expressed last night and opposes J Street’s advocacy. Governor Bush’s support for Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu is unwavering.”

Not good enough, the Israel hawks cried.

“Bush’s statements remain generic, and his demeanor does not convey passion,” groused Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post’s “Right Turn” column. Apparently, nothing will satisfy the Pro-Israel Purity Police until JEB! hauls the elderly Baker up to the podium, gives him a vicious forehand-backhand slap and screams at him to “shut his filthy mouth” about OFB.

I tell you, folks, watching these people whack away at one another for the next few months is going to provide hours of the finest slapstick entertainment, not to mention fodder for a couple of dozen columns at least. The only way I could be happier is if Sarah Palin threw her hat back in the ring. … But no. That would be too much to hope for.

Stay tuned, and pass the popcorn. The debates are going to be epic.

Here Comes JEB!

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Recently, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (or JEB! as his campaigns have referred to him) announced that he would form a “Leadership PAC” in January to “actively explore the possibility” of running for president.

After the announcement of the Leadership PAC, JEB! also announced that he was resigning from every private and nonprofit board of directors he sits on, according to stories in Politico and The Washington Monthly. Severing himself from all those corporate ties (which took effect on the last day of 2014) gives him a chance to characterize any slimy or damaging corporate connections as “long in the past” by 2016.

This may seem a curious attitude from the party who will be trying frantically to hang the 1990s-era indiscretions of Bill Clinton around his wife’s neck, but then, no one demands consistency from Republicans. Certainly not the national media.

In politician-speak, all of this means: “I’m totally running, but to announce this early would seem crass.” After all, the last thing someone running for the most powerful job in the Free World wants to appear is ambitious.

While I’ll probably never agree with JEB! on a lot of issues, I’ll give him credit for being at least reasonable on things like immigration reform and Common Core. He’s also miles ahead of many members of this party on the environment, according to statements I’ve read from both Democrats and Republicans from Florida. In fact, JEB! Is now a candidate for my small list of sane Republicans.

That’s going to be a problem for him.

See, there are two things that really grind the gears of the far right: (1) any proposal for immigration reform more realistic than “put a giant electric fence on the border and ship every single illegal immigrant home tomorrow, including the toddlers”; and (2) Common Core, a system of national education standards that they don’t really know anything about, but which Fox News has assured them is the thin end of the wedge for Islamofascistcommiesocialism.

JEB!, however, has stated that illegal immigrants “broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love.” Oh, the heresy! He went on to say, “It shouldn’t rile people up that people are actually coming to this country to provide for their families.”

This is guaranteed not to sit well for those for whom “riled up” is their default state, especially when it comes to Those People.

As for Common Core, it’s been decried by other Republicans such as Jim DeMint, former senator and Heritage Foundation president, who says the standards “substitute an unaccountable federal bureaucracy for state, local and parental decision-making in education.” It has also been condemned by presidential hopefuls Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum. But JEB! has vowed to keep pushing it, calling the standards “good for the country.”

So by 2016, JEB! will have two choices. He can stick to his guns on immigration reform and Common Core and lose primary after primary to one or the other of the jokers who’ll keep popping out of the Republican Clown Car to be the front-runner for 15 minutes before imploding in a cloud of racism, misogyny, or bat-spit craziness. Or he can pull a Romney and try to run from things he once championed, to convince the raging right he’s one of them, and then lose the general because neither side trusts him.

So far, JEB! has shown an admirable tendency to take the first option. He’s even said he’s willing “to lose the primary in order to win the general.” How he hopes to win the general election without getting enough primary and caucus votes to get the nomination has not, however, been disclosed by his campaign. It’s probably some kind of top secret “strategery.”

Or possibly, the wingnuts will be able to choke back their bile over immigration and Common Core and embrace JEB! as the one most likely to beat Hillary Clinton. After all, as governor of Florida, he did do some things they love. He cut taxes, of course. He signed the Stand Your Ground law, which effectively legalized the killing of young black men if you could convince a jury you were scared enough of their hoodies and Mighty Black Fists of Doom. He ended affirmative action in state college admissions.

The Teahadists love that sort of thing and, if they can find it in their hearts to compromise, just a leeetle bit, on a couple of issues …

Wait. What I’m I saying? They’ll never do that. JEB! is toast.