Lindsey
Graham: Let me drop a RINO truth bomb on you about why we can’t win with Ted
Cruz as our nominee
POSTED AT 9:21 PM ON DECEMBER 3, 2015 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
Via the Blaze, someone on Twitter described this as Graham’s YOLO
moment. This speech, to the Republican Jewish Coalition, was supposed to be
about foreign policy but Cruz went on before him and I guess Grahamnesty had
finally had his fill of the “bold colors, not pale pastels” pitch. He got into
the race expecting to be hawkish artillery against the offensive from Rand Paul
and libertarians. That offensive never happened and he’s been floating through
the campaign ever since, sporadically attacking Trump, sometimes grumbling
about Cruz, mostly complaining that no matter what we’re doing to damage our international
enemies, we need to be doing much, much more.
Today that changed. Here’s nine full minutes of this guy tearing
into Cruz, specifically about his hard line on — what else? — immigration and
his preference for banning abortion without even an exception for rape. (Marco
Rubio holds that position on abortion too although he’s said he’d accept a law
with a rape exception if it meant limiting abortion for more conventional
pregnancies.) You can’t win an election that way, says Graham, to which Cruz
fans say: We’ll see. The beauty of nominating Cruz, even if you’re a Republican
who prefers someone else, is that it’d be as pure a test of the “bold colors,
not pale pastels” theory of winning elections since Ronald Reagan. In the 35
years since Reagan was nominated, no party nominee on either side has been as
ideologically dogmatic as Cruz is.
Which means nominating Cruz would be about as controlled an
experiment as our system could muster in how the electorate would react to a
committed full-spectrum ideologue on the ballot. If he lost, especially if he
lost badly, it would destroy the theory that the GOP’s problem in presidential
elections lately is nominating mushy centrists who don’t really stand for
anything. (That’s not how the loss would be spun by Cruz fans, of course — it
would be blamed on media sabotage or whatever — but that’s the lesson other
Republicans would draw.) Grahamnesty’s placing his bet now that if given a
choice between Cruz’s bold colors and Hillary’s pale pastels, the pastels win.
Prophet of doom is really the only role still open to him in the primaries, so
that’s the one he’s going to play.
Lindsey Graham: Let me drop a RINO truth bomb on you about why we can’t
win with pastel colours as our nominee, especially if that person is Lindsey
‘Let’s bomb everything, including Pluto!’ Graham.
Heck, even if Mizz Scarlett promenaded around all 46
counties in South Carolina in a dress made of Miss Ellen’s green, silk velvet
with gold fringe portieres, he’d still lose by a bloody landslide. He might
beat George Pataki and Jim Gilmore.
BTW, Lindz: The same exact crap was said by the GOPe,
especially the Bushes and their surrogates, of the 40th (or 39th if you buy
into the stupid Birtherism involving Chester B Arthur) President of the United
States of America, Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Let’s look at just a few of the things said about Reagan by
Greater GOPers than you:
* ‘He’s too conservative!’
(So were a lot of greats to which Graham will never measure up to)
* ‘He’s a radical!’
(Anything right of centre-left is
considered radical…Besides, remember when radical was chic?)
* ‘He’s a stickler when it comes to the
Constitution!’
(Treasonous bastard! ///)
* ‘He’ll upend the gravy boat in DC!’
(However will we pay our
kids’ tuition at St Paul’s, Exeter, Miss Porters?)
* ‘He’s an amiable dunce – unlike, say, our
brilliant 44th and his creased pants!/’
(Mr David Brooks, would
you please pick up the white courtesy phone? Mr Brooks, white courtesy phone,
please!)
* ‘His temperament is unsuited for the POTUS.
Can you imagine what would happen if he walked out on a Soviet leader at a
Summit?’
(Yeah, we win. They lose.)
* ‘He’ll
start WWIII!’
(But, he didn’t. Hell, he didn’t even start the arming of the Mujahedeen,
including Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan. President Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski did that on 3 July 1979 – ‘What is most
important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the
Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and
the end of the cold war?’)
* ‘Do you want his finger on the nuclear
button?’
(‘Cuz, like, um, ya know, the guy who
thought Poland was FREE! was in far better capacity of his mental facilities or
something)
* ‘He’ll take a meat cleaver to the Federal
budget and get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse!’
(Oh, don’t tease me, you shameless hussy!)
‘But several of his characteristics seemed to rule him
out as a serious challenger. One was his penchant for offering simplistic
solutions to hideously complex problems…We have very little in common…I
knew…that trying to satisfy these (right-wing) zealots would doom any general
election hopes.’
—
Former President Gerald Ford on Ronald Reagan and conservatives (I guess
Americans preferred to take a chance on ‘Our best days are ahead of us’ and ‘My
theory of war: We win. They lose.’ than on the unelected President, who
believed that ‘There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never
will be under a Ford administration.’)
A picture can often tell a thousand words about a Presidency.
In full disclosure, this little girl from London wrote a letter to President Ford in 1975 and he sent me a handwritten note in return. So, I guess I have to wee bit harsh my sarcasm mellow.
And, they never get it…
But Gerald Ford had a
fatal political flaw, one that is aptly described in another fashion by James
W. Ceaser in a recent Wall Street Journal review of Pulitzer Prize-winning
historian Gordon Wood’s new book entitled The
Ideas of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States. The
Visionary Generation was the title of Ceaser’s review of Wood’s book on the
ideas behind the Revolution and the men we know as the Founding Fathers. The
description could easily be applied to the now iconic battle between President
Ford and Ronald Reagan for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. Ford
won that battle...on his way to losing a much larger war.
That
war?
Says Ceaser of Wood:
The
historian has the advantage of hindsight. He can see the development of an idea
or principle in a way that the participants along the way never can…. For this
reason, Mr. Wood has conceived the proper period for studying the Revolution as
running from the 1760s through the Jacksonian era, since this time span allows
one to see the full shape of the event.
Which
is to say, the battle over the acceptance of the democratic principle (as
Ceaser terms it) was fought and won not simply in the seven-year time span of
the American Revolution but over a much longer period of almost eighty years,
from 1760 until Andrew Jackson’s final term in the White House came to an end
in March of 1837.
In a strikingly similar fashion one can easily look
back and realize that what is now known to history as the “Reagan Revolution”
began not in January of 1981 when Reagan himself took the presidential oath.
Nor did it end eight years later when he left the White House. In
fact, it began in fits and starts roughly with the emergence of the British
philosopher John Locke and picking up intellectual grounding and authority as
it made its way through the centuries developed by a group that includes
everybody from the English-Irish statesman philosopher Edmund Burke to the
Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln and on to the 20th century. With the advent
of the American Progressive movement and the presidencies of both Roosevelts,
Woodrow Wilson and (yes) Herbert Hoover (a Progressive Republican), by the time
a young William F. Buckley arrived on the scene in the early 1950s with his
famous line of standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” the idea of an
ever-expanding state was not only mainstream it was the mainstream. In both political
parties, the media, academia and religion as well.
It was an idea that was hopelessly doomed, considering
the inevitable massive failures in a philosophy that was succinctly labeled by
its foes as “tax and spend” domestically or mocked on national security with
the slogan “Better Dead Than Red.”
Sooner or later
progressivism/liberalism was destined to find itself perched at the very edge
of the cliff where Americans find themselves and their country today. Out of
cash and out of credibility. But in the day, all manner of people thought this
was a big no-never-mind. And if the Goldwater — Rockefeller fight for the 1964
GOP nomination was in retrospect an enormous political warning flare, the
Ford-Reagan fight was, in retrospect, the tipping point when the balance began
to shift. FORD — AND HE WAS NOT ALONE — COULD NOT, DID NOT, SEE
IT COMING.
As historian Ceaser posits
in other circumstances, Ford was too involved in the events of the day to pull
back and understand what he would ultimately come to symbolize in American
political history well-beyond the standard “nice guy who rescued America from
Watergate” story line. In fact, as is clear in reading longtime Newsweek
correspondent and Ford biographer Thomas DeFrank’s book of private,
post-presidential Ford interviews, Ford literally went to his grave not
understanding what he had come to represent. DeFrank’s book, Write It When I’m
Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations With Gerald R. Ford, shows Ford
regarding his differences with Reagan as some sort of standard annoying
competition from an unfathomable and irritating fellow pol. Ford simply did not
understand what he was in the middle of — while Reagan understood with a
well-spoken and out-spoken clarity. A clarity that Ford, holding fast to the
stance of moderation, dismissed as Reagan’s “penchant for offering simplistic
solutions to hideously complex problems.”
How did this play itself
out?
More to the point, how
does this continue to play out right this moment? Ford saw the Soviet Union as
an adversary to be negotiated with — and hence deeply resented Reagan’s
criticism of Ford’s efforts to negotiate what was known in the day as “the
Helsinki Accords.” To Ford, Helsinki was part of an ongoing process of
negotiation that was standard presidential fare from FDR forward. In the case
of the Helsinki negotiations the triumph was supposedly that Ford had gotten
the Soviets to “sign a document that pledged them to observe the basic
principles of human rights.” To Reagan, the Soviets were, as he later famously
said, an “evil empire” who ” reserve unto themselves the right to commit any
crime, to lie, to cheat…” Hence Helsinki was a worthless enterprise. An agreement
with liars and cheats. Over and over and over the two men sparred from one end
of America to the other in 1976. Ford was the adamant “moderate” —
proud that he had picked the statist New York ex-Governor Nelson Rockefeller as
his vice president, ashamed of himself for dumping Rocky in a bid to stave off
Reagan.
Ford was about “trimming” government with a spending cut here and there
when he wasn’t busy negotiating with the Soviets. To Reagan the federal
government was the Leviathan incarnate, an increasingly out-of-control
Frankenstein which, if not sharply downsized, would bring the American
Experiment crashing down around its citizens heads. And the Soviet Union should
disappear. Or, as he also later said, “we win, they lose.” As we know, Ford won
the battle of 1976 — but he lost the larger war to Reagan. Yet the war between
the Gerald Ford’s of America — those within the Republican Party, the media,
and the larger world policy establishments — is still being waged every single
day. How does it show itself? Here are some examples of what might be called Ford versus Reagan: The Sequel.
Yep, and President Goldwater didn’t try to get anyone
beyond the base to vote for him either.
-
wbcoleman
on December 3, 2015 at 9:52 PM
New
game: Every mention of Barry Goldwater merits an amuse bouche.
I
love how GOPers lay the responsibility of Goldwater’s loss at the feet of
conservatives.
Truth: After the assassination of JFK and the
continuation of LBJ, voters were not going to elect a 3rd President in 3 years.
Most Americans felt they had to vote for LBJ because to do otherwise would be
seen as a betrayal of Jack and his family.
Also,
the news media didn’t help. CBS’s correspondent, Daniel Schorr, went so far as
to flat out LIE and claim that Goldwater was in Germany to meet with Nazis! On
July 12, he reported that “it looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated,
will be starting his campaign here in Bavaria, center of Germany’s right wing”
– which, Schorr provocatively added, was “Hitler’s one-time stomping ground.”
He
was forced by management to read one of those ‘Sorry, Not Sorry!’ apologies the
following day.
Bear in mind that Goldwater was being demonized as few other major-party presidential candidates before or since. “In a period of ten months,” wrote Lionel Lokos in his book Hysteria 1964, “Barry Goldwater was accused of being another Adolf Hitler, fomenting a racial holocaust, advocating a nuclear policy that would destroy half the world, seeking to destroy Social Security, being a lunatic paving the way for totalitarian government.”
* Goldwater called the story “the damnedest lie I ever heard” and told the late conservative writer Victor Lasky that it “made me sick to my stomach. My Jewish forebears were probably turning over in their graves.”
* Wrote The Weekly Standard‘s Andrew Ferguson in a 2001 review of Schorr’s memoirs: “Though easily checkable, [Schorr’s report] was false in all its particulars. Goldwater had spoken vaguely of vacationing in Europe but had made no plans to visit Germany. Goldwater’s interview in Der Spiegel was a reprint of an interview that had appeared elsewhere, and he had not even considered addressing the group Schorr mentioned. More important, the story was false in its obvious implication of an Anschluss between German neo-Nazis and U.S. Republicans.”
* Years later, the LIBERAL POLITICAL HISTORIAN Rick Perlstein, in his acclaimed book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the American Consensus, flatly described the story as “false” while Goldwater’s liberal biographer Robert Alan Goldberg characterized it as a “smear.”
Yes,
Goldwater was treated abominably, but he still almost certainly would have
lost…because Camelot.
What
gets me about people that point to Goldwater as proof that First Principles
lose is that they have to leap-frog over the 40th President (or 39th, if you
are a Chester B Arthur Birther):
1980 Presidential Election:
Ronald Reagan:
Electoral
vote: 489
States
carried: 44
Percentage: 50.8%
Popular
vote: 43,903,230
Jimmy Carter:
Electoral
vote: 49
States
carried: 6 + DC
Percentage:
41.0%
Popular
vote: 35,480,115
1984 Presidential Election:
Ronald Reagan:
Electoral
votes: 525
States
carried: 49
Popular
vote: 54,455,472
Percentage:
58.8%
Walter Mondale:
Electoral
votes: 13
States
carried: 1 + DC
Popular
vote: 37,577,352
Percentage:
40.6%
In
many opinion polls, Ronald Reagan is identified by Americans as the best
president of all time – with 19% of 1st votes by all respondents.
The
GOPers?
Richard
Nixon: * = less than 0.05%
Gerald
Ford: 1%
George
HW Bush: * = less than 0.05%
George
W Bush: 2%
Remember,
whilst a student a Princeton, future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was in a
state of acute depression and shock. It was November 1980. ‘OMIGAH! THE
DEVIL NAZI HAS WON!!!’ So, Ms Kagan cried and soaked her misery
in a bottle of vodka…no doubt singing John Lennon’s Imagine. Speaking of
imagination, is it so difficult to imagine the depression becoming euphoria,
the shock unmitigated joy, and the ‘drowning in a bottle of vodka’ becoming a
shaken, not stirred celebratory martini party sixty-nine days later. When was
that? It was 30 March 1991 when a Leftist Loon named John W Hinckley, Jr,’s
bullet.
Unfortunately
for Ms Kagan, the bullet was off by a
few millimeters.
‘DAMN, THE
DEVIL NAZI SURVIVED!!!’
New
Establishment/Consulting Class Drinking Game:
‘We must
have a nominee that can win independents. We cannot win the election without
independents!!!11!!’
How’d
that work out for Romney? He won among Independents by 5 points, 50-45, but
lost to Obama, 51-48.
Shut
up, smarty pants.
Finally..
Lindsey
Graham: Joe Biden Is ‘As Good a Man as God Has Ever Created‘
Must
see photo. *smh*
Fallon on December 3, 2015 at 9:45 PM
Mizz
Scarlett is just pleading for BFD Biden to start groping him.
I’ll
give $10,000 to the person who comes up with this REMF taking it up butt by a
junior staffer or page.
If
South Carolina won’t get rid of this a$$h0le, whom they claim to hate, then I
guess we’ll have to do it ourselves.
EUREKA! I think that I found the last job in America that
Americans will do and McGrahamnesty’s illegals won’t!
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