If Bill Kristol is always wrong then Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito shouldn’t run for president and we can just put that idea to bed. I’d like to see him resign from the Court, though, which I think would be an absolute prerequisite if he were going to campaign for political office. So, if Alito wants to follow Kristol’s advice, I wholeheartedly endorse this wacko idea.
The rest of the field that Kristol mentions (since he’s not satisfied with any of the eleventy billion candidates already running for the Republican nomination) are hardly any better, and in many cases they are obviously worse.
Mitch Daniels was probably the most successful Republican governor of recent times, with federal executive experience to boot. Paul Ryan is the intellectual leader of Republicans in the House of Representatives, with national campaign experience. The House also features young but tested leaders like Jim Jordan, Trey Gowdy and Mike Pompeo. There is the leading elected representative of the 9/11 generation who has also been a very impressive freshman senator, Tom Cotton. There could be a saner and sounder version of Trump—another businessman who hasn’t held electoral office. And there are distinguished conservative leaders from outside politics; Justice Samuel Alito and General (ret.) Jack Keane come to mind.
My understanding, and I could be wrong, is that Mitch Daniels has never been able to get his family to go along with the idea of a presidential run. As for Paul Ryan, a picture is worth a thousand words.
And don’t get me started on the trio of mouth-breathing House members that Kristol mentioned. Or freaking Tom Cotton.
Bill Kristol gave the world Sarah Palin and now he’s telling us that Ben Carson and Ted Cruz aren’t good enough for him.
And he’s not loving Jeb! either.
On the other hand, it may be that the lesson of the Trump surge—like that of the shorter-lived Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann boomlets in 2011—is that the rest of the field isn’t what it should be. We’ll have a better sense of that in a couple of months. But what if come October all we have is Bushies lacking all conviction, Trumpers full of passionate intensity, and a bunch of uninspiring also-rans? I devoutly hope this isn’t the case. But what if it is?
Yeah, what if it is?
You’ll call Trey Gowdy?
Bill Kristol, ladies and gentleman.
Always wrong.
Bill Kristol has a problem. He keeps going off of his much needed mental medication and goes into repeated fits of delusion.
Yes! Yes! Resign and run! Take Scalia with you as your VP candidate.
Twenty-two or whatever it is now still isn’t enough? Are we looking at the GOP acknowledging bench failure?
It occurs to me that Trump has been trolling the other candidates viciously without naming them. Anchor baby turns out to describe Bobby Jindal’s birth situation exactly. Ted Cruz didn’t even make that; he got the American parent exemption. And all the border issues fall at the feet of the governor of the biggest border state for 15 years–Rick Perry. Start looking for the Trump-trolling of other candidates while seeming rabid Elephant. And whipping up formerly settled or actually bogus issues into candidate bashing weapons. Slipping in the shiv while the folks cheer.
Unless what I read is wrong, Jindal would not be considered an “anchor baby.” His parents entered the country legally and at least one of them was employed here before immigrating. They wouldn’t have needed an American born child to continue their US residency or facilitate naturalized citizenship status.
Now, Mia Love, the new Utah US Rep, was an anchor baby and got in just under the wire before the law was changed to end that opportunity.
The literalness of the allusion doesn’t matter with Jindal any more than it mattered for the Republican base with Obama. The impression sticks firmer if it is more wiggly, which is why Obama’s citizenship and religion have become unshakeable beliefs for a quarter of the country even though those beliefs are not even close to true.
Guess I don’t understand the point of wobbly truthiness except as care and feeding of the already converted. Sure it gives them something to spout as they search for new converts, but it doesn’t convince anyone else.
wrt Jindal, would this cause his ten supporters to flee into the open arms of Trump? Or would they rightfully scream that Trump is a liar? As Trump’s supporters already know that he’s a liar, that wouldn’t damage him with them. But it could put a chink in his MO.
We’ve had over five years of the birther nonsense (quite possibly originating in camp Clinton, and if so, quickly and sensibly junked as a loser) and it’s convinced nobody except right wing loons and I’m not so sure even they believe it.
Now if Trump wants to expose GOP hypocrisy wrt an anchor baby, he should be waggling his finger in Mia Love’s direction and not at children of legal immigrants. Unless his next target is legal immigrants that he wants to claim should never have been admitted.
I have always associated the term “anchor baby” with immigrants who have kids on US soil, said immigrants aren’t citizens. Legal status doesn’t matter.
Has always been used in reference to the parents’ not legal immigration status.
Anchor Baby
I am aware. I am just saying the term has connotations, and when I hear it, at the gut level, I hear, “your parents aren’t Americans”. And I’m sure that’s what the horde hears, too.
On this issue, I think the horde hears “illegals” having US born babies that will let the parents stay in the country. That’s consistent with Trump’s framing that the undocumented parents and their US birthright children all have to go.
Decades ago the notion of “anchor babies” was politically hot in CA. But that was at a time when US born children did pave the way for the parents to remain in the country and which was subsequently changed.
Kristol comes from a pundit family and is a perfect example of the failures of nepotism. If he is intellectually serious about anything he wrote here he should be run out of town on a rail after tar and feathering. Alito? Keane? Rmoney’s boy running mate? Faceless GOP House reps? WTF?
At its most encouraging, braindead columns like this indicate that the Coaches of Team Conservative are having a hard time getting beyond the glaring weaknesses of all of their announced clowns and political dwarfs. Perhaps they envision a spectacular defeat—one can only hope.
Meanwhile, someone actually does journalism.
Hermann Schwartz, Reuters: One party system: What total Republican control of a state really means
Political malpractice, or seppuku. Pure and simple.
Even to the political blogs. Democratic blogs are fixated on the Presidency. Most progressive blogs are ignoring the election and watching the international scene and #blacklivesmatters and the signs of global economic meltdown again.
Time to reread you William L. Shirer and Milton Mayer to start watching for early warning signs on the Godwin’s Law scale.
Also a good time to reread W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, published in 1941 and surprisingly fresh. The discussion of Cotton Ed Smith, Bilbo, and Huey Long and….immigration…seems ripped from the New York Times.
I have been alive to thus problem for a while. I know you don’t like it, but I think the only way is for rich individual donors to make a liberal ALEC that can nurture individuals at the lowest levels.
My personal belief as to why Dem voters seem less interested is that many think less parochially than conservatives. Just by virtue of being more diverse and more open (as Dems are compated to repubpicans, in general) you are more aware of issue that cut across state and national boundaries like human rights, climate, foreign policy. These are big important issues. Combine that with more favorable reactions to centralized government as opposed to states and pair it with a lack of resources and you get a reason.
Sometimes he’s not even wrong.
John Michael Greer is feeling the pessimism.
John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report: The Last Refuge of the Incompetent
Looking for a revolution? Here’s a bucket of cold water for you:
Tarheel…
I am by no means a rightist, but…what if they are correct in this one assumption? Not oparticularly perceptive or educated in any real sense about politics in general, but right on the money about what has happened to them, their families and their different levels of culture and society over the past say 23 years or so…16 of which were presided over by DemRat presidents, by the way.
What then?
A more repressive form of government, or perhaps just the same one w/more technological tools at hand to enforce that repression? Probably the latter, it looks like to me. A kinder, gentler, more efficient repression, so-called “bipartisan” in nature. That’s what we have gotten w/Obama, and that might be the better of two evils for all I know.
We shall see, soon enough.
Won’t we.
Later…
AG
The only way the duopoly elite can restore balance is by returning governance to the way it functioned during the 1970s. That means swallowing a lot of the ideological garbage and turning modestly on the folks that have been paying them the big bucks. Pseudo-non-partisan bipartisanship of relationships across aisles and trains that run on time and peace and prosperity.
I don’t think the billionaires are smart enough to do this sort of pulling back. As Addington says about the neo-conservative juggernaut, “We won’t stop until another force stops us.” I have been calling that attitude “the march of folly.”
I think we are headed to a crackup. And it is a much the slackness and lack of focus on the left as it is the power of the center and the sentiment of the center to commit suicide rather than do necessary leftward adjustments.
Yup.
AG
Always easier to destroy, also climate change as I’ve said before is almost a problem designed to be as difficult as possible for human nature to deal with.
It certainly did not seem that way when we had the first Earth Day in the euphoria (or was that anticlimax) after the first men landed on the moon. It only turned in that direction with the Restoration of the Bush.
I’d say that the direction turned when RR removed the WH solar panels. Part of the backlash to Jimmy Carter’s sweater.
But what was really effective in changing the direction was the 1980s oil glut and consequent drop in oil prices. 1970 – 2006 chart Had oil prices been on the decline in 1980 would there have been a RR administration?
See the rise of the Changing of the Guard, written in 1986 about the rise of GOP think tanks.
This has been going on since Reagan took power, and arguably before that. Another great book, the System by David Broder and Haynes Johnson about the failure of Health Care Reform in the 90’s documents the right’s progression.
The right is organized, and from ’64 began a long march to take power. Nothing on the left is comparable.
It’s awe inspiring, such consistency, never hitting his mark. It’s genius I tell you. Beautiful, pure, nihilistic Republican genius; breathtaking for its irony quotient alone!
Why would Alito have to resign? Maybe if he’s elected he’d WANT to resign, but that’s another story.
After all, the ultimate arbiter of the law is the Supreme Court, and we already know that they are perfectly OK with doing anything and everything to help elect Republican candidates.
Unconstitutional to hold more than one USG office at a time.
constitutional is whatever 5 “justices” say it is.
Maybe not necessary in this case as the Constitution apparently only prohibits a member of Congress from serving in the executive branch. So, the Alito/Scalia ticket could be a go.
Matt Taibbi Inside the GOP Clown Car.
Could the Huckster have been thinking that if American women produced more babies they could grow up to fight for those physically demanding, low wage jobs that undocumented and imported contract labor workers have been taking? Nah — that would require a minimal level or rationality. Maybe he means that abortion is limiting the production of such fine young men such as Josh Duggar and David Huckabee. Or maybe he can only view women as uteri vessels that are best kept full.
The first sign of the decline of the US was the election of Reagan. The rest of the country was too stupid to see it.
evidently the Koch bros via their mouthpiece Walker is saying our President should disinvite China prez (who is obviously attending the opening ceremonies of the UN) because regular ppl are jumping in to snap up bargains on Wall St today (he phrased it slightly differently) -Obama is supposed to disinvite him from the UN opening as well?)
OT: According to Maddow, the VP from Shell Oil went with the British Foreign Secretary to Tehran to re-open the Embassy there.
Uh huh.
Uh huh.
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond needed Royal Dutch Shell executives as a key to visit Teheran and open negotiations on oil contracts. Nothing new here, see visit by Tony “BP” Blair to the desert tent of Colonel Gadaffi in 2007.
How Royal Dutch Shell circumvents UN sanctions on Iran …
○ Shell increases oil trade with Iran – despite sanctions – Sept. 2010
○ Eni’s Scaroni Meets Iran Minister in Vienna for Future Oil Work – Dec. 2013
○ Royal Dutch Shell – Iran sanctions and agreement nuclear deal – UANI
Oh my God … it would almost be worth it to 4 years of President Alito if we could start right now a 5-4 liberal majority court. Plus, hard to imagine him winning anyway. Especially given Kristol’s infallible record of being 180 degrees wrong on absolutely everything. It’s a wonder that guy can even feed himself.
Hey Boo – next time you update your site could you give us an “edit” button so it doesn’t look like all your commenters are illiterate or using Google translate from another language. I’ve got two typos in 3 lines.