The Nevada caucuses are over for both parties, and the Republican primary has been run in South Carolina.
There is much angst in the hearts and minds of the establishment members of both parties.
Let us first take a look at the big hot mess the Republican side is.
Donald Trump is winning, and winning big. He is ahead in the delegate count. Not just in this race either. He is head of where Romney and McCain were at this point in the last two election cycles.
The Republican “leadership” is clutching their collective pearls and asking how in the name of a merciful God is this possible.
My advice to them is to take a long, hard look in the mirror. The Republican “leadership”, especially in Congress has been destroying their brand value for decades. They have worked long and hard to completely alienate their conservative base.
Speaking of that conservative base, in a rare instance of agreement with the party leadership, they are as confused over this whole Donald Trump thing as the leadership is. Not for the same reasons though. The “establishment” leaders of the GOP put a lot of money behind former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. In past Presidential elections, this would have been enough to give Jeb a pretty good shot at winning the primary battle. Not this time though, remember that whole alienating their voter base thing? So the people who think they run the GOP have had their candidate shot down in flames.
The conservative base is scratching the collective heads because they don’t consider Trump to be an actual Republican. Take a look at his record. He has self-identified as a democrat in the past, and has supported a lot of democrats. As I have pointed out before there are some strong similarities between some his policies and those of the admitted socialist Bernie Sanders. Their policies on legal and illegal immigration for example. There is another reason to believe that Trump is not a Republican. He knows how to handle a hostile press.
So why is Trump so far ahead? Simple. He is perceived as a “Washington outsider.” The voters are sick and tired of “business as usual” inside the Beltway. They don’t want to throw away a vote on the same old, same old once again. Look who is second place, Texas Senator Ted Cruz. He is not just hated by the congressional Republican leadership, they actually fear the concept of him in the Oval Office. He doesn’t “play ball” and cozy up to the democrats. He actually tries to keep his promises to the people who elected him, which makes him a renegade maverick in Washington, regardless of the letter after his name.
I’m not a Trump fan, but his run for the Presidency is fascinating for a political junkie. Not only is he appealing to pissed off GOP voters, he has actual cross party support. Polling has consistently shown that 20% of his supporters are Blue Collar democrats. What used to loyal democrats who have been thrown under the bus by their party over the past seven years. He is also doing better than the typical GOP candidate in traditionally democrat demographics. Namely hispanics, blacks and women.
To see why Trump is doing well with those traditional democrat groups, just look at how the democrats have been treating their base since they started the Occupy the White House Golf Tour in January 2009.
There has been mild, sporadic and slow economic growth since the recession ended in July 2009, despite our Dear Leader’s best efforts to kill it. Most people have benefited from this. Except for blacks. They have gotten the shaft, despite all the promises made back in 2008. Just take a look at the very detailed information on employment, and unemployment, at the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. You can find breakdowns by race, gender, and age. As Senator Sanders has pointed out in his stump speeches, unemployment among black Americans is significantly higher than those of white Americans or any other group of American. This has not gone unnoticed by black single parent mothers, who are now working three jobs to send their kids to private school instead of two. Why they are sending their kids to private schools instead of public schools is left as an exercise to the reader in yet another way the democrats have been alienating their base.
Americans of Hispanic descent who are registered to vote (i.e. legal immigrants, and remember that Mexico is the number one source of legal immigrants to America), are hearing Trump’s call to secure our border. They have observed our Dear Leader’s policy of not enforcing our immigration laws, and the results of that policy. Things they left Mexico (which is in a violent narco civil war) to get away from, are showing up here in America. Drug Cartels, kidnapping, and armed gangs working for the cartels. In more and more cases, these violent criminal organizations are found using semi-automatic weapons supplied to them by our Dear Leader’s “Fast and Furious” program. They don’t like it, and are turning to Trump and Sanders, both of whom want to enforce the law in regards to our southern border.
Which leads us to the question being raised by the establishment democrat leadership wondering what happened to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s comfortable stroll to primary victory they were predicting. No surprised here, as I’ve pointed out, they have been working hard to alienate their base as well. Plus the fact that HRC is extremely unlikable, and massively corrupt. So democrat voters are also looking for an outsider. Thus the support for the socialist from Vermont from everyone who doesn’t like or trust Hillary Rodham Clinton. Given her high negatives, and history of massive corruption, is a significant number of democrats. This does not speak well of Hillary. She was correct when she said that Sander wasn’t a democrat until he decided to run for President. He has always run openly as a socialist. While in the Senate, he caucused with the democrats, but was not officially a member of their party.
However, you aren’t seeing the runaway victories that Trump has been seeing in the Republican primaries. This is because of another thing the doddering old socialist has gotten right. The system is rigged. The DNC has been blatantly in the tank for Hillary Rodham Clinton in this cycle. HRC is well ahead in the delegate count because the party made sure she had the super delegates wrapped up long before those pesky citizens could possibly muck up their coronation of Queen Hillary the First.
Mark Dice is at it again. He’s on the streets of San Diego, asking people to sign a petition in support of President Obama’s plan to secure his legacy by liberating the people of North Korea by launching a nuclear strike at the heart of North Korea.
It is refreshing to see that there are a few sane people in San Diego who refuse to sign the petition. For the most part, the Obama cultists sign it in order to support their Dear Leader.
But no amount of adjustment can obscure how bad the recovery has been for most American families. By many measures, 2014 was the strongest year of the recovery so far; the economy added nearly 3 million jobs, the most since 1999. Yet incomes were stagnant across virtually all groups: young and old, married and single, rich and poor.2 Virtually the only group to see a statistically significant gain in income was immigrants, whose median household income rose 4 percent to just under $50,000. Native-born households saw their income decline 2 percent to just under $55,000.
The recovery has utterly failed to lift the fortunes of the poorest Americans. The official poverty rate was 14.8 percent in 2014, nearly unchanged since the immediate aftermath of the recession, and far above the prerecession level. Some 15 million children and 5 million seniors are living in poverty.
The third part of a Bernie Sanders speech is pure socialist class warfare, income redistribution rhetoric. Nonsense which the useful idiots who support him swallow whole because they have no understanding of economics, and are either ignorant of or willfully ignore history.
Bernie is remarkably light on details on just how he is going to pay for his vision of a socialist workers paradise. The math isn’t hard. The Wall Street Journal put the price tag at $18 trillion, which is the current federal debt. Bernie denied the WSJ numbers, but refused to present any of his own. That is because he doesn’t have any plans based in reality. Socialism has failed each and every time it has been tried. It has resulted in economic collapse or has had to kill off large chunks of the population. Usually both. Socialist countries killed over a 100 million of their own citizens in the 20th Century. Remind any useful idiot who babbles about “feel the Bern” of this fact. Odds are it won’t make any difference. They will probably either ignore or deny it.
I’ve mentioned before that Sander’s stump speeches on the topic of immigration are even more hard lined, on both legal and illegal immigration, than Donald Trump’s stance on the subject.
There are two other common themes to a Sander’s speech.
The first sounds a lot like Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. One of the major catch phrases of that campaign was, “It’s the economy, stupid!” The brilliant James Carville gets credit for that. For those of you who don’t remember the early 1990’s, in Q492, when the election was held, the US had just come out of a recession. When the President at the time, George H.W. Bush, correctly stated that the recession was over, and the recovery was starting, the Clinton team would go into full attack mode, calling him a liar. Since the recovery had just started, the effects were not wildly felt. This tactic was wildly successful for Clinton, especially since the economy really was starting to recover, and he got to take credit for something that was already happening after he took office.
Bernie Sanders is pounding the pulpit and telling people not to believe the economic news coming from the Obama White House. Obama is telling you that unemployment is 5.6%, and Bernie is telling it’s 10.7%. Thing is that they are both quoting the current federal Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers. Barry is using the more commonly used U3 number. Bernie is using the U6 number, which is considered by rational economists to be a more accurate indicator.
If you have read my previous posts about the Obama Economy, you would think I’m siding with Bernie on this. I have to admit, the self identified Socialist does have a point. The so-called “recovery” has been going on for just over five years now, and it has been described everywhere from CNBC to NPR as “lackluster” and “jobless.” With a U3 of 5.6%, we should be damn close to “full employment”, yet the number of people not in the work force is at levels we haven’t seen since the deep recession of the late 1970s. Barry’s policies have managed to kill most of the economic gain that you typically get coming out of a recession.
While Sanders may be right about our Dear Leader‘s handling of the economy, odds are he will screw it up even more with his socialist economic policies.
You hear the MSM/DNC slamming Donald Trump over and over again because of his stance on immigration, both legal and illegal.The silence of the same “out raged”, so-called reporters regarding Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT), is deafening. Sanders is actually more hardlined on immigration, both legal and illegal, than Trump, yet he gets a pass.
It could be because with HRC and her criminal behavior regarding classified material is sucking up all the air time. That probably isn’t it. What little coverage it getting on most “News Organizations” is limited to recycling the Clinton Campaign press releases on the subject. Check out the stories NPR is pushing on the subject for an example.
What I really think scares the dedicated leftists with press credientials is both Trump and Sanders are rising the polls with what they consider an “extremist view.” That the U.S. immigration laws should actually be enforced.
That is a message that is polling really, really well with Americans of both parties, especially those in the likely voter category.
The progressive left has never been a fan of the whole “Freedom of Speech” thing. Oh, they sing it’s praises as long as they are the ones doing the talking, but as soon as anybody else tries to express an opinion they disagree with, it’s all “hate speech”, or not “politically correct”, or the current favorite, “racist.” It’s even worse on what should be bastions of free expression, college campuses. There they have “Speech Codes”, and “Free Speech Zones.” Neither of which seem to apply to anyone who is spouting the far left’s extremist agenda.
“The earnestly naive Bernie Sanders is who the Democratic party wants to be. The corrupt and venal Hillary Clinton is who they are.”
— AlphabetShoe
Let’s be honest here. Bernie Sanders may caucus with the democrats in the Senate, but he is not a member of the democrat party. The so called “mainstream media” calls him an “independant.” He calls himself a socialist. To be fair, about two thirds of the democrats in Congress are also members of the DSA. So Bernie just may be more honest than most of the congressional democrats.
Bernie Sanders’ stump speeches include statements about the US Mexico border and immigrants, legal and illegal, that make Trump sound like an open borders guy. I’ve seen this described as “nativist” behavior. That is a modern code word for nationalist. Bernie Sanders is a Nationlist Socialist who continously expresses his concern for the workers. If that is what you are looking for in a modern democrat, you need to review your early to mid 20th century history