Curb Your Authoritarianism? The 2016 Conventional Wisdom Thread (Elections, Part 6)

i can't believe hillary would be that bad at knowing which way the wind was blowing.

sadlol

xp tho the evangelical bent would lead one that way imo gantry is focused on his internal hypocrite a bit more, babbitt seems unable to come to terms with what a horrible status quo slimeball he is.

I kind of wonder whether Cruz did it out of spite, based on how nasty things got when they were essentially the last two candidates in the primary. Like if he dropped out early for whatever reason, or had Ryan's job, would he have made the same speech?

if you watch the highlights here he says "I'm not in the habit of supporting people who insult my father and my wife." I'm very glad there is at least one prominent Republican arguing that it's meaningful to be so personal and horrible as Trump is, and I just wish he could make that extra reach to say "between the two candidates, HRC is better," because somewhere in his withered heart he knows that's the truth

he does but that's actual career suicide

"Vote your conscience" is what congressional leaders say to their caucuses before a vote to signal that it's okay to vote contrary to the party line. This is the context for Cruz's use of the term - its signalling to Republicans that it's ok not to vote for Trump. I would hope this is obvious.

this morning he said the republicans "deserve to lose"

ya u necessarily dont need to evoke yr conscience if it agrees w the status quo xp

while brushing his teeth earlier he remarked "this fuckin sucks I was supposed to be the fuckin dude you steaming piles of crap"

this quote from the nyt sesh the other day is bringing me over to the 'trump is addicted to speed' camp

I have a friend who builds plants, that’s what he does, he’s the biggest in the world, he builds plants like automobile plants, computer plants, that’s all he does. He doesn’t build apartments, he doesn’t build office space, he builds plants. I said to him the other day, “How are you doing?” He goes, “Unbelievable.” Oh, great, that’s good, thinking about the United States, right, because he’s based in the United States. So I said, “Good, so the country is doing well.” He said, “No, no, not our country, you’ve got to see what I’m doing in Mexico.” He said: “The business there is unbelievable, the new plants we are building. People moving from the United States.” That’s what he does. One-story plants. You understand?

im on board with every trump conspiracy theyre all true but especially that one

“Christie turned over his political testicles long ago,” Cruz’s campaign manger, Jeff Roe, said on the Chris Stigall radio show Thursday. “I don’t take what he has to say with any meaning. You know, he embarrassed himself pretty quickly in this.”

cruz camp feeling itself this morn

"Vote your conscience" is what congressional leaders say to their caucuses before a vote to signal that it's okay to vote contrary to the party line. This is the context for Cruz's use of the term - its signalling to Republicans that it's ok not to vote for Trump. I would hope this is obvious.

― Οὖτις, Thursday, July 21, 2016 12:05 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's obvious what Cruz was doing, yes, but my thing was more about taking like three steps back and observing that people are jeering the idea of allowing conscience to interfere with their jingoistic lockstep and uttering a bemused and dejected 'huh'.

i'm sorry, i just don't understand what ted cruz has to do with bruce babbitt

yeah, he's anything but average. dude is a fanatic whose superpower is his ability to endure the scorn of others.

Cruz seems to be betting not just on a Trump loss, but a Huge Trump loss that will so demoralize the party that they'll come looking for the one who didn't go along to get along.

interesting observation by digby re the tone of cruz speech

Everyone assumes that he did this to set up his run in 2020 and that seems like a good bet. But it's worth listening to his speech if that's so. It wasn't your typical fiery, right wing Ted Cruz speech. It was, of course, extremely conservative, hitting all the hot button social issues and jingoistic high notes. But the rhetoric was couched in words like diversity and tolerance and respect. He even gave a nod to gays and Muslims and atheists and honored the family of Alton Sterling (which was met with stunned silence by the crowd.) It was the most "compassionate conservative" speech of the convention, contrasting sharply with the hard edged, angry verbal violence of the all the pro-Trump speakers. That was not an accident.

seems like hes thinking abt rebranding as gentle ted

he probably believes in compassion and stuff if he is seriously a christian. he just also believes in stripping gays and women of their rights and expropriating the heathens (via dominionism)

Tbh I don't really see a way through for him in 2020 and suspect in his own mind he's playing to be a Goldwater who didn't get the nomination. He wants to be valorized twenty years from now as the guy who was right all along we need to get back to the Party of Cruz that had big solid take-no-prisoners conservative values. Conveniently, being a bridge-burning iconoclast plays to all his interpersonal instincts and how his ego works.

what hurt him most to say aloud – "gays" or "atheists"?

or "Donald Trump"?

Tbh I don't really see a way through for him in 2020 and suspect in his own mind he's playing to be a Goldwater who didn't get the nomination

nah this guy really wants to be president.

yeah the crowd's reaction when he mentioned alton sterling's name was...something to behold

Goldwater was a curmudgeon who became beloved as a Man of Conscience in the twenty + years remaining to him in the Senate. Cruz ain't beloved.

i assume you're goofing rush but just in case you're not

imo hes 1st in line next cycle but as always every professional republican hating him is a huge drag on his chances, tho wldnt be surprised if we start hearing abt the softer kinder ted cruz out there rebuilding burnt bridges soon

Yeah, it's hard for me to separate out what seems remotely likely in reality from what might seem plausible in the nightmare-mind of Ted Cruz. Like, to me it seems plain that if Trump loses hard, Cruz would hardly have done better since he's an unlikable oily right-wing extremist whose party's leadership hates him almost as much as it hates Trump. But of course there will people ready to believe the "if only we'd nominated a twue conservative," a Tea Party line that's been building momentum since 2008. But if that contingent is really large enough to give somebody the Republican nomination, wouldn't they have given it to Ted Cruz this year?

xxp: I thought you were talking about Bruce Babbitt as well.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cn4-EqeWIAA_LoO.jpg

cyber

Look, we're under cyberattack, forget about them.

it reads like something from a twitter bot

lol totally

Cruz seems to be betting not just on a Trump loss, but a Huge Trump loss that will so demoralize the party that they'll come looking for the one who didn't go along to get along.

That would be interesting if things played out that way. And it is conceivable that this is exactly Cruz's thinking. "They all laughed when I went against the Trumpian tide, now you'll come crawling back once you see the error of your ways."

But if that is the plan, the math is wrong. In 2020, he'll need Trump voters on his side more than ever. The 2020 Republican candidate will need either to be more Trumpy than Trump, or be sufficiently diplomatic that he can plausibly extend an olive branch to butthurt Trumpophiles. Something like "My fellow True Americans, I know that you were disappointed in Our Dear Leader's loss back in 2016 - so was I. His Orangeness had the right message, but unfortunately he may not have been precisely the right messenger. Perhaps those sheeple out there just weren't ready for someone of his Awesome Realness. That said, now more than ever we need to reawaken the energy that all good freedom-loving Americans showed back then." That's a mostly-positive message.

"You fools! I told you so and you didn't listen!" Is not winning messaging.

Dr. Casino may be right that what he's going for is some measure of future retrospective admiration. Maybe (just maybe) he knows that his negative charisma is always going to limit his political chances.

Interviewers should start very pointedly asking Trump questions that don't make any actual sense as English language sentences to showcase very clearly how quickly Trump comes up with answers to things he can't even begin to understand.

Mr. Trump, do you or do you not want hen fap?

How would a trump administration respond to a NATO rebellion in turkey with Pinochet nuclear trade pact negotiation immigration crisis?

With strength. It's time that America stops getting kicked around, we are gonna be respected when I'm president!

we're gonna build a wall in NATO and turkey is gonna pay for it

Or, as has been mentioned a couple of times here already, just ask him very simple questions that anyone running for president should know. Such as: what is NATO?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cn5XMv7XYAABt9D.jpg

so what did Christie get for all his bowing and bootlicking -- a coupon for a dollar off the purchase of a Big Mac?

humiliation

probably a promise that he'll be attorney general if trump wins

thought Mike Mukasey had that one sewn up

apparently the NR set are calling christie "shinebox", so he's got that going for him

lol

go get yr shinebox

https://media.giphy.com/media/l0HFiBi4a1dHylhRe/giphy.gif

Haven't loaded the whole thread to look at today's posts, so maybe I'm repeating stuff already said.

I spent a couple of hours in the car today listening to right-wing radio out of Buffalo. However unreal such a forum may be, it's a good place to get a sense of what one side is thinking.

The anti-Cruz sentiment was massive and fierce--callers, interviewees, one host. (The only guy who semi-defended Cruz, who tried to frame what he did from his perspective, was actually Limbaugh, whose ire was reserved for Kasich.) The most vitriolic guy I heard was the former head of Cruz's Buffalo's operations.

I'm more convinced than ever he's politically dead. (The general antipathy towards him before this ever happened complicates trying to isolate last night.) It can't help that, supposedly, he was sending out fundraising e-mails an hour later. Being very specific about his wife and father today is totally understandable from my point of view, but from his side, I think that'll be viewed as selfish four years from now. Especially if Trump goes down in a landslide--I think rather than being remembered as a gesture of high principle, Cruz will be a convenient scapegoat on which to place phantom and self-serving blame.

Katie Packer, a Republican strategist who founded Our Principles PAC in a vain attempt to stop the Trump nomination, called the Cruz speech a “Rorschach test.”

“If you can’t stand Trump, like me, you saw it as bold,” she said. “If you love Trump, you saw it as a betrayal. If you don’t like Trump but have been cowed or fallen in line, you saw it as self-serving because you need that to feel better about your own weakness.”

Cruz is a Republican Senator from Texas, and will keep that position as long as Texas stays Red (which will at least encompass one more term for him).

That I don't know--I meant in terms of running again nationally.