It’s turtle quoques all the way down.
LOL, the people who vote this way are at the margins. Noone would vote for Trump if there was a REAL race going on for the Democratic nomination but the nomination is pretty well sewed up. I can make an argument for voting for Bernie in the proportional states but its hard to do in winner take all states where Hillary is ahead by 20 or 30 points.
I agree, you HAVE to give Cruz and Rubio an excuse to stay in the race. heck throw Kasich a bone or two and keep it a 5 way race with Carson.
Nm
Huh. Okey dokey then. :dubious:
I thought that for a long time, but unless he is hiring actors to be beaten and dragged out of his events while he jeers at them and openly wishes they could be “taken out on a stretcher”, that stuff seems to kind of seal the deal that he really is a brownshirt at heart. And really, even if they are actors (which I don’t believe at all), just encouraging his followers to look at their political enemies like that is beyond the pale.
On the Dem side all states are proportional. There are no winner take all states.
Other’s have already given this a thumbs-up but I will add another. I will be voting in today’s primary; I am a registered Republican but if I could I would vote for Hillary because, of the three most likely candidates to win the nomination (Trump, Hillary, Sanders), she is the most capable.
In general that’s true, but in this specific case I have to agree with what others have said – there is no comparison between the worst of the Republican candidates and either Hillary or Bernie. Republicans can do what they like to sabotage the Democratic nomination and it’ll still be either Hillary or Bernie and a win for the country. In the Republican field, of the realistically possible nominees, two are crazy and one is dangerous because he’s actually electable. I’m not saying this because I disagree with them – I disagree with Kasich and Jeb Bush, too, and they’d both likely be competent conservative presidents. But any of the others would be disasters.
The polls I’m seeing suggest the OP is correct. Unless there’s a significant change, it appears that Trump is on track to win the nomination and then lose the election, and at this point it appears that he would lose to either Hillary OR Bernie, though not by the same margin.
And his winning the nomination also has the potential of really shattering the GOP and having reverberations downballot. I’m salivating over that possibility. (I have honestly never understood this thing I often see Democrats say, that they want a healthy, functional opposition party in the GOP. I’d much rather they be a total basket case.)
Since more than a few (even on the Republican side) have noted his fascist tendencies, I will have to mention here that Hitler did begin as an agent from the state who was told to investigate/demolish those brownshirts.
Hitler ended liking the message of the ones he was sent to break apart.
I’ve been pounding the table a lot recently about this, but from my view Bernie is about as dangerous as Trump. Having Trump anywhere near The Button is borderline terrifying but I believe that some of Bernie’s economic/tax plans and his opposition to nuclear power (and to a lesser degree GMO) has the potential to do more long-term damage than Trump.
The brownshirt-style violence against his enemies – and the violence that he’s promoted against Mexicans and Muslims, even if inadvertently – is fascinating in its consistency with the rest of the narrative. Namely that of a demagogue railing against religious and ethnic minorities and blaming the country’s problems on them, and garnering huge popular support in the process, including the support of white supremacists. And in the latest twist, Trump favors limiting freedom of the press so he can prosecute media that are critical of him. All this ostensibly to Make America Great Again, sort of America über alles, as it were. It doesn’t matter if Trump is just a con man playing a game to get elected, the scary thing is that this is the sentiment that he’s tapping into and inflaming.
Right. I mean, aren’t all demagogues con men on some level?
Well, we could just agree to disagree, but I think there’s an objective test for comparing Bernie and Trump. How many countries can you think of that have Bernie-style social, economic, and tax policies? I can think of quite a few, including most of western Europe and, closest to home, Canada, where Justin Trudeau is sort of a Bernie kindred spirit on many significant policy positions including progressive taxation and the basic tenets of social democracy, and things seem to be working well.
Now how many can you think of that have had a Trump-like figure at the helm? I don’t think there are any, but one that comes close in a few key areas in Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister of Italy. Some of the resemblance is downright uncanny. Berlusconi is a wealthy business tycoon whose net worth is virtually the same as what The Donald claims to be worth – $8 billion. His business empire was complex and often legally dubious, fraught with conflicts of interest, and some ventures went bankrupt. Like Trump, Berlusconi has been constantly embroiled in lawsuits. Most interestingly, Berlusconi was both anti-immigration and anti-Islamic. He endorsed the deportation of illegals, limits on legal immigration, and controversially declared the superiority of western civilization. He was known for making wild and asinine statements, like calling a German parliamentarian a “Nazi” and claiming that Mussolini – the guy that Trump recently quoted – was actually a pretty good guy.
Sound familiar? So how did that work out? Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud and embezzlement, sentenced to prison, expelled from the Senate, and prohibited from holding legislative office for six years. He manged because of his age to do community service instead of prison time. He’s also been charged and/or convicted of abuse of office, bribery, defamation, and other financial malfeasance. He may yet serve prison time and be banned from public office for life following his conviction for paying an underage prostitute for sex, unless his appeal is successful.
Perhaps there is a business tycoon somewhere with the same con-man character traits as Trump and the same self-serving quest for political power but with a better track record than Berlusconi. I just haven’t found one.
Great article! I suggest scrolling down to “Trump is a badly flawed candidate” to understand why the Republican establishment can’t substantively criticize him without incriminating their own ideology, but Democrats can.
Right. It’s a mistake to think he has some magic ability to dazzle any electorate he faces.
How many of those countries have an economy as dynamic, sound, and strong as the American one? None. How many of those countries have as many elite education institutions as the US? None.
We can go back and forth attempting to compare the US with other countries and we’ll each be able to find something that supports our opinions on Sanders’ economic goals. We’ll just have to agree to disagree.
I don’t have any quibble with your comparison to Berlusconi. Trump will be a bad president. My only question is how bad Bernie will be.
The last point is moot. Bernie is done.
OK, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. Much further discussion would hijack the thread. I just want to say two things on those last points as a parting comment.
One, it isn’t hard to have a strong economy when you have vast natural resources and the space and resources to sustain a large population. It’s also not particularly difficult to promote a strong economy in almost any reasonably viable environment if that is the single-minded sole objective at the expense of all else – all you have to do is have a minimal government that levies almost no taxes, has no business or environmental or workplace labor regulations, no social services, and spends most of its resources promoting trade and perhaps plundering other countries. It’s not hard. What is much harder is having a strong society, of which the economy is only one aspect, just like household income is only one measure of the health and well-being of a family. What is much harder than promoting economic growth is promoting the kind of nation and society that you and I and most people would actually want to live in.
Secondly, on the education topic, we had a fairly extensive discussion about this earlier in GD. It’s remarkable just how many renowned faculty members and researchers at major US universities are actually immigrants educated elsewhere, a fact attributable to the relatively poor and under-funded state of US public education. I personally know of a number of such individuals who were educated in Canada and attracted to US universities by big-money offers of salary, staff, and facilities. Not saying this is bad, and they were certainly happy with the arrangement. But keep that background in mind.
And I’m saying, I suspect not bad at all, but I’m content to let the topic drop. I just had a hard time accepting that there’s any sort of comparison to be made between a lifelong icon of democratic socialism and a self-serving con man.