Election Politics #2

 

Seventeen months away from the presidential election but the political machines are already in gear and pumping out steam. After the Republicans did their best to evaluate their candidates to keep from having a bunch of dunces the way they did last time, Ted “The Snake” Cruz blundered through a series of nasty comments that he thought was a joke, about, a grieving Joe Biden. This, of course, proved that no amount of self evaluation will ever turn the GOP field into a bunch of intelligent players.

Cruz started with a supposed joke so dumb that it could stand with the most stupid comments of Michele Bachman, then displayed the cowardice of George Bush in his desertion of his air national guard post, by not having the stones to apologize in the same format in which he made the dumb comment, when he gave a half hearted apology on Facebook.

Cruz has now proved that he is certainly not presidential material, not senatorial material, not even grown up material. If the GOP doesn’t abandon him in droves they are really dumber than anyone has a right to be.

 

Then Marco Rubio, appearing on Fox news and speaking about our actions in various Middle Eastern countries that we have managed to destroy, came out with this statement about nation building.

“We are not nation building. We are helping them build their nation.” Come on Marco, you can sound dumber than that. It won’t be easy; but all you have to do is try.

Then Rick Perry announced his presidential intentions, with full military décor and accompaniment. Everybody dismissed Perry in the 2012 election as stupid because of his “oooops” moment but that moment wasn’t really about stupidity, just bad memory. Everything else he said was stupid. Perry couldn’t compete intellectually in 2012 among a field of pretty dumb people. How does he expect to compete now when the GOP field of 2016 has at least a couple of people who can actually walk and chew gum?

It’s pretty clear he has decided to attack the problem. He bought a pair of Cary Grant glasses. If you’re Rick Perry, that’s problem solving.

On the other side of the coin Hillary has announced that she will seek legislation to guarantee early voting periods and to attack the GOP practice of gerrymandering and doing everything they can to prevent minority voters from getting to the polls.

In reaction to Hillary’s attempts to get more people registered and to the polls, various GOP politicians have got their balls in an uproar over voter fraud. Of course, none of them seem bright enough to understand that, almost all voter fraud is perpetrated by poll workers, and not voters. This small detail has, so far, failed to make itself known to the average GOP politician. They should all be sent to Chicago for a quick course in real voter fraud. Daley may be dead but Chicago still follows the rules set down by the master.

What’s really interesting is that the last major case of voter fraud was overseen by Jeb Bush as governor of Florida in the 2000 presidential election, when Jeb’s pollsters lost, stole, or ate, enough ballots to push his worthless brother into the White House. The Bush presidency, which almost destroyed the nation, was the result of Jeb’s poll watchers who deliberately messed up the vote, and George’s dishonesty in accepting the phony count and, oh yeah, Al Gore’s, lack of balls, when instead of fighting for the presidency he folded like a cheap suit.

A great part of the Republican party is having a good old time trying to make the point that Obama’s foreign policy has been a great failure and thereby, by extension, Hillary’s foreign policy will also be a failure.

Mitt Romney threw a party out west this week, touch football, skeet shooting and how do we keep the poor in their place; and then he stood up at that party and using that good old GOP attack plan known as the BIG LIE, he ran a list of what he thought of Barak Obama’s foreign policy. He called Obama the worst foreign policy president in history. Is he crazy? Has he completely forgotten George Bush’s foreign policies which led us into two wars and just as a throw-in, made enemies of just about every nation in the world except Israel. When George Bush left office, no one wanted to have anything to do with America. The only thing that was worse than Bush’s foreign policy was his domestic policy, a policy that almost broke the country; that led millions to lose their jobs, their homes and their savings.

Has Romney forgotten so soon, the president who was unarguably the worst n the history of the nation, a president who makes every other look like a shinning light? Maybe before Romney attacks Obama’s foreign policy he should look to what has caused Obama to react the ways he has; Bush’s foreign policy.

Faced with the smoldering heap of ruin that was the legacy of the Bush/Cheney disaster, Barak Obama and Hillary tried valiantly to pick up the pieces of our foreign policy, just like he had to pick up the pieces of our domestic policy. I understand that GOP pundits depend on the ability of their constituents to forget all the damage that Bush/Cheney did to this country, but it’s only been eight years since Bush was still screwing up everything that he could and Cheney was lying about it.

Barak rejuvenated the economy even while Hillary mended fences all over the world, but both of them were carrying handicaps supplied by the former GOP administration and no, they didn’t get everything done, mainly because they got almost no cooperation from the remnants of the GOP that survived Bush and a lazy, uninformed electorate that returned many of the same bums who had almost destroyed the country to office only two years later.

Watched Chris Christie on This Week, and as he does each time he is interviewed, he proves that he is a snart guy. One place I don’t think he is informed is on foreign policy, especially when he speaks about all the nations in the Middle East that want to bring the fight to ISIS and names the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, etc., he just proves that he knows nothing about the situation and shouldn’t be talking about it until he goes to school on it.

The nations of the Middle East, with the exception of the Kurds on the battlefield and the Jordanians in humane terms have done nothing to either win the war on ISIS or to help create a peace. This is fact not conjecture, and if Christie doesn’t see that, then he sees nothing about our foreign policy.

He speaks about a coalition of the willing, but no one is willing except the Kurds and us. He talks about training more Iraqi troops. He obviously hasn’t been paying attention when twice, Iraqi armies trained and equipped at great American expense, dropped their weapons and ran in the face of ISIS. Maybe before he talks about this again, he should read the papers.

Lincoln Chafee who is opposing Hillary for the Democratic nomination chose the day she was announcing her platform for the 2016 election to challenge her on her position on the TPP, something that was guaranteed to not be mentioned in Hillary’s speech. This is the same Chafee whose platform is based on his desire to support that massive international movement, conversion to the metric system and who now has added his support of the TPP, a treaty which he has yet to read. Why is anyone interviewing this clown? He has about as much chance to win the primary as my cat.