Some of the hawkish figures who Ted Cruz recently dismissed as “crazy neo-con invade-every-country-on-earth and send our kids to die in the Middle East” … say they’d consider supporting Cruz anyway if he’s the last man between Donald Trump and the Republican presidential nomination.
Cruz, it turns out, hasn’t fully burned his bridges with that set of advisers and supporters of George W. Bush — figures like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and former National Security Council official Elliott Abrams, who aren’t closed off to Cruz, especially in the case of Abrams. Indeed, despite some lingering resentment and suspicion, there are even glimmers of rapprochement as the Republican primary looks like it could become a two-man race.
“I would not hesitate to back Cruz as the nominee,” Abrams — who not long ago told National Review that Cruz’s use of the word neocon invoked “warmongering Jewish advisers” — told BuzzFeed News. “If it’s a two man race, it’s really extraordinary to see Republican office holders in some cases or former office holders saying they don’t like Cruz or they would go for Trump, who is from my perspective not a Republican, not a conservative, has no policy views on anything that you can actually describe or get a handle on.”
Digby's conclusion is:
They might be saying that. But I'm going to guess they have just recognized that this pompadoured billionaire Bond villain might just pull it off. They may be bloodthirsty imperialists but they aren't stupid.
The problem is that a whole lot of GOP voters don't give a damn about their intellectual blather about "American hegemony" and would rather trust their authoritarian gut. They don't think trump is an isolationist. How can he be? He promises so many victories they'll be coming out of our ears. He says the military will be so strong nobody will ever mess with us again. He says he'll take their oil and bomb the shit out of 'em.
What more do they need to know?
Yes, there is much to enjoy about watching the Republican establishment frantic to prevent the worst of the Wild Bunch who are at the top of the polls getting the nomination, that they are reduced to considering supporting one of the most repulsive members of the Congress, perhaps the Senator most hated by his fellow Senators FROM HIS HOW PARTY! is a spectacle to enjoy. Digby asks, "What more do they need to know?" about the Republican rabble who have taken the "pompadoured billionaire Bond villian" to their bosom?
Well, fun aside, what if they elect Trump or Cruz? What will that say about the weakness of the opposition to the Republican-fascist party?
I have watched the left mired in its basic premises which have lost it election after election, the middle class and blue collar class, where most of the votes are, repeatedly talked into voting against even moderate Democrats whose policies were far better for them than the Republicans who get elected. I look around the blogs and see the same lines that have been in use for half a century being dutifully parroted by the would-be left. I see little to no willingness to ask ourselves why things have gotten as bad as they have. I have seen even less willingness to ask how such ideas as "more speech" and "free press" have resulted in our degraded politics which are lie driven, the very free press, from the top on down, the movers of those lies to the exclusion of an effective level of truth sufficient for a people to install an effective representative government.
I have watched as people on the left figured all they had to do is wait for things to get bad enough and then things would gloriously turn around. Even those who are realistic enough or, more likely, too ignorant to have ever heard of the dialectic seem to believe some magical force is going to suddenly make things ripe for their fairy tale revolution. I'm reading that kind of nonsense this season as I have ever single season of my adult life. I've watched as it didn't happen under Nixon, under Reagan, under Bush I, under Bush II and I strongly suspect I may live long enough to see it not happen under a Trump or a Cruz or what even more insane horror the Republican fascists have in store. It took the economic crises of the two Bushes to get the two moderate-Republican-Democrats, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama elected, we can't count on that kind of catastrophe every four years. And the reaction to their election in the off year crippled both of them with ever more insane Republican congresses.
The basic premises of neo-Jeffersonian ideology have been ineffect for quite a while now and the result is the politics we have. That's the test of those assumptions in real life instead of in legal theory. You explain to me how "more speech" has not been in effect. "More speech" was a slogan introduced by such guys as Nat Hentoff who went from The Village Voice and The Progressive to the Cato Institute. My fellow lefties, we were had by them and such legal servants of the corporate media as Joel Gora. Them and the media which pushed those lines.
It is clear there is no bottom beneath which the right in American will reach, I mean, Trump, Cruz, Rubio....? And, as the current crop of Republican governors and legislative leaders on the state level show, not to mention the popular figures in the media, outright fascism as a part of real politics has become a reality under the framing put into place a half a century ago.
For more on the half-century of delusion of the "left" read The Madonna of the Future. For how far things could go under the present regime, I don't know. Look at how the free wheeling culture of the Weimar Republic led, by law, not by sudden revolution, to Nazism taking power.
Update: We Have a Volunteer Specimen
Since when is the Democratic party establishment The Left?
I'm not interested in fantasy politics, I'm only interested in reality.
Your play left is a total failure in practical politics, it handed the Rehnquists and Roberts the language they needed to finish off self-government by people who haven't been fed a diet of lies.