Trump wins S.C. . . Bush drops out.

Saturday, 9:00 pm:  After coming in a distant fourth place in the South Carolina -- with the possibility still of slipping into fifth behind John Kasich -- Jeb Bush has announced on Saturday evening that he is suspending his campaign.

Donald Trump has clearly won the primary with about one-third of the vote.  As of 9:00 pm, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are virtually tied for second place with 22% each, although Rubio pulled ahead enough finally for him to claim his "victory" of second place, 22.5% to Cruz's 22.3%.

It's important to note that two-thirds of the voters did not vote for Trump.  Some pundits are still saying that he will not ultimately win the nomination when the Rubio-Bush-Kasich vote consolidates around one candidate.    But what if it remains a three-way with Trump, Cruz, and Rubio? -- as it seems likely to do, since they all have billionaire sources of campaign money to keep going.

Ralph

"Bush running on fumes"

That title, "Bush running on fumes," is typical of what we see on the eve of the South Carolina primary.   Donors are refusing to give him more money;   crowds are less than expected;  reportedly some of his staff are sending out their resumes, seeking other work.

As a further measure of the gloom pervading the Bush campaign, Jeb signed off a town hall on Friday with these parting words to his supporters: 

“I hope that you believe that it’s possible for us to do this. 
I hope you don’t think the end is near.”

The end is near.
Ralph

Meh . . . the non-compassionate Bush

Another reason Jeb Bush should not be president.   Along with my previously discussed objections, based on his cruelty to a classmate in prep school and his demonic attempts to force a brain-dead woman to be kept alive (see ShrinkRap on 2/5/15;  3/16/15;  and two on 6/11/15), is this story about Jeb advocating shame to enforce his moral imperatives.   The report comes from an article on Daily Kos by correspondent SemDem.

*     *     *

"This man cannot be president. I am not exaggerating what happened here.  [According to a law passed by the Florida legislature and signed by Gov. Jeb Bush] If a mother was going to give up her child for adoption . . . she was required to PUBLISH HER ENTIRE SEXUAL HISTORY in a major newspaper.

"The idea behind it was . . . to publicly shame the woman. . . . It was called the Scarlet Letter Law.  Your friends, neighbors, employers, family, and acquaintances would be able to read [the names of] everyone you had sex with . . .

"If you were raped and conceived a child, . . . you couldn't give the child up for adoption in the State of Florida unless you gave the rapist a chance to read about it in the paper. . . .

"The mother had to put all her personal information, including weight, her sexual partners, and WHERE they may have conceived.  NO exception was made in a case of rape!  . . .  It had to run for one month at the MOTHER'S personal expense even though this was forced on her. . . .  

"Instead of being publicly shamed, Florida women simply refused to do this.  It may have happened, but I don't know of one case where a woman printed her sexual history in the paper.

"Do you know what DID happen though?  Abortions increased.  Adoptions dropped--by a lot. . . . a personal friend of mine . . . wanted to adopt his stepdaughter when the law was in effect, but he couldn't.  Not without humiliating his wife.  This was JEB!'s Florida.

"Eventually. . . Bush conceded this may not have been the brightest idea.  He relented.  But it got what he wanted: to SHAME women.

" . . . .  The backlash from this awful law was such that the law was repealed fairly quickly. . . .  What is reprehensible is how JEB! is being allowed to rewrite recent history as if he never wanted this law and was somehow unable to stop it. He could have and he didn't.  It was a very shameful time in our state's history, and one that shouldn't be overlooked. . . . "

*     *     *

I don't doubt for a minute that Jeb Bush willingly signed this law.   Besides speaking and writing approvingly about the desirable role of shame in controlling out of wedlock births, this is completely in keeping with that prep school bully -- Jeb -- who led a gang of boys to chase down a classmate with long hair, throw him to the ground, and forceably hold him down while they cut off his long hair, even as he screamed and begged them not to.

Jeb's self-righteous smugness and basic cruelty to those he deems in violation of his priggish superiority make big brother Dubya look downright humane and compassionate --and a smarter and a more decent human being as well.   Having him on the campaign trail just shows up Jeb's deficiencies, even measured by the very low bar of George W. Bush.   His campaigning for Jeb! won't help.

In the indelible words of Sarah Palin:

"You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig."

Ralph

Republicans: "Don't make us hurt the nominee . . ."

Senate Republicans want President Obama to abdicate his responsibility to nominate a SCOTUS replacement so they don't have to damage the reputation of the, as yet unnamed, nominee.

Their first tactic was to claim, falsely, that it just isn't done for a president to nominate a SCOTUS justice in his last year in office.  That didn't fly, because it's not true;  so now they're trying this:

"Don't make us hurt the nominee."

Huh?   That's what it amounts to.  Sen. Ted Cruz said:  "I think that hearing would end up very politicized. And I don't think it would be fair to the nominee."  Thanks for you concern, Ted.    You could accomplish that by simply being fair to the nominee yourselves.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), in a tight re-election campaign, said it might "mislead" people into thinking it's about the qualifications of the candidate, but "it's bigger than that."  In other words, confirming President Obama's nominee -- no matter who it turns out to be -- is not an option.  So, if they have to destroy the reputation of the nominee, that's what they'll do.

Now they're pleading not to have to do the dirty work that they will 'be forced to do.'   Come on, guys.   Put on your big boy pants and do your job.  If you're going to hurt the nominee, you'll just have to take responsibility for your actions.

Perhaps the strategy is to try to scare off any potential nominee from accepting President Obama's nomination.   I think his strategy is going to be to select someone with such impeccable credentials and so obviously qualified that the Republicans will only wind up hurting themselves if they try to play politics.

As much as I disagreed with Justice Scalia's approach to the Constitution and disliked him personally, I do think it is downright shameful that Republicans couldn't even wait until after his funeral before turning it into a political "throw them to the lions" sideshow.   Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz didn't even wait an hour after his death was announced before throwing down the gauntlet.

Ralph

Republicans thumb nose at Ronald Reagan's plea

President Ronald Reagan, during his State of the Union address to Congress on 1/25/1988, his final year in office, said this:

"Now, to make sure there is a full, nine-member Supreme Court to interpret the law and to protect the rights of all Americans, I urge the Senate to move quickly and decisively in confirming Justice Anthony Kennedy to the highest court in the land, and to also confirm 27 nominees waiting to fill vacancies in the federal judiciary."

Ronald Reagan is widely and routinely invoked as the greatest president in modern history by most Republicans -- the same ones who now say filling the Supreme Court vacancy left by Justice Scalia's death should wait until next year so that the American people can speak through the election this fall.   That would mean the process couldn't even begin until a year from now -- meaning the seat would be vacant for perhaps 18 months or so.

In addition, in 1977 Mitch McConnell wrote an article in the Kentucky Law Journal in which he lamented the politicization of the judicial nominating process and said:  "altering the ideological directions of the Supreme Court would seem to be a perfectly legitimate part of a Presidential platform. To that end, the Constitution gives to him the power to nominate."

In 2016, McConnell was the first to call for the nomination to wait for the next president in 2017 -- obviously because he fears President Obama's nominee would alter the ideological direction of the Court.

Hmmm.   I believe it is spelled "h-y-p-o-c-r-i-s-y."

Ralph,

Bernie Sanders answers critics

photo credit:   Getty Images

From an interview with CBS Evening New's Scott Pelley, here are some important answers from Bernie Sanders to what critics are saying about him and his chances.

PELLEY: [Pointing out that both Iowa and New Hampshire have a largely white population and]  . . . A more liberal population than the states that you're headed to next, South Carolina, Nevada. You're gonna be facing African American voters, Latino voters.  How do you appeal to those people?
SANDERS: Well, the same way we appeal to all Americans. Look, if you and I were having this conversation nine months ago. . . .  You would have said, "Bernie, nobody knows who you are. You're regarded as a fringe candidate, you don't have any money, you don't have any political organization. Last poll we saw you in, four percent. How are you possibly gonna do well in Iowa or New Hampshire?" Well, a lot has happened in nine months. . . .

PELLEY: [Referring to single payer health insurance, raising taxes, $15 minimum wage]  Every one of these ideas is dead on arrival in the Congress.
SANDERS: No it's not. Change always takes place when millions of people stand up and fight back. And what we are talking about in this campaign is a political revolution.
PELLEY: The Republicans in Congress are gonna say, "You go ahead and have your revolution, but we're not gonna have one here."
SANDERS: Ah, but the Republicans, for better or for worse, are gonna be drawn into this revolution.
PELLEY: You're gonna change their minds?
SANDERS: No, I'm not gonna change their minds. The American people will change their minds. . . . 

PELLEY: Gallup did a poll a few months ago and the people that they surveyed said that they would vote for a gay candidate, an atheist candidate, and a Muslim candidate before they voted for a socialist candidate.
SANDERS: Uh-huh. Well, the people in Iowa and New Hampshire might not have been part of that poll, 'cause we just won New Hampshire I think by 21 points. [It was 22.]  And we came in a virtual tie in -- in Iowa. Look, let's not scare people with words, okay, all right? Social security, terrible, awful program? It's one of the most popular programs in American history. It's a socialist program.  The United States Postal Service is often regarded as one of the most popular federal programs. It's a socialist program. Veteran's Administration, of which most veterans feel really good about. You know, that's-- that's a government health insurance program. If you look around countries around the world, I mean, the ideas that I'm proposing, Scott, are not radical ideas.

*     *     *

I agree.   But the Republicans have not yet waged their relentless ad campaign full of hammer and sickle logos and screaming SOCIALIST scare tactics that they surely will do.  They're very good at damning messaging -- as distorted as they need to be.

Ralph

"No character" --quote from Heller's "Catch-22"

Thanks to singer-comedienne Bette Midler for circulating this quote from Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22, in which he describes one of his characters thus:

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all.   It merely required no character.” — Joseph Heller, Catch-22

I ran across this just after finishing the post summarizing David Brooks' comments about Barack Obama's character.   What a difference -- and what a difference it makes in a president.

Ralph