America Versus Europe.

Enjoy Hump Day. Joel Pett Is Still Not Liking Matt Bevin.

"Trump"ing NATO.

I am “not isolationist, but I am ‘America First,'” Donald Trump told The New York times last weekend. “I like the expression.”

Of NATO, where the U.S. underwrites three-fourths of the cost of defending Europe, Trump calls this arrangement “unfair, economically, to us,” and adds, “We will not be ripped off anymore.”

Beltway media may be transfixed with Twitter wars over wives and alleged infidelities. But the ideas Trump aired should ignite a national debate over U.S. overseas commitments — especially NATO.

For the Donald’s ideas are not lacking for authoritative support.

The first NATO supreme commander, Gen. Eisenhower, said in February 1951 of the alliance: “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.”

As JFK biographer Richard Reeves relates, President Eisenhower, a decade later, admonished the president-elect on NATO.

“Eisenhower told his successor it was time to start bringing the troops home from Europe. ‘America is carrying far more than her share of free world defense,’ he said. It was time for other nations of NATO to take on more of the costs of their own defense.”

No Cold War president followed Ike’s counsel.

But when the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 nations, a new debate erupted.

The conservative coalition that had united in the Cold War fractured. Some of us argued that when the Russian troops went home from Europe, the American troops should come home from Europe.

Time for a populous prosperous Europe to start defending itself.

Instead, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush began handing out NATO memberships, i.e., war guarantees, to all ex-Warsaw Pact nations and even Baltic republics that had been part of the Soviet Union.

In a historically provocative act, the U.S. moved its “red line” for war with Russia from the Elbe River in Germany to the Estonian-Russian border, a few miles from St. Petersburg.

We declared to the world that should Russia seek to restore its hegemony over any part of its old empire in Europe, she would be at war with the United States.

No Cold War president ever considered issuing a war guarantee of this magnitude, putting our homeland at risk of nuclear war, to defend Latvia and Estonia.

Recall. Ike did not intervene to save the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956. Lyndon Johnson did not lift a hand to save the Czechs, when Warsaw Pact armies crushed “Prague Spring” in 1968. Reagan refused to intervene when Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, on Moscow’s orders, smashed Solidarity in 1981.

These presidents put America first. All would have rejoiced in the liberation of Eastern Europe. But none would have committed us to war with a nuclear-armed nation like Russia to guarantee it.

Yet, here was George W. Bush declaring that any Russian move against Latvia or Estonia meant war with the United States. John McCain wanted to extend U.S. war guarantees to Georgia and Ukraine.

This was madness born of hubris. And among those who warned against moving NATO onto Russia’s front porch was America’s greatest geostrategist, the author of containment, George Kennan:

“Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

Kennan was proven right. By refusing to treat Russia as we treated other nations that repudiated Leninism, we created the Russia we feared, a rearming nation bristling with resentment.

The Russian people, having extended a hand in friendship and seen it slapped away, cheered the ouster of the accommodating Boris Yeltsin and the arrival of an autocratic strong man who would make Russia respected again. We ourselves prepared the path for Vladimir Putin.

While Trump is focusing on how America is bearing too much of the cost of defending Europe, it is the risks we are taking that are paramount, risks no Cold War president ever dared to take.

Why should America fight Russia over who rules in the Baltic States or Romania and Bulgaria? When did the sovereignty of these nations become interests so vital we would risk a military clash with Moscow that could escalate into nuclear war? Why are we still committed to fight for scores of nations on five continents?

Trump is challenging the mindset of a foreign policy elite whose thinking is frozen in a world that disappeared around 1991.

He is suggesting a new foreign policy where the United States is committed to war only when are attacked or U.S. vital interests are imperiled. And when we agree to defend other nations, they will bear a full share of the cost of their own defense. The era of the free rider is over.

Trump’s phrase, “America First!” has a nice ring to it.

Editor's note: hat tip.

Editor's comment: what doomed other world superpowers from Biblical times to now, including "great" britain and the old soviet union, has been their imperialistic drives to dominate and control the rest of the world, both economically, culturally, but most of all, militarily.

Enter the stage, the united states of america, as we hurl perilously to our doom, unless self checked. 

#GOP: Dump Trump.

Barack Obama And Isis.

YIIIIIIIIIKES!

Happy Easter, For He Is Risen.

Some See Alabama's Segregationist, George Wallace, In Donald Trump. Do You?

ATLANTA (AP) — One presidential candidate pledged to "Stand up for America." Two generations later, another promises to "Make America Great Again." Their common denominator: convincing certain Americans that their version of the United States is under threat.

Donald Trump, leader for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, has never said he's following the playbook of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who achieved national stature on his promise of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever," then made four failed bids for the White House from 1964 to 1976.

Instead, Trump invokes the anger of "the silent majority," a phrase he's resurrected from the era of Wallace and President Richard Nixon, who won in 1968 and 1972 in part by co-opting Wallace's racially charged populism.

Trump detractors hear more than a faint echo of Wallace in Trump's anti-establishment mix of economic protectionism and blunt nativism, and they note that the brash billionaire, like Wallace, has drawn similar results in the campaign: tense rallies that often involve violent clashes among protesters, police and the candidate's supporters.

"Trump is taking his campaign straight to the haters, and he's gotten the roots of that old Wallace crowd," says Joe Reed, a black Democratic Party broker in Alabama who came to know the four-term governor toward the end of his life, when he had abandoned his segregationist positions, long after a would-be assassin left him paralyzed.

The comparison offends Trump backers.

"George Wallace was a racist," said Debbie Dooley, a national tea party leader. "It's totally ridiculous for anybody to think the same about Donald Trump." She argues Trump's independence from "the money that controls Washington, D.C." outweigh his caustic rhetoric on immigration, Muslims and the protesters — many of them young and black — who interrupt his rallies.

"Donald Trump is not preaching hate," Dooley said. "He's standing up for the American workers and the American people."

Trump offers his outsized personality as an all-purpose antidote to a country that is "falling apart" and "never wins anymore."

The overwhelmingly white throngs at Trump rallies roar at his mention of a border wall and heartily approve his call to stop all non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States. Supporters cheer his promises to protect gun rights and share his lament that Christianity is under attack. They applaud his threats of punitive tariffs on imports from countries "killing us on trade."

Wallace, meanwhile, fueled his strongest campaigns in 1968 and 1972 with a wide-ranging critique of a society in decline. He modified the overtly racist language he used in his Alabama campaigns, fashioning himself instead as a "states' rights" conservative. He complained of rising crime and a "sick Supreme Court" that outlawed compulsory school prayer and allowed pornography.

Wallace, political historian Dan T. Carter said, "had all these ways of getting across what he meant" without explicitly mentioning race or class. "He said 'inner-city thugs,' and everybody knew he was talking about young black men in the cities."

Tom Turnipseed, who managed Wallace's 1968 campaign and became a civil rights activist, assigned the same motivation to Trump and Wallace. "Fear," he told The Associated Press.

"You can scare folks with that line that the Mexicans are coming because everyday working people ... see Mexicans in the labor market and it hurts their wages — they think of it that way, at least," Turnipseed said. "Governor Wallace, you know, did the same with African-Americans."

In his book "The Politics of Rage," Carter identifies Wallace and his play for working-class white votes as the model for the "Southern strategy" that Nixon and Ronald Reagan would use in four winning elections.

Nixon wrote in his memoirs of having to navigate Wallace so he would not "draw a large number of conservative votes from me." Nixon protected his right flank by criticizing court-ordered busing of schoolchildren to accomplish integration, vowing to impose "law and order" and declaring the "War on Drugs," which an aide later described as a targeting of "hippies" and blacks.

Trump is the latest heir of all this, Carter said.

"When you hear Trump supporters say he 'tells like it is' or 'he's not politically correct,'" Carter said, "what they're really saying, many of them, is ... 'I love it, because it's what I believe, too.'"

Protesters, meanwhile, become evidence of the national decay that only the candidate's tough leadership can reverse.

When activists interrupted his rally at Madison Square Garden in 1968, Wallace asked why Democratic and Republican leaders "kowtow to these anarchists." He added, "We don't have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, first one of 'em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that's all."

Trump has pined for "the old days" when such "animals" would be "carried out on a stretcher, folks." He orders security to "get 'em the hell outta here" and said of one protester, "I'd like to punch him in the face."

Reed acknowledged there are "working white folks who are mad" but says Trump, like Wallace, has them "turning their arrows at the wrong folks."

Trump denies he is playing to racism or xenophobia. His supporters "aren't angry people," he says, just frustrated "about the way the country is being run."

"What are we looking for, OK, all of us?" Trump asked after declaring that families, jobs, homes and health care face existential threats. "We're looking for security. We're looking for safety. We're looking for family, and taking care of our family, right?"

Editor's note: article is here.

Je Suis ...!

Blessed Good Friday. In # Days, He Will Rise AGAIN. ALLELUIA!!

FUNNY!

Pat Buchanan: Rule - Or - Ruin Republicans.

Rule - Or - Ruin Republicans.

“Things reveal themselves passing away,” wrote W. B. Yeats.

Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, his campaign has done us a service — exposing the underbelly of a decaying establishment whose repudiation by America’s silent majority is long overdue.

According to The New York Times, super PACs of Trump’s GOP rivals, including PACs of candidates who have dropped out, are raising and spending millions to destroy the probable nominee.
Goals of the anti-Trump conspirators: Manipulate the rules and steal the nomination at Cleveland. Failing that, pull out all the stops and torpedo any Trump-led ticket in the fall. Then blame Trump and his followers for the defeat, pick up the pieces, and posture as saviors of the party they betrayed.

This is vindictiveness of a high order.

It brings to mind the fable of the “The Dog in the Manger,” the tale of the snarling cur that, out of pure malice, kept the hungry oxen from the straw they needed to eat.
Last week came reports on another closed conclave of the “Never Trump” cabal at the Army and Navy Club in D.C. Apparently, William Kristol circulated a memo detailing how to rob Trump of the nomination, even if he finishes first in states, votes and delegates.

Should Trump win on the first ballot, Kristol’s fallback position is to create a third party and recruit a conservative to run as its nominee.
Purpose: Have this rump party siphon off enough conservative votes to sink Trump and give the presidency to Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose policies are more congenial to the neocons and Kristol’s Weekly Standard.

Among the candidates Kristol is reportedly proposing are ex-Governor Rick Perry of Texas and former Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, both respected conservatives.
Kristol contends a third-party conservative candidate can win.
He can’t be serious. It is absurd to think Gov. Perry, whose poll numbers were so low that he dropped out of the race last September without winning a single primary, caucus, or even a delegate, could capture the White House on a third-party ticket.
Perry would not even be assured of winning his home state.

Trump and Perry would split the conservative vote in the Lone Star State and deliver its 36 electoral votes to Clinton, thus assuring a second Clinton presidency. Does Perry want that as his legacy?
As for Coburn, he is not nationally known. But his name on the ballot would take votes, one-for-one, from the Republican nominee.

How would that advance the causes for which Tom Coburn has devoted all of his public life?
Indeed, if the supreme imperative for Kristol and the “Never Trump” conservatives is to defeat him, they have become de facto allies of George Soros and MoveOn.org, Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street — and the party of Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton.

However, if the oligarchs, neocons and Trump-loathers, having failed to stop him in Cleveland, collude to destroy the GOP ticket in the fall, they have a chance of succeeding. And Clinton’s super PACs would surely be delighted to contribute to that cause.

But, again, what will they have accomplished?
Do they think that Republicans who stay loyal to the ticket will not see them for the selfish, rule-or-ruin, wrecking crew they have become? Do they think that if a Trump-led ticket is defeated, they will be restored to the positions of power and preeminence that a majority of their fellow Republicans have voted to strip away from them?

The Beltway has to come to terms with reality. It has not only lost the country; it has lost the party. It is not only these elites themselves who have been repudiated; it is their ideas and their agenda.

The American people want their borders secured, the invasion stopped, the manufacturing plants brought back and an end to the conscription of our best and bravest to fight wars dreamed up in the tax-exempt think tanks of neoconservatives.

Trump is winning because he speaks for the people. Look at those crowds.
Establishment pundits are now wailing that they have gotten the message, that they understand that they have not been listening.
But still, they refuse to act on this recognition.

In June of 1978, Gov. Jerry Brown of California, who had fought tirelessly against Proposition 13, which would slash property taxes across California, did a U-turn when it passed in a landslide. And Brown himself implemented the tax cuts he had opposed.

He got the message and acted on it.

One sees none of this flexibility in the Beltway establishment, none of this acceptance of the new realities, only obduracy.
Donald Trump is only the messenger.

If these conservative defectors from a ticket led by Trump collude with Democrats, by running a third party candidate to siphon off Trump’s votes, they may succeed.

But they delude themselves if they think they will have solved the problem of their own irrelevance, or that they have a future.

The party will survive. They won’t.



Editor's note: Patrick Buchanan has been a senior advisor to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.

 Editor's comment: When all is said and and the dust settles in the #gop's "rumble in our jungle" white house campaign, the GOP will be left a STRONGER PURER party, and return to the original Principles of its founders, such as my hero, Abraham Lincoln. Right now, we have people who are FAKE republicans, and are simply members of our party because they don't want to be #democrats. It is these people who are destroying the GOP, and I despise them ALL! I say: Let the exorcism that is going on within the GOP continue unabated, so we may rescue our party back from its hijackers.

Joel Pett On Cuba And Donald Trump.

The Republican Party Needs REAL Abraham Lincoln Republicans.

Republicans Need New Leaders

Every journey begins with a first step.  If we have a clear vision of where we want to go, and if we hold true to our core foundational principles, then every step that we take brings us closer to our destination.  Otherwise, we are just wandering.  Otherwise, we are most likely moving in the wrong direction.

Today, our nation must choose between two competing visions, two very different destinations.  Democrat’s versus Republican’s.

In years past, it was often said about politics that we all wanted pretty much the same result, we all wanted the same destination; we just differed on the best way to get there.  People would say that we just had an honest disagreement about the best way to achieve the same goal.

Those days are long gone.  Today, the visions, the destinations, are clear opposites.  At the risk of oversimplifying:  the Democrat’s destination is socialism; the Republican’s destination is capitalism.

It’s true.  Sometimes Democrats try to conceal the fact that their agenda is socialism, but at other times they brag about it.  When Democrats, such as Hillary Clinton or the current Democratic National Committee Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz, are asked to explain the difference between their party and socialism, they scramble to explain the difference, but they can’t; they can’t because there is no meaningful difference.

At the same time, other Democrats, such as Bernie Sanders and his many followers, wear socialism as a badge of honor.  That level of candor is becoming increasingly popular among Democrats, especially younger voters.  A recent survey reported that more millennials favor socialism over capitalism; socialism over capitalism.  This is not something to be taken lightly.  If we are not careful, our next President could be another Democrat; our next President could be another full blown socialist.

While the Democrats are sometimes reluctant to admit that their vision is socialism, we Republicans are fairly consistent in aligning ourselves with the principles of free market capitalism.
However, the Republican establishment has two enormous problems.  One, the Republican message is not clear; and two, what little message that is presented is increasingly viewed as not being sincere.

Not being sincere: this is a huge problem for the Republican cause.  Sincerity is a hard thing to prove.  Really, the only way to prove sincerity is to have your deeds match your words.  And that is precisely why the Republican establishment is currently having a crisis of confidence within the party.

What’s gnawing at a lot of Republican voters is that we see battles that the Republicans could have won, but chose not to fight, while at the same time, there are battles that the Republicans had no chance whatsoever of winning, but made a huge spectacle out of their futile efforts.  It begs the question, are the Republicans really trying to change the direction in which our nation is moving, or are many of our battles merely for show?

In any event, it is time to clean this up.  It is time for clarity, it is time for accountability, it is time for leadership.

It is time for the leadership of the Republican Party to distill the essence of the Republican cause into a clear, unambiguous vision of where we want to take our nation, and most importantly, that vision must include the first few steps that we must take in order to get us moving toward the destination offered by that vision.

Right now, we don’t really have that.  What we currently have is a lot of Republicans espousing a lot of disconnected ideas.  Voters hear buzz words, buzz phrases, plan fragments, 20 second sound bites, 60 second answers to complex questions, and “go to my website to see my plan”.
In the United States Congress, there are currently 247 Republican representatives, and 54 Republican senators; I’m certain each would say that they have a plan.

Having 301 individual plans is the same as having no plan at all.  Having thousands of goals is the same as having no goals at all.  There is currently nothing specific to which to hold anyone accountable.  How convenient for them; how devastating for our party and our nation.

All too often people say that Washington is broken.  Many say that the solution is to reach across the aisle to find common ground with the Democrats.  Aside from the fact that socialism and capitalism are pretty much opposites; before we strain to find common ground with the Democrats, perhaps we should first consider finding common ground within our own party.

Liberty, free markets, competition, small government, lower taxes, opportunity, individual responsibility, strong military, national security, compassion.  Republicans say these buzz words all the time.  It is time that we gave meaning and direction to those words.  It is time that our leadership united us around a clearly articulated vision that is consistent with the principles behind those words.

It is time for leadership, it is time for accountability.  It is time that we as voters hold those that we elect to the House and to the Senate accountable for the leaders that they select.  Selecting their own internal leadership may very well be the most important decision that our representatives make; yet on the campaign trail it is hardly questioned.

All too often campaigns boil down to how powerful the candidate, more often than not an incumbent, has become.  Candidates, both Republican and Democrat, talk endlessly about the committee positions that they have been awarded and the bacon that they can bring back home from Washington.  The problem for our party and for the nation is that bribing voters with government largess usually works.  Incumbents are indeed difficult to defeat.

Republicans are currently caught up in a contradiction, and that contradiction is killing our party.  We say that we are for small government but we fall into the trap of competing with Democrats on the basis of who can get the most from Washington.  If we are going to try to out democrat the Democrats, we will never succeed in accomplishing the goals that we say that we value.
Republican members of Congress must have the strength, integrity, and vision to base their selection of leadership not on what the leadership will do for them, but on how true the leadership will hold to our core foundational principles.

Republicans frequently say that our nation is heading in the wrong direction.  That won’t change until we have better leadership.  Mitch McConnell is the top Republican leader in the Senate and Paul Ryan is the top Republican leader in the House.  The last significant thing that they did was to pass the Omnibus Budget.  That budget completely funded virtually every program that the Democrats currently have on their agenda in exchange for precious little.

Our Republican controlled House and our Republican controlled Senate funded programs that our leadership had previously declared to be unconstitutional; they funded programs that they had pledged in previous election cycles to, at the very least, defund.

Rather than offering a competing vision of their own, Republicans funded the Democrats vision.  They funded the steps that take us further away from capitalism and closer to socialism. 

As Republican voters, our first step toward a better destination is to hold the representatives that we send to Washington accountable for the leadership that they select.

Every journey begins with a first step.  The important thing is not how big that step is; the important thing is that we take it.

Jack F Huguelet
JFHuguelet@epbfi.com

Funny GOP.

The Political Rise Of America's Donald Trump.

Randy Blaser: How did American politics get to where we are today?

In this Tuesday, March 15, 2016, photo, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to supporters at his primary election night event at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla. (Gerald Herbert / AP)


As I watch this presidential election year unfold, I'm beginning to know how Theodore H. White felt covering the 1976 campaign in preparation for his next book in his still classic series "The Making of the President."

He had written of four previous campaigns, and after 20 years felt he didn't understand what had happened in America. "I suddenly realized the politics I had been covering all my life had nothing to do with the real or underlying politics of today."

White went back to the beginning and wrote his classic book, "In Search of History: A Personal Adventure."

I started covering local politics during the rise of President Ronald Reagan. As I watch this campaign unfold, I see a disconnect between the politics of the past and the underlying politics that affects everyday life.

Promoted stories from PoliticsChatter.com


Paul Ryan criticizes Trump’s riot comment

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Trump goes on Twitter rant against the Wall Street Journal

Of course, I'm talking about the rise of Donald Trump, who last week won the Illinois Republican primary on his steadfast march to be the GOP nominee for president.

I initially speculated that Trump would burn out. I still think he is a buffoon and in the American tradition of the Know-Nothings of the mid-19th century. But the prospect of him being the nominee for president of a major American political party is mind-boggling.

Trump is an empty suit – no policy, no plans and no knowledge. He is neither conservative nor liberal. He has supported policies that would enrich him.

At best he is an empty suit. At worst a blowhard whose main argument is that the game is fixed, the rules that enriched him hurt regular Americans. His solution? Elect him. Both parties should find that familiar.

Why are so many Americans responding to him? The best answer I've found was given by British journalist Tim Stanley writing in the Telegraph.

Trump, he says, is the symptom of a republic in decline, of institutional failure. He is the result of the angry nihilism of the right – think Tea-Party and Congressional obstructionists – and the authoritarianism of the left – think campus mob action to deny speakers with whom they disagree – combined with the corruption of the political class, where politicians do and say anything to get elected.

Trump, Stanley writes, "did not take America to war in Iraq on flimsy evidence, establish Guantanamo in contravention of human rights law, license the torture of enemy combatants, oversee the gargantuan NSA data-gathering operation, launch a dirty war of drone strikes against both terrorists and those unfortunate enough to live near them, undermine the religious freedoms of employers who do not want to subsidize the sex lives of their workers, overrule the states' wishes on marriage, compel citizens to buy healthcare products or deport thousands of illegals through aggressive round-ups."

Who wanted all that? Yet that has been our policy of the last 16 years, backed by the political establishment of both stripes.

Getting back to White ...

History, he said, is the intersection of forces and ideas. It is where one man can take an idea and ride it through to his desire to impose their will on those around them.

Is Trump that man? Are we at the intersection of time in history that makes Trump possible?

It is frightening to ponder the possibilities.

Randy Blaser is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.

Funny. TGIF.

Lying Hillary Clinton Denies She Is Responsible For The Loss Of A Single Person In Benghazi, Libya. She Is Right! Wink.

FloriDUH Kicks Marco Rubio Where It Hurts!

Anti-What?

Joel Pett Is Still Not Liking Matt Bevin.

Nancy reagan.

Donald Trump And GOP Establishment?

How The Republican Party [Is Blowing] Its Best Shot At Defeating Hillary Clinton.

How the Republican Party blew its best shot at defeating Hillary Clinton

by Michael Brendan Dougherty

Last week, the former presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Mitt Romney, gave a nationally televised speech denouncing the current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. Trump responded by saying that Mitt Romney would have gotten down on his knees for Trump's endorsement four year earlier. By that same afternoon, many anti-Trump Republicans had sold themselves on an electoral strategy of splintering the Republican field and going for an all-out fight with Trump at the convention. And then, later that night in a televised debate, Donald Trump promised to be the kind of leader that inspires American servicemen to commit war crimes and rebutted a criticism by Marco Rubio by reassuring the crowd about the size of his penis.

Yes, the Republican debate is just so damn noisy, unsettling, and distracting that Republicans and most of the press have taken their eyes off Hillary Clinton. All the stories about her speeches at Goldman Sachs have dropped from view. So too the mentions of her deep infelicity with the media ("We were dead broke!"). And gone are the embarrassing stories about how Clinton charities act as a kind of global grifting and cronyism operation, enriching the Clintons and allowing corporate and foreign interests to buy their attention and ministrations.

Did you even know, dear reader, that the U.S. bombed portions of Libya in the middle of February this year? The Obama administration is trying to contain the continuing disaster created by the Clinton-led intervention in Libya five years ago. Republicans, however, are plunged into their own civil war over The Donald, and have no time to point out that President Obama is still cleaning up after the mess Secretary Clinton made of his foreign policy. The Libyan state has crumbled, ISIS has moved in, gobbling up untold materiel from the ruins of the Gadhafi regime, neighboring countries like Mali have been severely destabilized, and the refugee crisis in Europe has been exacerbated by Libyan disorder.

"There was one arsenal that we thought had 20,000 shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles, SA-7s, that basically just disappeared into the maw of the Middle East and North Africa," said former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. While many of these may have been spirited to Syria, what if a dozen of them are fired at commercial airplanes over Europe one afternoon? Shouldn't Republicans already be pressing the case that Clinton had no good reason to believe that the rebel groups could secure weapons like these and govern Libya after the fall of Gadhafi?


Shouldn't Republicans have lit up at the characterization of Clinton's decision-making offered by Ann-Marie Slaughter, who said that "when the choice is between action and inaction, and you've got risks in either direction, which you often do, she'd rather be caught trying." That Clinton would rather be "caught trying" is one of the most damning things that can be said about a presidential nominee.

Republicans could have had a lot of fun in this election cycle, pointing out how Hillary Clinton is now constantly rewriting the history of her husband's administration on topics like same-sex marriage or financial reform. Republicans could be setting her up for fights with the intersectional left on gender politics. For a moment it looked like audience members at New Hampshire town halls were going to flambé her on the incredibly shabby treatment meted out to her husband's paramours and those who claimed he had sexually assaulted them.

Hillary Clinton is still an astonishingly weak campaigner and candidate for president. And the supposedly "deepest field" in the history of Republican nominating contests should have produced a nominee capable of transitioning toward the case against Clinton by the middle of this month. In 2008, John McCain faced a Democratic nominee in Barack Obama who excited people's hopes for the country, who had a short political record, and ran on high idealism. It was a near impossible task to defeat him given the record of George W. Bush. But this time Republicans had the chance to run against a nominee who can be easily covered in the muck of two Democratic administrations, someone who gives off the stench of high-handed corruption and unprincipled ambition.

And it's being thrown away. The fight within the Republican Party has been clarifying and even healthy in some ways, alerting the party's elites to a base of core supporters who were deeply unmoved by the Romney-Ryan platform of 2012. But the bleeding acrimony and outlandish juvenility of the Republican primary has managed to do for Clinton what she was incapable of accomplishing on her own: making her look presidential.

Editor's comment: i'm not giving up yet.

Enjoy Hump Day With Lying Hillary Clinton.

This Is Funny, Donald Trump.

As An Abraham Lincoln Republican, This 'Toon Makes Me Sad!

The New Republican Party?!

SNL Demolishes Donald Trump. Watch Funny Video.

GOP Cock Us! I Hope You Picked The Right One. Wink.

Did You Watch The #GOP Mudfest Last Night? i Did Not, But These Chimps Did!

You Lie!

GOP And Donald Trump.

Enjoy Your Afternoon After GOP Super Tuesday.

GOP After Super Tuesday!

GOP Aims To Take Down Donald Trump.