Electoral epigrams, 2015-2016 (GOP edition)

One per candidate:

Walker faced down a recall crisis
which voters declined to equate with ISIS.

Bush was judged dull, to his mishap:
He needed a bigger dose of clap.

How the GOP can stop Trump

It's obvious by now that barring a sudden radical winnowing of the Republican field, the nomination is Trump's. Therefore....

Cruz, Rubio and Kasich should meet a hold a lightning round of paper-scissor-rock to settle three positions in a unity ticket: president, vice president and secretary of state.

Each will have a much better chance of being nominated than any of them has now. If we're charitable, and assume that a solo rival would have a 50-50 shot at beating Trump, the casting of lots gives each a one-in-six chance of being the nominee -- and a 50/50 shot at standing for one of the highest offices in the land (they can play for Treasury if they prefer. Plus, their unity ticket would be les likely to shed supporters to Trump than any one would have by besting the others in coming weeks.

It might be objected that Kasich does not deserve to compete on equal terms, and Cruz and Rubio probably each believe as much about the other. But each at present has an equal chance (as far as can be discerned) of ruining the others' chances. In fact, all together are virtually certain to ruin the chances of all.

There's still Carson to be dealt with. But all three could pledge to plump for his books.

P.S. If Cruz and Rubio want to band together and insist that Kasich shouldn't get even odds, he could be pushed into doing a qualifying round. That is, he shoots once with either Cruz or Rubio. If he wins, he competes in the round of three on equal terms. If he loses, he goes to SecState (or Treasury), and Cruz and Rubio go one-on-one for prez-veep.

Pussyfooting around torture

Last night, Twitter flared up in response to the latest Trump provocation. Taking up a cry of passion from an audience member, Trump had called Ted Cruz a pussy. He'd crossed another red line, one tweet proclaimed.  He could be the first New Hampshire primary winner to use the epithet, said another.

Taking a very back seat was what the taunt purported. Trump was mocking Cruz for hedging his support of waterboarding -- the war crime for which the U.S. had executed enemies, the simulated death experience that the Bush administration had sanctioned as official U.S. policy. Trump has promised to do "a hell of a lot worse" -- that is, put the U.S. in permanent, proudly proclaimed violation of the Geneva Conventions, the international Convention Against Torture signed by Ronald Reagan, and the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Cruz, for his part, asserts that waterboarding isn't torture, taking as his authority the discredited and withdrawn "Bybee memo" from the Bush administration Justice Department that limited the definition of torture to punishment that induces pain equal to organ failure or death. He's also called for carpet bombing regions in which ISIS holds a civilian population hostage and relaxing efforts to minimize civilian casualties. He's evinced since his early manhood an unsavory passion for the death penalty. But he's not sadistic enough to meet Trump's standard of leadership.

It's not meaningless that Trump seized on a feminizing epithet to denigrate his rival, and one that associates femininity with vulnerability to being dominated. But the epithet was hardly the point. Lost in the grade-school reaction was the appalling fact that a presidential frontrunner was whipping up a crowd's enthusiasm for torture, and taunting a rival for expressing some ambivalence about it. And in fact, re-instituting torture as official U.S. policy is a near-consensus position among Republican candidates (Cruz says he opposes torture, but then defines a practice universally considered torture outside the GOP as not-torture).  Oppose it, and you're a pussy in the Foxosophere.

We are watching democracy degrade before our eyes. It's not done yet; the Democratic debates are an alternate universe, in which policy and political philosophy are debated civilly and with reference to facts. But one major party, primed for years by a sensationalist media that amplifies its worst impulses, is trafficking in dreams of mass deportation, mass murder (via carpet bombing), and institutionalized torture.

We are hanging by a thread.  And the dominant reaction, when the promise of Nazi policies is on most naked display, is "He said pussy!!"

Update: The Intercept's Dan Froomkin is one of the few to look past the name-calling itself and focus on the real story: GOP Candidates Compete Over Who Will Commit Most War Crimes if Elected

Five Republicans who are not democrats

Leave aside for a moment the favored policies of the ten Republican presidential candidates in the prime-time debate and the seven in the second-tier happy hour debate.  While there were very few actual policy differences, at least five candidates expressed startling contempt or disregard for the core structure of U.S. government, democratic constraints on the executive, international law, or the most basic standards of evidence for assertions made in public. 

Here's a quick look at five violations of the norms of democratic government as understood in the U.S. and internationally.

1. International law banning torture is not "brain surgery." Here's neurosurgeon Ben Carson responding to a question from Megyn Kelly: "As president,....would you bring back waterboarding?"

Alright. You know, what we do in order to get the information that we need is our business, and I wouldn't necessarily be broadcasting what we're going to do.(APPLAUSE)

We've gotten into this -- this mindset of fighting politically correct wars. There is no such thing as a politically correct war. (APPLAUSE)

John G. Taft's evasive honesty

What a peculiar exercise in moral exhortation. John G. Taft rather bravely excoriates the recklessness and cruelty of the current Cruzified GOP in the name of the party's grand old traditions of responsible governance and fiscal probity-- presumably embodied in "Five generations of Tafts [who] have served our nation as unwaveringly stalwart Republicans." And yet he does so by invoking the party's -- and his family's -- past shame: its collusion with Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunt. Taft manages to be refreshingly honest and subtly evasive all at once.

Taft levels his attack against Ted Cruz & co. in the name of his grandfather:

As I write, a photograph of my grandfather, Senator Robert Alphonso Taft, looks across at me from the wall of my office. He led the Republican Party in the United States Senate in the 1940s and early 1950s, ran for the Republican nomination for president three times and was known as “Mr. Republican.” If he were alive today, I can assure you he wouldn’t even recognize the modern Republican Party, which has repeatedly brought the United States of America to the edge of a fiscal cliff — seemingly with every intention of pushing us off the edge.

Throughout my family’s more than 170-year legacy of public service, Republicans have represented the voice of fiscal conservatism. Republicans have been the adults in the room. Yet somehow the current generation of party activists has managed to do what no previous Republicans have been able to do — position the Democratic Party as the agents of fiscal responsibility.

"The adults in the room" -- except with respect to one little issue that is the focus of Taft's historical analogy:

Twas the Night Before Shutdown (complete)

Twas the night before shutdown: the House changed its rules
To hold us all hostage to vain spiteful fools.

Poison pills had been stuffed in the CR with care
To deprive shiftless "others" of Obamacare.

A Senate CR, disinfected and clean,
Was blocked from a vote by the rightwing machine.

And Boehner with his baritone, and Cruz with his glower,
Took to podiums to prove gu'mmint could not sink lower.

So workers were furloughed and services shuttered.
The president was grounded, th'economy sputtered...

And all of a sudden the government mattered!
And Cruz and his crew with their own spite were spattered.

Twas the night be shutdown...Twas the night before default, cont.

The exciting conclusion...full epic after the jump.

     The leadership, stunned, called the vote off and soon
     The air fizzled out of the Tea Party balloon.

     The Senate bill, simplified, once more was tendered,
     As Boehner, Paul, Cruz in swift sequence surrendered.

     "We just didn't win. But we fought the good fight."
     Quite so -- if "good" equals "pumped full of spite."

     Thus did the caucus put on a brave face,
     Raised one more chorus of Ah-mazing Grace,

     Checked on their vitals and took a deep breath,
     Prepped to defend the sequester to death,

     Chanted their catechisms, glowing with pride --
     Beguiled, reviled and self-Cruzified.

Twas the Night Before Shutdown

Yesterday, Kurt Eichenwald tweeted:

Night before shutdown, House changed its rules so that ONLY GOP leadership could bring budget to floor. But it's the "Obama shutdown." Sigh. [Details here] .

The language sounded familiar, and seemed to gallop of its own accord as below -- with an assist from Matt Glassman as noted (MG):

Twas the night before shutdown: the House changed its rules
To hold us all hostage to vain spiteful fools.

Poison pills had been stuffed in the CR with care
To deprive shiftless "others" of Obamacare.

A Senate CR, disinfected and clean,
Was now blocked from a vote by the rightwing machine.

And Boehner with his baritone, and Cruz with his glower,
Took to podiums to prove gu'mmint could not sink lower.