The Great Pat Buchanan opines on Rubio... and Clinton...
and... the Establishments
* * *
Donald Trump won more votes in the Iowa caucuses than any
Republican candidate in history.
Impressive, except Ted Cruz set the new all-time record.
* HA! HA! THAT WAS FUNNY!
And Marco Rubio exceeded all expectations by taking 23%.
* EVEN THOUGH RAND PAUL AND CARSON WERE ON THE BALLOT AS
WELL...
(*SIGH*)
Cruz won tea party types, evangelicals and the hard
right.
Trump won the populists and nationalists who want the
borders secure, no amnesty and no more trade deals that enable rival powers
like China to disembowel American industries.
* YEP! THAT'S THE TRUMP APPEAL TO ME - EVEN THOUGH I'M A
CRUZ GUY!
And Rubio?
Marco Rubio is what columnist Mark Shields called Jimmy
Carter, 35 years ago, “the remainderman of national politics. He gets what’s
left over after his opponents have taken theirs by being the least unacceptable
alternative to the greatest number of voters.”
(*SHRUG*)
* OK... INTERESTING...
Marco is the fallback position of a reeling establishment
that is appalled by Trump, loathes Cruz and believes Rubio – charismatic,
young, personable – can beat Hillary Clinton.
But there is a problem here for the establishment.
While Rubio has his catechism down cold – “I’ll tear up
that Iran deal my first day in office!” – his victory would mean a rejection of
the populist revolt that arose with Trump’s entry and has grown to be embraced
by a majority of Republicans.
Cruz, Trump, Carson – the outsiders – won over 60% of all
caucus votes.
[The Tea Partiers'] anti-Washington messages, Trump and
Cruz’s especially, grew the GOP turnout to its largest in history, 186,000,
half again as many as participated in the record turnout of 2012.
(*NOD*)
Most significant, 15,000 more Iowans voted in GOP
caucuses than the Democratic caucuses, where participation plummeted 30%from
2008.
What does this portend?
While Iowa has gone Democratic in six of the last seven
presidential elections, it is now winnable by Republicans – on two conditions:
1) The party must be united.
2) It cannot lose the fire and energy that produced this
turnout and brought out those astonishing crowds of tens of thousands.
(*NOD*)
The remainderman, however, cannot reproduce that energy
or those crowds. For Rubio is not a barn burner; he is a malleable man of
maneuver.
Arriving in Washington to the cheers of populists reveling
in his rout of Charlie Crist, Rubio went native and signed on to the
Schumer-McCain amnesty.
* YEP! IMMEDIATELY! RUBIO IS A BACK-STABBING PHONY -
PERIOD!
He voted for “fast track,” the GOP’s pre-emptive
surrender of Congress’s constitutional power to amend trade treaties.
* YEP!
He hailed the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty
President Obama brought home.
(*SIGH*)
Now he is moving crabwise away from the TPP. (Shiftiness,
however, does not bother the establishment; it reassures the establishment.)
* YEP... THE ESTABLISHMENT REVERES FAKE, PHONY,
UNPRINCIPLED FRAUDS...
(*NODDING*)
Rubio is “The Hustler,” the “Fast Eddie” Felson of 2016.
And the Beltway is all in behind him.
* THE BELTWAY... THE URBAN ELITES... (GOP ELITES, THAT IS.)
Marco Rubio is now the candidate of the Washington crowd
that a majority of Republicans voted to reject in Iowa, the darling of the
donor class, and the last hope of a Beltway punditocracy that recoils whenever
the pitchforks appear.
(*NOD*)
Which brings us to the antithesis of Rubio – Bernie
Sanders.
Given where he started a year ago, a sparring partner for
the heavyweight Clinton, and where he ended, a split decision and a coin toss,
the Brooklyn-born socialist was the big winner of Iowa.
In the Democratic race, it is Sanders who has been
getting the Trump-sized crowds, while Hillary and Bill Clinton have been
playing to what look like audiences at art films in the 1950s.
* THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS EVEN LESS "DEMOCRATIC"
(MEANING CONTROLLED BY THEIR GRASS ROOTS AS OPPOSED TO THEIR SPECIAL INTERESTS)
THAN THE GOP. BERNIE'S CROWDS JUST DON'T MATTER.
Sanders will likely have the best night of his campaign
Tuesday – if Hillary Clinton’s surge does not overtake him – when he wins New
Hampshire.
* AGREED.
After that, however, absent celestial intervention - such
as a federal prosecutor being inspired to indict Clinton - Sanders begins a
long series of painful defeats until his shining moment at the convention.
* YEP... THAT'S THE LIKELY SCENARIO. (THAT SAID... I
DON'T BELIEVE EITHER CLINTON OR SANDERS WILL BE THE NOMINEE; OBAMA DOESN'T WANT
EITHER! AND OBAMA IS PRESIDENT... TITULAR HEAD OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY... WHAT
HE WANTS - AND DOESN'T WANT - MATTERS!)
But just as a stifling of the Trump-Cruz-Carson rebellion
by forces supporting another Establishment favorite like Rubio would bank all
the fires of enthusiasm in the GOP, Clinton’s rout of Sanders would cause
millions of progressives and young people who rallied to Bernie to give up on
2016.
* YEP...
(*SHRUG*)
* ABSOLUTELY...
(*NODDING*)
And if both the Sanders revolution that captured half his
party in Iowa and the Trump-Cruz revolt that captured [more than] half of their
party are squelched and we get an Establishment Republican vs. an Establishment
Democrat in the fall... America will be sundered.
* YEP. I BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.
For there is not one America today, nor two. Politically,
there are at least four.
Were this Britain or France, the GOP would have long ago
split between its open-borders, globalist, war-party wing, and its populist,
patriotic, social conservative wing.
The latter would be demanding a timeout on immigration,
secure borders, no amnesty, no more needless wars and a trade policy dictated
by what was best for America, not Davos or Dubai.
Democrats would break apart along the lines of the
Clinton-Sanders divide, with the neo-socialists becoming a raucous and robust
anti-big bank, anti-Wall Street, soak-the-rich and share-the-wealth party.
These splits may be postponed again in 2016, but these
rebellions are going to reappear until they succeed in overthrowing our failed Establishments.
For the causes that produced such revolutions – Third
World invasions, income inequality, economic torpor, culture wars, the real and
relative decline of the West – have become permanent conditions.
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