{"id":34425,"date":"2016-03-22T02:00:10","date_gmt":"2016-03-22T06:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34425"},"modified":"2020-07-06T10:44:58","modified_gmt":"2020-07-06T14:44:58","slug":"il-donalduce-and-the-empty-republican-suits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/03\/22\/il-donalduce-and-the-empty-republican-suits\/","title":{"rendered":"Il Donalduce<\/em> and the empty Republican suits"},"content":{"rendered":"

L. Neil Smith<\/a> on the Republican race:<\/p>\n

Consider the Republicans whom we\u2019ve watched and listened to over the past six months (it hasn\u2019t seemed like a moment less than six years). They are, as demagogues of various stripes and flavors loudly declaim, almost uniformly White and male, reflecting nothing more than the politics associated with the demographics in America at the moment. (There aren\u2019t very many black libertarians, either, nor black members of the John Birch Society or the Foundation for Economic Education.) That\u2019s certainly not the fault of anyone at all except the missing candidates, with perhaps an assist from the public education system that teaches neither rational economics nor ideologically untainted history.<\/p>\n

That being the case, all the Republicans seem to have rented the same crappy blue suit and boring tie. They are a tone-deaf, faceless gaggle without a shred of personality among them. I probably couldn\u2019t pick Mitt Romney or John Kasich out of a Vice-Squad lineup. The only recognizable quality Marco Rubio possesses is that he\u2019s short. Ted Cruz looks like Dorothy\u2019s Scarecrow pal, impaled above the cornfield on his stick. I\u2019m a political junkie, but policywise, I can\u2019t tell these stiffs apart. It\u2019s difficult to express how disappointed I was with Rand Paul\u2019s campaign. I kind of liked Ben Carson, but he turned out to be an idiot. I liked Carly Fiorina, and I\u2019m sorry she dropped out.<\/p>\n

All in all, Republicans are a posse of indistinguishable store dummies, soldier-clones shoulder to shoulder for the collectivist state. <\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Donald Trump stands as the exception to all of this. Neither a libertarian nor a conservative, I don\u2019t think ideas mean very much to the Donald. He is, first-and-foremost, a salesman, a wheeler-dealer, a mercantilist who makes the vile Romneys and the evil Bushes (I wonder what ever happened to the Cabots and Lodges) look like amateurish pikers. There is nothing he wouldn\u2019t build — a giant red brick Statue of Liberty with tassles on her golden pasties — if somebody gave him enough money. I do believe he\u2019d dress up in a Bozo the Clown suit and walk a slack wire to get whatever he wants. Make of that whatever you will; it\u2019s certainly no worse than those running against him for President.<\/p>\n

Whatever happens next, America is in for another wild and woolly roller-coaster ride. It\u2019s hardly for the first time. For those with long enough memories, it has survived vastly worse. Remember that the first President known to use the IRS as a political weapon wasn\u2019t Barack Hussein Obama, but Lyndon Baines Johnson. In any given election year, none of us ever gets what we really want. That\u2019s in the basic nature of democracy; we all get what the worst of those among us deserves. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

L. Neil Smith on the Republican race: Consider the Republicans whom we\u2019ve watched and listened to over the past six months (it hasn\u2019t seemed like a moment less than six years). They are, as demagogues of various stripes and flavors loudly declaim, almost uniformly White and male, reflecting nothing more than the politics associated with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,13],"tags":[1037,188,1382,517],"class_list":["post-34425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-usa","tag-donaldtrump","tag-electionwatch","tag-lneilsmith","tag-republican"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Xf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34425"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58466,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34425\/revisions\/58466"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}