Schadenfruede is not generally an honorable emotion. It seems wrong to rejoice in the tears of others. But in some cases, the guilt is removed and one can rejoice openly and gleefully and one of the pleasures of the Republican primary race is seeing the hopes and ambitions of one awful candidate after another being dashed. The pleasure would be even sweeter if the remaining candidates were not as bad or even worse.

There are those, especially outside of Ohio, who see John Kasich as not being so bad and maybe an acceptable alternative to the clowns who formed the rest of the pack. Kasich’s has an image of being ‘moderate’, and ‘reasonable’ and of being the ‘adult’ among the children. But we should not be fooled. His carefully cultivated image is as bogus as the ‘compassionate conservatism’ of George W. Bush and now that we are down to just three people, people are taking a closer look at this fraud.

Jesse Berney strips the veneer off Kasich and judges him to be ‘actually terrifying’.

John Kasich is such an appealing guy, isn’t he? He went to a same-sex wedding once. He thinks Donald Trump’s plan to deputize the violent thugs at his rallies so they can kick out all the brown people is pretty unreasonable. His folksy Midwestern-dad charm gives Democrats fits of terror when we imagine facing him in the general election.
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Despite his carefully cultivated appearance, and despite comparisons to the moron and the goblin left standing next to him, John Kasich is no moderate. A cursory look at his record proves the opposite: On the issues that matter, Kasich is a deep-red conservative who would do everything in his power to move America in an uglier, more regressive direction.

Berney focuses on his terrible record when it comes to curtailing women’s rights and concludes:

That’s the real John Kasich. Not the friendly dad on the debate stage shaking his head at all the bickering. Not the guy who attended a same-sex wedding — the one who went, and still opposes same-sex marriage. Not the one who sounds reasonable and kind — the one who would keep a rape victim from learning where she can end her pregnancy.

The Republican Party has three choices left: a man who would fundamentally destroy the values that actually make America great, a conservative true believer who would take America backward in a thousand different directions… and Ted Cruz.

Ashley Feinberg goes step by step into looking at Kasich’s record on a multiplicity of issues and pronounces him to be evil. He is anti-union, has gutted education, and opposed women’s right to access the services they are legally entitled. The article did not even mention how Kasich has cut taxes on the rich and reduced the amount of money that local governments get, thus reducing the services that they can provide and this has hurt the poor disproportionately.

Kasich can be as obnoxious as a Ted Cruz, as childish as a Donald Trump, as petty as a Marco Rubio, and as much an oligarchic-worshipping ideologue as any of the Republicans. His ambitions deserve to be as crushed as those of the rest of them.