On to the next round of primary contests

Last night featured a Democratic debate that took place in Flint, Michigan, the town that is currently at the center of the crisis about lead in the water and for long has been emblematic of the decay of America’s cities and its manufacturing base. I could not watch it but this report from The Guardian summarizes what happened and describes it as a ‘fierce debate’, with sharp exchanges between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton over actual issues but with no personal attacks or mudslinging. In short, the opposite of what happens in Republican debates. Tessa Stuart provides some of the choice quotes.
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Hillary Clinton, Wall Street, and the neoconservatives

In my post from two days ago expressing my puzzlement about the Washington and Republican establishment’s strategy against Donald Trump, I concluded with the following prediction.

Trump will be the Republican nominee and be selected on the first ballot. Most of the anti-Trump forces who are now screaming loudly will eventually give in and support him because they do not want a Democrat to win. You can seen the equivocation already taking place, with some in the party suggesting that maybe Trump is not so bad after all and laying the groundwork for eventual total capitulation. At the last debate, after calling Trump a conman and fraud and clown and suggesting he has a small penis, Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich all said that they would support Trump if he were the nominee. That shows that all this anti-Trump rhetoric is mostly sound and fury, signifying nothing.

While I said that ‘most’ of the anti-Trump forces will eventually come around to supporting him, I did not specify those who would not and this post will elaborate.
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The Trump voters

The big puzzle is whether Donald Trump’s supporters will be swayed by the relentless attacks on him by the party and Washington establishment. Will Trump succeed even without the full support of right-wing power brokers like Rush Limbaugh (who prefers Ted Cruz) and the active opposition of Glenn Beck and the motley crowd of conservative extremists that attended the annual CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) that met this weekend and which Trump canceled on at the last minute?
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End of the Alabama’s stand against same-sex marriage

The state of Alabama has been one of the holdouts against same-sex marriage despite the US Supreme Court ruling in June 2015 nullifying all state bans against it. The state’s chief justice Roy Moore has been adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage and on March 3, 2015, before the US Supreme Court’s ruling, the state’s supreme court (with only one justice in dissent) had barred all the state probate court judges from issuing such licenses.
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The puzzling strategy being adopted against Trump

The Republican party and the Washington establishment have clearly decided that they are deeply worried by the idea of Donald Trump being the party nominee and have finally declared all out war on him. The last debate saw Fox News tag team with Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to attack him with all they had. The Washington Post has editorialized against him. Republican senate leader Mitch McConnell has said that the party will not support him. And the party’s 2012 nominee Mitt Romney gave a blistering speech against him. All kinds of SuperPACS funded by wealthy donors are now running ads against him in the upcoming primary states.
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The torture issue exposes more hypocrisy of Trump opponents

The rise of Donald Trump has seen a whole lot of people in the Republican party and conservative movement suddenly realizing that divisive rhetoric and xenophobic attitudes and bigotry are bad things, even though they were advocating those very same things for decades except using coded language. They seem outraged that he is openly saying what they were covertly advocating.
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The Republican debate was even more ridiculous than previous ones

Last night’s Republican debate followed the familiar pattern, and even more so, of insults and endless crosstalk with the candidates and moderators talking over each other so much that often it was hard to figure out who was saying what. It resembled nothing so much as siblings arguing, with repeated “No, I’m not” “Yes, you are” types of exchanges. Adding to the cacophony was that the audience was even more rowdy, whooping it up even before the candidates were introduced, maintaining a constant background chatter accompanied by boos and cheers and repeated calling out of things that I could not make out. The event can only be described as an embarrassment.
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