Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

So had Rubio, Pence, Ryan....

 

Any plans by the Repugs to have Cruz taken out back and shot for treason?

 

Yeah, same dynamics at work.

 

I think that will take care of itself
A universally disliked pol gave his party's national gathering the middle finger. Cruz is done.

 

TigerVols, DQ has said many times over that if Trump is the man, he will not only vote for Hillary, he will donate to her campaign.

For his own sanity, let's hope he creates a new email address solely for that purpose and then never checks it again.

 

Maybe Cheney can take him hunting.

 

"We wish they'd spend more on their military" is definitely within the normal opinions on the matter.

This strikes me as very outside the spectrum in relation to NATO:
Then yes, I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, “Congratulations, you will be defending yourself.”

This is a ... non-standard way of evaluating defensive alliances:
SANGER: We were talking about alliances, and the fundamental problem that you hear many Republicans, traditional Republicans, have with the statement that you’ve made is that it would seem to them that you would believe that the interests of the United States being out with both our troops and our diplomacy abroad is less than our economic interests in having somebody else support that. In other words, even if they didn’t pay a cent toward it, many have believed that the way we’ve kept our postwar leadership since World War II has been our ability to project power around the world. That’s why we got this many diplomats ——

TRUMP: How is it helping us? How has it helped us? We have massive trade deficits. I could see that, if instead of having a trade deficit worldwide of $800 billion, we had a trade positive of $100 billion, $200 billion, $800 billion. So how has it helped us?

This strikes me as on Mars:
SANGER: But we’ve had them there since 1953 and ——

TRUMP: Sure, but that doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be something going on right now. Maybe you would have had a unified Korea.

This is generally not an agreed upon notion:
TRUMP: By the way, and I know what I’m talking about is massive. If we ever felt there was a reason to defend the United States, we can always deploy, and it would be a lot less expense. …

This just seems laughably simplistic:
TRUMP: Well, it would be ideal if we could get them all together. And that would be a possibility. But I’m a big fan of the Kurdish forces. At the same time, I think we have a potentially — we could have a potentially very successful relationship with Turkey. And it would be really wonderful if we could put them somehow both together.

SANGER: And what’s your diplomatic plan for doing that?

TRUMP: Meetings. If I ever have the opportunity to do it, meaning if I win, we will have meetings, we will have meetings very early on.

This is past Mars. This is somewhere near the Juno mission:
SANGER: I was just in the Baltic States. They are very concerned obviously about this new Russian activism, they are seeing submarines off their coasts, they are seeing airplanes they haven’t seen since the Cold War coming, bombers doing test runs. If Russia came over the border into Estonia or Latvia, Lithuania, places that Americans don’t think about all that often, would you come to their immediate military aid?

TRUMP: I don’t want to tell you what I’d do because I don’t want Putin to know what I’d do. I have a serious chance of becoming president and I’m not like Obama, that every time they send some troops into Iraq or anyplace else, he has a news conference to announce it.

OK, this one isn't really about what's in or out of normal parlance, just throwing it in here because he seems to have no idea what's being talked about:
SANGER: President Obama, as you probably know, as you probably read, is considering a no-first-use pledge before he leaves office for nuclear weapons. We don’t have one right now. Some other nations do, some don’t. Would you consider that stabilizing?

TRUMP: Depends on who we are talking about, it depends on who we are talking about. I would only make that commitment as the agreement is being signed. I wouldn’t want to play my cards. I don’t want to say that.

 

Mr. Barro, you forgot the 'Lyin' Ted' nickname.

 

Conservative backlash!!!!!

This is part of the corruption of Trump. He called Ted Cruz a liar every day and in every way for months (it used to be considered a breach in decorum to straight up call an opponent a liar, never mind use it as a nickname). The insults against his wife, the cavalier birtherism, the disgusting JFK-assassination theories about his dad: These things are known. And yet the big conversation of the day is Ted Cruz’s un-sportsmanlike behavior? For real? But forget Cruz for a moment. For over a year, Trump has degraded politics in some of the most vile ways. His respect for the Republican party as the home of conservatism is on par with Napoleon’s respect for churches when he converted them into stables.

But that’s okay because he’s Trump. He’s a “winner.” And now that he’s the nominee, the Smart Set and the Mob is telling me that Cruz is the outrageous violator of norms and good manners. Let’s all look down our noses at the sore loser everybody, as we bend the knee and make every apology possible for the sorest, most ungracious winner in American history. When I watch Trump’s kitchen cabinet of yes men rise from their “Thank you, sir, may I have another?” prostrations just long enough to talk about Cruz’s self-interestedness, I have to laugh. Where’s your shinebox, Governor Christie?

Ted Cruz has never been my favorite politician. And I am not so naïve that I don’t recognize the gamble Cruz is making.

But if the choice is between forgiving Ted Cruz’s obvious political calculation to become the standard bearer of an authentic conservatism or Donald Trump’s lizard-brain narcissism where no principle or cause outranks his own glandular desire to be worshipped like a conqueror atop the carcass of conservatism, I choose Ted.

I Choose Ted

 

Done and done ... and not in that order!

 

Holy shit, you read Jonah Goldberg ... there's hope for you, grasshopper!

 

It's never about race for the left: