Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

We still have time to mess this up!

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

DeSantis transforms Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Joe Lieberman disappointingly reemerged to remind us that he’s still alive.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Second rate reporter says what?

In my day, never was longer.

Everybody saw this coming.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Come on, man.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / More Milwaukee GOP Debate Open Thread: America Is Doomed, or Maybe It’s Just the GOP

More Milwaukee GOP Debate Open Thread: America Is Doomed, or Maybe It’s Just the GOP

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97Comments

  4. 4.

    max

    I don’t think one person has won the debate by screaming ‘MORE MONEY FOR RICH PEOPLE!’

    max
    [‘C’mon Rubio, you know you want to.’]

  6. 6.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    I didn’t watch either of the “debates” tonight. Life’s too short.

    And speaking of life being too short, take a couple of minutes and go to The Oatmeal’s Plane strip and marvel at his skill.

    Life’s short, but we can do a lot with it if we make decent choices and help each other.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  7. 7.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Trying to picture any one of these people in the Oval Office, and I simply can’t.

    Okay, I can barely picture Kasich, but I don’t want him there.

  10. 10.

    Mike J

    Hari Kunzru ‏@harikunzru 3h3 hours ago
    How many ‘debates’ are these people going to have? It’s like a season of Game of Thrones with no action, attractive people or swords,

  15. 15.

    amk

    gopolitico

    Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz exploited a softer debate format and showcased their mastery of the facts in the fourth Republican presidential debate.

    god bless murka.

  17. 17.

    MattF

    @SiubhanDuinne: I picture it as stationary eyes, forehead rolls around eyes. And then, I guess, an alien parasite bursts out of her thorax.

    And no, I’m not watching the ‘debate’.

  19. 19.

    Peale

    …panics, though…we had panics. I too would like to return to that time of a mere 110 years ago when booms and busts were nowhere to be found, no one ever talked about recessions, and we could just panic for a decade.

  22. 22.

    Betty Cracker

    And Cavuto sucked his own dick to end the show. Who knew he was that limber? Here’s my scorecard:

    Trump: lost ground — a dud tonight; yooodge loser
    Rubio: held steady, maybe even gained
    Fiorina: established herself as the most obnoxious candidate on the stage, a feat with Trump there
    Paul: nonentity
    Carson: zzzzzz
    Kasich: toast
    Jeb: didn’t fuck up but didn’t help himself either
    Cruz: meh

  23. 23.

    Kay

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    It’s so great that the GOP base hate him and Jeb Bush won’t let him be the establishment candidate because he could actually be competitive. If they lose they should all blame Jeb Bush. If he would just get out of the way another candidate could take his slot, and he’s not doing anything with it anyway. All the moderates here are mad at Trump but Jeb Bush is the problem, or the best thing that ever happened, depending on your view :)

  26. 26.

    trollhattan

    @Misterpuff:
    Technically those are frickin’ laser eyes.

    Carly seems like one of those movie characters who walks into a garden and the flowers immediately wilt and turn to stone.

  27. 27.

    MattF

    @MattF: I guess the link is somehow problematic. But… you can load the image by clicking on the start of the message that says you can’t load the image. Not intuitive, but it seems to work.

  28. 28.

    Kay

    I’m so glad the Fight for Fifteen were in Milwaukee, at the GOP debate. They send out emails before they have strikes so you can come out and support them, but unfortunately they sent out mine at 11 PM last night and since they were striking at 5:30 AM it is highly unlikely I will drive 60 miles to get to where they are since I was asleep when they told me about it and didn’t even get up until 6. They have to get better at lead time for their supporters. I need more than 17 seconds notice.

  29. 29.

    ThresherK (GPad)

    Is Frank Luntz a coach or a referee this time around? Is he the only one allowed to have a focus group? Cos I’m always getting a whiff of Ham Rove in how he’s treated in the press.

  31. 31.

    Redshift

    @Peale: We also had booms and busts, aka recessions. And depressions, plural.

    While looking that up, I discovered that there are conservative “economists” who are certain that the unfettered free market products the best results and all that talk of extreme settings in the pre-Fed era is a pack of lies. Apparently based on the well-established principles of The Market Is Awesome and Government Is Teh Suxxors And Can Never Make Anything Better, which trump all facts and empirical evidence.

  32. 32.

    mclaren

    @MattF:

    I picture it as stationary eyes, forehead rolls around eyes. And then, I guess, an alien parasite bursts out of her thorax.

    Your, sir, have just won the internet.

  33. 33.

    Redshift

    @efgoldman: His “focus groups” tend to produce results friendly to whoever’s writing the checks, with enough of a sprinkling of noise to make them pass for legit.

    Based on the selection here, I’d suspect Rubio (or more likely, some sugar daddy who likes him), but I don’t get a really strong impression without seeing more, and I’m not willing to wade through his twitter feed.

  34. 34.

    mclaren

    @Redshift:

    While looking that up, I discovered that there are conservative “economists” who are certain that the unfettered free market products the best results and all that talk of extreme settings in the pre-Fed era is a pack of lies.

    Cripes, you didn’t know that? Google Friedrich Hayek, who famously averred that “a depression is like a good cold shower” and recommended them heartily. His policy to deal with depression?
    Nothing.
    Sit by and watch people starve.
    Ayn Rand wasn’t an outlier. A whole shelf of fake Nobel prizes (okay, technically, the Rijkbank Prize for Economics in memory of Alfred Nobel, but it’s not a real Nobel prize, it was set up long after Nobel’s death) have gone to loons like Hayek whose answer to economic upheavals is “let the poeple starve.”

  35. 35.

    ? Martin

    @Redshift: More importantly, GDP was limited to your ability to dig metal out of the ground. The moment we moved off of that standard, GDP could grow as fast as you could get work done. Add people (immigration) and it grows faster. Make workers more efficient, and it grows faster. Invent new industries and it grows faster.

  36. 36.

    mclaren

    @trollhattan:

    Carly seems like one of those movie characters who walks into a garden and the flowers immediately wilt and turn to stone.

    You are correct, sir. Carly Fiorina is Rappaccini’s daughter.

    Great Nathaniel Hawthorne story, by the way.

  37. 37.

    mclaren

    @mdblanche:

    Well, could they at least switch to more of a Gong Show format for the next debate?

    Not possible. The stage would be empty within the first 3 minutes.

  40. 40.

    Gin & Tonic

    So Lufthansa is being affected by a job action on the part of the Independent Flight Attendants’ Union, which ends up cancelling some number of flights each day – I guess they decide day by day which airport or which flights to hit. And it turns out that one of the hundreds of flights canceled for today is the flight my wife was to take to get home. I have now been on hold for 70 minutes trying to get an agent to rebook.

  41. 41.

    mclaren

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    Trying to picture any one of these people in the Oval Office, and I simply can’t.

    Oh, please! Hark back to that classic, Idiocracy.

    Can you see it now? Trump in a Mexican wrestling mask shouting “I can pin anyone within sixty seconds!”

    Cruz wearing gold bling around his neck doing the conga while the country burns…

    Fiorina channeling Faye Dunaway from Supergirl and screaming “Kill them! KILL THEM ALL!!!”

  42. 42.

    trollhattan

    @Mike J:

    Jamie Lee Curtis just beat the shit out of Antonin Scalia.

    My life would be complete if this happened in meatspace. And Jamie could totally do it, if it came to that. Nino, goin’ down!

  43. 43.

    Thoughtful Today

    Wait, why is it a bad thing if the CFPB is “digging through credit records to detect fraud?”

    — daveweigel (@daveweigel) November 11, 2015

    lol

    Because if you dig deep enough, most right-wing economic math is fraud. Can’t have anyone figuring that out.

    ….

  44. 44.

    Mike J

    @Betty Cracker:
    Rupert Murdoch Verified account @rupertmurdoch
    Great debate. All did well, Carson, Bush, others did well, perhaps Rubio best of all. With all doing well Trump did not stand out like past

  45. 45.

    mclaren

    @Thoughtful Today:

    Because if you dig deep enough, most right-wing economic math is fraud. Can’t have anyone figuring that out.

    You may think you’re being snarky, but that’s the literal truth.

    Check out The Baffler article “The Long Con”:

    In 2007, I signed on to the email lists of several influential magazines on the right, among them Townhall, which operates under the auspices of evangelical Stuart Epperson’s Salem Communications; Newsmax, the organ more responsible than any other for drumming up the hysteria that culminated in the impeachment of Bill Clinton; and Human Events, one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite publications. The exercise turned out to be far more revealing than I expected. Via the battery of promotional appeals that overran my email inbox, I mainlined a right-wing id that was invisible to readers who encounter conservative opinion at face value.

    …I learned of the “23-Cent Heart Miracle,” the one “Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies REFUSE to tell you about.” (Why would they? They’d just be leaving money on the table: “I was scheduled for open heart surgery when I read about your product,” read one of the testimonials. “I started taking it and now six months have passed and I haven’t had open-heart surgery.”) Then came news of the oilfield in the placenta. (..)

    Back in our great-grandparents’ day, the peddlers of such miracle cures and get-rich-quick schemes were known as snake-oil salesmen. You don’t see stuff like this much in mainstream culture any more; it hardly seems possible such déclassé effronteries could get anywhere in a society with a high school completion rate of 90 percent. But tenders of a 23-Cent Heart Miracle seem to work just fine on the readers of the magazine where Ann Coulter began her journalistic ascent in the late nineties by pimping the notion that liberals are all gullible rubes. In an alternate universe where Coulter would be capable of rational self-reflection, it would be fascinating to ask her what she thinks about, say, the layout of HumanEvents.com on the day it featured an article headlined “Ideas Will Drive Conservatives’ Revival.” Two inches beneath that bold pronouncement, a box headed “Health News” included the headlines “Reverse Crippling Arthritis in 2 Days,” “Clear Clogged Arteries Safely & Easily—without drugs, without surgery, and without a radical diet,” and “High Blood Pressure Cured in 3 Minutes . . . Drop Measurement 60 Points.” It would be interesting, that is, to ask Coulter about the reflex of lying that’s now sutured into the modern conservative movement’s DNA—and to get her candid assessment of why conservative leaders treat their constituents like suckers.

    The history of that movement echoes with the sonorous names of long-dead Austrian economists, of indefatigable door-knocking cadres, of soaring perorations on a nation finally poised to realize its rendezvous with destiny. Search high and low, however, and there’s no mention of oilfields in the placenta. Nor anything about, say, the massive intersection between the culture of “network” or “multilevel” marketing—where ordinary folks try to get rich via pyramid schemes that leave their neighbors holding the bag—and the institutions of both evangelical Christianity and Mitt Romney’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

    And yet this stuff is as important to understanding the conservative ascendancy as are the internecine organizational and ideological struggles that make up its official history—if not, indeed, more so. The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.

    Source: “The Long Con,” Rick Perlstein, The Baffler, 2012.

  47. 47.

    cmorenc

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    Trying to picture any one of these people in the Oval Office, and I simply can’t.

    Oh, I can picture Donald Trump his first day in the Oval Office – and it will be a mixed experience of can’t turn head away utter fascination and utter terror at the same time. His brash alpha-dog tough dealmaker persona will hit a wall the first time he encounters a situation he can’t bluff and bluster his way through, which will come along very quickly.

  49. 49.

    bluehill

    @Thoughtful Today:

    Because if you dig deep enough, most right-wing economic math is fraud. Can’t have anyone figuring that out.

    In addition to not being scientists, none of the candidates are economists either, so this isn’t a surprise.

  50. 50.

    mclaren

    @bluehill:

    In addition to not being scientists, none of the candidates are economists either, so this isn’t a surprise.

    Oh, come on! I’m not an economist, but even I know there were depressions back in the old days before paper money and the Federal Reserve. Hell, there were economic depressions back in the frickin’ Middle Ages.

    Cripes, that’s like trying to explain away someone not knowing there are fish in the sea by saying “he’s not an icthyologist.” Goddamn, there are some levels of stupidity and ignorance so extreme that they just can’t be argued out of existence.

  51. 51.

    mclaren

    @? Martin:

    More importantly, GDP was limited to your ability to dig metal out of the ground. The moment we moved off of that standard, GDP could grow as fast as you could get work done cook the financial numbers, invent new fake CDOs and derivatives, and embezzle money using computer-aided control frauds.

    There! Fixed that for ya.

  53. 53.

    mclaren

    @Mike J:

    I’m guessing this Rupert Murdoch tweet comes from an alternate universe in which the phrase “all did well” means “crashed and burned in an orgy of insane lies, self-delusion and gross ignorance raised to the level of a religion.”

  54. 54.

    NotMax

    @bluehill

    Because if you dig deep enough, most right-wing economic math is fraud.

    No need to go deep. Merely opening to the table of contents reveals the sham.

  55. 55.

    mclaren

    @NotMax:

    Sounds as if I missed less than zero.

    If you had watched tonight’s Republican debate, your head would implode and your IQ would become an imaginary number.

    Be thankful you dodged the bullet.

  57. 57.

    NotMax

    @mclaren

    Call it the T-ball strategy. Everyone gets a positive citation for showing up.

    Translation of “all did well”: No one visibly frothed at the mouth, vomited or shat him/herself on camera, and not a single head rotated anywhere close to 360 degrees.

  59. 59.

    Doug R

    Well I watched izombie, the repeat of real time, the flash and agents of shield. Much less fantasy than the republican debate.

  60. 60.

    NotMax

    @efgoldman

    I’m shocked – shocked – that you would intimate Republicans might shade or spin the facts.

    ;) (As if the emoticon is necessary.)

  62. 62.

    Redshift

    @bluehill:

    In addition to not being scientists, none of the candidates are economists either, so this isn’t a surprise.

    Weird how not being scientists renders them unable to answer questions about climate change, but not being economists doesn’t prevent them from confidently insisting crackpot economic ideas are absolute truth. Why, it’s almost as if “I’m not a scientist” was nothing more than a dodge to avoid repeating their crackpot scientific ideas where an unfriendly audience might hear…

  65. 65.

    Fair Economist

    @mclaren:

    Oh, come on! I’m not an economist, but even I know there were depressions back in the old days before paper money and the Federal Reserve. Hell, there were economic depressions back in the frickin’ Middle Ages.

    Actually ALL of the depressions in the US – conventionally 1837, 1873, 1893, and 1929 – occurred on the gold standard. Cruz has it backwards – we’ve never had a depression since we LEFT the gold standard (in 1933).

    Also, pretty much every country started recovering from the Great Depression when it left the gold standard.

  71. 71.

    Radio One

    I thought the audience at the debate was completely a GOP establishment crowd obviously rooting for Rubio and hating on Trump, but then even they couldn’t stop themselves from cheering for Cruz and Carson numerous times.

  72. 72.

    lol chikinburd

    @Linnaeus: Nah, of course not. An hour after your comment, your comment is still the only reference I can find to the threats. Rest assured, though, that white liberals love them some First-Amendment-like-substance, and always know which signal is helpful to boost, and when.

  73. 73.

    goblue72

    @Redshift: Goldbugs and Libertarian free-marketers are insane. Innumerate, ahistorical and insane.

    Sure, we had recessions. But Peale noted, in the pre-New Deal era, we had financial PANICS. Violent, disruptive economic meltdowns – often accompanied by widespread bank failures, stock market crises, rapid increases in unemployment. Immensely damaging events to the financial welfare of regular Americans. Often lasting years – and occasionally leading into outright depressions. The 18th and 19th century business cycles were far far far more volatile and damaging than what we are used to. We even had one in the early 20th century. In 1929. I think we all know what happened after that.

    FDIC, the FHA, FSLIC, PUCHA, Securities Act of ’33, Exchange Act of ’34, the Investment Company & Investor Advisors Acts, Glass-Steagall. I don’t think most Americans realize (or ever learned) how much economic regulatory infrastructure the Roosevelt Administration put into place that provided a near permanent end to the economic chaos that would regularly visit the country due to the speculative excesses of the 1% when left to their own devices. We got a taste of it in the Great Recession following the efforts of those same fools to undo the regulatory apparatus that had protected us for so long. A financial crisis that would have descended into full-blown panic if they had been fully successful in completely destroying what FDR built. But thanks to what was left of the New Deal-era giant safety belt / airbag system, we didn’t. Banks were shutdown/failed, but never really closed – thank to the FDIC – and regular depositors didn’t lose a cent. Nowhere did we see an actual bank “run” on deposits. A wave of foreclosures happened – but didn’t turn into Great Depression levels of asset liquidation thanks to the FHA. Our stock markets went kablooey (we even had a day where money markets kinda sorta ‘broke the buck’ for a split second), but chaos didn’t ensue – thanks to the regulatory apparatus overseeing our exchange markets. And a Federal Reserve (a Woodrow Wilson era creation) providing massive monetary stimulus given Congress’ struggles to maintain ongoing fiscal stimulus.

    The system buckled but didn’t break. And these nut jobs are about nothing except smashing what is left to pieces. They aren’t conservatives. They are nihilists.

  74. 74.

    mclaren

    @goblue72:

    The Dude: Well, they finally did it. They killed my fucking car.
    German #1: Ve vant ze money, Lebowski.
    German #2: Ja, uzzervize ve kill ze girl.
    German #3: Ja, it seems you have forgotten our little deal, Lebowski.
    The Dude: You don’t HAVE the fucking girl, dipshits! We know you never did!
    [the Germans, stunned, confer amongst themselves in German]
    Donny: Are these the Nazis, Walter?
    Walter Sobchak: No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

    Source: The Big Lebowski, 1998, The Coen Brothers.

  75. 75.

    Calouste

    Ben Carson, a moron, quoted some number, most likely pulled out of his ass, that in the two hours of the debate 5 people died of drug related issues. In the same time period, 7 people died due to a firearm, but that apparently is not a problem.

  77. 77.

    Tenar Darell

    @NotMax: @Redshift: Completely OT the ahistorical debates… Hand to God thanks! I’m glad I took your advice re: alternative plays in NYC. Wonderful super dark & funny play.

  78. 78.

    Ruckus

    @goblue72:
    Beg to differ.
    They are conservatives. Regular people who work, vote, send their kids to public school, etc, who think that people need to work for what they get and that there should be no safety net that includes anyone/anything but the people who they think allow them to work and live, these are conservatives. They may not all be raving lunatics but they are conservatives. The people who want to tear everything down and exist in what they imagine is what the wild west was, they are conservatives. The religious crazies who want to impose what they think is the only valid way of life for the rest of us, they are conservative.
    They want to conserve a way of life that mostly didn’t exist. They want to create a world that gives them the right to exploit others, conserving power. They are conservatives. Not wanting to hang you from a tree or gut you on the street makes them not crazy but it doesn’t make them not conservative. Do not be fooled, conservatism is not comprised only of rabid destroyers. Those are the worst, the examples that are easy to see, but they are not the sum total of all conservatives. If they were it would be easier to marginalize them.

  79. 79.

    mclaren

    @Ruckus:

    I beg to differ. Check out the article “GOP voters want an apocalypse: The truth about Trump & Carson’s success — We’ve long since passed the time when Trump & Carson could be written off. Something’s different this election,” by Digby (Heather Digby Parton) at the Salon website.

    What seems to have happened is that GOP base voters feel betrayed and disillusioned because they voted for a Republican Congress and that Congress has failed to deliver the agenda on which they ran. First of all, they failed to remove President Obama from office, either through impeachment or at the ballot box in 2012. They also failed to repeal Obamacare,”close the borders,” ban abortion, stop gay marriage, or end political correctness, just for starters.

    Someone forgot to tell Republican voters that there are three branches of government regulated by checks and balances, and other people in their own party, as well as the opposition party, who have different agendas competing with their own. If you listen to right-wing media and follow what’s being said in the conservative bubble, it’s understandable. They were told that they won a huge mandate, and now they quite logically blame the people who have been making promises they don’t keep.

    When they listen to these professional politicians running for their party’s nomination, they just hear more of the same — and they don’t want to hear it anymore. They want someone who will assure them that this creaky government system with all those checks and balances, and all the resultant gridlock, will not be a hindrance to achievement of their agenda. They are tired of waiting. And right now they have two presidential candidates who are promising a different way of doing things.

    (..). Despite their professions of love for the constitution, these voters no longer believe in the system of government that constitution sets forth.

    The last time large numbers of voters demanded a man of action who would set aside the constitutional checks and balances and get things done was in the 1930s in Germany. The voters elected a man on a white horse. They wanted a leader — and they got him.

    Or, as the German word for leader has it, a Führer.

  80. 80.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @Ruckus:

    They want to conserve a way of life that mostly didn’t exist.

    I think that may be part of GoBlue’s point. Conservatives seem to have either slept through or were stoned during high school American History.

  81. 81.

    mclaren

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    Conservatives seem to have either slept through or were stoned during high school American History.

    Unlikely. Movement conservatives learned American history, they simply reject it as a pack of lies purveyed by a liberal education system.

    Movement conservatives get their American history from W. Cleon Skousen’s The Five Thousand Year Leap. Skousen creates an alternative parallel universe in which the Founding Fathers were Christian fundamentalist prophets guided by God to create a theocracy, and the problems with America are that we’ve fallen away from that godly path of laissez faire free-market theocracy into godless socialistic welfare-state sexual revolution counterculture depravity. Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness is now the conservatives’ bible, not the New Testament.

    These people aren’t ignorant, they’re delusional, just like Heinrich Himmler who sent out archeological parties called the Ahnenerbe to dig for evidence of the Aryan civilization of Atlantis that had to exist somewhere in the German homeland.

  82. 82.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @mclaren: You’re talking about movement conservatives, this a small subset of the Republicans. I was talking about most Republicans and conservatives.

  87. 87.

    mclaren

    @Amir Khalid:

    Let’s see…1932, a fire in the Reichstag. Public Decree passed creating a state of emergency that is unconstitutional, suspending many basic rights. The decree is passed without a time limit.

    Hm.

    September 2001, two planes crash in the World Trade Center twin towers. AUMF and USA Patriot Act passed creating a state of emergency that is unconstitutional, suspending many basic rights. The AUMF and Patriot Act is passed without a time limit.

    Sounds like a nearly exact parallel, doesn’t it?

  88. 88.

    Gex

    Dear lord, I hate the mouseover effect on images. Oh were you trying to look at that? Well too fucking bad.

  89. 89.

    sherparick

    @Peale: Well, Cruz is right, except of course for the 1929 stock Market Crash and Great Depression, preceded by the 1920-21 crash and recession, and the 1907 Panic and Recession, the 1893 Panic and Recession, the 1873 Panic and the Long Depression of 1870s and 80s, the Panic of 1857 and recession, etc. etc.

    Kasie Hunt needs to attend the fundraisers and donor meetings with the Koch brothers, or see the e-mails and texts from Grover Norquist. I am sure they are constantly going on about tax cuts and the need to bomb and invade various countries in the world. The plutocrats are both greedy and afraid and seeing other people bombed and invaded comforts them.

  91. 91.

    Barbara

    @Fair Economist: Indeed, if you read historical accounts, all things being equal, the sooner you left the gold standard the sooner you recovered. This is the part of the debate that struck my husband the most. As an econ major who wrote his honors thesis on the economic and historical bases for the “cross of gold” speech by William Jennings Bryan, he was mystified by Cruz. The gold standard clearly exacerbated economic cycles and made recessions much worse than they needed to be.

  92. 92.

    Peale

    @Barbara: for the conservatives I knew growing up, it was already an article of faith that depressions were caused by government charity.

  93. 93.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @mclaren:

    The last time large numbers of voters demanded a man of action who would set aside the constitutional checks and balances and get things done was in the 1930s in Germany. The voters elected a man on a white horse. They wanted a leader — and they got him.

    McLarern, please meet Reductio ad Hitlerum and why it is useless.

    The comparison between Hitler and Trump or Carson is absurd. It was widely accepted in Germany that Germany was the victim of a international conspiracy to weaken it, you know that WWI thing. Germans saw democracy as imposed on it by the conspiracy instead of the traditional German monarchy and the only result being political chaos. The Germans right and left wanted the strong man ruler back.

    What’s going on right now in the American Right is more like the later Roman Empire when the traditional elite went full paranoid over the demographic changes in the Empire. The GOP clown car is more like Emperor Honorius going ordering an attack on the Visgoths when the Visgoths were the strongest part of the Roman Army and then acting shocked when the Visgoths sacked Rome.

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