National Review @NRO, founded by W. F. Buckley (left), tweeted this image of @realDonaldTrump as con artist-old man. pic.twitter.com/Hay6m1j29r
— AlGiordano (@AlGiordano) March 9, 2016
And then, per Mother Jones, “Ted Cruz Hits Miami with One Cruel Goal”:
… Florida is a winner-take-all state, and Cruz is not seen as a strong bet to beat Trump there. Under conventional calculations, there would not be much reason for Cruz to spend time and resources in the state. But Cruz apparently has another goal in mind: to take away votes from Rubio and crush the Florida senator’s last-ditch hopes to win his home state and remain a player in the presidential race.
At the rally, Cruz let his opening act handle most of the knife-work. “Floridians are abandoning Marco Rubio,” declared Miami-Dade GOP vice chair Manny Roman, a Cuban American who was censured by his local party committee last year for breaking ranks and endorsing Cruz. He rattled off the results of Tuesday’s elections and said, “I’m calling on Marco Rubio, especially after last night, to suspend his campaign and endorse Ted Cruz.” The crowd roared with delight…
Cruz announced the presence of a special guest: a former Republican presidential candidate with business experience and a long record of talking about foreign policy. No, it wasn’t Mitt Romney, but onetime Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. Before dropping out of the race, Fiorina once observed that Cruz was someone who “says whatever he needs to say to get elected.” But that has since been forgotten. She was greeted warmly by the Cruz supporters…
***********
Apart from making yet another batch of popcorn, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Fiorina: "Ted Cruz is proud to be known…by the enemies he has made in DC"
— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) March 9, 2016
Cruz/Fiorina: The Likability Ticket
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) March 9, 2016
Cermet
As a liberal, what isn’t to like for a Cruz/Fiorina ticket? The flames they would go down in would make Barry Goldwater look like a close race with LBJ … lol.
raven
Lot’s of hoops.
charluckles
Trump or Cruz? If I am not careful I might start to feel sorry for the a-holes in the Republican party.
JPL
If Fiorina is selected in a vp slot, would she be better/worse than Lynne Cheney. hmmm
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
In honor of John Cole, I bring you this bit of news: State legislators make a big deal of passing some law having to do with raw milk by drinking some raw milk for the cameras. What happens next? You guessed it! They all got sick! But, not to worry, they tell us all that it had nothing to do with the milk. Itās only that itās filthy and infested with germs at the West Virginia capitol.
? Martin
That raises an interesting question. Ted Cruz seems completely oblivious to his own dislikability that I have to wonder if he can observe it in others? He’s like the Sheldon Cooper of assholes.
JPL
@raven: I have friends in DC for the ACC championships. They will not be cheering for TECH.
GregB
Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina have all the likeability and charm of Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole.
Anne Laurie
@? Martin: Y’know, I have sometimes wondered if Ted Cruz isn’t on the edge of the Asperger spectrum. He’s a narcissist raised by a religious maniac, but even by those standards he seems singularly incapable of understanding how human primates function with each other…
chopper
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
wow, he sounds like one of those ‘smart guys’ i keep hearing about.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@Anne Laurie: I don’t know if he is a narcissist. I always thought of him as more of a psychopath. And I think psychopaths have trouble understanding how others see them, not because of any inborn deficiency, but rather because of a lack of empathy. And if anybody’s qualified to raise a kid to be a psychopath, it would be a religious fanatic.
Miss Bianca
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Dear sweet jumping Jesus…I can’t have a sense of humor about this, I’m still smarting over losing a friend to brucellosis last year. He drank some iffy raw milk, got sick – it ate one of his heart valves out. Multiple open heart surgeries, and he died at age 31. A bonny rider, a funny, wonderful man, and someone whose absence I grieve to this day.
It’s like with vaccination….we forget that there was a reason Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization. If you ever spend any time going thru’ historical obituaries, the number of children’s deaths that can be attributed to drinking bad raw milk is just astounding and heart-breaking
Cermet
@Miss Bianca: So very sorry; what a needless death. Just terrible.
NotMax
@chopper
63% of those polled in his home village of Letart agreed that “the place ain’t the same since our idiot left for Charleston.”
27% disagreed
10% said “Come again?”
:)
Anne Laurie
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
You could well be right. But in my experience, ‘identified’ psychopaths — like Charles Manson, or Ted Bundy — are aware enough of how ‘normals’ function that they can fake empathy, often very effectively. Cruz seems more like he just can’t perceive how other people feel; he’s figured out there’s something different, but he’s also convinced it’s everybody else’s problem, we’re all too stupid/lazy/heretical to “get it”. He’s so empathy-blind that he can’t understand that he has a deficit in that area!
Mnemosyne
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
There is apparently some current thinking on the DSM side of things that sociopathy and narcissicm are a spectrum of the same personality disorder, not separate disorders. Not every narcissist is a sociopath, but it’s starting to look like every sociopath is an extreme narcissist.
Miss Bianca
@Cermet:
Thank you, yes. It was a terrible shock, with the accent on the “terrible”. I am now a humorless “anti-raw” campaigner. : /
debbie
I cannot imagine how Cruz thinks teaming up with Fiorina would be a good idea. The gal just does not know her place in things.
Gene108
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
I have had milk from a cow directly milked from a cows teat to my hand. The raw milk is very tasty. No one encouraged me to drink more than that sip.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think we can say that Senator Nelson holds his junior colleague in minimum high regard
MomSense
@Miss Bianca:
I’m so sorry. That is horribly tragic.
Jager
What! None of the legislators said, “Shit fire, all them damn barn cats been drinking raw milk for years, ever see one a them get sick?”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I see Kasch has pulled ahead of Trump in some polls. Has Trump started talking about Kaisch’s time at Lehman Bros yet?
MomSense
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
I really do hate to play armchair psychologist however my read on Cruz is that he was raised as a hero child by a father who probably wove in lots of biblical prophecy into his dreams for his son. Clearly Cruz was socially inept and probably bullied or at least not accepted by his peers in school. I bet his father comforted him with a lot of garbage about how the other kids were just jealous, God had big plans for him, he’s going to make history, and other grandiose religious and power fantasies.
debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
He did a while back, but I’m sure he’ll bring it up again. I hope there’s a lot of stuff he brings up about Kasich.
raven
@JPL: For some reason I thought it was in the Garden but that makes sense.
LAO
@MomSense: I’ve spent waaaay to much time thinking about this. I agree 100% with your arm chair analysis.
JGabriel
Mother Jones via Anne Laurie @ Top:
Or Fiorina meant it as a compliment and saw it as a plus. After all, substitute promoted for elected, and that was her MO as CEO.
WereBear
Who let Cruz into the Ivies, I’d like to know. What volunteer work did he do? What science prize did he win? Who looked at that face and was pleased?
nutella
Wow, those Repub candidates really all hate each other, don’t they?
BruceFromOhio
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): May I suggest the cyanide, gentlemen? Too strong? How about the syrup of ipecac then? As long as you are making yourself sick while looking utterly fucking foolish.
raven
@JPL: Speaking of DC, I have friends who are there with their kids and they had a White House Tour cancelled today because of the guy that shot the preacher and then drove there and threw some stuff over the fence.
MomSense
@LAO:
It starts out with a genuine desire to understand but then it’s hard to stop. It gets really bad when you try to figure out the motivations of the supporters. Makes it tough to go to the grocery store.
chopper
@nutella:
cruz’s strategy is to get solidly into second place and then pray real hard to baby jesus to do something bad to donald trump.
mark
Re: William Buckley. Watched this video of Gore Vidal at the Royal Geographic Society in 2008. An audience member asks “What, if anything, do you have to say about the recent passing of William Buckley?”
He pauses seriously for a moment and says “He is not going to enjoy Hell,”
Audience erupts in laughter
and then adds under his breath “He was a horrible being”
LAO
@MomSense: I appreciate that. Living in Manhattan, I’ve never met one of his supporters (or anyone I assume would support him)!
PurpleGirl
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Are they planning on deregulating milk production so that raw milk is easier to buy without telling people of the risk of becoming ill by drinking it?
LAO
@mark: I think the Buckley Vidal debates are on Netflix. To quote my grandma, it was hoot!
MomSense
@LAO:
I drove into the parking lot of the tractor supply place and, after seeing the bumper stickers on the cars in the parking lot, decided not to go in. You do have Trump Tower to deal with though. I took my youngest there this summer. He rode the gold escalators and then took a selfie outside giving it the finger.
PurpleGirl
@Miss Bianca: Sorry for the loss of your friend. In my early teens I read a bunch of books about the founding of public health as a medical field and the various different diseases involved, i.e. tuberculosis, typhus, etc.
Elie
@Miss Bianca:
Only one dairy is allowed to sell raw milk in Whatcom Co, WA… Its really hard work to produce clean batches and the county patrols it carefully. People, as you know, take a lot of shit for granted… like all those childhood diseases that there are vaccines to prevent — they think that they are no big deal until you see what is means when a newborn gets whooping cough or an immune compromised person gets measles encephalopathy.
LAO
@MomSense: You are an excellent mom! BTW, wasn’t saying we don’t have our fair share of shitheads, Trump, he’s clearly on us.
ETA: and Gulliani, how could I forget him!
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
What, what?? Haven’t heard a word about that. Will have to get busy googling.
Ryan
I take it back. File all of the posts under assholes.
JustRuss
Cruz/Fiorina: You may not like us now, but wait til you get to know us!
eemom
Cruz/Fiorina. Holy shit. Makes McCain/Palin look like Mondale/Ferraro.
And to think that a mere 8 years ago, I thought they couldn’t sink any lower.
SiubhanDuinne
@mark:
@LAO:
A couple of months ago I saw the documentary Best of Enemies about the Buckley-Vidal debates. It was very well done; I’d watch it again, and recommend it to anyone interested in the politics of that period or the erudition and sheer orneriness of those two guys.
LAO
@eemom:
Well there’s your problem. There’s no floor, they can always sink lower!
LAO
@SiubhanDuinne: thank you. That’s what I was thinking of. I couldn’t remember the name.
eemom
@mark:
When Noam Chomsky, another erstwhile Buckley nemesis, was asked to eulogize him, he said something along the lines of: “He was considered intelligent by many people. I was not among them.”
debbie
@SiubhanDuinne:
And to think they didn’t have to compare the size of their hands!
Groucho48
@JPL:
Fiorina has decades of experience destroying everything she touches while Liz Cheney only talks a good game. It would probably take Cheney most of the term before she started getting the hang of practical destruction.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Miss Bianca: I’m so sorry to hear of your friend’s tragic, too early, end.
@PurpleGirl: It seems the legislation is to permit cow shares, which in most places don’t include a risk warning.
Linda Featheringill
@Anne Laurie:
Asperger’s is a possibility. I share part of my life with a high-functioning Asperger person. We get along only because I make it damn clear what my reaction is to what he says. He calls me the Curmudgeon, but says that I’m his curmudgeon.
Anyway, the empathy thing is just not there.
He understands animals, though.
Steve in the ATL
@mark:
Buckley and my stepfather were classmates at Yale. He said Buckley was almost universally hated by students and faculty alike. The students even blamed him for the death of a professor: Buckley was such a bullying ass in his class that the professor took a sabbatical to live with a tribe in South America, who then killed him (and maybe ate him–can’t remember).
J R in WV
@PurpleGirl:
No, on the contrary. You now have to buy a share of a specific milk cow, and can then receive (purchase) up to that amount of milk produced by that specific cow. We used to (30 years ago) milk a dairy cow, and have friends who keep dairy goats, and make fabulous cheeses.
Everyone I know who does milking is very picky about sterility of all the equipment that comes into contact with the milk. We filtered our milk, and used boiling water baths on all the equipment, except for the cow’s udder and our hands, which got hot water/soapy scrubbed down, rinsed with more hot water, which everyone liked a lot in the cooler parts of the year. Dawn in the spring and fall and winter. Mid summer wasn’t as popular, but we still did it every morning…
Now we buy organic milk, but it isn’t the same as fresh whole milk. I agree that commercial milk must be pasteurized, but I’m glad we got to know milk from our own cow, in the long ago.
Bob In Portland
A Cruz/Fiorina ticket would be so awesome. I’m already thinking of slogans for them. “Fuck You, America!” See what I did? I included an exclamation point to pull in Jeb! supporters.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@mark: @eemom: Christopher Buckley wrote a long piece, maybe a book excerpt, about his parents not long after their deaths. I didn’t like the old man, but that was one nasty hit piece, even without considering the source. Actually the old man came off as a smug douche, which I knew. CB mostly complained about the old man being ungenerous about his son’s writing, but if CB didn’t know he was painting his mother as rage-filled, booze-soaked racist harridan, there’s some powerful denial at work there.
Politically I think Buckley the Younger is just a smug Bobo-ist (overrated as a humorist, IMHO), but the whole story about his kid and the way they froze him (I think) out of the family money is stomach turning
Bob In Portland
@J R in WV: When I was, oh, around twelve, we visited my grandparents down in Bogue Chitto, Mississippi. They had a cow, which stepped on her foot and has given her a lifetime of pain. But that fresh milk was delicious. One of my uncles brought in a bucket of milk. They poured it through a cheesecloth, all steamy. And that milk had so much butterfat that that a glass or two could coat the insides of your arteries.
There is something to be said about fresh milk. That said, it’s not worth getting sick over.
Mnemosyne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
As Anne Lamott said, if his parents had wanted him to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
I’m not someone who’s big on keeping stuff in the family, because a huge amount of damage can be done to children that way.
Steeplejack (phone)
The Google doodle today is a cool theramin applet. You can play it!
Pogonip
@Miss Bianca: So sorry about your friend.
My grandfather also squirted milk at the cats. I didn’t like warm milk so I didn’t get the cupped handful.
In addition to brucellosis, raw milk also carries milk fever, which killed Abraham Lincoln’s mother. If they’d had pasteurization I bet they’d have been happy to take advantage of it.
alan
@mark: I saw on Buckley’s TV show, he had Allen Ginsberg on the show and read Howl! Buckley made cute faces at first but then was quite lost. TV at ts best
Anne Laurie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yeah, I remember that piece — self-awareness was not including in the Buckley genome, was it?
Since Bill’s death, there’s been a lot of stories about him… taking a great interest in handsome young men, ‘mentoring’ rising young-conservative college boys, bringing them into the family home for weeks at a time, encouraging them to swim nude in the pool. Meanwhile, Pat ‘lived her own life’ as one of the premier Ladies Who Lunched, starting on the Long Island iced teas, followed by martini-fueled dinner parties, ending with ‘nightcaps’ by the pitcher. It’s a wonder (or a testament to the servants old money can hire) that their kids turned out as well as they did!
Nate Dawg
@Anne Laurie: He’s not afflicted with Aspbergers, I don’t think.. Having been around many, he doesn’t display the characteristics. They tend to lack key socializing traits and have a lot of difficulty appearing normal, non-robotic, and even usually fail at imitating those around them. Mitt Romney always struck me as slightly on the spectrum, though. He memorized car parts as a child and was quite out of touch with human emotions.
Cruz = psychopath/sociopath or narcissist. Hard to tell from this far, but he’s in one of those very similar, overlapping categories for sure.
FWIW: sociopathy and psychopathy have as much to do with Bundy and Mason as being British has to do with the Queen of England. They are rare birds, even among their group, and not useful to judge others against. 10% of the male population is on the socipath/psychopath spectrum, and that’s a conservative estimate. Very few are serial killers.
Feathers
@Anne Laurie: I have a relative (handsome, gay, now retired) who was mentioned in a magazine article as being in Nan Buckley’s circle. I’ve always liked him, because he was so much fun and the best conversation to be found at reunions and funerals, but he did spoil it that once when he let slip that things would be so much better if we could just bring back the workhouses. Distance is part of his charm, I’m sure.
Miss Bianca
Back late to the party. Thanks, all, for your kind words! I had no idea I was still feeling so raw about it all. (I’d call that an unpardonable pun, but Brendan would have loved it).
The worst thing was that he had been abusing drugs and alcohol pretty badly, which probably compromised his immune system…but he was getting clean and sober, trying to eat well, and I’m sure he thought he was doing the “healthy” thing. Sometimes I think that if there is a God, He is something of a cruel trickster.
(And not that all raw milk is necessarily unhealthy, and raw milk cheese is certainly delicious! But you do have to be so fanatical about cleanliness.)
Paul in KY
@JPL: Boy, is that a Hobbsian choice. Wow, that’s like saying would you rather be boiled in oil or flayed alive.
Paul in KY
@WereBear: You can get into any Ivy, if you are willing to pay full price. I think he did get some kind of scholarship, though.
Paul in KY
@Groucho48: Who would be advising & plotting with ole Liz?