Live from Parkville, MO: Two things crossing my screen. The first is a correspondent informing me that ex-Old New Republic writer Mickey Kaus, who I will remember as the crusader against Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein who got wingnut welfare from Slate to the tune of $350 per weblog post (that averaged 1.5 paragraphs each), is opposing Paul Ryan from the right for being too-big of a pro-amnesty squish on immigration to be a proper Speaker of the House.
The second is this:
Jeb Bush: Team Bush in a Fog: "If this is an election about how we’re going to fight...
...to get nothing done, I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people are literally in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation. I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that.
: Team Bush in a Fog: "That might be one of the most honest things Jeb has said...
...this campaign.... Letting folks know that he has other cool things he’d rather be doing than fighting for the nomination reeks of the kind of entitlement folks have come to expect from the Republican establishment.... We get this telling quote [from John H. Sununu]:
I have no feeling for the electorate anymore.... It is not responding the way it used to. Their priorities are so different that if I tried to analyze it I’d be making it up.
One has to wonder just where Mr. Sununu has been these last 7 years. Oh yeah, he’s been busy doing stuff like suggesting that President Obama’s trip to Kenya was merely at attempt to incite the birthers. And NOW he wants to scratch his head and wonder how his party went off the rails?... Really?... Bush, Sr. and many of his team are... shocked.... But the truth is, they would be in much better shape right now if they had stood up to all this nonsense a long time ago.... At least then it wouldn’t have come off so self-serving and entitled.
I firmly believe that Bill Clinton would have loved to get up on stage with senior Republicans, and jointly talk about how there were bipartisan New Democrat deals to be done on welfare reform, NAFTA, health-care reform, and deficit-reduction. Alan Greenspan was willing to play. None of the other Republican powerbrokers in 1993-1994 were, especially not George H.W. Bush sulking in his tent in Houston.
And now they are coming to realize that what they thought was their own political base really does not like them at all.
I must say, both impress me with their karmic justice...
