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Will they swallow GOP nominee & political puffer fish Donald Trump? Row 1: Mimi Walters, Steve Mensinger, Don Wagner; Row 2: Kim Ho, Steve Lodge; Row 3: Young Kim, Darrell Issa; Row 4: Larry Bennett, Jim Fitzpatrick; Row 5: Ed Royce, Ling Ling Chang; Jennifer Fitzgerald; Lucille Kring
The time to do what everyone should have known was inevitable has come.
The Presidential debates have dwindled down to a not-at-all precious one; the most contentious Presidential election in half a century is crawling into the can. This year’s most notable development is not the takeover of the national Democratic Party by the descendants of the old Democratic Leadership Council, because that happened a long time ago; this year has simply confirmed that the party establishment will stop at nothing to crush its left wing at the national level, which we already pretty much knew. (What we didn’t know was how completely ungraceful they would be at doing it.)
This year’s novelty is that the Republican Party has gone so many bubbles off plumb that the Republican Speaker of the House is apparently no longer supporting the party’s own nominee — who has become a sort of political puffer fish who is deadly if not properly prepared — and even the party’s Vice-Presidential nominee seems to support him only grudgingly. The soul of the Republican Party is being sorely tested this year — and, as Orange County is in many ways the spiritual home of both the new and old versions of the GOP, it seems fair to ask, in bold red type: where do our local candidates stand on the candidacy of Donald Trump? Are they “yea,” “nay,” or able to run faster than our pursuing readers?
Unsurprisingly, those OC-based candidates are for the most part not trumpeting their Trump-stances. (As our Travis notes, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is an apparent exception, but the rules of political gravity don’t seem to apply to him.) But as we are, like the OC Register, more or less included in “the media” around these parts, it seems right and just for us to ask our readers to hunt down our Republican candidates as quickly as possible — making use of your First Amendment rather than Second Amendment rights, we must clarify in case any of our readers are criminally insane and linking in from other OC blogs — and ask them whether they still (if they ever did) hope that Donald Trump wins the Presidency. Go ahead — ask them!
We’ve included head-shots (sort of) of a somewhat arbitrarily chosen baker’s dozen of Republican candidates, ranging from the nationally significant (Issa, Royce) to of statewide significance (Y. Kim, Wagner) to locally significant (Mensinger, Kring) to essentially included here as a cruel joke (sad Jim Patrick). But there are others out there as well. We left out “might-as-well-be-Republican” Democrats (Brandman, Daly, Solorio, Correa, Pulido, etc.) because the question is too easy for them (“Hillary!”); we left out Republicans who aren’t running this year because Kris Murray spoiled that fun. Add in any other GOP candidates you want, if they meet our above qualifications, and ask them too. Then report back to us! Do not skip that final step!
You’re welcome to ask Democrats whether they support Hillary, at least in the sense of “wanting her to win” (which even one deeply as disturbed by her as I do, because Tof rump), and send in your findings as well. But that won’t be interesting, because even those Democrats who will be voting for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or Peace & Freedom’s Gloria La Riva overwhelmingly want Hillary to beat Trump, because in the end we’d rather protest Hillary for four (and my guess is only four) years than see what horrors Trump may unleash after he translates the Constitution into “locker room talk.” We will update the body of this post as your entries arrive. Happy non-violent hunting!
*Kellyanne Conway….is toast. Corey is also toast. As we stated: “The Trumpster is the Typhoid Mary of 2016”. He can pull out his stiffy and show all and it won’t make any difference. Sadly, Dana has decided to do a Hirakiri….as has our good pal Darrell Issa.
They have lost their way on a day when Muhammed entered the city of Medina. Too bad really. Our vote for Bo Greitz, Ralph Nader or Ross Perot……….will make no difference. The reality is that Republicans across the country will have no future. Only Chaffetz and Mike Lee in Utah have grasped the totality of the demise of the Republican Party. We had warned from the beginning that the Tea Party people were really not Republicans. We said they were an aberrant force for evil in the Republican Party. No one paid much attention. No one thought much either way. Today they have to grasp the concept that the Tea Party has killed our Republican Party once and for all. Trump can start his third party ……and suffer continual defeat…….only because people falsely believe he has bucks. His bucks are more phoney than than the Lira in Italy or the Pesos in Mexico. Our future in the this country must restore integrity, honesty, transparency and truth. The more that Trump attacks and lies, the more the fall from grace.
*One more thing: We are broken hearted that Rudy Guiliani has downed the cool aid of Donald Trump. We will never support Rudy again….even though we were so proud of him after 911.
You should ask the Troll if he is a swallower too. Because he sure sounds like one.
The number one question is, does it really matter? Nobody out there cares anymore. The only purpose to this inquiry is to stick it to the Republican candidates, and that is petty, Greg. There are a lot of us who still believe in the GOP Platform (more or less, with some line item exceptions for some additional human compassion) and have sadly watched our party get hijacked by an oompa loompa with an ego the size of Rhode Island, while trying to adhere to the party line and honor the choice made by American voters. But please, hang this ass-hat around the necks of a bunch of candidates who did NOT build him or the crisis he has created.
Donald Trump is one of the last people on earth I would have called a REPUBLICAN. For years he has pushed an agenda of pro-abortion, pro-Hillary insider Democrat positions that are as far from the party I grew up with under Reagan as I can imagine. Just because he suddenly jumped his registration to the GOP does not make him a Republican any more than walking into a McDonald’s makes one a hamburger. From the beginning many of us believed he was a ringer to push people to Hillary. How do you get a nation to swallow the most distasteful of candidates? Give them one even worse. Yet the more outrageous Trump becomes, the more people cling to him as the alternative to Hillary. That says more about Hillary than it does about Trump.
Now let’s address those who DID create him.
We have the mass exodus of two-faced political cowards who HAD to have KNOWN what Trump is all about behind the scenes. When the on-camera persona is as divisive and disgusting as he is, you know damn good and well who he is when the camera is not rolling. They are not running because they “discovered” he is a misogynist jerk. They are running because he got caught on tape, saying things they KNEW he MUST say in private, based entirely on what he permits to come from his “outside voice.” I find that more disgusting than if they simply stood by him. Either we admit we are so desperate for the middle class to be cut in on the deals the insiders have left us out of that we will condone the victimization of women, minorities, and the disabled in pursuit of our own slice of the American money pie, or we leave the nation to more of the same policies that have destroyed the middle class and are pushing even harder downward until the working class becomes the working poor. That is not much of a choice, but since BOTH offer us crap for leadership but one lets us still feed our families with the roll back of open trade, etc. I guess we don’t have a choice.
What it comes down to is this; I don’t think ANYONE out there is fully enamored with Trump, or believes him to be the best person in the US for the job. Not even his die hard Trump-ettes think he is a great human being. No, it is not that the US has lost its collective mind in love of Trump. It is that fear of your girl Hillary makes us prefer Attila the Hun over the Coronation of She Who Would Be Queen.
Whether you like it or not, there are perfectly reasonable people in this world who believe Hillary will replace Supreme Court Justices with those who undermine basic Constitutional principles, something we have been led to believe by Hillary’s own words. Not exactly a conspiracy theory. On that note even Trump has gaffed with his agreement that those on a “no fly list” that restricts a COMMERCIAL transaction without legal due process not needed to restrict a commercial transaction would also apply to access to guns or ammo, a Constitutional right. While it may appear on the surface to be a good idea (I liked it at first) in the end it is suspension of a Constitutional right without legal due process to be convicted of a crime, something akin to a gang injunction area where kids are placed on a list to become less than full citizens with less rights than we are afforded under the Constitution. Ultimately I cannot support that, thanks to the overreach and slippery slope we see in the current leadership in Washington as our rights increasingly erode.
Many of us do believe there is a lot more to the story of Benghazi than we are being told. Our Ambassador is dead after having been denied multiple requests for more security, and that is negligence if nothing else.
The Republican Party did not build Donald Trump. The Democrats did.
I care. Frankly, if local GOP candidates aren’t willing to denounce Trump they absolutely should have that asshat hung around their necks.
That’s how we take our party back. Leaders lead. They stand up, they take a position and help us move on.
There’s an easy, righteous, and correct answer to this question, Cynthia. The answer is “no.” This is pretty much a slow pitch up the middle for GOP candidates, if they want to take advantage of it.
This is not “petty” if you think that Trump is as dangerous a political figure — as a rabble-rousing fascist — as many do.
“Leaders lead. They stand up, they take a position and help us move on.”
Yeah, but Cynthia is right: everyone knew what Trump is. He never hid any of it and record was long. The Republicans who endorsed him either:
A) liked him precisely for what he is, or;
B) were too afraid not to
He never hid any of it. So if somebody who previously endorsed him denounces him now then it’s being done purely for reasons of desperation, not any sort of principle.
It IS pretty entertaining to hear these folk start a sentence: “I have a mother, a sister, a an great auntie, a wife and three daughters…” Just like they had three months ago.