@cicerone imposter,
Quote:How you personally feel is your life.
Exactly.
Happy new year old fella.
Hope this one treats you better than the last.
@Builder,
I hope so too! It's been a great year, and at 80 yo, I couldn't ask for more.
@gungasnake,
Why are you bringing up John McCain? Is that the best you can do? This is 2016, and many important things happened beyond any interest in McCain since then.
The Donald will save us all!
Robert Reich
14 mins ·
I heard today from my friend, the former Republican member of Congress, who tells me GOP leaders -- desperate to dump Trump (whom he describes as an “unguided missile”) and defuse Cruz (“a total jerk”) -- are reexamining Party rules that bind delegates to candidates who win state primaries and caucuses. “There’s no law that says we have to nominate an asshole,” he says. “We’ll wait until it’s too late for either of them to file as a third-party candidate, and then flush them down the toilet.”
My Republican friend is technically correct. No law requires the parties to nominate for president the winners of primaries and caucuses. And either party can change its rules whenever it wishes. Many Americans forget that before 1968, most states didn’t have binding primaries or caucuses. That changed after the uproar over the 1968 Democratic convention (when, despite Senator Eugene McCarthy ‘s demonstrated appeal to voters in a number of primaries, the Democratic establishment selected Hubert Humphrey as their nominee). In response, Democrats came up with new rules for the 1972 Democratic convention that bound convention delegates to the outcomes of Democratic primaries and caucuses. Those new rules had three unforeseen effects: They sparked the creation of presidential primaries in most states; they remained in effect beyond the 1972 Democratic convention; and they spurred the Republican Party to create similar rules, with similar consequences.
But if the GOP changed its rules and disregarded the results of primaries and caucuses, would the public stand for it? Besides, don’t the citizens of a democracy have a right to nominate, as my friend indelicately put it, an “asshole”?
On the other hand, maybe we should worry (especially in this era of anything-goes social media) about the possibility that a truly dangerous demagogue (think Adolf Hitler, or even Trump) might someday be able to manipulate public opinion in such way he’s nominated and even elected. If so, does that mean we should return to the nominating system we had before 1968?
What do you think?
@edgarblythe,
I would hope congress would control any extremism from any Trump.
@cicerone imposter,
Congress have a history over at least the last decade of not being able to get out of it own way and the idea it could control a President Trump is unlikely.
@BillRM,
There's no way to predict that.
@cicerone imposter,
Yeah, but I think his rear view window is working pretty well.
@cicerone imposter,
Not always. You can see that A caused B, but you never know what would have happened if you had chosen Not A.
@roger,
That goes way beyond my logic skills. ...............
@roger,
Quote:Yeah, but I think his rear view window is working pretty well.
We can judge the likely future by knowing the past.
@BillRM,
I'm not so sure about that; history seems to repeat itself whether for good or bad.
@cicerone imposter,
Well, I'll put it another way; we know what happened and what that caused. We don't know the result of that decision not having been made.
