When will Hillary Clinton give up her candidacy ?

Not nearly as possible as a candidate who played buddy buddy with the John Society-not as a youth-but as a middle aged adult running for office. I refer of course to President George H. W. Bush. I don't recall you being upset about that.

....Could this all happen to a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn who attended Brooklyn college, and got a BS in Political Science from the University of Chicago, while participating in the then avant garde political movements including The Young People's Sociualist League, CORE and SNCC; lived briefly in a kibbutz in Israel and then pursued a lifelong career in politics? I think it possible.

Not nearly as possible as a candidate who played buddy buddy with the John [Birch] Society-not as a youth-but as a middle aged adult running for office. I refer of course to President George H. W. Bush. I don't recall you being upset about that.

Leading the Republican Party in Houston in the early 1960s, H. W. was forced to confront members of the putrid John Birch Society, an important constituency within the party in Texas at the time. Now, W. writes, even though his father did not like the Birchers, “diplomacy was [his] first instinct, and he tried hard to bring the Birchers into the fold. He instructed the party leadership to stop referring to Birchers as ‘nuts,’ and he appointed Birch Society members to chair several important precincts.” .....

.....In what I strongly suspect was a cynical effort to cater to racist whites, H. W. ran for the Senate on a platform opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act on “states’ rights” grounds — a political position that ranks among the most specious arguments ever conceived for rationalizing a system of legal apartheid.

How Conservatism Created Donald Trump
...This week, National Review has an editorial and a cover symposium with 19 conservatives denouncing Trump as “crude,” a “boor,” “astoundingly ignorant of everything that to govern a powerful, complex, influential, and exceptional nation such as ours he would have to know,” and so on. One of the writers, Andrew McCarthy, a National Review contributing editor, expresses astonishment that Trump could not identify such figures as Hassan Nasrallah, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. When Palin responded to a question about the Bush Doctrine with bug-eyed incomprehension, McCarthy angrily dismissed the suggestion that she did not know what it was as “nonsense.”

As the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, continues, Gov. Rick Snyder (R) is speaking out more about his perspective on the scandal, and this morning talked to MSNBC about where he’s assigning blame. The Detroit News reported it this way:

Quote:

Gov. Rick Snyder on Friday continued to lay blame at the feet of state Department of Environmental Quality employees for failing to require Flint to add corrosion control chemicals to its river water that could have prevented lead from leaching into the drinking water supply.

The Republican made frequent references to “culture” during the interview, complaining about public agencies lacking a “culture of asking the common-sense questions,” adding there’s “a huge bureaucratic problem and it’s part of the problem with culture in government.”

The rhetoric was jarring in large part because it came from the governor himself. When Rick Snyder refers to problems with “government,” he’s specifically talking about Rick Snyder’s administration. The decisions that did so much damage in Flint were made by emergency managers appointed by the governor himself.

Even the state Department of Environmental Quality employees Snyder is now blaming are employees who answer to him.

At one point, he added, “Let’s look at the entire cultural background of how people have been operating” – which is to say, the culture of how people have been operating in Snyder’s own administration.

The challenge for those of us in the observation business is to illuminate what’s plainly obvious without offending those who prefer not to see. But there’s no winning once passions are engaged, and hating the messenger is a time-honored tradition. Even though it was, in fact, obvious in 2008 that Palin was out of her league, as I pointed out in a column, her fans wouldn’t hear of it. About 20,000 of them took time out of their busy schedules to send me emails expressing their displeasure. (I’ve kept them all for nursing-home share time.) The whole episode was instructive in multiple ways, but most important, it foretold a dumbing down of the GOP that eight years later may prove irreversible.

The Trump phenomenon perfectly represents the culmination of populism and anti-intellectualism that became dominant in the Republican Party with the rise of the Tea Party. I think many Republican leaders have had deep misgivings about the Tea Party since the beginning, but the short-term benefits were too great to resist. A Trump rout is Republican moderates’ best chance to take back the GOP.

Although the far right’s mythology paints the Reagan years as the triumph of their ideas, the truth is that he governed very much in the moderate tradition of postwar Republican presidents. Reagan raised taxes 11 times, gave amnesty to illegal aliens, pulled American troops out of the Middle East, supported environmental regulations, raised the debt limit and appointed many moderates to key positions, including on the Supreme Court. But he skillfully kept his right flank protected by using thundering conservative rhetoric, even as he violated his own stated principles on a regular basis.

@georgeob1
re "mental states". Contrast Jeb Bush and Chris Christie. The latter commonly acts as a bully in his interactions whereas Jeb does not. Christie yells at people, he thrusts his body forward in a manner designed to threaten and intimidate. He insults. Jeb does none of these things or does them very rarely. Those differing behaviors are a manifestation of intentions and personal mental states. Christie's urges are towards domination of others to a degree or in a manner which can't be said about Jeb.

An authoritarian manifests mental states different from those who are not that sort of individual. The present Pope has very different things going on in his noggin that Stalin or Mussolini. But Stalin and Mussolini were very similar to each other.

Beyond that I note that everything we know about GHW Bush's behavior before he became president and the political & economic philosophies the artiuculated and supported in those days, indicated a man dedicated to the preservation of American democracy and the traditions of free enterprise and individuasl freedom that has long gone with it.