Not crazy, not a clown, and smarter than his brother

This morning on Morning Joe.

Jeb Bush is probably the best of the Republicans, but even from a prison cell Hillary would be the lesser evil on the central big-ticket items of progressivism, Social Security and Medicare.

On the other hand, on foreign policy she might be more GW to Jeb's Bush pere, making him on that one thing the lesser evil of the two.

As for Trump, he is a clown who hits clumsily at issues that need sensible discussion and is perhaps right, or at any rate a refreshingly novel way of being wrong, on some of them.

But you don't put Pere Ubu in the White House because you like what he says about street lights or because his sottises provoke others to try to articulate sensible views on hard questions.

Yes, I'm reading Alfred Jarry.

And wondering why.

Anyway, too bad about enduring control of the GOP by people pledged to the destruction of economic progressivism or at best indifferent to its survival.

And too bad about its more recent seizure by neocon global bomb-throwers.

On their fundamental commitments to capitalism and liberty as well as on social issues I am more in tune with moderate Republicans than the anti-capitalist social revolutionaries and race-baiters - and race-haters - of the Democratic Party.

"Hey, hey; ho, ho. Western Civ has got to go!" is about the opposite of my own political 'druthers, for America, for the Occident, or for the world.

Sean Penn and his Hollywood friends are not my political gurus.

It is interesting that, as they did for Somali pirates, the way over-privileged Hollywood left is offering the poverty justification for the crimes of the cartels that comes, in the end, to saying to our faces "You won't give them your money peacefully so they are right to shoot you and take it."

To which a perfectly sensible reply is I'd rather the forces of order shot them.

Somali pirates, Mexican drug lords, the outlook of the left on those topics is not significantly different from the "riot ideology" they articulated about Ferguson, Baltimore, and everything in between.

Not for me, thanks.