Why a leading Republican will vote for Hillary

She will not abstain.

She will not vote for the Libertarian or any other minor party candidate.

She will not write in some Republican she approves.

She explains why not.

Per the blurb at the bottom of the Politico article, this is the author.

Kori Schake is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. 

She was the director for defense strategy and requirements on the National Security Council staff, and deputy director for policy planning in the State Department of the George W. Bush administration.

This is her piece.

How Brexit convinced me to vote for Hillary

I was planning to cast a protest vote in November: write in Mitch Daniels or one of my terrific nephews, and vote Republican down-ballot to support strong Republican voices in Congress and help rebuild the party in the long run. 

But that approach is only satisfactory if Trump has no chance of winning. 

I’m genuinely concerned now that Trump could get elected, and that is why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton.

. . . .

Presidential contests are two-person races in the United States, and the only candidates who have a serious prospect of victory are the party standard-bearers. 

Protest votes are more satisfying than voting for the lesser of two evils, but they could result in Donald Trump being elected, just as British protest votes created an outcome many who cast those ballots realized, only too late, they never wanted at all.

Republican women organize for Hillary

Republicans should embrace a Hillary Clinton presidency

The bottom line

If the Republicans want me to vote for them they are going to have to stop trying to kill me, at a minimum.

That is, stop trying to weaken, undermine, diminish, and ultimately erase Social Security and Medicare.

That is not sufficient to earn my vote or my preference, but it is necessary.

For Donald Trump to win my vote or my preference he would have to be running against someone who is literally a fascist, a nazi, or a communist.

And, yes, I would have to say that condition is both necessary and sufficient.

Well, perhaps I exaggerate, on that.

Vote for Trump? Me?

An online test put up by Republicans that relied only on issue positions but left out a lot of issues and anyway assumed all issues could be assigned weights of 1 through 5 for purposes of evaluating candidate compatibility said I should vote for Trump, by a considerable margin.

Even if it is true that there are no such things as litmus tests or absolute deal breakers, this radically underestimates the difference in importance between something utterly trivial and something literally life or death.

There were no questions about protectionism, abandoning NATO, abandoning non-proliferation, or Social Security, and not enough questions about Medicare.

There were no questions about dealing with debt by defaulting or inflating the currency.

There were no questions about the EU.

There were no questions about the candidates' commitment to separation of powers, republicanism, faithful execution of the laws, or protection of and loyalty to American political institutions.

There were far too few questions about torture and there was nothing about "going after their families."

And nothing about credibility, trustworthiness, character, depth of understanding of the issues, or suitability for the office.

There were a lot of questions but it was all the same a shallow and poorly designed test.

I will be voting for the Democratic nominee, and I hope that will be Hillary.

A plague on both their houses

Both the agendas and the methods of the politically committed of both major parties have moved toward extremes over the years.

Each of us defines what is objectionable, here as elsewhere, in his own way.

This is my way.

The dominant conservatism.

Actual conservatives, for some decades in control of the Republican Party, have long seriously meant to repeal The Great Society, The New Deal, and every progressive construction since McKinley.

They oppose direct election of the president and favor repeal of popular election of senators.

They oppose institutions, laws, and regulatory controls and measures aimed at protecting workers, consumers, and the public from employers, producers, and economic powers.

They oppose the dismantling, over the decades and beginning in the mid-20th Century, of clerical power over American law as it concerns marriage as well as private and public conduct related to sex.

They would, if they could, restore the status quo ante, including re-criminalization of sexual immorality and pornography as they were defined and prohibited in American law through the 1950s and again making divorce very difficult if not totally impossible.

They favor measures to cripple the federal government by starving it through debt ceilings, elimination of the IRS, massive tax cuts, and opposition to deficit spending.

Some of them would, if they could, deport some 11 million illegal immigrants in a vast exercise in ethnic cleansing.

The dominant liberalism.

Liberals are responsible for a continuing malignant growth, originating in the mid-20th Century, of federal control over American economic and educational institutions, private and public, and increasingly over state and local machinery of law enforcement, in service to the PC agendas of radical environmentalists, feminists, sexual minorities, and so-called racial and social justice warriors.

Liberals indulge, support, and participate in the propaganda, policy, legislative, and demographic wars against whites, males, and white males, including the project to end the majority status of eurowhites in America.

Liberals support a radical environmentalism extremely harmful to the American economy and beneficial to our economic and military competitors, globally.

In particular, in connection with global warming they support a congeries of measures that, while useless to prevent it, would impose great costs on American businesses, consumers, and taxpayers to the advantage of foreigners and especially the world's leading greenhouse gas producers, the Chinese, who openly intend to actually increase their own pollution.

Liberals support empowerment of governmental, supra-national, and global institutions without democratic legitimacy and aimed at achieving liberal/radical goals or enforcing liberal/radical agendas.

Liberals support censorship and indoctrination by PC bureaucracies and the actions and agendas of PC thugs and mobs in our streets and our schools.

Liberals support groups and individuals who support weaponized history and guilt-trip politics targeting eurowhites, Western Civilization, and their friends and defenders.

Liberals support, ally with, and are supported by anti-capitalists including socialists, anarchists, and communists, as well as others openly committed to anti-Americanism.

Liberals support unrestricted abortion at will throughout pregnancy, and some openly support infanticide.

Children of Zinn, steeped in the weaponized history of the left wing grievance industry, liberals are anti-American and unpatriotic, wholly unable to happily celebrate the birth of our country or any of its several patriotic holidays.

Leningrad

Saw a You Tube documentary about the siege.

Hitler's order was to refuse to accept the city's surrender, to besiege it and annihilate all its inhabitants, and then physically destroy it as the Romans had destroyed Carthage.

It was genocide.

It is instructive to compare Hitler's plans for slavdom with Mussolini's comparatively banal African colonialism.

Hitler's Nazi ideology was based only partly on the fascism of Mussolini, whom he greatly admired.

His own contribution that differentiated Nazism from the original, Italian Fascism, was the murderous racism that encompassed his plan to wipe out the Jews of Europe and his plan to reduce the slavs, after murdering most of them, and especially the Poles and Russians, to Helotry.

Hence Leningrad.

The Italian intended nothing so cruel or so mad for his African natives.

Not even remotely.

Hence the Russians had much better reason to hope for the native tyrant's, Stalin's, victory than the German's.

Now he admits it!

"My vote doesn't matter," he says. But Jonah Goldberg still won't vote for Trump.

An individual's choice whether or how to vote makes no difference, at all.

What matters, of course, are the choices of large numbers.

An interesting point is that he uses the insignificance of the individual vote as a premise in an argument against voting for the clearly preferable lesser evil in case the candidates are all evil.

During a panel Q&A, a passenger on the cruise made a strong case for voting Trump. 

He ably argued that we know Hillary will be terrible, while we can only suspect Trump will be. 

Trump will probably do some things conservatives will like — Supreme Court appointments, etc. — while we know for a fact Hillary will not. 

And here’s what I said: I agree. 

If the election were a perfect tie, and the vote fell to me and me alone, I’d probably vote for none other than Donald Trump for precisely these reasons. 

The questioner declared victory, and many in the audience applauded. 

And then I said, “But I will never vote for Donald Trump.” 

My vote won’t decide the election. 

And I am not bound by hypotheticals like that.

But that raises the question how does somebody qualify as not an evil at all, but a positive good?

Must we refuse to cast our meaningless votes except when it's a choice between saints?

On the other hand, I have been tempted by the idea of sitting this one out, myself.

PS, his push comes to shove hypothetical vote for Il Duce indicates, I think, that for a national security conservative he is seriously undervaluing that Trump as foreign policy leader is much more dangerous than Hillary.

This is how splitters see things

Ron Chusid, Sanders supporter, on Hillary vs. Trump

While I will not entirely give up hope of an upset in the Democratic race by Bernie Sanders, the media is getting set for the showdown between Dangerous Donald and Crooked Hillary. 

Those are the current nicknames each has chosen for other, and they are both right about the other. 

I had planned to call them greater evil and lesser evil, but found that too many readers disagree as to which is which, even if we agree both of them are too evil to be fit to be president, or hold any other elective office.

Nobody has ever ever made any decent case for any actual quid pro quo corruption in Hillary's past or present.

Il Duce is only echoing decades of unsubstantiated Republican slander and character assassination and the rhetoric of that unreconstructed sixties jerk, Bernie Sanders, who thinks she and the Democratic Party are corrupt because they are frankly and seriously pro-capitalism and take money from capitalists.

Bernie and those like him think the entire system is corrupt because it is capitalist, it is pro-capitalist, and it runs on contributed money mostly from interested parties who are not poor, black, or powerless.

Dangerous Donald is trying hard to win over the Republicans. 

He already has the racist and xenophobic base of GOP voters, but reaction to him is mixed among the more ideological GOP leaders (who never figured out that the base doesn’t really care about their economic theories). 

Trump is backing away from one of his more dangerous and controversial ideas. 

He now says that banning Muslims from entering the country was “only a suggestion.”

I have commented much elsewhere on the viciousness of the left's unremitting accusations of racism against powerless white people seeking to defend themselves - think of the constant charges of classic European anti-Semitism that Jews plot unrelentingly against Christians and even use the blood of murdered Christian children in secret rites - and will not do so here again.

But Trump is a man who has urged the deportation of eleven million people, the unilateral repudiation of existing trade agreements and erection of massive protective tariffs, the routine use of torture against terrorists and Jihaders and the murder of their families, the breakup of the EU, fair play for Putin in Ukraine and Syria, US withdrawal from NATO and our Pacific alliances, abandonment of non-proliferation, and the possession of nukes by Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia.

And Chusid, passing over all this, classes his proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the US among his more dangerous ideas.

And then he goes on with the Naderite, Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, one's as bad as the other line.

Clinton has also faced difficulties policy-wise too this week, with Huffington Post and Common Dreams chastising Clinton for refusing to Rule Out Any and All Benefit Cuts to Social Security. 

On the other side, I’m sure there are a lot of Republicans who are angry with Dangerous Donald for not promising to cut Social Security.

But follow the link and read the page.

It's pure anti-Hillary spin.

Hill and Bern running for Monarch, too

Obama has been deporting illegal children along with their parents if ordered by a judge.

That is, after all, the law, and the president has a constitutional duty, crucial to the separation of powers, to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

Both Hill and Bern promised firmly they would not deport these children.

To be clear, these are not children born here to illegal immigrant parents - the so-called "anchor babies."

These are children who entered the country illegally, with or without their parents.

Moderators staged a tear-jerker moment, introducing a woman whose illegal husband had risked deportation.

The debate was in Miami, after all, and broadcast both in English and Spanish, with some of the questions in Spanish that was then translated for the candidates and broader audience.

Democratic debate, March 9

Mostly, it was the usual back and forth about Wall Street, Medicare for all, and federally funded free tuition at all state colleges and universities for undergrads.

(And is that only for undergrads, or also for grad and professional school students?)

But there were a couple of unexpected moments.

Moderators showed a tape of Bernie praising Castro's Cuba.

Sanders may also have hurt himself, at least in Florida, with comments that edged close to the state’s traditional political taboo: praising the Castro regime in Cuba. 

Moderators played a 30 year-old tape in which Sanders – then the socialist mayor of Burlington, Vt. – praised Castro’s regime and criticized past efforts to overthrow him. 

Sanders said that the Cuban regime was autocratic, but also praised its results in improving health care and education on the island. 

He got cheers. 

But when Clinton criticized Sanders for praising the communists in Cuba, the cheers were louder.

Yes, and Mussolini made the trains run on time, how swell was that?

Fair play for Cuba may work to this day with the leftier third of the Democratic Party, but it won't in the general if he gets that far.

And our Cold War leaders seriously screwed the pooch on that one, anyway, letting communism stand ninety miles off the coast while insisting ludicrously that we had to stop it in Vietnam - not Laos? not Cambodia? - on the other side of the world to prevent dominoes falling all the way across the Pacific to California.

Sanders to this day is on the wrong side of the issue of Cold War interventions in Latin America and embraces the Howard Zinn version of America's history in that region.

Howard Zinn, you may recall, was a communist, himself, and for a while actually a member of the CPUSA.

Through the most dangerous years of the Cold War he was an active red and a dedicated supporter of the Soviets and the spread of communism.

Reality Check: Sanders on the Monroe Doctrine

By Ryan Browne, CNN

Sanders blasted the history of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

Sanders was particularly critical of U.S. Cold War-era interventions against autocratic and leftist regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

He said, "Throughout the history of our relationship with Latin America, we've operated under the so-called 'Monroe Doctrine.' And that said that the United States had the right to do anything that they wanted to do in Latin America."

But is that what the Monroe Doctrine says?

The Monroe Doctrine originated in an 1823 speech President James Monroe made to Congress. 

During the speech, Monroe addressed the emergence of new countries in South and Central America which had recently obtained independence from the Spanish Empire.

Monroe said, "The American continents ... are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers."

The policy in this speech would later be referred to as the Monroe Doctrine, which sought to prevent European powers from recolonizing the Western Hemisphere.

Sanders is likely referring to the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. 

This was a policy of President Theodore Roosevelt which sought to have the U.S. intervene as a mediator in disputes between European and Latin American countries.

But the Monroe Doctrine certainly did not say that the U.S. "had the right to do anything they wanted."

Verdict: False.

Jorge Ramos, immigration activist and Univision star journo, asked Hillary to comment on Benghazi.

Her Republican critics are perfectly right about her lies about the attacks.

The truth was well-known to her and others in the government as the attacks occurred, but Obama, she, and the entire administration lied their butts off for days, pinning the whole affair on a silly internet video put up by some pathetic schmuck, whom they illegally and shamefully persecuted for quite some time after.

Later in Wednesday’s debate, moderator Jorge Ramos asked Clinton about the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed – including the U.S. ambassador to Libya. 

Clinton was the secretary of state at the time, and Republicans have raised questions about whether Clinton had properly prepared State Department installations in Libya for attacks, and about whether she had misled the public about the cause of the attack.

When Ramos began to ask the question, the debate’s audience began to boo at the mention of the word “Benghazi.” 

He kept on, playing the tape of a relative of one of the four who died, who said she believed that Clinton had misled her about the attacks – saying they had been reactions to an anti-Islam video, rather than planned terrorist attacks.

“She’s wrong. She’s absolutely wrong,” Clinton said about the woman. 

She said that the explanation she had given to the families was based on what she believed at the time – which was later found to be incomplete and partially incorrect. 

“This was fog. This was complicated.”

And then there was this real zinger, too.

In the debate’s early going, moderator Jorge Ramos asked Clinton who had given her permission to use a private email server for government business.

“It was not prohibited. It was not in any way disallowed,” Clinton said. 

“There was no permission to be asked.”

Would Clinton drop out of the race, Ramos asked, if an FBI inquiry into her use of those emails ended with her being indicted?

“That is not going to happen. I’m not even answering that question,” Clinton said.

All the same, what if?

I despise Hillary as a person and her adherence to endless global meddling as a foreign policy.

But I despise Bernie's Cold War leftism and oppose not just his adherence to socialism but his signature policies of Medicare for all and a federal financial takeover of state public university systems.

And I despise both of them for their wholly unreserved embrace of Democratic identity, victim, grievance politics.

Lesser evils, indeed.

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.

Marine Le Pen's FN will be hurt by "lesser evil" voting

Tactical voting could see Socialists vote for Sarkozy's Republicans

For us Americans it's the norm.

And it's really the norm for the French, too, with their two round system, but the Socialists have been taking the decision out of voters hands by withdrawing from the second round where they ran behind both the FN and the establishment right, Sarkozy's LR, in the first, urging their own voters to vote for the LR candidate so as to defeat the FN.

Sarko has refused to cooperate by withdrawing LR candidates from the second round in regions where they ran behind both the FN and the Socialists, and has angered even some of his own party by seeming to shrug, and saying "It is not immoral to vote for the FN."

The Socialists have been hysterical about the FN, as they have been in the past.

Marine is responding with the anger one would expect from the victim of a fierce campaign of slander and vilification.

She is the Trump of France, though she is a political pro and a good deal smarter, more savvy, and less clownish than The Donald and they don't agree in everything.

The FN is expected to do well in Marion Marechal-Le Pen's region.

But they are no longer expected to achieve the big advance that was talked of right after the first round.

Some stories even say the FN might lose ground, in net.

How splitters think

Poll Suggests Epic Presidential Battle Between The Lesser Of Two Evils–Please Give Us Another Choice

A race between a DLC Democrat such as Hillary Clinton and an establishment Republican would not differ significantly on policy, even if their primary rhetoric is different to attract two different partisan bases. 

Ron Chusid is not yet an outright splitter, but he already buys the idiotic and crucial splitter Tweedle-dee Tweedle-dum nonsense.

Odds are he'll get there.

Let's revisit reality for a moment.

Trump and Carson aside, all of the Republican candidates are conservatives dedicated to the complete elimination of every accomplishment of progressivism since McKinley, and have said so outright.

And Carson will not be the nominee.

Do we need the EPA, the FDA, and the rest of the regulatory state looking out for us, trying to keep the E Coli out of the lettuce, arsenic out of the toothpaste, sewage out of the drinking water, and explosives out of the air bags?

Are nearly all of us absolutely counting on Medicare and Social Security, and a whole lot of us on Medicaid and Obamacare and Food Stamps and CHIPS?

Do a whole lot of us need our backs covered by decent insurance against unemployment, perhaps even long term unemployment, in a bad economy?

Phooey.

The threat to me and my family posed by terrorism from any source, crime of any kind, feminism, gay marriage, secularism, abortion on demand, LGBT gender fantasies, black racism, the PC nitwits at Yale or Princeton or even the State Department, and/or illegal immigrants from anywhere at all is totally insignificant compared to the threat posed by movement conservatism and the Republican Party.

It is almost nothing compared to that threat.

But Trump is not really a conservative, you say.

All the same, do you really want to count on him to defend and consolidate the heritage of progressivism, and perhaps even expand it, against attacks originating in his own party?

What about attacks on Obamacare and the battles over the debt ceiling and the budget?

Would he resist Republican pushes for more austerity?

Would he even defend the IRS and the progressive federal income tax, financially crucial to progressive government?

Hillary would do much, much better than only defend key, basic pieces of progressivism.

And would we rather the politics of the next four or eight years be about his agenda or Hillary's?

It is stupid to hesitate for a moment.

Supporting the lesser evil

In France, the "respectable" left and right each claim to regard the other as a lesser evil than the FN.

So they behave accordingly.

France PM calls for united anti-FN vote

How the lesser evil is actually so much better than the greater

Michael Tomasky in The Nation

The lesser evil? Really?

Steven M

I left this comment at the post to which I link above.

You will see the relevance.

. . . .

Many are the liberals these days who think O should have focused on jobs creation and dealing with issues of inequality instead of on Obamacare, somehow itself not perceived as an issue of class or anyway as one sufficiently pressing.

It is believed that throughout his tenure he has not sufficiently focused on the working class – aka “middle class” in American political writing – and that this lack of focus has helped strengthen a perception among white voters of that class that the Democrats are not their party, any more.

Meanwhile, it is acknowledged that such class conscious policies would have benefitted by no means only white Americans or white Americans of the working class but Americans of all races.

And few would be so bigoted as to say that O has been sweating to advance the position or agenda of blacks in particular.

Sure, his cabinet and staff are too black to look like America.

But any suggestion he has neglected the white working class to be a black people’s president would be some sort of Klan delusion.

All which amounts to saying he would have been a better president for black people had he been a better president for white workers, and in just the same measure.

All the same, the impression has been created during his presidency more than any other in recent decades among whites and maybe not only among whites that the Democrats have become all too seriously the part of non-whites and anti-American, counter-cultural radicals, a party not only devoted mostly to the interests and aspirations of such folks but actually hostile to whites.

And that has deepened the alienation of whites, and in particular the white working class, from the Democrats.

The greatest part of the responsibility for this does not lie with O or his White House, his staff, or his policies.

It lies with repeated deluges of liberal, radical, black, and feminist propaganda attacking Republicans not over issues of class but for being men, for being white, and for being a party of white men all of whom in America hate women, gays, and everybody of all other races and religions.

That propaganda expresses the venom and wins the hearts and minds of a base that really does loathe pretty much everything about the ordinary white person, and especially the ordinary white male, in the United States.

But with every passing year it makes the Democratic Party less and less the progressive party of all of the non-rich and more and more the bigoted, narrow party of non-working class interests.

And I haven’t said a word about the abysmal impact on the American working class of mass, low-wage immigration, killer competition from overseas manufacturing thanks to free trade, and climate deals that paralyze American production to the advantage of those same overseas centers of manufacturing, on which issues the agenda of the Democrats is even worse for American workers than the agenda of Main Street, and apart from immigration even Wall Street, Republicans.

For the American working class of all races though in the minds mostly of the white working class, voting is a choice between enemies, between Republicans who would destroy every remaining vestige of the gains of a century of progressivism including Social Security and Medicare and Democrats whose policies also kill wages, jobs, and their future and even put Social Security and Medicare at risk.

The Republicans are their devoted class enemies, and even say so with their well know lust to destroy progressivism.

But the Democrats are also their enemies, doing little or nothing to protect them from conservative policies that hurt them in trade and economics and constantly beating the hell out of them because they are white, because they are male, because they are Christians, and because they are Americans.

As time passes, more and more such Americans see the Republicans, not the Democrats, as the less hostile party.

Whose fault is that?

All of which illustrates a point evident to many all along.

The many do not rule; the few govern.

Under any mixed government in Aristotle’s sense, or any popular government in the sense used from Machiavelli to Mill, Maine, Taft, and even to our own time, parties dominated by the rich and politicians drawn from the upper classes control the state.

Often in such cases it falls out that two major parties compete, and so must have distinguishable agendas.

Sometimes the differences make one of the two more plausibly the party of the plebs and the other the party of the oligarchs.

But not always, and other issues are always more or less part of the mix.

In fact, religion, ethnicity, or other factors can equally well be predominant in differentiating parties whose characterization, vis-a-vis each other, as reflecting interests of high and low is little better than derisory.

Sometimes describing political rivalries as very like sport rivalries is less metaphoric than at other times.

Sometimes such characterization is not only literally correct but comes close to exhausting the nature of the rivalry, altogether, its other content – and so its class content – diminishing to nothing, or next to nothing.

Nika riots

Of course, the Nika riots happened under a regime in no sense popular that nevertheless had to cope with elite and popular parties (factions) sufficiently organized and well-financed to sponsor racing teams, gangs, and rioters.

The hypocrisy of Salon's political dominatrix, Joan Walsh

The glee with which the GOP relies on Obama-hate to turn out its base shows the disturbing racial reality of 2014

She's good.

She's very good.

She writes this with an appearance of complete innocence, candor, and honesty, though it is abundantly obvious to everybody that the Democrats have long spent most of their efforts keeping up the engagement of their black base, at any price.

The Republican Party is relying on Obama-hate to turn out its 96-percent-white, middle-class-to-wealthy base, while the Democrats, still trying to be a multi-racial party in a multi-racial country, are trying to court voters of every race and class. 

It can be a tough sell.

I personally am 100% white, an elderly male soon to rely crucially, though not entirely, as my mother already does, on Social Security and Medicare for my continued well-being.

I voted twice for O and would again, partly because he is black and despite his annoying racist attitude toward whites.

And I will vote the straight Democratic ticket in November, no thanks to Joan; she makes my skin crawl as surely as Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter.

But she doesn't matter and neither do they.

The elites who dominate the Democrats remain, in opposition to the elites who dominate the Republicans, the lesser evil for the common man and the ordinary people of America, of any race, sex, religion, or ethnicity.

And so long as the Republican Party continues the complete slave of its anti-progressive ideology and elites while the Democrats remain relatively progressive, I can do no other.

Oh, let me share with you a gem, a lie from Joan so bland and egregious it made me laugh.

Lovers of false equivalence will say that Democrats work hard to turn out black voters, so why complain that the GOP is concentrating on whites? 

There’s really no comparison between the two strategies. 

Democrats rely on the fact that black voters overwhelmingly support the policies they promote, while Republicans still rely on white fear, if not white racism, as they promote a generalized Obama-phobia rather than specific counter-policies. 

No philosopher Kings

If he is wise, the philosopher is an atheist and an amoralist.

Judging by the general run of men, he is in some degree averse to the distress of others but, personal acquaintances aside, he is for the most part indifferent to their fate.

Indeed, again judging by the ordinary run of men, he fears his fellows more than he loves them, and his feelings and preferences are colored accordingly.

All the same, his preferences don't suffice to decide many questions that others among that same general run can decide only by appeal to moral or religious beliefs, if at all.

Assuming, of course, that he has no personal stake in the matter, nor does anyone whose fate concerns him personally.

But that is what, according to the classical view, the wise man, the philosopher King, is supposed to do.

Decide all those controversies.

Make law for all those cases.

But with no stake in the matter and neither moral nor religious convictions to guide him, absent both a love for others unnatural as hen's teeth and a not so unnatural general malevolence, he must truly be indifferent.

Let's put the question a little differently.

Don't imagine you had to make all those decisions.

Imagine someone else with no stake making those decisions, and able to make them with complete impunity.

Scary thought, eh?

Too many people like to wreck anthills or torment helpless animals . . . . or children.

Ordinary people, sufficiently informed, can sometimes decide which of the major parties is, based on its policy commitments, likely the lesser evil or the greater good, judging by their own interests and, though in most cases it counts for much less, by those of their acquaintances.

A more interesting question is how the ordinary politician arrives at the preferences that will enable him to decide what to support and what to oppose, once in office.

Assuming he isn't simply for sale.

In any case, it's not wisdom.

The Lesser Evil

Pity the Russians fighting for Stalin to defeat Hitler.

Or did they get it wrong?

Lesser evil? Sure. But enough less to be worth a treck to the polls?

Particularly given the underlying futility of voting, even for the best imaginable politicians or parties.

Selling the Store: Why Democrats Shouldn’t Put Social Security and Medicare on the Table

So you begin negotiations by conceding ground?

Writes Robert Reich,

Prominent Democrats — including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation.

This is even before they’ve started budget negotiations with Republicans — who still refuse to raise taxes on the rich, close tax loopholes the rich depend on (such as hedge-fund and private-equity managers’ “carried interest”), increase capital gains taxes on the wealthy, cap their tax deductions, or tax financial transactions.

It’s not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise.

Why politics is disgusting

Not the Democrats but the professional liberals who flak for them, supply many of their party activists, and make up part of their voting base are extremely annoying.

Their entire domestic agenda and their standard propaganda lines, especially as regards race and to a lesser degree as regards sex, are repugnant, apart from their erratic support for secularism and their often too limp support for traditional progressivism and American social democracy.

On the other hand, the entire domestic agenda and all the propaganda lines of the conservatives are repugnant, without exception.

And since they dominate the Republican Party that party is wholly repugnant, too.

What do they stand for, after all, but clericalism and capitalism unchained to do their worst?

As for foreign policy, the Democrats are only a somewhat lesser evil than the Republicans, while the professional liberals and the further left they effortlessly merge into and with whom they share many of their repulsive values are actually about equally evil with the conservatives and in some respects are even more evil.

They’re all a bunch of hateful liars, anyway.

Just thought I'd get that off my chest.

My blog, after all.

Lesser evil, indeed.

North Korea nuclear test branded 'serious threat' to US

Per the report,

US President Barack Obama spoke to his South Korean counterpart Lee Myung-bak to coordinate a response.

He "unequivocally reaffirmed" the US defence commitment to South Korea, "including the extended deterrence offered by the US nuclear umbrella," the White House said.

So South Korea gets to hide behind my granddaughters?

I do not find that a cheering thought.

And I was not aware that any treaty binding us to SK had any express connection with the “nuclear umbrella,” anyway.

I realize it’s a little late to be backing away from our defense commitments to SK and Japan.

But better a little late than too late, don’t you think?

And there is still time to climb down.

Not that I think for a moment it will happen.

Sometimes a lesser evil isn’t really any better than a greater, in any significant or relevant respect.