So sayseth Trump.

“I think we’ll win before getting to the convention but I can tell you if we didn’t and If we‘re 20 votes short or if we’re 100 short and we’re at 1,100 and someone else is at 500 or 400 cause we’re way ahead of everybody…I think you’d have riots,” Trump said on CNN Wednesday morning.

Oh pish posh to the Ohio Republican Party and Trump’s Republican opponents and every Republican in Republican Leadership for decrying this.  Trump isn’t calling for riots, or threatening riots, he’s just predicting they would come because… you know…

That’s what will happen if Trump isn’t proclaimed King.

Odd.

“Kasich’s done a great job with Ohio,” said Doug Mason, a concrete laborer, but he still planned to vote for Mr. Trump. “I think Trump will be John Kasich on steroids.”

Try to make yourself the anti-Trump, and you lose a vote because of a perception that Trump is more Kasich than Kasich.  Whatever that means.

Leaving aside some embarrassing quick typos, this does smack me as a pretty good blog post of mine.  Just a response to a letter to the Oregonian from a “Mark Kraschel”.  Footnotes of one rant, echoing points that if I’m generous point to fair laments, but in and of themselves fall apart.

In the intervening years, I’ve noticed that “Mark Kraschel” garners a number of search phrase hits.  Why, I don’t know.  Maybe he googles his name a lot?

Anyways… googling about, I see that he reads the Economist, and is a fan of Donald Trump.  At least… I think he is?

You used so much ink trying to convince us that Donald Trump is not fit for office (“Time to fire him”, February 27th). Do you think the type of person who reads your erudite publication would ever consider voting for him? Not likely. The people who will vote for The Donald are the disaffected bitter-clingers whom the last candidate you passionately begged us to vote for—Barack Obama—disparaged in his campaign. Those same disaffected people haven’t been doing well over the past eight years, and in case you haven’t noticed, they are mad as hell.
Government isn’t working for us. There are few good jobs, we’ve been stuck with a joke of a health-care system, the few rights we still enjoy are under siege and the future looks dim for our children. We are powerless to foment a revolution while working two part-time jobs to make ends meet, so all we can do is register a protest against the Dickensian nightmare that the elites have created for us by voting. Apparently, nobody listened (Republican or Democrat) to what we were trying to say in 2012. Come November, you’ll be hearing from us again, louder and clearer.
MARK KRASCHEL

It is a type of analysis, I’ll give you that.  He’s for the Donald not so much because The Donald will do anything substantial to address the problems of the system, but because he speaks in clipped insults against the Establishment, “just like me”.

Having waited in the weeds by endorsing and campaigning the one candidate poised to stick around the longest (as opposed to Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee) without getting anywhere in the public psyche (as opposed to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders) — that would be Martin O’Malley, to such sources as the Guardian’s amusement — the Lyndon Larouche Movement now turns its attention to battling Donald Trump.  And so enter the post factnet larouche board…

Designed to fail? You’d have to believe that Lyn never once wanted to be president.
Difficult for me to say.  My guess is he had the dream.
Or to see one of his associates win office.
Probably the case he didn’t.
As for Trump, there’s a billion opinions on the net. And a lot of them say his whole campaign is designed to fail.
I have a post on this blog to that effect, and saw a parody in the New Yorker along those lines as well.  The answer by now is, no… and it’s worthwhile to analyze the reasons for his successes and the failure of the Republican Party in getting someone else as the nominee.
He flubs his talking points. He contradicts himself. He’s unprepared.
If you watch Trump’s speeches he rambles from point to point and never says anything of substance. Put him in a debate with Lyn and you know who would win.
Hm.  Trump?  I suppose it’s a little like the Martin Downey Junior debate, in a way.

We’re running out of time and we’re running out of options. Time for Lyn to take center stage before Trump does. Replace his phony nationalism with the American System.
Long walk from the fringes of the fringe to the center of the arena.

And here we get a contradiction.

Trump is a dangerous global criminal, worse than Hitler and Cass Sunstein combined.
The “Worse Than” idea… as opposed to THIS…
We’re in a major breakdown crisis and Lyn is the only change. The other guys have failed.  Donald Trump is literally Hitler.
LITERALLY!!! Not even a reincarnation.  I’d have to look back to see if Obama were a “literally” ever.  At least with Bloomberg and Schwarzenagger — they were just bringing out “Mussolini Style Fascism”, which brings some element of analysis.

The TRUMP brand doesn’t really exist. It was created as a control mechanism to keep people in line — and away from the truth.
AAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!  See how frustrating this is?  It would be coherent if this read “The Trump Brand really exists.  It was created as a control mechanism to keep people in line.”   
Have you ever heard of seen a video of Donald Trump that made you actually think? No!
Har de har har.

What about the fact that Donald Trump has been in THREE parties: Democrats, Reform and then the GOP?

Hillary, being a “Goldwater Girl”, is only at two.  I think Sanders might be considered at three?
You know how many parties Larouche has been in?  The answer comes in the fact that the “Larouche wing of the Democratic Party” had these fly-by-night political party names through the general election campaigns… so on the ballot it was the “Economist Party”, or something akin to that.

Coming soon wherever you see Larouchies congregate to pass out their literature…

  Also, because they’re stuck in a branding rut, the “Trump — Hitler mustache” poster… which… has already been done.  I suppose in the theorum that Trump is playing with right-wing nationalism, you do have the “degrees on the political scale” working which wasn’t with Obama, but as bad as Trump is… and make no mistake, he just might be the worst presidential offering of one of the two major political parties of the last century — (at least in terms of what his messaging represents) — he’s not Hitler.

Do you know what a Trump nomination, nay a Trump presidency, means? A massive global breakdown crisis. Nuclear war. Mass starvation. You will wish you listened.

Sure.

On your side, parodically… here.

[The freshest comedy act today: Two old New Yorkers pranking people with tuna sandwiches]

These two self-involved septuagenarians are the alter egos of comedians Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, who met as undergraduates at Georgetown University and are returning to Washington for “Oh, Hello,” a touring show about their two kvetchy characters with a cult following. If this all sounds more like a conversation with your crazy uncle than a comedy show, watch this video.

Who will you vote for?
St. Geegland: Lyndon LaRouche. Lyndon’s getting the vote.
Faizon: I’m gonna support Bernie, our old friend Bernard. I’m going to say I’m supporting Bernie all the way till the end and then I’ll quietly vote for Hillary.

7) Invoking the Holocaust or the Nazis is always a last gasp of desperation from someone who’s losing an argument. And that’s exactly what we look like when we spread these memes. “Oh, is that all you got? Hitler analogies? Congratulations – you just lost the debate.” There are vast amounts of facts, figures, and anecdotal evidence that fully support the case for gun rights. We don’t have to go Nazi. You know who has to go Nazi? Lyndon LaRouche. Is that a look we want to go for too?
Trump’s making things a little too hard.  Nonetheless — I and war opponents in some “realist” arguments were fond of making the observation that, oh, “Saddam Hussein on his worst day is never Adolf Hitler” — so it can be avoided.

It is worth noting that Alex Jones’s websites… are effectively Donald Trump fan-pages now.  Which is all very weird, as it does show a display of values on what it is Jones prioritizes  (see here).  No clue how this will continue as Donald Trump maneuvers to play the “deal-making” moderate True Republican, but I haven’t seen Larouche on the Show for quite a while, nor have I seen the longer term Trump – bashing Webster Tarpley.

ITEM NUMBER TWO:
Your typical “Politicians echoing Larouche” schmearing– this in terms of climate change skepticism against Republican politicos…

AND in this theme… “Energy Lobbyists Gather; Blame Obama and Pope for “War on Fossil Fuels”.

Marv Fertel, CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute (compensation $3,761,026), said that nuclear power was being “squeezed by gas and renewables.” He promised to take up with his group a question about overseas financing that was posed by an audience member, Marsha Freeman of Executive Intelligence Review. If Fertel was aware that Freeman’s publication was founded by the bizarre convicted felon Lyndon LaRouche, he didn’t let on.

ITEM NUMBER THREE:  Well.  Not as fantastical as the Republican Establishment Notion of bringing out Condi Rice or Mitt Romney through a brokered convention.

…My question was, you know, with O’Malley I know you set that trap:  How does he come back into the race, because clearly there’s no candidate — I won’t even vote, if this is what we’re left with. So maybe talk about that, sir?  How does O’Malley come back into the race if that’s possible?  That was my question.

LAROUCHE:  Well, that can happen.  We can make a revolution of a certain type, in order of course.  We can overturn things. See whenever we become, as a people, whenever we become intelligent, we discover among other things, that we’ve been rummaging in a bastion of foolishness, and therefore we say “uh-oh!  We made a big mistake.  We shouldn’t have done that.  We shouldn’t have begun that.”  And what happens is then people just get rid of bad people.

Now I would say that all of the people who are implicitly rival to O’Malley should be thrown out of office, that is the notable ones; simply throw them out of office.  And it’s like a breath of fresh air!  Throw all these guys out of office — Oh! The air is so fresh!  We never want to go back there again!..

ITEM NUMBER FOUR — Dan Schmitt Reporting for duty.

One.  Well, it has calmed down here in Iowa now that the caucus is over. I stood alone at my caucus for Martin O’Malley. Different members supporting other candidates came over to wish me well but not to leave their candidate. None of the presidential candidates of either party have put in writing what their policies are. This is how the LaRouche team in different. We have just released a 33-page pamphlet entitled “U.S. joins the new silk road,” copies of which I will deliver to the council, the board of supervisors, and the public – plain English and with illustrations – it calls for getting rid of this imperial drive to rule the world, for you see, we have already lost our lead.

Should be standing out there in Marshaltown with the “Trump with Hitler mustache” and “Larouche = Truth, Trump = Lies” billboard any day now.

And… interesting.  I actually kind of want to read some “reports from caucus-goers on their experiences, even this.  I stood alone at my caucus for Martin O’Malley. Unfortunately, it shows what money can do. Different members supporting other candidates came over to wish me well, but not to change who they were supporting.

Brings me back to wondering on back in the days of Larouche’s presidential campaigns, how a caucus-goer for one of the mainstream candidates was supposed to make a pitch for a Larouchie’s support.  What’s interesting is that Dan Schmidt does offer up a rebuttal to Larouche’s post-election declaration…

On Thursday, Feb. 4, Lyndon LaRouche will be holding an emergency dialogue with LPAC activists on the implications of the brutal termination of the presidential campaign of Martin O’Malley, and what this signals about the immediate danger of general war. […]
LaRouche’s conclusion, following the abrupt termination of the O’Malley presidential campaign, even before the final Iowa results were announced, was that leading British circles, controlling the Barack Obama Presidency, are desperately escalating their preparations for war against Russia and China. The actions against O’Malley were, in effect, a red dye indication of the war preparations already well-underway. The fact that there were escalating British Crown provocations against Russian President Vladimir Putin, coincident with the actions against O’Malley, sealed the case. […]
These British Empire forces, including their Obama Presidency, are committed to the rapid depopulation of the planet, through warfare and other means. The coincidence of the breakdown crisis, the over-reaction to the LaRouche intervention on behalf of a viable O’Malley candidacy, and the dramatic escalation in targeted provocations against both Russia and China—coming from London and the White House—is the clearest evidence available that mankind is moving into a moment of grave crisis.

Or maybe… as Dan Schmitt reports… they went to vote, and they stood alone for Martin O’Malley as everyone else argued for Clinton and Sanders.

Well here we are! I’m not the Daniel that could read the hand writing on the wall, but I have been able to follow great citizens, Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche. But Lyndon LaRouche, who has been rejected time and again, as president, but who did not go on to make money for himself, but dug into history to understand how human nature works and has told us how the devil works, and how to, with a Christian heart, stop the evil of this world for the good of “We the People.”

ITEM NUMBER FIVE.  Electoral Historical footnoting.

Hmmph.
In Pennsylvania, unlikely candidates have appeared on the ballot before. The 2000 primary, for example, featured Republican Gary Bauer and Democrat Lyndon Larouche. Both men drew single-digit support, but “if you can be a protest vote on an issue, that can be very helpful,” said Robert Morris University political science professor Phil Harold. ”And it’s not a coronation on the Democratic side yet.”

And.
The disconnect stems from a long-running debate between the Christie administration and the Democratic party over whether Justice Jaynee LaVecchia should be categorized as an Independent or a Republican. While LaVecchia is a registered Independent, Democrats have argued that she should actually be considered a Republican, in part because she was nominated by Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman.
Roberts took aim at that argument in yet another retort March 1.
“Last time we checked, a registered Independent didn’t mean Republican…or Democrat…or Green Party…or even a Lyndon LaRouche supporter.  It means Independent,” Roberts said.

Honoring…
Ruth Williams. Williams is “a tireless community leader, she participated in many actions that led to equality, including the march on Sacramento, fighting the LaRouche initiative, and bringing attention to transgender issues, and serving on numerous boards.” Williams is a member of the city’s Public Safety Commission.
The recommendations will be presented on Monday to the West Hollywood City Council for its approval.

Smidgeon of success in Australia, once upon a time.

In 1988, Mr Truss stood as the Nationals candidate in the by-election for his state seat of Barambah.
In an upset, he was beaten by Trevor Perrett of the ultra-right Citizens Electoral Council. It was largely a protest vote against the Nationals for getting rid of Bjelke-Petersen.
Here it may be worthwhile looking over the CEC’s donors… Estate of Douglas Maccleath Dolgner is the only one on this list…. interestingly, one of the Top 5 Donors to any of these parties.

Theorizing similarities between Trump delegate “underperforming” and…  Reached at home Wednesday morning, Fakroddin declined an interview; Sadiq could not be reached. Neither would be the first to lose an election in Illinois because of apparent voter angst about what many perceive as foreign names. Thirty years ago, the Illinois Democratic Party watched its preferred nominees for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, George Sangmeister and Aurelia Pucinski, lose to supporters of Lyndon LaRouche named Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart.  Ironic, given the nativist nature of Trump’s campaigning.

Al Sharpton v Larouchies comes up in discussion of Trump “protester” rhetoric.

And the Uncyclopedia updates some new Larouche bits.

ITEM NUMBER SIX… Cliff Kincaid’s fantasy world, redux.

Oh, mercy me.  The real significance of David Duke’s endorsement of Donald Trump?  It has to do with… hm… er?  Their mutual communistic loves of Putin’s Russia?  And down the rabbit hole through “connecto dotting”…

Trump has his own Alexander Dugin—a political operative and alleged dirty trickster by the name of Roger Stone. A “former” Trump adviser who now runs a pro-Trump Super PAC, Stone wrote a book using Russian sources that blamed President Lyndon Johnson for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. His latest book is about what he calls the “Bush Crime Family”—including the two former Republican presidents—and credits such sources as Webster Tarpley, formerly associated with convicted con man and Marxist Lyndon LaRouche. Tarpley is a prominent figure in the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement, which blames unnamed U.S. officials for carrying out the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Sure.

A communist capitalist. Sure! Makes sense to me.Shades of Lyndon Larouche’s quadrennial infomercials in which he called Henry Kissinger the same.

Item number Seven.

Hey!  Some weird Analysis of Larouche.
In particular all good philosophical or moral ideas can become perverted and integrated into cults and political fanaticism. This has happened even with the Platonic, Neoplatonic and Leibnizean tradition which was appropriated and perverted by the Larouche political cult.
Fair enough.

More memories.
When I was in my teens, I used to love reading the screeds of Lyndon LaRouche and various Trotskyite factions pasted on walls and the outside of mail boxes in New York. Even Dr. Bronner’s Christian mystic rant about the unity of faith. There is something pure and liberating in a good rant. The more unhinged the better. It works better than waterboarding to suss out the fanatics in the world around us.

What do these names all have in common?
There have been, let’s see, former First Lady Barbara Bush, Oscar-winning actor Paul Newman, U.S. Senators John McCain and Estes Kefauver, Rochester-native and presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, and Boston Celtics’ Robert Parish, M.L. Carr and Satch Sanders. There could be others as well.
They’ve been to Farmington!

Item Number Eight.

Okay.  Around the bend in Russia and Iran…

Executive Intelligence Review Senior Editor Jeff Steinberg told Sputnik that in his Munich speech, Putin had predicted the strategies of the Obama administration almost two years before it took office.

Jeff Steinberg continues on Sputnik railing against George Soros.

Steinberg joins a symposium discussion about Obama’s State of the Union speech.

In this edition of The Debate, Press TV has conducted an interview with William Jones, with the Executive Intelligence Review, and The Hill columnist Brent Budowsky, both from Washington, to discuss the tensions between China and the United States over North Korea’s nuclear program and South China Sea.

William Jones does his bit on Press TV.  Odd commenting:  thanks to the russians, IR, hezbollah and of course Mr Putin the saviour of the modern world  …
And you can look to Press TV for a whole lot more William Jones.  Because we all know you needs your William Jones fix.

Leafing over the National Review, and I see a half page ad for… er…

The Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation Scholarship.

To be awarded sooner or later, and…

“The purpose of the scholarship is to honor President Coolidge, and the values for which the thirtieth president stood…”

All very weird, but I suppose proper enough to place into a conservative magazine.  (Reagan’s favorite president, for good reason.)  And I’m intellectually dishonest for leaving this list off with a set of ellipses, but it must be said…

… isn’t the proper essay for this scholarship contest, oh, about 5 words long?

Two articles in the latest Economist, as the 2016 Presidential election campaign wavers into new grand territory.  First off…

There is nothing immutable about the way the two parties currently line up. Republicans used to be the big-government progressive party, formed in opposition to slavery and pushing to remodel the South after the civil war; they have also been the small-government party, not only now, but in opposition to the New Deal in the 1930s. Democrats were once the small-government party, opposing those who wanted a more powerful federal government and defending the interests of white southerners against Washington; now they are famous as the big-government party, pushing federal anti-poverty programmes in the 20th century and government involvement in health care in the 21st.

This election could see the furniture rearranged again. Some Republicans wonder if a Trump candidacy might redraw the electoral map, winning over blue-collar whites who don’t normally vote in rustbelt swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin. If he loses, the party might still conclude that it needs to pay more attention to the economic anxieties of those who feel left behind.

… Yeah.  Well.  And the Democrats now do what?  Free Trade?

And this is something expressed I’ve been pondering, and been meaning to suggest something about this observation.

For much of 2015 they dismissed Mr Trump’s chances in the Republican primaries by relying on the book’s claim that parties usually guide voters towards “acceptable” nominees. But it was precisely by making such overconfident pronouncements, Mr Drezner argued recently in the Washington Post, that the authors sowed the seeds of their own demise.
Scientists are well acquainted with the “observer effect”, which, in physics, for example, stipulates that the characteristics of a subatomic particle can never be fully known because they are changed by the act of measuring them. Similarly, wrote Mr Drezner, “The Party Decides” has been “the primary theory driving how political analysts have thought about presidential campaigns. It seemed to explain nomination fights of the recent past quite well.” However, in previous elections, there were no crowds of journalists citing TPD. This time, says Mr Drezner, Republican decision-makers “read smart take after smart take telling them that Trump didn’t have a chance…so GOP party leaders didn’t take any action. Except that the reason smart analysts believed Trump had no chance was because they thought GOP leaders would eventually take action.”

Recall 2003  2004, and the rise and fall of Howard Dean — who, incidentally, was much more mainline a Democrat than Donald Trump is a mainline Republican.  Nonetheless the “Establishment” Democrats didn’t want him the nominee.  And granted, there are substantial differences beyond that — for one, the Democratic electorate then proved to much more small “c” conservative than the Republican electorate has been — but the Democratic Establishment helped bring him down, as did the other candidates.  Google “Dean” “Gephardt” and “murder – suicide” and I recall this…

And what about all of the magazine cover stories and political reporters, including me, who predicted a Dean victory in Iowa?
The caller said the attacks from Rep. Dick Gephardt had hurt Dean in Iowa. Gephardt ran ads that questioned Dean’s record of support for Medicare and Social Security. Dean responded with ads attacking Gephardt for his stand on the Iraq war. Joe Trippi, who was still Dean’s campaign manager at the time, has called the exchange of negative ads a “murder-suicide” by Gephardt.

Then there was a negative ad brought out by some unidentifiable super-pac funding which, once they were disclosed, were from funding sources identifiable to Team Clinton.

… note these were BEFORE the primaries.  As opposed to the Republicans of 2015, who waited, and waited, and waited, and assumed, and assumed.  No actions taken until, you know, after New Hampshire.  Because no one wanted to be Gephardt, and candidates were planning an inevitable Trump collapse into their strategy.  (Cruz, I suppose, most “successfully”.)

David Brooks goes all “Re-Create 68” on us.  Which, I’m supposing is the result of a 43 percent Trump delegate count with a 33 percent Cruz delegate count getting side-stepped by… Mitt Romney — and after a convenient change in the rules to disavow the 8 primary win threshold.

The most striking comment here is around David Brooks:

This isn’t about winning the presidency in 2016 anymore. This is about something much bigger. Every 50 or 60 years, parties undergo a transformation. The G.O.P. is undergoing one right now. What happens this year will set the party’s trajectory for decades.

It’s worth mentioning that Rush Limbaugh is taking to the Donald Trump bandwagon.  As opposed to Glenn Beck, who isn’t.

Theoretically, the two pillars of conservative talk radio would be sliding into opposite directions as… whatever the hell is about to transpire in this hypothetical worm-hole commences.

Oh.  Wait.

Option 3: Support a center-right, third-party candidate for president who would represent a civil rights Republicanism and hold the core message of the party in trust for better days. This approach would depend on finding a strong candidate who is willing to engage in an important but (given the history of such efforts) losing effort. A Mitt Romney candidacy would smack too much of an establishment bent on revenge. In contrast, Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana, would carry a winsome, disciplined, conservative message. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice would stand for everything Trump does not — gravity, dignity, character and serious moral purpose.

Oh my god, it’s Dick Morris’s fantasy 2008 “Hillary versus Rice” campaign finally come to fruition!