Month: May 2016

If you’ve never seen South Park, you should check it out.  The most original character is Eric Cartman, a kind of third grade Donald Trump.  To get the flavor of the show, the first episode was “Cartman gets an anal probe.”  I’ve only seen 15 or 20 episodes, and went to wikipedia to get an accurate description of his character.  They describe him as “… a loud, obnoxious, manipulative, racist and obese literal psychopath.”   Often the plot involves conflict between Cartman and Kyle, who is Jewish and highly moral.

Jeff Bezos is not Jewish, but I suspect his parents instilled a strong sense of morality in him, and from what I know he’s led an exemplary life.  His father was much like Cruz’s father, a Cuban immigrant of high natural intelligence.  The story I read about Bezos is that he turned to his parents for the seed money for Amazon.  His father had worked his way through college after immigrating, and had a successful career as a petroleum engineer.  He wasn’t rich, but he gave his son what he had, and the rest is history.  Amazon is one of the few companies I know of which is so revolutionary in the way it alters the way people live and conduct commerce.  Sometimes putting your faith in your son is the best thing you can do.

Young Jeff spent summers at his mother’s family’s 25,000 acre ranch in South Texas.  I don’t know how a teenage boy can have summers like that and not come out of it with some good, Western values.  Bezos doesn’t do politics, although he recently gave a nice contribution to Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, for some reason.

Today Bezos’ WaPo is out a story that makes Donald Trump look like a very weird guy.  What kind of guy impersonates his own publicity agent?  A nut, that’s who.  Trump lied about it, of course, and the war is on.  If he’s elected, Trump will try to get the IRS to go after Amazon.  That’s serious business, and someone like Trump would actually do it.  Whatever motivation Bezos had in taking Trump on, it’s now personal.

If nothing else, this will be the first test of Bezos in the public arena.  He’s had the WaPo for about three years, and has yet to do anything with it.  His first project is a big one, with a Pulitzer Prize for the having.  This will be very entertaining to watch.  I broke down a couple months ago, and paid for an on line subscription to the WaPo.  I hated doing it, but did so with the hope that Bezos was a little different than the Hive. Maybe I was right.

I shudder when I think of how ugly our politics is going to be for the next two years.  Being President in such a political environment would be a challenge to Lincoln, and Clinton won’t be up to it.  Things are going to be a mess.  By the time she staggers toward the gate in 2020 she’ll be running on fumes.  Time for Reagan, part two.

Somebody needs to ask Paul Ryan, “Will you promise that there won’t be a government shutdown?”  He’d say yes, and then it’s all over.  Surrendering the power of the purse makes Congress irrelevant.  It’s all ugliness ahead.

It turns out that the pressure of events led the guys at American Thinker to put off my piece until tomorrow.  I hope there’s no conflict there.  Thomas Lifson, more or less the main guy, has gone in with Trump, and others disagree.  This kind of thing is happening all over, from the Eagle Forum to Republican State Conventions.  You’ll see it live, on TV, from Cleveland.

Hey, it’s entertainment.

Summer is here in the Gold Country, nice and warm.  Back in Alaska, it’s probably still breakup, with melting snow and ice.  My heart’s still up there, but it’s really a young man’s country.

Hypocrisy is the grease of politics, and today’s kabuki in D.C. was a beautiful example.  Everyone acted their part well, even the irascible Lindsey Graham.  The fact remains that Trump is not a conservative, didn’t win the nomination by pretending to be a conservative, and won’t run against Clinton as a conservative.  If you were forced to categorize him ideologically, he’s some kind of eccentric centrist.  He’s his own man, who will do things his way.  At a fundraiser in Long Island last night, after denigrating his defeated rivals for the nomination, he said of Clinton, “She got her ass kicked last night.”  I’m sure the sophisticates of New York ate it up.  Trump’s an old man, and he doesn’t want to learn any new tricks.  He’ll win, or lose, on his own terms.  This is exactly what endears to him to his cult, and he won’t change.

There’s no sign of interest in an Abbott run as an Independent.  It’s probably just as well, now that I think about it.  It would probably hurt his chances in 2020, when we really need him.  It’s a long ways off, but I’d sign up for Abbott in 2020 right now.  I went to GoDaddy and tried to reserve the web domain of abbottforpresident, but it was taken.  He’s 58, and a principled constitutional conservative and legal scholar.  A tree fell on him and broke his back when he was 27, and he’s been confined to a wheelchair ever since.  It didn’t prevent him from winning election as Texas Attorney General, and as Governor two years ago.

There are other possibilities, like Gov. Bevin of Kentucky and Sen. Sasse of Nebraska.  Cruz and Rubio may both want to run again, but I have my doubts that anybody who was running this year would be right for 2020.  I think we’ll want to start over.  But, at least tentatively, I have a candidate.  He spoke to the Texas Republican State Convention today, and spent a lot of time promoting the Convention of States and Article V.  With his active help, we should get to 34 next year.  He understands that the key to success for the Convention of States is the BBA.  At least, the Texas Public Policy Foundation understands it, and they’re tighter than ticks with him.   This bodes well.

I read somewhere today that Republicans have to repudiate Bush’s Iraq war in order to win any future election.  I couldn’t agree more.  It was a disaster.  It cost us the White House in 2008, and until we listen to what the voters were saying that year we’ll never win it back.  Our next nominee has to make clear that, in retrospect, Iraq was a colossal screw up, and we’ll never, ever, do it again.

For some reason they didn’t put my article out on American Thinker today.  Maybe tomorrow.  Today I was thinking about race relations when I was a kid, back before affirmative action.  I grew up in Richmond, went to high school and college in Berkeley, and had a fair amount of interaction with black people, only occasionally unpleasant.  Right after my 16th birthday, when I got my license and car, I went in to the black part of Berkeley to a liquor store where a lot of black guys used to hang out.   I parked my shiny white ’56 Ford, walked up to one that didn’t look particularly unfriendly, and asked him if he’d buy me a six pack.  He said, sure, so I gave him five bucks and asked for a six pack of  Lucky Lager.  He came out with the beer, and offered me my change, which I declined, and thanked him for his trouble.  I used to do that all the time.

Black music was so good back in those days.  I listen to oldies all the time, and some of those old black crooners had such powerful, velvety voices.  You don’t remember a guy named Ed Townsend, but you might recognize his best song, “For your love, I would do anything for your love.”

Blacks and whites just got along better when I was a kid.

On the morning of the Indiana primary, after Trump called his father an accomplice in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Ted Cruz finally said what I think he should have said months earlier.  Once Trump had the nomination, he said, the media would turn on him with a vengeance.  They’ve been covering for him, refusing to focus on his sordid business and personal lives, and disinterested in past or current scandals.  Cruz predicted, specifically, that Trump’s tax returns, and his secrecy about them, would all of a sudden become a big story.

I’m watching With All Due Respect with Heilemann and Halperin (how do you tell one from the other?  I just refer to them as the Germans, like Ehrlichman and Haldeman in the Nixon White House) and they’re talking about Trump’s statement to AP that he may not release his tax returns before November.  And I’ll be damned, it’s a big story!  One of them was absolutely outraged, saying it’s the job of everyone in the media, himself included, to beat him up every day until he relents.  Every day, another story on Trump’s taxes.  This guy made a vow not to let this go.  Well, Ted, I guess you called that one.

The worse Clinton looks, and she looks pretty bad right now, the more the focus will be on Trump.  Except it won’t be $2 billion of free publicity.  It’s $2 billion in attack ads, disguised as news stories.  All so predictable.

Progress on the Platform. after talking today to Jeff Fields of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (who sounds like a very bright and savvy guy).  He said David Barton, of Wall Builders, will almost certainly be the man from Texas on Platform, and he will almost certainly be supportive of inclusion of an Article V provision.  Barton carries a lot of weight in conservative circles, especially in the South.  With Texas on board, as well as Michigan, Georgia, and Alaska, we’re off to a good start.  The Platform Committee convenes two months from today, so there’s lots of time to line up the votes.

The contacts I’m making on Article V in the Platform will be very useful as we build support for a provision on the Transfer of Public Lands, or TPL.  That’s the new terminology out of the American Lands Council, which I’m adopting.  Getting both of these items in the Platform is very important to me, and I’ve got some time.

The media will cover the meetings of Platform, hoping to sniff out conflict between Trump and the delegates.  Trump has opposed Article V in the past, but only to curry favor with Phyllis Schlafly.  Now that he doesn’t need her, who knows what he’ll do?   Follow his gut, wherever it takes him.  The same with TPL.  He opposed it on the campaign trail, but that’s over, so he’ll go with his gut on that one too.  I don’t think he gives a damn about either one.

There’s one final item I want to see in the Platform  — an outright demand for equality before the law for all Americans, and the end of racial discrimination against whites and Asians.  The end of affirmative action.  The Romney Platform of 2012 was squishy, as Romney would like it.  It rejects affirmative action, except when it’s really necessary.  Not nearly good enough for me.  With me, this one is personal.  I was a poor white boy, who’d worked his way through Cal, and I was discriminated against in the law school admission process.  The only way I was admitted to UCLA Law was under a small experimental program (discontinued the year after I got there) that gave extra weight to your LSAT score.  My grades were mediocre, but the score was high enough to get me in.

I won’t be in Cleveland, but I know a lot of people who will be.  People on the Platform Committee.  If unqualified equality before the law can’t make it into the Republican Party Platform, I’ve got to find a new home.

I’ve got an article in American Thinker up tomorrow, and I encourage everyone to read it.  I get around to equality before the law.  Like I said, it’s personal.

According to Chris Stirewalt of Fox News First the other day, a political party is a mechanism which is used to win elections.  It’s just a tool, really, with no identity of its own.  Trump had the votes in the primaries, so he won the use of the tool.  Republicans who still resist him just refuse to admit they lost.

One of Trump’s Stepford Wife Spokeswomen was on some show, declaring that Paul Ryan needed to support Trump “…for the Party.”  As though it was his now.  As if he ever cared “for the Party” himself.  But now that he’s probably the nominee the loyalty he never had is due to him.

Curly Haugland, the National Committeeman from North Dakota isn’t buying it.  The Republican Party, when it’s assembled in Convention, is subject to no Rules, but those of its own choosing.  If the delegates don’t want to nominate Trump, they don’t have to.  Trump’s brain trust, Roger Stone, knows this, and acknowledges it.  That’s why he tried to intimidate delegates who might choose independence.

At the moment the will to take control of its own destiny seems to be lacking within the GOP.  But one thing we’ve learned — Trump is capable of anything.  God only knows what idiocies he may spout in the next two months.  Come Cleveland, maybe people will see the debacle ahead, and decide to dump him.  If it was up to me and Curly we’d do it, but timidity reigns.  If this generation of Americans was around in 1776 we’d still all be bowing to the Queen.

Cruz is hanging on to his delegates, asking them to go to Cleveland to fight for the Platform.  It will be interesting to see the Platform Committee at work this year.  Will it do as it’s told by Trump, or declare its independence from him?  Will the delegates on that Committee be men or mice?  On the other hand, Trump doesn’t really care about the Platform.  He’ll ignore it, unless it is part of a larger theme, which would be rewriting the nomination rules to prevent a Trump from ever winning again.  And also deciding for itself who the next Party Chair should be.  Essentially, the delegates in Cleveland can declare their independence from Trump, and take control of the Party.  Why not?  It might embarrass Trump, but no more than he embarrasses himself on a daily basis.

No, the argument against Republican independence from Trump is simple  — stop Hillary.  But as bad as she’d be, who can say with certainty that Trump wouldn’t be worse.  He’s an ignorant man, surrounded by sycophants, with total confidence in his own instincts.  He doesn’t need experts.  We shall see.

On cue, the WaPo was out with a front page story about Trump and Howard Stern.  Two thirteen year olds talking about women’s body parts.  Keep it up, WaPo.  I smell a Pulitzer exposing Donald Trump.

Polls right now are as meaningless as they were when they showed Bush 3 leading for the nomination.  The Queen Bee, the NYT, and all her hive lie in wait.  This fall they emerge in a swarm.  It’s going to be ugly.  He’s such easy pickings.

I got in touch with Jeff Golden of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, who’s working on Gov. Abbott’s Texas Plan.  What’s clear to me after three years with the BBA Task Force is that if you don’t have the money, honey, I don’t have the time.  There’s a ton of good, conservative money sloshing around Texas.  The TPPF has gotten in to some of it.  They need to get some serious, Texas money going behind Article V.   The Task Force would be at 34, or close to it, if we had some money.

Ton Llewellyn of the Task Force and I are working on getting Article V in the national Platform, and he tells me things went well at ALEC in Pittsburgh.  They may even have a donor.  A former backer of the Compact approach to Article V, which is deader than a doornail, has seen the light.  Why does it take so long for these money people to figure things out?

The last couple nights on my walk I’ve seen a peacock hen, and last night a big old cock was chasing her all over the hillside.  I kept hoping for him to corner her, and show off his plumage.  It was incredible how disabling all those peacock feathers are on a male.  Somehow this poor bastard has to make a living in the woods carrying a fourth of his weight in ornamentation.  The hen was plain as day, but she had what he wanted, and he’d do whatever she wanted to get it.

You learn important lessons about life in the woods.

 

The Republican Party has to decide to either embrace its nominee, or repudiate him.  Its decision will either destroy or save it.  It must decide, this summer, if it is the party of Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump.  It can’t  be both.

The Republican Party of Alaska faced a similar decisions in 1998.  Its Republican nominee for Governor was a fraud and a liar named John Lindauer.  The liberal media had not exposed him during the primary, but as soon as he won, it all came out.  The State Central Committee, on which I served, met to decide what to do.

Lindauer was our nominee, and some said we had to stand by him.  The GOP hadn’t elected a Republican Governor in 20 years, and incumbent Democrat Tony Knowles was vulnerable.  If we repudiated the man who won our primary, Knowles would almost certainly win reelection.  The argument was that while Lindauer most certainly was a liar and a fraud, he was our guy, and we had to stick with him.

The majority of the Central Committee disagreed.  Sticking with Lindauer meant that the Republican Party was about winning elections and getting in power, and absolutely nothing else.  So we condemned our own nominee and voted to support a write in campaign by the second place finisher in the primary, Sen. Robin Taylor of Wrangell.  Robin fought hard and well, and his write in votes exceeded those of Lindauer, who was on the ballot.  Lindauer plead guilty to some campaign violations and left the state.  The Republicans maintained their majorities in the House and Senate, which they’ve held ever since.  Knowles was reelected, but the Democrats have not won the Governorship of Alaska again.  Republicans today hold supermajorities in the Alaska legislature.

Ten years later the Republicans of Alaska made a different choice.  Their nominee for the Senate, incumbent Ted Stevens, was under indictment for corruption.  Former state legislator David Cuddy ran against him in the primary, warning Republicans of the danger of a Stevens nomination.  He was ignored, Stevens was nominated, and when he was beaten by Nick Begich the Democrats had their 60th vote for Obamacare.

Everyone who was at that Central Committee meeting in 1998 will never forget who was there, and what side they were on.  The true character of every participant was revealed, and is remembered to this day.    The same will be true in Cleveland.  What does the Republican Party stand for, if anything?  And what, precisely, is the character of the men and women who are delegates to its Convention?

What do they stand for?

Trump the man, and Trump the candidate, bears no resemblance to the President who, more than any other, defined the modern Republican Party, Ronald Reagan.  He was a true conservative, honorable, and a consistent and effective advocate of the Constitution.  Trump is the opposite, a raging narcissist and bully, contemptuous of the restraints imposed on the government by the Founding Fathers.  He won the nomination by appealing to the worst instincts of the American people  — tribalism, jealousy and vengefulness.

There’s a risk that Republican divisions this year will end up electing Hillary Clinton and losing the Supreme Court for a generation.  In fact, the only way of avoiding that outcome is by repudiating Trump and backing an Independent candidacy by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Mitt Romney, or some other candidate who has the ability to win enough electoral votes to throw the election into the House of Representatives.  Abbott could win the 38 electoral votes of Texas, and pick up 50 more by winning the Far West.  This is Trump’s weakest area.  His open opposition to the transfer of federal lands to these states, and Abbott’s endorsement (echoing the position of Ted Cruz) of it, would be enough to win these states, their electoral votes, and deny Trump any possibility of getting to 270.

The 12th Amendment gives each state one vote when there is no electoral college majority.  No state is required to vote for the candidate who won its electoral votes.  Every state, and every Representative, is a free agent, tasked with voting their conscience.  Clinton could never win such a three way contest, since there is nowhere near a majority of Democratic states.  The Republicans in the House of Representatives would make the choice, Trump or Abbott (or Romney, etc).

They would decide.  Every conservative in the country should work to give them that opportunity.  The alternative is catastrophe.

Fritz Pettyjohn was the Chairman of Reagan for President, Alaska, 1979-1980, and is a former Alaska State Legislator.  He blogs daily at ReaganProject.com