Wednesday, April 9, 2014

2016 GOP pres. candidate will guard position and wealth of 'permanent ruling class America was never supposed to have.' GOP-E seeks expanded, unquestioned exec. branch power and rule by unelected technocrats, a la global warming. US two party system is completely dead-Jonescu, AT

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"Mitt Romney was the only candidate in the 2012 primaries who was hopelessly compromised on ObamaCare; thus...he was the obvious choice for an establishment that intended not to challenge that most unpopular lurch towards authoritarianism too vigorously." It shouldn't be news that neither Romney nor the GOP had any intention of winning. The whole thing was a $1 billion sham. "Winning" for the GOP in 2016 will again mean electing the radical left democrat:
 
4/9/14, "Meet the 2016 Republican Nominee," American Thinker, by Daren Jonescu

"How does the Republican Party establishment choose its presidential candidate?  Typically, constitutionalists accuse their establishment rivals of being moderate, risk-averse, stubborn old fools who lack faith in conservative principles. This is a soothing interpretation, as it begins from the hypothesis that the contest between conservatives and the GOP elite is a family feud. 

But there is another hypothesis -- less soothing, but, at least from an outsider's bird's-eye view, more reconcilable with the facts.  This hypothesis is that America has reached a stage of progressive soft despotism in which the only important family feud in national politics is between the fundamentally allied factions of the Washington establishment itself. 


The great advantage of despotism is its predictability. In nations whose leaders have forsaken the manners and morals of representative government, the future can mean only two things: the present, continued, or the present, escalated. Thus, if my alternative hypothesis is correct, it becomes possible to identify the 2016 Republican presidential nominee "a priori," if you will, with no need for rumors or speculation.

My only proviso is that we keep in mind the central difference between traditional despotism and progressive soft despotism, namely that in traditional despotism, the personal character and whims of the man with the fancy title are paramount, whereas today's is a ruling establishment game, in which major directional decisions are made by committees of mutual back-scratchers who outlast any of the figureheads they prop up to front the organization for a while.  Thus, whereas in a monarchy, popular democracy, or old-fashioned tyranny, the particular identity of the leader is everything, in soft despotism the standard-bearer is less significant for who he is than for which interests he advances for his handlers.


By "interests" here I mean only "specific agenda items."  Of course the true, fundamental interest of progressive establishmentarians, all German philosophical rationalizations aside, is simply to control and stabilize the masses, i.e., to maximize their usefulness while minimizing their threat.  This essential goal is as invariable as the feelings that fuel it, namely fear and greed. Thus to predict the establishment's practical moves is as simple as looking away from the increasing artificiality of electoral politics -- polls, "momentum," "electability," and well-timed scandals -- to observe the broad pattern of outcomes that remains consistent through successive campaigns.


That pattern, in American politics, is as obvious as it is unspeakable in polite society, namely the gradual imposition of a permanent progressive authoritarian state with unlimited executive power, answerable to no imperatives of human nature, and administered by unelected technocrats. 

America's national political establishment is factionalized along lines that correspond to what remains of the nation's unofficial "two-party system."  But what the competing factions lack in uniformity of emphasis and vocabulary -- "polite society" means different things to different men -- they more than make up for in unanimity of overarching purpose. 


Let's be clear:...These are ordinary men with ordinary moral weaknesses who, having in one way or another found themselves within reach of the world's biggest cookie jar, developed an irresistible habit of dipping in -- for financial advantages, regulatory favors, careers, self-importance, and in general for the means to permanent, risk-free status as kings of their various little hills.  In other words, they are men who have found, on the "honor among thieves" principle, that they have more in common with one another than with the cookie bakers they are robbing blind, and therefore a greater vested interest in covering for one another than in defending the rights of bakers.


By induction from the major public policy initiatives these men actively or passively promote, we may conclude that, surface frictions aside, the American ruling class seeks: (a) to shrink the range of unregulated human action; (b) to narrow men's moral horizons in order to foster conscienceless resignation to their parasitocracy; (c) to reduce citizenship to compliance and conformity; and (d) to promote "security," variously defined, as a primary social goal that trumps all considerations of self-determination, human dignity, and private property.

These goals are embodied in various forms by the elite, and then either trumpeted as "idealism" (Democrats) or finessed as "realism" (Republicans) via the elite's kabuki theater of competing electoral dummies, dhimmis, and dandies.  In short, these men have turned electoral politics into the comforting charade of which Tocqueville wisely forewarned, in which "the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again." (Democracy in America, Bk. IV Ch. vi.)


As is well known, the Democratic Party takes the lead on the goals cited above, continually shifting the vanguard just a little farther towards the socialist tyranny with which their leading lights always sympathized internationally, and which they now advocate boldly at home.  In our quest for the establishment's current mainstream, however, we ought to think conservatively, and look not to the daring vanguard, but to those points of alliance between the establishment's two public faces. 


That is, if you want to gauge the long-term trajectory of the ruling class, listen to the Democrat professors and activists who are calling for the criminalization of non-progressive opinions, the confiscation of all firearms, or the regulation of journalism based on socialist-defined "critical information needs."  But if you are seeking a snapshot of today's ruling class status quo, with a view to what they plan to accomplish in 2016, watch the GOP establishment.  For they -- and by "they" I mean the party elders, corporate insiders, and pandering "conservative media" fixtures -- show us precisely where the Democrats and Republicans are essentially allied on current objectives. 

Therefore, if one gets over the mental habit of imagining presidential politics are what they were when Calvin Coolidge won, or even when Ronald Reagan won -- after a war against the establishment, which learned a lesson from this defeat that it would never forget -- one can fairly certainly identify the next Republican nominee.


The trick to reading the Washington elite is to avoid overemphasizing the differences between Republicans and Democrats, which are minimized when the GOP establishment gets its way. A great egret has a longer neck than a little egret, but we call them both egrets because what unites them is plainly more essential than what distinguishes them.  The same goes for great progressives and little progressives. 

(The current Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue is often cited as an exception, even by establishment standards.  Obama represents the lawless vanguard, to be sure.  But if he is so far away from the mainstream establishment, then how do you explain all those cheerful Boehner-Obama photo ops, his signature power-grab being upheld as constitutional by a Republican-appointed Chief Justice, or all the establishment "conservative" pundits fawning over him in 2008 as though he were a combination of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Cary Grant.  My hypothesis, by contrast, explains these seeming incongruities very neatly.  Obama is not the establishment mainstream -- yet.)

A thought experiment: try plotting U.S. presidential politics on a Venn diagram.  I provide a template below.




Populate the two circles with the major policy positions and of any plausible Democrat and Republican presidential candidates.  
Policies that fall within the intersection of the two circles represent what the two sides of the ruling class substantially agree upon right now, thereby revealing the heart of today's Washington establishment.  The GOP faction of the establishment, therefore, can be counted on to promote the candidate they regard as falling most reliably within that intersection.  (Notice that this means the candidate himself need not be a full-fledged member of the establishment; they are merely looking for the man whose positions most closely match their priorities.)

For example, the left circle alone will contain the terms "transgender rights," "federally funded abortion," "gun confiscation," and "tax increases."  The right circle alone will contain "religious freedom," "anti-abortion," "gun rights," and "tax cuts."


The intersecting area will contain several items which, whatever else the candidates who embrace them may say, will truly define those candidacies, in the sense of revealing why the ruling elite favor those men as presidential nominees.  (For example, Mitt Romney was the only candidate in the 2012 primaries who was hopelessly compromised on ObamaCare; thus, on my hypothesis, he was the obvious choice for an establishment that intended not to challenge that most unpopular lurch towards authoritarianism too vigorously.)


Anything else the establishment candidate may represent, beyond the items in that intersection, will be useful optics for idiosyncratic purposes, and something for conservatives to cling to. This is not negligible, but its role is mainly aesthetic, putting a partisan face on an establishment agenda.

Nevertheless, the surest window to the establishment's "soul" is that middle section of your Venn diagram, where we find the "bipartisan" goals the Republican candidate will most assuredly stand for.

So here he is, the 2016 GOP nominee:


He supports a "path to citizenship" for illegal immigrants. This drops anchor for the progressive captains of the ship of state, eventually inflating the electorate with millions of people lacking education or cultural heritage related to individualism and property rights, while deflating manufacturing costs with low-skill, low-literacy workers.


His position on manmade climate change is "evolving," drifting and shifting somewhere along the continuum from "climate change may be real" (Jeb Bush, 2011) to "when you have over 90 percent of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role it’s time to defer to the experts" (Chris Christie, 2011). 

He criticizes ObamaCare as "failed legislation" (who could call it anything else?) but finesses any concrete talk of fundamental reversion.  He advocates a watered-down version of the establishment's thin gruel of "Repeal and Replace" -- something along the lines of "Tweak and Touch-up," with "free market solutions" as a euphemism for a heavily regulated pseudo-market analogous to cap-and-trade.


He is insistent that no one should impugn the motives and patriotism of the Democrat candidate -- any Democrat candidate -- and that "we all want what's best for America."  When asked during a presidential debate whether his Democratic opponent would make a good president, he says "Yes, but...."

He supports the Common Core agenda for nationalizing education standards, claiming that this is necessary to keep America "competitive," and to ensure that "everyone has a fair chance to learn the skills needed in today's economy."  He plays to conservatives by saying the problem with education is the teachers unions and "lack of choice."  Improving quality and providing choice are his euphemisms, just as in healthcare, for standardizing methods and outcomes to the point where every American child's fate will henceforth be molded by a centralized spiritual death panel -- this will be called "equal opportunity."


He supports the "vitally important" work being done by the "patriots" at the NSA, while promising "vigorous safeguards" to ensure that none of their top-secret methods of collecting every scrap of electronic communications data and other private information ever overstep the bounds of "legitimate" privacy concerns -- where no concern voiced to date meets the threshold of legitimacy.

He is absolutely silent on the question of whether the federal government has any responsibility to abide by its constitutional (i.e., legal) limits, and indeed rarely mentions the Constitution at all, and never as an essential concern.


There he is, your next GOP presidential candidate -- a man the establishment can live with.


Am I cheating by not providing an exact name?  But what's in a name, when that name is attached to a man who is, for all practical purposes, merely a vessel for an agenda devised by self-seeking manipulators behind the scenes?  An agenda designed to concentrate more power within the federal government, and ultimately within the executive branch.  Not the constitutional agenda for which the president was meant to be a vessel, but a "transformative" agenda designed to protect the social position and wealth of the permanent ruling class America was never supposed to have.

Might events falsify my hypothesis?  Unlike the global warmists, I hope so.  Failing that, might constitutionalists find a way to slay the monster at last?  That doesn't seem likely, to be honest.  More realistically, perhaps they can minimize the damage pre-emptively during the 2014 congressional primaries and elsewhere.  The establishment, a centralized authority monster, will be weaker in those areas it considers less vital.  Their attention and resources cannot anticipate and repel every "minor" challenge -- at least not until they have finished apportioning all practical authority to themselves. 


Whatever you do, don't assume that any candidate who espouses a few items on the Republican side of your Venn diagram is satisfactory.  That section then becomes the ruling class's shiny distraction.  Keep your eye on the intersection of the circles, where the two mildly competitive factions of the progressive elite follow their bliss together -- at their nation's expense." via Lucianne


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Comment: Certain things can't be overstated. Number one, the GOP establishment led by the Bush family and Rupert Murdoch, are motivated by the deeply held belief that they're better than we are and that we must be silenced. Number two, the Bush family is the worst thing to happen to this country since World War II. The rehabbing of the Bush name is going on 24/7 so is no drawback for Jeb. Jeb will be much worse than his relatives. I believe he has serious emotional problems. The left adores him now because he silences us and protects the permanent political class:

Murdoch errand boy
"A new report from Politico’s Ken Vogel details how ten major GOP consultant firms who made a combined $1 billion off Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 White House bid are still large and in charge of GOP politics, raking in millions more for the 2014 cycle.

According to Vogel’s analysis, the firms and the consultants who work for them have already made—through January 2014, nearly a full year before the midterm elections—more than $19.6 million.

“They’ve also cemented relationships with some of the GOP’s rising stars, setting up the firms for even bigger paydays headed into the fall, when costly advertising and mail campaigns begin, and for a 2016 presidential campaign expected to be the most expensive in history,” Vogel wrote on Monday.
The firms Vogel focuses heavily on include: Mentzer Media Service, Crossroads Media, American Rambler Productions, Targeted Victory, and FLS Connect.

Each of these firms handled major projects for the Romney 2012 campaign or for GOP groups aligned with Romney’s outfit.

Mentzer Media Service, an ad-buying firm based in Baltimore, was paid $280 million in the 2012 cycle from groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads, pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future, and Koch-brothers-funded organizations like Americans For Prosperity, and others. As of January 2014, the firm already made $2.2 million for this cycle.

Crossroads Media, another ad-buying firm based in Alexandria, VA, made $248 million in 2012, mostly from work it did for Rove’s American Crossroads and its sister group Crossroads GPS. This firm’s only work in the 2014 cycle thus far is $494,000 it made in 2013 from doing work for Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-AL) in his special election bid for Congress.

American Rambler Productions made $241 million in 2012 after being formed as what Vogel calls an “ad hoc umbrella consultancy” the Romney campaign created “to handle a variety of key functions, including crafting ads and buying airtime.” While this group has “effectively dissolved,” Vogel wrote, a myriad of the consultants involved “including Stevens and Russ Schriefer, formed a new firm with Romney ad director Ashley O’Connor and Austin Barbour that handled Christie’s campaign and is working on Arkansas gubernatorial candidate Asa Hutchinson’s campaign, among others.”

Targeted Victory is a digital firm that made $112 million in 2012 and has made $3 million through January for the 2014 cycle already. Vogel notes that it did work for Romney’s 2012 campaign, the RNC, Rove’s Crossroads and various other Super PACs. “Co-founded by [Zach] Moffatt [Romney’s 2012 digital director] in 2009, the firm has experienced explosive growth since the Romney campaign, more than doubling its staff to 85 employees and signing over 100 new clients in 2014 — more than the total number it had prior to the cycle,” Vogel wrote.

FLS Connect is a phone banking and data firm based in Minnesota that was paid $68 million in 2012 by the Romney campaign and a variety of other clients like congressional candidates and GOP electoral committees. Former RNC chief of staff Jeff Larson is a founding partner of FLS Connect, and Vogel notes he is “now running the independent expenditure advertising program at the NRSC, which is not among the various party committees, super PACs and candidates that have combined to pay FLS $10 million for 2014 work.”

While Vogel notes that hardly anyone “in the consulting world on either side of the aisle dispute that a certain amount of cronyism — or, at least, inertia — plays some role in determining who gets which contracts,” the GOP consultants he quotes in the article attribute their continued high-dollar workload to being effective political workerseven though they lost the 2012 election.

“People are either doing good work or they’re not and, if they’re not, the market will ultimately correct itself,” Moffatt said, for instance. “This is really a professional’s profession. A lot of people can talk about it, but not everyone can do it. A lot of these people think they can play in the NFL because they play Madden on the weekends, but it’s not that easy.”

Romney’s 2012 deputy campaign manager, Katie Packer Gage, seconded Moffatt’s assessment of the entire team being talented. “The people on our team were very, very good,” she said. “I would go into battle with my team any day of the week, and the political world knows that they’re smart, honorable people, so that’s why you see them continuing to get work.”"
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"So the people who lost for you before — and are willing to lose as long as they can preserve their situation — are now in charge of your great hopes for 2014.”"...(end p. 2) Pat Caddell

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In 2012 Romney and GOP consultants had no intention of beating Obama:

12/22/12, “The story behind Mitt Romney’s loss in the presidential campaign to President Obama, Boston Globe, Michael Kranish

“Building on its 2008 field organ­ization, Obama’s campaign had far more people on the ground, for longer periods, and backed by better data. In Florida, for example, the ­Romney campaign said it had fewer than 200 staff members on the ground, a huge commitment


of its total of 500 nationwide.
 
But the Obama campaign had 770 staff in Florida 


out of 3,000 or so nationwide….

Indeed, in swing state after swing state, the Obama field team was much bigger than the Romney troops.


Obama had 123 offices in Ohio, compared with Romney’s 40.

Obama had 59 offices in Colorado, compared with Romney’s 15,

accord­ing to statistics compiled by the Obama campaign.”…
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12/23/12, "Mitt's Son Says He Never Wanted to be President Anyway," Atlantic Wire, Connor Simpson

"If you thought the tale of how Mitt Romney lost the general election was already told, you would be wrong. Because there is so much left to tell, like how Mitt never wanted to be President anyway.  

At least, that's what Tagg Romney says in this new Boston Globe report on what went wrong with Romney's campaign. While the rest of the piece seems to say the problems lay in the Romney campaign's lack of technical advantage, and refusal to introduce the world to Mitt Romney, the human being, this little morsel from the Republican's son points to a larger problem:

He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to...run,” said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place...he would have been ecstatic to step aside."


So, yeah, that might explain why Mitt lost. Not wanting the job you need to publicly campaign for more than a year to get is step one in the "Not Getting Elected Guide for Dummies" book. Again, the rest of the mammoth piece, which you really should read, paints a larger picture of the struggle between Mitt's inner circle and his campaign advisors over whether they should humanize Mitt, which was ultimately their downfall.

And, also, the Obama campaign had more staff and cooler tech stuff....".

 
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In 2012 Romney refused to give any of his famous money to his campaign, even chose fundraising over campaigning in the stretch:

9/25/12, “Why doesn’t Mitt Romney contribute to his own campaign?” Reuters, Michael Waldman
 
"Lately, Mitt Romney has been so consumed with fundraising that his aides have had to defend his absence from the stump....

Romney, for whatever reason, has failed to use his personal wealth to pay his campaign’s bills. His refusal to self-finance is one of the mysteries of this campaign.”…
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Comment: The "mystery" is that Romney never wanted to run, fraudulently took money from people, is a con man, and is now into his new career as go-to political good fella of the Imperial Ruling Class to undermine conservatives and the two party system. 

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In the 2012 election, “The Republican Party abandoned” the issue of repealing ObamaCare. “A majority of the people wanted to repeal Obamacare, [an issue that] the Republican Party abandoned, Caddell noted.”:
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The 2010 takeover of Congress by the Republicans, Caddell said, “was not engineered by the Washington Republican establishment. They [the establishment] then took that victory and threw it away"….
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11/28/12, "The Incestuous Bleeding of the Republican Party," Erick Erickson, RedState

"Strip away the candidate and coalition and it is on the fifth floor of 66 Canal Center Plaza where the seeds of Mitt Romney’s ruin and the RNC’s get out the vote (GOTV) effort collapsed — bled to death by charlatan consultants making millions off the party,

its donors,

and the grassroots."...

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2/25/12, "66 Canal Center Plaza, Suite 555," NY Times

"In a single office suite in Alexandria, Va., firms hired by “super PACs” share the same space as consultants hired by the Romney campaign. Federal law prohibits super PACs from directly coordinating with candidates, but the groups share many ties and have paid for many similar services."...



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11/29/12, "Who's getting rich off of GOP defeat?" Rosslyn Smith, American Thinker

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By 2011 it was clear the Republican Party had no intention of repealing ObamaCare:

11/28/11, It’s the Obamacare, Stupid, Jeffrey H. Anderson, Weekly Standard

"The Republicans’ core problem...is that they’ve forgotten to ride the wave that brought them here. Republicans didn’t get elected in 2010 because of voters’ dissatisfaction with the Democrats’ handling of the economy. They got elected because the Democrats openly and arrogantly ignored the voters’ will in passing the monstrosity that is Obamacare.”…


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The Radical Left loves Karl Rove because he helps them win:

2/8/13, “Karl Rove’s Courage,” Slate.com, by John Dickerson 

Why it was brave—and smart—for him to challenge the Tea Party.”


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