trump is serious!!!!!

[Big RR]

It's why I voted for ...... Anderson in the general election...and Bill Bradley even after he withdrew in 2000 (and Nader in the general election)

Oh Big RR.... I sure hope you plan on voting for Hillary!

Number one, it depends on whether she runs. Number 2, it depends on who is running against her. Number 3, I will have to see the third party offerings. So only time will tell.

[Lord Jim]

The final despairing argument I get from some of my longtime Republican friends frequently is this...

"I can't stand Trump either, but do you want Hillary Clinton picking the next two or three Supreme Court Justices?

HELL NO I don't want that...

My reaction to that idea is similar to what strop said about going on a cruise:

I'd rather soak my bollocks in petrol, set fire to them, and beat out the flames with a bouquet of barbed wire,

But I don't want the Trump Monster picking Supreme Court justices either...

Who the hell knows what kind of justice he would nominate?

[BoSoxGal]

Looks like he's going to be your party's nominee, LJ.

My condolences . . .

[Long Run]

My condolences . . .

Let's not give up hope just yet. But it would be condolences to everyone, because even though it looks like he will get decimated by whoever he runs against, the fact is that he would then have an actual chance of becoming president. Elections are like sporting events in that way -- stuff happens -- that's why we bother with the vote.

[BoSoxGal]

Oh I agree, it's condolences to everybody - it's just more awful for true Republicans, I think.

If Trump somehow wins the election, I think we will see awfulness on a scale much worse than what Dubya and his pals did during their tenure in office. It's very, very sad for all of us.

[Lord Jim]

Won't be any cable news primary watching at Stately LJ Manor tonight...I don't think my stomach could take it...

(That's one thing I have to say for Trump; he's a remarkable appetite suppressant...I've lost 10 pounds since he announced last summer, and if he wins the nomination I expect I could lose another 20 by election day....) we're watchin' B' ball...

Boston up 27-19 over Atlanta in the second...

[BoSoxGal]

Hey, I'm watching that game (switched over from nauseating primary coverage on CNN) and that's not the score!

Red Sox are ahead, though!

[Lord Jim]

Hey, I'm watching that game (switched over from nauseating primary coverage on CNN) and that's not the score!

No, it's not....

The Celtics are folding like a cheap lawn chair; Atlanta up 47-39 at the half...

[BoSoxGal]

You're watching boring basketball!

I'm watching BASEBALL - WAY more fun!

[RayThom]

Abandon hope, all ye who enter... a polling booth on November 8th.

I feel strongly that if a moderate third party candidate enters the race they would emerge triumphant. Without this happening, in protest, I will not cast a vote for Hillary, and if Drumpf wins by one vote then I will resign myself to live by that decision.

Maybe it's time for some executive action and take a parallax view of the situation.

I think God has stopped blessing America.

[Jarlaxle]

Hypocrite.

No I'm not a hypocrite Jarl...

I'm just fed up...

Bullshit. You castigate people for doing something, then you turn around and admit you are planning to do exactly the same thing if Trump is the nominee. That is Rube-level hypocrisy.

[Lord Jim]

I don't know what the hell you're talking about Jarl, maybe you just don't know what the word hypocrite means.

I have castigated people for being foolish and/or delusional enough to support a foul mouthed transparent flim flam man as a solution to whatever political problems we have, and I'll continue to do so.

I also have absolutely no delusions about Hillary Clinton. I know she's a lying, self serving, pocket lining weasel...

But I also know that at least she isn't a reckless, completely unqualified buffoon, who wants to blow up our relations all over the globe, like Donald Trump. I also think there's a fair chance that she'll prosecute the war against Islamic extremism more vigorously than our current President Dolittle...

The purpose of posting my political background was to show just how much it takes to get me to vote for a Democrat. (Particularly one as odious and loathsome as Hillary Clinton.) There's absolutely nothing "hypocritical" about that.

I am angry and disgusted with many of my fellow Republicans. This country really needs a new direction, but a nose dive isn't the direction it needs. We had a golden opportunity to win this election against a highly vulnerable and beatable Democratic nominee, and instead we are pissing it a way by nominating this race-bating, toxic, POS. It's idiotic and embarrassing...


I have ignored a lot of the gratuitous insults and bullshit that you have hurled at me over the past months, (which is really rube-like behavior) mainly because I know how thin skinned and "on the edge" you are...

But I'm not ignoring this:

That is Rube-level hypocrisy.

You are cordially invited to go fuck yourself Jarl. You've got your head completely up your ass and don't know WTF you are talking about...

Anyone who supports Donald Trump (unless they are somehow making money off of doing so, which I doubt you are.) needs serious mental help... And you may feel free to take that personally...

[Jarlaxle]

That was some impressive tap-dancing, Jim. And note: I am not a "Trump supporter". I simply consider him slightly less-noxious than the rest of the field. My wife is the rabid Trump supporter.

[Lord Jim]

Some people seem to think that Donald Trump represents something "new", but I don't see him that way at all...

I think Trump is the logical culmination of a toxic trend in American politics that has been building for two decades...

Ever since the mid-nineties, our politics have grown progressively more divisive, polarizing and down-right nasty. Barack Obama was elected largely on a promise to try and get beyond this, (and he got substantial Republican support in 2008) but almost immediately upon taking office demonstrated that he was just another partisan, Democratic party hack....(when he turned the stimulus package over to Nancy Pelosi and then steam rolled Congressional Republicans. )

Trump is far and away the most divisive, polarizing, and downright nasty major Presidential candidate American politics has produced in at least a century. Absolutely nothing new about it; just the logical extreme.

My hope, (and it's a thin one given the fact that the second most divisive, polarizing and down right nasty candidate in the race is Hillary Clinton) is that at least in the case of my party, having embraced this ultimate level of toxicity, and then seeing it go down in flames in the general election, next time around we'll make a real shift...

Of course it's going to be tough for that to happen with somebody like Hillary sitting in the White House...

Though she reportedly did have a pretty good rapport with Republican lawmakers (who were initially highly skeptical about her) when she was in the Senate, and she developed a reputation for working across the aisle.

I'll expect the worst, but hope for the best...

[Lord Jim]

The most disheartening thing about what happened yesterday wasn't the fact that Drumpf swept all five primaries; it was the margins...

New York could be dismissed as an aberration because he lives there, but it's impossible to ignore what the 57% in Pennsylvania taking every county, and the 60% plus margins in some states means...

It means that a substantial portion of the GOP vote is now finally coalescing behind Trump, (which would have happened long ago for a normal front runner in his position)...

That's going to leave the 35-40 percent of the GOP that will never ever vote for Trump taking a walk...

I'm truly in disbelief that my party is now getting ready to nominate a guy who pulls 15% of the Latino vote (that must be the 15% that haven't heard of him yet...Romney got 27%) is upside down with half the electorate (women) 27-73, and has 35-40 percent of his own party leaving him...

Wow, that's a real recipe for victory...

It's like a nightmare come true... I kept expecting folks to come to their senses, instead more and more people hit the stupid button...

I really wish that an independent third party Republican would run, and spare me the pure misery of voting for Hillary Clinton...

Most of the time when I vote third party, (which I have done occasionally in Congressional races, if the GOP candidate here hasn't even gotten their act together to the point of even having a call letter or email sent to me and other registered Republicans in the city) it's a vote I cast as a pure protest. The people I have voted for, (mostly Libertarians) are folks I would never vote for if I thought they could actually get elected. If an independent Republican were to run, even if they didn't have much of a chance, at least I could cast a positive vote for them.

I know a number of Republicans personally that have similar longtime involvement with the party that will also never vote for Trump, but only a couple of them are willing to go as far as I am and actually vote for Hillary...

I think either not voting or voting third party protest with Trump at the top of the ticket is a fully acceptable and principled position to take, but I'd like to take a moment to explain why (absent a serious independent GOP candidate) I feel compelled to go even further and actually vote for Slick Hillie...

It seems to me that if I either voted a protest third party, or skipped voting for President, the statement I would be making is that I find them equally odious...

And frankly I don't...

Don't get me wrong, I consider Hillary to be plenty odious; odious enough to be equally odious compared to Ted Cruz...

But I consider Donald Trump to be uniquely odious; he is in a class by himself when it comes to odiousness, he is setting new standards for odiousness...

He is exploring outer boundaries of odiousness Where No Politician Has Ever Gone Before...

Also, if Trump is the nominee, I think it's very important not just that he lose, but that he get absolutely totally wiped out (even though that has the not-insignificant downside of Hillary Clinton thinking she's got some sort of "mandate")

I'm talkin' a forty state plus loss...

I believe this is important in order to completely excise the toxicity that he represents to the party....

I want him to lose so badly that even my grandchildren's grand children will never even think of nominating a vicious clown like this again...

[Econoline]

Jarl - Jim would be a hypocrite if he *DID* support or vote for Trump, just because Trump has decided to call himself a Republican; Trump has virtually nothing in common with the type of Republican that Jim is, and that he has spent his whole life supporting.

[Lord Jim]

Jim would be a hypocrite if he *DID* support or vote for Trump, just because Trump has decided to call himself a Republican; Trump has virtually nothing in common with the type of Republican that Jim is, and that he has spent his whole life supporting.

That's certainly the way I look at it...

I'm not absolutely inflexible, expecting a candidate to perfectly mirror my views. (none ever has). I can and have supported candidates I disagreed with on a number of issues. For example, while he certainly wasn't my first choice, and he's well to my right on most of the "social issues" I could have voted for Mike Huckabee...

To me the most important areas where I need to have general agreement with a Presidential candidate are those areas most central to the well being of the country and where Presidents have the most power; and those are in the areas of foreign policy, defense, and national security...

On these standards, while he talks tough, when you drill down on his policies they can best described as either disastrous and/or incoherent. A strong sense of neo-isolationism coupled with gratuitous belligerence towards our friends, and plans for ruinous trade wars seem to be the core of the "Trump Doctrine"...

None of this is either Republican or conservative. There's nothing Republican or conservative about admiring Vladimir Putin. There's nothing Republican or conservative about threatening to pull out of the NATO alliance, or encouraging Japan and South Korea to get nukes, and on and on and on....

In the 35-40 percent Never Trump Republican vote, (it was 37% in exit polls for the Pennsylvania primary...and frankly, if it were anybody other than Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side, it would probably be even higher.) there is a wide cross section of people....

Pragmatic conservatives like myself, who see Trump as a disaster for any number of reasons, and some who are further right, or Evangelicals who don't see him as any kind of conservative, (he certainly isn't) or don't approve of his lifestyle, and Libertarian conservatives who see him as a threat to personal liberty...

There's a whole menu of good choices for Republicans and conservatives of many stripes to select from for why they cannot support Donald Trump...

And I'll add one more thing...

Between Trump and Hillary, this is going to be one dirty, ugly, and nasty-assed campaign...

Possibly the dirtiest, ugliest, most nasty-assed since Andrew Jackson squared off with John Quincy Adams...

[Big RR]

Possibly the dirtiest, ugliest, most nasty-assed since Andrew Jackson squared off with John Quincy Adams...

Of course the Trump-like candidate won that one. Let's hope it's not a repeat.

And Ray, when you talk about a moderate candidate, I can understand you are looking for someone to the right of Hillary, but let's not perpetuate the myth that she is on the left, nor was Bill for that matter. That was started by the republicans who wanted to shift the political spectrum further to the right; no person n the left would have supported the crime and welfare reform bills Hillary and Bill did. Yes, she is left of center on some social issues (so was Obama), but she'll hardly pursue a left leaning agenda.

And Jim, I understand your concern about USSC nominees, but FWIW, there are very few people (repub or dem) who I think would be worse than Trump in that regard.

[Lord Jim]

no person n the left would have supported the crime and welfare reform bills Hillary and Bill did.

Bernie Sanders voted for the crime bill, as did a majority of the Congressional Black Caucus...

[MajGenl.Meade]

The sky is falling! I just found myself nodding in agreement with LJ and Big RR at the same time.... what is happening in the US of America? Could I really be thinking that a vote for the awful Hillary in November (assuming her vs the Trumpthing) is the best option? What if the truly unthinkable happens - and it's Cruz vs Hillary? I haven't been this conflicted in all my 39 years in the USA.