Opinions - some recommended reading

Laura Ingraham on Trump's path (and Cruz' path) to defeating an entrenched establishment. Spot on and an excellent but quick read.

Peggy Noonan believes the Republican part is in it's death throws.  I disagree.  It's being swept clean of an entrenched establishment which is absolutely necessary in both parties.  Whether it gets replaced with something better or worse is actually moot - if Trump wins and is a disaster he'll be quickly swept aside in four years.  That said, these points are especially incisive;

Party leaders and thinkers should take note: It’s easier for a base to hire or develop a flashy new establishment than it is for an establishment to find itself a new base...

The establishment was slow to see what was happening, slow to see Mr. Trump coming, in full denial as he continued to win. Their denial is self-indicting. They couldn’t see his appeal because they had no idea how their own people were experiencing America.

Bobby Jindal, unlike Noonan, believes it's not the GOP Establishment that created the Trump political animal.  He blames Obama. He argues among other things;

You can draw a straight line between a president who dismisses domestic terrorist attacks as incidents of workplace violence and a candidate who wants to ban Muslims from entering the country.

Jonathan V. Last thinks Ted Cruz crushed the Detroit debate. 

Meanwhile Bruce Walker explains just how weak of a candidate Hillary will be in November.  And an Investors Business Daily editorial thinks she's right to fear Trump.

Mark Cunningham claims there's no GP establishment cabal, just entrenched interests, but they have brought Trump's hostile takeover upon themselves.

Friday Musical Interlude - Bye and Bye

This month another new theme for Friday Musical Interludes.  Today, Bye and Bye sung by the Georgia Mass Choir.

Mitt Romney's secret agenda.

Hey Mitt, no one cares.

The man who many conservatives felt they had to hold their nose to vote for because he wasn't really a conservative, Mitt Romney, doesn't want people to consider doing the same for Donald Trump.  This is the same man who touted a Trump endorsement in 2012, and then subsequently lost a winnable election against Barack Obama.

Let me be clear - I do not believe Trump is the best nominee in the Republican field. By far.  Although I do believe he'd be a far better president than Clinton or Sanders even though that's a low bar to clear.

But let me also be clear - Mitt's words would carry more weight if he had actually won something at the federal level.  Maybe Mitt was just figuring he could influence the voters in the state he ran as governor - Massachusetts - in this year's primary.  Oops  - Donald Trump already won the primary there earlier this week.

What Mitt said today does the same thing that Mexican statements about the wall do for Trump - it validates that he's onto something.  In the case of Mitt Romney its about an establishment Republican attacking an outsider yet again.  It helps cement the idea that Trump is really an outsider running against all of Washington.

Secret agenda?

Then again, maybe the GOP secretly have calculated they can pin that outsider label on Trump by 'opposing' him.  Disaffected voters might flock to a candidate in the general election if they believe establishment leaders in neither party can stomach him.  If the GOP were so clever as to use the tactic of distancing themselves from Trump in order to get him elected, I'd actually be impressed. They'd be using the antipathy and apathy towards Mitt Romney (and others) as a lever to improve the odds for Trump winning the nomination and the general election. 

It makes sense in the context of who is staying in the race besides Trump: 2 establishment candidates and two outsiders to split the votes of non-Trump voters.  With both Kasich and Rubio sticking around no other establishment candidate can win enough.  With Cruz and Carson in the race, the outsider vote is split three ways (mostly towards Trump), but it keeps the possibility of no anti-Trump candidate to coalesce votes. Maybe Trump is the establishment's guy.

If that's the case, and the establishment is secretly behind Trump by being against him, I'm impressed.  Not that I'd like the idea, but it would be a smart move.

Does Mexico secretly want a wall?

Mexico seems like it wants to ensure a Trump presidency.  First there was Vincente Fox saying he's not paying for the wall.  No Mexico's finance minister is saying the same thing;

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - There is no way Mexico would fund Donald Trump's "terrible" plan to build a wall along its border with the United States if the Republican front-runner wins the U.S. presidential election, the Mexican finance minister said.

Trump, the New York billionaire developer and former reality television star, sparked outrage in Mexico when he vowed to force Latin America's second largest economy to pay for a wall along the southern U.S. border to stem the flow of illegal immigration and drugs.

In a televised interview late on Wednesday, Finance Minister Luis Videgaray categorically rejected the proposal.

"Under no circumstance will Mexico pay for the wall that Mr. Trump is proposing," he said. "Building a wall between Mexico and the United States is a terrible idea. It is an idea based on ignorance and has no foundation in the reality of North American integration."

Saying there's no problem ignores the reality on the ground in America.  There is a problem, and it requires a solution. Mexican officials pretending no problem exists helps Trump.  Saying you won't pay for it, in the face of an angry and frustrated electorate worried about crime, drugs, and jobs inflames that frustration and also helps Trump.  It's not clear how Trump expects to get Mexico to pay for the wall - his answers have been ambiguous, evasive and frankly grade school.  Nor is it clear that people buy that Mexico would actually agree to pay for it, no matter what trade leverage Trump alludes to having.  People might not even care about that part.  Then again, they might want to see him try.  But they want a broken immigration fixed almost as much as they want jobs.

Clearly Mexico either doesn't get it or wants to deal with Trump.  If they really don't want him to win, they'd tackle the problem head on (in other ways) rather than antagonizing Trump supporters or even undecided voters.  If Mexico is so against it, maybe there is something to Trump's steadfast insistence on it. So might go the thinking of a lot of Americans.

If Mexico really does not want a wall, do they even care that people are fleeing to America?  What sort of message that send to Mexico's poor?  Go away. That's what it's telling them. But why then, antagonize Trump when he's winning primaries?  That almost ensures that if he wins the presidency it's going to happen.  His ego won't allow otherwise.  That makes Mexican reactions so perplexing.

Tone it Down!

Sometimes I imagine that Democrats banded together in secret and decided to disseminate the idea to broader liberal groups to have Democrats register as Republicans and vote for Trump in an effort to disrupt the Republican primaries and get Donald Trump to end up the nominee.  After all the numbers of Republican primary voters have been surprisingly high this cycle.  Yes, there are a lot of disgruntled Americans who want to fix the country.  Yes there was a big field of candidates.  But in some states the turnout was double that of 2008. Double.  A liberal plot just like Rush  Limbaugh's Operation Chaos in 2008 to thwart Hillary Clinton's nomination is not beyond the realm of possibility.

But while that's worth mentioning, it's not what is on my mind right now.  The level of panic and vitriol over Donald Trump, and from Donald Trump, needs to ratchet down about 40 notches.  

I'm speaking mainly to the anti-Trump crowd right now: Tone it Down.   There's a number of reasons that there's no need to panic yet.

(1)  Trump only has 25% of the delegates needed to win the nomination.  There's plenty of race left.

(2)  If Trump turns out to be the nominee, Hillary Clinton is still beatable (less so, but still beatable).

(3)  The heated rhetoric will not help your case with Trump voters. It may turn off non-Trump voters. This is especially true if Trump is now starting to tone it down himself.

(4)  In due course other candidates will drop out and non-Trump votes will coalesce around the other candidate.A brokered convention is a distinct possibility.

(5)  If fewer candidates cannot lead to an alternate delegate leader, guess what - you are no longer the majority within the Republican party.  You need to re-evaluate.

Just consider different ways to beat Trump.  Either he's unbeatable or he's beatable.  Panic and heated rhetoric won't turn the tide.

We need to make America whole again?

Hey Hillary, how about we just climb out of the hole your party has put America in?