I don’t know how many times I have to repeat this line before it finally takes hold, but we live in time when it is the ruling class vs. the rest of us — from the open mockery by a sitting President of “teabaggers,” to a governmental attack on private citizens (Limbaugh, Bundy, the Koch brothers), to the declared war establishment Republicans, who can never bring themselves to actively reject the progressive agenda in any forceful way, are set to wage on constitutionalists, who make up the base of the party no matter how desirous Mitch McConnell or Jennifer Rubin or Karl Rove are to see that Reaganite contingent tamed if not marginalized as out of touch extremists.
To note that the cat is out of the bag is an understatement. Because not only is the cat out of the bag, but he’s wearing spats and a monocle, and flaunting his use of illegals to do his domestic work and maintain the landscaping of his Fairfax VA estate.
The biggest parlor game on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms these days is guessing whether former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush will run for president and save the GOP’s old establishment base from its rising populist wing.
The second most popular game is guessing what happens if Jeb says no.
Two dozen interviews about the 2016 race with unaligned GOP donors, financial executives and their Washington lobbyists turned up a consistent — and unusual — consolation candidate if Bush demurs, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie doesn’t recover politically and no other establishment favorite gets nominated: Hillary Clinton.
The darkest secret in the big money world of the Republican coastal elite is that the most palatable alternative to a nominee such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky would be Clinton, a familiar face on Wall Street following her tenure as a New York senator with relatively moderate views on taxation and financial regulation.
“If it turns out to be Jeb versus Hillary we would love that and either outcome would be fine,” one top Republican-leaning Wall Street lawyer said over lunch in midtown Manhattan last week. “We could live with either one. Jeb versus Joe Biden would also be fine. It’s Rand Paul or Ted Cruz versus someone like Elizabeth Warren that would be everybody’s worst nightmare.”
Most top GOP fundraisers and donors on Wall Street won’t say this kind of thing on the record for fear of heavy blowback from party officials, as well as supporters of Cruz and Rand Paul. Few want to acknowledge publicly that the Democratic front-runner fills them with less dread than some Republican 2016 hopefuls. And, to be sure, none of the Republican-leaning financial executives are so far suggesting they’d openly back her.
But the private consensus is similar to what Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein said to POLITICO late last year when he praised both Christie — before the bridge scandal — and Clinton. “I very much was supportive of Hillary Clinton the last go-round,” he said. “I held fundraisers for her.”
People close to Blankfein say the same calculus applies to a Jeb Bush-Hillary Clinton race as it would to a Christie-Clinton contest. “Those would be two very good choices and we’d be perfectly happy with them,” a person close to Blankfein said. Blankfein is a self-described Democrat, but his comments about Christie and Clinton reflect the ambidextrous political approach that many Republicans and Democrats on Wall Street take.
Leaving aside the ludicrous bombast by Politico that this is the “darkest secret n the big money world of the Republican coastal elite” — many of us have been writing on the one-party system that the federal government truly is for years now, as any reputable journalist with access to a search engine surely knows — what we have here is a clear indication of where we are in our trajectory toward European socialism, which is really nothing of the sort: that is, the end game is a social welfare state with declining levels of “income inequality,” but it one run by a permanent ruling elite, policed by its bureaucracies, with citizens turned dependent subjects, and the beneficiaries of this “fundamental transformation” being those in power colluding with those in industry and finance to form the perimeters of liberal fascism, itself a form of corporatism, cronyism, and aristocratic government architecture that is often camouflaged with rigged elections (whether through voter fraud, the illegal immigrant / dead vote, gerrymandering, or control over campaign money by the Party hierarchies (see, eg., Cuccinelli, Ken), and control of the messaging by a mainstream media that has become an arm of the government) and a mirage of market capitalism that is undermined entirely by governmental interference, corporate welfare, and attacks on the middle class and small business that serve to reduce competition and dissuade risk taking, and with it, innovation.
None of this is new. This is statism, and statism leads to tyranny of necessity. The signs have long been there, with a recent study concluding that on compromise legislation, the movement is of policy is 95% to the left.
Call it the long march. Pretend it’s historical materialism. Potato, potah-to.
Today’s GOP establishment realizes that, win or lose, they will benefit financially from a powerful centralized government. And the introduction of the TEA Party into the political arena has upset the charade that we have an adversarial system in any serious sense. This is what so frustrates the Boehners and McConnells, who exist to cut deals, to lose more slowly, to stand for nothing other than their own entrenched power and influence.
We are their enemy. The left, as much as they are to be despised for where they wish to take us, at least have the courtesy of occasionally dropping the mask. The GOP establishment, alternately, is busy trying to rebrand conservatism to comport with Jeb Bush’s / Mitt Romney’s “center-rightism,” which 50 years ago would have been aligned quite closely to LBJ’s Great Society agenda. They wish to hijack “conservatism” and marginalize constitutionalists as “extremists.”
I no longer suffer GOP apologists lightly. They are pernicious, and a very real danger to an already crumbling constitutional republic.
Wearing a flag pin in your label and mouthing platitudes that sound vaguely conservative but lack the tell of conviction is no longer a workable camouflage. And in truth, Wall St and the statists have us boxed in. Should conservatives stay home, assuming the media and the establishment Republicans can force feed us a Bush or Christie, Hillary wins. And because she’s both an ideologue and a power realist, she’ll happily play ball with corporatists and crony capitalists in exchange for finishing off the Cloward-Piven strategy to wreck our country from within.
In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s fictional socialist Utopia, the federal government becomes the country’s biggest employer, its bigger lender, its biggest “charitable donor,” etc. And so eventually it just subsumes the large corporations it original colludes with and cuts out the middle man.
Seems he was prescient. History shows that the romanticized Utopia Bellamy envisioned, when proponents of his brand of socialism grabbed the reins of power, turned into a Dystopian nightmare, with misery among the subjects the only form of “equality” that remained.
Well, that and mass graves.
So what’s not to like, right?
As disgusting as the Establicans, nee the RINOs, nee the “Eastern Establishment” have been for years, Politico sucks Donk Dick and is not to be taken seriously.
The only comfort I get anymore is looking back at history and seeing, from Taft vs. Dewey to Goldwater vs. Rockefeller to Ted Cruz/Rand Paul vs. the Bush Dynasty, is that there is nothing new under the GOP sun.
Orientation to the party GOP (to say nothing of the party Progressive) as opposed to orientation to humankind, is as orientation to a vapor as opposed to the orientation to those to be vaporized.
Politico is a lefty site. But it’s also a go-to site for establishment types on the “right” who like to leak, smear, or wink and nod.
On the contrary. A Cruz vs. Warren election would be the best thing that could happen to this country – by making the choice as stark and clear as possible.
(Thing is, I suspect Liz Warren would probably win. But that’s OK – sometimes you just need to know that things are over beyond any attempt at reconciliation, and that it’s time to go elsewhere…)
Orientation to the party GOP (to say nothing of the party Progressive) as opposed to orientation to humankind, is as orientation to a vapor as opposed to the orientation to those to be vaporized.
And in truth, Wall St and the statists have us boxed in. Should conservatives stay home, assuming the media and the establishment Republicans can force feed us a Bush or Christie, Hillary wins. And because she’s both an ideologue and a power realist, she’ll happily play ball with corporatists and crony capitalists in exchange for finishing off the Cloward-Piven strategy to wreck our country from within.
So we’re fucked. And you wonder why I want to cry.
The same old Rockefeller Republicans rear their head. And while treasonous for them to talk of backing Hillary if they can’t force Jeb down our throats, it’s not surprising.
As you mention, their interests are favored by corporatism, which Bubba was on board with all the way. And which have diverged from the interest of the folks on main street for some time now…
(Thing is, I suspect Liz Warren would probably win. But that’s OK – sometimes you just need to know that things are over beyond any attempt at reconciliation, and that it’s time to go elsewhere…)
Sadly, you are probably right. And again, I just want to cry.
For years, I’ve been trying to figure out what there is in the GOP worth loyalty. Still flummoxed.
“For years, I’ve been trying to figure out what there is in the GOP worth loyalty. Still flummoxed.”
And come to think of it, it *has* been years since Uncle Ron vs. Jimmuh Carturd or Walter Mondull. For a time there was Newt, but then he was destroyed by the Media Smear Machine and went off into the sanctuary of wonkiness.
Jeb is hard to take seriously if we want to elect a fat-ass establishment slut we can’t do better than Christie
he’s kind of the gold standard
Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens
Polish railroad workers who hauled the train-loads of Jews to the camps were paid by the Nazis not in money but in vodka, even calling it a bonus, which, they testify, was needful in order to endure the stench upon arriving at their destination and without which they say they wouldn’t have been able to do their jobs. Whereas, again, they say, railroad workers on other lines unconcerned with the death-camps received their wages in money.
It’s worth noting that the “rising populist wing” doesn’t much care whether Jeb says yes or no. We know that the Stabs will find their white knight somewhere and do their best to stuff him down our throats, and we know we ain’t swallowing again.
He helped.
also his bat-shit crazy quite-possibly-an-alien-whore hoochie did her part too
GOP. Meh. Done with ’em.
It’d be nice to have a real, substantive Party that had a chance in hell of countering what Leftists are offering to today’s ‘milder‘ Americans, who are willing to give up their costly heritage for a cuddle blankee.
. . . we made the most evil man who ever lived kill himself in fear before we could get to him.
“We” being the Russians assaulting Berlin he means to say? What a dolt.
“Thing is, I suspect Liz Warren would probably win.”
eCurmudgeon,
At least blood would be spilled:
By the way, Sen. Cruz was one of just three senators to vote against Kerry’s confirmation to be secretary of State last January.
I’d donate whatever time, talent and treasure I have to see him toe it up with the either Hildabeast or Fauxcapontis.
Meghan’s coward daddy voted yes yes yes yes in the same tone Meg Ryan used in the diner
The GOP is rebranding itself into the party of technocrats and corporatists in the business/financial sector. It is clear it has no more use for tea partiers or social conservatives (yeah, there’s overlap, but…), aside from asking you to provide a veneer of populism and thus some grassroots legitimacy. Fraudlent, but they need you as an exhibit.
I think there are better options than becoming cannon fodder for the Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street. Starting with securing your family and just watching it burn.
As others have already indicated, history suggests Elizabeth Warren would be the actual winner.
I’m starting to have the same reaction to the phrase “Meghan’s [adjective] daddy” as to the word “failshit.”