Ambassador Haley: your hand is still up. Might you want to put it down?
Senator Tim Scott has dropped out of contention for the Republican presidential nomination with dignity and humility. What he does next matters.
During the first Republican debate of 2024, Brett Baier, who cowered from the Fox News audience in 2020, afraid to tell them who won the presidential election, asked a simple question. He asked whether the assembled candidates would pledge to support Donald Trump no matter what. He asked if they would support his return to the White House 959 days after the January 6th travesty.
Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson kept their hands down.
Mike Pence, who would have been killed and hung by the crowd Trump incited, raised his hand to pledge his forever loyalty. It was an act of shameful weakness and an expression of abject political cowardice. He has been eliminated from the presidential campaign. His career in public service is over. His servility will long be remembered.
Tim Scott raised his hand too. Perhaps he might reconsider that action, given that Donald Trump has called for the creation of concentration camps and the imprisonment of political opponents and enemies. Does Senator Scott believe that he doesn’t mean it? What does he think Trump means by this insanity? Does he think it is unserious? Does he lack the wisdom to see the death and mayhem that will follow? Either way, he has been eliminated from the presidential campaign.
There are three contenders left on the Trump undercard.
They include the fascistic Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who wore these boots in public, has more recently been accused of wearing lifts in his cowboy boots, and sealed his fate with a finger dipped in pudding pointed at his staff.
He practiced a politics of performative cruelty in a bidding war of indecency in which cruelty was always a gateway to more cruelty. He declared war on the state’s largest employer and tried to make Mickey Mouse an enemy of the people. He embraced the legacy of division and disunion for his selfish gain and ambition. He has been annihilated by the process. His impending humiliation at the hands of California Governor Gavin Newsom will stand as a cautionary tale about the most moribund and pathetic presidential campaign there has ever been. He should drop out of the race. He has no path to victory in any early state. It’s over and has been for some time. It’s a cruel business. It is as mean as shipping cold, hungry and bewildered people around America as props in a sick game.
Vivek Ramaswamy is beyond belief. I wrote about him the other day:
Ramaswamy is an ill-prepared demagogue who is as arrogant as he is unprepared and illiterate about the world. He seems to believe that talking fast bestows credibility in the make-believe world of plastic people and cable boxes where he has thrived like a modern day Music Man. He is a pied piper of relentless BS and packaged inanities. They are presented as wisdom when they are really dollops of nonsense dispensed from the gilded perch of a lightweight with a talent for skimming profits in “pump and dump” schemes. He isn’t running for president, but rather auditioning for vice president against Tucker Carlson and MTG. He seeks Trump’s favor — not his defeat. He is a world-class scammer with no chance of winning any election in any state during the primary contest season.
This leaves Chris Christie and Nikki Haley.
They are both profoundly tainted and damaged by their association with Trump, who relentlessly exposed the worst aspects of their character. When the moment called for outrage, they showed indifference. When it called for wisdom, they displayed foolishness. When they were called to be idealistic, they were cynical. When the season demanded duty and courage, they showed selfishness and cowardice. Yet, it must be said, they are a cut above the rest.
Within both of them is the potential to move the GOP forward, and deal a crippling blow to the MAGA extremists whom they have alternately appeased, confronted, and antagonized. Some commentators have said that it is essential that the GOP field winnow, so that Trump face a single competitor who has the chance to lay out a clear choice and a different path. This makes sense, but obscures a profound difference between Haley and Christie that cannot be glossed or papered over, nor obscured.
Nikki Haley raised her hand. Chris Christie did not.
Chris Christie has broken free. Nikki Haley has not.
She remains Trump’s captive, tethered to him forever and ever — no matter what.
Nikki Haley wants to be president of the United States, but has already disqualified herself with a lack of judgment and a display of character weakness that is brutal to watch. She raised her hand, and has functionally kept it up through this very hour. Trump is calling for concentration camps and the end of the republic:
This is a call to violence and mayhem. Nikki Haley will get back in line behind it again because the predictable pattern is obvious, based on the abundance of past evidence that demonstrates that Nikki Haley is for Nikki Haley. She isn’t in it for the people, so much as in it for the game, which she loves enough to raise her hand for Trump. It’s pathetic and tragic.
Here are some straightforward questions that a functioning American political media would ask Ambassador Haley, who seeks to command the world’s most powerful military as commander-in-chief and command the world’s most potent nuclear arsenal.
Ready? Here they are:
Ambassador, would you care to rethink your devotional towards Trump?
Did you really mean to put up your hand? Would you like a pass? Would you like to say you meant to keep it down?
Maybe it is possible that Nikki Haley understands the absurdity of that moment, and how craven, weak and unworthy it made her. Maybe? At any rate, if she wants to be the sole survivor of the preliminary rounds, she needs to figure out how to get her arm back down. Until then, Chris Christie is a deeply flawed candidate, who is the only sane candidate in the field. He can’t get out because if he does, there are only sycophants with arms in the air who are left. That is terrible for America.
Our democracy is in the greatest danger it has ever been. I wasn’t around in the WWII era but I can assure you that my (deceased) father was and he fought for our rights and freedom then as he would without hesitation today.
To see that this clown possee is the best that the GOP has to offer is, to put it mildly, upsetting and Trump and his fascist/ignorant supporters are a real threat to the Constitution and the rule of law. Two things I never dreamed I’d be writing about in 2023.
We must do better-- and that comes from taking back the House and strengthening our Senate majority as well as re-electing Joe Biden. The alternative spells the doom of our country in my opinion.
How ironic. The hypocritical “never-will”contenders continue to cower to the former Coward in Chief. Shocker!
This is the new definition of leadership in the GQP. The only thing worse than these buffoons pretending to care about our democracy, is how easily the MSM is manipulated; continuing to treat they clowns as legitimate politicians, and not the conspiracy inclined whack-jobs the rest of us know them to be.
Scott proved himself about as knowledgeable about the Middle East as America’s favorite “know-nothing” grifters: Trump and Kushner. And their knowledge of the how the economy works, is no better.
DeSatan needs a Prozac the size of a watermelon, just to control his delusions of grandeur.
Haley tries to appease the MAGA mob by collapsing faster than a cheap lounge chair in the face of own Duplicitous policy decisions and support for the Mango moron.
Vivek, well he’s in a class of his own. He may not have taken the short bus to school, but he’s definitely certifiable.
As for the rest of the clown car still waiting around in a drunken stupor? I doubt 95% of Americans could even pick them out in a police lineup.
Be afraid, be very afraid...:)