This greatly concerns me...

Trump can indeed be characterized as an ass-clown; and his history includes support and friendship with many despicable Democrat/socialist scum-bags.

However, while the conservatives, libertarians and constitutionalists among us cheer for finally hearing a candidate directly address issues that our own feckless, republican-controlled Congress continually avoids, may I remind everyone that this 'Donald-bluster', generally, has no constitutional regard.

I fear we are being thrown a false prophet to distract us from sound, constitutional discussion amongst a few of the 'legitimate' candidates on why the U.S is in the mess that it currently finds itself. That is, modern liberalism, statism, and crony capitalism (corporatism). This to me feels like another Ross Perot, John McCain, or Mitt Romney.

As much as what Trump is saying rings true from a gut-reaction, we must be careful with thinking that one man or woman has all the answers and should be given the power to transform as they see fit. Remember, that is what Chairman Obama has been up to for almost 8 years!

I feel very strongly that we are being politically manipulated, and that short of a constitutional convention of the states as the only way to 'correct' this rogue, illegitimate federal government, we are headed toward the final destruction of this republic.

But I will not give up; and I am confident that neither will the rest of you!

what is a 'legitimate' candidate?

what are the specific credentials of a 'legitimate' candidate that Trump lacks?

is there a book or something that I missed reading?

[QUOTE]Originally posted by PennSig:
This greatly concerns me...

I feel very strongly that we are being politically manipulated, and that short of a constitutional convention of the states as the only way to 'correct' this rogue, illegitimate federal government, we are headed toward the final destruction of this republic.

Sorry to say it, its already destroyed. The parasite has out grown the host.

Excellent article by Mark Steyon:

http://www.steynonline.com/7114/the-trumping-of-party

The Trumping of Party

by Mark Steyn

Donald Trump has now said that he would reverse President Obama's executive amnesty for "DREAMers" - illegal immigrants who've been here since they were children - and deport every last member of the Undocumented-American community. The amnesty for the kids was supposed to prefigure an amnesty for their parents - for what mean old politician would advocate breaking up families? But, as he told NBC's Chuck Todd, Trump plans to keep the families together by deporting every single one of them:

"We're going to keep the families together, but they have to go," he said in the interview, which will air in full on NBC's "Meet the Press" this Sunday.

Pressed on what he'd do if the immigrants in question had nowhere to return to, Trump reiterated: "They have to go."

"We will work with them. They have to go. Chuck, we either have a country, or we don't have a country."

Now there's a campaign slogan.

But he's gone beyond that. Trump has - ta-da! - a policy paper:

1. A nation without borders is not a nation. There must be a wall across the southern border.

2. A nation without laws is not a nation. Laws passed in accordance with our Constitutional system of government must be enforced.

3. A nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation. Any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages and security for all Americans.

In other words, as every functioning society understood until two generations ago, immigration has to benefit the people who are already here. Government owes a duty to its own citizens before those of the rest of the planet - no matter how cuddly and loveable they might be. The fact that it is necessary to state the obvious and that no "viable" "mainstream" candidate from either party is willing to state it is testament to how deformed contemporary western politics is. Trump may not be a "real" Republican or a "real" conservative, but most of his rivals are not "real" - period, as Carly Fiorina would say.

There seems to be some dispute among the consultant-industrial complex as to whether Trump's rise comes from his seizing the immigration issue or because folks are just enjoying the show - like "Breaking Bad" star Bryan Cranston:

"I actually like his candor," Cranston said. "There's something so refreshing about shaking up that world that is all about being handled and here comes this loose cannon who has terrible ideas and would be a horrible president, but there's something great about his 'I-don't-give-a-shit' attitude that really kind of keeps others honest."

On the other hand, when it's a subject that both parties are evasive and dishonest about, maybe the issue and the I-don't-give-a-sh*t candor are perfectly aligned.

The retort that Trump is not a "real" Republican or a "real" conservative would of course be a devastating criticism had "real" Republicans and "real" conservatives" in Washington managed actually to "conserve" anything during their time in office. Fiscal prudence? Constrained welfare? Private health care? Religious liberty? There's no point to a purity test for a party that folds more reliably than the White House valet. As I've said, for the Republican establishment the issue is Trump; for a large part of the base the issue is the Republican establishment.

And among the broader citizenry, where elections are decided, the GOP's complaint is entirely irrelevant. It's not often that I find the pajama boys of Vox.com worth reading, but this Ezra Klein column makes an interesting point:

It's not that Trump is a moderate Republican. It's that he's a moderate, full stop. And he's the kind of moderate that really exists, not the kind of moderate Washington likes to pretend exists.

What, after all, is a "moderate"?

The way it works, explains David Broockman, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, is that a pollster will ask people for their position on a wide range of issues: marijuana legalization, the war in Iraq, universal health care, gay marriage, taxes, climate change, and so on. The answers will then be coded as to whether they're left or right. People who have a mix of answers on the left and the right average out to the middle — and so they're labeled as moderate.

But when you drill down into those individual answers you find a lot of opinions that are far from the political center. "A lot of people say we should have a universal health-care system run by the state like the British," Broockman told me in July 2014. "A lot of people say we should deport all undocumented immigrants immediately with no due process."

Because the first position is "left" and the second position is "right", the pollsters split the difference and label such a person a "moderate". But he isn't actually a moderate, so much as bipartisanly extreme. In practice, most "moderates" boil down to that: They hold some leftie and some rightie positions. The most familiar type of "moderate" in American politics are the so-called "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" red governors of blue states - Christie Whitman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Pataki and (in his Massachusetts incarnation) Mitt Romney. In practice, they usually turn out to be not all that "fiscally conservative" because it turns out the social liberalism comes with quite a price tag.

Suppose there were a countervailing force to the fiscally conservative, socially liberal type? Fiscally liberal, socially (or at any rate culturally) conservative. Recent elections in Europe suggest there's no shortage of voters who like their welfare checks, free health care, state pension plans ...but don't see what any of that has to do with letting the country fill up with fanatical Muslims hot for sharia and female genital mutilation. Once upon a time the old left-wing parties represented that interest, but the British Labour Party and most European social democratic parties abandoned that market when they got hot for multiculturalism and diversity.

Is there a similar constituency in America? In other words, people who like their Medicare and food stamps ...but, like Trump, think there are too many unskilled Mexican peasants flooding into a country with ever diminishing social mobility and no hope of economic improvement without a credential that requires taking on a quarter-million dollars in debt. As Trump's detractors see it, he's just a reality-show buffoon with a portfolio of incoherent attitudes that display no coherent worldview. But very few people go around with a philosophically consistent attitude to life: Your approach to, say, health insurance is determined less by abstract principles than by whether you can afford it. Likewise, your attitude to the DREAMers may owe more to whether your local school district is collapsing under the weight of all this heartwarming diversity.

Presumably, if you're one of these bipartisanly extreme moderates, which of your incoherent positions is more pressing on election day determines your vote. The question then is whether large numbers of the electorate are as concerned about immigration as Trump purports to be. Via Mickey Kaus, for example, I found this nugget in a new paper by that David Broockman fellow quoted up above:

On immigration and abortion citizens tend to think the entire range of elite policy debate is too far to the left.

But on abortion one of the two parties at least talks the talk, even if it does nothing. On immigration both parties are engaged in a conspiracy against the American people. One party gets cheap voters and Big Government dependents; the other gets cheap labor and a chocolate on its turned down coverlet in the junior suite. The Democrats made a smarter deal. The Republicans signed a demographic death warrant. Yet Jeb! and the other alleged non-buffoons in the race have to be dragged kicking and screaming to get beyond the most ludicrous sentimentalist pap on the subject. If a "real" Republican is someone who toes the party line on a suicide mission, why be surprised that voters seek reality elsewhere?

The experts are still assuring us that the next Trumpian infelicity - after Mexicans, McCain and Megyn - will be the one that causes his campaign to self-destruct. You could be waiting a long time. As Ann Coulter says, the quickest way to get rid of Trump is to steal his issue and run with it.

http://www.steynonline.com/7114/the-trumping-of-party

Mark Steyn is a better writer than Steve McCann, but they make a similar argument:
The Republican Party Establishment, the GOPe, has created the vacuum which Trump is stepping into.

Trumping the Republican Establishment
By Steve McCann

The alarm bells are reverberating throughout the halls of the Republican Establishment as the realization has begun to sink in that their days controlling the Party are over. Nothing is more telling than the Real Clear Politics average of the four most recent polls of Republican voters. The Establishment’s favored candidates (Bush, Christie, Graham, Kasich and Rubio) account for only 24.7% of the polling results (Trump alone has 22.3%). The pent up anger over the abysmal performance of the Republican Party hierarchy over the past 27 years has justifiably reached a boiling point.

The current iteration of the Republican Establishment has been dominant in the Party since 1989, setting up a process wherein they have effectively chosen all the presidential candidates and steered a course of fawning cooperation with the Democrats. The responsibility for the current state of the country as well as its dismal future rests heavily upon their shoulders.

In 1988, thanks to Ronald Reagan, the Democratic Party was a defeated ragtag army of special interest groups and socialist wannabes. The 1988 election was another Reagan landslide as George H.W. Bush, running as Reagan’s Vice President and heir, won the popular vote by over 9 million and the electoral vote 426 to 111. However, by 2015 a radicalized Democratic Party has become the dominant power in Washington, implementing a devastating agenda opposed by a majority of the American people. This was made possible, in great part, by the folly, hubris and avarice of the Republican Establishment.

In the past six presidential elections the feckless (i.e. mushy moderate) Republican candidates, effectively chosen by the Republican hierarchy, have lost the popular vote by nearly 54 million (or an average of 9 million votes per cycle). They have averaged only 210 electoral votes out of 538 available (39%). Thanks to the efforts of the oft maligned grass roots, the Republican Party has controlled either one or both houses of Congress for 17 of the 27 years since 1989. With the exception of the Newt Gingrich’s leadership of the House of Representatives for four years, the Republican leaders of both houses have been card carrying members of the Establishment as well as true believers in the philosophical bent of getting along with the Democrats by acceding to the overwhelming bulk of their demands in order to avoid confrontation and curry favor with a hostile mainstream media.

In the eight years from 2001 to 2009 when the Republicans did control the White House (and both Houses of Congress for six years) spending skyrocketed, the nation became embroiled in an unnecessary and costly, in both lives and treasure, war in Iraq, the federal bureaucracy grew exponentially, illegal immigration remained unchecked and persistent fealty to globalization continued the ongoing loss of jobs and wealth to other countries. These factors plus the nomination of another feckless candidate opened the door allowing the most radical President in the history of the United States together with a Democratic Party in step with Barack Obama’s ideology to assume power.

The meteoric rise of Donald Trump as well as the showing of the many other non-establishment candidates is the end-product of a Republican Party too timid to be the opposition in a nation that can only function politically with two national parties. At any other time and place in the nation’s history Donald Trump would not be considered a viable candidate, considering his checkered past political leanings, his previous monetary support of the Democratic Party and his unbridled narcissism. His latest reincarnation as a political superstar is thanks to the very Republican Establishment that now so loathes and fears him.

However, as the nation is entranced with this latest reality show and rightly focused on domestic issues, over the next five years the international scene will become extremely perilous. While the media concentrates on the vile images of the atrocities committed by ISIS, the more dangerous threat to the United States is Russia with Vladimir Putin, an avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler, at the helm. Once the Ukraine has been neutralized he will turn his attention into forcing the hand of NATO by encroaching on the Baltic nations to test whether the United States and its European allies will have to will to come to their defense per the NATO treaty. Concurrent with that scenario, Russia’s new best friend and ally, Iran, freshly released from any sanctions and free to buy and develop offensive weapons, will aggressively expand their hegemony in the Middle East precipitating another confrontation with the United States and its allies.

Dealing with matters of war and peace with the attendant lives of millions in the balance requires clear headed thinking without the intrusion of any rancor, emotion or ego. Characteristics in short supply with Donald Trump. Others such as Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal and Ben Carson exhibit these necessary traits and yet are in step with the economic and immigration policies as articulated by Donald Trump.

The desperation of the Republican Establishment will soon become virulent and their vitriol while aimed primarily at Trump will also target other so-called outsiders as well. That plus the inevitable splitting of the conservative and right of center vote as the nominating process unfolds will ultimately deny Trump the nomination.

Regardless, Donald Trump, who is a patriot and sincerely concerned about the future of the country, must stay in the race until it is an absolute certainty that none of the Establishment’s favored candidates will win the nomination. At that stage by dropping out of the race he has the opportunity to go down in history as being the man who drove a stake through the heart of the current Republican Establishment and transformed the Party into a viable and determined opposition focused on making America great again. That will be a monumental feat far exceeding what he has done or will do in the business world.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com...t.html#ixzz3jAjWApzr

Living in NJ, I have been exposed to Trump in the news my whole life. He's not an unknown to me, and most people in this area. Having followed him this election cycle and reading his online positions, I can only hope he goes all the way because he is saying all the right things this country needs. Now, I hope he picks Dr. Carson for his VP..

quote:

Originally posted by njauto:
Now, I hope he picks Dr. Carson for his VP..

Has anyone checked Carson for a pulse lately?

I've watched his interviews and and I can't tell from one moment to the next if he has died.

quote:

and his history includes support and friendship with many despicable Democrat/socialist scum-bags.

Impossible. We have been assured that he can't deal with these types. They can not, and will not respect him. He will simply call them names. No way he's has friendly, respectful relationships with people who have views different than his.

quote:

may I remind everyone that this 'Donald-bluster', generally, has no constitutional regard.

But Jeb Bush does. That guy is overflowing with "Constitutional regard".

quote:

As much as what Trump is saying rings true from a gut-reaction, we must be careful with thinking that one man or woman has all the answers and should be given the power to transform as they see fit. Remember, that is what Chairman Obama has been up to for almost 8 years!

Trump won't be given that power. Obama wasn't given that power either. He took it, and the other branches of government failed to put it in check.

quote:

I feel very strongly that we are being politically manipulated,

Of course we are. But I don't believe Trump is doing the manipulation. Remember that guy Jeb? The one who according to every major Republican power was going to be our nominee? How's he doing in the polls?

I believe Trump threw drove that manipulation train right off the rails.

quote:

I believe Trump threw drove that manipulation train right off the rails.

Yes, and we owe him a debt of gratitude for it.

As the author above concludes, he must stay in long enough to keep Jeb or one of the other GOPe candidates from getting back on track:

quote:

Donald Trump, who is a patriot and sincerely concerned about the future of the country, must stay in the race until it is an absolute certainty that none of the Establishment’s favored candidates will win the nomination. At that stage by dropping out of the race he has the opportunity to go down in history as being the man who drove a stake through the heart of the current Republican Establishment and transformed the Party into a viable and determined opposition focused on making America great again. That will be a monumental feat far exceeding what he has done or will do in the business world.

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:

quote:

I believe Trump threw drove that manipulation train right off the rails.

Yes, and we owe him a debt of gratitude for it.

As the author above concludes, he must stay in long enough to keep Jeb or one of the other GOPe candidates from getting back on track:

quote:

Donald Trump, who is a patriot and sincerely concerned about the future of the country, must stay in the race until it is an absolute certainty that none of the Establishment’s favored candidates will win the nomination. At that stage by dropping out of the race he has the opportunity to go down in history as being the man who drove a stake through the heart of the current Republican Establishment and transformed the Party into a viable and determined opposition focused on making America great again. That will be a monumental feat far exceeding what he has done or will do in the business world.

Keeping my fingers crossed. anything but the same old establishment.

quote:

Originally posted by njauto:
Now, I hope he picks Dr. Carson for his VP..

I most respectfully disagree.....It should be Ted Cruz. I'll get on the rally train for Dr. Carson as Surgeon General.

A lot of main stream Republicans are bashing Trump's immigration plans as not workable.

I think that when the freebies get turned off (food, housing, healthcare), the free lawyers get turned off, illegals get arrested and stay arrested, etc - there will be a significant flow of illegals out of our country.

We must address the anchor baby issue. Illegals are coming to our country, having a baby, and thus creating a U.S. citizen to open the door for more illegals coming here and stealing from real U.S. citizens.

^^^And we need to severely curtail the migration of legal immigrants, the vast majority of whom are from the third world thanks to the Immigration Act of 1965, which is a key component of Trump's plan. Wages will rise when cheap labor is not constantly brought in, not to mention, illegal immigration will be slowed to a trickle when they don't have the support base.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by njauto:
Now, I hope he picks Dr. Carson for his VP..

Has anyone checked Carson for a pulse lately?

I've watched his interviews and and I can't tell from one moment to the next if he has died.

Yeah, I agree, he is extremely low key but I like that he is not a career politician and unlike a lot of the others accomplished/ did a lot of good in his life. Plus,I think he's pretty solid on the conservative issues.

mjauto...

Carson is in Phoenix today, scheduled to speak in the same convention center Trump spoke at recently.
Carson was slated to speak at a Tempe church which would have seated 2,300.
We'll see what kind of crowd he draws.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:

quote:

Originally posted by njauto:
Now, I hope he picks Dr. Carson for his VP..

Has anyone checked Carson for a pulse lately?

I've watched his interviews and and I can't tell from one moment to the next if he has died.

If the Republican ticket is Walker/Carson, we'll know that the Zombie Apocalypse has begun.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:

quote:

Originally posted by njauto:
Now, I hope he picks Dr. Carson for his VP..

Has anyone checked Carson for a pulse lately?

I've watched his interviews and and I can't tell from one moment to the next if he has died.

He's just thinking real hard.

I sure hope Jeb doesn't get the nomination.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/s...=2015-08-18-18-13-25

If he's willing to compromise on the 4th then why not the 2nd?