General News And then there were 15, Walker drops out

[youtube]rY0WxgSXdEE[/youtube]

One down, 15 to go.

 

Why? Was he the only republican candidate in their pocket?

 

I can't wait for Colbert's next installment of the Hungry for Power Games.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=svMxwRj3LdY

 

^^Trump has been sucking up all the GOP media coverage, and Sanders is taking the left (shockingly by collecting popular support for appearing to be a decent human being) so the other candidates are all having a tough time. Even Hillary and Jeb have been on the backburner, because I think everyone's tired of Bushes and Hillary is just too scummy as well.

 

While I find the vast majority of the candidates rather revolting, I wish the moderates (I'm generously using that word only as a comparative) would stand their ground or collectively back one moderate, because the populism of Trump is really damaging the quality of debate. Walker's experience in government is rare in such a hard-right figure, so he could, in a hypothetical American primary in which headline-chasing weren't the way of conducting affairs, be a well-rounded and coherent advocate for his cause.

If one major figure offers no depth, then the others can't, either. But it's hard to have Trump taken down for that when too many candidates result in too much background noise, competing media presences and too little time in the candidates' debates to discuss policy in detail.

But I guess realistic and intellectually justifiable policies are unappealing to many voting in the primaries by their very nature, so having a higher quality of debate at this stage is a tall order anyway.

 

The reason there are so many candidates can be seen as the result of that bone-headed Supreme Court decision: Citizens United, allowing the flood of billionaire money and Jesus Bucks to spend freely on Super-PACs. As they say, be careful what you wish for, and here is the result: billionaires competing with each other to get "their" candidate in.

Walker is an odious example of low-wattage "leadership" characteristic of the once-proud GOP: anti-union, anti-gay and who suggested that building a wall between Canada and the US was a "legitimate issue to look at".

Good riddance.

 

Not to mention, that wall would have made it much harder for sane people like myself to flee to Canada, in the event he won.

I'm glad he's gone!

(A side note: Given that a large section of the US/Canadian border is in the middle of Lake Superior, I wonder how he proposed building a wall at such depths? Surely a huge wall would look very unsightly at the shore, and would have killed off any tourism; being from Michigan, it made me ponder the sheer idiocy of such a scheme)

 

The car gets a little more comfortable.

 

You would think so, but Trumps head rapidly expands to fill any vacant space in the car before any other candidates can move.