Stand By for Super Tuesday!

It is now only a week till the first of three high points of this year’s national elections in the U.S. will occur.  This will be Super Tuesday on 1 March.  The source that I consulted indicated that 14 states and one territory, American Samoa, will be voting.  The number of those states is equally divided between the old Confederacy and everywhere else in the country.

All the candidates still in the running are already frantically checking their meds. because more delegates will be gained that day than on any other one day before the conventions.  In comparison the dribs and drabs of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina till now will suddenly become small potatoes, though they did serve to knock off a bunch of candidates, very lightly among the Democrats because they only had a few to begin with, but extremely heavily among the Republicans, since most of the time their clown car was bursting at the seams.  At the start they had 17 aspirants eager to emulate Obama, thinking that if that you-know-what could, then surely they could as well, and better.   That number seriously wrecked TV viewing through the past six or seven months, due to the large amount of GOP stumble sprees that were supposedly debates.

On the Democratic side things are much easier to follow, because Ms Hillary Clinton has been seriously challenged only by Bernie Sanders, a pleasant-looking guy who greatly impressed me during the financial troubles of 2007 and 8, when he did a great job of explaining one of the major causes of those problems, namely the proliferation of some mysterious “instruments” called “credit default swaps.”

   Today, with financial troubles still in the news and possibly very much in prospect, you don’t hear much about credit default swaps.  What has become of them?   Driven underground?  No longer existing?  That is to be hoped, because, as Sanders said at the time, very few people could tell you what they are, and it’s been years since I could even pretend to know.  They were some brain-busting things for sure, because they were so illogical, and that should’ve made them illegal from the start.

 One would think that by now Sanders would be already shot down because he is associated with socialism, but that doesn’t seem to have hurt him, maybe because it’s been determined that the same could be said of many of the U.S.’s founding fathers.

Over on the Republican side, the 17 have also essentially been cut down to just two, though there are still three others still hoping for a miracle.   But what a pair!   Cruz and Trump, with the latter in the lead, though not by much.   Neither one is anything to write home about, though Cruz seems to be hated by more people, including many in his party.

I think I know why Cruz is so despised.   As Clem Kadiddlehopper, the rural character of a great comic of the past, Red Skelton, would’ve said, he just doesn’t look right to me.  And then there are dozens of issues that he has ack basswards.  The latest came up just a couple of days ago.

Suggesting that when it comes to current events, he is no better than a laggard in a high school civics class, Cruz said that if elected he will direct the Federal Government to turn over all its public lands in Nevada to that state, which essentially means eventually into private hands, i.e. the 1%,  That must mean that he also supports the recent takeover of the Malheur Bird Sanctuary in Oregon by a bunch of armed rural gangsters, all of whom are now in jail, except for one woman who is now suing the Government for the Biblically significant amount of 666 million dollars and one man who is now deceased, having been shot after he nearly hit a police officer with his pickup truck while trying to evade a road block.

Those criminals kept trying to justify themselves by saying their goal was to “return” that sanctuary to the local population.  But those locals  were actually quite happy to see the Government get back the bird refuge.  See my recent post on LaVoy Finicum.

In the meantime it’s been said that Cruz’s wife, who has been photographed trying to avoid being kissed by him, is supporting Hillary Clinton.   That doesn’t seem to have been reported by anyone in the media except Gawker, whose creed is that rumors quite often turn out to be the truth.

Donald J. Trump on the other hand, comes off as little more than a comedian, and I can’t help thinking that he’s mainly in this for the chuckles.   I think he tipped his hand in the very first days of his candidacy, when he said that there was no use in having these elections at all, because that quickly he had already gotten so much support that he might as well be declared the President then and there, and that would be the end of it.  No muss, no fuss.

Very few people remember that unseemly display of bravado and egotism, but I do.  And I think it is only the miserable quality of his opposition so far that he has held the lead among the other Republican candidates for all except a few days. But his advantage consists of only one-third of the vote in only one of the two parties.  One reason that the imminent Super Tuesday will be so interesting is that the day after we will suddenly know a lot more about that situation.   For now I just know that my crystal ball can’t see him representing the United States at the next G-8 meeting.   At the next Miss America pageant, yes.  At the next international climate meeting after Miami settles under the Atlantic Ocean, no.

I also think it’s strange that, though D.J. Trump has offended many groups, so far, to the best of my knowledge, he has avoided attacking, at least directly, that easiest of Republican targets -- people who share my kind of African ancestry.  Why?   Is that a mere oversight or what?  Is he saving us for the real kill, should things get so tight that he has to try to squeeze out of the bigoted elements in the electorate more than just depending on them to “purify” the attendance at his speeches, or has he simply forgotten that we even exist?

Donald J. Trump is a hard bird to figure out.  I seriously doubt that he himself has anywhere close to a clear idea of what he is about, and if one was listening closely, they would’ve heard him admitting as much, on several occasions.