It's a good thing America is concentrating on the truly big news stories:
Like #OscarsSoWhite from #HollywoodSoLiberal. And the head-smacking drama of the
But before our presidential candidates do any more harm to what a few of us still consider the republic, what of the
Republican intellectuals are tearing the skin off each other's backs in their search for a true conservative, as if they'd know one after spending years defending the neocon-driven Bush administration.
Republicans actually had a conservative in the race, but they smothered his candidacy because it threatened their hold on power, and cast his young voters to the winds.
Sen.
He aptly compared
"This race should not be about who can grasp the ring. Electing Gollum should not be our objective," Paul wrote on
"I am the only one on this national stage who really doesn't want power or dominion over you. I want to set you free, I want to leave you alone, and I want a government so small you can barely see it."
The trouble is, of course, that the acerbic Paul's campaign can barely be seen.
Now the Republicans are left with Sen.
Sen.
The insiders would rather have Jeb!
What was amazing last week was that the
The irony, though, is that for years the magazine defended former President
The attempted takedown of Trump leaves Bush's brother and establishment heir Jeb! to sit back with all that cash, play the moderate conservative and pick up the pieces.
Slap me again. And again. Thank you, sir, may I please have another?
I understand why people gravitate to Trump, especially working people who've been beaten up by the economy and see a nation run by knaves. My argument's not with them.
Trump's tough, he's not politically correct, he mocks journalists and makes funny faces. That's attractive in a candidate, particularly for Republican and Democratic grass-roots voters who can smell the weasel on establishment pols with their eyes closed. But such a personality may be disastrous in a president.
As I've written before, Trump is about wielding the federal hammer. And now he's armed with a personality cult. Neither is remotely conservative.
The use of the federal hammer is actually the statist Democratic position. It's something a
But if Trump gets past Cruz in
The Democrats.
Front-runner and former Secretary of State
But they're panicking. Why? Because if they weren't panicking, they'd be mentally ill. She feels the
Sanders, the unreconstructed socialist, is surging in
The FBI is investigating how top-secret government emails ended up on her private server. Her partisan meat puppets brush it off as nothing, but there's a sweet stench about this one now. If a midlevel foreign service officer did what she's done, they'd be fired by now, or indicted.
So the Clintonistas might cheer her every word, clapping frantically. But other Democrats wonder who the Democratic establishment might draft, if Hillary's email issue becomes truly septic and the FBI does more than investigate.
Bernie put out a stirring TV spot called "America" with that old Simon and Garfunkel track that evokes a mythic, romanticized '60s, in the way Republicans reach to the Reagan '80s.
And a worried Hillary looks to stop the bleeding in
A week to go before
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John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.