And then there was one clown

The last clown standing between Donald Drumpf and the Republican presidential nomination, Ohio Governor John Kasich, today ended his campaign. He was always a long shot and, while not ideologically different from the other Republican clowns candidates, he was different in other ways.

Kasich’s religion is every bit as conservative as any of the other Republican clowns candidates, but his seemed genuine, unlike several of his rivals—and no one knows WHAT Drumpf really believes, or doesn’t.

When Kasich entered the race, I said:

Kasich is often called a “moderate”, but that’s only because he sometimes differs from his fellow Republican politicians. The reality is that Kasich is no moderate, and is actually quite conservative on most issues. [link in the original]

I went on to point out that he was as bad as the other Republican clowns candidates on LGBT issues, because he was, but I also noted that—unlike his rivals—he said he would attend a same-gender wedding, and that, in fact, he’d been invited to one and planned to attend. While I admire the honesty, and think that was the absolutely right thing to say, I can’t imagine that went down very well with the frothing base of the Republican Party who were wetting themselves in excitement over the candidacy of openly religious extremist candidates in the race. Maybe that’s part of the reason the far-right religious base of his party never embraced him.

He also wasn’t much loved by ordinary conservatives in the party because he said his conservative Christianity was the reason he backed programmes to help the poor, like extending Medicaid in his state, something the more rigidly rightwing Republican governors refused to do, because, Obama. While I disagree with Kasich on pretty much every issue, and I absolutely don’t share his religious views (and am actually very uncomfortable with people merging their religion and politics), at least Kasich's interpretation that Christianity compels care for the poor is absolutely correct; anyone who disagrees clearly hasn’t read the Gospels. If only Kasich applied that same Christian charity to other issues…

The news that Kasich was about to quit the race was in my various news feeds when I got up this morning, but as I joked to Roger Green on Facebook, I always wait for the official official announcement. I also joked that the wait would give me time to think of something nice to say about Kasich. I said nice things in that post last July, and here, too (well, as nice as I can be about a Republican politician, I suppose). But last July I also said:

John Kasich is not the worst of the Republican clowns candidates, not by a long shot. But that doesn’t mean he’s a good candidate, either—none of them are. The longest of the Republican long shots, George Pataki, is the least odious, but in a truly awful field of candidates who offer nothing to true moderates, that’s really not saying anything positive about him or Kasich, the runner-up for least odious.

What a horrible situation it was when one of the best things I could say about a candidate is that he was “the runner-up for least odious”! But, that was the nature of this Republican nomination campaign.

Now we have the certainty that Drumpf WILL be the Republican candidate for president. We all must do everything within our own power to ensure that Drumpf is defeated, and, it seems to me, we must return Congress to Democratic control for the good of the Republican Party, as much as for the good of the USA: Only a crushing defeat will give the Republican Party enough of a mandate to take back their party and shove all their clowns out the flap of their Big Top.

The Republican Party needs a crushing defeat in November so they can take their party back and avoid being utterly destroyed. But if Drumpf doesn’t suffer a crushing defeat in November, the USA may be destroyed.

What a horrible situation, indeed.