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Nightly Ramble: Random Thoughts on Iowa

Tonight I’m just outside Syracuse New York. I have the load of potato chip dip of all things, and I’ll be dropping it off in Queens at about 8 o’clock in the morning. Truck continues to run well, I’m in good health and good spirits.

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The reports are that the groundhog has predicted an early spring. While there are those that will laugh at the reliability of the groundhogs prognostications, I should point out that they have been far more accurate than those predicting global warming.

Looking forward to spending some quality time with Donna. This weekend is her birthday and that’s always a special time for us.

By now, you all know that Ted Cruz won in Iowa last night. This despite the many predictions of his demise. All of which were wishful thinking.

All of the polls showed Ted Cruz losing Iowa… mostly on the strength of Cruz being strongly against the ethanol mandate. In cornfed Iowa, this is big stuff.   No politician in history has ever challenged  this nonsense… not in corn country…  and survived to go on to the next round, before. He had Iowa Governor Branstad actively campaigning against him on the matter, and he still won. And yes, he won the race rather handily. Which raises the question about the political sacredness of the ethanol mandate.  it also addresses the issue of a genuine conservative can win despite the misgivings of the establishment GOP.

The poll takers were also suggesting that Rubio was within striking distance of actually winning this thing. Put together and at the very least, these would seem to call into serious question, polling data and its accuracy, or at the least, those of the establishment GOP pundits observing at all.

As for Trump, it would appear as I suggested last night that the inevitability factor has disappeared. So has the constant output of tweets on Twitter. As of this writing the new services are now making mention but he hasn’t done anything on that service in 12 hours. There’s a number of possible reasons why, of course. I’ll leave them to your imagination.

And as if to show himself as completely disconnected from reality, Marco Rubio told his adoring audience that the pollsters said he had no chance…. and claimed victory. Hmmmm Marco? Third place isn’t exactly a win.

I have to say I overheard Limbaugh today talking about Rubio and how Rubio is a principled conservative. No, Rush, he is not. And yes, he is the last hope for the GOP establishment at this point. They’ve got to latch on to somebody after all, I love ya, man, but you’re dead wrong about this. We’re going to come back to this one I’m sure. Repeatedly.

Something on the order of 60% of Iowa [2] Republicans voted for either a black or one of two Hispanic men. And quite literally none of the Democrat voters in Iowa did that. Ponder the importance of that.

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Add to that, with  O’Malley removing himself from the race,….( mostly because the only people that were noticing he was in the race, were laughing…)  the average age of the Democratic candidates is now 71. I guess all we really need to do is run those DNC spots over again about fresh ideas, and young faces. Maybe they’ll go for it without noticing.

If there’s anything that surprises me it’s that Jeb Bush didn’t remove himself from the race. Yes, as Brit Hume points out, he’s got several million dollars to keep him going, but going in one direction? He’s already spent 54 million dollars and only managed 2%. At this point he’s acting like he has no clue as to why he’s even in the race. And frankly, I don’t either.

I’m going to add something here in an effort to reemphasize something I suggested last evening. There’s been an awful lot of late, talking about how this election and these candidates are going to be the end of the Republican Party. Interestingly enough, that kind of talk has been coming from liberals… both Democrat and Republican.

But I have to say that my read is a little different. We’re going to see the end of the Democrat Party in this.

Ponder the completely untenable choices of the soon to be indicted criminal and the  socialist / communist. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to ask the question about how many of the Democrat party faithful are going to be rushing headlong for the exits. In fact, I’m going to suggest that is one major reason why Donald Trump is doing as well as he is. Seeing the lack of intelligence on the Democrat tickets these days, there’s a lot of people jumping ship for something more tolerable.

If you don’t trust I’m saying on this, consider this little mentioned fact… The fourth place Republican candidate got more votes then Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton combined.

While I’ve been writing this a lady driver pulled up next to me in her truck and went inside to grab something to eat or use the restroom or something. And somebody was waiting for her to return. I couldn’t resist this.

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Off to bed, and then down the road I go. I’ll see you tomorrow.