Trumped

The Iowa caucuses gave some definition to the GOPer field, though in fact it doesn't much matter which candidate emerges--they're all frightening bigots, blowhards and incompetents.  But Trump unexpectedly lost--he very nearly slipped to third place--and although no one else is saying it yet, I believe his failure to debate played a role.  Update: Actually, now Trump is saying it.

Ted Cruz won on organizing Evangelicals, but he is likely to come in no better than third in New Hampshire, and who knows from there. The reaction today is to wonder if the Trump is all trumpery, an image inflated by entertainment value, that may deflate like (in Frank Rich's phrase) a big fat balloon. But it's likely that there are now three viable GOPer candidates and though the order may change (in New Hampshire my guess is Trump, Rubio, Cruz--although a fourth could sneak in somewhere there, i.e. Kasich is popular) that's likely to be the race.

Hillary Clinton escaped Iowa with a very close win, while Bernie Sanders demonstrated both the weaknesses in her candidacy and the future of the Dems, as Eric Levitz argues persuasively in New York magazine online.  This bodes well for those who believe that corporate capitalism as it is currently constructed is unable to effect the changes necessary longterm to address the climate crisis.  As well as Sanders actual key issue, the increasingly debilitating gap between the rich few and the many left behind.

Yet that future is not now, and Hillary is the electable present, the alternative to GOPer apocalypse with one of these dangerous idiots in the White House together with a GOPer House and Senate.  The spectre of Sanders as Nader is too scary to dismiss, though there are a lot of primaries to go.

The scariest possibility broached so far is quoted in the Frank Rich piece, in which her email situation leads to an indictment or special prosecutor, after the Dem convention in the summer.  If there's anything the electorate wants to avoid, it's another Clinton pursued by another special prosecutor.  In which case, welcome to the American apocalypse.