Hi tkc and clo,
I was really looking at the folks who have had a following.
Chris Christie looked viable in some ways, but he was right to back out. He needs a few more years to prove NJ. If he can do that, he will make a solid, old-style Republican candidate.
But can he win the nomination? Don't know. I think he fails too many of the purity tests. If I were Fox News, I'd be dialling back on the crazy for the next four years so that the right wing lumpen mass starts believing incrementalist rather than antediluvian thoughts again.
Incrementalism is the kind of Republicanism that has a lot of virtues, in my view. I think it tends to be a bit slow, but it is pragmatic, allows change in a dynamic environment and respects both history and science.
History is something which grows continuously. It is not stuck at some random point of perfection, to which one might return. It submits to change. Science defines its vision through imagination, reason and observation. It submits theories to reality rather than conforming reality to theory.
The antediluvian impulse is fundamentally ahistorical and unscientific. It believes in purity rather than dynamism, faith rather than flexibility. It is doomed to engender catastrophe in the face of a world that itself changes. Although it claims the mantle of conservatism, it is fundamentally unconservative in the sense Burke was described as conservative. Instead, it is Luddite.
This is the monster Limbaugh and Fox have made. Limbaugh actually believes himself. Ailes - well, he's more crafty in my view.
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