Here is a stark reality for both Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders voters: Should your candidate win the presidency, he will disappoint you. Both candidates have whipped up voter passions by offering ideologically comforting — and strikingly similar — narratives promising political revolution. Both would fail to achieve such a momentous national transformation because popular opinion and the country’s system of checks and balances would get in the way. (See the Obama presidency.)

See the Obama presidency. Yeah, no shit. <Mumble, Mumble> Naïve freaking dopey ‘Bama supporters.

But another reason is that they have the “credibility” that comes from spending years angering “establishment” politicians — that is, people who have been sullied by having to govern in the real world of constraints and tradeoffs. Years of screaming from the fringes, refusing to deviate from a simplistic message as others ran the country, have given both men a massive political asset in 2016 — “authenticity” — and that quality alone is attracting people, particularly those who suspect that elite corruption or conspiracy is responsible for the country’s problems.

Sanders’s program recognize that it is not just politically impossible — it proposes a massive economic transition based on excessively optimistic budgetary assumptions. Cruz’s plan to carpet bomb Syria, meanwhile, does not even require close inspection to conclude it is shallow. These are among the indications that they would not bring good instincts to the real, harder decision-making that comes with the Oval Office — even if you agree with moving in the general direction one of them wants to go.

Authentically believing that the whole country secretly agrees with your agenda and will join you on the barricades is not a virtue, it is a fantasy. Sincerely proposing poorly thought-out policy does not change the fact that it is poorly thought-out policy.

Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders are authentically wrong – The Washington Post

A-fucking-men, WaPo, a-fucking-men.

We know it is people partial to authoritarianism that like Trump. I’m so curious about the psychological traits that makes people such suckers for impossible pie-in-the-sky ill-advised bullshit….