You Broke It, You Bought It
Dana Milbank said about the best thing I’ve read about the Donald Trump takeover of the GOP.
Republican elites are panicky about the durable dominance of Trump (and to a lesser extent Ben Carson) in the presidential race. They are right to worry, but I don’t feel much sympathy. Trump is a problem of their own creation.
Trump gets ever more base in his bigotry — and yet, with few and intermittent exceptions, rival candidates, party leaders and GOP lawmakers decline to call him out. So he continues to rise, benefiting from tacit acceptance of his intolerance.
The GOP created him and now the things they used to say only behind closed doors of the board room or on the golf course are being yelled through a bullhorn.
To my ears it sounds like a teaspoon in the garbage disposal but Republicans think it’s a sweet melody.
Seems to me even the media walks on eggshells around his lies; they were tougher on Carson than Trump. Not tough enough in either case.
1I hope the GOP pays through their long snaky elephantine trunk of a nose for having broken not just the party but a large chunk of this country. Pays and pays and pays until they are flat broke and begging in the street like those they despise.
2Pay? Um, just remember that even for them if the Don of Dons is elected things could swing sideways. But they have the resources to out-country themselves to say like, Tierra del Fuego – the Land of Fire. I always picture that place as Hell on earth.
3Own your violence, T-Rump and all the snacilbupeR gun toters. Last night five peaceful protesters at a Black Lives Matter event were shot by masked cowards from their hideout in an SUV. More gratuitous violence incited by the hate speech of irresponsible ‘Americans’ too st00pid to read or appreciate the US Constitution.
“Equal protection under the law” is quite clear. It means everyone, not just a few, not excepting anyone. It means people of all or no religions, any and all ethnic origins(s); everyone and equal.
4The GOP mainstream (which is now a backwater) won’t call him out on his lies because all the other candidates are repeating them. And our lovely lapdog poodles in the press (apology to Truman lest he visit me some moonless night) have gotten so accustomed to treating even the most ignorant lies as simply differences of opinion (“Views on shape of earth differ.”) just roll over and let the lies stand. Cow forbid that they should do anything that might harm their ratings.
5Part of me wants to say that The Donald would be the best thing to happen to Hillary in ’16. But then I thought way back when in 2000 that the best thing for the Dems would be W. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would vote for an idiot, alcoholic, cocaine addict. Particularly my very conservative career military father who I couldn’t imaging ever voting for someone who had abandoned their comission. But guess what he did. And look how that turned out. Ultimately, I would rather have intelligent, serious people on both side of the political spectrum. We might disagree, but a fool in the White House is too dangerous to contemplate.
6Unfortunately, the fools who vote for the Fool, really don’t care about the country. They are self-centered bigots who want their beliefs justified and their profit ensured. Democrats have the future of this country and the world to save. We have to shout from the rooftops, oppose the voter ID’s and gerrymandering with strength and passion.
7In one of the counties nearby here in suburban VA, there was a huge ruckus at a county planning board meeting because a mosque wanted to enlarge! The hateful ignorance on display was jaw dropping. Oh, and the enlargement would increase the size of the mosque to a whopping 8,000 sq. feet. About the size of a Wendy’s.
And in a another item, The Donald has been corralling the press at his events. They’re not allowed to move freely about the crowd. Today in the WaPo the media is not going to challenge those restrictions! Yeah!! Let’s hear it for the liberal media, folks! Freedom of the Press, be damned. The Donald is in charge!
This Thanksgiving I’m going to be grateful that I’m not a mouth-breathing, fear-mongering, gun-toting, knowledge-challenged, butt-head of a conservative.
8JAKVirginia, the sequestration of the press into fenced off sections started with W’s first campaign (maybe earlier?) because the GOP knew that their idiot candidate couldn’t string two coherent words together. I think it reached an apex with Palin who had one horrible on-air interview and then the campaigned that she would no longer be taking any questions from the press.
Unfortunately, our Fourth Estate has failed us. The fact that politicians refuse to answer questions from the press — refuse to answer questions from THE PEOPLE, should be a major story. It should be THE story. Every time they write about a candidate the first and last thing they should say is that the press has no access.
9I tried to warn people about Donald Trump but I misjudged Americans’ ability to hate. My bad.
At least someone at the NYT is aware of history.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/opinion/mr-trumps-applause-lies.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
Now, excuse me while I go light some candles in memory of the values that created this country.
10You light some candles Lorraine. I’m just gonna go and start drinking. Get a head start for Thanksgiving when I will have to deal with my Republican family.
11I hear you, Mark, and have already started to prepare.
12Actually, sequestration of the press began with Ronnie. Nobody in his campaign wanted people reading what he ACTUALLY said on the campaign trail.
13The mainstream GOP may bemoan the ascendance of Trump, Carson, et al., but I notice they aren’t willing to do anything to stop it. They continue to feed their base hate, bigotry, fear of anyone who is different, irrationality, divisiveness, distrust of government, and celebration of ignorance.
And that is what they will reap.
Just not as soon as we’d like.
14This, I’m afraid, is one of my less popular opinions, but I blame the Democrats far more than the Republicans on this. Yes, the Republicans are evil, play to racism and religious bigotry, and are ‘lucky’ that 9/11 gave them the chance to aim their anti-Semitism at a different group of Semites. Yes, they are manipulative — don’t know how Momma feels about some words, so just will say that, for many of them, their parents could meet at a party and not recognize each other. Yes, they ‘log-roll’ fools into supporting idiotic economics by promising them passage of unpassable ‘social issue’ bills — and for the establishment, bills they have no desire to see actually get passed.
So what else is new?
But over the last four elections, Democrats have never called them on it. I may be wrong — in some safe districts — but I know of no campaign ads, speeches, or flyers that attacked the racist e-mails that started in 2008 and were sent by Republican issues. I know of no candidate challenged by Democrats for appearing on radio shows or on speakers platforms with leaders of hate groups. (There are hateful radio talkers, but I am limiting this to just the most extreme, the mad preachers like Brian Fisher, the Tony Perkins types, and now we have candidates appearing at a conference led by someone who wants the Biblical punishment for gayness to be legal — and had literature saying so at the conference. And Gov. LePage of Maine is a frequent guest on a local program by ‘sovereign citizens.’)
We have been silent. We’ve ignored or brushed off the platforms that enshrine racism, Christianism that is as vile as Islamic extremism, we’ve ignored the declarations of nullification and secession that we thought were buried in century and a half old graves.
We have been silent, when the wall that once separated the ‘sewer right’ from the ‘hard right’ has come down. We have been silent as ghost paranoias from the Fifties, even from the time of Jefferson have begun walking the political earth again.
We have told blacks, Hispanics, gays, sexually active women, and now Muslims that ‘since we know you know we’re on your side and will vote for us rather than them, we don’t have to become controversial by sticking our necks out and actually fighting against your enemies — at least until we know the battle has been won — or we think it has. (Remember ‘post-racial America?’)
As for the policies of President Obama — more successful than any President since the Roosevelts, except for LBJ domestically — well, there are people and polls that say they might be unpopular — and a lot of pundits and mike jockeys saying the same thing, soo our candidates did their best, in states with the touch of red, to hide our support for them, sometimes even our votes for him (Remember Aliison Lundergan Grimes?)
Pit bulls bite — because they are dogs. It is the responsibility of adults to keep them under control. We are supposed to be adults.
15Mark J nailed it. You can’t under-misestimate the idiocy of the Republican voters. There’s nobody unqualified enough for them.
16As I has stated before,schoolkids get suspended for pointing their fingers like guns. Maybe some scaredy cat SS guy will fear for his life and hose down the Donald.
17