"Joy and pleasure are as real as pain and sorrow and one must learn what they have to teach. . . ." -- Sean Russell, from Gatherer of Clouds

"If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right." -- Helyn D. Goldenberg

"I love you and I'm not afraid." -- Evanescence, "My Last Breath"

“If I hear ‘not allowed’ much oftener,” said Sam, “I’m going to get angry.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, from Lord of the Rings

Sunday, October 09, 2016

Republicans Built This

Digby points out that the real danger in Trump's bid for the presidency is not Trump himself, but his supporters:

I'm sorry, but I think people are missing the point. Trump is Trump and saying that he can get away with grabbing women's crotches because he's a star is not really different from him saying "I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and wouldn't lose any voters." He has used blatantly racist, sexist, xenophobic, violent psychopathic language since the first day of his campaign.

This "political incorrectness" is what his followers like about him.

People like this are not going to quietly acquiesce to the idea that Trump was forced to quit the race over saying the word pussy and docilely vote for Mike Pence instead[.]

She has illustrations of some of the hard-core trumpanzees. Click through to view.

And in the post immediately following, she quotes this story from Kurt Eichenwald, who has written extensively about Trump's business dealings and their possible impact on our national security should, gods forbid, he be elected:

Shortly after I wrote an article for Newsweek about how Donald Trump’s business interests could undermine national security should he be elected president, one of his supporters assaulted me. He used the internet to do it.

Read the whole thing -- it's not that easy to excerpt without losing important details. And it's scary. There's not much that frightens me. This does.

The Republicans are madly trying to cover their asses on this, but let's face it: this phenomenon is their creation. Digby goes back to the Tea Party, but the origins are much earlier than that: think about the Moral Majority's rise in the '70s and the way that Reagan and the GOP figured to use them to create a "permanent majority," which only led to the increasing dominance of the "religious" right on the party's policy positions, to the extent that the likes of Tony Perkins drafted portions of the Republican platform. (And note how, after the revelations of the "Pussy Tapes," the "Christian" leaders are standing firm in support of this disaster. Click through to read their comments, which are simply jaw-dropping. And then read the Twitter responses -- Perkins and Company aren't fooling everyone.)

So, the GOP has spent two generations creating this monster and, as monsters tend to do, it's gotten out of control. It's beyond hope that this point that the Republican party is going to come to its senses -- they've become too focused on winning at any cost, and for what? They want to rule, not govern, that's been made plain over the past eight years.

And in the meantime, they've made themselves into the party that stands squarely against everything America means.



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