Today's Must-Read: Alabama Edition

Digby, on the whys and wherefores of the Alabama GOP senate primary:

There have been many postmortems about the Alabama Senate primary runoff last Tuesday, mostly focusing on what its result tells us about Donald Trump and whether it affects Mitch McConnell's future. These are good questions, since the candidate endorsed by Trump and McConnell lost to a deranged theocrat considered to be so extreme that even the National Rifle Association dropped nearly a million dollars' worth of ads to try to defeat him. How can it be that a man who was opposed by just about everyone in the Republican Party won the Republican nomination in the most Republican state in the country?

She goes on to look at a fundamental misreading of the temper of the GOP's "big tent." It's not pretty, but there is hope -- or a disaster in the making:

The GOP stuck together to vote for Donald Trump despite the misgivings of many more mainstream Republican voters. They are party loyalists and simply couldn't imagine themselves voting for a Democrat, especially not the hated Hillary Clinton. Those voters aren't the ones who will get fed up and leave. It's far more likely that if the party finally splits it will be the people who want to vote for "the craziest son of a bitch in the race" who will go their own way. That's not how Steve Bannon originally envisioned blowing up the establishment, but it could achieve his goal anyway.

I think there's another element that Digby doesn't touch on: this is Alabama, which gave us, among other things, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III: we're talking about hard-core racists, misogynists and homophobes who voted for the nutjob who best reflects their values.

Such as they are.