Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Sunday, August 30, 2015

The Crazy Month

So, the Donald continues to ride high in the polls, defying gravity.  I personally thought he would come crashing down in October, so I'm temporarily not wrong.  My reasoning is that August has proved to be the month of crazy.  The month of anger.  It was the month the Tea Party swarmed town halls over the audacity of that Kenyan in the White House daring to help people buy health insurance.  It was the month of Ferguson, too.  And Katrina.

August is the month reason goes on holiday.

Still, there is certainly enough evidence that Trump is here to stay.  It remains to be seen how he will fare once the third tier candidates start to drop out.  Jeb! is looking like Rudy! before him, so the presumptive favorite looks very weak, with staff resignations and lackluster polling. Walker is a freaking imbecile and Ben Carson is simply a more reasonable Trump.  Both Carson and Trump represent the way the GOP electorate feels about their "political class."  Not surprisingly, a party who is ideologically committed to hating government turns out to hate politicians.

Trump feels almost like a sociology experiment.  The moneyed interests who run the GOP have been stoking the base for 30 years with talk of abortion and "special rights" for minorities and the dangers of having a government do anything.  This has gotten their voters to the polls, so that they can do what they really want to do: cut taxes on the wealthy.

But now, the great mass of GOP voters seems to have clued in to the fact that abortion is still legal and Obamacare isn't going away and the gays are still getting married and Mitch McConnell really isn't interested in shutting down the government and defaulting on the debt in order to shut down Planned Parenthood.

The result is that the two frontrunners are a real estate developer and a neurosurgeon.  Two men so temperamentally unsuited to be president it would be funny if it weren't frightening.  I don't know if there is a White Knight who can swoop in and save the GOP from its own voting base.

And I really don't care.

This is their monster.  They made it.  Let them dance with it.

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