The Republican Party's Implosion Has Been a Long Time Coming. Today Is the Day.
The Republican Party's Implosion Has Been a Long Time Coming. Today Is the Day.
I love the smell of reckoning in the morning.
By Charles P. Pierce
Mar 1, 2016
The old Whig party had become much degenerated from its original purity and tone; and, at the first clang of the bugle of the pretentious disorganizer, the mass of its adherents broke the ranks for new banners. —Robert McKinley Ormsby, "A History Of The Whig Party," 1860.
CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE—The Republican Party was born of panic. It was a child of the regular economic panics that afflicted the American economy. It was a child of the blind panic produced by the general perception that the country was reeling toward destruction. It was a child of the panic afflicting the Whigs, who had been for decades the other party in a two-party system, but which disintegrated almost overnight in the aftermath of the presidential election of 1850, left in smithereens by the acceleration with which the country was hurtling toward disunion. The Republican Party was born of panic, and the Whig Party died of panic. And, somewhere in what admittedly must be a very boring corner of Valhalla, the old Whigs must be chortling at the panic now afflicting the Republican Party, which has fallen for the most pretentious disorganizer of them all. What goes around comes around, even if it takes 156 years to do so. Somebody pour old Zach Taylor another flagon of mead.
On Tuesday night, Donald J. Trump is odds-on to win at least seven of the 11 contested Republican presidential primaries. If he does so, he is better than odds-on to be the Republican presidential nominee. The facts are as stark as the slopes of Lookout Mountain in the early morning light. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished, especially by those of us who see the Republicans as having been cruising for this particular bruising ever since it so greedily ate the monkeybrains in the 1980s. But, from the people who make their living at being Republicans, we are seeing the kind of existential panic that you only see once or twice in a century. It's Watership Down, with Super PACs and Mitch McConnell.
Almost daily now, we are seeing increasingly fantastical notions being floated by practically everyone with an increasingly meaningless title. McConnell lets it be known that the party's congressional candidates will drop He, Trump "like a hot rock" in the fall. Someone else is counting on a "brokered convention," or even changing the rules to free up the delegates won through the entire process, as though that would be anything but a sprawling knife-fight to which the most peaceable solution would be the creation of third, fourth, and fifth-party candidacies. Still other people speak dreamily of saviors—Paul Ryan, who would preside over the convention, or even Willard Romney, who keeps sniping at He, Trump on Twitter while He, Trump snaps back (correctly) that Romney is a two-time loser whom nobody really likes.
Make no mistake. All of these scenarios are profoundly corrupt and profoundly anti-democratic. He, Trump played by the rules established by the largely vestigial Republican establishment. He won in caucus states (Nevada), and he won in primary states (South Carolina, New Hampshire). He stands poised to win states on Tuesday night from Massachusetts to Alabama. There has been no hint of scandal in any of his victories. It is delusional to pretend that he is not the overwhelming choice of the people who are voting Republican in the year of Our Lord 2016. And it is intellectually dishonest to try to concoct strategies to deny the consensus choice of your party a nomination fairly won just because the consensus choice of your party is a vulgar talking yam. If your party happens to have concocted a constituency with a sweet tooth for authoritarian nonsense, then trying (again) to push that reckoning down the road is to guarantee something even worse comes along next time.
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http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a42569/super-tuesday/
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Love me some Charlie Pierce 
Repubbies skankily trying to avoid responsibility for the Scuzzball they have spawned. Republics are totally the Party of Irresponsibility.
