With a big assist today from The Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts, Jr., we continue to fill the void left by HuffPo's refusal to cover the campaign of Republican front-runner Donald "Rump" Trump (except in its Entertainment section). You're welcome! Here's Pitts on why Rump appeals to so many in his party, and what that ultimately tells us:
Trump is No. 1?
Sure. Why not? Didn’t he promise to build that wall and make Mexico pay for it? There you go, right? Immigration solved, right?
Well...no. But the very fact that so many of us apparently think so provides a vivid illustration of the anti-intellectualism and deep-fried yahoo-ism now holding the Republican Party hostage.
Somehow, the party of Teddy Roosevelt, Gerald Ford and Bush the elder has become the party of secession talk, revolution talk and vigilantes harassing children on the Southern border, the party of the “war on whites,” “the war on Christmas,” tea parties and birthers, the party of anti-science, anti-history and fear that the U.S. military is, right this moment, preparing for the invasion of Texas. In a word, the party of crazy.
Small wonder it is also the party of Trump.
Yes, cooler heads will soon prevail, and some establishment candidate will carry the banner into battle. But don’t let that tempt you into being sanguine about this insane moment when the leader of the Republican field is a two-legged id with an incontinent mouth.
We should take no solace in the fact that Trump will eventually fall from his lofty perch. Rather, we should wonder what it says about the GOP that he was up there in the first place. (our emphasis)A brief anecdote could serve to illustrate "The Problem." As we noted below, there was a rally in Columbia, SC, of "Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan" members who were demonstrating against the removal of the Confederate treason flag from the South Carolina state capitol grounds. The leader of that group of simian/ human hybrids is one Roy Pemberton, who was asked for whom he would vote in the 2016 election, if the choice were a certain match-up:
Pemberton’s world is one of hate, cloaked, at least at times, in a veneer of righteous struggle. He said he would vote for Ben Carson, the African American Republican candidate for president, over Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton. He said he hates black people as a race, but not individually.So, whether or not Rump is in the race, or is the front-runner, is really irrelevant; "The Problem" is the audience that finds what he and the other far-right cranks in the race says so appealing. It's called "The Republican Base," also now undeniably revealed as "The Party of Crazy." It's who you are, Republicans; own it.
BONUS: See also Digby and Andrew O'Hehir.
