The GOP Gets What it Deserves With Trump

It was the late 1990s, and the Gingrich "revolution" had crashed and burned. Bill Clinton had been re-elected, the economy was booming, the budget was balanced, and the impeachment proceedings regarding the Monica Lewinsky scandal had failed. Faced with running against President Clinton's record, the GOP turned to Texas Governor George W. Bush, a folksy village-idiot type on the outside, but a man who had turned Texas from blue to red in one-and-a-half terms. Bush managed to win the election saying things like "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully," and it got no better from there. Bush would win two terms as President on a platform of "gay-baiting," denying science in both the cases of climate change and stem-cell research, protecting "guns on demand," hyper-nationalism and war-mongering, and giving big business their way, all the while. If the Bush-Cheney years had been the low point of the Republican Party's existence, that would have been terrible. The Iraq War is one of the great atrocities of our time, and they left in the midst of a full-throttle economic crash. I won't even get into their record of taking the Clinton surpluses and turning them into the deep debt we suffered from for years after they left. They were no shining moment in our history.

Unfortunately, the GOP since then has become a complete embarrassment to our country. You cannot start the story at Donald Trump, or even at Sarah Palin, because Bush's brand of anti-intellectualism really did set the stage for this behavior. You can't get to someone as utterly incompetent and unprepared as Sarah Palin without first having the "aw shucks" Presidency of Dubbya. What's happened since then is sad, pathetic, and beneath the party that has been the past home of Bob Dole, Jack Kemp, George H.W. Bush, Dwight Eisenhower, and all the way back to Abraham Lincoln. What they've become does no service to a great nation today.

The supposed elders of the GOP are responsible for Trump's rise. John McCain did many great things for America in his life, but he thrusted a complete incompetent on this country when he selected Sarah Palin as his running-mate. Former Speaker John Boehner and current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sat by silently as Donald Trump stoked the "birther" movement during President Obama's first term, and now act perplexed at how he became their standard-bearer. Speaker Paul Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy recruited and fund-raised for the Tea Party class of 2010 when they ran for Congress, and then wonder why that group shuts down even basic action in that body, and follows the lead of Ted Cruz. The leadership of the Republican Party was simply so afraid after President Obama's "movement" steamrolled them in the 2008 election that they got in bed with the angry, the stupid, and the freakish elements of their political party to preserve relevance and power. It is actually fairly ironic and satisfying to see that past Tea Party darlings like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio just aren't able to give extreme enough rhetoric to the Trump crowd now. It tells us all so much about where the Grand Ole' Party is going.

By the way, while I'm on it, I can't state enough times that Rubio and Cruz should not be treated as some sort of upgrade on the insanity that is Donald Trump. Sure, they don't have actual Ku Klux Klanmen at their rallies, that we know of, but there is not much policy difference with Donald Trump, except for the few issues where he is to their left. In any normal election, we would be referring to these men as absolute extremists. Cruz is amongst the most evil of political actors I've seen in many years in Washington, once accusing Vietnam Veteran and former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of being corrupted by foreign governments during his confirmation hearings as Defense Secretary. Marco Rubio is an incapable man, one who I could say many bad things about, but also one who has been completely bought and sold by donors.  The evil one and the stupid one are terrible in their own right, and are creations of the runaway Republican movement, but we are relegating them to back-burner status because we have a guy actually getting endorsed by white supremacists. These guys are actually worse on policy issues, believe it or not, but they are a little less openly offensive than a white-nationalist campaign, so we are treating them like they are the good guys here.

Let's be perfectly clear here- i'm glad that an increasing number of Republicans are joining with what Democrats have largely been saying about Donald Trump for a while now- this man is unacceptable. We cannot elect a President who's brand of xenophobia is attracting the true bottom or the barrel of American society, actual white supremacists. We cannot elect a President who scapegoats whole religions, calls for us to erect walls with our neighbors, spews sexism, and calls Mexicans "rapists and drug dealers." Donald Trump is offensive and wrong on just about every level. I do not want this man to ever be my President, not even for a day.

In the end, Republicans have to come to grips with a reality- they created Donald Trump. They didn't shut down the birthers, those who accused the President of being a Muslim, the talk of "taking our country back," or those who espoused crazy conspiracy theories about the President being a power-hungry dictator. It was not enough to say they disagreed with President Obama, they had to take it to the next level to energize this breed of person. Once you energize them, it's hard to stuff them back in the box. Both parties have to deal with the consequences of their rhetoric, and Republicans have to face the fact that the anger they stoked for years created this mess. Telling people an ignoramus like Sarah Palin is qualified for the Vice-Presidency, then turning her loose with all of her vitriol on American politics is bound to only lead to an even crazier byproduct. We got that in a Congress that won't do basic things now, and want to investigate all kinds of crazy conspiracies. That ultimately lead us to this. The Republican Party told their voters it was okay to be ignorant, it was okay to be angry, and it was even okay to lash out. Well, here we are. I hope you like it.