Excellent and descriptive essay on the State of the Union …
How the Republican Party Became a Haven of Resentment and Rage | The Conversation | by Randall Stephens
Today, communists are no longer hiding under every rock or bed, but Republicans, masters of the paranoid style, have plenty of targets to fit the pattern: journalists, Mexican immigrants, climate scientists, unions, academics, treacherous politicians, or gun control advocates.
White politicians and activists are driving a great deal of the political conversation, to the joy of voters who feel beset by forces out of their control. The language of embattlement runs through these circles like a raging river.
…
The modern right’s ideological alchemy has already turned Kim Davis into a latter-day Rosa Parks, the founding fathers into born-again evangelicals, climate science into a hoax, and Reagan’s outlandish and discredited “voodoo economics” into the only way America can get back on track.On the latter point, incidentally, the right’s partisans might pay heed to how slash-and-burn tax cuts have worked out in my home state of Kansas. As of April, the Republican governor Sam Brownback’s land of Oz needed $400m to close the deficit.
Since July, pundits have been variously marvelling and panicking at the surprising rise and continued rise of Donald Trump – but really, it makes perfect sense. The party that cultivated the politics of outrage and bolstered stubborn anti-intellectualism is racing to the bottom of a bottomless pit.
The frontrunner (for now) is a Frankentrump of the GOP’s own creation. He is the embodiment of decades of anger, antipathy, and anti-establishment hostility.
Unfortunately for the Nation, Tricky Dick Nixon made a come-back for a murderous Christmas bombardment on Hanoi in December 1972 until he lost it due to the break-in at the Democrats’ headquarters in Washington DC by his CIA henchmen or ‘plumbers.’ The threat of impeachment forced him to leave office in August 1974 and left a stain on the Office of President of the USA.
The coming presidential election is going to turn on only one point, in my estimation.
No matter which surviving Republican runs or which Democrat, the overall very badly informed voting public will vote on the relative likelihood that what they consider to be “correct” is what the person for whom they are going to vote will try to do.
It’s going to be a moral referendum.
Watch.
RatPub types think that most non-European immigrants, most people espousing other religions than their own and most people of races other than their own tend towards a form of “immorality.” That’s what the Rats are running on. It’s a grand U.S. tradition.
The DemRats? A little more evolved socially, they believe that a Dem president will “fix things” by…by what is the real question. Opposed at every turn by both the legislature and the Supreme Court, no president…even one who actually means to try to do things…is going to get very far.
Of course…the “winner”…the one who best convinces the Permanent Government that he or she threatens its hegemony the least…will most likely not do anything to upset the PermaGov applecart. All show, no go. You know…like Obama? Or Bill Clinton? Or Bush I? (Bush II and Jimmy Carter were PermaGov mistakes. Carter was too honest, Bush II too stupid.)
The Permanent Government is reaching a stage where it may well have to be renamed.
The Terminant Government.
Watch.
AG
P.S. I can’t bear to watch the late night comedy shows. I looked into both Fallon and Colbert on their opening nights and a couple of times thereafter. Life is funnier than are they even when it’s serious. It has better bands, too. But I read today that Colbert had D.Trump on last night. Somewhere in his hustle he said something along the lines of “At least I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren that I interviewed America’s last president.”
Like dat.
If D.Trump wins…just like dat.
Watch.