Some things are based on faith because that’s their nature. You know, I have no evidence that I won’t die of a heart attack or be crushed by a meteorite before I can finish this article, but I’m going to try to write it anyway. I have to believe I’ll survive the next ten minutes or I can’t really function. Likewise, Dana Milbank has to believe that America’s right-wing electorate is good and virtuous and they’re just fibbing us about all those opinions they have about Trump and science and blacks and alligator-filled moats and pollution and math and torture and turning the Middle East into a radioactive sheet of glass.
Milbank goes so far as to use Mitt Romney as his case in point. After all, if the right had been serious about that ObamaCare derangement, they would have nominated Herman Cain, amirite?
Oh yes, Dana, you are so right. In their eminent wisdom and decency, the American right nominates the reasonable and responsible candidate every.single.time. They may flirt with Steve Forbes but they can be relied upon to go with the son of a president in the end. They may say they love the military, but they’ll take the AWOL guy over the POW guy. If they seem to be temporarily taken in by the psychotic stylings of Michele Bachmann or the toxic Abramoff-Man-On-Dog mix of Rick Santorum, they’ll settle in on a real upright truth-teller like Mitt Romney.
Look, if your choice is Poppy Bush or Pat Buchanan, you’re already screwed, but we can probably agree that only one of them was prepared to deal with the collapse of the Soviet Union. If you’re offering me Phil Gramm or Bob Dole, well, I guess you have no intention of actually winning the presidency but I’m okay with picking Dole.
But the real issue is whether it’s actually true that the right in this country has been acting responsibly and can be relied on to act responsibly now. I’m not sure they’ve actually been given the option of acting responsibly, if you want me to be truthful about it. The best they have on offer is the former guest host of The O’Reilly Factor who also happens to be the two-term governor of Ohio. I’ve been predicting that John Kasich will emerge as the real “responsible” candidate for the simple reason that Jeb! Bush obviously can’t hack campaigning while dodging all the monkey poop being flung his way.
I shouldn’t have to dig into the Pentagon-sized closet full of Marco Rubio skeletons to convince you that this charlatan isn’t the modern day Poppy Bush or Bob Dole. Those guys were World War Two veterans with a decent grasp of basic reality, not the kind of fools to deny climate science while representing Atlantis in the U.S. Senate.
Carly Fiorina is some combination of Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes, with less business sense.
Ben Carson is some combination of Alan Keyes and Tom Coburn, with better scalpel sense.
Rick Perry was under felony indictment and Chris Christie should be under felony indictment.
There’s no need to go down the whole list because we know how Milbank feels about Ted Cruz. Whether we’re talking about Jeb!’s anchor babies and blacks who want free stuff, Carson’s unconstitutional Muslims, or Trump’s drug-dealing Latino rapists, I’m not seeing anything decent or responsible about any of these candidates. Again, the guy who comes closest to what might approximate decency is Kasich, and he’ll either catch on or he’ll go out like his name is Jon Huntsman Jr.
But we were talking about American Republicans, not their would-be representatives.
What are these folks currently obsessed about?
A sample: Repealing health access for more than 10 million Americans, scuttling a nuclear deal with Iran that they don’t understand, banning funding for Planned Parenthood based on doctored videos and false allegations, some county administrator in Kentucky who can’t stay married herself and doesn’t want to issue marriage licenses for anyone else, forcibly deporting Latinos by the millions, denying climate science or that there’s really water on Mars, shutting down the government, defaulting on our debts, closing an export bank that they don’t understand, and opportunistically outlawing the filibuster.
But, in the end, they’re going to do the right thing and get over their flirtation with “outsiders” like Carson and Trump and get with the program.
And everything will be okay.
Republican primary voters may be angry at the political establishment, but they are not irrational: They don’t wish to nominate a sure loser. And Trump is that. Americans, in a general election, will never choose a candidate who expresses the bigotry and misogyny that Trump has, regardless of his attributes. (Similarly, liberals love Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary race, but ultimately Democrats won’t choose Sanders, because, regardless of their personal preferences, they know a socialist won’t be elected president.)
Which one of the eleventy billion candidates isn’t a “sure loser”?
Look, they might nominate Bush or Kasich or Rubio. And they might not. But they’re completely irrational. The Conservative Movement is an irrational movement. If it wasn’t they’d never have nominated the guy who invented ObamaCare to beat the guy who made it a national law. And they’d never have been okay with Romney’s unprecedented problem with the truth if the truth meant anything to them.
Milbank says he’ll eat his column if Trump is the nominee. That’ll be fun to watch, I guess, but I don’t see how it matters, really. What difference does it make who wins this nomination? Hasn’t Milbank seen enough to know that the right has gone past the point of no return?
