Quote:President Obama Just Showed Us How to Fix the Republican Party
You can't let them disown Trump.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
OCT 14, 2016
On Thursday evening, President No More Fcks To Give stopped by Columbus, Ohio to deliver a speech that, frankly, I've been waiting for someone to give ever since Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for president.
There were no words minced and no quarter given. By the time he left the stage, there was no ass he aimed for that went unkicked. Every clock was thoroughly cleaned.
You really have to watch the whole video to get the full flavor, even though that entails sitting through paeans to the political genius of poor Ted Strickland, who thus far has failed to catch the wave in this election.
But The Washington Post has a really good account of the high points. To wit:
"But so the problem is not that all Republicans think the way this guy does. The problem is, is that they've been riding this tiger for a long time…They've been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years, primarily for political expedience...People like Ted's opponent, they just stood by while this happened...
And Donald Trump, as he's prone to do, he didn't build the building himself, but he just slapped his name on it and took credit for it. This is in the swamp of crazy that has been fed over and over and over and over again.
So the point is, if your only agenda is either negative — negative is a euphemism, crazy — based on lies, based on hoaxes, this is the nominee you get. You make him possible.
This, as the kidz say. This, a thousand times.
The president ran down all the symptoms of the prion disease that has been afflicting the Republican Party—and the conservative movement that is its life force—ever since the party ate all the monkeybrains in 1980.
The candidates. The advisers. The talk-radio goons and the direct-mail charlatans. The slogans that pass for policies and the policies that make no sense to anyone who actually lives an actual life in the actual United States of America in the actual year of 2016. And the idiots in The Base who swallow it all whole until they can't express their economic insecurity in any other way except with a TRUMP THAT BITCH T-shirt.
The president presented an obvious and undeniable diagnosis. He framed El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago as not an aberration of the conservative mind, but as its inevitable culmination.
This should be a theme in every address given by every Democratic politician from now until Inauguration Day. Should Hillary Rodham Clinton win the presidency, and should the Democrats make substantial gains in the national legislature, there is going to be a strong and concerted effort to make her offer some gesture of "healing" to the crazy people after such a "divisive" campaign.
(And, in truth, she impresses me as being distressingly vulnerable to said appeal.
I could be wrong there.) That effort should be resisted as vigorously as the president called out his opponents on Thursday.
Not until you clean up your own house, boyos. Not until the elements that produced your 2016 presidential nominee have no more purchase in your party. Not until the ideas that have animated eight years of vandalism and obstruction and ideologically based goldbricking are crushed underfoot.
You have become a chronic danger to American democratic government and it's time for a serious intervention.
Hell, the Democratic Party had the campaign of George McGovern, as good and decent a man as has ever served in Washington, hung around its neck for 25 years by conservative lightweights and ratfckers who couldn't carry McGovern's shoes.
Given that, the GOP should have to answer for nominating Trump until time shall be no more. That's what the president was all about in Columbus on Thursday.
And there is no time to lose. Already, the effort to distance itself from its own monstrous creation is beginning on the American Right.
They're fleeing across the ice floes the way Victor Frankenstein fled from the creature. For some reason known only to God, The New York Times handed over some op-ed real estate to Erick Erickson on Friday, and this was what we got.
Most Trump supporters believe their communities are under assault, and many feel too powerless and isolated to do anything about it. People need to feel more in control of their destiny, and that happens only when we ensure that their local governments shape their lives the most, not nine black-robed masters or a dysfunctional Congress in Washington.
That's why Republicans should empower individuals by making school choice a priority. Education must be treated as a civil right, and parents should be allowed to pick where their children go to school. Education dollars should then be allowed to follow those students to those schools. The Republican Party must be the party of religious liberty. When beliefs clash, people and government need to accommodate those differences. To force people of faith to adhere to secular standards is as much an imposition of a religious viewpoint as forcing secular people to adhere to the standards of a religion.
The party must also get government out of the marketplace, except to ensure a level playing field and protect against fraud. It must support innovation and creative disruption, lower taxes and reduce regulation. And it must find ways to help people transition out of our archaic social welfare programs by assisting them in establishing individual savings accounts that could pay for health care and college educations.
Lastly, Republicans should establish themselves as the party of heterogeneity, opposed to one-size-fits-all morality. Different communities should have the freedom to be different in the public square. To do that, the party must reduce the one-size-fits-all government in Washington and empower those laboratories of democracy: state and local government.
So that's the solution to the problem of how a major political party could get so drunk on states rights and Bible-banging that it became an easy mark for a guy who was able to energize states rights and Bible-banging with a 100-proof soupçon of mindless nativist rage: more states rights and Bible-banging. No, thanks.
And then there's Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin who, on Friday, as ABC News tells us, followed through on his threat to get up in public and think Big Thoughts again.
"The left does not just seek a continuation of the last eight years," the Wisconsin Republican says in remarks he plans to deliver Friday. "They do not just seek to further the liberal progressive experiment. They intend to make it into a reality — an arrogant, condescending and paternalistic reality… "You see, when Hillary Clinton says we are 'stronger together,' what she means is we are stronger if we are all subject to the state," Ryan said.
"What she means is we are stronger if we give up our ties of responsibility to one another and hand all of that over to government. But there is no strength in that. Only hubris. Only the arrogance to assume we are better off if we fall in line and bow down to our betters."
(The account is silent on whether or not Ryan was sipping a fine $350 bottle of Pinot Noir while composing his remarks about the perfidy of "the elites."
So that's the solution to the problem of how a major political party could get so drunk on voodoo economics, phony populism, and elaborate charades designed to shove the nation's wealth upwards that it became an easy mark for a vulgar talking yam who was able to energize voodoo economics, phony populism, and elaborate charades designed to shove the nation's wealth upwards with an injection of crazoid whote nationalism: more voodoo economics, phony populism, and elaborate charades designed to shove the nation's wealth upwards suggested by a guy who's been on the government dime for one way or another since he was in high school.
Again, no, thanks.
It is plain now that the Republican Party, and the conservative movement that is its life force, is not going to reform itself from within. Too many people are making too much money off the old model that was hijacked by Donald Trump to give it up once the maniac's hands are pried off the wheel. On Thursday, President No More Fcks To Give pointed the way.
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