3769

He can’t help being dumb.

3770


3771

Please stop, you’re getting me hot and bothered

3772

Good piece linked here.

3773

Yeah, Trump has shown the GOP for what it is. A bunch of craven cowards with absolutely no principles or morality.

3774

And apparently, a significant chunk of Americans see that and think “Yeah, I want some of that!”

3775

Well, you got the bonus racism, and that’s super attractive to racists.

3776

They are just saying the quiet part loud now. For the vast majority of their voters the messaging and appeal was always this, just more subtle. “Fiscal responsibility” always meant “don’t give money to minorities”, “family values” always meant “gay bashing and keeping women in their place”. People who actually thought these things were valuable on the face of them were few and far between.

3777

Very much this.

3778

That’s because no one needed Trump to reveal what the GOP were. You could see this coming miles away, but Trump just made it harder to ignore, for those who had been ignoring it.

3779

Maybe, but we have evidence that there’s several of them on just this forum. And thank god for that, I would be incredibly sad to have seen Timex, Strollen, Scuzz, etc. go the way of Malathor.

3780

They can speak for themselves about how they viewed those things at the time, but I just wanted to clarify that there were other reasons one might have supported the GOP in the old days. Most of those were based on fraudulent or self-serving theories propounded by people who may or may not have been acting in good faith (but likely weren’t), but at least they were theories with reasonable explanations and non-racist / non-horrible goals. So, it’s possible that they saw the dogwhistles for what they were and still supported the party because it seemed the lesser of two evils… until it didn’t.

3781

The thing is, a lot of the fairly big names in conservative media, are never trumpers… Those are folks who said they wouldn’t go along with this. So i think it’s somewhat simplistic to think that Trump is just saying the quiet part loud.

I think, at least for me, that it was more about choosing (albeit subconsciously) to not see things for what they were, because there were legitimate grievances with what the Democrats did, and because there were conservative principles that actually had merit.

But with Trump, it highlighted that the GOP didn’t actually believe in any of those principles. And they actually did things that they once criticized the Democrats for.

3782

Which is why this group can be brought back, either in existing parties or maybe some other party they form later. I don’t know. If they were privileged enough to ignore the ugly in the past but see it now, then there is hope. There is more hope if they can admit how far back the rot really goes but hey if they can recognize the stench now, that’s at least something.

The rest of them are garbage people. They either delight in the carnage or just don’t care enough about other people more than their tax brackets. Those people are a lost cause.

3783

Careful, Lost Cause is a banner some of them have been waving proudly for 150 years!

3784

Jeopardizing national security to own the Libs.

3785

Hey guys, I know that there’s all these questions about my involvement with foreign entities, but I really think it would be best if we removed the thing that watches over people who crime with foreign entities.

No, it’s not related! Geez!

3786

Applause emoji. It’s really hard for me to understand how someone could have lived through Newt Gingrich and the Bush presidency and Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and etc and have not seen it, or at the very least can’t see it now in retrospect.

3787

Indeed, before Trump there was McConnell and his pledge to obstruct everything to make Obama a one-term President. Before that there was Bush, who lied us into a war, ordered kidnapping and torture and tried to cover it up. Before that there was Gingrich and Graham and Starr and 5 years of ‘investigations’ into a failed real-estate deal and ultimately setting a perjury trap for Clinton. Before that there was Bush the Elder, who helped cover up the Iran-Contra affair by pardoning all the perpetrators. Before that there was Reagan, who perpetrated the illegal Iran-Contra scheme and tried to cover it up. Before that there was Ford, who pardoned Nixon for his crimes. Before that there was Nixon himself, who secretly bombed Cambodia and killed millions in North Vietnam with saturation bombing, and who engaged in a whole series of crimes designed to win re-election, and then covered them up.

That anyone had to wait for Trump to grasp the nature of Republican conservatism is amazing; it would take some force of will to be so obtuse.

3788

Most of them are saying to burn the GOP to the ground, salt the earth and then fire said earth into the sun. So they’d agree with you I think.

They’d also agree with this.