Grand Old Party: From Party of Lincoln to Party of Crackpots – how truly sad

I used to think that the one-time Party of Lincoln was more interested in wishing it could be the Party of Reagan.

TRUMP: Did anybody watch his pageant?

Although I’m now wondering if the Republican Party has its desires to become the Party of Extremists who can only “fit into” society by marginalizing all the normal people.

HOW ELSE TO explain the fact that real estate mogul Donald Trump has polls showing his presidential fantasies being taken seriously by those people inclined to cast ballots in Republican primaries.

Or the fact that presidential dreamer Rick Santorum (a former senator from Pennsylvania) is taking up his own issue – gay marriage. He wants it written into the Constitution that gay couples have no business thinking of marriage as something that applies to them.

He’s sure there are enough people still peeved about the Supreme Court of the United States striking down efforts by the states to ban gay marriage that they will unite behind his would-be presidential campaign.

Of course, it would mean that everybody in society not interested in voting in the Republican primary would be united against him. But what does he care; the basic principle of ideologues is that everybody who doesn’t think like themselves is irrelevant and to be disregarded.

THAT’S DEFINITELY THE strategy of Trump, who got the people worked up with his nonsense talk of Mexico (he wants the nativist and xenophobe vote) and now is claiming he’s owed an apology by his detractors – on account of the fact that the drug boss who was imprisoned in Mexico managed to escape.

Does he think those two morons who escaped from an upstate New York prison last month somehow allow him to score political points against some other group? Or is it just as irrelevant a point as anything related to Joaquin Guzman.

SANTORUM: Looking for his political niche

Or is all of this just more cheap political rhetoric of the sort that IS the inherent problem with our political system these days?

Although I don’t take Trump’s poll lead at all seriously.

FOR ONE THING, it is early in the process. There also are so many candidates in that Republican primary.

Which is why a 15 percent support total (which is all Trump can claim) is enough for him to be “the leader” at this point in time. It’s also possible that those people in the 15 percent are the only ones who will ever support the idea of a president who probably thinks he can remodel the White House and rename it “Trump Mansion.”

 

GUZMAN: Nobody owes Trump an apology

They’re also probably the people who actually bothered to watch the Miss USA pageant Sunday night; living in their own world and pretending that Trump didn’t say anything out of the ordinary.

As though the fact that the pageant wasn’t on a national network and had to settle for being viewed on an obscure cable TV channel wasn’t evidence enough – some people are just way too eager to live in their own world and think the rest of us have to live there subordinate to them.

NOT THAT THE GOP is alone in playing its political games with these issues. My e-mail inbox has been getting flooded with its share of messages such as, “Trump’s ridiculous, offensive ideas (and the Republicans who agree with them”).

The real point of those messages is to encourage us to donate money to the Democratic National Committee, or other allied groups, to bolster their own election efforts. After all, what good is a “President Clinton” or whomever if they run into a Congress determined to vote “no” on anything they desire?



CLINTON: The beneficiary?

Such as the kind of people who fall into the “15 percent” and would be inclined to sympathize with Trump’s business interests over the concerns of the people.

Which may be what Trump really hopes to achieve by running for office – being able to tell the president what he should do is better than having to hold the office and deal with all its inherent stresses and frustrations.

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