Trump Supporters Make Death Threats Against Delegates

Donald Trump has pandered to some of the ugliest elements in the GOP base: white supremacists, open racist, and misogynists in general.  Now, some of those same Trump supporters are reported to be making death threats against delegates who fail to support their new fuhrer.  Meanwhile, Trump is on a charm campaign seeking to calm fears of the GOP elite.  Personally, I wonder if Trump can control the hate and discord that he has deliberately cultivated.  Politico looks at the death threats. Here are excepts:

First it was an email warning Steve House, the Colorado GOP chairman, to hide his family members and “pray you make it to Cleveland.” Then there was the angry man who called his cellphone and told him to put a gun down his throat.

“He said, ‘I’ll call back in two minutes, and if you’re still there, I’ll come over and help you,’” House recalled.

Since Donald Trump came up empty in his quest for delegates at the Republican state assembly in Colorado Springs nearly two weeks ago, his angry supporters have responded to Trump’s own claims of a “rigged” nomination process by lashing out at Republican National Committee delegates that they believe won’t support Trump at the party’s convention — including House.

The mild-mannered chairman estimates he’s gotten between 4,000 and 5,000 calls on his cellphone. Many, he says, have ended with productive conversations. He’s referred the more threatening, violent calls to police. His cellphone is still buzzing this week, as he attends the RNC quarterly meetings in Florida, and he’s not the only one.

In hotel hallways and across dinner tables, many party leaders attending this week’s meetings shared similar stories. One party chairman says a Trump supporter recently got in his face and promised “bloodshed” if Trump doesn't win the GOP presidential nomination. An Indiana delegate who criticized Trump received a note warning against “traditional burial” that ended with, “We are watching you.”

[A]lthough the harassers are typically anonymous, many party leaders on the receiving end of these threats hold Trump himself at least partly responsible, viewing the intimidation efforts as a natural and obvious outgrowth of the candidate’s incendiary rhetoric.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The party chairman who said a Trump backer threatened "bloodshed" at the convention also said the man told him he would "'meet me at the barricades’ if Trump isn't the nominee.” The chairman spoke on condition of anonymity.

Trump’s campaign has never explicitly encouraged violence. But it has promoted tactics that have contributed to delegates’ fear. Earlier in April, a top Trump adviser posted online the cellphone number of Tennessee state party chairman Ryan Haynes, along with a message accusing the state party of trying to “STEAL your vote TODAY.”

Haynes told POLITICO at the time that he nearly canceled the party’s delegate selection meeting after a barrage of vitriol and the specter of violence.

The fears expressed by party leaders are bubbling up at a time Trump is facing internal pressure to rein in his confrontational inclinations too. Paul Manafort, Trump’s GOP convention chief, who is in Florida to attend the RNC meetings and assuage the concerns of the GOP establishment, has encouraged the candidate to temper his bombast.

But even if Manafort is able to nudge Trump toward a more traditional presidential bearing, the hostile energy his campaign has already whipped up among some supporters has left a trail of anger and intimidation that is likely to linger when the convention comes in July.

Paul Ryan Bursts the GOP Establishment Bubble

I loath Paul Ryan who I perceive as a child of privilege reverse Robin Hood.  To many in the GOP establishment who see a brokered convention as the sole route to save the party from the insanity that the establishment created by allowing lunatics to hijack the party base, Paul Ryan was to be the draft savior of the GOP.  Yesterday, Ryan basically said that there was no way, no how that he would accept the party presidential nomination if it were offered at the GOP convention this summer. If Ryan is being truthful - always a big if with the man, the GOP establishment will have to cast about for a different savior.  Meanwhile the anger and discord within the party continues to ferment and grow.  A column in the New York Times looks at the establishment's no-win situation.  Here are highlights:

If Paul Ryan really meant what he said, the Republican Party has lost its best chance to take the White House and maintain control of the Senate.

“Let me be clear: I do not want nor will I accept the nomination for our party,” Ryan told reporters on Tuesday afternoon at a news conference held in the Republican National Committee’s headquarters on Capitol Hill.

Even after Ryan’s declaration, there were some political figures who still consider Ryan a possible nominee. Harold Ickes, a top adviser to Priorities USA, the super PAC supporting Clinton, envisaged a scenario in which Ryan would find himself having difficulty turning down the nomination.

“He does not want to be seen as derailing any candidate. He plays ball, and I suspect this is the art of playing ball,” Ickes said:

If it gets down to a deadlocked convention, and party leaders come to him and say, “Paul, we are going to go down in flames, we are going to lose the Senate and lose ground in the House. Only you can help redeem the party,” it would be pretty hard for him to say no.

Without Ryan at the top of the ticket, the Republican Party faces the likelihood of disaster on Nov. 8, assuming that either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz is the nominee.

What makes Ryan’s statement painful to Republican leaders and a welcome relief to Democrats is that there is a consensus in both parties that Ryan is far better equipped to capitalize on Hillary Clinton’s vulnerabilities than either Trump or Cruz — both of whom have negative ratings that come close to or exceed Clinton’s.

The exceptionally hostile views of all three leading candidates gave momentum — at least until Tuesday afternoon — to speculation among Republican leaders about a Ryan nomination. They do not want to blow the opportunity of a winnable contest. That their speculation can no longer focus on Ryan does not mean that their speculation will end.

At the same time, all the talk split members of the Republican establishment into two camps: those who hoped to see Ryan or some other noncandidate nominated and those who see any attempt to nominate Ryan or another noncandidate as a rejection of the 14.6 million votes cast for Trump and Cruz so far.

As John Feehrey, a Republican lobbyist and party operative, told me,

People inside the beltway are dreaming. It’s going to be either Trump or Cruz. We are in a populist moment in this country. Unless Trump completely collapses in the next couple of months, he will be the nominee. Ryan doesn’t want the nomination under these circumstances.

Rich Lowry, editor of the anti-Trump National Review, believes it would be politically suicidal, given the level of support the two have received in the primaries and caucuses thus far, for the Republican Party to nominate anyone other than Trump or Cruz.

Republican voters “are not interested in someone who’s embedded in the party’s leadership, they’re not interested in someone who is donor friendly, and who’s soft on immigration,” Lowry declared on Meet the Press on April 10th. “It would be one thing if Ryan was a compromise between Cruz and Trump. He’s a rejection of both of them and of 70 percent of Republican voters.”

If no dark horse Republican candidate emerges and if Bernie Sanders does not catch up to Hillary Clinton, the election will feature either Clinton vs. Trump or Clinton vs. Cruz. In that case, the next president is likely to win not because he or she is the most loved, but because he or she is the least hated.

Will Cruz's Wisconsin Win Save or Doom the GOP?

The mud wrestling in the GOP continues in the wake f Ted Cruz's resounding win in the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday.   Some are depicting Cruz's win as the beginning of the end for Donald Trump while others see it as setting the stage for a brokered GOP convention where some non-candidate such as Paul Ryan - who I despise - can be given the nomination and, in the eyes of the so-called GOP establishment, save the party form the frightening rabble of the base that the very same GOP establishment empowered over the last 20+ years.  A piece in Politico looks at all of the maneuvering and in-fighting.  Here are highlights:

In the town of Ripon, Wisconsin, sits a small, white clapboard schoolhouse with the sign: “Birthplace of the Republican Party.” According to Wisconsin lore, the GOP was conceived there in 1853, when a small group of citizens, inspired by their opposition to the spread of slavery, came together to change “the future of our nation,” as the “Little White Schoolhouse” website puts it.

The question we face now is: Has Wisconsin done it again? That is, changed the future of the nation—or at least of the GOP? Republican elites are giddy over the trouncing of Donald Trump by Ted Cruz in Tuesday's primary, and the GOP establishment did pull off a victory when it came to slowing the Trump steamroller. For a few more weeks at least, the world has been made safe for the GOP as we’ve come to know it—aging white men who hold many of their voters in bewilderment or outright contempt and then, more often than not, go on to politely lose to the Democrats in the fall. Usually by a small enough margin that keeps the majority of GOP officeholders in power. (Which is all that really matters, right?)

But the GOP leadership is probably in deep denial. It's far more likely that the Republican Party as we know it died Tuesday night in the same state as it was purportedly born in. What’s forgotten amid the celebration is that 83 percent of Wisconsin Republicans still voted for the two candidates who are most determined to redefine the Party of Lincoln (and Ripon) and break the “establishment” hold on it. In some ways, the Stop Trump movement’s shotgun marriage to Ted Cruz—the most awkward coupling since Michael Jackson “dated” Brooke Shields—is actually a worse bet for what Cruz likes to call “the Washington cartel.” 

Cruz, a shrewd strategist, is also well aware that a number of the people who support him now really hope to force a contested convention and insert somebody more pleasing to their interests. In classic fashion, for example, Lindsey Graham used his awkward endorsement of Cruz, a man whose murder he had joked about only weeks earlier, to endorse John Kasich. The GOP’s all but powerless powers-that-be have said that Cruz is the least bad of two terrible options, with Wisconsin’s own Paul Ryan, the 2012 vice presidential candidate and current speaker of the House, emerging as the favorite dark horse (or white knight: pick your political cliché) to save the party. If the Ryan scenario—however unlikely—does in fact play out, it’s entirely probable that Wisconsin and its favorite son could someday be viewed as saviors of the GOP, or at least of the GOP establishment.

In a blistering statement issued last night that preposterously labeled Cruz an establishment “puppet,” the Trump campaign hit on that point, which will likely be its main campaign theme here on out: The evil establishment is coming for you.

Cruz himself is unlikely to tolerate the label of establishment “puppet” for long. He’ll undoubtedly find a way out of his brief marriage of convenience with the GOP hierarchy—and basically do an end run around them, a tactic at which he is has proved to be highly skilled, after all. Thus, what the Republican elites are likely to have done in Wisconsin is make an eventual arrangement of sorts between the Trump and Cruz factions of the GOP all but inevitable—if only to stop the establishment from screwing them both. And the “Stop Trump” strategists will have to decide whether such blatant defiance of the express wishes of their own voters at Cleveland with Candidate X is worth potentially destroying the GOP once and for all.

In other words, the elites are still more dead than Jon Snow.  So what’s likely to happen now? 

1. The Trump ComebackFor the next few days at least, media pundits will discuss the dismantling of the Trump bandwagon with thinly disguised glee. That is, until they realize how much he helps the ratings. Without Trump dominating the news, what else are they going to talk about—issues? Probably by next week, the media narrative will feature the beginnings of Trump’s comeback.

2. The Cruz Cavalcade GrowsMeanwhile, the professional, even ruthless, Cruz campaign will continue to siphon off delegates wherever they can find them. The senator will score at least a few more victories—and maybe even have a battle to the finish in California. All of which means Cruz will have hundreds of devoted supporters descending on Cleveland with no love for the entrenched veterans of official Washington.

3. A Trump-Cruz PartnershipBoth candidates will arrive at the convention with a vested interest in permitting only one of two names to be placed in nomination—and they’ll collectively have the vast majority of delegates to enforce their will. Whether the two manage a more permanent partnership, as in a ticket together, seems almost unimaginable. But so was the idea that JFK would pick a man he despised, Lyndon B. Johnson, for vice president in 1960, among a half-dozen other odd-couple pairings in U.S. political history. 4. The Romney Do-Over Do-Over?There is one more sensible size 11 shoe that might drop. And that’s Mitt Romney deciding the third time’s the charm—making his interest in a “draft” at the convention a bit more obvious than it is already.

My prediction? Trump and Cruz, who have both come to prominence detesting and being detested by the GOP establishment, will find a way to upend that establishment once again. But whatever happens next, Wisconsin, you deserve the thanks. Or blame. We’re not sure yet.

Keep the popcorn coming.  The spectacle will continue to be interesting to watch.

Extremist, Ted Cruz Predicts a Revolt if the GOP Uses Brokered Convention

While I find all of the Republican presidential candidate to be frightening (Kasich is just as extreme as Cruz and Trump, but knows when to shut his mouth), perhaps the scariest is Ted Cruz, a true extremist who seemingly is every bit as insane as his lunatic father, Rafael Cruz, an anti-gay extremist extraordinaire.   With the GOP establishment literally many years too late in recognizing the whirlwind it created by welcoming Christofascists, white supremacists and know nothings into the party, Cruz is threatening a revolt of the swamp fever afflicted party base if either he or Donald Trump are not crowned as the party nominee.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at Cruz's threat. Meanwhile, a piece in The Advocate looks at the insanity and extremism that has enveloped Cruz under the tutelage of his nutcase father.   First, these highlights on Cruz's threats to the party establishment:

Ted Cruz, campaigning in Wisconsin ahead of Tuesday's primary, says that if the Republican Party establishment were to anoint a candidate other than the two leaders in primary and caucus voting—Cruz and Donald Trump—at the party convention this summer, the GOP base would "quite rightly revolt."

Talking with reporters in the basement of a Masonic Center in Madison, Wisconsin, shortly before recording a town hall with Fox News in the auditorium upstairs, Cruz dismissed the concept of a new candidate like Ryan entering the fray. Currently, the Republican National Convention's Rule 40 mandates that a candidate must win a majority of the vote in at least eight states in order to get his or her name nominated at the convention, effectively preventing anyone other than Trump or Cruz from being placed in contention. Cruz rejected any suggestion that the convention would scrap Rule 40, as has been widely speculated.

"Both Donald and I have been very clear," Cruz said. "We shouldn't be changing the rules because Washington is unhappy with how the people are voting."

He added, "The rules are the rules."

Still, should party leaders attempt to nominate a third candidate, Cruz painted a dark vision for how that would go down. "This fevered pipe dream of Washington, that at the convention they would parachute in some white knight who will save the Washington establishment, it is nothing less than a pipe dream," Cruz said. "It ain't gonna happen. If it did happen, the people would quite rightly revolt."

Cruz's concept of a revolt sounds far more peaceable than the rioting Trump has envisioned if he wins the voting but loses at the convention. Cruz said that if a convention selects a third candidate, "the voters would naturally say, 'To heck with you, we're staying home.'"

Personally, I can't summon a shred of sympathy for the so-called GOP establishment.  They made this entire catastrophe happen.  They are now reaping what they sowed.   As for Ted Cruz's sinister extremism and dangerous mindset, here are excerpts from The Advocate:

If you follow politics at all, you probably know Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz’s major issue stances — he’s anti-LGBT equality, anti-abortion rights, a proponent of free-market economics and an aggressive foreign policy.

But to really kow Cruz’s worldview, it’s important to know his father, mentor, and top campaign surrogate, 76-year-old Rev. Rafael Cruz.

“Rafael Cruz is an extremist,” Chuck Smith, CEO of Equality Texas, tells The Advocate. “He is the senator’s role model. Rafael Cruz spoke at the World Congress of Families event in Utah with a gay-bashing lineup of hateful speakers, and he is Ted’s surrogate traveling across the country on the campaign trail bashing gay people. Like father, like son.”

Ted Cruz, for instance, calls the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling “lawless” and “fundamentally illegitimate,” but his father says it’s the work of the devil. “The devil overplayed his hand with that decision on June 26,” Rafael Cruz said in a speech last August, predicting that godly Americans will rise up against it. 

Among Rafael Cruz’s other antigay greatest hits: At the World Congress of Families event last November, he said gay people want to legalize pedophilia, starting with an effort to strike down age-of-consent laws. Indeed, he has frequently described LGBT people as sexual predators. He has also said marriage equality is part of a government plot to “destroy the concept of God” and establish socialism in the United States.

Rafael Cruz seems to have long believed his son was destined for great things. “Essentially his father groomed him for this moment,” conservative Iowa radio talk show host and Ted Cruz backer Steve Deace told The Boston Globe in January, as father and son were campaigning in the state.

“By the time Ted Cruz was 9, his father was providing heavy doses of conservative Christian politics at the dinner table,” wrote Globe reporter Tracy Jan. “By 13, the younger Cruz had memorized the Constitution and through high school toured the state of Texas, delivering speeches on free market economics and the Constitution.”

[H[e [Refael] now touts himself as an ordained minister. His theology goes beyond traditional evangelical and fundamentalist views. He “is an advocate of Christian dominionism, which essentially holds that fundamentalist Christians should take over, well, just about everything,” David Corn wrote in a February Mother Jones article.

Corn described Rafael Cruz as a “freelancing evangelical,” and that pretty much sums it up. He has claimed to be a pastor at a church in Dallas, but there is no record of such an affiliation, according to a Washington Spectator investigation. That investigation also found that the Bible college he claims to have attended doesn’t exist.

However, the conservative Christian crowds he draws apparently haven’t questioned his credentials, and religious right leaders see him as an asset to his son’s campaign. “He’s a clarifying check that Ted’s the real deal,” antigay Iowa activist Bob Vander Plaats told the Globe.

The lack of distance between father and son shows how dangerous a Ted Cruz presidency would be, Smith tells The Advocate. He “lets his father say all the fiery gay-bashing rhetoric, but Ted Cruz will implement that rhetoric in his policies and appointments,” Smith says. “He is the worst candidate in the race, and I have no doubt he will discriminate against gay and transgender people all over the United States if he is elected president.”

“While Donald Trump is disturbing, Ted Cruz is dangerous, . . . 

One thing I have noted over the years as I have watched and kept an eye on the batshitery of the far right Christians: nowhere else other than in Christofascist circles can one get away with peddling outright lies about one's credentials and claim to have attended non-existent  "bible colleges" and it simply doesn't matter.  It speaks volumes about oth Cruz's and those who support them. 

GOP Establishment on the Ropes

As Hillary Clinton begins her pivot toward the general election in November, the so-called GOP establishment finds itself on the ropes and seemingly in a death spiral as the lunatic party base that it nurtured for years and whose ugliness was ignored with winks and nods continues to rally to Donald Trump.  While last nights primary results kept Ted Cruz and John Kasich in the GOP nomination contest, the chances of stopping Trump seem to be fading.  Having watched Trump's fact free, ego filled "speech" last night, it is hard to believe how low logic, reason, and objective reality have disappeared from the GOP.  A piece in Politico looks at the desperate situation of the so-called GOP establishment.  Here are excerpts:

The Republican establishment is just about out of candidates — and if the delegate math is tough for Donald Trump, it’s far worse for everyone else.

The donors who pumped millions into an anti-Trump campaign are now assessing whether to continue the fight. And while some mainstream Republicans are girding for a likely floor fight at the July convention, others are losing their resolve.

“Only in the minds of the delusional DC establishment is there a brokered convention at this point,” said Tony Fabrizio, a longtime GOP pollster who advised Rand Paul’s campaign. “And if the elites try and steal the nomination from Trump, the riots at the ’68 Democratic Convention will look like a garden party.”

By taking Florida, along with Illinois, North Carolina and the North Marianas Islands (Missouri was still too close to call), Trump racked up more than 200 additional delegates, increasing his lead and further dimming the hopes of those desperate to stop him.

Tuesday night delivered more carnage for mainstream Republicans when Trump steamrolled Marco Rubio, long thought to personify the party’s future, in the senator’s home state of Florida.

“The goal for most of us at this point is to keep delegates away from Trump, and it really doesn’t matter who wins them,” said Charlie Black, a longtime GOP operative who just signed on as an adviser to Kasich’s campaign as it approaches a contested convention. “There are delegates who will be bound to Trump on the first ballot or the first two ballots who aren’t going to be for Trump once they’re free. If you get to a third ballot, the world changes.”

The Republican Party’s #NeverTrump movement, after spending $15 million in Florida and not putting so much as a dent in Donald Trump’s armor, has only a few unpalatable options left: uniting behind Cruz, long a loathsome thorn in the establishment’s side, or pinning their hopes on a long shot like Kasich and girding for a messy fight at the RNC’s convention that could further fracture the GOP beyond repair.

“With Kasich winning Ohio, a contested convention is more likely than ever,” said one Republican operative in Washington. “The backside shadow campaign for delegates who will come to you on the second and third ballots begins.”

the party is not about to roll over for Trump, especially with his negatives rising higher amid a spate of violent skirmishes between his supporters and protesters at several recent rallies. In fact, there’s rising chatter on Capitol Hill that the party could nominate Ryan himself at the convention.  “He probably wouldn’t [do it] but everyone thinks he’s Republican Jesus,” said one GOP Senate staffer.

A number of prominent Republican Party donors who funded the anti-Trump campaign, including New York City hedge fund manager Paul Singer and the Chicago Cubs-owning Ricketts family, plan to gather in Florida later this week for a private meeting.

But many establishment Republicans aren’t convinced Cruz’s chances in a general election are any better than Trump’s. With Rubio’s collapse, they’re coming to grips with the fact that the party’s best chance of taking back the White House may come not in November of 2016 but 2020.

Stopping the GOP Apocalypse

But for the danger posed to the country, the hand wringing among Republicans over the Party's descent into insanity and the rise of Donald Trump might be almost humorous.  Certainly well deserved misfortune.  A piece in The Daily Beast joins the chorus of those lamenting the situation and proposing a means to block a Trump nomination.  The piece which equates the GOP with European powers bumbling their way into World War I fails, however, to concede that the current state of affairs was self-created and is the result of years of pandering to lunatics and extremists, not some chance mistake.  Here are column highlights:. 

These are, as the Chinese curse goes, interesting times. In a Republican presidential debate, the leading candidate defends the size of his penis and attacks the Constitution, asserting that he will order the U.S. military to commit war crimes. A few days earlier the same candidate said on national television that he had to “do research” on the KKK, David Duke, and white supremacism before he could take a position. During the week, the frontrunner threatened Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, because the Post had dared write articles he thought critical. “And believe me, if I become president,” Trump said, “oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems.”

Welcome to Donald Trump’s world. Trump isn’t the first ridiculous character to run for president—Al Sharpton ran for the Democratic nomination in 2004—nor the first openly bigoted candidate—George Wallace ran for president three times. But Trump is the first ridiculous, openly bigoted candidate who stands a very good chance to win a major party’s nomination.

How did this happen? 

It’s everyone’s fault and no one’s fault. There were some who welcomed Trump onto the presidential scene, confident that he could help scold an out-of-touch establishment slow to grasp the problems of a troubled America. In a July 2015 Politico piece, National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote that Trump had hit “on an important truth that typical politicians either don’t know or simply fear to speak. “When Mexico sends its people,” Trump said, “they’re not sending their best.” That’s obviously true,” wrote Lowry who compared him to “Herman Cain squared—an early-nominating-season phenomenon with a massive media megaphone.”

By January, Lowry’s magazine was dedicating an entire issue to the urgency of stopping the threat of Trump, who “would destroy the conservative movement.” And I was just as wrong, if not more so. I wrote that facing a loss in Iowa, Trump’s ego would tilt him toward leaving the stage before being proven a loser. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

For various reasons, the Republican candidates have enabled Trump’s rise, slow to launch a concerted attack, largely giving him a clear path. Each candidate seemed more obsessed with this currently popular but insane notion of winning a “lane” rather than winning a race, while Trump was focused on winning a race.

Logic dictates that the remaining candidates should focus on holding Trump as far below 1,237 as possible, with the goal of pushing the convention to a second ballot. While some speculate a second ballot might be a scenario for a new candidate like Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan to enter the race, that strikes me as unlikely. The far more plausible outcome would find two candidates joining together to form a ticket, pooling delegates to get over 1,237.

There are rules for securing the nomination, and as long as the rules are adhered to, the game has been played fairly. In 1976, the great conservative Ronald Reagan took his fight to the convention and came within one delegation (Mississippi’s) of defeating a sitting Republican president, Jerry Ford. Surely if a convention strategy is good enough to challenge a Republican president, it’s good enough to challenge a major Clinton donor like Donald Trump.

As the process moves into a slate of winner-take-all states, the key to the convention strategy—call it the Reagan Strategy, not the brokered convention strategy—is for Rubio and Kasich to win their home states. But in what strikes me as a bizarre move, Ted Cruz is moving resources to Florida and attacking Marco Rubio on the air. Why? Does Cruz think he can win Florida? It seems the longest of shots. Much more likely is that he helps hand the state to Donald Trump. That will all but finish any chance Cruz has of becoming the Republican nominee.

So the madness and miscalculation apparently continues. The Republican Party is lurching toward the Somme, where death and destruction will replace hopes for a November victory. Dig your trench. Get your gas mask. The boys aren’t going to be home by Christmas.

The Death of the GOP Would be a Blessing

As I note frequently, as a former Republican back in the days before the GOP went batshit crazy and embraced ignorance, religious extremism and open hostility to all non-whites, in my view, the only way to fix the GOP is for the party to die.  The cancer has simply metastasized to a point where the patient cannot be saved and for the good of the country, a speedy death is what one must pray for. Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker  seemingly is coming to a similar conclusion, although she caveats her view with "this GOP."   My problem with Parker's piece is that she assumes that such a thing as "Republicans of conscience" can still exist in such a putrefied and ugly political party.  Most former Republicans of conscience now see themselves as independents - now the largest percentage of voting age Americans - or reluctant Democrats.   To her credit, however, (i) she does lay blame for what the GOP has become at the feet of the short-sighted, cynical opportunists in the so-called GOP establishment that first welcomed the barbarians into the party, and (ii) she has denounced their actions in the past, albeit perhaps not forcefully enough.  Here are excerpts from Parker's latest column in the Washington Post on the demise of a once great party:

So it has come to this: a brokered convention or President Hillary Clinton.

These options seem to be what’s left to Republicans of conscience, who are, let’s face it, rather Romney-come-latelies to the pyre. They’re based on the following evidence: It is highly unlikely that Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio or John Kasich can wrest the nomination from Donald Trump, even though most polls show each of the three beating Clinton but Clinton beating Trump.

The most Republicans can hope for now is that Kasich and Rubio win the primaries in their home states of Ohio and Florida, respectively, as Cruz did in Texas, and enough other contests to deny Trump the necessary delegates, thus paving the way for a brokered convention.

The other option, offered in the service of saving the republic, is to vote for Clinton.

There, there, now. ’Tis bitter fruit, indeed, for any Republican to consider voting for Clinton for reasons well-known to all sentient beings, including, for the sake of clarity, her lack of appeal to the GOP’s dominant older-white-male demographic. This was the party, after all, that saw the future in former Alaska governor Sarah Palin — she of the red-heeled tundra, sparkler of fantasies and promisor of all that is ordinary. . . . Not surprisingly, she has endorsed Trump. Because? Because he’s an “outsider” (like any other Ivy-educated heir-billionaire) and “We are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.”

Even though few Republicans could ever vote Democratic, and certainly not for Clinton, it wouldn’t be the end of the world as we know it. But voting for Trump, whom other civilized nations find abhorrent, might be.

Any hope that Trump might not really mean what he says is either delusional or a gamble too far. Which would voters prefer: The man who promises a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” or one who’ll say anything to get elected? The lunatic or the liar?

It has finally dawned on Republicans that their die is cast and Trump is about to destroy the party he relatively recently rejoined. Like a bunch of Ebenezer Scrooges, GOP leaders have begun emerging from their sleep, blinking at the horror of past misdeeds, trying to prevent a future that their actions foretold.

Republicans . . . . don’t deserve much slack for allowing their party to devolve from an ideas-driven counterweight to liberalism to a ragtag consortium of discontents dissociated from anything like an intellectual trust.   From William F. Buckley to Donald J. Trump in the wink of a Palin eye, the reaper is grim, indeed. . . . Love of country requires that Trump be stopped.

[I]t may be time for some creative destruction. Should Trump become the nominee, more reasoned minds in the GOP might do well to abandon it altogether. The death of this party — of know-nothing ugliness and outright fascist rhetoric — might be a blessing, a cleansing of the palate before a resurrection of the party of limited government and individual liberty.