America's Other Contagion: Conservative Irrationality

America continues to reel from the coronaviris pandemic - a situation made worse by the Trump/Pence regime's delayed reaction and initial ignoring of the warnings coming from numerous experts.  Now, the same mindset that set the stage for a worsened impact on the nation is being exhibited by many on the right who want to prematurely "reopen the economy," largely out of fears that following the advice of medical experts will dim Donald Trump's re-election chances.  And for Trump, it is always only about him.  Increased deaths is I suspect an easy trade off in his mind if it improves his re-election outlook.  Thankfully, Trump cannot force governors and mayors to drop socially distancing orders and we may be saved from the embrace of "alternate facts" by the increasingly irrational right wing.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Trump/the right's continued refusal to accept medical and scientific fact.  Here are excerpts:

The most dangerous contagion we now confront is the coronavirus, which has killed more than 20,000 Americans and thrown more than 16 million out of work. The second-most-dangerous contagion is the conspiracy-mongering, hostility to science and outright irrationality promulgated by President Trump and his loudmouth media enablers. It will take intensive contact tracing to follow the spread of crackpot ideas: Is Trump infecting the cable news hosts, or are they infecting him? Suffice it to say, [Trump] the president and his media fans are both afflicted with perilous misconceptions that are making the threat from the coronavirus far more acute.

At first, both Trump and his media toadies dismissed the threat from the coronavirus, claiming it was no worse than the flu and that it would miraculously disappear by April. Any suggestion that Trump was mishandling the threat was dismissed as a “hoax.” Then on March 13, Trump finally declared a national emergency, and the tone among the Fox News propagandists instantly changed — from deriding concern about the coronavirus among liberal bed-wetters to lauding Trump’s heroic wartime leadership.

The new resolve did not last long: Within days, the drum beat on the right evolved into “the cure cannot be worse than the disease.” Conservative talking heads argued that the economy had to be reopened even if it meant sacrificing the lives of the aged and infirm who are most vulnerable to covid-19. Trump was listening: On March 24, he announced that he would “love” to restart the economy by Easter.

On March 29, Trump had spoken of 100,000 to 200,000 deaths as a likely scenario. Now an influential model from the University of Washington projects “only” 61,545 coronavirus deaths. (Other models are more pessimistic.) But instead of concluding that social distancing works, many on the right are now arguing, with characteristic illogic, that the threat was overhyped all along and that we can all go back to work.

There is even a budding subculture of coronavirus truthers who claim that death figures are exaggerated by a liberal media conspiracy to make Trump look bad. Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson, Brit Hume and “Diamond & Silk,” among others, have all claimed that, as Hume put it, the “fatality numbers are inflated.” In fact, the official death toll is likely a vast underestimate because so many people are dying without being diagnosed with covid-19.

But because the Trumpified right lives in a world of “alternative facts,” we are back to where we were a few weeks ago, with many conservative commentators and administration officials once again braying for the economy to reopen. Trump — Fox viewer No. 1 — is listening intently, and he is receptive to the message because he is seeing his poll numbers fall as the unemployment numbers rise.

Internal government projections, reported by the New York Times, show that “if the administration lifts the 30-day stay-at-home orders, the death total is estimated to reach 200,000.”

The consensus of experts — you know, the people whom right-wingers don’t listen to — is that it will be impossible to lift social distancing requirements until much more widespread testing and contact tracing are in place.

It’s hard to talk sense into [Trump] a president who thinks that a virus can be defeated by antibiotics. Public health officials such as Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah Birx are like the passengers in a car that Trump is slowly driving down a winding mountain road: Can they convince the president that we won’t get to our destination faster by simply going straight off the cliff?

Florida Pastor Arrested for Defying Social Distancing Ordinance

Howard-Browne.

Despite gubernatorial orders imposing social distancing measures and restrictions on gatherings of more than 10 people, mega-church pastors and scamvangelists like Jerry Falwell, Jr., have ignored the orders and held church services and gatherings that could increase the spread of coronavirus thereby putting the lunacy and social irresponsible nature of Christofascists on open display. In Texas, three pastors are challenging the constitutionality of a stay-at-home order issued by Texas officials in Harris County (which encompasses Houston).  The whining charlatans claim the mandate improperly tramples on individual freedoms by closing churches.  Their related bitch is that the order failed to designate gun stores “essential” businesses.  Of course, the real reason for their complaint is that they will miss out on collections at services if they comply with the order, showing once again that money is their true god.  Also of note is that among these pastors is notorious anti-LGBT activist and hate group leader Steven Hotze, who has compared LGBT individuals to murders, rapists, and pedophiles. 

Thankfully, in Florida one of this type of religious extremists in the Tampa area has been arrested for failure to comply with that state's ban on large gatherings. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the mega-church pastor who has ignored the ban on large gatherings for weeks now, endangering both his lemming like parishioners and the larger community.  Here are article highlights: 

You knew it had to transpire sooner or later: a religious leader claiming both spiritual and constitutional immunity from laws aimed at protecting people from COVID-19. As it happens, the first “martyr” to this dubious cause was a controversial Tampa pentecostal minister named Rodney Howard-Browne who has been defying official guidelines on protecting the members of his flock for weeks now. Here’s the Tampa Bay Times’ write-up of the arrest he deliberately provoked:

The pastor of a Tampa megachurch who held two services on Sunday for scores of worshipers was arrested Monday for violating a county order requiring residents to stay at home to limit the spread of coronavirus. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, co-founder of the River at Tampa Bay Church, turned himself in to the Hernando County jail and was booked on Hillsborough charges of unlawful assembly and violating quarantine orders during a public health emergency, jail records show.

He got sprung on bail immediately, and will likely use the incident for massive publicity purposes.

Howard-Browne encouraged personal contact and claimed his sanctuary contained “machines” that would “kill every virus in the place,” making it “the most sterile building in…all of America.” He is also, of course, arguing the local order he defied violated his religious liberty rights. . . .

Howard-Browne has also suggested those believers who fear the coronavirus are “pansies,” and as reported in the New York Times, has argued he’s fighting a global socialist conspiracy:

“Because the climate change narrative for global governance failed,” Mr. Howard-Browne said in a video of the [March 15] service, “they are using the World Health Organization to then come in and take over the control of nations.” He added, “There’s going to be forced vaccines” to “kill off many people.”

You might think Howard-Browne is cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs and dismiss him as a fringe character. But he seems to have some friends in high places: He shared a photo to Facebook on July 11, 2017, as he stood over President Donald Trump with his hands on the president’s back. Vice President Mike Pence can be seen amongst the men in the group, with his head bowed in prayer.

If the spread of the infection could be limited to these pastors and their followers, a cynic might argue that it would be a good thing - Darwin's theory in action, if you will  - but they selfishly will be exposing others.  It is also disturbing that this type of lunatic has access to the White House.

The Right's Normalization of Immorality

Trump/Pence sycophant Alex Jones.

Former George W. Bush White House official Michael Gerson has another lament in the Washington Post about the normalization of immorality steadily taking place under the Trump/Pence regime and the lap dog like Republican Party. Gerson is an old style Republican - as I once was - where morality and the truth or at least some semblance of it - mattered. Not so under Trump/Pence despite Pence's feigned piety and religiosity.  Now, lies and outright lunacy are embraced so long as they evidence fealty to Der Trumpenführer.  A perfect example is Trump world's rallying to defend Alex Jones, a delusional liar.   Yet Jones symbolizes what the Republican Party has become.  Republican "friends" who like to think otherwise are only deluding themselves.  Here are excerpts from Gerson's column: 

One of the current complaints of the Trump right concerns the treatment given to Alex Jones by Facebook, which has temporarily banned the Internet radio host for videos that violated “community standards.” 

At various points, Jones has promoted the belief that 9/11 was an “inside job,” that Hillary Clintonwas running a child sex ring out of a pizzeria, that NASA had built a child slave colony on Mars in order to harvest blood and bone marrow, that the Oklahoma City bombing, the Boston Marathon bombing and the Sandy Hook school shooting were government “false flag” operations, that some shooting survivors were “crisis actors,” that “globalists” are intent on committing genocide and that Democrats are on the verge of launching a second civil war.

There are few things I enjoy less than spilling ink on Jones’s vile lunacy. But President Trump has made a great many unpleasant things unavoidable. He has appeared on Jones’s Infowars program and assured Jones that his “reputation is amazing.” The White House briefly gave Infowars a press credential. And Donald Trump Jr. has retweeted Infowars stories.

So what explains this theatrical wink and nod to the bedlam wing of the hard right?

This instance is important, not just for its directly destructive influence on political discourse, but also for its explanatory power. It represents not only a certain approach to political strategy but also a certain approach to morality, pressed to its logical extreme. Trump is not a dogmatist; he is an egotist. He judges others not by their convictions, or even by their hold on reality, but by their fidelity to his person. It is a form of identity politics in which all that counts is one man’s identity.

This is but one example of Trumpian ethics. Remember when a white man in Boston, spouting Trump slogans, beat up a homeless man outside a subway station? Trump responded: “People who are following me are very passionate.

Remember when a Trump supporter punched an African American man at a rally? Trump said that his follower “obviously loves his country.”

Remember when the alt-right provoked violence in Charlottesville? Trump pronounced some white nationalists to be “very fine people.”

[Trump] The president has a nearly impossible time criticizing his fans, even when they are guilty of hate crimes and violence. In Trump’s own private creed, they are absolved of guilt by their loyalty to him.

Any political movement is defined not just by what it aspires to, but also by whom it excludes. And the alt-right, the Alex Jones right, the white nationalist right know that they are fully included in Trump’s definition of his movement. They have become experts in tacking to the shifting winds of his whims. They know that their loyalty to him has been rewarded with a legitimacy they have craved for decades. And they are full, enthusiastic partners in the Trump project — to delegitimize any source of authority and information but his own.

Back in the world of actual morality, there is serious collateral damage. Congressional Republicans are further tainted by their association with right-wing extremism. Genuine populists are discredited by consorting with people who accuse elites of arming for mass murder. The religious right is caught in bed with a diseased, seeping moral relativism. And Fox anchors come to the defense of a man who verbally defiles the graves of murdered children.

Despite attempts at utilitarian justification — despite outrage-dulling repetition — this is not normal or moral. It will never be normal or moral.

Trump Spirals into Ideological Psychosis

I for one have always seen Donald Trump as mentally ill.  Not so much in a "raving maniac" way, but rather a very sick narcissism and total lack of care or empathy for anyone but himself.  In seeking to satiate his unquenchable ego he engages in behavior that must be painful to his children, perhaps other than Donald Jr. who seems as sick as his father.  Now, as the election nears an end and Trump finds himself losing by most accounts, the man is lashing out and offering any and all excuses rather than taking a good look at himself in the mirror and understanding how unsavory and dangerous he appears to those tethered to objective reality.  Conservative columnist and former GOP white house staffer Michael Gerson has an op-ed that looks at Trump's increasing psychosis.  Here are excerpts:

Given even the lowest expectations, Donald Trump still has the capacity to surprise.

In recent days, Trump has sneered at the looks of a woman who accuses him of sexual assault, denigrated the appearance of Hillary Clinton, proposed to drug-test his opponent, used his campaign to promote what appears to be a Russian covert operation, asserted that Clinton has held secret meetings with international bankers “to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty,” attacked“Saturday Night Live,” promised to jail his opponent and contended that the “whole election is being rigged.”

Which means that Trump is sickeningly cruel, boorish, bonkers, subversive, conspiratorial, obsessive, authoritarian and reckless with the reputation of American democracy.

This is quite a closing argument for a presidential candidate. I imagine it did not emerge from focus groups. So what does all of this mean?

(1) It means that the Republican nominee for president is frighteningly unstable under pressure. He is easily baited, highly sensitive to slights, prone to using faulty information from the Internet, hyperbolic and vengeful. Now imagine those characteristics during a confrontation with China in the South China Sea.

(2) It is an indication of the quality of his closest, non-family advisers. Stephen Bannon and Rudy Giuliani are not attempting to keep Trump in check. They are feeding his manias. Trump is completely unmoored from restraining influences, and would be as president.

(3) Trump’s closing case is a version, not of movement conservatism or tea party conservatism, but of crackpot conservatism — an alt-right rage against a vast, scheming establishment that includes the liberal media, global financiers and a growing list of women making accusations of sexual assault. All this was previewed during Trump’s political rise, which included birtherism, vaccine denialism and insinuations of foul play in the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. GOP leaders can hardly pretend to be surprised  . . .

(4) It is a further indication (as if we needed it) that Trump has no commitment to the American political system. He is perfectly willing to delegitimize democratic institutions as a campaign tactic, squandering a civic inheritance he does not value. Even before his current troubles, he said that an electoral loss would be prima facie evidence of fraud and encouraged supporters to monitor majority-black polling stations in Pennsylvania. Now he is entering uncharted territory. By preemptively questioning the legitimacy of his forthcoming shellacking, Trump is stepping outside the four corners of the constitutional order, on the model of autocratic strongmen he has publicly admired.

The man is a clear and present danger and MUST be defeated on November 8, 2016, hopefully by a resounding margin which will underscore  his utter unfitness to have ever been the GOP nominee.  Hopefully he drags down GOP members of the Senate and House of Representatives with him. 

Climate Change Deniers Dispute Danger of Hurricane Matthew

Once again I find it hard to believe the idiocy and embrace of ignorance that motivates far too many on the far right.  With Hurricane Matthew poses a dangerous threat to much of the east coast of Florida, some climate change deniers are downplaying the danger and suggesting that the news media is working with the Obama administration to exaggerate the danger in order to hype the danger of climate change.  Among those starting the meme is self-loathing closet case, Matt Drudge, and Oxycontin loving Rush Limbaugh.  To describe these individuals as despicable - not to mention down right crazy, in my opinion - is an understatement.  Talking Points Memo looks at the foul batshitery. Here are excerpts:

Hours ahead of Hurricane Matthews’ landfall on Florida’s Atlantic coast, some climate change skeptics downplayed the danger of what meteorologists say could be the worst such storm since Hurricane Katrina.

Public officials and meteorologists have repeatedly stressed the strength of the storm, especially to those living in the evacuation zones on Florida’s Atlantic coast.

Yet in the face of those pleas conservative aggregator Matt Drudge, who has a house in Florida, tweeted that “The deplorables are starting to wonder if govt has been lying to them about Hurricane Matthew intensity to make exaggerated point on climate,” and“Hurricane Center has monopoly on data. No way of verifying claims. Nassau ground observations DID NOT match statements! 165mph gusts? WHERE?”

Drudge later posted the web address of a NOAA buoy and encouraged readers to monitor the storm on their own, to see if “observations match the Hurricane Center’s claimed 140 mph sustained winds."

On Wednesday, Rush Limbaugh expressed a similar sentiment on his radio show, saying that government scientists might be “playing games” with storm data in order to “sell” the role climate change has played in making hurricanes stronger.

Rather than downplay the storm, though, the libertarian news site Heat Street inexplicably went after President Barack Obama for "refusing" to protect GOP nominee Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort from the hurricane's wrath.

I fear for the children of such right wing lunatics who might be placed in danger by a refusal to take the hurricane seriously.  On the other hand, allowing the adults to put themselves where they will be washed away might be a positive.  It would be a modern day example of evolution where the stupid perish.  

The Right's Insane Immigration Conspiracy Theories

During my time as a Republican Party member and activist, white supremacists and white nationalists were not openly welcomed into the Party.  Indeed, when someone did engage in rants along such lines, most of us rolled our eyes and viewed the individual akin to an insane family member that one tries to keep quiet and out of public view.  Those days are gone and, with the rise of Donald Trump, white supremacy and white nationalism is one of the twin pillars of today's Republican Party - the other is right wing Christian religious extremism, although it greatly overlaps the Party's open racism. A piece in Salon looks at some of Trump's bizarre conspiracy theories and provides a good explanation of the obsession with the now mainstream fringe elements who believe Mexico is engaged in a conspiracy to reconquer the American Southwest and more.  Here are excerpts:

[T]he notion that the Mexican government is orchestrating an invasion of the United States has been a staple on the white nationalist far right for years.

“This is a longstanding conspiracy on the radical right,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “There have been claims for the better part of ten years now that Mexico is secretly planning to reconquer the American Southwest.”

That conspiracy to take over the Southwest goes by the names Plan de Aztlán (taken from a 1969 Chicano movement manifesto) and “the Reconquista,” or Reconquest. One theory is that it will happen through the “birth canal,” meaning that Mexican women are being sent to the United States to give birth to lots of children and take power through sheer demographic force. The other is that it will take place through force of arms. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, one of the most extreme but influential anti-immigrant organizations, has lent its support to the theory.

“It boils down to the claim that Mexico is consciously infiltrating its citizens into the United States in order to take back the lands lost to the Americans,” said Potok.

A 2006 article in Front Page Magazine, for example, described “the Mexican invasion of the United States” as “a campaign to occupy and gain power over our country — a project encouraged, abetted, and organized by the Mexican state and supported by the leading elements of Mexican society.”

In 2005, anti-immigrant advocates seized on the Mexican government’s distribution of a safety guide to migrants as evidence that the government was coordinating their outmigration for the economic purpose of ensuring remittances. Rick Oltman of FAIRreportedly said the books were evidence of  “the Mexican government trying to protect its most valuable export, which is illegal migrants.”

The theory probably originated, said Potok, in a small group called American Patrol, based in Southern Arizona, and was popular amongst Minutemen anti-immigrant militiamen during their heyday, from the mid to late 2000s.

“It’s a conspiracy theory that began on a tiny hate group on the Arizona that has spread far and wide and quite deeply penetrated the mainstream,” said Potok.

In 2014, a video circulated of a man who described himself as a former Border Patrol agent, who charged that the influx of refugee children was an act of “asymmetrical warfare” carried out by unnamed malignant forces so that they could sneak in drugs and chemical and biological weapons (he also put suggested that the Ebola outbreak in Africa was spread by intentional conspiracy). The video was cited by right-wing figures including former Congressman Allen West.

Others, including former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, accused the U.S. government of being complicit in coordinating the wave of Central American child refugees. That taps into the notion, said Potok, that President Obama wants immigrants and refugees to come to the United States because they will be future Democratic voters. It’s also part of a broader theory that dangerous forces abroad are allied with an internal fifth column of liberals who are aiding the enemy for their own nefarious purposes.
 The reality, of course, is that Mexico doesn’t decide which immigrants come to the United States; immigrants experiencing complex social and economic realities do. But conspiratorial explanations become increasingly appealing as the global forces that shape people’s lives become ever more abstract. Trump isn’t just tapping into racist sentiment. He’s channeling a right-wing account of how the world works that is no longer relegated to the fringe.

Trump’s Repellent Inner Circle

While Donald Trump has shaken up the management of his campaign, overall, the leadership remains driven by bigotry and misogyny.  Indeed, Trump's new campaign chair, Stephen Bannon, as reported by the Washington Post, is now being plagued by stories of (i) being registered to vote at an address where he does not live, (ii) past domestic violence, and (iii) anti-Semitism.  The Donald certainly knows how to pick winners, especially since Bannon was supposed to be an improvement over Russia linked Paul Manafort.  A column in the Washington Post (bu a conservative columnist) looks mare and Trump's  ugly inner circle.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump is undergoing his own “extreme vetting.” And we are learning a great deal about the quality of his public pledges. . . . Trump is undergoing a rapid, convulsive transition from Mr. Hyde into Dr. Jekyll. In the movies, this role would require hours in the chair of a highly skilled makeup artist. Trump has Sean Hannity.

For much of Trump’s fan base, these details couldn’t matter less. The Trump revolution is mainly a matter of personnel, not policy. Put the right man in charge who will hire the “best people” and fire all the corrupt, stupid failures. Trump’s primary appeal — and his main source of self-regard — is his skill as a negotiator, manager and talent scout.

Here we are also getting a good feel for the candidate. Trump’s campaign has been a roiling, noxious, dysfunctional mess from the start, characterized by public feuds, subject to sudden leadership changes and unable to fulfill key functions (like actually having a campaign apparatus in key states). And Trump’s personnel selections have been both instructive and disastrous.

Consider this list of Trump’s chosen: Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski had a brutal and demeaning style that resulted in a staff revolt, and his manhandling of a female reporter overshadowed the Trump campaign for weeks. Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was paid lucrative consulting fees by foreign interests and resigned after reports that Ukraine anti-corruption investigators were scrutinizing millions in alleged payments there.

Longtime adviser Roger Stone is a crackpot conspiracy theorist who asserts that Bill and Hillary Clinton are “plausibly responsible” for the deaths of roughly 40 people and that Hillary Clinton should be “executed for murder.” Confidant Roger Ailes recently stepped down from his job at Fox News under a cloud of sexual harassment claims. And Steve Bannon, Trump’s new campaign chief executive, is known for his bullying tactics and for running a website (Breitbart News) that flirts with white nationalism.

There are a few exceptions to this pattern — Kellyanne Conway and Mike Pencecome to mind — but Trump has hired and elevated some of the very worst people in American politics, known for their cruelty, radicalism, prejudice and corruption.

What does all this say about Trump as a prospective president?

First, it means that the ideal of leadership Trump displayed as a reality television star is his actual view of leadership. It is not an act. In Trump’s view, leaders elevate themselves by belittling others. They yell and abuse and bully. And their most important quality is absolute loyalty to the great leader, the star of the show. This is a view of leadership that would make H.R. Haldeman cringe.

Expect the Trump Campaign to Get Even More Extreme

Part of what has lead the Republican Party to be now controlled by an out of control and down right ugly party base has been the rise of extreme right wing talk radio and similar "news" sites and outlets. These microphone jockeys and "journalists" care little about objective reality and focus on what will most excite the prejudices and paranoia of their listeners.  Hence why one study found that those who watch Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, were found to be the least informed - even less informed than those who watched little or no news at all.  Now, Donald Trump's campaign is going to be under the control and guidance of one of the mavens of the most extreme such faux news sites, Breitbart News.  A column in the Washington Post looks at how the GOP's craziness is likely about to get far more insane.  Here are excerpts:

Shaken by the fact that he’s losing, Donald Trump has fled into the parallel universe of the extreme right — and apparently plans to stay there for the remainder of the campaign. Let’s see if the rest of the Republican Party is dumb enough to follow him.

Trump has reportedly been feeling “boxed in” and “controlled” by the few people around him who actually know something about politics. Advice from these professionals to tone it down must be responsible for his slide in the polls, he seems to believe. So he has hired as chief executive of his campaign a man named Stephen Bannon, who will not only let Trump be Trump but also encourage him to be even Trumpier.

Bannon runs Breitbart News, a website that creates its own ultranationalist far-right reality — one that often bears little resemblance to the world as it really is. 

The site’s since-deceased founder, Andrew Breitbart, once “described Bannon, with sincere admiration, as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement,” according to a Bloomberg News profile. Riefenstahl was the brilliant filmmaker who became one of Hitler’s most effective propagandists. I think the comparison is wrong; Bannon is not nearly as talented.

He is a practiced provocateur, however, with a gift for reinforcing the worldview of far-right true believers. Bannon gives readers the impression that the nation is in grave and imminent peril, that Muslims are conspiring to impose sharia law throughout the land, that Mexican immigrants are running rampant in a wild crime spree, that only Trump can save us — and that polls showing him far behind Clinton are somehow skewed, incompetent or irrelevant.

It’s all a paranoid fantasy, designed to exploit anxieties about demographic and economic change. And Trump has decided that his best chance of winning is to peddle this garbage, some of which he may actually believe.

So if anyone was wondering whether this election cycle could get any worse for the GOP, it just did.

It now appears to be a good bet that Republicans will lose control of the Senate. It is far too early to predict a “wave” election that might threaten the GOP’s big majority in the House, but Democrats are allowing themselves to dream. For Republicans, the two most likely outcomes of the election are bad and worse.

Trump’s decision to throw in with the likes of Bannon can only increase the probability of a GOP debacle. Does it have to be spelled out for you in neon lights, Republicans? Trump could not care less about the party, and he would happily destroy it to feed his own ego.

Bannon, likewise, appears to view the party of Lincoln as merely a vehicle for his own ambition, which is to nurture and grow a nationalist-right movement. His website is as critical of the Republican establishment as it is of the Democrats. He has no interest in making Trump more palatable to the general electorate. 

It was perhaps foolish of me to hope that very many Republican elected officials would reject Trump on principle. But now, perhaps, more will do so for reasons of self-preservation.

Trump has made his decision. In a town hall meeting this week moderated by Sean Hannity of Fox News, Trump ignored opportunities to embrace traditional American values and instead reinforced a message of nationalism, xenophobia and fear. He offered himself as the only solution, promising, like any tinhorn strongman, that “I have as big a heart as anybody.”

But there is no room in that heart for the GOP. Trump won’t save you, Republicans. You had better save yourselves.

 The GOP establishment is now truly reaping what it has sown by years of winking and nodding to insane elements of society, including the Christofascists, white supremacists and the outright crazy. Trump is the embodiment of it all and Bannon  will make the lunacy even worse.  I for one have no sympathy - all of this could have been avoid if the leadership had had a spine and not welcomed these horrible people into the party.  

The GOP Convention's Ugly First Night

In some ways watching the GOP National Convention is akin to self-inflicted torture, but it should be required viewing because it puts a spotlight on just how insane and out of the mainstream the GOP has become.  If one isn't a right wing Christian fanatic, white supremacist, conspiracy theory devote, a not tethered to objective reality Hillary hater, or simply insane, there really is not much place for you in today's Republican Party.  All of this was on open display last night and reinforces my view that I did the right thing when I decided to escape the insane asylum the GOP has become years ago. A column in the Washington Post looks at some of the insanity and the freaks who Donald Trump is making mainstream within the GOP.  Here are highlights:

Welcome to the Donald Trump Republican National Convention.

Roger Stone, longtime confidant and informal adviser to Donald Trump, . . .  chose this moment, when the party presents itself to the nation, to team up with Alex Jones — the conspiracy theorist and radio host on whose show Trump has often appeared — as “co-hosts” of the rally for a couple thousand Trump supporters. Like the Trump campaign itself, the convention has elevated those who bring the crazy.

Many Republican officials are avoiding Cleveland this week entirely. Others are tacitly supporting the Trump ticket, swallowing their reservations; a last-ditch rebellion on the floor Monday afternoon by anti-Trump delegates was easily put down.

This vacuum gives voice to Trump’s proudest and loudest supporters, those who, before Trump, resided on the fringes. It has legitimized people like Jones.

Jones is famous for asserting, among other things, that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing. Trump, who appeared frequently on Jones’s show to promote his theory that President Obama wasn’t born in America, told its host in December that “your reputation is amazing.” . . . He [Jones] said that “Hillary is a foreign agent of the communist Chinese, the Saudi Arabians and others.” Noticing a disruption in the crowd, he denounced these “anti-freedom scum who need to get their ass to North Korea.”

Police on the perimeter and in a boat could witness a few participants openly carrying handguns, the droning of the kudu horns, the guy carrying an eight-foot wooden cross, the woman who botched the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the primary challenger to John McCain who said, “We don’t need frail, fearful, old people representing us.”

Dozens of attendees wore “Hillary for Prison” T-shirts. One sign that said “Latinos for Trump” featured a bumper sticker declaring “9/11 was an inside job.” The flip side had the message “Hillary for Prison” (the first “i” was dotted with a Jewish star and Muslim crescent) and a bumper sticker declaring fluoride “poison in the tap water.”

Trump has “cojones,” Stone said. And Clinton? “A short-tempered, foul-mouthed, greedy, bipolar, mentally unbalanced criminal.”  “She’s a reptile!” somebody added.  “A liar!”

This is the face of Trump’s GOP. “Republicans who do not choose to join our cause: You will be replaced,” Stone said. “Good riddance. This is not about unity.”

GOP Benghazi Committee Finds Nothing; Stevens Family - Don't Blame Hillary

For anyone getting their news from any source other than Fox News it should have always been a foregone conclusion that the GOP House Committee on Benghazi would turn up nothing.  The whole endeavor was never about finding some undiscovered truth but, instead, about inflicting political harm on Hillary Clinton and damaging her presidential run for office.  Seven other committees had found no smoking gun or anything else harmful to Clinton or the Obama administration and only deranged Hillary haters should have or could have expected a different result.  Oh, and did I mention the far higher losses of life on the watches of Ronald Reagan and Chimperator Bush which never were given such an exhaustive investigation?  It is unfortunate that the GOP members of this witch hunt do not have to personally repay the sums wasted for no legitimate reason.  The Washington Post blasts the committee in a main editorial  Here are excerpts:

ON THE night of Sept. 11 and morning of Sept. 12, 2012, U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers in Benghazi, Libya, came under attack by terrorists armed with automatic weapons, mortars and fuel to start fires. By the next morning, four brave Americans lay dead — Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens; his aide, Sean Smith; and two former Navy SEALs providing security, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty. It was a horrific crime whose perpetrators remain for the most part unidentified and unpunished — and a setback for U.S. foreign policy in the wider Middle East.

As if all of that weren’t bad enough, the Benghazi attacks mutated into yet another of the partisan dramas that U.S. politicians — in this case Republican politicians — generate in lieu of constructive policy making. Unable to turn the events to their advantage when they occurred, during the 2012 election campaign, Republicans have persisted in attempting to milk the “scandal” for the past four years. They have done so even though repeated previous investigations — including by a GOP-led House intelligence panel — found nothing to contradict the Obama administration’s basic account. 

And now, after two years and $7 million, comes Tuesday’s final report of a Republican-led House select committee, which adds exactly nothing substantial to the story. It’s true that the panel’s investigation did, along the way, help trigger the revelation of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server, which is a real issue. On the most sensitive point, however — Ms. Clinton’s personal culpability for what happened in Benghazi — the committee came up empty. 

Yet for reasons best known only to themselves, Republicans have insisted on pursuing their own more inflammatory and conspiratorial version of events. Maybe someone should investigate that.

Ironically, at the same time Vanity Fair is running a piece that looks at the Stevens family's request that Hillary Clinton cease being blamed for the tragedy that claimed the life of their family member.  Odd how they have less of an agenda than sleazy Republicans obsessed with inflicting political harm on Ms. Clinton.  Here are article highlights:

Democrats on the House Committee released their own, three-hundred-and-thirty-nine-page report on Monday. They also cited “woefully inadequate” security in Benghazi. But they claimed to have been virtually shut out of the official Committee report. They called the probe, led by the South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy, a witch hunt. “Gowdy has been conducting this investigation like an overzealous prosecutor desperately trying to land a front-page conviction rather than a neutral judge of facts seeking to improve the security of our diplomatic corps,” the report said.

Dr. Anne Stevens, the sister of Ambassador Chris Stevens, has served as a family spokesperson since his death. She is the chief of pediatric rheumatology at Seattle Children’s Hospital. We spoke twice in the past three days, including shortly after the House Select Committee report was issued. Dr. Stevens recalled that her brother had been fascinated by the Middle East since childhood, when he dressed up as Lawrence of Arabia, with a towel and a pot atop his head. He served in the Peace Corps, in Morocco, before joining the Foreign Service, and he served twice in Libya before his final posting there, as well as in Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Riyadh. My interview with Dr. Stevens has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Whom do you fault for the lack of security that resulted in the death of your brother, in Benghazi? It is clear, in hindsight, that the facility was not sufficiently protected by the State Department and the Defense Department. But what was the underlying cause? Perhaps if Congress had provided a budget to increase security for all missions around the world, then some of the requests for more security in Libya would have been granted. Certainly the State Department is underbudgeted.

I do not blame Hillary Clinton or Leon Panetta. They were balancing security efforts at embassies and missions around the world. And their staffs were doing their best to provide what they could with the resources they had. The Benghazi Mission was understaffed. We know that now. But, again, Chris knew that. It wasn’t a secret to him. He decided to take the risk to go there. It is not something they did to him. It is something he took on himself.

After years of congressional investigations, do you feel that your brother’s death has been politicized in Washington?

Yes! Definitely politicized. Every report I read that mentions him specifically has a political bent, an accusatory bent. One point that seems to be brought up again and again is the accusation that the attack was a response to the video. I could understand why that conclusion would be made, because it was right after the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Egypt. But, frankly, it doesn’t matter that that was the thinking, that night, about why the attack occurred. It’s irrelevant to bring that up again and again. It is done purely for political reasons.

And guess who blocked increase security for State Department facilities?  Congressional Republicans, of course.

The take away is that the next time you hear some Republican apologist whining about Benghazi, what you need to do is ask them to their face when they plan on having a tattoo that says "I'm an idiot" placed on their forehead. . 

The Media Needs to Stop Normalizing Trump

Some had predicted that the feckless mainstream media ("MSM") would seek to boost Donald Trump and deflate Hillary Clinton because of a desire that the presidential race be a "horse race" with more suspense and increased viewing and support for media coverage.  Stated another way, the MSM is all about money and is only too happy to help foist a disaster on the country if it lines its pockets with cash in the process.  A piece in Salon looks at the problem of the MSM's normalization of Trump and willingness to over look his endless stream of lies and policy free bloviating.  Here are article excerpts:

It’s only May, which means we have about five months before the presidential election. There are conventions to be had, running mates to be selected, debates to be overhyped, and an obscene amount of money to be spent on an equally obscene quantity of advertising. The general election campaign hasn’t even really begun yet, on account of it being so damn early in the cycle still. Hell, we don’t even have official nominees yet for either major party.

And yet, we find ourselves in a peculiar situation. Specifically, the presumptive nominee for one of the major parties has already given a soft endorsement to a long-since discredited theory that his likely opponent is complicit in the covered-up murder of a political associate. When you strip all the names from this situation and view it through the lens of established political norms, that looks crazy and desperate.

[W]e’re talking about one candidate backhandedly making the allegation that his opponent was an accessory to murder, and the press reaction is “boy, that Trump sure can drive headlines – better watch out, Hillary!”

This is precisely what I was talking about I wrote earlier this month about the danger in normalizing Trump. He wants all the craziness to be taken in stride, and he’s succeeding. He’s being abetted in this by a Republican Party establishment that is happy to bite its tongue so long as they get their tax cuts and conservative judicial nominations. But that’s no reason for the press to buy into Trump’s game and treat his crazy mudslinging as a mere campaign tactic rather than a disqualifying character flaw.

And it’s only going to get worse as the election cycle wears on. Trump met a few weeks ago with Ed Klein, an infamous source of salacious and discredited Hillary Clinton bullshit. Just this week, Trump promoted Klein’s latest book, which is full of insane nonsense. None of this is normal, so stop treating it like it is.

This is no longer Trump on reality TV.  We are talking about the future of the country.  Yet the MSM is again proving itself as useless as it did during the Iraq War buildup that was all based on lies that the MSM could have exposed had it been responsible and not acting as a platform for liars.