LF: GOP brought this plague on itself

O’Jays

Even by his standards, it was an astounding performance.

Over the course of just two days last weekend, Donald Trump spewed bigotry, venom and absurdity like a sewer pipe, spewed it with such utter disregard for decency and factuality that it was difficult to know what to criticize first.

Shall we condemn him for retweeting a racist graphic on Sunday filled with wildly inaccurate statistics from a non-existent source (“Whites killed by blacks — 81 percent”)?

Or shall we hammer him for tacitly encouraging violence when an African-American protester was beaten up at a Trump rally in Birmingham on Saturday? “Maybe he should have been roughed up,” Trump told Fox “News.”

Shall we blast him for telling ABC on Sunday that he would bring back the thoroughly discredited practice of waterboarding — i.e., torturing — suspected terrorists?

Or shall we lambaste him for claiming — falsely — at the Birmingham rally that “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City, N.J. applauded the Sept. 11 attacks and reiterating it the next day, telling ABC that “a heavy Arab population... were cheering."

Trump is a whack-a-mole of the asinine and the repugnant. Or, as a person dubbed “snarkin pie” noted on Twitter: “Basically, Trump is what would happen if the comments section became a human and ran for president.”

Not that that hurts his bid for the GOP nomination. A Washington Post/CNN poll finds Trump with a double-digit lead (32 percent to 22 percent) on his nearest rival, Ben Carson, who is his equal in nonsense, though not in volume. Meantime, establishment candidate Jeb Bush is on life support, mired in single digits.

And the party is panicking. In September, Bobby Jindal called Trump “a madman.” Two weeks ago came reports of an attempt to lure Mitt Romney into the race. Candidate Jim Gilmore and advisers to candidates Bush and Marco Rubio have dubbed Trump a fascist. Trump, complains the dwindling coven of grownups on the right, is doing serious damage to the Republican “brand.”

Which he is. But it is difficult to feel sorry for the GOP. After all, it has brought this upon itself.

Keeping the customer satisfied, giving the people what they want, is the fundament of sound business. More effectively than anyone in recent memory, Trump has transferred that principle to politics. Problem is, it turns out that what a large portion of the Republican faithful wants is racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, the validation of unrealistic fears and the promise of quick fixes to complex problems.

That’s hardly shocking. This is what the party establishment has trained them to want, what it has fed them for years. But it has done so in measured tones and coded language that preserved the fiction of deniability. Trump’s innovation is his increasingly-apparent lack of interest in deniability. Like other great demagogues — George Wallace, Joe McCarthy, Huey Long, Charles Coughlin — his appeal has been in the fact that he is blunt, unfiltered, anti-intellectual, full-throated and unapologetic. And one in three Republicans are eating it up like candy.

Mind you, this is after the so-called 2013 “autopsy” wherein the GOP cautioned itself to turn from its angry, monoracial appeal. Two years later, it doubles down on that appeal instead.

And though candidate Trump would be a disaster for the Republicans, he would also be one for the nation, effectively rendering ours a one-party system. But maybe that’s the wake-up call some of us require to end this dangerous flirtation with extremism.

“You got to give the people what they want,” says an old song. Truth is, sometimes it’s better if you don’t.

Jeb Bush: Trump not a 'serious candidate'

Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush says rival Donald Trump is “uninformed” and “scary,” again questioning the billionaire real estate mogul's fitness to be commander in chief.

In an interview airing Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the former Florida governor cited Trump's evolving stance on Syrian refugees and fighting the Islamic State.

“Look, I just think he's uninformed,” Bush said. “The simple fact is that he's been wrong on Syria and on the refugees pretty consistently. And no one's holding him to account. He first said we had no interest in being involved in Syria. And then he said let the Russians take out ISIS. And then he said let ISIS take out [Syrian President Bashar] Assad. Back and forth it goes. And the net effect of this is in these really serious times he's not a serious leader.”

Bush, who Trump has repeatedly assailed as being “low-energy,” did praise the Republican front-runner’s media strategy, saying he's played reporters “like a fiddle...by saying outrageous things and garnering attention.”

The former Florida governor also called Trump “smart” and reiterated his pledge to support the eventual GOP presidential nominee. That said, Bush said he’s confident that Trump will eventually fade.

"Anybody is better than Hillary Clinton. Let me just be clear about that," Bush said. "But I have great doubts about Donald Trump's ability to be commander in chief. I really do."

“I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt to see how the campaign unfolded. But if you listen to him talk, it's kind of scary to be honest with you, because he's not a serious candidate,” Bush said. “He doesn't talk about the issues at hand that are of national security importance for our country. To keep us safe is the first priority of the president. And he's all over the map, misinformed at best and praying on people's fears at worst.”

“I'll let the voters decide about Donald Trump,” Bush added. “I'm pretty confident that the more they hear of him the less likely he's going to get the Republican nomination."

You know how it is with statistics. You can always make the numbers work to tell the story you want to tell.

If you look only at interracial violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault), that percentage is right on.

“Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.”

If you limit the scope to murder, blacks commit 66% of all interracial murders. And they're 13% of the population.

Question: Doesn't anybody from that family of effete smiling incompetent airheads have anything to do but aspire to be president from the age of three? At the chronological age of 25 they are at the mental age of six.

Everybody in the Bush Family Dynasty are raised with aristocratic expectations of entitlement to high public office. They are Establishment Blue Bloods with shady connections that date back for generations.

I am no fan of Trump,but this is nothing more than an example of partisan slander by highlighting and exaggerating his faults (which need no exaggeration!" and totally ignoring the same and even worse by the Dims.

Given that he is a reporter from Miami,I am guessing he is a HUGE fan of His and Her Panic immigration,both legal and illegal.

Why is democracy held in such high esteem when it’s the enemy of the minority and makes all rights relative to the dictates of the majority? (Ron Paul,2012)

American Indians had open borders. Look at how well that worked out for them.

Ghetto trashing the country - world with ... mud hut economics - morals --- is ok !

If you ... don't use exclamation points --- you should't be typeing ! Commas - semicolons - question marks are for girlie boys !

And by the time they reach 50, they have progressed to the mental age of six & one half.

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” - George S. Patton

Are you kidding, Willie Boy? The Drats have placed and kept their constituancy on the plantation for decades by giving, or at least promising to give, them the store - i.e. money for nothin' and the chicks are free. Yes, we will just take it away from Whitey and pass the savings on to you, my dear, loyal useful idiots.

"“You got to give the people what they want,” says an old song. Truth is, sometimes it’s better if you don’t."