Acting Like a Spoiled Brat, Encouraging Bigotry, Promoting Old Ideas (fit for the dark ages), and Gridlock Government: The GOP and its Frontrunners

Satire?.. [click on image to enlarge]

Things are becoming a bit clearer. The Donald and Hillary seem to be on the inside track to their party's nomination. If I had to vote today, I'd vote for Bernie, because of the issues he's raising. It's a discussion we ought to have had already. He's bringing to mainstream many of the issues the Occupy movement raised just a few years ago.  But, I think Hillary will be a stronger--yes, with many negatives--Democratic candidate in the general election. I'm not sure the country is ready to elect a 75-year old "socialist". Yes, I do think age is a factor, and I think Americans don't know much about socialism yet. We do live in a liberal, social, democracy, but who really knows this?...

The South is, well, the south, whereas a vast majority of whites are conservatives who support the Republican party in similar numbers as blacks the Democrats. However, those who support Trump are almost a different political species. Most are sad the South didn't win the Civil War. They are jingoistic, xenophobic, simplistic low information voters. South Carolina exemplifies their views. In the rest of the country, issues like the economy and jobs, health care, the environment, etc, are high priorities, but in SC the top concern was terrorism!

All Republican candidates are selling fear, ultra-nationalism, religion, saint Reagan, and policies fit for the Dark Ages. But, Trump has managed to combine the lunatic fringe--which in Republican circles is ..normal--and the angry mob that believes the minorities, and the leftist elites have robbed them of greatness. Apparently their attention has been captured by a shining object, more aptly an orange clown who speaks with a third-grade language, insults and bullies anyone he doesn't like, while he deliberately refuses to be more specific as to how he'll assume the role of Vladimir Putin to rule the US.

Here's a leader who may be the presidential nominee of one of the two major political parties and whose rhetoric belongs in the gutter. We should aspire for higher political discourse as a nation. Trump is throwing tinder in the fire stoked by the GOP all these years, and he's popular not because he comes up with new ideas or new extremism--these attributes and attitudes have been already cultivated within the Republican party.

Here's a leader that questioned Obama's birth place and faith. Just a couple days ago, Trump Twitted that Obama would have gone to Scalia's funeral if it were at a mosque!  He knows what he's doing, judging from SC exit polls that showed 73% of Republican voters want to ban all Muslims from the US, among other crazy beliefs.

A recent Daily News cover

Oh, we hear from the media that the "establishment of the Republican party" doesn't like Trump, or Cruz. Why, you may ask... Is this establishment in the mainstream? Well, no! See how the leadership of the GOP has behaved since Obama became president. Sorry, I meant to say, since Obama won the election. Even before he took office, the GOP began to reject everything he stood for regardless of the result of a landslide election. They began to challenge him not only on policy and ideological grounds but on legitimacy grounds too!  And, for good measure, they pinned the great recession on him! Being childish, however, has appeal among at least a third of the American public nowadays.

So, now, like a spoiled child, the Republican leadership pouts about the Supreme Court nomination, arguing that this president should not be allowed to nominate a new justice to the SCOTUS, because, heck, Obama will nominate a liberal. Horrors. But, their faulty memory doesn't recall that in 1991 when Thurgood Marshall, the most liberal justice on the court retired, president Bush (41) gave us Clarence Thomas, one of the most conservative members of the high court. And, when centrist Sandra Day O'Connor retired, Bush (43) gave us another ultra-conservative, Samuel Alito.