Salon: Really, it’s time to shut down the GOP: A deeply unserious party...

[Charles de Gaudless]

...hijacked by lunatics and Fox News, is driving us all into a ditch

Republicans are finally noticing that Donald Trump is a political liability. In the wake of Trump’s attack on John McCain, GOP candidates found the courage to condemn his revolting shtick — a little late, of course, but good for them. The problem, though, is that they don’t quite understand that Trump isn’t an anomaly; he’s the latest product of a party that long ago abandoned any pretense of seriousness.

Trump, quite literally, is an actor; he’s delivering the lines his audience (the Republican base) wants to hear. But he’s not the first of his kind. He’s doing what many Republicans have done in recent years: pretend to run for president in order to promote his personal brand. Trump is playing a role previously filled by people like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann, both of whom, at one point, were front-runners in the race for the Republican nomination. And of course there’s Sarah Palin, the failed reality-TV star and once half-lucid part-time governor of Alaska who Republicans thought capable of running the country.

Everyone (well, almost everyone) acknowledges that Trump is a bloviating clown totally unfit for public office, but is he really that much different than Herman Cain or Sarah Palin? None of these people have any business running for president or vice president or any other office. Bachmann, admittedly, was at least an experienced member of Congress, but her campaign was thoroughly unserious. Like so many of her fellow Republicans, Bachmann became a Pez dispenser of fatuous Fox News talking points – and that’s the problem.

These people exist in the Republican Party for a reason: the GOP sold its soul to Fox News and the broader conservative mediascape years ago. Republicans are now constrained by these forces, which manufacture unhinged, absolutist narratives that dominate discourse in the party. Republicans, as a result, can’t afford to compromise or propose realistic policies – the zealots won’t let them. Worse still, any Republican who dares to step out of line gets pummeled on Fox News for weeks on end. In the face of such pressure, is it any wonder the GOP has become what it has?

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Like Bill Maher said, the Democrats went corporate, and the Republicans went batshit-fucking crazy.

[Hortensis]

1. So agree. How can a white-supremacist core still have such power as one of our 2 major parties?

Amazing. According to Gallop, "the base" is only @42% of GOP/conservative "independents.

The only ones who will either shut down or revive the Grand Old Party now, though, are the more moderate blocks, who supposedly now have started identifying themselves in larger numbers as liberal or moderate either socially or economically. I've only waited 40 years to see that -- and am still waiting. All this time those people have lacked whatever it takes to say no to the extremists and hatemongers they've lain with since the 1980s, accepting and supporting every destructive action like house pets who can't imagine a life without fleas. Without their enabling, the greatly shrunken GOP could not still exist as a powerful bastion of white supremacists dancing on corporate strings.

As for the future form of an organized conservative party, though, the many millions of minority conservatives who lack a major party to call home, some registered as Democrats but most estranged from the political process, just may have something to say about that. I'm looking forward to watching the show, whatever label it emerges under.