GOP’s epic trainwreck: Jeb Bush flails and Donald Trump ascends

[Liberal_in_LA]

GOP’s epic trainwreck: Jeb Bush flails and Donald Trump ascends
Republicans like to console themselves by pointing to 2012, when most of the mediocre GOP candidates took a turn running first in the polls. But Donald Trump isn’t Herman Cain.

I’ll admit Trump’s rise, and his persistent lead in the polls, surprises me a little. But it shouldn’t. All the things people think ought to damage him – his attacks on illegal Mexican immigrants and John McCain; his attorney’s claim that marital rape isn’t rape; ugly comments about a breastfeeding attorney – aren’t going to matter to the GOP base. They don’t like immigrants, McCain, feminist talk about “marital rape” or uppity breastfeeding career women.

I suggested Tuesday that Trump might be hurt by attorney Michael Cohen’s bizarre attack on the Daily Beast journalists who unearthed a 1989 Ivana Trump deposition accusing her husband of rape, as well as by his claim that there’s no such crime as marital rape. Indeed, Cohen quickly apologized and Trump moved to distance himself from his close associate and regular campaign surrogate. There was no such reaction to outrage over his comments about McCain or Mexican immigrants. So Trump recognized that he couldn’t brazen through a claim that marital rape doesn’t exist (the attack on journalists wasn’t as big a deal.)

Meanwhile Jeb, the man who was running to save his party from scary guys like Trump, is fading. But maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise, either. It took Bush two weeks to condemn Trump’s remarks about Mexicans who come to this country illegally. He quickly denounced his attacks on John McCain, but he’s been otherwise silent about the threat Trump’s right-wing populism poses to his party and the country. Jeb was supposed to be the guy who was willing “to lose the primary to win the general,” but he hasn’t had the courage, or even the apparent impulse, to go after Trump.
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/30/gops_epic_trainwreck_jeb_bush_flails_and_donald_trump_ascends_as_the_party_goes_further_off_the_rails/

The Republican Party is like an old, ramshackle house long neglected by its owners. A crazy squatter moved in, and now they can’t get him out. For now, anyway, it’s Trump’s house.

[AlinPA]

1. Trump will skyrocket in GOP polls if he starts making racist remarks about all non-white Americans,

and by bashing gay people.

[Generic Other]

2. I read a random internet post

the person said that voting for Trump would be like trolling the United States -- an epic win for LULZ. How many dimbulbs (hopefully non-voting) think like this?

[hifiguy]

3. It's like the end of a Frankenstein movie.

The monster they created is running amok and pulling the burning castle down around their ears.

And they can't leave, because the mob with torches, pitchforks and AK-47s are waiting for them outside.

Delicious.