Leonard Pitts: "I don't want the Republican Party defeated next week.
"I want it immolated."
http://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/for-gop-defeat-is-not-enough/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=article_left_1.1
Granted, Republicans did not invent paranoia, persecution complexes or reality estrangement. I remember as a child hearing the barbershop regulars spin elaborate theories of how the moon landing was a hoax and Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for a man” actually took place in a New Mexico desert.
It seemed pretty harmless at the time.
The GOP’s innovation was to harness and nurture that craziness for votes. It flattered and wooed the guy in the barbershop — and the woman in the beauty parlor — by taking them seriously. Through its media partners — Fox “News” and talk-radio kingpins from Limbaugh on down — and with the timely arrival of the internet and social media, it gave them support and a megaphone.
In return, it reaped the nigh-nuclear energy of kooks, cranks, outcasts and iconoclasts whose take-no-prisoners anger invigorated a Grand Old Party. But they also pushed that party further and further to the right — past Nixon, past Reagan and the Bushes, past political and intellectual coherence. Past decorum.
Until, finally, the party sold its soul to The Donald.
SNIP
= new reply since forum marked as read
