Because on the one hand, RIGHTEOUS:
And on the other, hopelessly naive:
Republicans ought to focus on doing the right thing: putting up every legitimate roadblock to Trump that they can. Unexpectedly, a key moment in American democracy has snuck up on the GOP. When he denounced Trump, Romney said he wanted to be able to say he’d fought the good fight against a demagogue. That’s the test other Republicans may want to consider.
Action doesn’t mean political chicanery or subterfuge. It doesn’t mean settling for an equally extreme — and perhaps more dangerous — nominee in Ted Cruz. If the party can muster the courage to reject its first-place finisher, rejecting the runner-up should be even easier.
Why?
Why do they have to reject Trump?
Why does this party have to save itself?
I mean it. Nobody has yet been able to answer that question.
AMERICA has to save itself from Trump, but I see no reason why Republicans are under the same obligation. I see no reason why he can’t be the face of the party if that’s what the majority of the party’s voters want now. I see no reason why Cruz can’t be the nominee if he can win the required amount of delegates.
I see no reason why Romney or Ryan (who are just Cruz and Trump in nicer clothes with bigger vocabularies) NEED to be the Republican party’s standard-bearers.
What is the benefit to the rest of America by having Romney or Ryan as the nominee instead of Trump? Or Cruz? What does America get out of it?
Why do we need a polite, not-quite-openly racist, anti-government party in government? What do we get out of having Republicans in charge? At the national level we’ve gotten economic crisis, neverending war, illegal spying, torture, weakening of every kind of business regulation lawmakers get their hands on, steadfast opposition to immigration and reproductive health and clean water and clean air, and as a superfun bonus an empty chair on the Supreme Court for the forseeable future. You’ll pardon me if I don’t implore somebody to dress that up in Hugo Boss and mouth platitudes about God in order to make it palatable.
I see why political commentators and strategists want to maintain the fiction that we need two equally valid and opposing schools of thought in precisely equal measure. If anyone hates learning new lines, it’s these understudies in the play of democracy. So long as there are two parties who both appear to go through the same motions, no one has to take sides and nobody has to be upset.
But I don’t see what bearing that has on people who need jobs and kids who need food and women who need health care and soldiers and sailors and airmen who need to come home from war. America doesn’t need two parties to function as a country (in case you’ve forgotten, one of those parties expressly made sure American WOULDN’T function by shutting down the government twice). America needs duly elected representatives who serve her people’s interests. That’s it. That’s all America needs.
If the Republican party burns itself down in Cleveland, nominates Trump, and we are left with the only viable option as a country to vote against that talking trash heap, we can do that and America will be just fine.
The GOP doesn’t need to save itself from Trump if that’s not what it wants to do. The rest of us need to save America from Trump (and Cruz, and Romney, and Ryan, and all of the chittering insects in R-covered skin suits running for Senate) by defeating him in an election in November.
And if there’s no GOP at the end of it, you tell me one single reason I should give a shit.
A.
*Standing ovation!*
The idea that they need saving is ridiculous. They’re doing well at the Congressional and state level. If anything, the country needs saving from the GOP.
It is possible–although the Globe editorial makes no mention of it–that they’re worried about what fills the power vacuum if the Republican Party collapses over all this. In a way, this is a replay of the 1964 election year–a lot of harrumphing from the elites about what would happen if the Bircherite rabble took over (funny thing, they did take over, under Reagan, and the Republican powers-that-be were really happy about that).
What these supposed Republican moderates (a mythical creature these days, to be sure) still do not want to admit is that this is the result of decades of their own skulduggery, their own calculating manipulation of their party stalwarts’ worst instincts, along with some exceedingly cynical lip service to the same minorities they were simultaneously dogwhistling about to their white base, and all because winning became much more important than governing–something that’s lately becoming all the more apparent at all levels of governance.
I mean, fuck me to tears, the power elite of the party were touting Scott Walker and Jeb Bush as their presumptive standard bearers only a few months ago. Didn’t that give them even a moment’s pause, even a fleeting instant of reflection? No.
If the party’s crumbling, if T.rump is their ascendant public face, well, fuck, whose fault is that? For Bible-thumpers, they damned sure have forgotten their Hosea.
GOP disappears? Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I would be perfectly fine with having the next presidential election be between the Democrats and the Greens, and the GOP and the NRA rotting in prison for their crimes against humanity.