The Republican establishment is facing a revolt of its base and the
only solution seems to be a top-down coup against the beast it created…
It is popular for Republican “populists” (read: followers of the Trump
cult of personality) to deride the Republican establishment, though the
actual differences between them is only one of degrees of extremism.
Sean Illing
explained at
Salon in
October that the Republican establishment is “cooked” and “powerless.”
South-of-the-border-phobia was replaced by the debate process which has
now been replaced by Muslim immigration.
And it is not like the establishment has many – if any – viable choices. Cruz, it has been
argued by Matthew Yglesias at
Vox,
is actually more extreme in his positions than Trump, and except for
billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, the establishment
isn’t hurrying to line up behind former golden boy Rubio either.
When Robert Costa and Tom Hamburger wrote at
The Washington Post about a power brokers dinner
on Monday, a firestorm erupted – yes, another one. The root cause,
which is really just a symptom, is that the dinner was hosted by
Priebus, and the topic was to no one’s surprise, Trump. Thus
revealing, says Costa, that the establishment is preparing for a
contested convention.
This probably isn’t a surprise to anybody. Trump has already said
that if he is not treated with respect he will run as an Independent,
regardless of his loyalty pledge. In the words of The Young Turks, the
Republican establishment is
planning a “coup” if the voters pick Trump.
The Republican establishment, then, is facing a revolt of its base
and the only solution seems to be a top-down coup against the beast it
created.
As Costa then
tweeted, this didn’t make Carson very happy:
So Carson has just figured out that the Republican cabal is not about
“We the People.” Took him long enough. Welcome aboard, moron.
If the idea of the establishment launching a coup against its own
base after riling up the base with visions of an anti-Obama coup is
deliciously rich stuff to Democrats, wingnut shrieking heads are outraged.
It is possible by the end of the Republican convention we’ll all be
wondering how the RNC managed to stab itself in the back and throw
itself off Trump Tower three times.
Laura Ingraham joined the circus on the
December 11 edition of Courtside Enertainment Group’s
The Laura Ingraham Show
See, all the brainiacs over at the RNC, all the brainiacs
like Priebus, Dog bless them but they’ve, they all thought they
were going to be so clever and tamping down a populist surge. They spent
so much time trying to figure out a strategy for, in my mind, stopping
the people from having much say over the process. They wanted a strategy
to limit debates. Oh, we can’t have all this infighting. Did you ever
come to think that maybe, maybe the establishment, as long as it doesn’t
listen to the people, is just itching for a fight from the people? Why
not actually work with the people? This is what I do not understand.
They sit behind closed doors, at these fancy restaurants on Capitol
Hill, and then they leak the details to Bob Costa. Because they are
trying to scare off the candidates, trying to get people to drop out to
pave the way for Marco, or for Jeb’s people.
[…]
INGRAHAM: They don’t listen on trade, on immigration, and even on
this issue of limiting people coming into the country. They decide, OK
let’s just demonize Trump, let’s demonize Trump and then we’ll demonize
the whole populist movement, as a bunch of racists, xenophobics,
(inaudible), low information people. They’re all dumb, they’re all
stupid, and we’re going to figure it all out at the convention. And this
piece merely reconfirms what I’ve been thinking for a long time, that
the establishment refuses to listen to the people.
She’s far from alone, as Buchanan’s syndicated column Friday was titled “An Establishment Unhinged”
where he argues in defense of Trump (and here he is talking
about more than the Republican establishment) “that our political-media
establishment is dumb as a box of rocks and leading us down a path to
national suicide.”
Buchanan writes,
Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration “until our
country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,”
Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions.
As all the old hate words — xenophobe, racist, bigot — have lost
their electric charge from overuse, and Trump was being called a fascist
demagogue and compared to Hitler and Mussolini.
The establishment seemed to have become unhinged.
So calling a xenophobe a
xenophobe, and a racist a
racist (he should know) and a bigot a
bigot,
is hate speech, apparently, but calling Mexicans a bunch of rapists and
murderers, and Muslims a bunch of terrorists, is not hate speech.
In fact, Buchanan goes where Trump went, ignoring all the evidence of
domestic terrorism (largely by white, at least nominally 'christian' men
with assault weapons), saying:
Muslims are clearly more susceptible to the siren call of
terrorism, and more likely to be radicalized on the Internet and in
mosques than are 'christians' at cult or Jews at synagogue.
This is not true. As I argued the other day, 'christians' are very susceptible to radicalization, and Fox News is
leading the charge, not that Buchanan hasn’t played his own part over
the years. After all, he was the racist’s candidate of choice for the
presidency back in the day.
Yet though many more Americans have been killed by cult-goers than
by mosque-goers, he claims that this lie he just told “is why we monitor
mosques more closely than cathedrals.”
Clearly, the establishment is not the people who are unhinged, or, in
speaking of the Republican establishment specifically, at least not as
unhinged as the Republican base, it’s demagogic leader, and cheering
section.
If the plan all along was to utterly destroy itself, the Republican
establishment could not have done any better than it has, and without
any help from Democrats (such help seems completely superfluous at this
point).
This is not to say we should let up (we shouldn’t) only that it is a
time-honored precept that one should not interrupt one’s enemy while he
is making a mistake. Or, as is the case here, publicly sodomizing
himself.