And now the rats are fleeing the ship. We now are hearing the clarion call from some of the most important conservative media that Trump should either play the game according to the rules, or the GOP will find a way to abandon him for its own survival. Sadly for the GOP, the die was cast a long, long time ago. And when they could have gotten rid of the cancer called Donald Trump, they dilly dallied until it was too late to do anything meaningful to stop Trump.
The soul of a political party is tested now and then. The Democrats were tested when Bill Clinton was impeached by the house. No one abandoned him, when he was guilty of a "petty" felony. They were addicted to the money he knew how to bring to his party. The Democrats failed their test, but I'm not sure they could have passed it without tearing the party apart. This season, it's the Republican's turn. And they are failing with no excuse. When political leaders are saying that Trump is a con artist who has no business being president, but they support him anyway in the same breath - this is an example of the ethical and moral bankruptcy of the party. This is a colossal failure with no mitigating factors - and no excuses for their (expected) eventual loss in November.
This is a year where the GOP should have been able to easily win the presidency. All they had to do was stop leaning towards the extreme right, and let Hillary's failings do her in. In a news cycle that just reported that the Clinton Foundation placed a well heeled contributor in an important government security post, Trump kept making an ass out of himself, wasting another good chance to rightfully attack Hillary for "business as usual".
Trump is likely making a bogus claim that his taxes are being audited. I'll bet that he doesn't release his taxes because he'll be shown to be a less than successful businessman who is engaged in many questionable deals. Trump's history in making deals show that he knows how to prosper at the expense of others. I can only imagine if this tendency holds true about a presidential run. After losing miserably, he can set himself up as the ringmaster of another media circus, having a networked radio/TV show available over the air or on the internet, where he'll make more money than he ever did with NBC. He'll continue to claim he was cheated, and people will pay to hear his nonsense.
Where does this leave the GOP? The way I see it, they would be smart to abandon the racist wingnuts in their base, and go back to the honest conservatism of a William Buckley and Barry Goldwater. If they also abandon the evangelicals, they might be a smaller party which fights for survival at first. But they will be free to promote a more coherent and more palatable policy - something that could easily hurt the Democrats if presented by a charismatic leader like Ronald Reagan.
By now, you may be wondering who I'm going to vote for. And I think it will be the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson. In New York, the Democrat running for president almost always wins the state. Since I don't like Hillary, and I am disgusted with Trump, I think it's a safe bet for me to give Johnson the vote - and hope that they get more votes than the GOP this year. If this happens, all political hell will break loose - and maybe, just maybe, the political elite will realize that they have to do something for the rest of us, lest we vote them out....
No comments:
Post a Comment