It's a Wonderful Party

I get it now. Frank Capra is directing our politics. It's 2008 and, having let a skinny black kid with a funny name ascend to the highest office in the land, the GOP is considering political suicide.  The party intends to destroy itself in two ways. First, it will gerrymander Congressional districts so that Republican idiots can win seats by appealing only to other Republican idiots. Second, it will steadfastly refuse to act as the loyal opposition to the aforementioned SBKWTFN. As a result, the party will become politically dysfunctional and ideologically irrelevant.

But the GOP's guardian angel has come to show McConnell, Ryan, et al. how the world would be without it. Eight years of ineffective government, Harry Reid using the Nuclear Option to get lower court judges confirmed, an infrastructure that continues to crumble, and, then the coup de grace - the occupation of the party's empty husk by a snake-oil salesman who has seen the potential of appealing to idiots.

About Trump replacing Obama, wags have been saying that orange is the new black,  But more important, anger is the new savvy.  If you can get the torch and pitchfork crowd to vote for you, you don't need soccer moms.  And you can get the mob to follow you if, in fact, one party has gone off in search of every last vestige of unfairness anywhere in the land, and the other has inexplicably shot itself in every vital organ it could find.

Donald Trump is every sane American's nightmare.  Not just because he is so bad, but because his election was not a fluke.  We don't deserve better.  We applaud the gerrymandering that seems so good for our parties, whichever one is doing it in our name, never thinking that anti-democratic behavior might be, well, bad for democracy.  We believe it's better to bequeath crumbling roads to our kids rather than the obligation to pay for good ones.  We have sequestered the money our military needs. We elected bozos, and now we have a bozo-in-chief.  It's not only he who is uniquely unqualified.  So are we.

Sadly, the GOP does not yet appear to be losing its resolve to do itself in.  Paul Ryan still grits his teeth and says nice things about the usurper.  John McCain still points to the few things Trump's national security team has done right.  (That part of the screenplay needs a rewrite: in addition to the President going off half-cocked on twitter, Mike Flynn should have remained in charge of defense until he could sell us out in a more noticeable way to make the point.) 

Yes, there are straws in the wind - Sen. Corker, for example.  But is the lesson being learned? I suspect not.  In the final reel, Democrats will realize that their apathy and pique made Trump possible.  They will come out to vote and teach the Republicans the lesson that they seem unable to draw from Trump's awfulness.  Whether there are any better angels left in the GOP by then remains to be seen.