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Showing posts with label Rolling Stone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rolling Stone. Show all posts

Saturday, August 22, 2015

Stupid And Ugly

I was all set to write a piece about Donald Trump and how it's entirely possible that he could: a) win the GOP nomination and b) win the presidency. Of course, that's the emotional side of my brain working, not the rational and more cold side. It's being a cynic. He would not be able to break the Democratic wall of 246 given his comments about Hispanics and women that any Democratic nominee would win.

But Matt Taibbi's recent article in Rolling Stone more or less beat me to it. Quite accurately, he describes the Trump voter and more.

People are tired of rules and tired of having to pay lip service to decorum. They want to stop having to watch what they say and think and just get "crazy," as Thomas Friedman would put it. Trump's campaign is giving people permission to do just that. It's hard to say this word in conjunction with such a sexually unappealing person, but his message is a powerful aphrodisiac. Fuck everything, fuck everyone. Fuck immigrants and fuck their filthy lice-ridden kids. And fuck you if you don't like me saying so. 

Those of us who think polls and primaries and debates are any match for that are pretty naive. America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now the stupid wants out of its cage, and Trump is urging it on. There are a lot of ways this can go wrong, no matter who wins in 2016.

The cynic in me agrees with him yet I think he's putting this stuff out there to shock people into reality. Imagine how our country would be viewed around the world if Trump were president. We'd lose a great deal of respect and our enemies would run the table on someone so naive. In so many ways, Trump is the adolescent that is illustrative of the GOP base today.

A higher level analysis shows that the GOP is doing the same things to themselves they did in 2012. They are going as insane as insane dictates to win a primary filled with anger, hate filled fear mongers that are completely irrational. It didn't work in the general last election and it won't work now.