What's below rock bottom?

You have to admit that Republicans are classy, don't you? They really know how to uphold the dignity of the office of President of the United States - you know, just the most powerful nation on Earth.

What's below rock bottom? Rock bottom doesn't exist, apparently. At least, every time I think the Republicans have hit rock bottom, they sink even lower.

Provocation is a feature, not a bug

Josh Marshall at TPM is a smart guy and he's been observing our political system closely for some time. I've posted his commentary before, and he's always worth listening to.

Here he explains how the dynamic driving Trump's candidacy is all about his target audience, and why it's not likely to work as well in the general election (though he could still win, of course):

The key to understanding the Trump phenomenon - his ability to do all these things and pay no price - is that it has very little to do with Trump and almost everything to do with the portion of the electorate he is currently operating. The current Republican party is built in large part on roughly 25% to 30% of the voting electorate which is radicalized and revanchist - a topic I discussed here. We can think about the the nature of Trump's appeal in three basic ways.

First is simple political substance. TPM Readers are entirely familiar with that the fact that a large segment of the American right is animated by a belief that 'their' world, their America is being taken away from them - this includes everything from declining white racial dominance, having to choose whether you want to hear the phone tree message in English or Spanish, changing cultural mores. The whole package. This is the essence of Trump's campaign - beating back the external threat - the harsh anti-immigrant policies, Muslim bans, flirting with white supremacists, etc. This is the most visible and literal part of Trump's appeal.

Second is the appeal to power and force. Trump is the master of GOP 'dominance politics', the intrinsic appeal of power and the ability to dominate others. All of this has an intrinsic appeal to America's authoritarian right, especially in a climate of perceived threat, which has been growing over the last two decades - something political scientists are now catching on to. We might think of this as the embodiment and acting out of the policy drives noted above. The phenomenon of the imperiled, resentment right is something you're well familiar with if you're a close observer of American politics, certainly if you're a regular reader of TPM. ...

The third factor is I think the least obvious but for these purposes the most important. On the radicalized, revanchist right, provocation and transgression of norms isn't simply indulged. It functions as a positive good. It is a feature, not a bug, to use the tech phrase. What the mainstream electorate might view as an 'outrage' is actually signal of the willingness to tear down a corrupt order that is unwilling (Democrats and elites) or unable (RINOs, mainstream GOP) to turn back the tide of threat. So whether or not you think it's a good idea to kill terrorists families, saying you will is a signal that you won't accept limits. How can Trump break all the rules and pay no price? What's his magic? Changing your positions, obviously lying, taunting enemies - none of these hurt Trump because his core supporters are not seeing them through the same prism you likely are. They're not signs of deception, bad character or untrustworthiness. They all signal a refusal to accept the norms of the threatening order and thus a willingness to overturn it.

To put this more simply, you're being too literal. While the Trump movement is heavily tinged by racial backlash, it's not like all Trump backers would embrace outright white nationalists. But that's not the point. Provocation is a feature, not a bug. But this isn't how the great majority of the American public approaches the world or our national politics. Indeed, the divide is what's tearing the GOP in half at the moment. Because it's a very big chunk of the Republican party. To put this concretely, most Democrats will never support Trump for simple policy reasons, even if there are segments of the Democratic coalition that might. But what we are talking about here is a distinction between policy and political mentality, specifically a view of politics based on resentment and desire for revenge. And that operates with a large minority but not close to a majority of the electorate.

Well, I hope not, at least. Certainly, the people whose politics are based on resentment and desire for revenge are the most noticeable right now. They're certainly the loudest.

And Republicans are going to vote for Trump anyway, if he's the nominee. There's no way a large percentage of Republicans will vote Democratic, just because their nominee is a racist, fascist clown.

If racism really bothered them, they probably wouldn't be Republican in the first place. And Republicans tend to be very authoritarian, even if not actually fascist. Besides, Americans are polarized, and much of that polarization tends to be along party lines. Even those Republicans who despise Trump are likely to hold their nose and vote for him anyway.

On the Democratic side, resentment and the desire for revenge aren't completely absent, and I've been hearing a lot of angry talk by Bernie Sanders' supporters that they'll vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, if she wins the nomination.

I doubt if that's a significant number of Democrats, but it doesn't have to be. This election, like most of these elections in our polarized country, will be decided on the margins. Most Republicans, and most right-wing leaning voters, will vote Republican. Most Democrats, and most left-leaning voters, will vote Democratic. The result will depend on turnout and on the decisions of a relatively-small group of people who aren't already invested in a particular candidate or political party.

Democrats are notorious for being unreliable voters. Usually, they do vote in presidential elections, at least, which is why Barack Obama has won twice. But this time, if Bernie Sanders loses the nomination,... who knows? (Note that there's no question about Hillary Clinton supporters. I've never heard one of them say that he'd vote Republican, or just not vote at all, if Clinton didn't win the primary.)

Also, how appealing is resentment and the desire for revenge? How angry is the typical American voter? Angry enough to risk destroying our country, just to overthrow the 'establishment' (whoever and whatever you consider the establishment to be)? There are crazy people on the left, too, you know, and Hillary Clinton is nothing if not an establishment candidate.

Maybe Bernie Sanders will win the Democratic primary, but that brings other problems. His young supporters love him, but just how willing will mainstream America be to vote for an atheist socialist Jew (which is exactly how Republican propaganda will describe him, when they turn their well-funded attacks on him)?

The GOP propaganda machine has attacked Hillary Clinton nonstop for two decades now, and she has the scars to prove it. But they haven't even started on Bernie Sanders yet. Mud-slinging does work, you know. That's why they do it.

This is a frightening election. Donald Trump has done that much, at least. Ted Cruz would be at least as bad as president - probably even worse - but he wouldn't worry me nearly as much as a candidate. Even Republicans can't stand Ted Cruz, and he's such an extremist that I can't see him winning a general election.

Donald Trump is a clown, a bigot, and a fascist. He should be a complete joke. But,... we've stopped laughing, haven't we? If Republicans aren't willing to stop him - and they certainly haven't limited themselves to anything else in their desire for political power - America could be back in the 1930s again. Only on the wrong side, this time.

Who's to blame for the KKK?

I see that ridiculous argument online, too. It's the "big lie." There's a kernel of truth in it, but only enough that it needs some explanation.

Of course, liars rely on that. It's far easier just to repeat the lie over and over and over again than to explain why it's a lie,... and to keep on explaining it. It takes a lot less time, too.

At the same time, even if it were true (which, again, it's not), it wouldn't excuse anything. If Republicans are racist, it's not an excuse to say that the Democrats are also racist - even if it were true.

That's how a three-year-old argues. "Well, Bobby does it, too!" That's not an excuse. If I kill someone, will I escape blame if I point out other people who are also murderers? I doubt it.

For more than a century, the South was solidly Democratic. And, yes, the Ku Klux Klan was Democratic, too. They were still racist and still conservative. The KKK was never 'progressive' (admittedly, political issues - and the labels we use - change as time goes on, too).

But the rest of the Democratic Party changed. Finally, they started doing the right thing. This probably started with Franklin D. Roosevelt - or Eleanor Roosevelt, who seems to have persuaded him - when black people were permitted to take part in New Deal programs, instead of just white people.

Then Harry Truman desegregated the military. Even the initial steps towards that almost cost him re-election in 1948, as Strom Thurmond - yes, the future Republican - ran for president on an explicitly segregationist platform and almost won enough votes in the South (which was ordinarily a gimme for the Democrats) to cost Truman the election.

(Chicago Tribune)

Incidentally, that's where this photo comes from. Truman was popular enough that he would have won re-election easily without the racist revolt of southern Democrats. As it was, he barely won. It was a clear warning from the Dixiecrats.

Even then, those Dixiecrats couldn't bring themselves to vote Republican (the 'party of Lincoln,' you know). And our next president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, wasn't any better, from the standpoint of those southern racists. So it wasn't as though they really had an alternative,... yet.

Then came Lyndon B. Johnson and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yes, as Republicans will tell you, many Republicans voted for it,... and those racist Dixiecrats did not. But it was a southern Democrat (Johnson was from Texas) who pushed it through Congress.

President Johnson, and the northern Democrats who supported it, knew that they'd lose the South. They did the right thing, anyway. Say what you will about the Democrats - and their timidity, their fecklessness, their lack of political courage frustrates me to no end, sometimes - this time they did the right thing, knowing that it would hurt them politically.

Republicans reacted with glee. The Republican Party eagerly did the wrong thing, because it would benefit them politically. GOP leaders began their notorious 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists.

It worked great. Southern white racists had an option now. And very, very quickly, the South went from being solidly Democratic to solidly Republican. They were still the same racists, of course. They hadn't changed their minds, just their political party. Strom Thurmond was still the same guy he'd always been.

Well, not entirely, of course. As society changes, even conservatives are dragged along, kicking and screaming all the way. And as a matter of politics, there wasn't much chance of getting segregation restored, anyway (although they were able to maintain effective racial segregation in schools and neighborhoods, even if it had to be disguised a bit).

Besides, those Republican politicians weren't wooing racists for the racists' advantage. They wooed racists for their own political advantage. For the most part, they just threw the racists a bone occasionally, while they used their new political power for what they really wanted to do (primarily, to cut taxes on the rich). It was mostly just rhetoric. It's always easy to say what you want to do, while not planning to actually do it.

In the Reagan years, Lee Atwater explained how it was done. Republicans discovered that racism worked very well in the North, too, as long as they weren't too blatant about it. In the North, they convinced working-class whites to see economics in racial terms, thus getting them to vote against their own best interests. Those were the so-called "Reagan Democrats," and many of them remain in the Republican Party to this day.

As time went on, though, this changed the Republican Party. They'd quickly lost the black vote, of course. And they lost most of the Northeast (except Wall Street, for obvious reasons), which had formerly been the Republican stronghold. Politically, the South more than made up for that, but racism wasn't the only thing the South brought into the Republican Party.

Believe it or not, the Republican Party never used to be anti-science. Indeed, there used to be about as many scientists registered Republican as there were registered Democratic (about 40% in both cases, with the rest Independents). After all, there's no real reason why a scientist wouldn't be conservative economically, socially, or even politically.

But the racists who flooded into the Republican Party were often fundamentalist Christians, too - people who had little respect for science and were frequently antagonistic to it. As time went on, scientists began to leave the GOP, just as those people who had a problem with using racism for political advantage did. Over time, the Republican Party changed - and not in a good way.

The absolute hysteria in the GOP at the election of our first black president really demonstrated how racists had taken over. The fact that so many Republicans still believe that Obama is a Muslim and still believe he wasn't born in America demonstrates both that racism and the faith-based mindset of the GOP base. Evidence means nothing to them. They're simply going to believe what they want to believe, no matter what.

And that leads us to Donald Trump. (And to Ted Cruz as well, of course. Cruz is no better than Trump, not even slightly. It's just that Trump gets all the publicity, since he's so far in the lead.)

Back in Lincoln's time - and for years afterward - the Republican Party was progressive. But not anymore. Of course, it hasn't been progressive for a long, long time. Still, it wasn't particularly racist until Republican leaders saw a political advantage in racism.

For all its faults - and they're legion - the Democratic Party took the high road and did the right thing for America, even when they knew it would hurt them politically. The Republican Party deliberately took the wrong road, cynically taking advantage of racism for political advantage. Decades later, we've got the kind of Republican Party that strategy created.

They brought this on themselves. The crazy, angry, bigoted Republican base didn't happen by accident. That might not have been the original intent of their 'Southern strategy,' but that was the result - not just of the initial 'Southern strategy' but also of the continued use of racism, bigotry, and religious extremism since.

Destroying America, or just destroying the Republican Party?

Believe it or not, these people are running for President of the United States. You know, the most powerful nation on Earth?

"Little Marco"? Of course, that's just standard Trump these days, as they're behaving more like particularly low-class guests on the Jerry Springer Show than candidates for president. (I'm not exaggerating, either. They've actually been arguing about the size of Donald Trump's dick!)

Yeah, that's how juvenile and idiotic it's become. Now, there are real issues here. This is not, actually, a 'reality TV' show, much as that's what Donald Trump and his supporters are making of it. It's real. It's our country. It's America.

The faith-based seem to have lost touch with reality entirely. But then, the Republican Party has been pushing them in that direction - for political and economic reasons - for decades now, hasn't it? You reap what you sow.

And if they were only going to destroy the Republican Party, I wouldn't care. Sure, we need a conservative political party, but we need a rational conservative party. The GOP has become batshit crazy. Sorry, but that's the only way I can describe it. I don't know if sanity is even possible for the Republican Party anymore. And, unfortunately, there's a very real danger that they may destroy America, too.

As bad as Mitt Romney would have been as our president four years ago, that's nothing compared to what we're seeing now. Indeed, even Romney is speaking out against Trump in a truly remarkable way.

Keep in mind that Romney was the Republican candidate for president just four years ago, and this is what he's saying about the current front-runner - and very likely their eventual candidate - this year:

If Donald Trump’s plans were ever implemented, the country would sink into prolonged recession. A few examples. His proposed 35 percent tariff-like penalties would instigate a trade war and that would raise prices for consumers, kill our export jobs and lead entrepreneurs and businesses of all stripes to flee America.

His tax plan in combination with his refusal to reform entitlements and honestly address spending would balloon the deficit and the national debt. So even though Donald Trump has offered very few specific economic plans, what little he has said is enough to know that he would be very bad for American workers and for American families.

But you say, wait, wait, wait, isn’t he a huge business success? Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about? No, he isn’t and no he doesn’t.

Look, his bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who work for them. He inherited his business, he didn’t create it. And whatever happened to Trump Airlines? How about Trump University? And then there’s Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks and Trump Mortgage. A business genius he is not. ...

Now let me turn to national security and the safety of our homes and loved ones. Mr. Trump’s bombast is already alarming the allies and fueling the enmity of our enemies. Insulting all Muslims will keep many of them from fully engaging with us in the urgent fight against ISIS, and for what purpose? Muslim terrorists would only have to lie about their religion to enter the country.

And then what he said about on “60 Minutes”. Did you hear this? It was about Syria and ISIS, and it has to go down as the most ridiculous and dangerous idea of the entire campaign season. Let ISIS take out Assad, he said, and then we can pick up the remnants.

Now, think about that. Let the most dangerous terror organization the world has ever known take over an entire country? This recklessness is recklessness in the extreme. Now, Donald Trump tells us that he is very, very smart. I’m afraid that when it comes to foreign policy he is very, very not smart.

Now, I’m far from the first to conclude that Donald Trump lacks the temperament to be president. After all, this is an individual who mocked a disabled reporter, who attributed a reporter’s questions to her menstrual cycle, who mocked a brilliant rival who happened to be a woman due to her appearance, who bragged about his marital affairs, and who laces his public speeches with vulgarity.

Donald Trump says he admires Vladimir Putin, at the same time he has called George W. Bush a liar. That is a twisted example of evil trumping good.

There is a dark irony in his boasts of his sexual exploits during the Vietnam War. While at the same time, John McCain, whom he has mocked, was imprisoned and tortured.

Dishonesty is Donald Trump’s hallmark. He claimed that he had spoken clearly and boldly against going into Iraq. Wrong. He spoke in favor of invading Iraq. He said he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11. Wrong. He saw no such thing. He imagined it.

He’s not of the temperament of the kind of stable, thoughtful person we need as a leader. His imagination must not be married to real power. ...

Think of Donald Trump’s personal qualities. The bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third grade theatrics. You know, we have long referred to him as “The Donald.” He’s the only person in the entire country to whom we have added an article before his name, and it was not because he had attributes we admired. ...

Mr. Trump is directing our anger for less than noble purposes. He creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants. He calls for the use of torture. He calls for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit First Amendment freedom of the press. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.

Here’s what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the members of the American public for suckers. He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.

His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president and his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.

Mitt Romney is right about that. Of course, he's also a hypocrite, given his own tax policies, the fact that he also inherited his money, his own reluctance to release tax forms (and absolute refusal to release more than the most recent, when he'd already started running for president), etc.

And much of that has been standard in the Republican Party for some years now (for example, the promotion of torture, scapegoating of immigrants, and religious bigotry towards Muslims). Mainstream Republicans have channeled hate, fear, anger, and bigotry for their own political advantage. Now, when it's come alive and they've lost control of the monster they created, they're worried.

Not worried enough, I'd say. Even Romney has refused to say that he won't support Trump, if Trump wins the Republican Party nomination (which he almost certainly will, don't you think?). Yeah, Trump might destroy America, but Republicans will remain loyal to their party anyway, huh?

Still, that speech is astonishing, don't you think? It's not just standard campaign talk. As Josh Marshall at TPM says:

Romney won't ever be able to walk that back. Yes, people dismiss a lot of campaign bluster as 'Well, things get said in the heat of a campaign. blah blah blah.' But you don't ever come back from the kind of things Romney said about Trump today.

And how did Trump respond? Well, he kept it classy, as always:

It was while Trump was reminding everyone that Romney went out of his way to ask for his endorsement four years ago that Trump did what Trump does best, delivering the type of line that’s tailor-made for Twitter and our outrage age. “I could have said, ‘Mitt drop to your knees,’ ” the former reality TV star said to cheers.

Now, it’s impossible to say for certain that the Donald was making a crass blow-job joke—and that’s the point. Like his “wherever” comment about Megyn Kelly last August, or his “schlonged” remark about Hillary Clinton back in December, Trump’s “drop to your knees” wording lends itself easily to a salacious reading while still offering Trump the chance to deny it was his intent.

Yeah, this is the guy who's leading in the Republican nomination for President of the United States (and, incidentally, getting the evangelical Christian vote, too). This is the clown who's turned our system of government into a circus - and a raunchy circus, at that.

None of that is stopping Trump, though. Again, this is the monster the Republican Party created, the monster they've been nurturing for years, the monster they've continually used to gain more political power. You know that's true (despite the best efforts by some Republicans to... wait for it... blame Obama).

So what's all this mean for our country? It's not good, I'll tell you that. Even if Donald Trump loses, it's not good.

I don't know what more I can say about it, I really don't. So I'll just end with this from Josh Marshall at TPM (referring to last night's Republican debate):

You may have noticed that during the debate audience members in the line of sight behind the moderators were giving thumbs ups, making faces or just aping for the cameras like you'd expect to see as a football game or a wrestling match. We've never seen anything like that. The pro-wrestling mania of the Trump rallies is seeping into debates, like a virus spreading through a host body. And I tend to doubt that those people were all Trump supporters. It doesn't matter. Creeping Trumpism is taking over his opponents from within.

The upshot of the last forty eight hours is that the GOP actually seems to be groping its way toward a strategy of doing anything possible to prevent Trump from getting to the convention with 50+% of the delegates. Just what that gets them isn't clear and I don't think they have any idea. They are on the one hand saying he could destroy the party and grievously damage America while still saying they'll probably support him if he's the nominee. (Note that Romney nowhere ruled out eventually supporting Trump.) Still that seems to be the emerging plan. You'll note that Romney wasn't asking anyone to drop out. Quite the contrary. He wants everyone to stay in and use strategic voting to keep Trump from amassing more than half the delegates. With that strategy this debate made perfect sense, a brutal war of attrition meant to grind down an opponent who cannot actually be beaten.

Right now it's Trump vs the stakeholders of the institutional GOP, represented by Rubio, Cruz and Romney in the wings, like two vast armies wheeling around for a decisive combat over a small town or village. Trump's army is clearly stronger, but not unbeatable. Whatever happens, there's no way the village doesn't get brutalized and probably destroyed in the process.

Seth Meyers: the GOP's schoolyard fight

This is getting more and more embarrassing for America, isn't it? And I'm sure it's showing China and the rest of the developing world how badly democracy works.

You know, regarding Donald Trump's proposed libel laws, I've got to point out that Barack Obama would be the richest man in America by now, if they'd been in effect for his term. And Fox 'News' - not to mention talk radio in general - would be bankrupt, huh?

The hate and nonsense debt has come due

Yesterday, I noted how Joe Scarborough asked if this was how the party of Lincoln dies. Today, Josh Marshall at TPM explains what has happened to bring the GOP to this point.

Note that he doesn't talk about the underlying causes of all this. He doesn't mention the Republican Party's notorious "Southern strategy" at all. But he explains what has happened to create this "Trump problem" for the GOP:

It's a build up of what we might call 'hate debt' and 'nonsense debt' that has been growing up for years.

This crystallized for me after the last GOP debate when Trump told Chris Cuomo in a post-debate interview that the IRS might be coming after him because he's a "strong Christian." Set aside for the moment how this unchurched libertine was able to rebrand himself as a "strong Christian." What about the preposterous claim that he is being persecuted by the IRS because he is a devout member of the country's dominant religion? Republicans simply aren't in any position to criticize this ludicrous claim because they have spent years telling their voters that this sort of thing happens all the time - to Christians, conservatives, everyone the liberals at the IRS hate. And this, of course, is just one example of hate and nonsense debt coming due. Shift gears now and they're "RINOs."

Take Trump's plan to deport 11 million people living in the US illegally or build the planned Trump Taj MaWall. As John Kasich has futilely tried to explain in debate after debate, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, this is simply never going to happen. Such an effort would be more on the order of a post-War World II population transfer than anything remotely like a conventional immigration enforcement action, costing probably hundreds of billions of dollars and perhaps even constituting something approaching a war crime. As for the Wall, of course, in the real world net immigration across the US-Mexico border has actually gone into reverse in recent years. More are leaving than coming. But in the Republican/Fox news world, hordes of feral Mexicans are still streaming across the Southern border - them and a layering of ISIS death squads who fly from Ankara to Belize and then walk to the Arizona border.

But this is just the hate and nonsense debt coming due from 2013. You can either let the status quo go on or you can devise a way to regularize at least the majority of people who are here illegally. There's no other option. Unless you just want to say 'No Amnesty' and pretend the problem will go away with 'self-deportation' or some other such nonsense. And that of course is precisely what Republican congressional leaders did. All Trump did was say openly, clearly, more coherently what Republicans were already saying themselves, while also saying out of the sides of their mouths that somehow they'd get to the mass deportation later.

The truth is virtually Trump's entire campaign is built on stuff just like this, whether it's about mass deportation, race, the persecution of Christians, Obamacare, the coming debt crisis and a million other things. At the last debate, Trump got pressed on his completely ludicrous tax cut plan. He eventually said growth (which if you calculate it would need to be something like 20% annual growth on average) would take care of the huge budget shortfall it created. But Republicans can't really dispute this point since all of Republican campaign economics is based on precisely the same argument. What about Obamacare? Can Marco "Establishment" Rubio really get traction attacking Trump for having no specific plan to replace Obamacare when Republicans have spent the last five years repeatedly voting to repeal Obamacare without ever specifying a plan to replace it with? On each of these fronts, the slow accumulation of nonsense and paranoia - 'debt' to use our metaphor - built into a massive trap door under the notional GOP leadership with a lever that a canny huckster like Trump could come in and pull pretty much whenever. This is the downside of building party identity around a package of calculated nonsense and comically unrealizable goals.

There's more, of course, but that's a pretty significant excerpt. I like the metaphor (which, if you read the entire column, is actually about computer programming).

This won't be a trap for the Republican Party if they win the election, though. They're upset now because they think that Trump won't have a chance (and, admittedly, because Trump is such a loose cannon that they have no idea what he might do).

But this is the same party that used - and still uses - racism for political advantage. Do you really think they'll have any ethical concerns about Donald Trump? No, they'll certainly end up on board with Trump if he ends up as their nominee. And so will most Republicans, I suspect.

Plus, I've already heard young Bernie Sanders supporters say that Trump would be better than Hillary Clinton. It might just be talk, and it's probably just a small number of complete idiots anyway, but... who knows?

I can't help but remember that George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004 after we already knew what a complete disaster he was for our country. After that, I've had zero confidence in the American public. And the off-year elections in 2010 and 2014 bore that out, don't you think? Both because of the people who voted Republican and the people who let the Republicans win because they couldn't be bothered to vote at all.

This is like sitting in a courtroom, charged with a crime you did not commit, and wondering what kind of jury you've ended up with to decide your fate...

Is this how the party of Lincoln dies?

I don't like Joe Scarborough very much. In fact, I disagree with this former Republican congressman and current cable TV/talk radio host about most things.

But I certainly agree with his latest remarks about Donald Trump's refusal to distance himself from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists:

...MSNBC host Joe Scarborough asked if "this is how the party of Abraham Lincoln dies," in a column for the Washington Post on Monday.

Scarborough, who has been repeatedly criticized for his apparent on-air coziness with Trump, wanted to know how the billionaire real estate mogul couldn't know who Duke was.

"The first question is why would Trump pretend to be so ignorant of American history that he refused to pass judgment on the Ku Klux Klan before receiving additional information?" he asked. "What kind of facts could possibly mitigate a century of sins committed by a violent hate group whose racist crimes terrorized Americans and placed a shameful blot on this nation’s history?"

Trump has repeatedly bragged about having the "world's greatest memory" so it's hard to believe Trump doesn't know what the KKK stands for, he wrote.

"The harsher reality is that the next GOP nominee will be a man who refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan and one of its most infamous Grand Wizards when telling the ugly truth wouldn’t have cost him a single vote," Scarborough said.

He concluded: "So is this how the party of Abraham Lincoln dies?"

During his Monday morning broadcast, Scarborough said Trump's supposed lack of knowledge of Duke and the KKK were "disqualifying."

He's wrong about one thing. Today's Republican Party is no longer "the party of Abraham Lincoln." The GOP abandoned Abraham Lincoln - and any claim to his name - when they adopted their 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists.

The whole point of that strategy was to take the South - all of those racist Dixiecrats who'd been solidly Democratic since the slave-owning days of Lincoln - from the Democrats. It worked, too. It worked remarkably well.

Politically, it was hugely successful. The GOP attracted a lot of northern racists, too, especially when they managed to convince working-class whites to see economic issues in terms of race (thus getting their support for tax cuts for the rich).

And have you seen the absolute hysteria since the election of our first black president? The Republican party is no longer the party of Lincoln. Donald Trump is just a symptom of that, not the cause.

Still, he's a pretty remarkable symptom, don't you think? Can you imagine a candidate for President of the United States needing to think about it for awhile before repudiating the Ku Klux Klan, needing to think about it before rejecting the support of white supremacists?

Of course, what that means is that his supporters will understand, when Trump eventually came out against white supremacy, that he was forced into it by 'political correctness' and the 'liberal media.' His delay will make that perfectly clear.

So now, Trump can claim that he (eventually) made the right decision, while racists will remain convinced that he actually agrees with them. It's just that that hated political correctness forced him to say otherwise. That's a winning argument in the Republican Party. And it might even work for the general electorate - or, at least, the especially clueless among us.

Joe Scarborough said something else about Trump in his broadcast this morning:

“I mean is he really so stupid that he thinks Southerners aren’t offended by the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke? Is he really so ignorant of Southern voters that he thinks this is the way to their heart — to go neutral, to play Switzerland when you’re talking about the Klan?"

Hmm,... will Southern white Republicans really be offended by this? I don't know. These people were wooed into the Republican Party in the first place by racism. But let's just see how much support Donald Trump loses from this, shall we?

If he loses any support at all...


PS. Here's Joe Scarborough's editorial in the Washington Post. It's short, but in some ways, it's even better than as excerpted above. For example, he also says this:

The day I hung up on Donald Trump, I asked on air, “Is this what Germany looked like in 1933?” Later, I warned Republicans that Trump’s rhetoric could lead to a brokered convention where “the party will kill itself.” But it looks like I overestimated primary voters in the early GOP contests. A brokered convention is now just the fantasy of Republican elites and Marco Rubio fans.

Yes. Just imagine that. He compared his fellow Republicans to the Nazis and ended up overestimating them. How often does that happen?


PPS. Rachel Maddow also has an editorial in the Washington Post. She talks about the white supremacists who've been making robocalls for Donald Trump. Then, she continues:

The racist American Freedom Party is technically running its own candidate for president on a “Stop White Genocide” ticket, but its heart is clearly with Trump. A statement from the group announcing that first round of racist robocalls in Iowa called Trump “The Great White Hope.”

Before the first votes were cast this year, Trump’s candidacy was also being hailed and welcomed by the American Nazi Party, the KKK-affiliated “Knights Party,” the skinhead and neo-Nazi online forum “The Daily Stormer” and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.

Duke started praising Trump on his radio show during the summer, saying that Trump’s campaign was doing “some incredibly great things,” but he stopped short of fully endorsing Trump’s candidacy. Now, Duke is overtly calling on his supporters to join the Trump campaign: “Voting against Donald Trump at this point, is really treason to your heritage. . . . I am telling you that it is your job now to get active. Get off your duff. Get off your rear-end that’s getting fatter and fatter for many of you every day on your chairs. When this show’s over, go out, call the Republican Party, but call Donald Trump’s headquarters, volunteer. They’re screaming for volunteers. Go in there, you’re gonna meet people who are going to have the same kind of mind-set that you have.”

Call the Republican Party, call Donald Trump's campaign headquarters, and there you'll find people with the "same kind of mind-set" as KKK members. Yup, I guess so.

Donald Trump could have repudiated this - I mean, clearly repudiated this, right from the start. He didn't. He made it clear - to these white supremacists, at least - that he welcomed their support. He has, in effect, made it clear that he agrees with them.

You see, the very fact that the 'liberal media' had to pressure Trump to (very reluctantly) repudiate the racists, however half-heartedly, just demonstrates to the racists that Trump agrees with them. As I say, it's just the 'political correctness' - which every right-winger loves to hate - of the 'liberal media' - which they hate even worse - which has forced him to say otherwise.

That's exactly what these racists want to hear.

But this still isn't how the party of Lincoln dies, because the Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln. That died a long time ago.

Make Donald Drumpf again

John Oliver just gets better and better, doesn't he?

Oh, and here's DonaldJDrumpf.com. In fact, I just bought a cap. :)

Autism causes vaccines

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

Heh, heh. I don't know. I just thought this was funny.

Seth Meyers: Trump's South Carolina win

And here's Seth Meyers. Great, isn't he?

Being an atheist doesn't mean that you're rational

Perhaps I should have used the full title? Being an atheist doesn't necessarily mean that you're rational.

Either way, this is a great video - a bit depressing perhaps, but only because people remain people. No, people aren't getting worse. It's just that the crazies can easily find a soapbox - and an audience - these days.

But the solution to problems of free speech is more speech. This video is excellent, isn't it?

John Oliver: abortion laws

John Oliver has been off the air for a couple of months or so. I've missed him. Oh, I've never actually watched his entire show, but I've certainly missed these video clips. He does a great job, doesn't he?

John Oliver makes me miss Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert a little less. Well, maybe not much less. But he's definitely their spiritual successor, wouldn't you agree?

(Yes, I know that Stephen Colbert is still on the air, but his new show isn't anywhere near as good as the Colbert Report used to be. Right now, I'd say that John Oliver is the best at this sort of thing, followed by Seth Meyers. I watch Trevor Noah and Larry Wilmore, too, and I enjoy both of them, but I've still got to give the nod to Oliver and Meyers.)

Duh! Of course it's about race!

(Jim Morin)

As TPM points out, this latest snub is the ultimate attempt by Republicans to delegitimize our first black president:

"I'm amused when I hear people who claim to be strict interpreters of the Constitution suddenly reading into it a whole series of provisions that are not there," Obama said.

But in the blatant declaration that Obama should not even put forward a new Supreme Court nominee to fill the vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia's death, Republicans are continuing to delegitimize a president that they have long sought to undercut. Many observers view the Supreme Court emerging drama in the Senate as the pinnacle of the drawn out, deep-seated and racially tinged effort to block America's first black president from leaving a lasting legacy on the country that elected him twice.

Obama's presidency has been marked repeatedly by moments where opponents have sought to define him as "other." As recently as September 2015, 43 percent of Republican voters still believed Obama was Muslim despite Obama's strong and consistent public affirmations of his Christian faith. Twenty percent of Americans still thought Obama had been born outside of the United States despite the fact that the president has publicly turned over his birth certificate identifying that he was born in Hawaii. [Funny, but Ted Cruz was not born in America, and neither was John McCain. Neither of those facts tended to bother the 'birthers,' though.]

"Clearly, you have an element in the Republican Party who is very uncomfortable with diversity in this country," says Cornell Belcher, the president of Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies and a former pollster for both the Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign.

Some congressional actions against Obama have been blatantly demeaning and disrespectful, from the time Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) screamed "you lie" in a visceral outburst at Obama as he delivered a health care address before Congress in 2009 or the time Rep. Steve King said in 2008 before Obama was even elected that that if Barack "Hussein" Obama won the White House, terrorists "would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11."

Earlier this month, the Senate and House budget committees broke with decades-old tradition and decided not to invite the president's budget director to testify before their respective committees about the president's budget, a move that one senior staffer to a Congressional Black Caucus member concluded came "from a dark place."

The Supreme Court fight has resurfaced uncomfortable and troubling questions about the nature of the opposition to Obama and the willingness of his opponents to defy norms and conventions that previous presidents were accorded.

"Reagan appointed someone to the court in his last year, LBJ did the same thing," says Michael Eric Dyson," a scholar and author of The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race. "Why was it legitimate for those men in an earlier epoch, but not Barack Obama? How can we conclude anything but race?"

Of course it's about race. It always was. This has been unprecedented in American history, from the very start of Barack Obama's first term, because a black president was also unprecedented in our nation's history. Many racists will simply not accept a black man in the White House, no matter what. (That includes racists who would indignantly deny being racist, too.)

Indeed, this began even before Barack Obama took office for his first term. Before Obama had proposed anything at all, Republican leaders met and agreed to oppose whatever he wanted, no matter what it would be. And they held to that, even when the Democrats adopted the Republican plan for health care reform.

Can you imagine that, for any other president, for any white president? How about when America was at war? How about when America was fighting two wars, and while our economy was also collapsing in the worst economic crash since the Great Depression? How about at a time of national crisis?

It's absolutely unbelievable that any political party would have done that to a white president, and it's even more unbelievable that they would have gotten away with it, if they'd tried. At any time, let alone at a time of national crisis! Can you imagine the uproar - from the media and the public alike - if Obama had been white?

Can you imagine the reaction if the Democrats had done that to George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan? It wouldn't have happened. Period. Of course this has been about race. The very lies that Republicans spread about Barack Obama are only tolerated, let alone believed, because the president is black.

Oh, sure, they'd lie about any Democrat. Certainly, they'd oppose any Democrat. But the extent to which the Republican Party has sought to delegitimize this president is unprecedented in American history. They don't just oppose him. They're encouraging their supporters to think of Obama as not really a legitimate President of the United States at all.

Don't you know that he's not really the president, because ACORN stole both elections for him? Don't you know that he's really Kenyan, and not really an American at all? Don't you know that he's actually working with his fellow Muslim terrorists, and not really for America? All of this, and more, is said about our first black president in an attempt to delegitimize him. He's not really the president, you see, not really an American at all.

That wouldn't even be attempted if Obama were white. Certainly, it wouldn't work. Even Republicans aren't dumb enough, most of them, to believe the lies they spread about Barack Obama - and Michelle Obama, too, I'm sorry to say - if they'd been white.

And from the very beginning, the disrespect they've shown to the President of the United States would not have been tolerated - not even within the GOP itself - if the president had been a white man, certainly not without the president actually doing something to merit it.

This has to end. America has to decide, once and for all, to move forward, rather than back. To be honest, I don't really care who wins the Democratic nomination for president. But we have got to elect another Democrat - especially given the situation in our Supreme Court - if we want America to survive and thrive in the 21st Century.

The Republican Party's notorious 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists was hugely successful, politically, and they've used that power to do a great deal of damage to our country in recent decades. But it has to stop. We have to become better than that.

The Republican Party has done this to itself. It can't win, not with these kinds of tactics. America, as we know it, will not survive if we keep heading further down that terrible path.

(Raging Pencils)

John Oliver: Voting

This is about one thing: suppressing the vote. In particular, it's about suppressing the minority vote and the poor vote. It's about suppressing the vote of Democratic-leaning American citizens. Period.

There are lots of bullshit comments about this video. "Everyone should have an ID." Irrelevant. "IDs are easy to get." Not everywhere. Indeed, Republican politicians are simultaneously closing offices and otherwise making it harder, not easier, for Democratic-leaning citizens to get an ID.

Are you worried about fraud? Why? For two decades, Republicans have searched desperately for evidence of in-person voting fraud, without finding any. At the same time, this solution to a nonexistent problem will likely disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of American citizens. At the very least, it will discourage voting, and our voter turnout is disgraceful, already.

Face it, no one would commit fraud this way. It would be completely asinine - not accomplishing anything, while risking jail time and fines, both. Plus, it would be very, very easy to determine if fraud had occurred, since there's a record of everyone who votes. If in-person voting fraud was a thing, it would be quite easy to demonstrate it.

No, if you really wanted to commit fraud, there are much better ways to go about it - ways that these voter-suppression laws wouldn't affect at all. Heck, at the very least, there's absentee voting. Of course, that would have no effect either, and would be equally easy to discover, but it would still be far more likely than in-person voting fraud.

No, forget all those desperate arguments, and just look at the results. Republicans know as well as anyone that in-person voter fraud is a nonexistent problem, but that these laws have the potential to hugely impact voter turnout among Democrats - not everywhere, but in many states. That's why they do it.

This isn't about voter fraud. It's an attempt to keep some Democrats from voting. Period.

Fact-checking Ted Cruz's climate denial

Ted Cruz lied. Surprise, surprise, huh?

But I was quite impressed by the clever way this video clip demonstrated that.

Best candidate money can buy?

(Chan Lowe)

Charles M. Blow calls Marco Rubio "a too-slick-to-be-trusted stripling who oozes ambition with every obviously rehearsed response." And Chris Christie hammered Rubio in last night's debate for being "scripted" by his handlers (which Rubio then demonstrated to the audience by continuing to repeat his prepared soundbite three more times).

But that's not what bothers me the most about Rubio. What bothers me the most is that he's pretty much owned by billionaire Norman Braman.

He has bankrolled Mr. Rubio’s campaigns. He has financed Mr. Rubio’s legislative agenda. And, at the same time, he has subsidized Mr. Rubio’s personal finances, as the rising politician and his wife grappled with heavy debt and big swings in their income. ...

A detailed review of their relationship shows that Mr. Braman, 82, has left few corners of Mr. Rubio’s world untouched. He hired Mr. Rubio, then a Senate candidate, as a lawyer; employed his wife to advise the Braman family’s philanthropic foundation; helped cover the cost of Mr. Rubio’s salary as an instructor at a Miami college; and gave Mr. Rubio access to his private plane.

The money has flowed both ways. Mr. Rubio has steered taxpayer funds to Mr. Braman’s favored causes, successfully pushing for an $80 million state grant to finance a genomics center at a private university and securing $5 million for cancer research at a Miami institute for which Mr. Braman is a major donor.

Even in an era dominated by super-wealthy donors, Mr. Braman stands out, given how integral he has been not only to Mr. Rubio’s political aspirations but also to his personal finances.

Now, there's even more information about that teaching job:

Marco Rubio has received plenty of attention - and criticism - for skipping Senate hearings and votes as he campaigns for his White House bid.

But this isn't the first job where Rubio has taken heat for failing to go all in. Documents and records obtained by NBC News suggest that as a visiting professor at Florida International University, he worked less than 10 hours a week and missed three-in-10 classes during his first semester of teaching - all while making more than most part-time visiting professors. ...

For that, he would earn $69,000 ...

Yes, Rubio was paid $69,000 for working less than 10 hours a week and missing three out of ten classes that semester. (And this was at a time of "layoffs and tuition hikes caused by what the university president called 'the most serious budget crisis in our history.'")

Note that he didn't even teach the class by himself. His "longtime friend and pollster Dario Moreno" taught the class with him, and by Moreno's own admission, Rubio didn't even have to grade papers. (If you're a teacher, or you know a teacher, you should know what a huge deal that is.)

So why did the golden boy get such benefits? Well,... maybe because his billionaire backer, Norman Braman, gave $100,000 to the school?

Norman Braman owns Marco Rubio. His money is everywhere in Rubio's life, both his private life (and his wife's) and his public life.

I know that the five Republicans on our Supreme Court have declared that "money is speech," but this guy owns a U.S. Senator and a guy who might well become President of the United States. Certainly, if he does become president, that will be almost entirely a result of Braman's money (which not only bankrolled Rubio's U.S. Senate campaign, but started his political career in the Florida state legislature, too).

This isn't particularly unusual. Now that we've sold our country to the highest bidder, billionaire sugar-daddies are common in the Republican Party. Sheldon Adelson almost single-handedly kept Newt Gingrich in the presidential race in 2012, and Foster Friess did the same thing for Rick Santorum.

Other billionaires are bankrolling their own candidates, or pooling their money into Super PACs. But even for Republicans, the extent to which Braman's money pervades every aspect of Rubio's public and private life is just astonishing, isn't it?

And I'm sure he's got the best handlers that money can buy. Whether or not that means he can win the presidency is an open question. But if this doesn't work, there's plenty more money out there to try with other candidates.

What have we done to our democracy? Make no mistake, we did it to ourselves. Certainly, we elected the Republican presidents who appointed right-wing ideologues to the Supreme Court.

(OK, maybe we didn't elect George W. Bush in 2000, but we let the election get close enough that the five Republicans on the court could appoint him to that position. And the fact that Republicans were a majority on the court was because of our previous bad decisions in electing presidents.)

Of course, when it comes to presidential candidates, the entire Republican slate is horrible. As Charles Blow points out, the top three finishers in the Iowa caucus were "a much-loathed anti-institutional who has shown a pyromaniac’s predilection for wanting to torch Washington rather than make it work; the real estate developer spouting nativist and even fascist policies with the fervor of a prosperity preacher" and Rubio, scripted and packaged and entirely bought.

What have we done to ourselves?

(Tom Toles)

AronRa interviews Rebecca Vitsmun

Rebecca Vitsmun is always great, isn't she? She's just so sparkling, so funny, so... likable.

The first 15-20 minutes of this is especially good, as she talks about surviving the tornado that destroyed her house (the whole community, in fact) and then being outed as an atheist on national television by Wolf Blitzer.

There's a reason why the video clip of that went viral, and that reason is Rebecca Vitsmun. Watching this, it's easy to see why.

Happy Birthday, Ronald Reagan

(John Darkow)

Today is Ronald Reagan's birthday. Well, if he were still alive, at least. In honor of the occasion, maybe you'd like to read this obituary.

Even at age twelve I could tell that Jimmy Carter was an honest man trying to address complicated issues and Ronald Reagan was a brilcreemed salesman telling people what they wanted to hear. ... I spent the eight years he was in office living in one of those science-fiction movies where everyone is taken over by aliens—I was appalled by how stupid and mean-spirited and repulsive the world was becoming while everyone else in America seemed to agree that things were finally exactly as they should be. The Washington Press corps was so enamored of his down-to-earth charm that they never checked his facts, but if you watched his face when it was at rest, when he wasn’t performing for anyone, you could see him for what he really was—a black-eyed, slit-mouthed, lizard-faced old son-of-a-bitch. He was a bad actor, an informer for McCarthy, and a hired front man for a gang of Texas oilmen, fundamentalist dingbats, and right-wing psychotics out of Dr. Strangelove. He put a genial face on chauvanism, callousness, and greed, and made people feel good about being bigots again. He likened Central American death squads to our founding fathers and called the Taliban “freedom fighters.” His legacy includes the dismantling of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the final dirty win of Management over Labor, the outsourcing of America’s manufacturing base, the embezzlement of almost all the country's wealth by 1% of its citizens, the scapegoating of the poor and black, the War on Drugs, the eviction of schizophrenics into the streets, AIDS, acid rain, Iran-Contra, and, let’s not forget, the corpses of two hundred forty United States Marines. He moved the center of political discourse in this country to somewhere in between Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet. He believed in astrology and Armageddon and didn't know the difference between history and movies; his stories were lies and his jokes were scripted. He was the triumph of image over truth, paving the way for even more vapid spokesmodels like George W. Bush. He was, as everyone agrees, exactly what he appeared to be—nothing. He made me ashamed to be an American.

Yup, that about sums it up.

Oh, and he was elected, at least in part, thanks to the Republican Party's 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists. Remember those famous "Reagan Democrats"? They were working-class white people who'd been persuaded to see economics in racial terms.

Heck, Lee Atwater himself admitted it:

It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Anyway, you can read the rest of that if you want. But here's another perspective on Ronald Reagan:

No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed. ... “You could walk through Ronald Reagan’s deepest thoughts,” a California legislator said, “and not get your ankles wet.”

In all fields of public affairs—from diplomacy to the economy—the president stunned Washington policymakers by how little basic information he commanded. His mind, said the well-disposed Peggy Noonan, was “barren terrain.” Speaking of one far-ranging discussion on the MX missile, the Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, an authority on national defense, reported, “Reagan’s only contribution throughout the entire hour and a half was to interrupt somewhere at midpoint to tell us he’d watched a movie the night before, and he gave us the plot from War Games.” The president “cut ribbons and made speeches. He did these things beautifully,” Congressman Jim Wright of Texas acknowledged. “But he never knew frijoles from pralines about the substantive facts of issues.” Some thought him to be not only ignorant but, in the word of a former CIA director, “stupid.” Clark Clifford called the president an “amiable dunce,” and the usually restrained columnist David Broder wrote, “The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.”

No Democratic adversary would ever constitute as great a peril to the president’s political future, his advisers concluded, as Reagan did himself. Therefore, they protected him by severely restricting situations where he might blurt out a fantasy. ... His secretary of the treasury and later chief of staff said of the president: “Every moment of every public appearance was scheduled, every word scripted, every place where Reagan was expected to stand was chalked with toe marks.” Those manipulations, he added, seemed customary to Reagan, for “he had been learning his lines, composing his facial expressions, hitting his toe marks for half a century.” Each night, before turning in, he took comfort in a shooting schedule for the next day’s television-focused events that was laid out for him at his bedside, just as it had been in Hollywood.

His White House staff found it difficult, often impossible, to get him to stir himself to follow even this rudimentary routine. When he was expected to read briefing papers, he lazed on a couch watching old movies. On the day before a summit meeting with world leaders about the future of the economy, he was given a briefing book. The next morning, his chief of staff asked him why he had not even opened it. “Well, Jim,” the president explained, “The Sound of Music was on last night.”

If I were the kind of guy who'd give up on America (I'm not), I'd say that Ronald Reagan was the beginning of the end for us. He might not have been as disastrous as George W. Bush - and even Bush looks reasonable compared to today's Republican politicians - but this is where we started to go downhill.

Reagan wasn't responsible for everything. He wasn't smart enough for that. But I never understood why he was so popular. With Republicans? Sure. Faith-based people will believe whatever they want to believe, and Reagan was just as shallow as television.

But why he still has a generally good reputation today, I'll never understand.

Elizabeth Warren: America's rigged justice system

This is the person I want to elect President of the United States! Oh, I'll be happy enough with either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. But if I really had my choice, it would be Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

PS. I'm always being told, usually by particularly clueless progressives, that there's no difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties. Look at what Republicans are trying to do in the House of Representatives, as Sen. Warren explains so well, and tell me that.

Hell, look at the plethora of 5 to 4 decisions - disastrous decisions, when all five Republicans have their way - in the Supreme Court and tell me that.

You won't agree with anyone about everything. (I hope not, at least.) But there are huge differences between the parties - and yes, I mean between Hillary Clinton and any Republican, too.

Barack Obama dividing Americans

(Jim Morin)

On Wednesday, Barack Obama visited a mosque:

President Barack Obama said Wednesday he wanted to assure Muslim-Americans that they were an important part of the country’s successes despite the rhetoric coming from some Republican presidential candidates.

Obama delivered his comments in Maryland after meeting with Muslim leaders at the Islamic Society of Baltimore. It marked his first visit to an American mosque as commander-in-chief.

He said that he had two words for Muslim-Americans that he said they don't get to hear often enough: "Thank you," both for keeping the country together and serving their neighbors.

He noted that this is "a time of concern" and "of some fear" for Muslim communities across the United States, attributing some of it to the "inexcusable political rhetoric against Muslim-Americans that has no place in our country."

“We’re one American family and when any part of our family starts to feel separate or second class or targeted it tears at the very fabric of our nation," he said.

"We’re one American family and when any part of our family starts to feel separate or second class or targeted it tears at the very fabric of  our nation."

To Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, that was Obama dividing us, "Always pitting people against each other." Funny, isn't it? It's just like how Barack Obama divided America by being black, I suppose.

Obama should have realized that many Americans hate and fear black people. So why divide us by being black?

Likewise, many Americans hate and fear Muslims, so why divide us by telling American Muslims that they're an equal part of our country, one part of the "American family"? That's just so divisive, isn't it? LOL

Republicans, on the other hand, know how to bring us all together. Like this Republican state representative in New Hampshire:

A Republican state representative in New Hampshire on Wednesday submitted testimony to a state House committee hearing arguing that giving public assistance to Muslims amounts to treason. ...

"Giving public benefits to any person or family that practices Islam is aiding and abetting the enemy. That is treason," [Ken] Weyler wrote in his testimony...

Yeah, why couldn't Barack Obama have united us by calling some Americans - including those who've fought and sometimes died for our country - treasonous and "the enemy," based entirely on their religion?

After all, there's nothing that unites people like religious bigotry, right?

(Mike Peters)