The Impending Death of the GOP

One can only hope.

Matt Taibbi delivers quite the preliminary obituary.  Actually a ringing, rollicking prose poem in praise of the idea, in the new Rolling Stone.

The thing I worry about here, is the inevitable zombie remains.  They will continue to shamble around the country for decades, desperately hungry for braaaiinnns... but also horribly allergic to them, as they have been since at least the Hoover administration.  These un-dead will continue the hurt and kill the un-privileged, the un-male, the un-cis, the un-straight, the un-religious (Christian-only, of course), the un-wealthy.  In sum, the vulnerable.  A quicker way to disinfect the country from this plague would be wonderful, but it's probably wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, enjoy:

“If this isn’t the end for the Republican Party, it’ll be a shame. They dominated American political life for 50 years and were never anything but monsters. They bred in their voters the incredible attitude that Republicans were the only people within our borders who raised children, loved their country, died in battle or paid taxes. They even sullied the word “American” by insisting they were the only real ones. They preferred Lubbock to Paris, and their idea of an intellectual was Newt Gingrich. Their leaders, from Ralph Reed to Bill Frist to Tom DeLay to Rick Santorum to Romney and Ryan, were an interminable assembly line of shrieking, witch-hunting celibates, all with the same haircut – the kind of people who thought Iran-Contra was nothing, but would grind the affairs of state to a halt over a blow job or Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube.”

A century ago, the small-town American was Gary Cooper: tough, silent, upright and confident. The modern Republican Party changed that person into a haranguing neurotic who couldn't make it through a dinner without quizzing you about your politics. They destroyed the American character. No hell is hot enough for them. And when Trump came along, they rolled over like the weaklings they've always been, bowing more or less instantly to his parodic show of strength.