“I love Bernie! I’ve donated to his campaign! He’s great!” my super conservative Beltway establishment Republican friend says. “Feel the Bern!!” He texts me with a snicker during all of the Democratic debates. The night of the Iowa Caucus I retaliated, texting, “Cruz! I’m so happy!!” I knew that’d make him cringe.
So while Republicans are swooning over Bernie, I’m obsessed with the GOP field for the same reason I spent a year getting into Real Housewives of Whatever Awful Place: I loathe all the cast members. They’re disgusting, short-sighted narcissists and I just can’t look away.
In the immortal words of Twitter beat poet Donald Trump: They’re all horrible. Total losers.
It boggles the mind to think of all the incompetent, unimaginative, unaccomplished and unintelligent Republicans who decided to sit this one out. One has to praise Michigan Governor Rick Snyder for staying home and merely poisoning his own state instead of the entire country.
Wisconsin is way at the bottom (if not “dead last”) in job growth, and yet college dropout and wet cardboard impersonator Scott Walker still put his hat into the ring. This year Politico ranked Louisiana last in basically everything. Still their twangy “stop being the stupid party” exorcist-in-chief Bobby Jindal thought that’d be a great launching pad for him to be POTUS.
GOP-gadfly and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina ruined a major American company, lost to Barbra Boxer by 10 points, was fired by the McCain/Palin campaign for (wait for it) gaffes, yet she somehow got this idea that what the country really wanted in the White House was a Bizarro Hillary. I mean, Texas Governor Rick Perry, Mr. Oops himself, saw this pathetic clump of corporate-ese spewing militia-kissers and mused, “Even I could win this thing this time!”
But what’s really fun about this election is witnessing the coal-burning “with us, or against us” Nixon-Reagan-Bush Republican machine break down. Like everyone else in 2000 who saw the Brooks Brothers riot take over the country, I thought this “perception is reality” brand of the Bush-Cheney-Rove holy trinity would come back in full force for Jeb. I just assumed. I mean, “Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can’t get fooled again.” Right? But no! Jeb has affluenza, a word someone came up with describing those who are wealthy and yet still pitiful.
Jeb Bush, everyone. Please clap.
Ted Cruz reminds me of the creepy film that develops on the top of mushroom soup. Marco Rubio’s credibility is on par with his personal credit score. Sorry, I’m not buying your plans to defeat ISIS when no one would let you finance a Honda.
So out of this compost pile has grown a monosyllabic, monomaniacal outer-borough sue-happy mutant man-child named Donald Trump. Every day he comes up with a new human right he’d like to violate: Bombing the hell out of civilians being held by ISIS; shuttering Muslim places of worship; killing the families (women and children) of alleged terrorists; or closing the Internet. In the last debate he got an applause break for the war crimes he promised to commit. The Party of Lincoln has devolved into the party cheering for torturing the right people.
Trump won 35 percent in New Hampshire, which means 65 percent of GOP primary voters don’t want him to be their nominee. But he’s still winning! The Republican machine that cut taxes while putting a couple of wars on credit cards, that buckled the economy, that waterboarded innocent people, that sat idle while thousands of Americans died in Hurricane Katrina, that had 9/11 happen on their watch, now can’t save themselves and stop Trump?!
This is fantastic!
Then there’s the delicious irony that because there are so many candidates still running-Trump will continue winning. So because the entire field is flawed and terrible and incapable of honest self-reflection they’re staying in and allowing Trump to sweep. The only way out of this mess is for the field to become selfless, think of the party over their own personal ambitions and drop out, allowing the least horrible candidate who’s not named Trump to win.
Trump is a goiter on the neck of the GOP. He’s sticking out because the party is sick. And they have no one to blame but themselves. (You know, personal responsibility and all.)
Go hate-watch 2016! Go Trump!
Tina Dupuy is a nationally syndicated columnist and host of the podcast, Cultish. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com