Taking Advantage of Calamity

by Deacon Blues

It was just a couple of weeks ago that establishment Republicans were openly (and stupidly) talking about finding every way possible to stop Donald Trump at the GOP convention from getting the party's nomination. Even the liberal media at MSNBC asked how a major political party could openly conspire to deprive Trump the nomination if he came to Cleveland within a hundred delegates of the 1,237 needed to claim the nomination.

And of course such talk by establishment Republicans, out in the open, did lead to several unintended consequences. First, it riled up Trump's supporters even more, to the point that the GOP had to contend with a demand that their convention be an open-carry event. Thank goodness the Secret Service quashed those demands, but can you imagine the visuals the rest of the country would have seen of GOP convention-goers arguing amongst themselves, with their guns in plain sight? What could possibly go wrong?

Second, all the talk about preventing Trump from getting the nomination led him and Ted Cruz to take their debate into the gutter, which is only making voters wretch at the thought either of these slugs could ever be the Commander in Chief. Sure, the core of Trump's base is one part working-class abandonment by establishment Republicans, one part nationalistic and racist fringers, and one part "blame the brown people" victimhood amongst whites stoked by right wing media for the last twenty years. Fast-forward to the days immediately after Cleveland, and ask yourself how the 2016 electorate will view the GOP nominee after a week of rhetoric and behavior more akin to a mob than a major political party? That should be pretty. And don't cry for Republicans; they deserve this train wreck.

My big question is this: how should the Democratic Party and its nominees respond?