They are Shocked, Shocked I tell you!
Posted: January 4, 2012 Filed under: John Birch Society in Charge, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd | Tags: Election, US Politics 51 CommentsI’ve written a lot about my experience watching the Republican party gut support for the ERA, women’s reproductive rights, and eventually mainstream economics, science and rational
thought. I became an unintentional activist in the 1980s when the Nebraska State Chair of the Democratic Party signed me up for a Republican county convention and told me to go fight to keep women’s rights in the Republican Party Platform. Starry-eyed kid that I was, I said that I’d give it a try even though I really wanted to just work on the issues I cared about like the ERA. Every time I wanted to give up, she sent me back in to try again. She told me that nothing good would ever come to the country if both parties weren’t filled with reasonable people.
What I witnessed in the 1980s in Omaha, Nebraska was a series of elections where storefront churches sent women and men into Republican conventions and organizations with little white cards that basically had marching orders and talking points. The women had long, straight, lifeless hair and faces. The wore empire waist, gingham, home made dresses. I came in with my dress for success power suit and my newly minted economics MS. I was no match for what I discovered was Eric Hoffer’s True Believer in the flesh. I’d read that book for a High School English class and thought it only explained Nazis. The fembots read their objections to the ERA and to birth control and abortion access from their cards written by their male pastors with their nodding, smiling husbands at their side. I never considered sisterhood to be universal after that.
By about my second convention, I was being shouted down and called names that I won’t mention here. The Party establishment–mostly members of the Omaha Country Club–represented the city’s business interests, lawyers and doctors. They were completely unprepared for the ruckus. The meme for the decade was that platforms don’t matter. Let them put in whatever they want. They needed the votes for their own agendas. It was implied that all of this was lip service. I left the party quite a few years before Pat Robertson won Iowa but let me tell you I wasn’t surprised. My own run for the unicameral was an eye-opening experience. You’ve never experienced fascism in quite a personal way until you have a campaign run against you from the pulpits of catholic and evangelical churches. Those folks will do and say anything, literally. Forget Stalin, christofascists believe their ends justify the use of any means necessary, and the scary thing is that their neighbors will believe them. It’s nothing less than a crusade of lies, anger and mean.
I’ve been reading The Politics Blog written by Charles P. Pierce at Esquire Magazine with encouragement from SkyDancing reader Ralph. He’s got a great piece up today on how the chickens are coming home to roost for those country club Republicans that really, really want Mitt Romney or some other country club Republican to be likable enough to beat Barack Obama. The powers that be want to gut Frank-Dodd and ensure that we can drill relentlessly in whatever garden of Eden they choose. They are fully aware that independents like me will run from the likes of Santorum and Perry. Rove and his cronies are salivating over the vulnerability of the president. They are also savvy enough to know they are riding in a clown car that they bought and paid for with funds and fundie ass-kissing. They should’ve thought a bit more about the ride before they gave the keys to insane people.
Precisely how many times are we going to be treated to public expressions of mock horror from Important Conservatives that 40 years of allying themselves with nativist hooligans, anti-intellectual crackpots, Christomaniacs, and the sad detritus of American apartheid finally has produced a field of presidential candidates that these same Important Conservatives find less than adequate? Once again, the whole exercise requires both the writer and the reader to ignore the obvious consequences of four decades of political history and conclude that the Republican party has lost its mind only recently. And it requires both the writer and reader to convince themselves that out there, somewhere, is a superior candidate to the ones presently available, and to ignore the obvious conclusion that titans like Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, and Paul Ryan chose not to run because they suspected they might get beaten like gongs, if not by President Obama, then by the wholly unacceptable Willard Romney.
And Bobby Jindal? Just stop, okay? You’re killing me.
(By the way, Politico? Quoting Fred Barnes on anything is the recognized international I Got Nothin’ signal. Quoting Fred Barnes on American politics is the functional equivalent of asking a fruit bat what it thinks about the trade deficit.)
Yes, the stern father is trying to get the keys to the clown car back from people completely dedicated to a crusade to turn the US into something completely disdained by the founders; a theocracy. The delightful Pierce read is a response to this “think” piece at Politico on the batch of wackos and the dull ideal-less Willard that have gone in and come out of Iowa. Not one of them is wholly acceptable to the mishmash of sociopaths associated with today’ Republican party. Some are anathema to the Tea Party. Santorum and Gingrich are the ultimate corrupt, lobbying insiders. Others are not trusted by the christofascist crusaders. The two sane candidates on deck are Mormons and way too reasonable–in the manner of reason that only today’s Republican faithful can define–and way too attached to reality to be acceptable to a group of people who reject modern civilization. Huntsman and Romney can’t be enthusiastically elected in today’s pared down Republican party which requires a pathological detachment from reality. Examine the evidence of Eric Cantor, who went into a state of apoplexy on 60 minutes last week when being told that Ronald Reagan raised taxes 12 times and compromised with Democrats many more times than that.
This is what happens when you sell your souls for votes and unfettered greed. We’re in about the 7th ring of a Republican-made hell right now and the country club dudes want out of their Faustian bargain so they can stay there. Their compadres at the wheel want to go straight to ring 10. We’re living their Divine Comedy with the rich grabbing everything, endless unemployment driving wages down, and absolute lax enforcement of the remaining Nixonian regulation. Yet, they could capture both the Senate and the White House.
Republicans this year find themselves in something of generational slackwater in this election cycle.
There are younger, talented Republicans, such as Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who judged themselves not ready to run for president this time.
There were also a number of potentially formidable Republican governors — Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels — of an older generation who chose for various reasons not to run.
This left Romney not competing against the most promising presidential-level talent this time.
“It’s not like the old days of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan,” said Washington Examiner columnist Michael Barone. “They were all pretty well-known candidates. It’s just sort of a weak field.”
Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes went a step further, asking: “Would Romney be odds-on to win the nomination if Mitch Daniels or Chris Christie or Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush were in the race?
Not likely.”
That doesn’t mean, Barnes and others argued, that Romney couldn’t grow into a more forceful standard-bearer for his party in the process of campaigning against President Barack Obama.
Whoever wrote this piece has never spent any serious time researching Bobby “the exorcist” Jindal who has absolutely gutted our state’s universities and hospitals so that he can say he didn’t increase the number of people on the state’s payroll. They haven’t checked the state’s unemployment rate which has doubled under his watch. They certainly haven’t listened to him speak. You have to be a speed listener to do that. It takes special powers Then, there is Paul Ryan that’s as big of a crank as any one I’ve seen in public office recently. Even Newt Gingrich recognized his entitlement reforms as right wing engineering before he was called out by the other cranks.
This is the problem. The Republican Party has spent 40 years purging their ranks. There is nothing left but candidates so flexible with their positions they’ve been on every side of every issue or people so frightening that you wouldn’t want them near your children. Consider Senator David Vitter whose record is simply impeccable for every one in the clown car. Ask people if they’d want to spend time with him and every one runs for the door and hides their daughters. Consider the number of Republicans from which you’d hide your young sons. You name any Republican these days and you can point to either the freewheeling old school hypocrisy or the creepy “I don’t believe in science, math, history, and reality” factor. They elect soci0paths in safe districts because they are reliable voters for the party’s special interests.
Consider Bachmann’s insistence today–as she headed for the hatchback door–that Obama is a socialist as best represented by Obamacare. It seems her evangelical fundie friends just couldn’t do it for a woman. She hit the eject button. But, she’s still doling out the crazy. Consider that Obamacare with its individual mandate is the Heritage Foundation/Republican Senate Health care response to Hillary Clinton’s health care study. Republicans got a Republican plan that both Romney and Gingrich supported in the 1990s because it was the Republican plan and came from the Heritage Foundation. Some how they’ve pinned it on Obama and deemed it socialist. How can any one reconcile this with out some part of their brain imploding? The individual mandate was the hallmark of the Republican plan. All you have to do is check the Legislative record or the press articles of the day. It was one of the things Obama supposedly opposed when he ran as a Democrat. How can any Republican candidate that’s had enough experience to be the president run away from former Republican policy initiatives and conveniently forget that Obama opposed it before he loved it?
The concept of the individual health insurance mandate originated in 1989 at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 1993, Republicans twice introduced health care bills that contained an individual health insurance mandate. Advocates for those bills included prominent Republicans who today oppose the mandate including Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Robert Bennett (R-UT), and Christopher Bond (R-MO). In 2007, Democrats and Republicans introduced a bi-partisan bill containing the mandate.
In 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama was opposed to the individual mandate. He stated the following in a Feb. 28, 2008 interview on the Ellen DeGeneres show about his divergent views with Hillary Clinton:
“Both of us want to provide health care to all Americans. There’s a slight difference, and her plan is a good one. But, she mandates that everybody buy health care. She’d have the government force every individual to buy insurance and I don’t have such a mandate because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance, it’s that they can’t afford it. So, I focus more on lowering costs. This is a modest difference. But, it’s one that she’s tried to elevate, arguing that because I don’t force people to buy health care that I’m not insuring everybody. Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t.”
The Republican clowncar ride these days enforces a strict policy of historical amnesia. Pierce sees the contortionist sideshow that’s become the Romney candidacy. Romney’s put himself into a denial pretzel to runaway from Republican past.
It is at moments like this in which I feel just the faintest twinge of sympathy for our man Willard. I mean, what more does the poor sap have to do? He’s walked back his previous ironclad commitments and then he walked back many of his own walk-backs. He has abased himself before all the steaming iron gods of modern conservatism. He’s grabbed control of the wild-west landscape produced by the Citizens United decision and demonstrated that he has absolutely no conscience regarding using anonymous corporate button men on the opposition while pretending all the while that he’s Michael Corleone at his nephew’s christening. And still he’s got people sniping at him, and dreaming their dreamy dreams about thuggish governors of New Jersey, diminutive governors of Indiana, and zombie-eyed granny-starvers from Wisconsin. It can’t be easy being the cousin that every Important Conservative winds up having to take to the prom.
Willard, if you want to play up to today’s Republicans, you’re going to have to literally have a come to Jesus moment. Like Bobby Jindal, you’re going to have to give up the religion of your family and force your wife and kids to convert. You’re going to have to say you were deceived by Satan and that explains the entire Massachusetts Governor thing. It almost worked for Newt right? The best deal is that you can contort yourself into the new Willard and Newt will forever be Newt.
I have no intention of ever voting Republican again. That does not mean, however, that the Democratic Party gets my vote by default as I think Obama and others are expecting. I am clearly looking for something else. I do not intend to sell out all of my education and principles to settle for the anti-war but otherwise incredibly cracked crackpot Ron Paul who is a throwback to the confederacy. There is no way Donald Trump’s narcissism and hype traps me into forgetting how he took all that parental money and government money and parlayed it into bankruptcy. He is not the greatest showman on earth. Nader pretty much encompasses all of those complaints and more. Bloomberg? Forget about it! This could very well be the first major election that I will give a resounding pass. In that case, consider Mary Landrieu a lost cause. She’ll never squeak through in today’s Louisiana where the electorate was changed by a Rovian exodus. The only thing that could drive me to the polls is fear of Mitch McConnell as majority leader. Is this what the democratic experience has come to?
This maybe the worst election year ever.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
great post!
Thx! I’ve never seen such a mess!
I second that emotion, bluelady.
Elizabeth Dias, at Time’s Swapmpland (http://swampland.time.com/2012/01/04/how-michele-bachmanns-faith-and-gender-may-have-cost-her-a-shot-at-the-nomination/), has an interesting take on what happened to Michele Bachmann:
Meanwhile, I read recently that 44% of Repub voters identify themselves as Evangelicals. As a friend of mine says, we’re no longer talking about a political party here anymore–we’re talking about a cult.
Yup. I wonder if Michelle will attach herself to reality long enough to realize what happened to her.
Cult is an operative word for them. I also believe Dak is right when she says this will be the worst election season ever.
In a way, I feel for Michele Bachmann, She’s crazy but still deserved better than she got. I doubt she’ll admit it to herself though. That would require re-examination and I don’t see her as up to that task.
If you think about it, if Bachmann had won she would have been the first female POTUS, but she’s anti-feminism. Those two statements should not go together.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/01/04/michele-bachmanns-glass-house/
She’d have never won. She has a tenuous grasp on reality and it as even obvious to the informed that watch Fox news.
Wow, 44%. I had no idea it was that high.
dak, you’re right about the worst year ever. I have never felt this hopeless about the election and our country.
Consider Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson
They may not win but they would be a principled vote and they’d send the message that you will not be forced to choose between bad, worse or apathy.
If enough of us choose third party we might at least give the 1% pause that their “investment” in the 2 parties may not be quite the investment they initially thought it would be long term.
Get someone on the ballot everywhere and you’ve got a deal.
Right now I have a soft spot for Buddy Roehmer. He could be on the Louisiana ballot but he’s still a Republican. I don’t object to him other than he’d bring the clown cars with him.
I like Roemer. He seems very real and his policy positions seem good. I don’t care if he’s a Whig so long as he’s on the ballot in enough states to win or scare the established party.
I’ve gotten a kick out of following him on twitter! He always says things that I agree with so far. Last night he was joking that he almost got enough votes out of Iowa to form a bowling league. He’s still trying to get into the debates. I can’t figure out why they won’t let a couple of those guys in given the situation with Huntsman. Huntsman’s family’s money must have bought access.
me too Dak.and great post! 🙂
Unless I’m remembering wrong, Huntsman’s family money makes Romney look like a poor person. That will buy most things and I’m sure got him a spot in the debates.
Yes. I’m surprised Huntsman’s daddy didn’t get him an oopalompha … he’s trying to get him the presidency
I thought you had a bad time of it in 2008. This year the Republicans seem to have pulled out all the stops to bring you people who no-one in their right mind would vote for.
All I can say is good luck and great post Kat.
Thanks Tim! You all could be close to a vote of no confidence over there too!! I think the liberals are tired of their grand bargain.
Oooo, you may be right there MacDuff.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/lib-dem-president-accused-of-slagging-off-the-coalition-6283807.html
And it was never going to work over here. A Prime Minister who went to Eton and a Chancellor who has a personal fortune trying to get us out of a period of austerity where everything is going up in price. And on top of that they have to run the country with a bunch of people who want everything to be fair and equal, whatevs.
The PM seems supremely out of touch with most Brits. Tony sure left the labor party in disarray. He should’ve stayed away from Dubya. He’s a chaos vortex.
Good old Dubya, don’t ya miss him? What’s he up to now? I know Tony’s making a boatload of money.
He seems to be hanging out around the house. He ventured to Canada a few times to make speeches. He’s probably gone back to playing video games like he used to do in the Texas Governor’s office.
Oooo, what games do you think he plays? I seem him as an RTS kinda guy, something like Command & Conquer, World in Conflict that sort of thing.
I bet he’s a magic dwarf in Wow
Chances are you could catch Dubya biking, with his SS detail, around his Preston Hollow neighborhood in Dallas. He has no shortage of big money backers in that neighborhood, including the guy who floated him the 5% of the Texas Rangers which first up’ed his profile for his later run for governor.
They probably bought boatloads of his books to subsidize his forays to his library at the SMU campus.
Marvel Comics stock should have risen from the sales 🙂
I love the idea that somewhere in Texas there is an ex-president screaming into a headset, “Whore the Ford,” and in the background a very exasperated wife says, “I think it’s For the Horde George.” lol
Ron Paul must have watched Obama’s ’08 campaign.
Ron Paul May Have Secretly Won The Iowa Caucuses
yeah. Obama’s folks really gamed those caucuses.
I read where Paul’s people are organized in all the coming caucus states. He could really make a mess of the convention. At least, I hope he does.
Yes — that is my guess as well since I watched carefully how the 0bot crowd manipulated all the caucus states — and bought the dem leadership and parties in many states.
Follow the crooked 0bama model — is the way to win — as long as caucuses exist.
No one has mentioned the tiny numbers out of the total voting population — only the obsessive political types on crack go to these caucuses.
These Iowa caucus numbers are basically meaningless — more than likely adjusted and manipulated on several levels.
Another home run!!!!
Back in the early 80s the Republicans in WA State was full of ethical, intelligent leaders — elected and voting members. And then the Evangelical — right wing religious nuts took over the GOP in one caucus night. All of the reasonable Republicans were replaced on the precinct level by the right wing nuts in a planned take over. In off election years (non Prez or Gov election) the caucuses are sparely attended. There were many feature articles on what happened with interviews with the Christian right — who bragged that they looked at both the dems and republicans and decided that the GOP was ripe for a take over.
Evidently what happened in WA state was also happening in a lot of other states — DAK’s personal eye witness account of the Christofacists take over in her state parallels what happened in WA state.
So what happened to the Republican party workers — an the sane Republicans? There was a huge shift of Republicans to the Democratic Party. In the state political districts I watched several members of the House switch to the Dem party. The Democrats got some really good people — but also some conservatives who helped the Dem party’s lean to the right.
So by the end of the 80s — the GOP party was now the party of the Evangelical right wing nuts. Some of the people who remained in the GOP –kept voting GOP — because they really had not idea who was in charge and that there had been a coup.
In 2007 the Dem party in WA state was bought by team 0bama. So the Dem party in WA state no longer exists. The 0bamacrat party is being run by and for 0bama. Again the take over happened in the off election year when few bother to attend the caucuses. Come the 2008 caucus — well the faux caucus votes in WA compared to the primary votes — show the extent of the dirty tricks played by 0bama — cult 0bama.
So both parties in WA state have been taken over by cults.
I’m an Independent — I can never be part of a cult — nor can I vote for anyone who uses cult methods in order to win an election.
Cult leaders have their own agenda and they will use cult members anyway they please to reach their goals.
We need to remember what happened to the GOP –how the party that supported the ERA has now become the party of the Christian Taliban.
One detail about the caucuses — this is where individuals with strong opinions show up. Peace tends to draw a crowd — and of bumper stickers in WA state — the highest numbers seem to relate to Peace.
0bama has lost the “peace” vote based on his record and his actions — and Ron Paul appears like a “peace” candidate. Irregardless of Ron Paul’s record or platform — as long as he sounds like the Peace candidate — he will get the single item Peace voters.
Here’s an article I found on Huffpo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/in-iowa-peace-voters-turn_b_1184012.html
Speaking of the mess, if I were 10/15 years younger, I’d get the hell out, and go to Australia….they don’t have the housing mess we have, unemployment is 5.2%, and it seems those who have a 4 year degree, earn 50,000 to 90,000……..
Dak you certainly put it all up front up, we just can’t cross over and support this mess. I’m ready for the Woman’s National Party, and following in Susan Anthony’s footsteps.
I would gladly do the same.
Oh, gawd, Ian Welsh just threw American women under the bus for Ron Paul’s stand on Afghanistan. Yes, Ian, abortion rights are more important than anything else because if the government can indicate they OWN your body and can hold you in involuntary servitude everything else is moot; including dead Pakistanis at weddings.
Oh, and let’s just pretend he’s not bugfuck crazy on the gold standard, the FED, and the rights of blacks.
It never fails. “Liberal” men are just as bad as the wingnuts. They’ll throw women under the bus in a heartbeat.
I’m afraid you’re right. It’s probably hard for people to understand what equal rights actually mean for all of us, when they don’t see a problem for themselves.
Yes, I had that in my evening news reads last night…I didn’t make a big deal about it cause it was almost time to start the showdown. (Sick isn’t it!)
I saw it, Minx. I noticed Welsh inching closer to Ron Paul in his last couple of posts. Yet, even if Ron Paul were elected he’d never be able to end the wars, etc. The CIA wouldn’t allow it. All you have to do is look back to what they did to JFK. The military-industrial-intelligence communities run this country and no president can stop them.
We ‘can’ walk and chew gum at the same time. The idea that you toss women’s rights overboard to correct course on our lousy foreign policy decisions is a no-starter and should bring home how anemic and/or whacked the field is. Women’s rights are civil rights. Hummmm. Who said that??? And Ron Paul clearly said that he wants to be able to declare: We’re all Austrians now.
I don’t think so. Paul can take his nostalgia for 1900 back to Texas.
No, actually, I didn’t. Missed the point entirely, because all you can see is the one red blinking light. Don’t worry though, step by step, Obama and the Dems are selling away all your repro rights anyway, and at the same time they’ll be blowing up brown people, something you think is less important than your repro rights – you just said so explicitly, while I did not indicate a preference. Oh, and bailing out banksters.
Me, I didn’t choose. I haven’t endorsed Ron Paul, and anyone who says I have is a liar.
You, on the other hand, have said control over your reproductive rights is more important than blowing up brown people. Because the one thing the President does have complete control over is who gets bombed.
The government already controls your body. If you missed that part, you haven’t been paying attention.
You’re a single issue voter, you’ve just proved it. Nothing is more important than your rights, and if that means a pile of brown people get blow into a red mist, you’re ok with that.
I’m not a single issue voter but I consider abortion rights to be an acid test on how serious people are about civil rights and liberties. You praised Ron Paul for bringing up the anti war issue and put it in terms of giving up on abortion rights. Everything else about his is anathema. Why not say it’s worth giving up the greenback for the peace issue? Why is it that women’s right to self determination is the pawn in this game? Paul’s not just soft on abortion rights. He’d allow states to criminalize abortions and probably birth control. He’s a religious extremist. The right to an abortion is the right not to be held in servitude by government edict. It’s the right to autonomy and to be recognized as a complete adult able to make moral decisions. It’s the right not to be recognized as state, parental, or spousal property. I am not about to put 51% of America into a subhuman category.
He’s got more problems than that. Ron Paul is a neoconfederate. His views on the economy are so far out of the realm of reality to be dangerous. He has not one stand on any economic issue that’s even grounded in reason or reality. He is followed by a cult that includes members of Storm Front because his coded state rights argument basically puts women and all racial minorities into a situation where they are less important than property. I didn’t say that you supported him, I said you’re throwing women’s right to autonomy and the right to not be enslaved to government edict to the wind because he’s got a pacifist agenda. You’re the one that brought that particular issue up as being negotiable. That’s been one of the traditional American Liberal Male ways of taking women off their civil rights fights.
If we can’t respect the civil liberties of our own citizens then we will never get to the point of respecting “brown” people in other countries enough to quit declaring war on them every time it suits us. And if you think the president controls who gets bombed you’re sorely mistaken. We have proxies that can do that just as easily. The CIA can arrange just about anything. If we don’t respect the personhood of our own citizens, then we may not bomb them, but we certainly will starve them, sell them into slavery, allow them to be abused by religious cults from our country, poisoned by our pollution, and on and on. There are more ways to kill “brown” people than to drop bombs on them and Ron Paul loves them all.
Ron Paul is not a serious person. If you want to speak to the peace issue, than you should use some one who is less of a crank on everything else to get your point across and you shouldn’t put women’s autonomy up as a bargaining chip just like Obama does.
No, actually, you are missing the point. We know full well that Obama and the so-called Democrats are willing to trade away women’s rights. But don’t ask 51% of the population to swallow being turned back into chattel in a trade-off for your fantasy of a peace that will never happen. If you truly believe that Ron Paul as president–or anyone else as president–could change the course of the CIA/military-industrial complex at this point, you are hopelessly deluded. Ron Paul didn’t bring anti-war arguments to the fore, because the media simply ignores everything he says except what fits with their narrative.
But in the meantime, it doesn’t trouble you one bit to ask the question
YOU are saying WE have to make that choice. I refuse to accept such a false choice. If you don’t stand up for the rights of women to be autonomous human beings, then you have no credibility in talking about any kind of civil rights or human rights.
Thank you…BB for saying this…
http://www.juancole.com/2012/01/three-republican-bears-and-none-just-right.html
I don’t see how any one can consider Ron Paul a libertarian. He’s a nasty old confederate hold out. Ayn Rand would carve him a new one.
I don’t get it either…what is it with these people?
Meanwhile, the christofascists still want Willard to disappear:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71077.html
The FBI should have plants at this meeting. Some of these folks are domestic terrorists.
I just read that, Dak. Tell me that isn’t creepy–a ‘consensus’ candidate, according to the religious nuts. The Republicans are committing suicide. Or maybe they already have.