Bump. They say it's rude to kick a dog when it's down, but some dogs deserve it. A fairly lengthy paste, sorry, but this article from Britain's 'Independent' pulls absolutely no punches-

Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. They have long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals -- and it turns out they were onto something. Every six months, the Republican Party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.

Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" -- but that wasn't enough. So they found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay," and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."

That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. A survey suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why.

Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past thirty-five years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The U.S. must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W. Bush.

The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice -- pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally) -- even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."

The Republican primary voters heard the message right -- the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump responded to these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."

The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself -- and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Clay Johnson studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he was actually worth -$600m. That is, he owed $600m more than he owned. You and I were worth more than him.

Johnson says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects -- which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius."

Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 percent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnson studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump -- and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.

How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the House slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this -- he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.

The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world-view either doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the U.S. will have to extend its debt ceiling -- the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow - or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart."

Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in OPEC, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show 'The Apprentice', and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.'... It's so easy. It's all about the messenger." It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was told they have some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, OK?"

Johann Hari: Donald Trump Has Revealed the Truth About the Republican Party


Trump won't get the GOP nomination, anymore than Palin or Bachmann, that much is surely true. But the Republicans are in some post-meltdown parrallel universe to have these sort of buffoons speaking for them. To say nothing of Limbaugh, Beck etc. So this is what the Teabaggers have apparently reduced the GOP to. How long will it be before the GOP can be taken seriously again?