Stranger Danger

UK View:  Can't Look; Can't Look Away

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MEHR, MIT SALZ:  Courtesy of the blog on the other side of the mirror, there is no better proof of the state of the Republican party and right-wing politics in America than that offered by the cultural sinkhole mutant zone devolving state of consciousness Texas (where --and this, a local joke -- the Cockroach is the state bird): 

"When you drive away all the reasonable people from your party," we are told, "you end up with Trump and the head of the Republican party in Travis County, Texas... [a state where] The lowest common denominator is very, very low."

The newly elected chair of the Republican Party in the county that includes the Texas Capitol spent most of election night tweeting about former Gov. Rick Perry’s sexual orientation and former President Bill Clinton’s penis, and insisting that members of the Bush family should be in jail.

He also found time to call Hillary Clinton an “angry bull dyke” and accuse his county vice chair of betraying the values of the Republican Party ...

... Morrow’s main complaint is with “establishment” Republicans, who he does not believe should hold elected office, he said. Last week, he tweeted that the Republican National Committee was just a “gay foam party.”

 

Morrow has a long history of critiquing prominent state Republicans in vulgar, and often sexually explicit, terms...

... Travis County GOP...vice chair Matt Mackowiak [is] apoplectic. Mackowiak, a Republican strategist, immediately announced over social media that he would do everything in his power to remove Morrow from office... “I’m treating this as a coup and as a hostile takeover.”

“Tell them they can go fuck themselves,” Morrow told the Tribune.

The post concludes with a straight shot at what the emergence of Trump means, politically and culturally -- that in many places, America is much like Yeats' poem; A Box Full Of Bad Crazy That's Looking For A Way Out:

There will be many more mini-Trumps and Trump rallies just as there were many tea party rallies. The gun nuts and militia movement will join with them; the white nationalists already have.

Even if the right manages to take down Trump it is too late to take down his followers. The right has been stoking the fears and resentments of their base for decades and now they are seeing the result of their labors. They thought they could milk the followers forever without consequence. They were wrong.

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UND JETZT:  Gilding the Lily, or proving the point Susan from Texas made (via Reuters):

One of Donald Trump’s sons appeared along with a white supremacist while giving an interview on a conservative radio show, adding to concerns that the front-runner in the battle to be the Republican candidate in November’s presidential election is willing to accept support from extremist supporters.

Donald Trump Jr., who is actively campaigning for his father, gave an interview on Tuesday on "Liberty Roundtable," a conservative Utah-based radio show...

During the show he was questioned by ... another radio host whose show "The Political Cesspool" is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leading U.S. civil rights group, as "racist and anti-Semitic."

During the interview, conducted over the telephone, Trump Jr. talked about what a good father Donald Trump was and how his campaign is changing the Republican Party.

“It’s not a campaign anymore, it’s a movement,” he told his interviewers.

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