How the GOP got hijiacked by Trump’s Troll Party

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They’re all gits.

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Git 'er done!

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The GOP is reaping what it has sown. After a generation of telling everyone that what’s causing all their problems are illegal immigrants, gays, women, damn liberals, and brown terrorists, they shouldn’t be surprised that someone with Trump’s message is having success in the polls. I’m just hoping they haven’t been so successful that he actually gets elected.

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Sounds like the “troll party” is the Repulican funhouse-mirror version of Occupy - angry, directionless, and disappointed.

Of course, they’re also the Republican version, so you know, add layers of hate and bigotry and fear and Jesus to the mix. And while they should be supporting a candidate who would actually make a difference, they’re supporting a candidate who validates them instead, because that little emotional boost is something they readily confuse with “actually solving problems.”

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I keep hearing the GOP ask “how this could happen to the Reagan’s party?” But for the last 35 years, the Repub party have been lead by entertainers and outsiders instead of qualified people. You can draw a line from Reagan to Perot (I know he wasn’t Repub, but he is where the Teapartiers got their start) to Limbaugh and his ilk to Bush the 2nd (owner of the Texas rangers). In other words, they deserve what they get. If the Repub establishment is afraid of Trump, perhaps they should not have been playing to the lowest common denominator for so long.

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came here to say this.

Trump, and all the Trolls, are finally calling the GOP’s bluff.
As others have noted here and elsewhere, Trump and the Trolls are simply saying out loud all the same things that GOP has been implying or saying quietly for literally decades.

Reap what you sow, indeed.

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I think it was the guy who ran McCain’s 2008 campaign who recently said something like “conservatism isn’t about issues anymore, it’s about being angry.”

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They also spent generations telling Americans that “politicians have no idea what they’re doing,” so it’s no surprise that some people took them at their word.

Honestly though, it’s crazy that Trump’s supporters find “zero relevant experience” to be an asset. It would be like someone saying “Appoint me as CEO of your Fortune 500 Company! I’m the perfect candidate for the position because I’ve never had any experience in business!”

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Aww, boohoo hoo. Poor Republicans. Boohoo hoo (this is my sad voice and I am sad for them).

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I find it weird that Boehner and McConnell get criticized for showing cowardice and caving to the left, when looking from the left, it seems like they’ve not nothing except deliberately obstruct and refuse to let anything get done.

This seems to be the same on both sides, here and in the UK.

Can’t help find it worrying that working across the aisles seems to be a done thing. It’s all so partisan (and I’m as guilty of it as anyone).

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Sounds like the “trolley party” is the Repulican funhouse-mirror version of Occupy - angry, directionless, and disappointed.

Agreed, except for the “directionless” part. That’s a corporate media narrative that doesn’t reflect the greater reality.

The overall movement had clear goals and achieved those goals in very quantifiable ways. Scores of powerful splinter groups are carrying on the fight to this day and having tremendous success.

For example, the only reason Bernie Sanders is now a front runner based mostly upon a wealth disparity platform is vastly due to the past and even ongoing work of Occupy. Same goes for the mayor of our largest city in the nation currently.

The corporate media wants the public to ignore these facts for various self-serving reasons.

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To be honest, I’m not sure they even understand these facts. I don’t think political punditry is a carefully scripted act, those people really think that stuff. They may have been selected by a process that promotes people with a certain agenda, but I think they really are that dumb. Apparently Mitt Romney actually thought he was going to win. The bubble is real.

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They’ve become a fun house mirror version of everything we once mocked Obama supporters for being: cultish, immune to facts, swift to attack apostates, glassy-eyed and swaying as if the Great Man was going to lead them to the Kool-Aid troughs in the hot Guyana sun.
And yet even while complaining about the trolls, Wilson can't help but remind how much his party has been all about that kind of angry demonizing for a long time now. If the rest of America can only avoid the undertow, there is every reason to enjoy this ship sinking.
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One of the most insidious aspects of the trolley Party’s virus is the notion that compromise itself is somehow equivalent to cowardice. Government only functions when politicians can find common ground. The trollies discount the strength of compromise out of hand, and you end up with situations like threatening to shut down the federal government over a relative pittance of funding for a women’s health organization.

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This is clear and compelling evidence for why I should be in charge of all of the everything, and allowed to shoot people who disagree with me.

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Ya’ know …

Given Trump’s numbers compared to the other GOP candidates, a more empirically justified conclusion is that Rick Wilson is the real troll.

One of the conservative tropes buzzing around is that the GOP is the party of Lincoln, and therefore deserves the African-American vote, is the real de-segregation party and deserves the real civil-rights cred. This, of course, is nonsense, since it ignores the shifts in Republican ideology since, well, the 1860’s. The point is that it isn’t sensible to talk about Republican political ideology in terms of Reagan or Lincoln or any other historical figure. It is what it is now. And now it looks like Donald Trump. Regardless of what conservative ideologues believe, Donald Trump is today’s GOP.

Enjoy your fence.

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Five words for Wilson: “Whoever smell’t it, dealt it.”

But through it all, the GOP was the one party even vaguely amenable to limited-government conservatism, to at least some adherence to the Constitution over the social preferences of the moment, and to the constraints on government power that our Founding Fathers so cherished. It was nice while it lasted.

So much so, it took Democrats to do this work for them? Really.

Yeah, I’m done with these people.

Lincoln was sent this letter from Karl Marx and the IWMA. I can’t see Marx having sent anything to a political party who resembles the modern day Republicans.

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