That is where I disagree, I don’t think Trump is clever at all. There seems to be an in-built reaction that when an outrageous asshole is successful we say to ourselves, “Well, he must be smart.” But most of them aren’t smart at all. They are successful because someone has to be successful. We don’t pay any attention to the 10,000 assholes who are just as smart and as driven as Trump who have not been remotely successful.
If you put the whole world in a coin flipping competition you’d end up with someone who won 32 coin flips in a row. Then we’d all ask, “What’s your secret, how are you so good at that?”
Those bastards. Hastur is the land in which the play the King in Yellow takes place. Derleth’s bastardizations of the Chambers and Lovecraft cannot be tolerated.
The Tea Party largely skyrocketed to attention when Dick Armey’s Freedomworks started funding a lot of their activities, but yeah, the GOP has lost most of its control over them (which is partly because the Koch boys find it useful to have a Tea Party to manipulate the corporate wing, and partly because they’ve lost control.) I wouldn’t say that the Tea Party has principles so much as it has dislikes (and occasional likes, but the dislikes are more dependable.)
The plan to get them out for Romney did work pretty well, but unfortunately the plans to keep Romney from talking like Romney when reporters were around didn’t, and it’s also still “the economy, stupid”, and having a bunch of GOP politicians and Limbaugh going loudly and rabidly misogynist before the election definitely cost them three Senate seats and helped lose them the Presidency.
