So the revelation of the Access Hollywood outtakes from 11 years ago – which NBC presumably has had all along, and which they reportedly explicitly chose to sit on through Sunday\u2019s debate until someone leaked them to the Washington Post first – seems to have done what nothing else could in this asinine and ridiculous political season: forced actual sitting GOP elected officials to bail off the Trump Train. Twelve hours ago it was only Utah, but now all manner of Congresscritters are running like hell from a candidate they backed through his birtherism, his attacks on Muslims and Mexicans, his insults of a Gold Star family, his three marriages and tabloid history, all the things that made \u201cDonald Trump for President\u2019 a spectacular joke and a burlesque of American politics.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the thing: the deadline to get Trump off the ballot was a month ago and change, depending on what mechanism you choose. Or at the convention. Or at the debates. Or at the very beginning, when the RNC could have dismissed him as a publicity stunt, an attention-seeker, not a serious contender for leader of the free world. But they didn\u2019t, because they couldn\u2019t. Because he\u2019s not a fluke, he\u2019s not a mistake, he\u2019s not some sort of black swan event – he is the natural and inevitable result of a party that nailed its colors to the mast the day that Kevin Phillips published \u201cThe Emerging Republican Majority.\u201d Lee Atwater, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck – all signposts on the road to Trump, betting the house – and the kids\u2019 college money and the next month\u2019s groceries and ultimately blood, kidneys and semen – on the eternal preeminence of Archie Bunker as Real True American.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why nothing mattered until now. Muslims didn\u2019t matter. Latinos didn\u2019t matter. African-Americans sure as hell didn\u2019t matter. And the womenfolk would do whatever their husbands told them, see? Except for the feminazis and the diesel dykes and the hairy-legged hippies, and who cares what they want, right boys? Except this time, they didn\u2019t piss off and dismiss one demographic group or another – never mind that while merely sloughing off Asians or Arabs or Mexicans or Muslims alone might not be a dealbreaker, dissing all<\/em> of them meant you had to win all<\/em> the white people. And ultimately, that\u2019s where Trump’s cunning plan falls apart – because Trump always assumed that all the white people thought just like him.<\/p>\n And now, on top of everybody else, he\u2019s pissed directly at fifty percent of the population.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s not a coincidence, and it\u2019s not a mistake by his lights. After all, Obama running for the White House uncorked eight years of race-hate on a scale not seen since the \u201cNew South\u201d tamped down the overt racism in the 1970s. It only stands to reason that putting Hillary at the top of the ticket would pop the cork on 190-proof misogyny, and the idea that Trump knew how to put a woman in her place was at some level a big part of his appeal for the base that put him on stage in Cleveland.\u00a0<\/p>\n And now the rats are starting to flee the ship, now that it\u2019s been torpedoed at the waterline. Don\u2019t applaud them. They deserve to drown. Ask them why it took until now. The GOP is hanging onto the edge of a cliff by its fingertips. It is our responsibility, for the good of the nation, to lace up the steel-toes and stomp. Hard. Every day from now until November 8, and every day after that.<\/p>\n What are you prepared to do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So the revelation of the Access Hollywood outtakes from 11 years ago – which NBC presumably has had all along, and which they reportedly explicitly chose to sit on through Sunday\u2019s debate until someone leaked them to the Washington Post first – seems to have done what nothing else could in this asinine and ridiculous … <\/p>\n