Frank Bruni, writing in the Times today, makes no bones about how Republicans may be feeling about themselves (= ought to feel about themselves!)
It’s hate worn down into resignation, disgust repurposed as calculation. Stopping a ludicrous billionaire means submitting to a loathsome senator. And so they submit, one chastened and aghast Republican leader after another, murmuring sweet nothings about Cruz that are really sour somethings about Donald Trump.
Will they still respect themselves in the morning?
I’m not sure we’ve ever witnessed a capitulation this grudging, a cynicism this grotesque, a reversal of regard this fraudulent and flat-out hilarious. While politics is an impure arena in which yesterday’s enemies routinely become tomorrow’s allies, the transmogrification of Cruz goes beyond that, proving that in the right circumstances, with the right motivation, you can see just about anyone in a newly flattering light. ...Bruni,NYT
Forget about politics for a moment and just take notice of some people who are prominent on the right who are actually quite decent. What's astonishing is how willing they have been to embrace Cruz simply because he is not Trump. They are caught up in a primary season (and this has been building for years... decades) that's as embarrassing as it could be. They have a reasonable candidate in Ohio's Kasich but he doesn't seem to turn on the voters. He gets less press. He's not outrageous. It's as though most of us have dropped our obligation to self-govern in return for spectacle.
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Maria Konnikova, writing in the latest New Yorker, makes a very interesting point about Donald Trump and his effect on supporters.
A California judge, Kim Wardlaw, addressed this issue in her ruling in another lawsuit against Trump University. “As the recent Ponzi-scheme scandals involving onetime financial luminaries like Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford demonstrate, victims of con artists often sing the praises of their victimizers until the moment they realize they have been fleeced,” she wrote. Wardlaw is right about marks. Not only do they sing the grifter’s praises until the moment they’ve been fleeced but they often keep singing them afterward, so as to not admit to themselves, or the rest of us, that any fleecing has taken place.
This raises a depressing possibility. If Trump is indeed a con artist, and if he is, in the end, elected, we may end up not wanting to admit that we were scammed. At the moment, Trump’s supporters see him as authentic and honest, even as they dismiss more traditional candidates, like Hillary Clinton, as quintessential politicians—that is, as opportunistic liars. Perhaps, in the future, we’ll cling to this belief to preserve our collective self-image. In that case, the term “con artist” may end up applying to us, too. ...Konnikova,NewYorker
I'd like to add another possibility -- one that has become kind of an obsession. Not so much George W. Bush himself as his administration was a con. Even without his "election" by the political right's representation on the Supreme Court, he was a con. So was Reagan. In both cases they were also conned by their own party. Even if there weren't enough evidence to prove this, you only have to dig out the hard numbers showing the spending during the their terms. Republicans were -- and continue to be -- fleeced by their own leaders.
