"Rarely has a party so passively accepted its own self-destruction. Sure, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz..."

“Rarely has a party so passively accepted its own self-destruction. Sure, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are now riding high in some meaningless head-to-head polls against Hillary Clinton, but the odds are the nomination of either would lead to a party-decimating general election. The Tea Party, Ted Cruz’s natural vehicle, has 17 percent popular support, according to Gallup. The idea that most women, independents or mainstream order-craving suburbanites would back a guy who declares his admiration for Vladimir Putin is a mirage. The idea that the G.O.P. can march into the 21st century intentionally alienating every person of color is borderline insane.”

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David Brooks, Time for a Republican Conspiracy!

Brooks is watching his beloved GOP crumble into nativist ranting and know-nothing anti-policy, and he can’t stand it. 

What’s happening to the GOP the political equivalent of glitch art, where the signal is so distorted by the voltage spike in the heartland that you almost can’t make out what the transmission was supposed to be before being databent.

If Brooks thinks stepping back and contemplating Trump’s affection for Putin will lead to some grand reawakening of the Grand Old Party, he’s smoking crack. He’s hoping to be the Greek chorus in this drama, explaining what the fates have in store for those that break the rules. But today’s Republicans would rather see the theater burn to the ground rather than accept the story’s predetermined end.

Krugman offers pragmatic advice: 

[…] the average of recent polls shows Trump, Cruz, and Carson with the support of roughly two-thirds of likely Republican primary voters, while all the establishment candidates combined draw barely 20 percent. And do we really imagine that any significant fraction of the overwhelmingly dominant blowhard bloc consists of moderate voters who just don’t realize what they would be getting from Trump or Cruz?

[…]

The point is that this primary doesn’t look like an aberration, in which the GOP majority is losing its way; it looks like an outbreak of honesty, with the GOP majority finally going for candidates saying what it always believed.

from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/137682116557