Once again, the GOP gets the vast bulk of the credit for this shattered guardrail - an expectation of at least some trustworthiness.
Yeah, progressives were seriously bummed when Barack Obama was more centrist than consistently left-leaning, but then it was always Republicans who'd dubbed him a Messiah. But the GOP base - wow, they've been played for yokels ever since Richard Nixon carefully cultivated the seeds of a Southern Strategy that had been sown for over a decade by the far right.
But David Frum seems taken by surprise at the in-your-face LIES from his party's totally-in-front runner - "Donald Trump’s dishonesty, however, is qualitatively different than anything before seen from a major-party nominee."
Hullo! The Republican base has been lied to over & over & over again for the past eight years.
They have voted for candidates who ran on the pledge that they would vote to overturn Obamacare, KNOWING that it was a non-starter, that it would never ever happen. But did the conservative press question them on the claim?
Did they point out what would happen to the economy if we actually did totally shut down the government in order to the president to heel? Nope - not a whisper. They let the BIG LIE go unchallenged.
It was bad enough when the party wasn't in control of both the House & Senate, but they'd had those majorities since 2015 - and still the promises remain unfulfilled.
THAT is why the base hates the party establishment, rallies behind "let's burn it all down & rebuild" voices like Ted Cruz.
Voters don't have to worry about finding out that their guy is a liar. They know Donald Trump & while they might not like what they see, they trust that his dishonesty it is REAL. Which makes him the only honest one in the bunch, at least in their eyes. He's a flagrant liar & doesn't pretend to be anything else.
Even Trump's most fervent admirers might agree with Ted Cruz, who last month said, “Whatever lie he’s telling, in that minute he believes it. But the man is utterly amoral. Morality does not exist for him.”
Yeah, Trump's amoral, but that's not news. One name - MARLA MAPLES. My guess is his supporters find it better to a epic & open cad than someone who sells out supposed principles.
Even in the midst of his biggest lie, few people doubt that the person who believes it the most is Donald Trump.
The pundits who weren't ignoring his lies seemed to be set on dismissing them as something all politicos do, especially the vilified "Washington establishment."
Consider Joe Scarborough, who trashed his party's elite with, "Conservatives that have been betrayed by the Washington establishment for 30 years, by Republican candidates that run for office saying they're going to balance the budget and lie. Republican candidates that run and say they're going to overturn Obamacare and lie. Republican candidates who say vote for me and I'm going to have a humble foreign policy and lie."
As David Frum points out, "Scarborough’s list of betrayals weren’t 'lies.' They were failures, failures made inevitable by the impossibility of the Republican base’s own demands. (How do you balance the budget while cutting taxes, without touching either defense or Medicare?).
"As one unfriendly critic noted, the Republican rank-and-file weren’t exactly innocent victims of elite deception. (They)… wanted everything, and, after all, GOP leaders promised them that it was possible—even though those same leaders knew it was not.
"Place the blame for that failure where you will, however, the results were glaring: radical Republican rejection of the trustworthiness of their leaders—all their leaders. What, then, was one liar more—especially if that liar were more exciting than the others, more willing to say at least some of the things that Republicans wanted said? Cynicism leads to acceptance of the previously unacceptable. Another guardrail down."
Coming soon!
Shattered Guardrail #3 - expectation a candidate for POTUS
has a least adequate understanding of public affairs.
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