Blowing the Biggest Political Story of the Last Fifty Years

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/news/2016/03/14/blowing-the-biggest-political-story-of-the-last-fifty-years/

Ah, the crescendo of complaint! The Republican establishment and the mainstream media, working hand in hand in their unprecedented, non-stop assault on the “short-fingered vulgarian” named Donald Trump, would have you believe that Trump augurs the destruction of the Republican Party. Former Reagan speechwriter and now Wall Street Journal/CBS pundit Peggy Noonan expressed the general sentiment of both camps when she said on Super Tuesday that “we’re seeing a great political party shatter before our eyes.”

But here is what no one in the GOP establishment wants you to know, and no one in the media wants to admit: Donald Trump isn’t the destruction of the Republican Party; he is the fulfillment of everything the party has been saying and doing for decades. He is just saying it louder and more plainly than his predecessors and intra-party rivals.

The media have been acting as if the Trump debacle were the biggest political story to come down the pike in some time. But the real story – one the popularity of Trump’s candidacy has revealed and inarguably the biggest political story of the last 50 years — is the decades-long transformation of Republicanism from a business-centered, small town, white Protestant set of beliefs into quite possibly America’s primary institutional force of bigotry, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, warmongering, intractability and cruelty against the vulnerable and powerless.

It is a story you didn’t read, hear or see in the mainstream media, only in lefty journals like The Nation and Rolling Stone, on websites like People for the American Way, and in columns like Paul Krugman’s. And it wasn’t exactly because the MSM in its myopia missed the story. It was because they chose not to tell it – to pretend it wasn’t happening. They are still pretending.

[fbc]

1. Meh, I think the rise of Bernie Sanders is a bigger story.

and the media is blowing that one too.

[Fast Walker 52]

6. Bernie is one man. This story is about two giant institutions in America

and how they have let us down-- the news media and the GOP.

[Major Hogwash]

2. It started with Reagan.

There was a great article posted here last week detailing how he started his campaign for President in Mississippi.

[kentuck]

4. Yes. Perhaps the self-deception has finally come to an end?

The self-deception about the "shining city on the hill". The false belief that the more you cut taxes, the more money will come into your Treasury. The false belief that Ronald Reagan single-handedly ended the 40-year Cold War. The false belief that it was the welfare mother, driving her Cadillac, that was the cause of all our economic imbalances. The false belief that we could force our way on the world with the strongest military on earth. That God was on the side of Republicans and that gave them the right to dictate to everyone else what was right or wrong. And the lies. The lies.

[Fast Walker 52]

7. the ned of the BS couldn't come soon enough

Our country is built on so many terrible lies that older generations loved to ignore.

[brer cat]

10. I rec this post.

You know republicans very well, kentuck. I have heard all of that passionately stated by the rank and file...the millions of voters who believe every word they hear on fauxnews, deny any facts that dispute their worldview, and vote against their best interests in every election from the top of the ticket to the bottom.

[GoneFishin]

3. Trümp is Rush Limbaugh running for President. The right wing has pretended that crazy is normal

since Reagan was in office, and it has worked. Their base totally believes it.

[Fast Walker 52]

5. the story is how terrible our media is-- and how they have consistently looked the other way

while the GOP fucks us over.

[KG]

8. not a accident. listening to NPR discuss the gop campaign in solemn tone as if it weren't a cringe

tells ya all you need to know....

[anothergreenbus]

9. Yes, the lies we tell even when we want to believe

we are fine upstanding people. I'm still rattled by how reckless and inhumane Clinton's intervention in Libya was and the untold human suffering that has ensued. America has nearly hit rock-bottom morally. It has some serious soul searching to do.