Just for the fun of it, here is a short list of the dangerous blinking red don’t-go-there topics that have given the Republican party seizures in recent years.
* Inequality of income and of opportunity. People are pissed about this. You can tell in a lot of ways but my favorite is how you started seeing climate deniers try to paint scientists as elitists promoting this stuff to gobble up all that lucrative grant money. (I worked on NOAA grants. You eat a lot of ramen.)
* Immigration. They will need hispanic votes to survive but the worst and nastiest anti-hispanic bigots happen to be voters they need right now. It’s a rock and a hard place.
* Rape.
A bunch of Democratic staffers three pitchers into a happy hour would have a hard time coming up with how one could combine those three into some sort of party-destroying perfect storm Voltron sharknado monster. And yet.
[D]etails of a book published in 1993, however graphic, aren’t the only thing that made the story explosive. When Mak reached Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, for comment he first asserted that “by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.”When [Tim] Mak[, author of the book Lost Tycoon, The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump] reminded Cohen that that isn’t true — New York’s “marital rape exemption” law was struck down in 1984 — Cohen “changed tactics,” threatening to sue The Daily Beast for $500 million if a story with Trump’s name and the word “rape” was published.
The guy is leading New Hampshire by twelve. He has a guaranteed spot in the next debate. Nobody in that room has the same native skill at commanding attention in front of TV cameras. Jeb(!) can barely keep a crowd awake when he’s the only one on stage. Pretty much the best case scenario for the GOP will be if Chris Christie makes the cut and they get in a fistfight.
Oh yeah, open thread. Because even when he’s leading in the polls and borking the entire GOP there remains something a little embarrassing about writing a whole post about Donald Trump.