It's Come Down To 'Merely Awful' Versus 'Truly Awful' For The GOP

When a rooster gets its head cut off, it can still run around the barnyard for a few seconds. This, as scientists know, is because the neural network in the spinal cord is pre-programmed to direct the muscles in frequently used movement patterns such as running. And as political scientists and pundits should know, this explains why the Republican rooster is running around the party barnyard these days cocka-doodle-dooing "Trump is better than Cruz!" despite -- or rather because of -- having lost its head.

When the Republican rooster still had its head, and we're talking only a few weeks ago, it was cocka-doodle-dooing about how Rubio or Bush or Kasich or even Christie -- Somebody Please! -- was going to knock off the front runners and walk the Grand Old Party back into the White House. But no more. And so it has come down to the Merely Awful versus the Truly Awful for the GOP.

This has happened for reasons both obvious and no longer particularly surprising.

To riff off a great Robert Hunter/Grateful Dead lyric, if you plant ice you're gonna harvest wind, and Republicans have done a textbook job of just that by refusing to learn the lessons from crushing defeats in 2008 and 2012, indulging in the magical thinking that has long pervaded the American conservative movement, and perfecting ignorance and hate as messages as its drift to the right morphed into a full-blown gallop and the party's base came to be dominated by Bible thumpers and angry white men -- and sometimes Bible thumping angry white men.

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