BY MAX BURBANK | Visualize this: by moonlight, corpses dug from fresh graves; the abnormal brains of psychopaths stolen from a medical school. In his shadowy laboratory, Dr. Frankenstein stitches dismembered parts into a single grotesque form. The chain hoist clanks, slowly lifting the monstrous body up, up into the gathering storm! Lightning strikes, thunder roars! Transformers crackle, spit sparks, the monstrous body smokes! Inert. Lifeless. Still. But wait! A hand twitches on the dangling arm, Dr. Frankenstein lifts his hands to the sky and shrieks…not “It’s Alive!,” but “Where the F$%& did THAT thing come from?!”
Not “That’s not what I meant to do.” Not “Who replaced my beautiful creation with this hideous monster?” Not “Oh, the horror of the predictable but unintended outcome of my experiments.” Not “Oops” or “Sorry.” Not “My bad.” Just “Where the F$%& did THAT thing come from?!” — as if there was absolutely zero connection between what he’d been doing and what happened.
That’s the Republican Party right now. After literally a generation cobbling together a hideous mash of Southern Strategy, Dog Whistle Race Baiting and Fox News — slopping in chunks of rancid, defective brain matter from Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh, strapping the results to a waterboard and juicing it with “enhanced interrogation” — the Republican Party absolutely cannot imagine who the hell put Donald Trump on the gurney where they’d spent all that time doing such cool stuff.
David Brooks is shocked, shocked, that after years scribbling fawning apologia for the Bush administration’s lie-based regime change and its quest for the holy-yet-completely-made-up weapons of mass destruction, a liar-liar-pants-on-fire like Donald Trump could demand such respect!
John McCain is shocked, shocked, that less than a decade after trying to rejuvenate his own flagging presidential campaign by choosing an incoherent attention trollop as his running mate, a lowlife huckster like Donald Trump could be a heartbeat away from the presidency!
Mitt Romney has his secret underwear in a twist and is shocked, shocked, I says, that after literally begging for the endorsement of (and money from) Donald Trump — a birther hobbyist unable to understand how such a darkly complected President could be born in Hawaii, when everybody knows those people come from Africa, now, somehow inexplicably, that same Donald Trump, that actual same guy is the front-runner for the Republican nomination! Is this Bizarro World?!
And this violence! Out of nowhere, in a vacuum, with no provocation whatsoever, hordes of well-organized, professional thugs and bad dudes, almost certainly at the behest of known brutalitarian strongman Communist Bernie Sanders, descend on a perfect love fest (not a rally, we don’t want to call it a rally, what is this Nuremberg?) of law abiding White Supremacists, God-fearing, ponytailed, toothless sucker-punchers and adorable Heiling Grannies! Donald Trump is robbed of his God-given, constitutional right to free speech! I know, because Trump spoke about it freely and at great length on every network for at least an hour longer than the rally itself would have run, and to a much larger audience.
But what could he do? After careful consultation with the police, and at their insistence, Trump “postponed” the event, because he would never, ever want anybody to get hurt. Unless he was, you know, actively calling for them to get hurt like he does at every single rally, and certainly would have done at this one if the police hadn’t insisted he “postpone.”
Except, here’s the thing: they didn’t. The Chicago Police Department says they had the whole situation pretty much under control, and that violence only broke out after Trump let everyone stew in the arena for a half hour before releasing a toady to tell them the Wizard wasn’t going to see them and they should come back tomorrow.
See, the police didn’t “advise” Trump about anything. He never met with or spoke to them. He lies with such a high degree of certainty that the press won’t ask him about it, for fear of venturing into analysis. If they do ask, his earpiece will probably malfunction anyway.
So with Super Duper Tuesday (seriously?) in the rearview mirror, what happens next? Rubio’s out, and now must decide if losing his home state to Trump was humiliating enough — or if he’d like to shoot the moon and lick The Donald’s jackboot. He could endorse Ted Cruz, an unspeakably loathsome human weasel whose survival depends on the enormity of Trump’s ego keeping direct sunlight from setting him ablaze.
So the Grand Old Party (or Grand Old Penis, after Trump’s rebranding) offers three sinking ships for horrified elite Republican rats to climb aboard.
Let’s call Ship Number One the Lusitania, where all the sailors line up behind Donald Trump. All they need to do is sign a loyalty oath stating “I pledge my soul to an orange leather sack of excrement, its pursed lips smacking at the prospect of bloody protesters wheeled from its presence on stretchers. We are indeed the party of White Supremacy, and we pretty much always have been since Goldwater — so let’s just admit it and win until we’re sick of winning.”
On Ship Number Two, the Titanic, panicked passengers desperately attempt to keep Trump from amassing enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot at convention, allowing Cruz, Kasich, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and other imaginary white knights to fight it out like rabid cats in a sack.
What’s left? The doomed ghost ship of last resort: The Flying Dutchman. Here, the spectral crew moves the goalposts at the last minute. They can do that. Conventions are governed by party rules, not law. One of the rules is that those rules can be changed whenever and however. Hell, they could make it so the candidate with the biggest hands gets the nod.
The Republican Party has nothing but bad choices left. If human last-Clementine-left-in-the-box-three-weeks-after-you-thought-they-were-all-gone Trump is the nominee, they’ll have to pray like hell for a terrorist attack. Barring a major fear-generating event to push your run-of-the-mill, mildly racist voters over the edge, there simply aren’t enough White Supremacist, neo-Nazi and fascist votes to win the general election.
The brokered convention and rule change options both lead inevitably to thwarted Trump voters turning their rage and violence inward. That’s enough Republican on Republican fisticuffs to make the Chicago ’68 Democratic National Convention look like a damn Sunday School picnic.
The Republican chickens have all come home to roost, and in mid-July they are going to turn the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio into their own personal cock-fighting ring. Why not? Hasn’t the Republican race been basically a cockfight all along? See what I did there?
The only question left is, “Who’s to blame?”
Who made that monster on the table? The Republicans are certain it wasn’t them.
Thanks, Obama.
Want more Max Burbank? Of course, you do! “Cruz” his musings, at maxburbank.wordpress.com.
