It appears we are at the part of the zombie movie where the desperate survivors turn on themselves.
With time running out until the first primary votes are cast, establishment Republicans have begun a ferocious round of finger-pointing over who is to blame for the party’s failure to stop Donald Trump.
Golly, Wilbur, I don't know. I'd have to say the lion's share of the blame lies with those in the party who encouraged more and more radical rhetoric from their leaders, priming the base for ever-more radical ideas and a hatred of the mere idea of government. The people who framed every election as a battle against brown people coming to kill you and/or marry your daughter and/or take your stuff. The pundits who fomented an active, seething, virulent hostility for knowledge or expertise inside the government, instead declaring that all of science, medicine, public policy, national security, and anything else you can name could be solved by a shouting man-child calling all those other people dumb.
Or, what the hell, blame it on Jeb Bush. Whatever floats your little boat.
Receiving much of the blame is Right to Rise, the cash-flush super PAC that broke records when it announced last year that it had raised more than $100 million in support of Jeb Bush. The group has directed relatively little of that sum toward attacking Trump — instead focusing its efforts on taking down Bush’s establishment rivals, above all Marco Rubio. [...]
Stephen Hayes, an influential Weekly Standard columnist, blasted Right to Rise for a strategy that effectively “cleared the way for Trump.”
The other campaigns, too, are to blame, according to this interpretation of events. Nobody wants to attack Trump because he will be mean to them. Donors don't want to fund ads attacking a fellow Fabulously Rich Guy. And so forth.
What's conspicuously not being contemplated: How the Republican base got to the point that they would rather support a cartoonish, racist, petulant gilded boor rather than any of the other candidates the nice rich people have selected as "legitimate" candidates for running the whole of America. Why is the base so quick to climb onto the wagon of the fellow who says Mexicans are rapists and Muslims should be banned wholesale from the nation? The man who is convinced that the entire collected experience of America and the Americans who run it is no match for his innate ability to decide which things may or may not be losers? Why are these people so convinced that a lying, shallow puddle of a man with a loud voice and his own television program has all the needed answers, because he has a loud voice and his own television program?
It is a mystery. Truly, a task for a master detective.