Hey, mad props, Carson.
Oh, the GOP establishment—still mourning the bad rap their party is getting now that its front-runners have lent a full-throated endorsement to the base's
anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-everything views.
Many Republicans worry that the image of these early months will last. “This year is different, and what is happening now is leaving a searing impression,” said Peter Wehner, who headed the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives under President George W. Bush. “This is toxic for the Republican Party — potentially lethal for it.”
The leading candidates, Wehner added, are “sending a message in bright, Trump-like lights to nonwhite voters that they are not welcome.”
That is exactly the message being sent and it's a brand that has taken the GOP base by storm. If it wasn't obvious enough after Donald Trump rose to the top by tagging undocumented immigrants as "rapists" and "murderers," Ben Carson is putting an exclamation point on it with his pronouncement that he "
absolutely would not agree" with putting a Muslim in the Oval Office. Sound horrific and completely unconstitutional to apply a religious litmus test to the presidency? It is. And yet
30 percent of Iowa Republicans would go further—making Islam illegal in the United States. Yes, you read that right. Not just bar Muslims from elected office, actually jail them.
Iowa Rep. Steve "cantaloupe calves" King gets it.
“I wouldn’t expect those remarks would hurt Dr. Carson in Iowa. I think they help him,” said Rep. Steve King (R), a conservative leader in that state.
You know your party's really headed down the crapper when Steve King is actually more in tune with the base than all the establishment Republicans combined.