On MSNBC, Republican National Committee head Reince Priebus is unconcerned with whether the hackers that released internal communications from the mirroring Democratic organization were tied to the Russian government or not. What, me worry?
To be fair, telling America that nothing matters anymore is three-quarters of Reince's remaining job, and has been since it became clear that the party really was going to nominate Angry Fascist Summer Squash as their presidential candidate. What Trump says doesn't matter; what various party functionaries say or do doesn't matter; a Republican convention that ended up being something akin to a tire fire doesn't matter either. It will all work out, says Reince each week, while staffers rummage around the back room for the man's spine.
But it's still interesting to see Trump's influence ooze so readily over the remnants of the Republican Party. The pre-Trump Republican Party was nothing if not obsessed with Russia's every twitch and move, and by the party's telling one election ago Vladimir Putin was two collectable stamps away from reforming the whole Soviet Union. Now, the party's various hawks and sparrows are unconcerned that forces known to be close to that same government are strong suspects in the ratf--king of the opposing American party on the eve of that party's convention, or that those hackers took especially keen interest in the one Democratic staffer researching Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort's work for ousted pro-Putin Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych.
Meanwhile, the party has acquiesced, at the Trump campaign’s insistence, to watering down anti-Russian elements of its platform, and leaders shrug off assertions from Candidate Trump that maybe if he were president we wouldn't be so quick to help NATO allies fend off Russian advances.
The list of things that no longer matter to Reince Preibus, or Mitch McConnell, or the collected paranoiacs who are certain that President Obama is one Jade Helm from conquering Texas but are oddly sanguine about the intentions of the belligerent ass sporting a wallet stuffed full of Russian cash, is long.
These are the same people, mind you, who remain three-quarters convinced that the sitting American president is secretly a foreigner and a Muslim. They were convinced that the Obama administration was secretly buying up all the nation's ammunition so that good and true patriots would not be able to buy any. They have forever been on the lookout for FEMA camps, and are still damn certain that ACORN is out there, somewhere, and are certain that Hillary Clinton personally intervened to make sure Americans died good and proper in Libya one evening, and fervently believe that all of climate science, collectively, is a worldwide elite-scientist plot against Ma and Pa Fossil Fuel.
Losing their collective shit over conspiratorial goings-on is quite literally the Republican Party's only remaining core identity, the only thing that rouses them to hold hearings or show up for rallies. It is how Trump systemically stripped all the other candidates out of the race: Because he was willing to opine that immigrants were rapists, and that everything is rigged, and every last person is crooked and whatever else he read in his Twitter feed that particular morning, and the other poor cads couldn't or wouldn't follow.
Here we've got a Russian-financed candidate with a Russian-tied campaign manager getting impromptu assistance from Russian hackers to help throw an election toward the fellow who's not quite sure he wants to keep going with all thisNATO business and nobody in Republicandom can get roused about it? No John McCain, or Pat Buchanan, or Fox News Nightly Freakout Theater?
Tsk. You're slacking, conservatives. We know you've just got back from a long week of burying your national party in a too-shallow grave with an ornate and bigly headstone, but in the old days you would have been all over this one.