everyone's gone to the moon...

     On Google, type in

Groucho Marx, Marilyn Monroe, "some men are following me"

and play the scene on You Tube

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------------- [excerpt, Frank Rich's September 2015 article (continued)] ------------------ Trump's ability to reduce the head of his adopted party to a comic functionary out of a Gilbert-and-Sullivan operetta is typical of his remarkable success in exposing Republican weakness and hypocrisy.  

The party Establishment has been trying to erect a firewall against the onslaught by claiming, as George Will has it, that Trump is a "counterfeit" Republican and that even "the assumption that today's Trumpites are Republicans is unsubstantiated and implausible."  Thus voters should discount Trump's "bimbo" tweets, anti-immigration fulminations, and rants about Mexican "rapists" as a wild man's ravings 

that don't represent a party that reveres women, welcomes immigrants, and loves Hispanics.  The Wall Street Journal editorial page, in its own effort to inoculate the GOP from Trump, disparages him as a "casino magnate" -- an epithet it doesn't hurl at Sheldon Adelson, the still-bigger casino magnate who serves as sugar daddy to the neocon hawks the Journal favors.

     Trump does take heretical economic positions for a Republican -- "The hedge-fund guys are getting away with murder!" -- but on the matters of race, women, and immigration that threaten the GOP's future viability in nonwhite, non-male America, he is at one with his party's base.

     What he does so rudely is call the GOP's bluff by saying loudly, unambiguously, and repeatedly the ugly things that other Republican politicians try to camouflage in innuendo, focus-group-tested euphemisms, and consultantspeak.

     In reality, Trump's most noxious views have not only been defended by conservative stars like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and late summer's No. 1 best-selling nonfiction author, the radio host Mark Levin, but also by the ostensibly  more "mainstream" Republican candidates.  

Trump is picking up where his vocal fan Sarah Palin left off and is for that reason by far the favored candidate of tea-party Republicans, according to a Labor Day CNN-ORC poll.  

Take Trump's peddling of "birtherism," for instance.  

It's been a right-wing cause since well before he took it up; even Mitt Romney dipped into that racist well in 2012.  It took a village of birthers to get Republicans to the point where only 29 percent of them now believe that Obama 

was born in America (and 54 percent identify him as a Muslim), according to an August survey by Public Policy Polling.  Far from being a fake Republican, Trump speaks for the party's overwhelming majority.


     Charles Krauthammer, 

another conservative apoplectic about Trump's potential to sabotage the GOP's 2016 chances, is arguing that Trump's incendiary immigration stand is also counterfeit Republicanism -- an aberrational "policy innovation."  The only problem is that Cruz, Walker, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson have all supported Trump's "policy innovation" calling for an end to the "birthright citizenship" guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.  


In Pew's latest survey on the issue -- taken in May, before Trump was in the race -- 47 percent of Republicans agreed as well.  Even more Republicans (62 percent) support building a wall along the Mexican border (as does Krauthammer), much as they did in 2012 when Herman Cain did Trump one better by proposing an "electrified fence."  

Trump's draconian call for deporting illegal immigrants en masse is also genuine, not counterfeit, Republicanism.  Romney had not only argued for "self-deportation" in his last presidential campaign but in 2008 had called for newly arrived illegal immigrants to be deported immediately and for the rest to be given just enough time "to organize their affairs and go home."

     With women, too, Trump embarrasses the GOP by saying in public what "real" Republicans keep private.  The telling moment in the Fox News debate was not when Megyn Kelly called him out for slurring women as "fat pigs" and "dogs" but the cheers from the audience at Trump's retort, in which he directed those same epithets at Rosie O'Donnell.  (No one onstage protested.)  When Trump attacked Kelly the next day in language that seemed to refer to menstruation, most of his GOP rivals made a show of rallying around Kelly.

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