Month: December 2015

Another dose of sanity
by Tom Sullivan
After the week and year we have had, it becomes hard to believe there is still a Force for good operating in this world. So the NPR story last night about Omaha’s Tri-Faith Initiative lifted the gloom just a bit. Religious leaders in Omaha are constructing a mosque, a church and a synagogue on a shared 38-acre plot.
At least someone is trying to get along. These days, it is a radical idea. Making Omaha a target even:

All the more reason that it feels right, says Doug Dushan, a member of Countryside Church. He says attacking the foundation of extremist, separatist, ideology isn’t just dangerous — it is exhilarating.
“It does reinforce that I think any development in any faith have happened against the grain,” Dushan says.
Similar initiatives are underway elsewhere. One in Berlin would house all three religions in a single building. Elnes, the minister at Countryside, says it’s part of a growing movement.
“Right now, worldwide, what we see when we look at the three Abrahamic faiths,” he says, “is that the progress end of all three of those faiths actually have more in common with each other than they may have in common with the extreme ends within their faith.”
Syed Mohiuddin agrees. A cardiologist, he heads the American Muslim Institute and is excited to complete the Tri-Faith campus, which should happen in the next few years.
“We’ll have music. We’ll have parties,” Mohiuddin says. “Food, food brings everybody together” — that is, after they work out the various dietary restrictions and hundreds of other small issues.

Representing the Darker Side, the publications FrontPage, Daily Caller, and WorldNetDaily view attempts to have interfaith music and parties as deeply disturbing, as possible attempts by the Muslim Brotherhood (and Warren Buffett?) to destroy Israel and the Judeo-Christian values of America. (Sorry, no links. Not gonna do it.) A ringing endorsement, you might say.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

We may need each other this year

by digby

Yes, it’s that time of year again. The time when I come to you, my readers, Santa hat in hand, for the annual Hullabaloo Holiday fundraiser. It’s hard to believe that this creaky old blog has been around this long but on January 1st it will be 13 years. And for the last decade not a day has gone by that a new post did not appear. Since 2007, there have only been a handful of days in which a new post written by me did not appear.  That’s 24/7 365.

Not that I mind, of course. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But it does leave little time for making money in ways other than writing.  Were I to take that job as a Walmart greeter or a dog walker it would really cut into my time for blogging.  So, each year I turn to you, my loyal readers, for a little support to keep this strange habit of mine — and yours — going. And many of you are always so kind and generous that it assures me once again that this effort is not in vain.

I recently went back and looked at the early posts to remind myself of how far we’ve come. And it’s true that things have changed — unfortunately, not entirely for the better. Back when I started this thing we were getting ready to go to war in Iraq and there was a bloodlust in the air that was truly frightening. At the time we were just a little over a year away from 9/11, a legitimately frightening attack of catastrophic proportions and our leaders were taking cynical advantage of that fear to advance a long held goal in the middle east. It felt as though the train hadn’t just left the station, it had never even stopped there.

A lot has happened since then. The war turned out to be the disaster many of us predicted. We suffered a terrible economic crisis from which we are only beginning to emerge. And the right has gone from teetering on the edge of insanity to a swan dive into total lunacy during the ensuing years.

Today we are observing a majority of the Republican party in thrall to a fascistic billionaire and a far right demagogue. And the bloodlust of the post-9/11 period has re-emerged, this time in the form of an adolescent yearning to assert white America’s dominance so strong that they are willing to completely abandon all restraint. We have now entered a truly surreal period in American politics.

Back when I first started blogging, my point of view wasn’t seen very much in the media.  The liberal blogosphere was a motley crew of average citizens fighting back the self-identified “warbloggers” who dominated the internet in those early days. As the mainstream media eagerly danced to the tune of the war party we were documenting their atrocities. Those early efforts helped form the nucleus of what became a resurgent progressive movement.

Today we have Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow on TV.  We have many sophisticated, modern web sites discussing politics, even liberal politics. Even the editorial boards of the mainstream newspapers are finally becoming somewhat alarmed by the GOP’s lurch toward fascism. But from the looks of it since Paris and the rise of Trump, it wouldn’t take much to push the media right back to December 2002.  All you have to do is look at the list of questions asked in the CNN debate this week to see how willing — no, eager — they are to fan the flames of war. There’s a feeling of instability and danger in the air and I don’t think we should count on them to behave with professional skepticism.

If you think the old-time blogging we do here might be of use to you in the coming year of election fever and right wing fear-mongering, I hope you will consider making a donation. It makes it possible for me to keep writing what I write each day and offer a platform to my wonderful regular contributors, Tom Sullivan, Gaius Publius and Dennis Hartley.

We early lefty bloggers were right about the war and we were on to the encroaching radicalism of the GOP long before anyone else was.  We had the media’s number too. If we can keep doing this over the next year I guarantee you can count on Hullabaloo to stay fiercely independent and devoted to the truth as we see it.

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And now an unhinged word from the NRA

by digby

Right wing watch caught NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch on The Blaze TV. If you haven’t seen Glen Beck’s new network it makes Fox, Newsmax TV and One America Network  look like The Daily Show by comparison. (And yes, we have four wingnut welfare cable “news” networks now, each one loonier than the last.)

Anyway, RWW points out that James Comey stated that the San Bernardino shooters did not, as previously reported, post their plans to Facebook.  This pokes a major hole in the reaction of the right wing in the wake of the attacks.

Here’s an example of the measured response from the right courtesy of Loesch:

“Here’s an idea. How about you guys stop letting terrorists in … because you all have blood on your hands right now.” 

“It wasn’t the NRA that made the rule that said we’re not allowed to look at the social media activity of people who are unvetted and coming from hotbed areas of terrorism like Tashfeen Malik,” Loesch continued. “I don’t know if people missed Government 101 and how all of this works, but that was actually Jeh Johnson and the Department of Homeland Security.” 

“It was that rule, that very rule, that allowed inside these United States, fiancée Pakistani Visa applicant Tashfeen Malilk, who, by the way, was ranting on social media for years about her jihadi fetish,” Loesch fumed. “She was fetishizing jihadism online but because Jeh Johnson was so obsessed with political correctness and so obsessed with optics — which I’m sure is going to be of great comfort to the 14 families who lost people in San Bernardino that day — I’m sure they’ll find great comfort in the fact that Jeh Johnson did all he could to make sure that DHS was beyond reproach in terms of politically correct optics.” 

“I also have a major problem with all these tragedy dry-humping whores,” she ranted, “and I’m not watching my language because it’s about time somebody call you out for what you are. You sicken me.”

Liberals are tragedy dry-humping whores. There you have it.

Here’s another video by that nice level headed woman:

As you might guess, I have different view.

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Rush and O’Reilly’s highwire act

by digby

One of the more interesting sideshows in the GOP presidential circus has been the high-wire act performed by talk radio hosts as they try to walk the party line with the heavy weight of Donald Trump hung around their necks. It’s not that they don’t have plenty of practice at balancing the party line and the conservative id; this year the wire is just much higher and the burden is much, much heavier.

A quick survey of right wing radio and counter establishment institutions shows that in general there is a clear preference for Senator Ted Cruz. This is to be expected. Cruz is a Tea Party-style movement conservative to the core. And his aggressive confrontational style is what most of these activists and media personalities have been demanding of their representatives in government for years. Cruz is a hero on the right not just for being uncompromising, but also for keeping his commitment to do everything in his power to deliver on their agenda. They could not ask for more.

But that doesn’t mean they are eager to criticize Donald Trump, particularly when it comes to his hardcore stance on immigration. It’s not that they truly mistrust Cruz on that issue (and certainly not to the extent that they loathe Marco Rubio for his involvement with the Gang of 8 and what they inaccurately call “amnesty.”) There’s no question in this crowd that Cruz’s conservative bona fides are fully in order.

But as much as they like Cruz, on immigration Trump has been singing their tune in the crude way that only talk radio hosts and drunken uncles tend to. Naturally they like hearing it — they’re the ones who wrote the song. While the politicians in Washington were convening “autopsies” that concluded that the party needed to reach out to Latinos, the conservative base was screaming in defiance and nobody running for office articulates their rage about this the way Trump does.

But let’s face facts: The media “thought leaders” may like how Trump is getting the base riled up and excited but they know he isn’t really one of them. Like everyone else, they undoubtedly assumed that he was a good showman who was getting the troops excited for the campaign ahead, but would obviously flame out long before now. They may have persuaded themselves that the country is ready for a Tea Party zealot like Cruz, but Trump is something else altogether — he has not signed on to the whole program and they know it.

This was illustrated in living color this week when, after all the demented statements Trump has made over the past few months, the thing that finally evoked a rebuke from every talk show host from Ingraham to Beck to Levin to Limbaugh was his criticism of Cruz “acting like a maniac” in Congress, and insisting that you can’t get things done that way. Trump clearly didn’t understand that he had just spit on the conservative movement’s most valued and cherished tactic, the energetic implementation of which they most admire about Ted Cruz. You can say what you want about torture and ethnic cleansing and war crimes. You can trash talk Washington politicians all night long. But you simply do not criticize conservative movement strategy. That is, by definition, RINO talk.

Still, just as Trump’s rivals have to be cautious about how far to go in criticizing him for fear of alienating his supporters, so too does the right wing media. All you have to do is watch the delicate pas de deux between Trump and Roger Ailes to see how challenging this can be.

Just look at the strange contortions Bill O’Reilly goes through to keep some semblance of credibility without alienating Trump’s supporters:

“Donald Trump understands the anger sweeping America today, and is tapping into that anger. He’s not really concerned that much much with policy right now, he is running on emotion. His campaign strategy has been brilliant, but if you take what he says literally he can be a frightening guy. I see many of his statements as over the top rhetoric, designed to get him votes, not necessarily in stone policy pronouncements.”

Likewise, after very mildly criticizing Trump for the Cruz comments earlier in the week, Rush Limbaugh came back yesterday, post-debate, with this:

“Trump drops the performance persona and communicates. This is an example of many; these things happen frequently in his personal appearances. I’m only illustrating this, or mentioning it, because so many people still wonder how it is that Trump doesn’t get hurt by what some people think are the stupid things he says or the ignorant things he says or the mean things he says or the controversial. The things that would normally destroy others he profits from. And professional communicators are scratching their heads, professional political people are scratching their heads, it doesn’t make any sense. They’re still hoping that Trump will implode. He’s not gonna implode, and I’m just trying to help people understand why. It’s all rooted in the bond, the connection that Trump has made with the people who support him. And, by the way, that bond is rooted in substance.”

Contrast that with what he said about Cruz’s debate performance:

“I thought Ted Cruz was outstanding last night. Ted Cruz speaks like a traditional powerful, well-versed proud — unabashedly proud — conservative. He is an articulate representative of conservatism and the conservative movement, and he is a happy warrior. He loves doing what he’s doing. He loves mixing it up. He loves getting in there. And he is relishing this opportunity to put on display what he believes and what millions of the rest of us believe.”

Rush went on and on about how Trump was the first to tap into people’s anger and condemn political correctness and tell it like it is. He took some oblique credit for reeling Trump back in on the Cruz “maniac” question. Then he commented on what was really important: He ran Trump’s little speech in which he said he would not run as an independent and said:

“Okay, so the performance persona is gone there, folks. That’s straight from the heart. That happens frequently in his personal appearances. There was humility. All the characteristics that people think Trump doesn’t have were right there in 30 seconds.”

Trump was a good boy and got with the program and Rush was clearly very relieved. But nobody’s really kidding themselves that anything Trump says is binding.

Limbaugh and the rest of the talkers are palpably nervous, as you can see by their bizarre rationalizations about the Trump phenomenon. They are all conservative-movement media figures who cater to the right wing, so they have to at least pay lip service to his appeal. But they are also political professionals who don’t live completely in the bubble they have created for the rubes. They know Trump is a disaster for the party. At this point they’re just trying to keep things from hurtling out of control.

The question is if they have somehow managed to persuade themselves that their favorite maniac, Ted Cruz, can actually win the nomination. It’s likely that they, like everyone else, had assumed that a more mainstream figure would come out on top and they would reluctantly go along. Now it’s looking like there’s a decent chance their guy could head the ticket.

The prospect of that must make them even more nervous than Trump. After all, if Cruz wins the nomination and loses the general election, they will not be able to fall back on their perennial excuse that the nominee wasn’t conservative enough. You cannot get any more conservative than Ted Cruz. If that happens it won’t be a disaster for the Republican Party — it will be a disaster for the conservative movement. But it would be very good for the country.
Salon

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An important little fact check

by digby

I’ve been hearing some rumblings from lefty friends that they think people might be wiling to support Trump of Clinton due to his brave  and bold prescient opposition to the Iraq war. I think that’s a long shot even if true, but it’s important to note that like virtually everything else he says, it just isn’t true:

He was a real profile in courage.

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A marriage made in hell

by digby

In the unlikely event that you are unaware of the stakes for the GOP if either of the current frontrunners make it to the general election, this Vox article by Andrew Prokop lays it out nicely:

Let’s be clear on the political stakes here. It is not impossible that Trump or Cruz could win a general election. But there’s ample reason to believe that a Trump or Cruz nomination makes all of the following far more likely:

Sweeping electoral defeat for Republicans, for the presidency and in the Senate at least (some Democrats have even suggested to me that the House could be put in play)

Either a liberal takeover of the Supreme Court or a missed chance for conservatives to pad their majority (since four of the court’s nine justices will be older than 80 when the next president is inaugurated)

A tarnishing of the GOP’s image among Hispanics that will last a very long time. (This is obviously true for Trump, but Cruz is also far further to the right on immigration than any modern GOP nominee.)

With so many other options available, nominating either Trump or Cruz would be a tremendous risk to take for a party that has any interest in winning.

And yet somehow Trump and Cruz have ended up first and second in the polls, with one of them leading Iowa and the other ahead in New Hampshire.

He admits that other frontrunners have collapsed all at once (Howard Dean being the obvious example) but notes the important difference here:

Is the establishment really still willing to assume that two poll leaders will just collapse?

Two poll leaders who not only have excited voters but who each has access to tens of millions in cash?

He wonders why the GOP establishment has failed to rally around Rubio who has always been to logical choice on paper and goes over all the reporting which shows that the Big Money Boyz and the party poohbahs are still flummoxed about what to do about Trump and Cruz. They just don’t have a clue about how to stop this train and it gaining momentum every minute they fail to do it.

It’s looking more and more like one of them if not both will be there down the stretch and either with a good chance of winning the nomination. In fact, it’s looking more and more to me as if Cruz is actually going to end up being the establishment choice which is so perfect I can’t believe it: they hate him and he hates them, a GOP match made in heaven.

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In a world led by these bozos
by Tom Sullivan

Many readers must have had the same reaction to Tuesday’s Republican debate: disbelief. A stage full candidates for president promising that, after swearing to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, they would violate the principles behind it and commit war crimes in our name (like those who set recent precedent). Banning Muslims from the U.S. Carpet bombing. Targeting civilians, women and children. All-American, make-Jesus-proud stuff like that. Because strong, you know?

Instead of allaying people’s fears in the aftermath of recent terrorism, they fed them. Stoked them. CNN set the tone with a berserker lead-in right out of a Don LaFontaine “In a world …” movie trailer. Republican leaders pledging to fight terrorism staged an hours-long infomercial for Daesh and proved once again that their commitment to American principles is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Front-runner Donald Trump doesn’t know what the nuclear triad is. “Not a problem,” writes Gail Collins. “He can hire somebody who knows about nuclear weapons. Somebody really great.” Charlie Pierce agrees that “none of these guys is up to the job.”

The “overwhelming insecurity” was palpable, as Charles Blow observes this morning:

I would posit that most of the issues that get traction in these debates, and indeed have gotten traction among Republican voters this cycle, have to do with a tremendous insecurity about power and safety — terrorism, the economy, immigration, gun rights, refugees, exploding drug addiction among white youth, policing, all of it.

We live in an America that is changing in dramatic demographic ways right before people’s eyes. Many of our largest cities are already majority-minority or soon will be. The electoral map, altered by this growing number of minority voters, makes it increasingly difficult for Republicans to win the presidency, even as they enjoy overwhelming successes on the state and legislative levels.

None of this is new. Republicans have been running on fear of change and the Other since Lee Atwater and before. Martin Longman at Political Animal quotes from the GOP platform from 1952 to prove the point:

We assert that during the last twenty years, leaders of the Government of the United States under successive Democrat Administrations, and especially under this present Administration, have failed to perform these several basic duties; but, on the contrary, that they have evaded them, flouted them, and by a long succession of vicious acts, so undermined the foundations of our Republic as to threaten its existence.

We charge that they have arrogantly deprived our citizens of precious liberties by seizing powers never granted.

We charge that they work unceasingly to achieve their goal of national socialism.

We charge that they have disrupted internal tranquillity by fostering class strife for venal political purposes.

We charge that they have choked opportunity and hampered progress by unnecessary and crushing taxation.

They claim prosperity but the appearance of economic health is created by war expenditures, waste and extravagance, planned emergencies, and war crises. They have debauched our money by cutting in half the purchasing power of our dollar.

We charge that they have weakened local self-government which is the cornerstone of the freedom of men.

Etc., etc., etc. Longman writes, “Their rhetoric is old. Their tactics are old. Their belief systems have been warped forever.”

Stanley Greenberg has measured the anxiety for years. The Republican base “thinks they are losing politically and losing control of the country – and their starting reaction is ‘worried,’ ‘discouraged,’ ‘scared,’ and ‘concerned’ about the direction of the country – and a little powerless to change course.” Republican candidates know well that there’s nothing like Viagra and a little peace through superior firepower to treat that. It is all they have left.

Afghani Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai addressed the anti-Muslim rhetoric:

“It’s important that whatever politicians say, whatever the media say, they should be really, really careful about it. If your intention is to stop terrorism, do not try to blame the whole population of Muslims for it because it cannot stop terrorism. It will radicalize more terrorists.”

Instead, she believes, education, not discrimination is the key to stopping terrorism. “If we want to end terrorism we need to bring quality education so we defeat the mindset of terrorism mentality and of hatred.”

Does that mean we don’t get to blow shit up?

OMG, the Village is taking over Hollywood

by digby

Ok, Trump and Carson are one thing. But now it’s getting serious. The world has officially gone mad:

One week after striking a deal with MSNBC, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin have signed a deal for a weekly show for Showtime, the premium cable channel announced on Tuesday.

Mr. Heilemann and Mr. Halperin, perhaps best known as the authors of “Game Change,” will be featured on a weekly 30-minute show that will offer a “behind the scenes look” at the 2016 presidential election, Showtime’s president, David Nevins, said in an interview. It will not be a talk show.

Mr. Nevins likened the show, which will be called “The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth,” to Showtime’s “A Season With Notre Dame” and HBO’s “Hard Knocks.” “The Circus” will feature a rotating set of characters, he said, from the presidential candidates, to campaign handlers and possibly members of the news media. Mr. Heilemann and Mr. Halperin will be correspondents on the show, along with the Republican strategist Mark McKinnon. It will premiere in January.

These are the two most boring people on earth, do they not know this? Did the suits at Showtime fail to watch their show?

It was bad enough that MSNBC thought they’d be interesting and informative. But at least they are a cable news network and being boring is somewhat expected. Do these Showtime execs think they are some kind of answer to John Oliver?

Oh dear…

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Chris Christie went on CBS and proved what everyone once knew about him. #psycho

by digby

John Heileman told Chris Matthews he thinks Chris Christie was just joshing when he made these psychotic comments yesterday on CBS News. (Heileman giggled and said that politicians often say things they don’t really mean.)

You be the judge if this puts Christie in the Carson, Santorum, Trump school of idiocy:

Responding to a debate-night jab from presidential hopeful Rand Paul, Chris Christie launched his own attack at the Kentucky senator, calling him “unfit” to be commander-in-chief during an appearance on “CBS This Morning” early Wednesday.

“You see the problem for folks like Sen. Paul is that they don’t realize we’re already in World War III,” Christie said. “The fact is this is a new world war and one that won’t look like the last two. And this is one where it’s radical Islamic jihadists everyday are trying to kill Americans and disrupt and destroy our way of life.“

Christie added of his GOP rival: “If he doesn’t understand that we’re already in that war, then it’s just another example of why he’s so unfit to be president of the United States.“

Late Tuesday during the debate, the Kentucky senator hit Christie for saying he would shoot down a Russian plane in a Syrian no-fly zone, saying that “if you’re in favor of World War III, you’ve got your candidate.” Paul also called out the New Jersey governor for the 2014 Bridgegate scandal, insinuating that someone who would be in favor of a third world war would also back the shutting down of a bridge for political retaliation — something Christie aides had previously been accused of.

Christie doubled down on his no-fly zone proposal, adding that the “rules of engagement would be very clear.”

“If [Russians] go into our no-fly zone after we’ve warned them to stay out, then they would be shot down,” the Republican contender, bumped up from the undercard Fox Business debate into CNN’s main stage on Tuesday, told CBS News. “It will be made very clear to them what those rules were. If they decided to violate them, that’s what the no-fly zone means – don’t fly, and if they fly there, their pilot will get shot down.“

The New Jersey governor also expressed skepticism that Russia was truly a U.S. ally in the fight against the extremist terror group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“I don’t believe that that’s the case,” he said. “The fact is Russia’s been stealing our lunch money the entire time from the Obama administration — from Hillary Clinton’s reset button to going into Crimea and Ukraine and the activities they’re doing in Syria to prop up their puppet, Assad. So ISIS is simply not being attacked by Russia. Russia is in Syria along with Iran to prop up Assad.“

Christie continued: “If that offends folks in the U.N. crowd, I’ m sorry but America needs to assert itself again.“

And of Russia, he said that, “they are aligning with the Iranians to try and create an Iranian empire across the Middle East. I don’t call that a friend.“

Seriously, that is no less nutty than anything Trump has said. In fact, I don’t think Trump has ever said we’re in World War III, so he’s actually sensible by comparison. He’s got some nerve saying that anyone else is “unfit to be president.” He’s unfit to be anywhere in politics.

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Rush can’t abandon The Donald even if he wants to

by digby

Rush today:

Trump drops the performance persona and communicates. This is an example of many; these things happen frequently in his personal appearances. I’m only illustrating this, or mentioning it, because so many people still wonder how it is that Trump doesn’t get hurt by what some people think are the stupid things he says or the ignorant things he says or the mean things he says or the controversial. The things that would normally destroy others he profits from. And professional communicators are scratching their heads, professional political people are scratching their heads, it doesn’t make any sense. They’re still hoping that Trump will implode. He’s not gonna implode, and I’m just trying to help people understand why. It’s all rooted in the bond, the connection that Trump has made with the people who support him. And, by the way, that bond is rooted in substance…

Of everybody in this field right now, Donald Trump was the first to tap into, viscerally, what Americans are feeling and living. This is not to slight anybody else. This is not to be critical of anybody else. He started with the border, the southern border, and worked his way to refugees and the economy and any number of things that are making this country weak and said it’s got to stop. And during all of this he let everybody know that they were right.

He validated what millions of people were already thinking. This is what the establishment of both parties misses. They think that most of the people this country are brain-dead, sponges, mind-numbed robots waiting to be influenced by any number of false prophets or phony Svengalis, because they have a basic contempt for average, ordinary people and what they consider to be their lack of mental ability. So they’re dead wrong about that.

So Trump comes along, and he didn’t say anything anybody else wasn’t thinking. He said something everybody was thinking. He said lists of things everybody was thinking. He validated and he let everybody know that they were right, that America is not great with Obama and the Democrat Party in charge. America is not even trending to the great with Obama and the Democrat Party in charge, and Trump did not need a focus group or polling data to tell him this. His heart told him. His instincts told him. It’s what he saw, he went out and said it. Call him Captain Obvious. And collective politicians have their heads in the sand.

But it’s Ted who really has his heart:

I thought Ted Cruz was outstanding last night. Ted Cruz speaks like a traditional powerful, well-versed proud — unabashedly proud — conservative. He is an articulate representative of conservatism and the conservative movement, and he is a happy warrior. He loves doing what he’s doing. He loves mixing it up. He loves getting in there. And he is relishing this opportunity to put on display what he believes and what millions of the rest of us believe.

I thought Cruz looked really good last night.

A couple of days ago everyone was saying that Rush was turning on Trump because he had been rude to Cruz. I said that this was not the case — the Rush was doing what he always does which is make Republicans toe the conservative line. Interestingly, Trump backed way off of Cruz and Limbaugh drooled all over him today.

This doesn’t mean Rush is endorsing Trump. He, like most of the professional right wing, much prefer Cruz. But just as all the right wing presidential hopefuls can’t afford to alienate Trump’s crazy followers neither can’t these guys. Those crazy followers are Rush’s audience.

When he says Trump just tapped into what was already out there, he’s referring to the political zeitgeist he created. Trump is his creature and no matter how much he may loathe him he can’t cut him loose.

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