You know how when you see the secondary villain in a movie have some horrible fate befall him or her? You know how you feel when, for instance, that guy is ass-raped by a gorilla in Trading Places? You laugh, then you feel terrible for him for a moment, and then you think, "No, fuck that dude. He was gonna shoot our heroes. He deserves some ape dick."
Yeah, that's pretty much how the Rude Pundit felt watching Gov. Chris Christie standing behind Donald Trump while Trump gave another of his stream of (barely) consciousness self-congratulatory speeches after winning a bunch of the primaries last night on Super Tuesday (which is a dumb goddamn name for anything that adults are supposed to be involved in). Whatever Christie was thinking, whether it was "I might have helped burn the country to the ground" or "I hope he doesn't talk too long so I can get more hot wings," being backseat bitch to the alpha dog of assholery is everything he deserves.
2. Republicans are not going to go to "war" or tear themselves up over Donald Trump as their nominee. They aren't going to flee from him in great numbers. They aren't going to disavow him. They are going to line the fuck up like the brainless loyal tools that they are, climbing over each other to see who gets to cup his balls in their mouth for a little while.
And the reason is simple: When is the last time you saw the Republicans admit they were wrong? Except for Trump, these motherfuckers refuse to outright condemn George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Right now, they're talking a good game about distancing themselves from the expected nominee. But once Cruz drops out, most of those voters are going to head for Trump. And when Trump starts breaking 50%, the Republican establishment would rather kiss Trump's tangerine ass than deal with the ramifications of fighting him.
They're Republicans, after all. It's Democrats who rip each other to shreds at times like this. For some in the GOP, frankly, Trump has to be liberating, like "Oh, thank Christ, I don't have to pretend I'm not racist anymore."
3. On CNN last night, a fucked-up but telling moment occurred during the coverage of the returns. Trump surrogate Jeffrey Lord, who should be in a picture dictionary under "old white man," and Democratic activist Van Jones, both regulars on CNN, went at each other about Trump's difficulties with race. Jones was talking about Trump not immediately disavowing the KKK when Lord countered with Obama and Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who said a few sketchy things that were supposed to prove that Obama hated white people or something back in 2008. Jones responded, "Reverend Wright never lynched anybody. Reverend Wright never killed anybody." This led to Lord declaring that the Klan was "the military arm, the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party," which is true if American history ended in the 1960s.
The back-and-forth continued, with Jones bringing up Trump's long history of hating non-white people: "That whole thing with the Central [Park] jogger kids, he got the entire City of New York whipped up on this idea that these kids had done something wrong. And then when they are trying -- and they were innocent, we all make mistakes...He never apologized to those kids. And that's a stain on him. And you can walk through time after time where he has done stuff like that. The stuff about Native Americans being, you know, a criminal organizations and Mafia."
Lord answered with something that made the Rude Pundit wish he could reach into his television and punch Lord right in his dick. He said, "But, Van, what you're doing right here, what you're doing here is dividing people. We're all Americans here, Van...You are dividing people. This is what liberals do. You are dividing people by race...This is what liberalism is all about."
So liberals are dividing people by pointing out the divisive and racist comments of conservatives. That's pretty much the CNN version of "Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself." It's a stunning logical leap that absolves any racist of guilt. No, it actually turns the guilt around and places it on anyone who would dare to call out bigotry. We shouldn't say that the KKK was and is a group of terrorists who despise blacks and Jews and Hispanics and anyone not like them. No, that's divisive. We should say that the KKK is a group of terrorists who hate Americans, even if that statement is just fucking stupid.
Jones couldn't even respond to Lord's next statement, which was about the violence committed by the KKK: "[T]hey did it to further the progressive agenda. Hello?" You got that? Because the post-Reconstruction south was run by racist Democrats, anything they did was "progressive." Then, as if to add salt to the fucking wound he had already packed with bullshit, Lord said, "We have to be passionate about making sure, as Robert Kennedy used to say, that this country is color blind."
This is an article of faith among many conservatives: Democrats in the south were once racists who worked to prevent civil rights for African Americans; therefore, the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln, is the one that actually cares about racial justice in this country. Of course, that's an incomplete telling of the story of what happened to freed slaves in the south after the Civil War. It leaves out the way that Republicans totally dicked them over in order to consolidate power and please northern capitalists during an economic depression.
You know who ended Reconstruction, part of which was assuring that blacks could have full participation in the running of the south, including the presence of the military? It was fucking Republican presidents. First, Ulysses S. Grant pulled back some on intervening in Southern affairs (even though he used troops to enforce federal actions), and then, as part of the deal that made him president, Rutherford B. Hayes removed Union troops from the region, leaving the white racist Democrats to have free rein to enact crazy-ass laws that created a new kind of slavery for black southerners. In other words, everyone fucked them over. You don't get to declare that your party was somehow clean because of the actions of Lincoln but leave out Hayes.
By the way, that paraphrase of Robert Kennedy on a color blind country is actually RFK quoting Justice John Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the decision that affirmed those crazy-ass Jim Crow laws and damned the south to nearly a century of backwards fuckery. Kennedy (and Harlan) declared that "Our Constitution is color blind," not the country. That's a big fucking difference. And the rest of Kennedy's speech where he said that in 1963 was about how African Americans got a raw deal economically and socially and that the government needed to enact laws to change that. Or, you know, divisive shit.
By the way, you know who wrote the Plessy decision? Justice Henry Brown, who was appointed by Benjamin Harrison, a Republican.
Yeah, the Republican Party is the party for Trump, almost like it's been waiting for him.
5. Oh, right, Hillary and Bernie each won some stuff.