NYT Editorial: "The Republican Party needs to be crushed & the earth salted behind it"

[JHB]

6. It's not the 4th year of the Trump presidency, it's the 40th year of the Reagan "revolution"

https://driftglass.blogspot.com/2020/09/look-on-my-works-ye-mighty-and-despair.html

The Reagan Revolution at 40: Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!
October 1, 2020

If you walked away from this week's "debate" hellscape gasping like a gaffed trout and wondering what the fuck you just saw, well I'm sorry be the one to break it to you, but you're about 40 years late to the circus.

And here here at the ass-end Reagan Revolution, what you saw manifested on stage at the Sheila and Eric Samson Pavilion in Cleveland, Ohio, and what you may have read in much of the media after-action reports, was the end-state of the of the Republican party's two most important projects

You mean tax cuts and judges? Nope.

Sure, destroying the government by obstruction, sedition and looting the treasury (and then securing their getaway by packing the courts with a phalanx of dead-eyed far-right fanatics) is very important to Republicans, but this is the downstream effect of the two most important Republican projects of our lifetime, not the causes.

The causes of all the nearly-incomprehensible bug-eyed madness your see running wild in the GOP are these.

First, the engineering of a voting base who will believe anything that Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump shits into their skulls. Literally. Anything.

Much more at the link. And the second big Republican project was the methodical gelding of the free press.