Idiot’s delight

It must have been comforting for Donald Trump to stand by and listen to Sarah Palin endorse him last week and hear someone that makes less sense than he does. Ms. Palin’s rambling endorsement of Trump, sounded ,more like a librarian reading Dr. Seuss to a third-grade class, than it did a serious endorsement for a presidential candidate. Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that Mr. Trump has never been viewed either by his own (adopted) party, or by the rest of the electorate, as a serious candidate.

Mary Altaffer/AP

Listening to Ms. Palin identify Trumps crowd as - “teamsters and teachers, cops and cooks, you rock n’ rollers and holy-rollers”, it’s not hard to see how this campaign success is happening. You didn’t hear - doctors and lawyers, professors and business owners, being mentioned, Trump’s appeal, much like Palin’s, is obviously to the lower quadrant of the economic and education scale,

On the same day that she endorsed Trump, Palin responded to published reports that her son Track had been arrested for domestic abuse. Palin took a swipe at President Obama, implying that her son’s legal problems were a byproduct of the President’s failure to address the problems of Post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the Iraq war. A year earlier, an alcohol fuel birthday party degenerated into a drunken brawl involving most of the Palin family, including Track who appeared to get the worst of it. The trouble seems to have started with the Palins, who were traveling in a stretch limousine while celebrating husband Todd’s birthday, crashed another party where they were apparently were not welcomed. The altercation seems to have started or at least been centered on daughter Bristol, who, according to police reports, was intoxicated and belligerent when the authorities arrived. Bristol, you may remember became pregnant back in 2008 when she was seventeen and unmarried. At that time, her mother was the Bible-quoting governor of Alaska and running mate of Republican presidential hopeful John McCain. Bristol gave birth to the child but never married the father and became a spokesperson for pre-marital abstinence. Unfortunately, she found herself unmarried and pregnant again in 2015.

This all seems to be just another bizarre chapter, in the bizarre candidacy of Donald Trump. Trump has, at one time or another, managed to insult women, almost every minority, his fellow Republican candidates and virtually anyone that he decides to, while alternately lavishing saccharin-laced compliments on those foolish enough to support him. Interestingly, Trump is also mired in an ongoing feud with Fox News, the only major network to openly support the Republican party. 

So while Trump, the thrice-married, four times bankrupt business-man turned politician, continues his attacks on Ted Cruz, the Canadian-born first-term back-stabbing Princeton and Harvard educated elitist who is hated by his own party, he has received a crucial endorsement from the half-term former Governor of Alaska, who is now the matriarch of a red-neck partying Alaskan clan who, while not pontificating in unintelligible-staccato poetry, is busy raising her illegitimate  grandchildren and bailing her brawling son out of jail.

The Republican Party is now the most fractured, ineffective political party in our nation’s history. If Ronald Reagan were alive today, he would have to admit, once again, that his party has left him.