Trump Enlists McCarthy, By Jingo!

The above picture has Paul Manafort and Lee Atwater in one convenient place--as they should be. See, Paul Manafort and Lee Atwater are kind of the progenitors of this little old thing called the Southern Strategy which is basically a dogwhistle racism that relies on racists to understand an encoded message about who is to blame for all the bullshit going on, whilst also wanting to protect the unbearable whiteness of privilege. Roger Stone--well, we can pretend he isn't part of this campaign because of who he is. But he assuredly is a mouthpiece for this campaign.

These deep connections to the roots of the latter-half of the 20th century Republican politics are enough for me to recognize the "questionnaire" idea that Trump laid out as a kind of extremely unprescient McCarthyism. Is it not possible that respondents could lie?  Is it not a kind of "political correctness" to try and determine who has "right thinking"?

Heh. Why try to trap what Donald Trump and his campaign does by comparing it to anything the GOP ever tried before? Except because he is coughing up an unsavory past and because he is sort of wrecking the GOP's credibility. His words don't stand up to the least fact checking.

I'm not saying there is a hell of a lot of Russian-inspired ratfucking going on (although I might question how it came about that Big Bad Mad Vlad and Roger Stone both came to the conclusion that Julian Assange looked like a right rodent dildo)  but maybe? The party formerly leery of the USSR has come to love the replacement. And the son of an immigrant who is the father of four children of immigrants, wants purity tests. So not American. So Trump, though.