When Will Republican Rhetoric Reach Peak Crazy?

And the black man and the woman are among the most vitriolic. Go figure.

You don't need a program to figure out who's the nastiest bit of business in the clown car that's morphing into a clown bus. They're all trying to out-nasty each other, thanks to Trump's over-the-top style.

Ed Kilgore points out the source of the problem, with some good examples. Hint: Everyone is saying, New Yorker-style, "Hey, I'm running here!"

Josh Marshall gets pretty deep into the core of the problem:

In the economics of Crazy, there is purity and volume. Trump has brought to market a purer and more widely deployable product. He has also radically increased volume. Like a high-flying tech start-up or new drug syndicate, he has radically devalued the product, while dominating the transformed market in a way that allows him to make a killing even against reduced prices and margins. Many of us thought that the string of collapsed business deals and partnerships would hurt Trump. And they may have damaged his bottom line. But in the political realm they have only served to confirm his image as a no-nonsense (all nonsense?) truth-teller who is indifferent to how controversy may affect his personal fortunes. In both purity and volume, his competitors simply cannot compete.

And yet they try.

Dana Milbank of WaPo traces the problem to how crazy the Republican base is. To him, all the crazy talk is calculated. Get that? Calculated to appeal to the crazy base. Holy crap.

Fifty-four percent of Republicans last year said they thought that “deep down” Obama was a Muslim, and 29 percent said they didn’t know, according to a poll by political scientist Alex Theodoridis, who writes for The Post’s Monkey Cage blog.

Walker’s encouragement of the Muslim myth was another case of a dynamic that could be problematic for the eventual Republican presidential nominee: Saying zany things is rational strategy.

Zany = rational in the world of the GOP. Now we begin to understand the (temporary?) ascendency of Donald Trump.

I'd be sanguine if Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush hadn't been elected president. Twice.

Misty-colored memories of the way we were.

Update. Donald Trump adds his thumbs up to a Republican government-shutdown attempt to defund Planned Parenthood. Double holy crap. Guess going for the women's vote is Job One.

Just so you know, if the Donald is for this, it boxes in any rational voices in the GOP, if there are any, that is.