"Divisions in the Republican Party" is not what spawned the Tea Party movement

It was foaming hatred of the black guy who'd been elected president and a need to pretend they never heard of George W. Bush.

Everything else was just an excuse to spray bile around. However, several people rode the bile into office, where they have served ideological patrons more than their constituents.

Mitt, your party loved dictators and authoritarians as long as they...

...called themselves "anti-communist."

As long as they checked that box they received a warm welcome from your party and had carte blanche to get away with murder. Quite literally.

Precisely. There is no "Trumpism", this attitude is baked into the conservative core

Schlafly and her fellow conservative activists (William F. Buckley, Brent Bozell, etc.) were smarter about it, but they were out to advance their cause at all costs and would wreck anybody who got in their way. The fostered hatred of the media about "liberal press bias", by which they meant "failure to cheerlead the conservative viewpoint."

They spent the 60s and 70s going after and wiping out the Rockefeller Republican wing of the party. If you weren't Conservatively Correct, you either got the boot or were isolated and replaced after retirement with an Approved Conservative.

They were successful at that, so why would they change tactics? Demonize the opposition, push through their agenda, and brazen out the complaints and pushback. Just ask Mitch.

All you need to know about why Trump is starting up the coronavirus briefings

His father was old school Repub.

Mitt is more "middle" school, still believing the highest virtue is shooting money skyward -- as much as possible, as high as possible, as fast as possible -- but still retains enough manners to say something thoughtful and gracious when someone of accomplishment passes on.

Conservatives of that ilk have always been a bit sweet on fascism...

...and often more than a little. (No surprise that Buchanan was her mentor.) They loved Franco, the Shah, Pinochet, South American Juntas, and now Putin. Before the war they admired Mussolini's Italy. I swear, for some of them, the only reason they didn't love the Nazis was because they were "the other team", and would have been happy as clams if the Western powers had joined with the Nazis to take down the Soviet Union.

She and her '90s pals weren't "optimistic" Reaganists, they were self-righteous entitled Ivy League fucks who really believed everything would go the way it did in the fanfiction of "the way things will go" they wrote in their heads. And they'd been groomed by the Wingnut Welfare system to believe precisely that and go forth to propagandize the message. All of them could count on a RW-funded make-work landing pad when they were "between gigs". They didn't have to venture out into the real "free market" they championed. A few phone calls and they could always turn up someone willing to pay them for some work.

Laura, as well as Anne and Dinesh, ran into the wall of reality, that the world wasn't going to conform itself to their childish fantasies, and they went nuclear.

"Some men" (and women) "just want to watch the world burn."

Trump (Jr) was busted on Hillary Street!

Malcolm Nance
@MalcolmNance
My favorite part of newly released .@DonaldJTrumpJr drunk Arrest record? He was busted on Hillary Street! #ISYN!

Current Republicans love to claim hims as their own, but their counterparts at the time...

...(which would be a mix of Republican and Democratic factions) called him a "socialist" for some of the policies he championed.

Excess deaths (to April 11)

The United States recorded an estimated 37,100 excess deaths as the novel coronavirus spread across the country in March and the first two weeks of April, nearly 13,500 more than are now attributed to covid-19 for that same period, according to an analysis of federal data conducted for The Washington Post by a research team led by the Yale School of Public Health.

The Yale team’s analysis suggests that the number of excess deaths accelerated as the pandemic took hold. There were 16,600 estimated excess deaths just in the week of April 5 to April 11, compared with 20,500 over the prior five weeks.
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Those excess deaths — the number beyond what would normally be expected for that time of year — are not necessarily attributable directly to covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. They could include people with unrelated maladies who avoided hospitals for fear of being exposed or who couldn’t get the care they needed from overwhelmed health systems, as well as some number of deaths that are part of the ordinary variation in the death rate. The number is affected by increases or decreases in other categories of deaths, such as traffic fatalities and homicides.

But excess deaths are a starting point for scientists to assess the overall impact of the pandemic.
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