Three-legged stool

Break Up the GOP

By Bill Maher

It’s often been said that the Republican Party is a three-legged stool. One leg is the religion/culture warriors, another is the big business fiscal hawks/tax cutters, and the other is the defense hawks. Donald Trump has performed one valuable service in this campaign: exposing just how wobbly that stool is. Actually, it’s completely broken. When’s trash day? If the legs don’t fit, you must acquit.

Trump is the canary in the coalmine warning everybody it’s time to partition the Republican Party into three separate entities. Each can stay crazy, just not together. They have to have some kind of ideological cohesion, otherwise the only thing left to unite them is an asshole, and that’s not working.

Nativists who hate immigrants shouldn’t be in the same party with large corporations, who need low-wage labor. Deficit hawks shouldn’t be glued to neocons, who always want bloated defense budgets, or to tax cutters, who always fight for less revenues. Those who worship only guns and God don’t belong with those who worship only money. Old folks who want to protect Medicare and Social Security don’t belong with young hedge fund managers who want to privatize them. Anti-internationalists like Rand Paul don’t belong with John McCain, who wants to go to war everywhere.

It’s funny that the Republican Party keeps turning to Paul Ryan to do the jobs no other Republican wants to do – like speaker of the House, or President of the United States. He’s the ultimate Republican because he’s all of these contradictions in one man. A pathological liar you can trust; a worshipper of both Jesus and the atheist Ayn Rand; a deficit hawk who always votes for bloated budgets; and an ideologue with a plan to dismantle Medicare who campaigns against any cuts to Medicare.  

Republicans see their problem as a lack of a candidate to unify them, when the real problem is that their voters have competing agendas that can’t be unified, and shouldn’t be for a democracy to function.