{"id":27496,"date":"2018-01-19T00:01:15","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T00:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=27496"},"modified":"2018-01-19T00:01:15","modified_gmt":"2018-01-19T00:01:15","slug":"gop-turns-wacky-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=27496","title":{"rendered":"GOP turns wacky, man!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Just how crazy has the modern Republican Party become?<\/p>\n

Get a load of this …<\/p>\n

According to an essay in RealClearPolitics, Mitt Romney — the 2012 GOP nominee for president of the United States<\/em> — is considered an “outlier” should he win election to the U.S. Senate later this year.<\/p>\n

You might ask: Why is that?<\/p>\n

The Republican Party has become the party of a man who not long ago wasn’t even considered a Republican. I refer to Donald J. Trump, the current president and a man who Mitt Romney has criticized with extreme prejudice.<\/p>\n

Romney is considered <\/a>the odds-on favorite to win the open U.S. Senate in Utah; Orrin Hatch, the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, is bowing out at the end of the year. Romney hasn’t yet announced his candidacy, but virtually everyone thinks he will.<\/p>\n

He also was considered to be the epitome of establishment GOP principle. Romney was considered a fiscal and social conservative, a pro-business sort of fellow. He campaigned for president in 2012 calling himself a “severe conservative.”<\/p>\n

That might have been enough for doctrinaire Republicans to embrace him.<\/p>\n

However, he has taken Donald Trump to task with, um, severe vigor.<\/p>\n

In 2016, he called Trump a “phony” and a “fraud.” He delivered his anti-Trump mantra in a 17-minute speech that raised plenty of hackles among the Republican “base” that had endorsed Trump’s presidential candidacy.<\/p>\n

And just recently, Romney labeled the president’s description of African nations, Haiti and El Salvador as “sh**hole countries” as “antithetical to American values.” The RealClearPolitics essay found that fascinating because “most of Trump’s Republican denouncers are either comfortably outside of Congress or on their way out.”<\/p>\n

Romney, meanwhile, is likely on his way in<\/em>, heading for a sure-fire electoral victory in the U.S. Senate contest in Utah.<\/p>\n

All of this to my mind paints a picture of a major political party in a state of serious disarray. It has attached itself to an individual, rather than a set of principles.<\/p>\n

Thus, I welcome Mitt Romney’s return to public life. My hope is that he continues to remind us that the president really and truly is a “phony” and a “fraud.”<\/p>\n\n

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Just how crazy has the modern Republican Party become? Get a load of this … According to an essay in RealClearPolitics, Mitt Romney — the 2012 GOP nominee for president of the United States — is considered an “outlier” should he win election to the U.S. Senate later this year. You might ask: Why is … Continue reading GOP turns wacky, man!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[61,1424,1941,3101,3456,5051],"class_list":["post-27496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","tag-2012-election","tag-donald-trump","tag-gop","tag-mitt-romney","tag-orrin-hatch","tag-us-senate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27496"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27499,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27496\/revisions\/27499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}