Steve King, Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan Are All Republicans for a Reason

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

14 January 19

Not one of them is a freak accident.

here was nothing funnier in our politics the past week than the sudden discovery by our respectable conservatives that the Republican Party has been a comfortable home for white-supremacist meatheads like Steve King (R-Berchtesgarden) of Iowa. Ben Shapiro nearly sprained an intestine trying to get back onto safe ideological ground, and Max Boot continues to be shocked, shocked, by the whole business.

This, of course, is a tributary of the great flowing river Lethe of conservative memory loss in which they are hoping this whole administration* can be lost to memory forever, and that nobody will remember that 40 years of conservative politics made someone like this president* not merely possible, but inevitable. We're all just lucky that he turned out to be a boob, too. Grant the conservatives who came before him the blessings of forgetfulness, however, and we may not be as lucky the next time.

One of the interesting things about Sherrod Brown's potential presidential candidacy is that his success as a Democratic senator from Ohio pretty much puts the lie to the theory that Democratic statewide officeholders in red-states have to be apostates in order to survive in office. (I am looking at you, Joe Manchin.) It often is argued that Democratic politicians caught in that bind have no choice but to do things like vote for Brett Kavanaugh or take a dive on climate-related votes. Brown's continued success as an out-front progressive is a kind of refutation of that idea, and, if he runs for president and succeeds in the rest of the former industrial midwest the way he has in Ohio, then a lot of calculations are going to have to be reviewed.