Donald Trump & devolution

I like how Johann Hari frames conservatism in his Huff Post article on Donald Trump's rise to fame in the Republican party:

"They have long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals -- and it turns out they were on to something. Every six months, the Republican Party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale."

For those of you out there enthralled with evolution take note. Some more excerpts:


"Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: 'We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!' -- but that wasn't enough. So they found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an 'interesting coincidence' that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is 'I'm better at what I do because I'm gay,' and argues 'there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.'


"That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. A survey suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why.Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past thirty-five years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

"The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: 'I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff.' On Iraq, he says: 'We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours.' It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to 'stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength.' The U.S. must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W. Bush."

Read the article for the rest. It's a solid case that Trump is the epitome of what conservatives really want, an evolutionary regression in real terms. And they are getting it in State after State as well as the Fed govt, to wit the Ryan Budget and the rollbacks of evolutionary developments in Michigan and Wisconsin, to name but a few examples.