President Obama spent a fairly large chunk of his Thursday speech in Columbus, Ohio needling conservatives and Republicans, alleging, among other things, that GOPers have “been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years.” Esquire’s Charles Pierce called it the speech he’d “been waiting for someone to give ever since Donald Trump became the Republican nominee” and gushed, “There were no words minced and no quarter given. By the time [Obama] left the stage, there was no ass he aimed for that went unkicked.”
In Pierce’s view, Obama’s analysis was pitch-perfect (bolding added):
The president ran down all the symptoms of the prion disease that has been afflicting the Republican Party—and the conservative movement that is its life force—ever since the party ate all the monkeybrains in 1980. The candidates. The advisers. The talk-radio goons and the direct-mail charlatans. The slogans that pass for policies and the policies that make no sense to anyone who actually lives an actual life in the actual United States of America in the actual year of 2016. And the idiots in The Base who swallow it all whole until they can't express their economic insecurity in any other way except with a TRUMP THAT BITCH T-shirt.
[Obama] presented an obvious and undeniable diagnosis. He framed [Trump] as not an aberration of the conservative mind, but as its inevitable culmination.
Pierce declared that from this day forward, the GOP “should have to answer for nominating Trump” given that “the Democratic Party had the campaign of George McGovern, as good and decent a man as has ever served in Washington, hung around its neck for 25 years by conservative lightweights and ratfckers [sic] who couldn't carry McGovern's shoes.”
Republicans, Pierce charged, “have become a chronic danger to American democratic government and it's time for a serious intervention.”
