As for any claims about having a pulse, there's really no way of knowing whether Priebus felt otherwise. However, when one considers that the GOP's end-of-days is now being predicted more frequently and with more certainty by a wider range of Republicans , hindsight suggests that Priebus may well possess a level of foresight immensely higher than that for which he'd been previously given credit. Apparently, some dreadfully morbid inner voices had informed him then that the Grand Old Party of the sainted Ronald Reagan and "Honest Abe" Lincoln was indeed without pulse -- dead and gone forever -- but that the grand new party spawned of Sarah Palin couldn't possibly be permitted to further replace it.
And so, taking into account the jaw-dropping surrealism of his Party's on-going death match with a two-legged political catastrophe known as Donald Trump, the act three years ago by Priebus of symbolically declaring his Party dead by his choice of describing a sorely needed analysis of its continued failures as an "autopsy," could be viewed as -- whether by happenstance or design -- a Dubya-like act of preemption.
In any event, there's an inescapable irony connected to the idea that years later, the outcome of Priebus' preemption seems eerily similar to the chaotic aftermath of George Bush's preemptive war on Iraq. For the GOP, the unexpected arrival of Trump seems to have only emboldened the seemingly pre-stone-age cultural mentality of a large part of its base much in the manner by which ISIL's sudden emergence has spun parts of Iraq and the Middle East down a several centuries old time warp.
Already dead?
During the week just prior to the June 12 Orlando Massacre, much was being made of Trump's sickeningly racist attack on an Indiana-born "Mexican" judge presiding over a now highly-publicized lawsuit related to the "Trump University" scheme , the one scam from among a multitude of Trump capers most likely to garner "The Con Don" his own episode of " American Greed. " The nakedly racist nature of Trump's effort at gaining leverage in the case -- unlike many prior Trump outrages -- seemed at the time to have sparked a much wider consensus among prognosticators about its potential for finally bringing down his campaign and perhaps by proxy, even the Republican Party itself.
Indeed, the businessman-turned-politician's campaign approach -- viewed here as it relates to his "management" of the Trump U flare-up -- followed what appears to be an integral part of Trump's business model. In this case, Trump's extravagant mendacity results in the candidate symbolically bankrupting his own candidacy; maxing out its, at best, quasi-credibility due to a lack of personal scruples and baseline self-discipline.
Now, it's entirely possible that Trump's inability to finesse his hatred of Mexicans -- or, in this case, a perceived Mexican -- by way of dog-whistle rhetoric, could be the factor that eventually brings to a halt, Trump's train wreck of a campaign. But, the perspective here is that the faux-fabulous "Trump Train" actually began its official slide off the rails the night the self-proclaimed "counter puncher" withered like a sun-dried tomato under a Muhammad Ali-like barrage of abortion-related questions from MSNBC' s hyper kinetic Chris Matthews.
During that late-March one-on-one, Matthews -- who speaks at a rate of approximately 3,500 words per second -- delivered his standard "lightning round" series of journalistic jabs, uppercuts and right crosses at Trump prompting the by-now-thoroughly-punch-drunk-counter-puncher into yet another politically ill-advised brain-fart that managed to raise a stink among partisans on both sides of the issue: his declaration that women who choose to have abortions ought to be subject to " some form of punishment."
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