John Dean on the Republican candidates for President.

Excerpts from a recent article:

• Not one of the GOP candidates is attempting to lead; rather, they all are dancing to the tune(s) they believe the GOP base wants to hear. But the contemporary GOP base, after years of irresponsible Republican leadership that has turned them off to all things relating to government, has lost contact with reality. Accordingly, the GOP base has made clear they do not want a candidate who is really qualified. To the contrary, as the polls leading up to this second debate showed, the party’s base favors the least qualified candidates.
• Remarkably, the Republican base at this stage of the primary process favors candidates who know absolutely nothing about being president: Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
• In short, at this stage of the primary process, the Republicans favor two of the least qualified potential candidates in modern history for the presidency, and after this last debate, they may make it a trio if Fiorina advances in the polls.
• No one can really be surprised at this anti-Washington, anti-qualified politician posture of the GOP base. After all, Republican leaders have been playing their base, as well as other Americans, for fools for several decades. Republican leaders have been pushing anti-government rhetoric for decades. The effort to diminish–or better yet, destroy–federal power began in earnest when Newt Gingrich was a back-bencher in the late 1970s, throwing grenades in the House of Representatives. His total irresponsibility in gaming the system attracted attention, and soon he was the leader of the House Republicans, and Speaker of the House by 1995. He never stopped pushing the envelope, down to his forcing an impeachment of President Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, while Gingrich was deeply involved in his own marriage destroying affair. Other GOP leaders have picked up where Gingrich left off as his own bad behavior made him irrelevant on the national stage.