Behold Your Roosting Chickens

[Content Note: Bigotry.]

Yet another article about "establishment Republicans" crying all the tears that decades of expressly cultivating a base that responds with enthusiasm to rank bigotry has yielded presidential candidates who campaign on rank bigotry.

With two weeks to go until the first contest of the 2016 presidential race, Republicans who fear their party has been hijacked by the likes of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz found little to comfort them in the latest debate.

...Some Republicans worried that the time remaining to stop Trump or Cruz from seizing the inside track on the nomination was evaporating and that the establishment candidates were doing little to slow either man’s momentum.

"They are digging themselves a bit of a hole," said Fergus Cullen, the former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party. "It's entirely possible the final two candidates will be Trump and Cruz, and people like me will be despondent."

Thomas Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, often viewed as the country's most powerful mainstream business lobby group, fretted in a speech in Washington on Thursday that the rhetoric in the Republican primary campaign was "damn serious and sometimes a little scary."

Your party has not been "hijacked" and this rhetoric is nothing new. The only thing that's new is that it's being delivered via bullhorn instead of dogwhistle.

"What happened to my party?" wonder the elites of the Republican Party, shaking their heads gravely and publicly wringing their hands, before shuffling off to wash them of any responsibility.