I know that this particular phrase has been overused in this rabid shaggy dog of a campaign, but both candidates gave speeches today and shit really got real. Hillary Rodham Clinton went to Las Vegas and, if The New York Times is correct here, she pretty much fitted Donald Trump for a lovely armband.

"The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for the alt-right," Mrs. Clinton planned to say, according to the prepared remarks. "A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party." Mrs. Clinton also planned to note that David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, was "jubilant" on his radio show recently while describing Mr. Trump. "A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military," Mrs. Clinton planned to say. "If he doesn't respect all Americans, how can he serve all Americans?"

Meanwhile, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago went to New Hampshire—which at least makes more sense than going to Mississippi with Nigel Farage—and responded with his usual cool dispatch.

"Hillary Clinton's actions constitute all of the elements of a major criminal enterprise."

On Wednesday night, she was a bigot. I suspect that by Saturday, she's going to be a werewolf.

"What is being uncovered now is one of the most shocking scandals in American political history. A Secretary of State sold her office to corporations and foreign governments, betraying the public trust—putting innocent lives in danger—and then she went to great lengths to hide, delete, destroy and lie about the evidence. Just like her lie that she never sent any material marked classified. Lie after lie after lie. This is the corruption we expect to see in a Third World country—but not in America."

There is not an ounce of evidence in the record for any of this. Not even the last part. American history is chockfull of examples of Cabinet officials who actually did sell their office. Somewhere in the Beyond, Albert Fall is rightly pissed about this.

"Now, I have not seen Hillary Clinton's remarks. And, in a sense, I don't want to dignify them by dwelling on them too much, but a response is required for the sake of all decent voters she is trying to smear. The news reports are that Hillary Clinton is going to try to accuse this campaign, and the millions of decent Americans who support this campaign, of being racists."

Well, not all of them, as she said in Las Vegas. Just the crazy racist ones.

"All of this adds up to something we've never seen before. Of course there's always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment. But it's never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now."

OK, so now I have to take a second. This is breathtakingly harsh campaign rhetoric. "You're a crook! Yeah, well, you're a Klansman." I am perfectly willing to blame the tone of things on the forces stirred up throughout the Republican primary process by the eventual nominee, currently pivoting so hard he's screwing himself into the ground. I suspected something like this would break out, but not before Labor Day. Christamighty, what's left now? And please don't answer that. I'd rather wait here under the sofa until it actually happens.

But one of the very real responsibilities for this nightmare of a campaign lies not with a candidate that normalized hate groups but with an elite political media that, by adhering to rules that did not apply, normalized that candidate. Donald Trump has hurled wild, vicious (and largely unsubstantiated) charges every since he first stood up behind a podium as a candidate. This is nothing new. So now, his wild, vicious (and largely unsubstantiated) charges are being hurled in a campaign context in which they have become the way people run for president, at least in 2016. And they're being hurled at a person for whom much of the elite political media has had a barely concealed grudge for 25 years.

There now will follow some earnest chin-stroking about the tenor of the campaign. And nothing will change. This is the campaign we are going to have, and there's no turning back. It's going to be rough, and more than half-vile, but it's going to be more reflective of the actual state of the nation than a hundred soft-focus TV spots with gentle music.

We have to face it. The four horsemen have been out of the barn for months now.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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