Take, for example, Germany, which is now far more of a leader of "the free world" than Trump's American dystopia. Once upon a time, it was America going to war against German fascism. My, how the roles have reversed. It may not be a war, yet, but Germany is certainly on the side that is fighting American fascism. Yes, the great threat to America is Kim Jong-trump, the orange-tinted demagogue roaming the White House in his bath robe. We know what's going on.
The Republican presidential primary is up and running in New Hampshire, where conservative prospects lined up in Manchester Saturday for the first cattle call of the 2016 cycle.
Speakers at the New Hampshire Freedom Summit, which was sponsored by Citizens United and Koch-backed Americans For Prosperity, included Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, all of whom would be top tier presidential contenders should they run.
Donald Trump also spoke.
Huckabee seemed especially determined to show he could compete for conservative votes against politicians like Paul and Cruz, who have each earned a devoted following among tea party activists. While the two senators mostly stuck to their usual talking points, Huckabee offered an extra large serving of red meat.
"My gosh, I'm beginning to think that there's more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States," he said in his remarks. "When I go to the airport, I have to get in the surrender position, people put hands all over me, and I have to provide photo ID and a couple of different forms and prove that I really am not going to terrorize the airplane – but if I want to go vote I don't need a thing."
Huckabee is apparently trying to position himself as the stupidest Republican in the field, and on the merits of his comments yesterday he's succeeding. Though of course the competition is fierce.
It's hardly worth commenting on someone who thinks North Korea is a freer place than the United States (and presumably the entire Western world), but it's awfully rich of any Republican to criticize the national security state that has arisen in the wake of 9/11 given that it was the warmongering and torture-loving Republican administration of Bush and Cheney that put those restrictions in place. And it's simply ridiculous to suggest that for some reason airport security is akin to election security given that voter fraud (according to the evidence as opposed to Republican scaremongering) amounts to a microscopic problem that hasn't even come close to impacting the outcome of any election, whereas lapses in airport security (and, more broadly, all security involving air travel) can lead to event such as, you know, 9/11. Seriously, anyone who cares at all about what happened on 9/11, including the families of the victims, should take Huckabee's comment as a gross and insensitive insult. Because that's what it was, along with being insanely stupid. Perhaps he should go to North Korea for some re-education. Otherwise, though, it's awfully rich of any Republican to talk about freedom when pretty much that entire party is doing its utmost to deny freedom to so many Americans, like the freedom to vote, the freedom to have access to affordable health care (including birth control), the freedom to have one's reproductive rights respected, the freedom to receive equal pay for equal work, the freedom to have the same opportunities to succeed as the rich and privileged, and so on. But, no, this is the party that only wants freedom for the rich and privileged, and for people to own whatever firearms they want without restriction, for companies to be able to do whatever they want without regulation, for people to be able to use their theocratic Christianity to discriminate against anyone they want, and so on. In other words, they want freedom for themselves, everyone else be damned to the dystopia of their right-wing desires. Yes, they talk up FREEDOM, but Republicans are anything but the liberty-loving freedom fighters they claim to be.
Donald Trump is probably not the son of an orangutan
By Richard K. Barry For reasons unclear to me, it is frequently thought in our culture that those able to make themselves a lot of money are more intelligent than the rest of us. I don't doubt that they are perhaps better at that one specific thing that has allowed the cash to roll in, but we tend to ascribe to them a more general intelligence. Donald Trump is a perfect example of this tendency. Regarding a recent event in which Trump once again shows how stupid he is, Salon writes:
The real estate mogul yesterday filed a $5 million lawsuit against Bill Maher, after the television host failed to fulfill his end of a deal asking Trump to prove he is not a "spawn of an orangutan."
Maher made the bet on Jay Leno's show, very obviously mocking Donald Trump's non-announcement announcement in October, in which the birther promised to donate $5 million to a charity of Obama's choice upon the release of the president's college transcripts. Maher mocked Trump and "the syphilitic monkey that runs his Twitter tweet," saying, "We did a new rule one week, that suppose that Donald Trump had been the spawn of on orangutan having sex with his mother." He clarified to Leno, "I'm not saying it's true — I hope it's not true. But unless he comes up with proof, I'm willing to offer $5 million to Donald Trump that he can donate to a charity of his choice."
Everyone was in on the joke except for Trump, who amazingly became the joke of the joke (of the joke). He offered up his birth certificate to prove that he was not, in fact, the son of an orangutan: "Attached hereto is a copy of Mr. Trump's birth certificate, demonstrating that he is the son of Fred Trump, not an orangutan."
And after Maher didn't pay up, Trump sued. "I don't think he was joking," Trump said regarding the bet on Fox News yesterday. "He said it with venom. That was venom. That wasn't a joke. In fact, he was nervous when he said it. It was a pathetic delivery."
Wow. Just, wow. Can you image the court proceedings in a lawsuit like this? Or maybe Trump does believe that there is no bad publicity as long as they spell his name right. He's wrong about that. The man is truly an idiot.
As everyone knows, this election will all come down to the independent
voter. So I decided to do a poll of the most independent voters in New
York. Well, the most independent vote: Donald Trump. We know he's
independent because sometimes he's a Republican, sometimes a third-party
candidate, and even a Democrat on occasion.
In this election, Trump is breaking hard for Mitt Romney. Extrapolating
from this poll, I predict New York will go for Romney. As with the
predictions of Unskewed Polls,
this result will likely surprise a lot of people. But should it,
really? You know the old saying: as goes Trump, so goes America.
President Obama will rue the day he passed up Trump's $5 million offer;
that might have turned the independent vote to Obama. Ah, lost opportunities!
People will counter this result by claiming that there
aren't nearly enough undecided voters in New York to change the election. I have two responses to this. First, I'm talking about independent voters, not undecided
voters. New Yorkers are very independent, especially the 61% of them
who say they will vote for President Obama. My second response is, "La,
la, la. I can't hear you!"
Others will claim that my sample size is too small. This is ridiculous.
Donald Trump is a very big sample size. Also: "La, la, la. I can't hear
you!"
So when Tuesday night comes and
Fox Newsannounces that Romney has won New York: I told you so. And you will owe me (and to a lesser extent, Dean Chambers) a big apology. (Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)
Idiot extraordinaire Donald Trump tweeted yesterday that President Obama was a terrible negotiator, writing that "He bails out Chrysler and now Chrysler wants to send all Jeep manufacturing to China--and will."
The Detroit Free Press notes that the comment "drew a heated tweet from Chrysler Group Vice President for Product Design Ralph Gilles: "You are full of shit." Actually, they wrote that he said Trump was full of "@%#!," but that is not what Gilles tweeted.
Romney has not only been going around lying about Chrysler's intention to ship jobs overseas, he has produced political ads making the same claim that has been rejected as inaccurate by the car maker.
In fact, according to the Free Press:
Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionee told employees by email on Tuesday that all U.S. Jeep production would stay in place and would "constitute the backbone of the brand."
We've almost gotten used to Romney's lies, but when it actually frightens workers that their jobs might be disappearing, is that not finally too much? And if it isn't, what would be too much?
It's also incredible that the party that claims to know so much about big business can make auto executives so angry.
If Mitt Romney really thinks Donald Trump is a valuable ally, his judgment is well beyond suspect.
Donald's Trump's "very big" revelation is that he's an idiotic racist jackass
By Michael J.W. Stickings So what was Trump's "very, very big" revelation about President Obama, that something "bigger than anybody would know" that the media would cover "in a very big fashion"? Uh... just more of the same spotlight-hogging nonsense, this time full of phony claims of generosity. As New York's Dan Amira wrote:
It turns out that Trump's "very big" revelation was that he still wants to see President Obama's college records, the ones that some right-wing conspiracy nuts believe would show that Obama got into Columbia as a foreign exchange student from Indonesia. Trump would also like to see Obama's passport records, which would prove... something Muslim about Obama, probably. In fact, Trump wants to see these documents so badly, that he's offering to donate $5 million to charity if Obama releases them by October 31. And that's it. That's the whole thing. So we didn't learn anything new about President Obama today, but we did learn something new about ourselves: However low our expectations of Donald Trump were before, they were not low enough. Perhaps, they can never be low enough.
And we should be ashamed of ourselves for paying even the slightest ounce of attention to him. I do apologize. Watch this, if you will, for it is nothing if not a spectacle of unironic buffoonery, but then let's move on.
The Republican Convention will kick off a day late
in Tampa thanks to the threat of Tropical Storm Isaac, so I'm guessing
the gay bars in Ybor City and the strip joints elsewhere will get some
extra business today. Yip yah.
I'm not going to rain on the GOP's parade. Let them have their fun of
Obama-hating, gay-bashing, warmongering on women, birtherism, and
demonizing everyone that isn't white, straight, and Jesus-shouting.
(Aw, they had to cut Donald Trump
because of the storm. Bummer.) If these folks want to wallow in their
unbearable whiteness, let them have their fun. Mitt Romney will get
some kind of bounce out of it, which will send the Villagers into
paroxysms of twitterpation over how close the race is, and then wait
with bated (if not gin-soaked) breath until the Democrats convene in
Charlotte and they do their version of the partisan rag.
The only mildly interesting news out of the convention is former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist's endorsement
of Barack Obama. That really scattered the pigeons, but anyone who's
watched Mr. Crist over the last few years saw it coming, and the rumors
that he'll challenge Rick Scott
for governor in 2014 have been nearly as rampant as those about his
private life since he got hammered by Marco Rubio in the 2010 Senate
race.
Call it liberal bias, but I'm not going to devote too many pixels to the
GOP wet blanket party over on the other coast. I've been watching
conventions since the 1960's and they're basically studies in foregone
conclusions, right down to the spontaneous demonstrations cued to the
second. But if I wanted a constant stream of whining, bashing, and
misogynistic and hateful rants about how horrible life is under the
brutal heel of that secret Muslim Kenyan-born gay socialist
coke-snorter, I'd subscribe to a certain family member's Facebook page.
A high-level surrogate for presumptive Republican presidential
nominee Mitt Romney's campaign said this year's White House race will be
about issues, not where President Obama was born.
Speaking on
CNN’s State of the Union, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) said both he
and Romney agree that Obama was born in America.
"I would say both Mitt Romney and I agree. The president was born in America," McDonnell said.
CBS News estimates Romney now has 1,198 GOP delegates.
Romney didn't go to Texas Tuesday night to celebrate.
He was raising big money with Donald Trump in Las Vegas.
Okay, a couple of points to make here before I move on:
1) Texans won't forget the insult. Texas is arguably a soft Republican state now, as the dramatic increase in Latinos bodes poorly for a state-wide electorate suddenly voting not only against their better interests but also against their own safety and security. Romney really needs to solidify his standing with the cowboys and oil men of Texas and generate enthusiasm. This fundraiser with Trump in Vegas not only puts him at odds with Texans who would have wanted to celebrate with Romney, but gives a clear signal that the yankee has more stroke than the largest state in the Republican column.
2) The more Trump speaks and the closer that Romney ties himself to Trump, the bigger the loss Romney faces. For Trump, it's a no-lose situation: he gets publicity, he gets to dupe the rubes out of even more cash in his casinos, and if Romney manages a miracle, he suddenly has stroke in the White House. This is Trump's M.O., however: risk nothing and gamble with everyone else's money. After all, it's how he attempted to "steal" the Empire State Building for a mere $50,000. For Romney, he's blind to the danger he's put not only his campaign in, but the entire party.
3) Up until now, the Obama re-election campaign has kept their powder dry and not unleashed torrents of attacks. This is traditional and pro-forma: you don't launch a full-scale campaign until you're sure of who you are facing. Even now, Obama will smartly withhold the main thrusts of his attack at least until Romney names a Veep candidate. Why tip your hand and allow your opponent to shore up his weaknesses? By all accounts, Romney is not politically savvy enough to remain nimble. A lot of what he has said up to this point has been a mixture of memorized bromidizations and off-the-cuff gaffes -- "tells," if you will. Romney's weakness is his uncomfortable balance of entitlement with the appearance of caring for the poor (if indeed he actually does not).
If Romney's staff is as disciplined as it should be, Romney will take this opportunity to lay out his attacks on Obama. It's free play time, and Obama will be busy being presidential right up to the convention, if not beyond. A lot depends on the polls: specifically, polls in states like Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina.
Right now, though, Romney has a few weeks of free sailing, and that message seems to be taken up. So far this week, Romney's attacked foreign policy and the stimulus, two Obama strengths (and two really stupid attacks to make). Job creation will likely be on the agenda, which for Romney is probably his strongest argument.
Which is saying a lot considering how few jobs he's actually created himself, a point the President's team has been quick to make early and often.
Mitt Romney, as you may have heard, is attending a fundraiser in Las Vegas today with no less a shining light of the GOP than Donald Trump (as well as with another party star, Newt Gingrich). In anticipation of the event, Romney was asked about Trump's birtherism:
Mitt Romney said Monday he wasn't concerned about Donald Trump's commitment to the "birther" conspiracy, one day before the GOP presidential candidate hosts a fund-raiser alongside the celebrity business magnate.
Asked on his charter plane whether Trump's questioning of President Barack Obama's birthplace gave him pause, Romney simply said he was grateful for all his supporters.
"You know, I don't agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don't all agree with everything I believe in," Romney said. "But I need to get 50.1% or more and I'm appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people."
(Actually, he doesn't need 50.1% or more, he needs 270 Electoral College votes. But perhaps we should excuse him this apparent lapse of understanding of the rules of American democracy?)
What a steaming pile of horseshit. (No disrespect to our equine friends.)
Romney isn't a birther and could easily have said he thinks (or preferably knows) Obama was born in the U.S., brushing off the question and moving on, but instead he saw an opportunity to pander shamelessly and, as usual, took it. And to whom was he pandering? Why, to the many, many Republicans who are on Trump's side on the whole birther nonsense. To all those "good people" on the crazy far right, which is more and more the Republican mainstream, whose support he needs in November.
But even if you don't think he was pandering to the right, his refusal to take a side was also typical of his tendency to flip and flop like a shameless opportunist, so unprincipled is he, so utterly soul-less, so desperate for votes, so fearful of pushing any prospective supporters away. (He may tout himself as a successful businessman, but there are countless indications he's a terrible leader.)
Anyway, enjoy the Romney-Trump-Gingrich spectacle today. For more, see my recent posts:
ABC News reports on a funny thing that happened on ABC this morning:
This morning on "This Week," ABC News' George Will called Donald Trump a "bloviating ignoramus," questioning why presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is associating with the real estate mogul, who once again falsely questioned President Obama's birthplace this week.
"I do not understand the cost benefit here," Will said on the "This Week" roundtable. "The costs are clear. The benefit — what voter is gonna vote for him (Romney) because he is seen with Donald Trump? The cost of appearing with this bloviating ignoramus is obvious it seems to me."
"Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics," Will added. "Again, I don't understand the benefit. What is Romney seeking?"
I don't know... approval from the powerful so as to fill some gaping hole in his soul?
(UPDATE: Trump has fired back, tweeting: "George Will may be the dumbest (and most overrated) political commentator of all time. If the Republicans listen to him, they will lose." I don't much care for Will, but I'd defend him here. There are many who are dumber. Has Trump ever watched Fox News?)
Look, I take (and for the most part agree with) Will's point, but there's the usual bloviating arrogance here:
First, while birtherism is a refuge for the ignorant, and worse, Republicans (that is, members of Will's own party) have for the most part spent the past four years, and more, questioning Obama's loyalty to America.
This more line of attack on first the candidate and then the president has taken a number of forms, but Romney himself has engaged in it repeatedly, accusing Obama of going around the world apologizing for America, a blatant lie. Yes, birtherism has been one of the ugliest forms of it, what with its more explicit racist component, and Trump has been one of the most visible of the birthers, and one of the loudest, but Will is just trying to distance himself and his beloved party from a movement, if you can call it that, that has been very much a part of the vicious Republican assault on Obama, one that's still going strong today.
Will often takes this smarter-than-thou approach in his punditry, and to his credit he has criticized the more extreme elements in his party on occasion, but you can't really have it both ways. Birtherism and similar lines of attack on the president (e.g., playing the affirmative action card, which Trump has also done) are a huge part of what the Republican Party has been about the past several years. If you count yourself a Republican, this is what your party is about. You can try to pretend otherwise, or wave off these elements as too silly to bother with, and you can try to make yourself look good by comparison in doing so, but that would be a gross misrepresentation of your party.
Second, Donald Trump is a popular Republican -- among Republicans -- as his high poll numbers last year indicated. Will may not like that, but it's true. And why is he so popular? It's his birtherism, sure, to a point, but perhaps more so his bullying views on foreign policy (advocating the America be a sort of global bully, pushing everyone around, including China, to get whatever it wants) -- indeed, this has become Romney's main foreign policy view as well: Russia's still Enemy #1 and America ought just to go around swining its supposedly massive dick. It's not exactly an enlightened position to take, but it's not like Romney is terribly enlightened on foreign policy.
Furthermore -- and this is really why Trump is so widely esteemed -- Republicans worship successful businessmen and the super-wealthy, and Trump is both (even if his record as a businessman has been full of massive failure*). Put another way, Republicans love rapacious greed, and Trump is nothing if not rapaciously greedy.
(*As I wrote back in February, if you want failure, you need look no further than Trump's own career -- for example, the USFL, the Trump Shuttle, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, massive debt, bailouts by banks, bankrupties... really, one could go on and on. See here and here for the details of these and other failures.)
Far more than birtherism, and even more than bullying American foreign policy and militarism, this is the core of today's Republican Party, with the chief policy goal being the significant lowering of those tax rates affecting the wealthy. The Republican Party is the party of plutocracy, not democracy, and it advocates a laissez-faire system in which the rich can acquire more and more wealth -- and of course more and more power. Will's views, admittedly, are more nuanced and complex than that, and he may not approve in full of this plutocratic agenda, or even acknowledge it, but basically both he and his party are fundamentally pro-Trump.
Third, while I agree that the benefits of appearing with Trump aren't clear, if indeed there are any, Romney has proven himself throughout this campaign to be a shameless panderer and suck-up who will do and say anything for votes. Given that, it makes sense he'd want to appear with a popular Republican celebrity like Trump. Furthermore, for someone lacking in charisma and broad public appeal like Romney, being at Trump's side is an opportunity to bask in a desirable glow of someone very much unlike himself. Romney and his campaign no doubt think he'll be able to benefit just from being in the presence of that glow.
But, really, Romney may simply want to be in the presence of another super-rich businessman. Look at who Romney is: a one-term governor and otherwise political failure who has made a fortune in the business world as a vulture capitalist. Trump has been critical of Romney in this regard -- "He'd buy companies. He'd close companies. He'd get rid of jobs." -- but that may not matter much to Romney. Or, rather, it may, but perhaps Romney sees in Trump what other Republicans do, business success, and perhaps that's all that really matters here.
Simply put, Trump is someone to whom Romney can relate on a deep personal level (more personal than political), someone even more successful (in a way), and even richer, than he is. If you view the world through a lens of plutocratic entitlement, as Romney seems to, Trump's a superstar. And who doesn't want to hang out with superstars?
So while there may be no obvious benefit to it, in terms of votes, is it really any wonder Romney will be appearing with The Donald -- and with Gingrich as well, making up what I've termed "the un-holy Republican triumvirate of 2012"?
The fact that George Will doesn't see this, or doesn't want to, is evidence that he doesn't understand, or doesn't want to, today's Republican Party, including its 2012 presidential flag-bearer.
It is true that opponents running for their party's presidential nomination say some very nasty things about each other. It's well understood that one of the best ways to put together a general election campaign is to simply gather all the clips of what was said about the other party's eventual nominee by those who where vying for the job.
For example, there are great comments made by Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum's campaign about the predatory nature of Bain Capital. I posted a few of those earlier in the week.
We can add to that list comments that Donald Trump made about Bain in an interview last April with CNN's Candy Crowley.
What makes Trump's comments marginally more interesting is that they come from someone who claims to be America's uber-capitalist, thus making it difficult to suggest his critical comments on Bain Capital are attacks on capitalism itself, as Romney has been saying about President Obama.
In a clip, which I'll run below, Trump described Romney's experience at Bain in this way: "He'd buy companies, he'd close companies, he'd get rid of jobs."
In fairness, Trump may not have been critical of how Romney made his money, suggesting, as other's have, that Bain conducted it's business within the rules of the game.
All Trump is saying, and all many of the critics of Romney's time at Bain are saying, is that this type of company is not primarily interested in job creation. To suggest that Romney's work there prepares him to create jobs in America is absurd. Trump, before he became a Romney booster, was making what seems like a pretty obvious point.
Remember, this whole thing became an issue because Romney claimed, falsely, that he created over 100,000 jobs at Bain Capital. He made this an issue.
And, by the way, when the right thinks they have discovered something important by pointing out that some of Obama's campaign contributors have been in the same business as Bain Capital, private equity firms, they miss the point. Even for those who believe there is nothing wrong with this kind of endeavour, it doesn't mean that a history working in it prepares one to be a great "job creator," as Romney would like us to believe.
A presidential candidate's resume is an issue. I'm sure Republicans will agree we need to vet all candidates who aspire to the top job (though it would be better if they agreed truth should be our guide). I'd be very comfortable sticking to the facts.
The question for me is: why is Mitt Romney so uncomfortable with a thorough examination of the jobs on his resume, how he made his money, and how that might relate to his qualifications to be president?
Once upon a time, Donald Trump, socialist that he must be, thought it was important to ask.
Rome's First Triumvirate was made up of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus. (It was an informal alliance and ended in civil war between the first two, with Caesar emerging victorious.)
Rome's Second Triumvirate was made up of Octavius (later Augustus), Mark Antony, and Lepidus. (It was a formal dictatorial agreement and also ended in civil war. Lepidus was exiled, Antony committed suicide after losing to Octavius, and Octavius became emperor.)
These have been of varying degrees of excellence (or lack thereof). I'd probably put Rush at the pinnacle (Today's Tom Sawyer / He gets high on you / And the space he invades / He gets by on you), though if you put aside its warmongering and tyrannical inclinations that first Roman one wasn't bad. (Better than that brutal one with Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon that contributed to the Thermidorian Reaction, anyway.
Anyway, if you want un-holiness in your triumvirates -- non-excellence and super-rich douchebaggery, egomania and bullying blowhardiness, with enough inner turmoil, only barely papered over, to descend into its own form of civil war -- you don't have to look any further than today's Republican Party, with the presidential campaign underway and the party rallying in lockstep behind its un-beloved nominee.
Yes, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, and Newt Gingrich -- look away if you must! -- are actually going to be campaigning together next week, not surprisingly in the cesspool of Las Vegas.
No, this isn't a joke. (Seriously, it's not. It just seems like one.)
But what's funny, if not side-splittingly so, is that these three men hated each other once upon a time, and may still. Just last month, for example, Trump criticized Romney over the latter's profiteering vulture capitalism: "He'd buy companies. He'd close companies. He'd get rid of jobs." This is what the Obama campaign is saying, and understandably so, it's what Republicans like Gingrich and Santorum said when they were in the race, and it's what Republicans are now trying to sweep under the rug, as if none of that had ever been said.
Gingrich didn't pull any punches at all. In January, he sent out a blast to National Review's e-mail list calling Romney "a timid Massachusetts moderate" and calling on conservatives to "stand up and fight."
And of course Republicans generally tolerated Trump when he seemed to be a force in the party but generally considered him a loud-mouthed buffoon (which of course he was, and is).
But now these three are all getting along, or pretending to get along, if only to show partisan unity. (Predictably, the self-aggrandizing The Donald is talking nonsense about being the best veep choice for Mitt.) There's even this hilarious, if not really in a terribly funny way, campaign flier:
Yes, Trump as Uncle Sam. Fucking hilarious, no? Just makes you long for the greatest triumvirate of them all...
It wasn't particularly funny, but it did have an underlying nasty edge to it. Jimmy Kimmel was MC, with performances by President Barack Obama and former NBC correspondent David Shuster, who got off the cutting remark of the night when he pointed out the Gingriches were attending, and noted "I guess their check cleared."
To his credit, Kimmel didn't fawn over Obama and had a zinger or two in his arsenal: "There's a term for Presidents like you, just not two terms."
"Last year at this time, this very weekend, we finally delivered justice to one of the world's most notorious individuals," Obama said. Then a picture of real estate mogul Donald Trump appeared on the room's television monitors. The president last year delivered a scathing roast of Trump, who flirted with running for the Republican nomination and claimed he had solved the "mystery" of Obama's birth certificate.
Obama also took a shot at the Republican congressional leadership, whom he thanked "for taking time from their exhausting schedule of not passing any laws" to attend the dinner...
"[Mitt Romney and I] both have degrees from Harvard. I have one, he has two. What a snob."
The crack drew a thumbs up from former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who was in the audience. Santorum dropped out of the presidential primary campaign earlier this month. He had called Obama a snob for encouraging young Americans to attend college.
In my own small way, I have been pushing the idea of Hillary Clinton running for president in 2016. I think she'd be great, and apparently I have company.
What does the list of encouragers look like, in no particular order?
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has said that she would be "one of the first" to ask Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to run for president in 2016, and, if you can believe it, Donald Trump has even said positive things about the possibility. Go figure.
Most intriguing, though, is the comment by Bill Clinton that he would be "happy" if Hillary sought the presidency, though he is sticking to the script that he doesn't think she will. As he told Good Morning America:
I believe that she's being absolutely honest with you when she says she doesn't think she'll go back into politics. But if she comes home and we do this foundation stuff for the rest of our lives, I'll be happy; if she changes her mind and decides to run, I'll be happy.
I think that comment speaks volumes. It says to me that Bill knows his wife and knows that when the time comes she will be very tempted to get back into politics.
For her part, Hillary has been saying things like, "It's flattering, but, you know, I'm not planning to do that," adding that she has no "desire or intention" to run again for the White House.
Of course, even a casual observer would realize that these are non-denial denials. All they suggest is that someone else in her party currently has the job and is running for re-election and that it would be highly inappropriate for her to create unwanted background noise. We get that.
I'm not saying she will do it. I don't think she would risk a high-stakes run in which there were difficult odds against success. But if things align in any reasonable fashion, I don't see how she could say no.
In my humble opinion, her kind of political talent comes around rarely, and it would be foolish for the Democratic Party not to encourage any aspirations she might have.
Oh, please, make it so. If for no other reason than the comedy alone -- and not just because it would guarantee an Obama landslide.
(Of course, it's not going to happen. Trump is, as usual, full of shit -- and just trying to hog some limelight. There's a better chance he ends up as President Romney's secretary of state. Or that the GOP picks Palin at a brokered convention this summer.)
The megalomaniacal Donald doesn't seem to get a lot, and certainly not Santorum. As he told CNN's Ashleigh Banfield yesterday:
Rick Santorum was a sitting senator who in re-election lost by 19
points, to my knowledge the most in the history of this country for a
sitting senator to lose by 19 points. It's unheard of. Then he goes out
and says oh okay I just lost by the biggest margin in history and now
I'm going to run for president. Tell me, how does that work?... That's
like me saying I just failed a test. Now I'm going to apply for
admission to the Wharton School of Finance. Okay? He just failed a
test... And now he's going to run for president. So, I don't get Rick
Santorum. I don't get that whole thing.
So... you're not allowed back in after you lose, whether it's in school, business, or politics -- or whatever?
It's certainly true that Santorum lost badly in 2006 and that his loss seemed to spell his end in politics. I remember celebrating his loss that night, along with many other Republican losses, and thinking that this ridiculous extremist, this joke, had only gotten what he'd deserved. But we must remember that the 2006 midterms were bad pretty much across the board for Republicans. Santorum would have lost anyway, I suspect, but the size of his defeat had a lot to do with the Democratic wave that flipped Congress. And of course he lost in Pennsylvania, a purple-to-blue state, not a Republican stronghold like, say, Alabama or Utah.
Regardless, why should his loss six years ago disqualify him? Why should failing a test disqualify you from getting into Wharton or any other school? You might as well tell Tom Brady he can't play football next year because he lost the Super Bowl. Please. It's a stupid argument.
And the fact is, Santorum is connecting with Republican voters in a real way. The Romney-backing Trump may not get that either, and it may be somewhat surprising that Santorum has found such success recently, but there you go. (It's hardly surprising that Trump supports Mitt, and otherwise would likely have gone to Newt. He clearly understands, and values, shameless opportunism and self-whoring, not the sincerity and, yes, integrity that seems to be driving Santorum.)
Besides, if you want failure, you need look no further than Trump's own career -- for example, the USFL, the Trump Shuttle, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, massive debt, bailouts by banks, bankrupties... oh, one could go on and on. See here and here for the details of these and other failures.
Why doesn't Trump just take his own advice and give up?
Trump's endorsement reinforces Romney's well-deserved reputation as a privileged rich douchebag with a plutocratic sense of personal entitlement. This is the narrative that is coming to define Romney and that will haunt him during the campaign.
Once upon a time, Trump may have helped with independents, but he's been exposed as a laughingstock -- or, rather, even more of one -- with his baseless Birtherism and various other inane political ramblings. He's an egomaniacal bully, more Newt than Mitt, but now it's Romney who must shoulder the burden of his support at a time when the race is just about over and he needs badly to shift gears for the general election.
(I would add: If Trump really likes Romney, why not endorse when a high-profile endorsement would matter more, like before South Carolina or Florida? The timing is nothing if not curious. It's like he only wanted to back a sure thing.)
Well, so much for that "debate" Trump was supposed to "moderate." The unbridled egomaniac known as the The Donald has pulled out of the Newsmax affair -- which was only going to be Gingrich vs. Santorum anyway, as everyone else turned down the offer to play bit parts in Trump's purely self-serving political reality show -- and is now (surprise, surprise) talking about running as an independent.
Don't be fooled. He won't run. He was never serious about running as a Republican, and he's certainly not serious now. (He'd corner the electoral market on Birtherism, but that would be about it.) He's just trying to hog the spotlight to push the Trump brand, which was the whole point of his early flirtation with challenging for the Republican nomination.
You think Sarah Palin's bad? There appears to be no more shameless attention whore than Donald Trump. And he comes with a big mouth and bullying personality as well.
But wouldn't it be great if he were to run? Seriously.
So ridiculous even Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann want no part of his "debate."
Which means the "debate," really just an excuse for The Donald and his megalomania to be in the spotlight again, will be a Gingrich-Santorum affair (Paul and Huntsman won't be there either), to the extent they aren't overshadowed by Trump, that is, a "debate" between the frontrunner and an afterthought.
And yet people will still watch (assuming it's actually held). And why? Because Trump is crazy, and because you never know what he'll do or say, and because morbid curiosity rules the day in our popular and political culture.
Even the generally unreasonable Perry and Bachmann are staying away. That tells you all you need to know.
A blog on politics, philosophy, science, sports, and the arts -- featuring news, commentary, and analysis by Michael J.W. Stickings and the Reaction team.
