So now we have the long-form birth certificate. The 44th President of the United States is a natural-born citizen, and the document was produced amidst a fervor of speculation which has never gone away since being slyly introduced into the campaign arena by some disenchanted and bitter PUMAs. A large proportion of the GOP freshmen Congressmen elected last year doubted that the President was really an American citizen, and their Congressional leaders refused to disabuse them of such a silly notion.
The fact that the President was forced to end such insidious speculation by actually producing his birth document is an embarrassment for America and a blight upon the intellectual reputation of its citizens. The fact that it had to be produced after weeks of outright slander at the hands of a high-profiled American business mogul and reality television star, who’s, allegedly, mounting a run for the Office, himself, smacks of something else entirely.
Donald Trump has often mentioned briefly that he’d like to run for President, but such remarks were always incidental. Trump was too busy shedding wives and businesses to do anything serious in preparation for running for public office – like voting. Yet all of a sudden, for the past month, all we’ve seen is Trump on any and all television networks and chatshows, loudly declaiming doubt about the President’s citizenship. It didn’t matter that everything he was saying was an outright lie – that no one in Hawaii remembered the President as a child, no one admitted going to school with him, that Trump had sent investigators to Honolulu to seek out the elusive birth certificate, that the document was hiding something about who or what the President really was – something sinister.
The only thing that really mattered was that Trump was contributing to the Big Lie school of propaganda: repeating something often enough and loud enough so that eventually people hearing it would come to believe it. Since over 40% of Republicans already believed that the President wasn’t American, not only did these claims further ensconce their belief, they convinced this demographic that Donald Trump was the best and most qualified candidate to run for President from the Republican party.
Some people reckon this is all a publicity act, designed to garner viewers for his television show on NBC; others disagree. On Monday night, Bill Maher, guesting on The Late Show with David Letterman, bet Letterman a week’s wage that Trump was a serious candidate for President. He was doing this, reasoned Bill, simply because he could.
I’m wondering if Trump’s got other motives. I’m actually wondering if Trump isn’t a stalking horse, a smoke-and-mirrors man testing the waters for someone else.
True, since Trump’s emerged, no less than Michelle Bachmann and Mitt Romney have declared they’re setting up “exploratory committees” – sorta kinda like a cowardly way of wondering what people will make of them as candidates before they actually declare. If people like them, they’ll be bold and go for the prize; if they don’t, they’ll retreat to oblivion and lick their wounds. Ron Paul’s emerged with a committee of his own.
But something else has happened too.
Two days ago, Haley Barbour was the first of the wannabes to announce that he actually didn’t intend to run for President. The former RNC chair and current Mississippi governor has certainly run into some long-term memory problems with regard to the history of race relations in his home state, and he’s an ex-lobbyist and Washington insider, which would mean Haley would campaign, not for change in Washington, but for much of the same old same old. But Haley’s closing the door on his candidacy opens up a couple of other doors as well.
Indiana governor Mitch Daniels has often been pitched by the pundits as a viable Republican candidate for 2012 amidst a field full of hucksters, flip-floppers and certified batshit; yet Daniels repeatedly has said that he wasn’t interested in running, especially whilst Barbour, a personal friend, was thinking about a candidacy. Such was their friendship, that Daniels wouldn’t even think of opposing him on the campaign trail; rather, he’d put his full endorsement behind the Mississippian.
Now Barbour’s out of the race, closing the door of candidacy behind him, but graciously holding a door open for Daniels, should he be so obliged.
Not only that, but there’s also a grassroots movement afloat in certain areas of the Republican party. The Republicans are a party steeped in history, just as the Democrats are. The only difference is that the Republican Party is mindful of history and uses it as a guide, where the Democrats, since 1970, at least, have thrown historical caution to the wind. This particular tranche of the party is harkening back to the election of 1952, when it looked as though their only hope was the ueber-conservative Senator from Ohio, Robert Taft, son of the former President and Chief Justice. Horrified at the thought of such a Rightwinger being the front-runner (in those days, there were such things as moderate Republicans), various party operatives got a movement going that resulted in the drafting of war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, and the rest – as they say – is history.
Now there are rumours afloat of an effort to draft Jeb Bush, after looking over the flotsam and jetsam offering themselves up as sacrificial lambs.
What’s this all to do with Trump? I’ll tell you.
Trump blasted on the scene, preaching birtherism from all angles. He took it, shook it and threw it into the mainstream in a way it had never been done so previously. On his way, he managed to make enemies of three such important American icons as Bill Cosby, Jerry Seinfeld and Robert de Niro. Whereas before, birthers were to be scorned and ridiculed, like the preposterous Orly Taitz, now an American business tycoon was echoing doubt and threatening all sorts of investigative action, dominating the conversation in and around serious political discussion shows, amongst other things.
The result is that the President produced the document: to stop the silly season behaviour and shut everyone the hell up. Trump trumpets victory, saying this was all he ever wanted the President to do, and he’s done it. The birthers skulk away to mutter their doubts to themselves and try to come up with something else with which to disqualify the President, searching for yet another euphemism to use in place of the word “black.” John Boehner breathes a sigh of relief, because he won’t have to slap wrists and compromise his principle of not telling people what to think (not that he ever really had any principles in the first place).
And into this somewhat saner arena could step a bona fide, viable and potentially strong candidate in the form of Mitch Daniels … or even a drafted Jeb Bush. Just remember that the last time the Republicans drafted a Presidential candidate, we got 8 years of GOP rule and an introduction to Richard Nixon.
Speaking Truth to the Power of the Lying Liars of the US Media, Right AND Left.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
More Money Than (Common) Sense
Earlier this week, at a private fundraiser for the President in California, an event for which each person attending paid $5000 for the privalege of eating in the same room with the Chief Executive and listening to him address the gathering, free of the toxic news media which follows at his heels, a young woman stood up in the middle of the President’s speech peeled off her top to reveal a teeshirt bearing the smiling image of cri de coeur martyr of the moment, Bradley Manning, and began to sing an ode to Private Manning.
Within seconds, she was joined by the rest of her party at their table, until the lot of them were politely ushered from the room by attending plain-clothes security officers.
The President thanked them for their offering and carried on with his speech.
As protests go, this was tepid. The song was trite, the rhyme awful. It wasn’t even a full-fledged or full-throated protest, in that part of the lyrics stated that the singer and her company would vote for the President in 2012. What was amazing was that these young(ish) people were able to afford a fee which only well-heeled donors were likely to make in order to attend a rally for the President and to contribute to his campaign fund. (That was another oxymoron: They were protesting something for which they clearly blamed the President, yet their song admitted support and, collectively, they’d just contributed a grand total of $76,000 to his campaign kitty). Go figure.
Later on, the young woman in question described herself as a “trust fund brat and sometime artist.” Well. That says everything.
The radical chic have returned to live amongst us. Are you old enough to remember them?
The first time they appeared, forty-two years ago as chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his essay, they’d decided to espouse the cause of Civil Rights – six years after the Act had been signed and almost a decade after the highly publicized demonstrations. This particular clique, led by Leonard Bernstein, Baba Wawa and the mother of the fragrant Katrina vanden Heuvel, decided to throw a dinner party, not for the leading lights of the NAACP or the Urban League, but for the Black Panthers. The original real Black Panthers.
On the afternoon of the day of the festivities, Leonard Bernstein, hosting the event, suddenly realised that his butler and two maidservants were black, so he sent them home and frantically called an employment agency, requesting that they despatch three Latino servants to work for the evening. And when the soiree was under way, the radical chic suddenly found that they were actually sharing the same airspace as real black people, people from the street and from parts of the city they studiously avoided.
Bradley Manning is the pin-up of this generation’s radical chic. It’s highly unlikely that Miss Trust Fund Brat was even remotely interested in what the President had to say about his budget plan in relation to the obscenity Paul Ryan’s trying to hawk, or the state of the declining middle class – a euphemism, I’m loathe to use, because if you work to live, you’re working class, so own the term and live with it. She obviously isn’t thinking of the masses of unemployed or underemployed, of people who’ve flattened their 401K’s simply to get by or people, heretofore, made bankrupt by medical expenses. She probably is unaware of the situation in which her state of California found itself a few yeafs back when state employees were furloughed and paid with IOU’s. She finds the decaying infrastructure of California a nuisance and an inconvenience, but she and her mates have $76,000 to donate to a candidate they heckle in order to be able to get their point across about someone who’s accused of committing an act of high treason.
Whether Manning’s guilty or not is for the courts martial to decide, but the fact that he’s attracting such a high level of extremely wealthy people who part with their money so readily and in such a discombabulated way, says far more about these doyens of the extreme Left than it does of either Manning or any of the things these people “protest.” It would have been far better and benefited Bradley Manning far more if this woman and her cronies had contributed the $76,000 paid for the Presidential evening to Manning’s defense fund, which must be accumulating.
Last week, the day before the President’s speech on the budget, I received an e-mail from Adam Green of Bold Progressives, having subscribed to his newsletter ages ago. The e-mail was frantically advising everyone on the mailing list that the next day, President Obama was about to give a major speech in which he would announce that he was cutting Social Security, Medicaire and Medicaid.
Hurry! Hurry! We had all of 24 hours to stop the President from committing such a heinous act. All we had to do, Green’s letter explained, was send a donation of $5 to his organisation. If that didn’t “stop Obama,” the next step would be for all Progressives to boycott President Obama. The next morning, in the hours leading up to the speech, Green smugly announced that 60,000 people had made donations and pledged to stop the President from cutting these entitlements.
Sixty thousand people paying five dollars apiece … In a space of less than 24 hours, Green had accumulated $300,000. As the Brits would say, that’s a nice little earner. And – oh yes – President Obama, after all, didn’t “cut” Social Security or Medicare or even Medicaid. He made a seminal speech, with Paul Ryan sitting in the front row, where he politely but firmly, trashed Ryan’s handiwork as irrelevant.
But the politics of fear had garnered Adam Green a tidy $300k. Adam’s a graduate of my alma mater, the University of Virginia, known for having a stringent, student-patrolled honour code. Had Adam tried that scam as a student, he’d have been given 24 hours to pack his bags and leave the University. Do not pass “Go.” Do not collect $300,000.
Instead, Green continued fear-mongering. Just because Obama (he never actually calls him “President Obama”) didn’t do that there and then, we’ve got to ensure he doesn’t cut entitlements in the future, so … a request was made for further donations of $5 from e-mailed recipients.
Until that moment, I’d largely ignored Green’s panic-driven screeds as spam, in much the same way I’ve ignored his amateurish political punditry as some remnant of a drunken evening spent in the company of the Jefferson Debating Society for lack of anything better to do; but in reading those two e-mails and thinking about his grifting accumulation of more money than most people see in a year in the space of one day, I had an Oral Roberts epiphany.
If Bradley Manning is the 21st Century radical chic’s Black Panther, then Adam Green is the Left’s Oral Roberts. Growing up in the South of the 1950s, as a small child, I remembered Roberts’s frightening radio rants, which promised salvation, if only you put one hand on the radio and the other in your pocket to reach out the princely sum of $5 to send ol’Oral. Now I’ve come full circle, with Adam Green promising all our social and political wet dreams would come to fruition if only we keep one hand on the keyboard and the other clicking the credit card payment details in order to send dosh to Adam who’ll personally ensure that the Obama horde is stopped at the gate.
My father was a lifelong Democrat, who stuck with the party from Roosevelt, for whom he cast his first vote, to Clinton, for whom he cast his last. Wherever he is, seeing these grifters and shifters from his side of the political equation, parting with money which could be better aimed at other causes, he’d be hard put not to utter one of his many stock phrases: that a fool and his money soon part. It’s just a shame the fools in question all seem to be from the Left, and that these same people are proving to be as unyielding, unthinking and close-minded as their brethren from the Right.
Within seconds, she was joined by the rest of her party at their table, until the lot of them were politely ushered from the room by attending plain-clothes security officers.
The President thanked them for their offering and carried on with his speech.
As protests go, this was tepid. The song was trite, the rhyme awful. It wasn’t even a full-fledged or full-throated protest, in that part of the lyrics stated that the singer and her company would vote for the President in 2012. What was amazing was that these young(ish) people were able to afford a fee which only well-heeled donors were likely to make in order to attend a rally for the President and to contribute to his campaign fund. (That was another oxymoron: They were protesting something for which they clearly blamed the President, yet their song admitted support and, collectively, they’d just contributed a grand total of $76,000 to his campaign kitty). Go figure.
Later on, the young woman in question described herself as a “trust fund brat and sometime artist.” Well. That says everything.
The radical chic have returned to live amongst us. Are you old enough to remember them?
The first time they appeared, forty-two years ago as chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his essay, they’d decided to espouse the cause of Civil Rights – six years after the Act had been signed and almost a decade after the highly publicized demonstrations. This particular clique, led by Leonard Bernstein, Baba Wawa and the mother of the fragrant Katrina vanden Heuvel, decided to throw a dinner party, not for the leading lights of the NAACP or the Urban League, but for the Black Panthers. The original real Black Panthers.
On the afternoon of the day of the festivities, Leonard Bernstein, hosting the event, suddenly realised that his butler and two maidservants were black, so he sent them home and frantically called an employment agency, requesting that they despatch three Latino servants to work for the evening. And when the soiree was under way, the radical chic suddenly found that they were actually sharing the same airspace as real black people, people from the street and from parts of the city they studiously avoided.
Bradley Manning is the pin-up of this generation’s radical chic. It’s highly unlikely that Miss Trust Fund Brat was even remotely interested in what the President had to say about his budget plan in relation to the obscenity Paul Ryan’s trying to hawk, or the state of the declining middle class – a euphemism, I’m loathe to use, because if you work to live, you’re working class, so own the term and live with it. She obviously isn’t thinking of the masses of unemployed or underemployed, of people who’ve flattened their 401K’s simply to get by or people, heretofore, made bankrupt by medical expenses. She probably is unaware of the situation in which her state of California found itself a few yeafs back when state employees were furloughed and paid with IOU’s. She finds the decaying infrastructure of California a nuisance and an inconvenience, but she and her mates have $76,000 to donate to a candidate they heckle in order to be able to get their point across about someone who’s accused of committing an act of high treason.
Whether Manning’s guilty or not is for the courts martial to decide, but the fact that he’s attracting such a high level of extremely wealthy people who part with their money so readily and in such a discombabulated way, says far more about these doyens of the extreme Left than it does of either Manning or any of the things these people “protest.” It would have been far better and benefited Bradley Manning far more if this woman and her cronies had contributed the $76,000 paid for the Presidential evening to Manning’s defense fund, which must be accumulating.
Last week, the day before the President’s speech on the budget, I received an e-mail from Adam Green of Bold Progressives, having subscribed to his newsletter ages ago. The e-mail was frantically advising everyone on the mailing list that the next day, President Obama was about to give a major speech in which he would announce that he was cutting Social Security, Medicaire and Medicaid.
Hurry! Hurry! We had all of 24 hours to stop the President from committing such a heinous act. All we had to do, Green’s letter explained, was send a donation of $5 to his organisation. If that didn’t “stop Obama,” the next step would be for all Progressives to boycott President Obama. The next morning, in the hours leading up to the speech, Green smugly announced that 60,000 people had made donations and pledged to stop the President from cutting these entitlements.
Sixty thousand people paying five dollars apiece … In a space of less than 24 hours, Green had accumulated $300,000. As the Brits would say, that’s a nice little earner. And – oh yes – President Obama, after all, didn’t “cut” Social Security or Medicare or even Medicaid. He made a seminal speech, with Paul Ryan sitting in the front row, where he politely but firmly, trashed Ryan’s handiwork as irrelevant.
But the politics of fear had garnered Adam Green a tidy $300k. Adam’s a graduate of my alma mater, the University of Virginia, known for having a stringent, student-patrolled honour code. Had Adam tried that scam as a student, he’d have been given 24 hours to pack his bags and leave the University. Do not pass “Go.” Do not collect $300,000.
Instead, Green continued fear-mongering. Just because Obama (he never actually calls him “President Obama”) didn’t do that there and then, we’ve got to ensure he doesn’t cut entitlements in the future, so … a request was made for further donations of $5 from e-mailed recipients.
Until that moment, I’d largely ignored Green’s panic-driven screeds as spam, in much the same way I’ve ignored his amateurish political punditry as some remnant of a drunken evening spent in the company of the Jefferson Debating Society for lack of anything better to do; but in reading those two e-mails and thinking about his grifting accumulation of more money than most people see in a year in the space of one day, I had an Oral Roberts epiphany.
If Bradley Manning is the 21st Century radical chic’s Black Panther, then Adam Green is the Left’s Oral Roberts. Growing up in the South of the 1950s, as a small child, I remembered Roberts’s frightening radio rants, which promised salvation, if only you put one hand on the radio and the other in your pocket to reach out the princely sum of $5 to send ol’Oral. Now I’ve come full circle, with Adam Green promising all our social and political wet dreams would come to fruition if only we keep one hand on the keyboard and the other clicking the credit card payment details in order to send dosh to Adam who’ll personally ensure that the Obama horde is stopped at the gate.
My father was a lifelong Democrat, who stuck with the party from Roosevelt, for whom he cast his first vote, to Clinton, for whom he cast his last. Wherever he is, seeing these grifters and shifters from his side of the political equation, parting with money which could be better aimed at other causes, he’d be hard put not to utter one of his many stock phrases: that a fool and his money soon part. It’s just a shame the fools in question all seem to be from the Left, and that these same people are proving to be as unyielding, unthinking and close-minded as their brethren from the Right.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
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