Trump Debate Update

Well, The Donald officially has announced he won’t be hosting the NewsMax Republican presidential debate, so that is a shame.  But following up on my earlier post about right-wingers suggesting that Sarah Palin co-moderate with Trump, here is today’s Doonesbury.

(click to enbiggen.)

I’d love to know how much lead time Garry Trudeau has when he creates this stuff.  I mean, I wonder whether he did this strip because he had seen the ’wingers arguing Palin should be included, or because he just thought only the idea of Palin getting involved could make the situation even more absurd, and therefore had the idea himself as a great parody.  And, if the latter, I wonder what he thought when he saw the ’wingers clamoring for Palin to be involved and he knew he already had today’s strip in the pipeline.

I swear, I give the GOP six weeks -- tops -- before they've engineered it so that the rest of us can no longer distinguish parodies of their party from the real thing.

Newt Puts Romney in a Box With the Trump Debate

One of the things in which political junkies like me too often indulge is idle speculation about how campaign events shape themselves and whether what we are watching is, in fact, ultimately some candidate’s devious plan.  It’s pointless, I know, but it’s fun, so I’m going to indulge myself.

I wonder whether Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump planned in advance what we are now seeing regarding the NewsMax debate Trump was supposed to moderate in Iowa on December 27^th.  After all, it seems to have worked out remarkably well for Gingrich.

Newt and Donald met Monday morning for an hour and then held a press conference in which Newt endorsed the idea of Trump moderating a Republican debate, calling it no more ridiculous that Ronald Reagan starring in a movie with a chimp.  (Psstt . . . Donald.  That makes you the chimp.)

The thing is, though, other candidates either already had or pretty much immediately thereafter indicated that they would not participate in the debate.  Ron Paul’s campaign – currently running 2^nd in Iowa – had issued his formal refusal two days before, and Jon Huntsman announced that same Monday that he would not participate in this “publicity stunt.”  Michele Bachmann telegraphed an obvious out by questioning on Tuesday whether Trump could be objective since “he said he’s already leaning towards a candidate.”

(Rick Perry so far has kept mum.  Only Rick Santorum has agreed to also take part.)

Of course, the only person Newt is really interested in seeing on stage with himself is Mitt Romney.  And Mitt Romney announced yesterday that he, too, is not interested in attending Trump’s debate.  Which set Newt up perfectly:

“I think if you’re afraid to debate with Donald Trump, people are going to say, ‘so you want me to believe you can debate Barack Obama, but you’re afraid to show up with Donald Trump?” Gingrich told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren.  “And I think – it strikes me it’s kind of a very weak position.  I don’t know why people would do that.”

It didn’t help Romney that Trump spoke to MSNBC later that same day and expressed surprise at Romney’s refusal to participate:  “Frankly, I’m surprised because he really wants my endorsement.  I mean, he wants it very badly.” (emphasis added)

Ouch.  It sounds very much like Romney approached Trump hat-in-hand, but didn’t want anybody to know he was wooing the reality-show hairpiece.  That looks pretty weak too.

And now Romney is very nicely boxed in.  The debate isn’t scheduled to take place for another three weeks, so I’d be surprised if we don’t see Gingrich trying to make hay about Romney’s refusal to appear during those weeks.  If Gingrich keeps this story alive – the story about Romney being “weak” – then you just know it’ll be like catnip to Donald Trump, and is the perfect little substance-free spectacle with which our political media prefers to distract itself.

Indeed, that already appears to be happening.  In an interview scheduled to air tonight at 10:00 PM on Fox Business News, Sarah Palin is weighing in and urging Mitt Romney to change his mind and take part in the Trump debate.  And right-wing house organs like Free Republic are suggesting that – wait for it – in order to make this less of a circus Palin, too, should moderate:

You know, if I was [sic] Trump, I’d ask Sarah Palin to join him to moderate the debate.  The left in the media are talking about how Trump is just a publicity hog, and how he’s not a serious journalist who can moderate a debate, forget that, if Sarah Palin, who did go to college for journalism’s sake and knows a lot about every single issue was to join Trump, we’d have us a great debate.

[snip]

If Trump wanted to up the ante, he'd ask Palin to help. Then, we'd get a real debate, what with her knowledge of this issues and her connection with the American people. And it would infuriate the Republican establishment because Romney just said he wouldn't do it. If he won't kiss the ring of Trump, he will sail far away from getting the nod of the American people if he decides to not kiss Sarah's ring.  (emphasis added)

(I don’t make ‘em up folks, I just report what I see ‘em saying.)

So I imagine for the next few weeks we’ll be treated to Gingrich and Trump both sniping at Romney and calling him “weak” for failing to appear at the Iowa debate on the 27^th.  Sarah Palin – the sultana of self-promotion, the prima donna of PR – will continue to weigh in, and the media will speculate like wild about whether Mitt Romney will flip-flop on “the Trump debate decision.”

Either way he’s fairly screwed.  If Mitt refuses to debate then (i) he’ll be deemed weak for ditching the debate, and (ii) he’ll be deemed to have insulted Donald Trump, who – for some completely unfathomable reason – the GOP base holds near and dear to their hearts.  If Mitt agrees to debate then (i) he’ll be deemed weak for backing down, and (ii) he’ll forever have cemented in the public’s mind that there really is literally nothing about which Mitt Romney won’t “flip-flop.”

Nicely played, Newt.

Sarah Palin Update (Kind of)

D’Oh!

A month or so ago I predicted that Sarah Palin would not run for office, but would instead try to position herself as a “kingmaker” within the Republican Party; if she could convince GOP candidates that she was capable of delivering a substantial bloc of Republican voters, then the candidates would have to kiss her ring to obtain her endorsement.  This would keep her a viable political celebrity and help to ensure continuing (paid) speaking engagements.

So far that hasn’t happened; to date I have seen no reports that any GOP candidate has been pressing for Palin’s endorsement.

But in what is (for me, at least) a surprising twist, Donald Trump seems to have stepped into the role Palin seeks to fill.  To date Trump has met with Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, and – we now learn – Rick Perry.  What’s more, Trump apparently turned Perry into a Birther.

Of course, the irony is that it was Sarah Palin herself who started this fad when she met Trump and the two of them – for unknowable reasons – went to a chain pizza restaurant where Trump embarrassed himself by failing to eat his pizza like a true New Yorker.  Jon Stewart explains:

I have absolutely no idea why the Republican presidential aspirants think that kissing Donald Trump’s ring will do them any good – I can’t imagine that Trump wields any real power within the party – but I do delight in imagining how bitter it must make Palin to be ignored by the candidates and reality TeeVee alike.

Ah, politics . . . thy name is schadenfreude.

The Real Reason Obama Waited Until Last Week to Release his Long-Form Birth Certificate

For all the last part of last week we were treated to political pundits and professional entrail-readers speculating about why Obama 'waited' until last week to release his long-form birth certificate. There was much rumination about whether it was because Trump was surging in the Republican polls, or whether it was designed to cut the legs off of Jerome Corsi's imminent book Where's the Birth Certificate? What kind of 11th-Dimension political chess was Obama playing by timing the release when he did?

Well, have you seen Obama's speech at this weekend's White House Correspondents Dinner? It was hilarious, particularly the first two videos that accompanied it. The first, before he began speaking, was a music video featuring a (really quite horrible) rock song titled "I am a Real American" and featuring (several times) a throbbing picture of the long-form birth certificate center screen.

The second came after Obama announced he was going to prove he had been born in Hawaii by showing everybody his "birth video." Suddenly the room was pierced by a loud cry and African-sounding music, and the screen started showing the beginning of Disney's The Lion King, with the baby lion being anointed by the baboon and all the other African animals bowing in obeisance toward him.

When that clip finished Obama asked, "Where's the Fox table? Look, I want to make sure you guys know that that was a joke. That was not really my birth video, it was a children's cartoon. If you don't believe me, Disney has the long-form."

So I don't think Obama waited until last week to release the long-form birth certificate for any 11th-Dimension political reason. I think he timed it just so his performance at the WHCD would be really, really funny. This wasn't about politics, this was about comedy. And given how pissy Donald Trump got about it, it worked out really, really well.

Ayn Rand Was Very Silly, But Conservatives Are Just Evil

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life:
The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish
fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable
heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood,
unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

--John Rogers
Kung Fu Monkey


Johann Hari has a new column up over at the UK's The Independent that simply is a must-read. He excoriates today's Republican party for its crass insistence on promoting only the interests of the country's uberwealthy at the direct expense of the less fortunate 99% of Americans. For example, of the Ryan Budget plan he points out that "it halves taxes on the richest 1% and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, health care for the poor and elderly, and basic services. . . . Ryan says 'the reason I got involved in public service' was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, who described the poor as 'parasites' who must 'perish', and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: The Virtue of Selfishness."

However, the vast majority of Hari's column devotes itself to Donald Trump and what it says about the modern Republican party that he is now the party's frontrunner in Presidential nominee polls. Describing Trump as "the Republican Id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality," Hari offers up a few choice quotes from the Donald about how America should deal with the rest of the world. On Libya: "I would go in and I would take the oil . . . I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq: "We stay there and we take the oil. . . In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours."

* * *

In the liberal blogosphere, which I frequent, there has been for a number of years now a good deal of focus on the new, ersatz Republican followers of Ayn Rand's writings. Alan Greenspan himself, the maestro of our current financial debacle, was one of Rand's most devoted followers -- he actually sat at her feet as a college student and was editor of one of her Objectivist publications. As a result, to this day he so objects to any government regulation of any business or financial activity that he once told Brooksley Born that he was not even in favor of prosecuting financial firms that committed fraud because that would only interfere in the market's ability to punish such firms itself. (He, Larry Summers and Bob Rubin were also instrumental in crushing Born's attempt to impose derivative regulations while she was with the CFTC; of course, given that unregulated derivatives trading is a large part - if not the largest part - of how the financial industry got into the mess it did, that decision seems in retrospect very, very stupid).

In Congress, of course, we have Rep. Paul Ryan and his plan to wage war against almost everyone in America for the benefit of his small number of rich paymasters, and we have newly elected Senator Rand Paul who makes no bones about the fact that he is an Ayn Rand devotee (although it is not true that he was named after Rand; my understanding is that his name is short for 'Randal').

And this constant reference to Ayn Rand's writings by our new Republican Overlords -- who, despite controlling only one chamber of Congress, somehow manage to decide what issues must be taken up by the government (abortion and the deficit, but not jobs or the economy) and how those issues must be framed -- and by bloviating Conservative pundits and TeeVee talking heads, has had an affect on the people who listen to such folk.

For example, about two years ago, shortly after Obama had been sworn into office and the first glimpses of Tea Party Madness were beginning to emerge among the nation's more conservative elderly, I was checking out a few books at my local library. A sizable percentage of the immediate population where I live consists of retirees. Whilst checking out my books I got into a brief conversation with the librarian, who told me that she had just started reading Atlas Shrugged as part of a local book club. She told me she thought it was important that as many people as possible read Ayn Rand's opus because the book is "so relevant, given what's happening in the world today."

Now, a couple of things about this statement struck me immediately. First, I could think of nothing that was "happening in the world" right then that would make Rand's so-called philosophy more relevant than before -- that is, unless you count the fact we now have a black man sitting in the White House. Second, the library doesn't sponsor book clubs; this apparently was something she had gotten into with some unspecified number of friends, and they all had suddenly decided they needed to read Ayn Rand. Third, I couldn't just let this statement go unchallenged, because the last thing we need is people interested in reading Ayn Rand for the lessons they think they can learn from her.

So I explained to the librarian, as gently as I could, that I had read Atlas Shrugged and nearly all of Rand's writings years and years ago, back when I was in High School, and that - like a lot of people who stumble across Rand - I had enjoyed them immensely. However, after I grew up some and gained a greater appreciation of how people work in the real world, I came to see Rand's writings as fairly juvenile. I told her (as nicely as I could) that I thought they were not writings anyone should ever make the mistake of taking seriously.