It’s Monday, May 9th, 2016…but before we begin, we love it when several strands of thought come together into a thread. Such was the case Sunday morning when we viewed Hope ‘n Change‘s depiction of the opposite ends of the spectrum of response to Donald Trump…
…while contemplating a conversation we had Saturday with friends, one of whom is a full-throated Trumpeteer. We queried The Donald die-hard what “promise” Trump would have to break in order for him to admit he’d been hornswoggled by a huckster. We placed the term “promise” in quotes because, by our buddy’s reckoning, Trump hasn’t really taken a firm position on or promised anything…other than “the wall”…because he’s still open to changing his mind based on “new facts“; riiiigghhht!
After refusing to answer the question through misdirection and repeatedly changing the subject, he finally answered, “the wall”, whereupon we responded swine would fly before “the wall” was constructed.
But he’s so disenchanted with “the Establishment”, he’s going with Trump simply because he’s “different”; talk about an understatement! When informed Newt was a likely Trump running mate, he stated, “Oh, I like Newt.” “But he’s the quintessential “Establishment” man”, we observed. No cogent response.
In any event, the question was then put to us what we were going to do, to which we replied, “Wait; there’s a lot of time between now and November, and anything can happen.” Which includes (i) unlikely as it may once may have seemed (but as even the likes of the great Thomas Sowell has suggested), a 3rd-party run by some genuine, unifying Conservative of note; (ii) Trump perpetrating some unpardonable faux pas…or Team Clinton revealing one of the mortal sins The Donald’s most assuredly committed but has yet to held to account; or, (iii) Hillary’s indictment…or sufficient amounts of the solid evidence against her being leaked so as to render her candidacy untenable. And heaven forbid The Donald begin bearing the merest mantle of respectability and begin ACTING…
…like a man even remotely deserving of consideration for the highest office in the land!
In a similar vein, the ever-insightful Stilton suggests he’s…
“…going to ask the Trumpsters to take a deep breath and stop screaming at the rest of us to love him NOW or ELSE (per the first cartoon). And I’m also telling the Never Trumpsters that it’s six freaking months until election day, so let’s stop holding our breath and agree to give The Donald a fair hearing until then. He might suddenly develop something approximating manners, or surround himself with truly outstanding people. Hey, it could happen.”
Yeah, it could…but we highly doubt it!
In other words, I’m telling both camps to just shut up and listen for awhile. Otherwise we’ll all be hearing president Hillary’s cackle for the next 8 years.”
But then, this entire election thus far would have seemed not unlikely but impossible twelve months ago. Now, all bets are off.“
They most certainly are! But as the WSJ notes, Trump’s reconciliation tour is off to the worst start since George Pataki’s presidential campaign:
“The week that Donald Trump all but wrapped up the Republican nomination for President should have been a time of reaching out to adversaries and trying to repair his party’s breach. Instead the New Yorker has launched what appears to be an attempt to purge anyone who won’t immediately sign onto what he calls “the Trump train.”
Mr. Trump’s threats against GOP doubters escalated over the weekend, especially against House Speaker Paul Ryan for saying on Thursday he wasn’t yet ready to endorse the businessman. The two men are set to meet in Washington on Thursday. But in the meantime Mr. Trump is resorting to political threats to force Mr. Ryan to bend to his will.
On Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Mr. Trump suggested he might try to strip the Speaker of his role as chairman of the GOP convention in Cleveland in July unless Mr. Ryan endorses him. “I will give you a very solid answer, if that happens, about one minute after that happens, OK?” Mr. Trump said. “But there’s no reason to give it right now, but I’ll be very quick with the answer.” (Yet another example of Trump’s brilliant command of English!)
The Trump camp also unleashed Sarah Palin to announce on CNN that Mr. Ryan’s career is probably “over” and she will lead an effort to defeat him in his Republican primary in Wisconsin later this year…”
…But the Republican Party is not one of his golf courses for which he can determine who has what tee times. A political party is an alliance of people who share enough principles to unite to win elections and run the government. They can’t be ordered around by Don Corleone-style threats…”
And therein, as we opined to our friends on Saturday, lies the problem. One compadre suggested, in a eerie parroting of The Donald himself, Trump has built a “great” business and surrounded himself with “great” people. We asked him to name a single “great” business, or single “great” person. Non-answer…followed by a change of subject.
Here’s the reality, as recounted by Derek Hunter at Townhall.com:
“…Trump will not admit he’s made a mistake and won’t apologize when he is demonstrated to have been wrong. He simply pretends he did nothing wrong or, more disturbingly, claims he didn’t say what there is video of him saying, sometimes only hours earlier.
Don’t get me wrong, the president of the United States shouldn’t travel the country or the world apologizing to everyone (see Barack Obama), but the unwillingness or inability to when obviously wrong is a major character flaw. Donald Trump seems to fancy himself a pudgy Fonzie with bad hair, when in reality he’s an incredible narcissist with dangerous delusions of grandeur.
No matter who you are or what you do, no matter your background or profession, there are things you do not know. Smart (competent, confident!) people seek out that missing knowledge with the understanding they’ll never know it all. If they own a company they hire the best. If they are in government they hire staff who specialize. Trump appears to have done neither of these things in his campaign.
When he said his top foreign policy advisor was himself because he has such a good brain, I knew it was a problem. When he advised people to surround themselves with “unsuccessful people” because they’ll “respect you,” I knew I couldn’t be a part of supporting that man.
He
actually said,
“And you’ll find that when you become very successful, the people that you will like best are the people that are less successful than you, because when you go to a table you can tell them all of these wonderful stories, and they’ll sit back and listen,” he said. “Does that make sense to you? OK? Always be around unsuccessful people because everybody will respect you. Do you understand that?”That’s Donald Trump in a nutshell. It’s also the advice of someone more interested in ego stroking than learning or bettering themselves. It’s not someone who should be president…”
Yes, there’s still some six months until perhaps the most important election in American history…but we’re not encouraged by what’s been said by this bombastic buffoon up ’til now.
So now, here’s The Gouge!
First and foremost, let’s not forget the face of freedom’s foremost foe, as detailed in the WSJ:
Good question: Why is government failing at so many levels?
“The Flint, Michigan, water crisis began in April 2014. This week, two years later, President Obama stood before a crowd of Flint residents and said: “I’ve come here to tell you that I’ve got your back, that we’re paying attention.” And people wonder why Bernie Sanders is doing so well.
This being Barack Obama, he went on, embellishing his commitment to the people of Flint: “I will not rest, and I’m going to make sure that the leaders at every level of government don’t rest until every drop of water that flows to your home is safe to drink and safe to cook with and safe to bathe in, because that’s part of the basic responsibilities of a government in the United States of America.”
It’s worth parsing that last sentence about clean water being a basic responsibility “of a government in the United States of America.” A government? Which government? Flint’s, or Michigan’s, or Barack Obama’s government in Washington?
After two years, what we know about this water crisis is that governments indeed failed at the local, state and federal level. That may have something to do with why the presidential campaign is overflowing, from right to left, with the idea that government is “failing” in virtually every imaginable respect. So maybe Mr. Obama has touched on something important, to wit: Why is it that government, whether in Flint or Washington, is in a failed state?
It looks to us as if Mr. Obama sensed that the narrative of the Flint failure was turning against his view of government, so he decided it was necessary to reframe the problem. He told the Flint residents that their crisis was the result of “a larger issue,” which was a certain mindset toward government. “It’s a mindset,” Mr. Obama said, “that believes that less government is the highest good no matter what.”
No matter what? No one believes that. The anger coursing through the electorate now is over a government that doesn’t seem to be able to do its job—no matter what.
…In Mr. Obama’s telling, Flints happen because of a “corrosive attitude” that forces us to “underinvest” in pipes, bridges and roads. That is, any government failure is due to a lack of funding. And the opposite: Spend more and government failure goes away.
A counter-view would be that “we” underinvest in better infrastructure because entitlement spending has first claim on so much of the revenue taxpayers send government, at every level. In Flint, pensions and retiree health benefits consumed one-third of the city’s budget.
The default solution, for Mr. Obama, is that Washington’s rainbow pot can be expanded to pay for Flints everywhere. This is what he means by, “I’ve got your back.” The prudent might slip a hand around to their back pocket.“
And if Flint’s water fiasco doesn’t convince you of the utter ineptitude of government at every level, consider the travails, both past and immediate, inescapable future of what has up until now been promoted as the belle idéal of government-subsidized success stories:
Oh,…
In all seriousness, you’re telling us, NASA, the organization who, with an unlimited budget and undissmissable personnel…you know, the folks who brought us Apollo I…
…Apollo XIII…
…Challenger…
…Hubble…
…Columbia…
…and the Mars Climate Orbiter…
…without a single employee resignation, termination or demotion, can honestly compete in a head-to-head contest with SpaceX…
…and
…Blue Origin?!? We think NOT!!!
It’s quite literally “no-contest”; yet The Obamao and his heir-apparents…on both supposed sides of the aisle…are in complete agreement mo-money is the answer. Again, we think NOT!!!
Next up, courtesy of Jeff Foutch, Sylvia Thompson, writing at RenewAmerica.com, reveals the misdirection, obfuscation and division inherent in even the most (seemingly) innocuous pronouncements by Barack Hussein Obama’s Administration:
Harriet was into firearms!
“If any Americans think that the Obama Treasury Department’s decision to change the face of paper money has anything to do with good intentions, they are sadly mistaken. This move is another ploy by Barack Obama and his cadre of sycophants, behaving badly, to provoke divisiveness throughout the populace.
Under whatever guise Obama is cloaking this despicable move, he has delivered another blow to the American people, especially white people. Another in-your-face to all who hold this nation’s founding and history dear. Gains we may have made in race and gender relations in this country, by design, are being set back decades. There must be fifty ways (a la Paul Simon) to honor women of the civil rights and suffrage movements without spitting in the face of America’s heritage.
Classic liberal Greta Van Susteren, on her Fox News show, called the plan to remove Andrew Jackson from the twenty dollar bill and replace him with Harriet Tubman “stupid.” I will venture to say it was much more sinister than stupid, but I’m pleased that even a liberal mind sees through Obama’s machinations on this one.
Van Susteren offered, reasonably, that if the goal is to honor Harriet Tubman and the honor has to be with a monetary bill, why not create a bill specifically for her? A 25 dollar bill is Van Susteren’s suggestion. I read that Dr. Ben Carson, former 2016 presidential candidate, suggested a two dollar bill for Ms. Tubman. He could also see through Obama’s machinations.
Harriet Tubman’s work was indeed for liberty, but liberty for only black people. The women’s suffrage movement was for only women. Past American presidents served for the good of the whole country. Neither service should cancel out the other, as Obama and his Treasury drones have so insidiously proposed.
This man Barack Obama could not sink lower in my estimation. He is like a cancer eating away at the soul of the nation…”
Nor ours; and we second the Sylvia Thompson’s opinion as to the cause of America’s malady!
Moving on, Kimberly Strassel details how…
If an unemployed taxi driver from Romania knew about Hillary’s server, so did China.
“Maybe it should be a verb: To be Guccifered. Though maybe, in Hillary Clinton’s case, it would be better phrased as a crime. As in: “They got her on a Guccifer.”
Guccifer is the nom de Internet of the Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar. Few people realize it, but the Eastern European anti-hero is why the world knows that Hillary Clinton maintained a private email server while secretary of state. This week he may have made Mrs. Clinton’s road to the White House a lot rougher.
…In interviews from his federal jail cell this week (he was arrested in 2014 and extradited to the U.S. earlier this year), Guccifer claimed to have easily and repeatedly hacked Mrs. Clinton’s server. “It was like an open orchid on the Internet,” he told NBC News. “There were hundreds of folders.”
Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon went ballistic, claiming that no one should believe “the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell.” He pointed out that Guccifer offered no evidence, and said it was “unfathomable” that the hacker would have accessed Mrs. Clinton’s email and not leaked it. Maybe. Then again, Mr. Fallon has no idea what Guccifer did with his material or why, and the hacker can hardly prove anything from a stripped jail cell.
The bigger point is that an unemployed taxi driver in Romania, using nothing more than a desktop computer, was able to infiltrate Mr. Blumenthal’s account and discover that a woman privy to America’s closest-held secrets was using a home-brew server.
The Chinese are bright—even brighter than Romanian taxi drivers. They employ hackers whose only job is to infiltrate the U.S. government. Those hackers have supercomputers at their service. They have lists upon lists of relatives and friends and aides of powerful people. When they break into accounts, they don’t publicize it.
And yet we are to believe that the Chinese never found their way to clintonemail.com? That they couldn’t even keep up with a freelance hacker? “For me, it was easy . . . easy for me, easy for everybody,” Guccifer told Fox News this week. How easy was it also for those foreign hackers to get to the webmail or home-brew accounts of Clinton aides like Huma Abedin, who took her boss’s lead and operated off the government grid?
An interesting side note to this week’s NBC story: It says that “investigators fully intend to question” Guccifer about Mrs. Clinton’s server. We are a year into the email scandal, more than a month into the Guccifer extradition, and that interview hasn’t yet happened? One might wonder if FBI Director Jim Comey’s server investigation is proceeding with the same alacrity as the bureau’s IRS-targeting non-investigation…”
Here’s the juice: we’ve never believed the crap about Comey being a man of independence and unimpeachable integrity; were he actually such…
…he’d never have gotten a job in The Obamao’s Administration in the first place.
Meanwhile, as David Harsanyi relates writing at NRO…
“When your choice is two reprehensible, corrupt, and immoral demagogues, you can always pick the ethical way out and choose none of the above. The Republic will survive an election cycle.
The Republican party is a different story, however. For those who are idealists about the Constitution — and there are probably far fewer than some of us like to imagine — there are a number of reasons to sabotage the Trump party, even if it ends with a Clinton presidency. The first is to salvage some of your own dignity and principles. But there are other long-term political advantages to beating back an authoritarian populist who peddles conspiracy theories and big-government schemes and doesn’t have a freshman-level comprehension of the basic workings of American governance.
The first political advantage is that it would save our divided government. On the same day Trump won the GOP Indiana primary and secured the party’s nomination, he decided to use a story in the National Enquirer — the future in-flight publication of Air Force One — to accuse Senator Ted Cruz’s father of helping Lee Harvey Oswald assassinate President John F. Kennedy. This was just an amuse-bouche of the utter stupidity that down-ballot GOP candidates will have to deal with, justify, rationalize, ignore, excuse, or support every day for the next six months or so. One hopes the stench of this kind of endorsement clings to them for the rest of their unprincipled and, it is to be hoped, short political careers.
If you’re worried about alienating people, you already have done so. The people who ensured that the most flawed GOP candidate running — who’s also the most unpopular in every demographic category, the least conservative, and the most vulgar — will blame movement conservatives and their imaginary puppet masters for bringing down a hero. Trying to placate them is a waste of time.
…Now that Trump has secured the nomination, the press will finally become hyper-focused on the massive backlog of Trump’s business dealings and various other points of his unpleasant history. Does anyone think it’s going to be easier to share a ticket with him?…”
Fortunately, as stated above, we have some six months to make up our mind…though you know where we’re leaning!
Turning now to our continuing coverage of the Republican post mortem, writing at NRO, John Fund offers his explanation of…
“So for now it looks as if America will face a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the fall.
Doug McIntire, a popular KABC Los Angeles talk-show host, tells me that “there has never ever been an election in which the major candidates represented such a loathsome choice.” Indeed, only about one-third of voters think either candidate is honest and trustworthy. “The overwhelming majority of Americans think both the D and R frontrunners are dishonest,” tweeted Nebraska senator Ben Sasse (R.) this week. “The people are right.”
I’ll deal with Hillary Clinton in a future column, but for now the question is, How did Donald Trump happen? Looking backwards with perfect hindsight to explain the Donald Trump triumph has become the new sport of the political community. Everyone has a theory…
…I think all of these theories have some validity, but I’d like to add another. Donald Trump may not know much about policy, but he is a genius at brand extension, marketing, and the intimidation and bullying of opponents. He is the political equivalent of a shark. He swims in waters that he makes turbulent, and in which he is the chief predator: He eats and he survives. He knows that deep in the American psyche people love a winner, and as Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi used to say “Winning isn’t everything — it’s the only thing.” Machiavelli, seen as the master of the dark arts of politics, put it more elegantly in The Prince, when he wrote that if you triumph, “men will always judge the means you used to have been appropriate.”
The wealthy and winning image that Donald Trump projected for 14 years on his reality show The Apprentice laid the groundwork for him to be viewed as a winner. His exposure also gave him an extraordinary 93 percent name ID with voters before he announced. The next-best-known GOP candidate was Jeb Bush, who, despite his famous family name, was known only to 77 percent of the American people, and quickly fell into the trap of becoming the first of Trump’s foils.
…But now Trump faces a shark at least as hungry and ruthless as he is –- Hillary Clinton. Hollywood mogul David Geffen, who isn’t endorsing anyone this year, famously told columnist Maureen Dowd years ago of his old pals the Clintons: “Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”
In the lying department, Hillary and the Donald are as evenly matched as any two major-party candidates in American history. Susan Mulcahy, a former columnist for the New York Post who helped build up Trump as a media figure, writes that “he could not control his pathological lying,” even on mundane matters. She writes in the latest issue of Politico magazine that “if Trump said, ‘Good morning,’ you could be pretty sure it was five o’clock in the afternoon…Denying facts was almost a sport for Trump.”
The race in November may come down to which political shark — Clinton or Trump — voters are most scared of, and which tells slightly fewer lies.“
Or rather who lies the most…and the best!
Finally, on The Lighter Side…
Magoo
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