Be INFORMED

Sunday, May 01, 2011

Donald Trump: A Republicans Wet Dream?

  Nothing describes Donald Trump and the Republicans decent into stupidity more than this article from Common Dreams.

Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.

   It would appear that Trump is the new hero/class clown right now.

That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

     On Donald Trump’s wealth, it is noted that most came from filing for bankruptcy.

Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".

  The rest makes for some great reading, so do so here.

The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.

 

Trump Gets Slammed At Dinner

   I do wish that I could have been at this dinner to hear President Obama and Seth Meyers roast Trump right to his face. Watch Obama at the end of this post.

From Helene Cooper at the NY Times blog,  "Obama Zings Trump at White House Correspondents’ Dinner."

"...As a hair-gelled, grimly unsmiling Mr. Trump sat at a nearby table — a guest of the Washington Post — Mr. Obama ripped one punch after another at the real estate tycoon..."

Also checkout the story from The Caucus Blog at the NY Times: "Inside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner."

Here's a little more from the Times' blog...

Obama Zings Trump at White House Correspondents’ Dinner
By HELENE COOPER
New York Times Blog
April 30, 2011   10:51PM

“...Donald Trump is here tonight,” the comedian in chief said, grinning. “Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is prouder to put this birth certificate to rest than The Donald. Now he can get to focusing on the issues that matter. Like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened at Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”

  Anyway. President Obama was on a roll.

  Seth Meyers via The Washington Post