Well, I do.
I have previously opined, confidently, that Donald Trump supporters, every single one of them, are stupid. This I have pointed out, is the only possible explanation for supporting an obvious narcissist who utters no substantive or serious policy ideas, believes rationalizations are legitimate arguments, is vulgar and insulting without shame or hesitation, and has the essential character of a pimp.
I was wrong.
They aren’t stupid.
They are very stupid.
Senator Marco Rubio at work in the Senate this week.
It would be nice if the most viable alternatives to Donald Trump didn’t go out of their way to show that they aren’t qualified to be President of the United States either.
Marco Rubio, who was already under well-earned fire for saying that he hated being a Senator and not bothering to vote on Senate bills, a rather substantial part of the job he was elected to do, thought about it, shrugged, and then became the only Senator who couldn’t be bothered to cast a vote on massive $1.8 trillion spending and tax package engineered by new House Speaker Paul Ryan. There’s just no excuse for this, and Rand Paul was not being unreasonable to suggest that if all Rubio wanted to do was run for President–and many have commented that unlike Trump, Cruz, Bush and the rest, he isn’t even doing that very hard—he should resign and let someone else represent the people of Florida.
“It’s a trillion dollars in spending and I think earlier this week he talked about having some activity and then wasn’t here,” Sen. Paul told POLITICO. “So yeah I think it’s important to show up to your job. I think that really he ought to resign or quit accepting his pay if he’s not going to come to work.”
How can anyone argue with that?
For his part, Rubio offered a weak, weak, weak excuse for his no-show, saying, “In essence, not voting for it, is a vote against it.” No, not voting is also not voting against it. As Thomas More pointed out before he lost his head, the law’s assumption is that “silence gives consent.” If Rubio is correct, then a bill could be voted down by more Senators abstaining than voting for a measure. Is he correct? No.
But then he doesn’t show up to work that often, so it’s understandable that he’s confused.
Rubio’s conduct demonstrates arrogance, lack of diligence, integrity and trustworthiness, laziness, and it doesn’t encourage me about his judgment, either.
Somewhere, Donald Trump is smiling.
No, I don’t mean how to hold on to our core values while taking responsible measures to prevent a fatal cultural infestation by radical Islam, though that’s a tough one too.
The U’S.’s existential dilemma is how to prevent a 2016 Presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Such a race would represent a holistic failure of the assumptions of American democracy, including the belief that ordinary Americans can be trusted with responsible self-governance.
I just forced myself to watch an entire Donald Trump campaign appearance in Iowa. Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.
He is a pathological narcissism case study. He’s having a ball, just being in front of a beaming crowd. Not a word of genuine substance came out of his mouth. Mostly, he talked about himself—how popular he is (He’s ahead in the polls! He’s ahead in the polls!), how nice he is, how he gets along with everybody, how he’s always right. Good God. Get the hook. If a high school candidate gave that kind of preening, hubris-gagging, “I’m the greatest thing since string cheese” speech running for student body president, he’d be jumped by the football team after the assembly. People who act like Trump are not well: this is about him being desperate for affection, not leading the country. Why do so many people fail to see that?
Well… Continue reading
Note: That is not Lindsay Graham on the left, and not Donald Trump on the right. But you get the idea…
—–Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), on CNN’s “New Day” turning Trump’s slogan, “make America great again” against him.
Graham is unelectable as well as un-nominatable, and he knows it, for no fool he. The GOP right wing regards him as a RINO like his pal John McCain, and also more than a little strange (why has he never been married, hmmmmm?); Graham is too Southern, too Senatorial, and too candid to have a chance in the general election either.
Graham is running as a truth-teller on foreign policy, and even that has been hard, since his poll numbers are microscopic and he has been relegated to the kiddie table in all of the debates. So it is true that he has less to risk being direct than the other candidates, but his undiplomatic, uncompromising condemnation of Donald Trump is exactly what the nomination race needs, and as I have written from the beginning, a well-executed, slashing, “Have you no sense of decency?” attack would both bring Trump to earth and enhance the candidacy of its Republican messenger. So far, nobody seems capable of delivering it effectively.
Trump’s latest envelope-pushing, evoking the worst of the U.S.’s domestic World War II bigotry as well as the early stages of Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitism, confines his candidacy to bigots, cowards and fools—admittedly a large constituency but a disqualifying one. The clear path to stopping Trump is making his supporters unwilling to look at themselves in the mirror. Democrats faced a similar challenge in 1968, when George Wallace was speaking before huge crowds. Continue reading
South Carolina lawmaker Rep. Christopher Corley (R- Aiken) decided to take on the daunting challenge of topping Las Vegas Assemblywoman Michele Fiore’s entry in the “Most Tasteless Christmas Card That Proves Its Republican Politician Author Is An Idiot” competition. You saw that one, right? It features Fiore, her husband, her adult daughters, their husbands and one of her grandchildren…
…holding guns, with a useful note in the corner denoting which models the are each planning on using to bag a reindeer and Santa too, I suppose, since there are ten Fiores.
There is a lot wrong with the card, beginning with the fact that, as the Bible says, there is a time for every season, and regardless of one’s faith or lack of it, this season is and has always been about peace and love, not shooting things. Fiore uses children as props for political grandstanding, which is ugly and an abuse of power.
The card also says “I am an idiot,” but that arguably is a good thing, since as many people should know as possible. (Either her constituents are idiots, or they like them for some reason.) Still, the silly card is relatively harmless, except that Fiore embarrasses her party and gives anti-gun hysterics another excuse to portray all those who resist the obvious progressive goal of banning guns entirely as lunatics.
Corley’s card, however, is much, much worse. Continue reading
“Hey Republicans! Step HERE! It’s your DUTY!”
I’m sure the paper’s editors will get a holiday gift basket from the Democratic National Committee for their nakedly partisan trap.
Erupting with indignation over Trump’s recent “let’s make fun of the disabled reporter” performer and his subsequent lie that he wasn’t doing what video shows he did, the Washington Post editors concluded with a demand that Republicans condemn Trump, or else:
[I]t is time for Republican Party leaders to make clear that they do not approve of Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration. If they do not, their party will be seen as complicit in his hatefulness, and deservedly so.
There are two reasons this is partisan and hypocritical.
The party could have and, I wrote here, should have scratched Trump from the nomination hunt and the debates early on, before it had given him a platform and he had become, for the nonce, a front-runner in the polls. His third party threat would have been more bluster than reality then, and without a national TV audience, Trump would have probably been content to file a lawsuit and throw a few tantrums. But it’s not called “the stupid party” for nothing. The GOP missed its window of escape. Turning on Trump now would undermine the party’s primary mission, not that the Post cares, and that is electing a Republican President. Continue reading
Donald Trump is apparently testing yet another piece of political conventional wisdom. Having already conquered such long standings assumptions as “A Presidential candidate shouldn’t talk and act like a sixth grader” and “A candidate shouldn’t embarrass his party every time he opens his mouth,” Trump is now setting his sights on the classic, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up,” but with an impressive extra challenge.
He is now trying to cover up the fact that he grotesquely mocked the disability of a New York Times reporter in a public appearance that was videotaped.
Trump actually is denying that he did what he was obviously doing. Very bold, very intrepid. It will be fascinating to see if he can pull it off.
Here’s Trump, after the Times excoriated him for ridiculing reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a malady that limits flexibility in his arms:
“Serge Kovaleski must think a lot of himself if he thinks I remember him from decades ago – if I ever met him at all, which I doubt I did. He should stop using his disability to grandstand and get back to reporting for a paper that is rapidly going down the tubes.”
Odd that Trump didn’t remember him, since before doing his “man with weird arm movements” bit he said quite clearly, “Now, the poor guy — you’ve got to see this guy…” One doesn’t normally call a reporter “a poor guy” for no reason, nor does one say, “You’ve got to see this guy” if you aren’t going to show the crowd what it is they have to see.”
Never mind, Trump is going for it: the full “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”, or as Jimmy Durante put it, in the show that gave the Ethics Alarms category it’s name, “Elephant? What elephant?” Continue reading
1. Stay classy, Donald.
2. Yes, I agree, it is refreshing to have a politician on the scene who does not hide his true self, does not calibrate his words and opinions to what people want to hear or what journalists and pundits will approve, does not suddenly speak in a Southern accent in front of crowds south of the Mason-Dixon line or pose as a lifetime Yankee fan in the Big Apple. Okay, it’s a novelty to have an asshole who has the integrity to openly behave like the asshole he is.
BUT HE’S STILL AN ASSHOLE.
How are people missing this?
3. One theory is that Trump has chosen this week to go all out to see if there is anything he can say or do so beneath the dignity of the office he is seeking and so repugnant to core American values that the idiots supporting him will finally wake up and say, “What was I thinking?”
If so, his experiment is working well.
And yes, it is fair to identify anyone who supports Donald Trump at this point as an idiot.
4. Please ask the Donald Trump fans at your Thanksgiving dinner whether this is really how they want to see their President behaving in public. If #2 above is correct, I assume that he’ll eventually don a Hillary mask, glue a herring to his forehead, and recite dirty limericks while riding on the Spinning Teacups ride in Disneyland nude. Hell, why not?
5. Imagine:Democrats decided that they didn’t want Howard Dean to be President based on this…
Donald Trump makes Howard Dean look like Henry Higgins. Continue reading
I refused to weigh in on the brief and silly ethics question being asked of various Presidential candidates regarding whether they would kill Baby Hitler given the chance via DeLorean or Star Trek gateway or something similar. I am beginning to wonder, though, if candidates to lead whatever is left of the U.S. 50 years from now will be asked a similar question about killing Baby Trump.
Donald Trump’s revolting candidacy…cannot fairly be called the most unethical presidential candidacy, but it is early yet. It may well prove to be one of the most harmful. As the United States faces some of the most difficult challenges in its history, Trump has chosen to use the nation’s process of deciding on its leader for his own ego gratification and self-promotion, without preparation for the job, deference to fair campaign rhetoric, or acknowledgment of his own fatal flaws as a candidate. Exploiting his status as a media celebrity in a celebrity-besotted culture, as well as the news media’s lack of discipline or principle, he is opportunistically advancing his candidacy on the lack of credible GOP contenders, using tabloid headline tactics….Donald Trump is perfectly happy to make a mockery of the presidential nomination and election processes while distorting them too. If he manages to convince enough fools to vote for him, hell, sure…he’d have a blast running for President. If his run peters out, it’s still worth lots of publicity, and increases the value of the Trump “brand.” Even the most unethical of the previous candidacies were based on a sincere, if misguided belief that the country’s welfare would be served by it. Does Trump have that belief? I wonder. No, his can’t be called the most unethical candidacy. But it is reckless, and it is intentionally appealing to the worst in 21st Century American character: fear, celebrity worship, ignorance, and materialism. Meanwhile, every second of attention his candidacy distracts from serious consideration of our nation’s leadership reduces the chances of the public doing its hardest and most important job carefully and competently.
I wrote that five years ago. Continue reading
Poor John Kasich. The Ohio governor is by experience, practical political views and demonstrated executive skills among the most qualified and able of all the Presidential candidates. Nonetheless, he is a lazy communicator and a clumsy one, and in a job where words and persuasion matter as much as any other tool of leadership, he repeatedly reveals himself to be untrustworthy. The above passage, from Kasich’s foreign policy speech this week, exemplifies this.
A President cannot say that he wants an agency that will promote Judeo-Christian values, because it will be heard, and fairly so, as an effort to promote some religions over others, something the United States government may not do, and may not even appear to want to do. Worse, Kasich chose the exact moment when his words were guaranteed to be interpreted in the worst light possible by Democrats and the news media, as the nation was immersed in an a debate about screening Syrian refugees that was being elevated to dueling hysterias by both the left and the right. Sure enough, I just heard CNN’s Michael Smerconish compare Kasich’s proposal to ISIS-style forced conversion.
Nice job, John. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 