“GOP Junior-Varsity Debate”: Welcome, Losers. I’m Your Moderator, Donald Trump
Welcome to the Fox News junior-varsity debate, featuring these losers to my right and my left. They’re all horrible.
I’m Donald Trump, which you already know. I develop the world’s best buildings, I have $10 billion, and I’ll be your next president, which these dummies don’t seem to understand.
Because I had a hit show, “The Apprentice,” which was huge, just huge, Fox thought this lineup of losers might get some actual ratings if I were to be the moderator. Though even I can’t work miracles at 5 p.m. Seriously, Fox—5 p.m.?
First let’s hear from Rick Perry.
Rick, c’mon, you wear glasses so people think you’re smart. It just doesn’t work—people can see through the glasses. You did a lousy job at the border, so now we have all these Mexican rapists. Anything to say? Not interested.
Next, Carly Fiorina. Once was a CEO, like me. But Carly, look—you got fired from HP. Then you lost in a landslide to Barbara Boxer. I mean, clobbered. If Americans want a CEO to be president, why would they choose a two-time loser instead of Donald Trump?
George Pataki, where are you? Oh, down there. A fellow New Yorker. Hello, George.
Listen, you were a terrible governor of New York, one of the worst. Here’s my question for you: I said you couldn’t be elected dog catcher in New York, so why would you run for president? You’re so far behind in the polls, you’re literally invisible. A nobody. Fox News probably shouldn’t have let you into the lobby. A lobby that could use some work, I might add. It’s horrible. So are you, George.
This says Jim Gilmore. Never heard of him. Who is Jim Gilmore? Is that you? Hello Jim, I’m Donald. You’re horrible.
Bobby Jindal. Interesting life story, very interesting—born in Louisiana just months after your parents emigrated here from India. Real name, Piyush Jindal. First Indian-American governor. Very good. Here’s the question: Can you show me your birth certificate right now?
Let’s turn to Rick Santorum. Rick, hello. Question for you: Do you have a plane yet? I don’t know if you’ve seen, but I have a really, really big plane. Listen, if you ever want to get out of Iowa and see the rest of the country, give me a call and maybe I’ll give you a ride. Maybe.
Finally, my good friend, Lindsey Graham. I see you’re doing great in the polls, really great.
Lindsey, you’ve said that your sister could act as first lady if you become president, since you’re not married, which is something I’ve accomplished three times. Since you made your sister part of the campaign, I’d like to give out her phone number, her e-mail address and her Facebook profile. Fox, can we put up that information? There it is. Make sure to contact Lindsey’s sister today and ask her why her brother is such a loser.
That’s it, time’s up. I’d like to thank Fox News, which is so much better than Univision, it’s not even funny.
Tune in on Jan. 20, 2016, when Sharon Osbourne, Gilbert Gottfried, Gary Busey and other former “Celebrity Apprentice” contestants join me for my presidential inauguration. Rick, make sure to wear your glasses. Other Rick, I’ll try to send a plane for you. And which one is Jim Gilmore, again?
By: Laurence Arnold, John McCorry and Patrick Oster; Opening line Column, Bloomberg Politics, August 6, 2015
“The Undercard”: What Will Be The Fate Of The GOP Candidates Who Didn’t Make The Cut?
So the hammer finally dropped on seven Republican presidential candidates who did not make Fox News’ top ten national polling threshold for the first official debate of the cycle: Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Jim Gilmore. They have been relegated to a 5:00 PM “forum” on Fox tomorrow that will last an hour; the top ten will rumble for two hours at 9:00 PM.
One of the story-lines for the next couple of weeks will be the fate of the candidates who didn’t make the cut. Will the media start treating them like the Walking Dead? Will donors and previously committed activists abandon them? Will any of them see the handwriting on the wall and just drop out? Or could this whole make-the-top-ten obsession of the last couple of months turn out to have been a chimera?
You’d have to figure that three of the leftover candidates have a survival advantage. Perry has gotten off to a good start substantively and in terms of early Iowa impressions. He also has a lifeline to Texas and Christian Right money. Fiorina remains a candidate other Republicans want to push in front of cameras to savage Hillary Clinton without the appearance of male pigginess. And Lindsey Graham is this cycle’s clown prince, beloved by media for his jokiness, his moderation on some domestic issues, and his mad bomber hawkiness on foreign policy, making him a nice matched set with Rand Paul.
As long as Rick Santorum has Foster Friess willing to finance his Super-PAC, however, he can probably stick around. And what else does Bobby Jindal have to do? Govern Louisiana? Hah!
In the wake of not making the Fox cut, Team Jindal has settled on an interesting reaction: predicting Bobby will overwhelm the field with his Big Brain (per Buzzfeed‘s Rosie Gray):
The Bobby Jindal campaign likewise responded with a certain level of disdain for its fellow undercard debaters.
“Unlike other candidates, Bobby has a tremendous bandwidth for information and policy,” said Jindal spokesperson Shannon Dirman. “He’s smart, has the backbone to do the right thing, and his experience has prepared him well for debates on any number of policy topics. If anyone thinks they can beat him in a debate I’d love to learn about it.”
Bobby used the term “bandwidth” himself a couple of times during Monday’s Voters First Forum in NH. It’s apparently the new term for “smartest guy in the room,” which will probably be etched on Jindal’s political tombstone. He’s got all the arrogance of Donald Trump, but without the poll numbers.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 5, 2015
“This Promises To Be Fun”: Christmas Comes Early This Year — The Gift Of A Trump-Fueled GOP Debate
I feel like a kid the week before Christmas. There’s just one present under the tree, but it’s all a columnist could ever hope for: the first Republican debate!
How could Thursday night in Cleveland fail to be one of the most entertaining political spectacles we’ve seen in a long time? There are, far as I can tell, 17 candidates for the GOP nomination. Nobody’s quite sure which 10 will qualify for the prime-time clash, with the rest relegated to an earlier also-rans debate. Fox News, which is organizing the festivities, says it will use an average of national polls to make the cut, but won’t say which polls.
One hopes the poor candidates at least hear the good or bad news before they arrive in Cleveland. Imagine the phone call Rick Perry’s campaign might get: “Um, has the governor’s plane landed yet? Because it turns out we need him on stage quite a bit earlier than we thought.”
That would be a shame because Perry gave arguably the most memorable debate performance of the 2012 campaign, though not in a good way. But if Fox News were to go by the RealClearPolitics polling averages, as of one week before the debate Perry would be bounced out of the main event. A late entrant, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, would take his place.
Mind you, Perry is at 2.2 percent in the polls, on average, while Kasich is at 3.2 percent. In a recent Post poll, Perry actually led Kasich by 4 percent to 2 percent; in other surveys, the difference is within the margin of error. On such small or perhaps nonexistent distinctions may hang political careers.
So for the candidates on the bubble, life must be fraught. But we already know who’s going to be the star of the evening. Are you ready for your close-up, Mr. Trump?
Every recent poll of Republicans has put Donald Trump in first place. The RealClearPolitics average has him at 19.8 percent, trailed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at 13.6 percent, establishment favorite Jeb Bush at 12.6 percent and everyone else in single digits.
When I look at the Trump phenomenon, I can’t help but recall something Gen. David Petraeus said to my Post colleague Rick Atkinson as they surveyed the battlefield during the early days of the Iraq invasion: “Tell me how this ends.”
A gaffe that might have ended a normal campaign — derisively questioning the war record of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was shot down over Vietnam, held as a POW and tortured — seems only to have made Trump stronger (as, ahem, I had predicted). The lack of any relationship between his wildly slanderous allegations about Mexican immigrants and the factual record seems not to bother his fans one bit. The fact that he supports universal health care, when opposing any such thing is a Republican article of faith, seems a minor detail far outweighed by the loud and irrepressible Trumpness of his being.
Maybe Trump will somehow self-destruct in the debate. But who among his rivals is more skilled at projecting a persona on television? Trump knows how to filibuster and won’t hesitate to turn an inconvenient question back on the questioner. Even if he brings nothing to the lectern but bombast, he might emerge unscathed.
The question becomes whether the others go after him. Perry, if he makes it to the big dance, surely will. But what about the rest? Will they throw proper punches, legal under Marquess of Queensberry rules, against an opponent who kicks, bites and gouges?
And how will the non-Trump candidates seek to present themselves in the most positive light? Will Walker refute Trump’s allegation that Wisconsin is “doing terribly,” or will he just brag about his victories over organized labor? Will Bush break into Spanish? Will Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), drowned out of late, try to crank up the volume? Will retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson again compare the Affordable Care Act to slavery?
Can Mike Huckabee come up with an even more offensive Holocaust analogy for the Iran nuclear deal? Can Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) remind voters that, you know, he’s still in the race? Will Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) help Mr. Trump with his jacket and ask if he’d like a glass of water? Will Kasich make himself the flavor of the month? Will New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie punch somebody?
Going out on a limb here: This promises to be fun.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 30, 2015
“The Great Humbug Of Donald Trump”: Instead Of Substance, We Will Get More Circus Coverage Leading The News
Thanks to the world-class narcissist now driving the Republican clown car, it ought to be clear to Americans just how badly the donor class has lost control of the presidential primaries, which they once had rigged to dictate who we could vote for.
Millions of Americans seem not to grasp that Donald Trump’s campaign is a mirage, an inchoate blending of the political/showbiz film satires Wag the Dog and Simone, thrown together with all the integrity of P.T. Barnum’s notorious FeeJee Mermaid.
On Wednesday, one of the dimmer figures in the presidential race threw a spotlight on what we should all be seeing clearly: Trump threatens the continued existence of the Republican Party.
That’s because Donald Trump’s campaign is built on hate mongering and discord, while a growing body of surveys, polls, focus groups, and an analysis of demographic trends shows that Americans are embracing the progressive ideals in our Constitution. Whether it’s marriage equality or a path to citizenship for those who entered the country illegally, the tide of history is against not only Trump, but the 15 other Republican candidates who all broadly side with him — just in more subtle language.
And I’m not the one saying that the Republican Party may soon go the way of the Whigs (last seen in 1854).
No, that insight comes from former Texas governor Rick Perry, who’s currently taking a back seat in the clown car.
Fortunately for the donor class, most political reporters only heard Perry say “Trumpism” is a “cancer on conservatism.”
That line alone just doesn’t capture his overall point. Neither did most of the coverage of the rigorously written, nuanced speech that Perry read.
Trump, Perry said, is selling “a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition” unless Trumpism is “clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded.”
Perry also made note of Trump’s rare appearances in church, an apparent effort to undercut conservative Christian support. After all, when it comes to religion, The Donald is a devotee of Mammon, but he’s angling for support from primary voters who think GOP stands for God’s Own Party.
The new reality that political reporters obscured is this:
We once had a primary system that required candidates to genuflect before the oligarchs. But now one low-level oligarch is thumbing his nose at the rest of them — and under this new system, the much richer oligarchs, from Sheldon Adelson to the Koch brothers, are as helpless to shape the direction of events as — well, as the mass of voters who don’t have billions to donate.
The Republican nightmare is that Trump doesn’t need donors to stay in the race. The power of all that Koch and Adelson money is discounted, the way Trump sometimes pays creditors just pennies on the dollar.
And so while candidates who never had a chance anyway – Carson, Huckabee, Jindal, Pataki, and Perry among them – will be forced to withdraw for lack of donations, Trump can party on. And Trump told “Morning Joe” Scarborough Friday that if he is denied the nomination, he might run as an independent — unless the Republican establishment starts treating him respectfully.
Political reporters are missing the big story because they get rewarded for covering the horse race, not the issues; for going with the herd, not standing apart. Step apart from the herd and you’ll get picked off, perhaps by an editor or anchor taking a shot at you from the home office, perhaps by the hyenas on the campaign staff.
Telling the news the candidate’s handlers want told, regurgitating manufactured controversies, and highlighting gaffes – those are the stories that make the careers of campaign reporters.
And, besides, it’s easier to focus on who is ahead in the polls than it is to actually learn important policy matters — such as how raising the minimum wage affects job creation, how tax cuts affect various income classes, or the significance of the words “corruption of blood” in the Constitution.
Instead of substance, we will get more circus coverage leading the news. Bowing to that reality, here are two things we know for sure about Trump’s fortune. And it should get some media attention because Trump wants us to judge him by the contents of his wallet, so:
- Trump is worth at least $1 billion, but no verifiable evidence exists to support his exclamations that his net worth is more than $10 billion.
- Trump reported that his production company took in just $4 million over the last 18 months for Apprentice and other Trump television properties, far below the $65 million annual fee he put out in 2011, a number so absurdly unrealistic that his broadcaster, NBC, derided it as “grossly inaccurate.”
Other news we still have yet to see make the major news reports: Donald’s long, unsavory connections to businesses run by organized crime and the lawsuits by minority workers at multiple Trump companies complaining about harassment.
But the lack of that coverage is no more surprising than Barnum’s avoiding hard questions about his fake mermaid.
By: David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, July 24, 2015
“Guns And The Two Americas”: If You Want To Lessen Your Chances Of Getting Shot, Stay Out Of The South
The waves of mass shootings continue to roll over the United States like surf on the ship of state’s prow. Every few weeks now we get hit with a jolt of cold water. We shake and shudder, and then brace ourselves for the next one.
So we beat on — a nation whose people are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of most other developed countries. The only thing extraordinary about mass shootings in America is how ordinary the killing grounds are — elementary schools, high schools, colleges, military recruitment centers, theaters, parks, churches.
Is no place safe? Actually, several places are. You want protection in a country that allows a deranged man to get an assault weapon to hunt down innocent people in a public space? Go to the airport — that bubble of gun-free security. Or go to a major-league baseball game, or a stadium in the National Football League.
Our big league venues may be engaging only in security theater, as critics assert, but their owners don’t think so. They now mandate metal detectors to snag weapons, and most of them even ban off-duty cops from bringing guns to the games.
Nationwide, if you want to lessen your chances of getting shot, stay out of the South. The South is the most violent region in the United States, and also the place with the highest rate of gun ownership. More guns, easily obtained by the mentally ill, religious fanatics and anti-government extremists, mean more gun deaths.
Better to go to a city or state with gun restrictions, at least if you’re playing the odds. Most of the states with tighter gun laws have fewer gun deaths.
That’s one America, the slightly safer one. It includes government gun-screened zones like airports, courthouses and many high schools. But more significantly, it also covers property used by our most popular obsession, pro football — the free market at work.
The other America is an open-fire zone, backed by politicians who think it should be even more crowded with average people parading around with lethal weapons. Just after the tragedy in a Louisiana theater a week ago — a shooting by a hate-filled man who was able to legally obtain a gun despite a history of mental illness — Rick Perry called gun-free zones a bad idea.
In his view, echoing that of the fanatics who own the Republican Party by intimidation, everyone should be armed, everywhere. Once a shooting starts, the bad guy with the gun will be killed by the good guy with the gun, somehow able to get a draw on the shooter in a darkened theater, or behind a pew in church.
This scenario almost never happens. The logic is nonsense, the odds of a perfectly timed counter-killer getting the drop on the evil killer unlikely. And even when such a situation does happen, as in the Tucson shooting of 2011, the armed citizen who jumps into the melee can pose a mortal threat to others. In Tucson, an innocent person came within seconds of getting shot by an armed bystander who wasn’t sure whom to shoot.
Most gun-free zones, like the theater in Lafayette, La., are not gun-free at all. They have no metal detectors or screening — that would cost too much, the theater owners claim. Gun-free is a suggestion, and therefore a misnomer. Eventually, the more prosperous theaters in better communities will pay for metal detectors, further setting apart the two Americas in our age of mass shootings.
The Mall of America — more than 500 stores in four miles of retail space, drawing 40 million annual visitors to a climate-controlled part of Minnesota — is trying to be a gun-free zone. “Guns are banned on these premises” is the mall’s official policy.
If the mall took up Rick Perry’s suggestion, shoppers could roam among the chain stores packing heat, ready for a shootout. The owners of that vast operation, similar to those who stage concerts and pro sports, think otherwise. The mall has a security force of more than a hundred people. Yeah — I hear the joke about the feckless mall cops. But the Mall of America trusts them more than well-armed shoppers to protect people, as they should.
Surprising though it may seem, gun ownership is declining over all in the United States. We are still awash with weapons — nearly a third of all American households have an adult with a gun. But that’s down from nearly half of all households in 1973.
What we’re moving toward, then, are regions that are safer than others, and public spaces that are safer than others, led by private enterprise, shunning the gun crazies who want everyone armed. The new reality comes with the inconvenience and hassle of screening and pat-downs similar to the routines at airports — enforced gun-free zones, not mere suggestions.
As a way to make everyday life seem less frightening, the new reality is absurd. But that’s the cost, apparently, of an extreme interpretation of a constitutional amendment designed to fend off British tyranny, a freedom that has become a tyranny in itself.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, July 31, 2015
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