The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Trump Certainly Heightens The
Dramatic Tension

Posted on | April 27, 2011 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

I, for one, am thankful that the birth certificate release proved to be pure anti-climax. Let this be a lesson to everyone to avoid investing energy in distractions. Try not to notice the amount of Obama Exceptionalism that was brought to bear.
The blog seems to have its comb-over in place today. Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection thinks that the ongoing Trump assault on the President is doing damage.
A few points:

  • It’s still a distraction to fret about a sworn President’s bona fides in the face of the diplomatic, military, and economic challenges besetting the country. Thanks, Trump, for sucking up valuable bandwidth. Oh, and your hairstyle is a joke.
  • The media has abetted this. The two-edged sword of the birth certificate as a news cycle management device seemed to be a Lefty Lure. Now, with new books on the subject being published and seeming to sell well, the ability to flip the switch on the topic may have been lost. Did the cabal of producers and editors know this, and push Trump anyway?
  • Trump seems a joker. Having attained a foothold with Barack Obama’s long form birth certificate, Trump appears to be branching out into lower-hanging fruit like, oh, college transcripts. Even Ace of Spades is applauding:

Ah well, I want to see his grades and which courses he managed his A’s in, even still, and I want to know there was no special non-grade-based track for magna at Harvard.Impress me, buddy.

I want to know. I’m tired of every Republican’s SAT scores and grades being leaked while the frigging colleges clamp down on Democrats’ records like they’re blueprints for hydrogen warheads.

 

What’s interesting here is that Trump started out with the tinfoil hat problem of the long form birth certificate and then walked back to the low hanging fruit of the college records. Whether that was the strategy from the outset, or an adroit shift on Trump’s part when he felt he’d maximized the LFBC issue is beside the point. It was well done.
Whether Trump leverages that into a GOP standard level of biographic disclosure for the good President remains to be seen. Possibilities:

  • Trump will gets a phone call from a plutocrat telling Trump to lay by his dish. He would then be a tool.
  • Trump gets the desired TV ratings and lays off of BHO willingly. He would then be a dilettante.
  • Trump presses the advantage and reveals BHO in his intellectually mediocre glory.

I still see Sarah Palin as a more rounded politician than Trump. Trump and BHO appear similar in that there seems to be more interest in the idea of being President than the crushing actuality of the job. Sarah is relatively more mature.
If Trump’s hijinks end up doing any good, it will be mostly in passing.

Update: Linked at Amused Cynic.
Update II: Also linked at The Camp of the Saints, who has a good roundup going.

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