Trump Certainly Heightens The
Dramatic Tension

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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.

2012: Still A Muddle

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by Smitty

Rich Galen at CNSNews contrasts BHO with predecessors’ approval ratings at this point in their first administration. Carter was doing about 10 points worse. The interesting point is that BHO’s approval equals that of the Gipper:

The best example is Ronald Reagan whose 43 percent matches Obama’s current rating. Reagan, let us remember, went on to win 49 states in his re-election in 1984 against the Democrats’ dream team of Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro.

On the other hand, Dr. John Pitney, professor in the school of government at Claremont McKenna College in California, sent me a great annotated bibliography of press pieces about how weak, how late-starting, how little-known, how futile it looked for Democratic candidates at about this point in the 1992 President cycle.

Yes, and I must admit that my non-regard for Mr. Ruling Class Bush41 bought me eight years of Bubba:

It is true that Clinton was aided and abetted by Ross Perot who mounted a furious third-party candidacy and who, in spite of not winning any electoral votes, got nearly 20 percent of the popular vote.

While H.W. would probably not have won anyway, Perot’s candidacy clearly cost Bush several states, much as – eight years later – third party candidate Ralph Nader likely cost Al Gore a victory in Florida and we know how that turned out.

So, when you hear the office know-it-all state with absolute certainty that they can divine the outcome of the Presidential election in November 2012 because of the polling in April of 2011; smile, nod, stir your coffee, and walk back to your desk.

Perot was proto-Tea Party. 15 years ahead of his time. No blog support.
What I like the most about this notion of unpredictability is that there is hope for repeal of Amendments 16 & 17, plus that atrocious Federal Reserve Act during their centennial in 2013.
While the current efforts of Paul Ryan &c are not nothing, the fact that they are not addressing the roots of Federal over-reach is worrisome.

One thing we do have to look forward to is the Left nattering on about how 2012 is the most raaaaacist election ever. To paraphrase the Instapundit, the country will get past raaaaacism when the people on the Left perpetuating the raaaaacism finally desist from the raaaaacism.

Obama: Miracle Cure for Liberalism

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Some people who were lulled into a trance are now wide awake:

Daniel Loeb, founder of Third Point LLC, was one of the biggest Obama fund-raisers in 2008, rounding up $200,000 for him, according to campaign-finance records. In the decade prior, Mr. Loeb and his wife donated $250,000 to Democrats and less than $10,000 to Republicans.
But since Mr. Obama’s inauguration, Mr. Loeb has given $468,000 to Republican candidates and the GOP, and just $8,000 to Democrats.

The Lonely Conservative has further thoughts about Obama’s big-money donors.

Respecting Lawrence O’Donnell

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by Smitty (via Hot Air)

O’Donnell does a more courageous job of expressing the Progressive Faith than almost anyone else on the Left.

The fact that the Progressive Faith arrives in a sodomized expression of Christianity comes close to triggering a puke reflex. It happens. May Heaven have mercy upon you, Lawrence O’Donnell, and the Holy Spirit grant you the wisdom to grasp that the State is not the Almighty, merely a secular means of de-conflicting group interests.

People seriously interested in the Rich Young Ruler are directed to Bonheoffer, but warned: ol’ Dietrich was never about the feel-good Gospel, right up to the bitter, tragic end.

Update: More at Eternity Matters.

Progressive Economics Fail At The Huffington Post

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by Smitty

Over at SOL/PuffHo, they just don’t get the new Progressive Economics. Jobs are what matter. Product? Not so much. Thus, if the State of Illinois pays for signs with spelling errors, that isn’t a bug, that’s a feature! Workers and materials suppliers will be kept busy moving the location of the typo all around the sign. It’s all about jobs saved or created, man!

It is crucially important to view this as a sign of Progressive economics.

Created? Why, yes! What may superficially appear to be an increase in societal entropy is really all about job opportunities. New bureaucracies will have to be born to create a staff of people who can interpret the increasingly meaningless signs cluttering the landscape.
After a critical mass is reached, a new academic field will emerge: Progressive English Studies. The old, relatively stable form of English will remain, so that the Ruling Class can continue its course of leisure and oppression of the common dogs, but those common dogs will be increasingly fragmented, divided, and unable to manage parties or tea, much less Tea Parties.
Full circle, then: this humble sign in Illinois, far from a sign of stupidity, is a harbinger of winning the future, full employment, and portion controlled servings.
Yeah, Progress: yeah!

Lest you think this post pure snark, check out the new line of street sign furniture.

Update: linked at House of Eratosthenes.

VIDEO: Obama Sermonizes About This Silly Distraction From His Incompetence

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Professor Glenn Reynolds:

The White House may think it’s sprung a trap, but I think they waited too long. By now — as the polls from earlier this week showing how many independents thought Obama wasn’t born here, and which probably prompted the release decision, indicate — the damage is done.

UPDATE: We now have a White House transcript of the president’s press-conference statement, which gets fact-checked by Conn Carroll:

President Obama claimed that the reason he released his birth certificate today is because the issue had become a distraction. Specifically, he blamed the conspiracy for drowning out his speech earlier this month attacking Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity. . . . That is just plain false.

Read the whole thing at The Washington Examiner.

UPDATE II: Evidently banned by his new corporate overlords from resurrecting his Trig-Truther obstetric inquisition, Andrew Sullivan resorts to nudge-nudge wink-wink mode:

Get over yourselves, MSM. And do your job – not defending the right of people in power to protect themselves, but scrutinizing them relentlessly, with every fact and document you can get. . . . Do you know what I am saying?

Yeah. We know exactly what you’re saying, Andrew.

UPDATE III: Ace of Spades notes that some Birthers just keep on Birthin’ — which is exactly the problem with Sully and Trig Trutherism. Once somebody stakes their political credibility on a particular narrative, they have what might be called a status investment in the truth of that narrative. People who have built reputations as 9/11 Truthers (e.g., Alex Jones) and never going to come out and say, “You know what? This conspiracy-theory stuff is a big steaming pile of hooey. I’ve been a total dupe, an abject fool, a credulous idiot, and I guess everybody who made fun of me was right.”

By the same token, Sully can never admit that his absurd fascination with Trig-Trutherism was the product of his own emotional and intellectual weaknesses. He may eventually just tiptoe away from Trig Trutherism, hoping people will forget what a damned ridiculous spectacle he made of himself, but he wil never ‘fess up and own it.

strong>UPDATE IV: Shocking revelation!

The certificate reveals that the future president was born Barack Hussein Muhammad Jihad Guevara Manson Obama on July 4, 1976, in Pyongyang, North Korea. Not only is he not a natural-born citizen, he’s not even old enough to be president. And his mother, Ethel Rosenburg, lists her religion as “Stalinist.”

That James Taranto, what a kidder . . .

PREVIOUSLY: WATERLOO FOR BIRTHERS: Obama Releases Long-Form Birth Certificate

Donald Trump, Neo-Confederate?

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That’s what Alyssa Rosenberg of Think Progress appears to be suggesting with her report that Donald Trump donated “$25,000 for the post-Katrina restoration of Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis’s retirement estate on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”

“Pin the Confederate Tail on the Republican” seems to be a popular progressive game this week, with Jamelle Bouie of The American Prospect exulting over a recent poll showing substantial pluralities of Republicans in Georgia, North Carolina and Mississippi say they wish the South had won the Civil War.

Dave Weigel noticed that the same poll shows a surprising level of Lost Cause sentiment among Democrats. In fact, the poll found that 22% of Mississippi Democrats wish the South had won the War.

This poll is from the liberal Public Policy Polling firm which, of course, is engaged in anti-GOP propaganda. But I reckon they haven’t considered the possible consequences. One can imagine some crafty operative circulating an anonymous e-mail before next year’s crucial South Carolina primary with the subject line: “Romney: Soft on Race-Mixing?”

UPDATE: Whoopi Goldberg plays the race card — wow, who could have seen that coming, huh? — and welcome, Instapundit readers!

By the way: I was born in Atlanta, Georgia (and have the birth certificate to prove it), yet when it comes to college football, my allegiance has always been to the University of Alabama, because my Dad graduated at Tuscaloosa.

Perhaps you could find a metaphor there. Just sayin’ . . .