What is the Appeal of Donald Trump?

I've got a post coming up at DaTechGuy on Monday afternoon about Donald Trump in which I recount parts of a conversation we had last night with friends about Trump's candidacy. Like a lot of other voters, apparently, my friend is all in for Trump and really likes what Trump says.

You can read about that over there, but I'm going to put in my two cents about Trump here.

Sure, Trump is saying the right things (sort of, sometimes) because he's a pandering entertainer. A reality TV star. He might be a businessman, but part of that business is entertainment. He's not a conservative and I personally don't think he's serious about being president. I believe he's in there to get publicity, to agitate, to get attention, and maybe to get the candidates talking about the right issues, although I might be giving him too much credit there.

Victor Davis Hanson nails exactly why Trump is at the top of the polls:

Trump preps little. He has no real agenda. And he makes stuff up as he goes along. For such a New York brawler, he has thin skin, smearing his critics, often in creepy fashion. How can a former Democrat, once a pro-choice, pro-amnesty liberal and a supporter of single-payer health care, remain the godhead of the conservative base for weeks on end?  

The answer is that Trump is a catharsis for 15 percent to 20 percent of the Republican electorate. They apparently like the broken china shop and appreciate the raging bull who runs amok in it. Politicians and the media are seen as corrupt and hypocritical, and the nihilistic Trump is a surrogate way of letting them take some heat for a change.

Trump has reversed himself on nearly every single conservative issue.

I've been stunned at the number of presumably intelligent people who have voiced support for him. When I suggested to my friend last night that perhaps Ted Cruz would be a better candidate, he shut me down and said he'd already made up his mind for Trump.

Well, then.

Even The Washington Post, is befuddled:

Trump has supported universal health care, was once an abortion rights advocate (who has since evolved), has a record of donating to Democrats, and is (was?) friends with the Clintons. Plus, he's said this: "I probably identify more as Democrat," Trump told CNN in 2004. But for reasons we're still analyzing (here and here and here), Trump is the conservative darling of the 2016 presidential race at the moment.

It's also important to realize, I think, that while people like Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh might support Trump's right to speak out and confront these controversial issues, they may not necessarily support Trump as president.  The distinction is a large one.

And so, it's important for people like my friend last night, and others on the Trump bandwagon, to fully research the issues and the candidates, not just what they are saying today.  My fear is that we have too many voters who won't make the effort and will simply settle for a reality TV presidency.

Mainstream Media Fiddles,the Middle East Burns, and Obama Does Vegas

I'm dumbfounded.

Just when I thought the world couldn't get any more sprayed-roach crazy than it is, the American Ambassador to Libya is murdered (along with three other Americans), and all the mainstream media can do is criticize Romney for speaking out against it?

This makes me furious.

I don't know if I'm more angry at the media for being such lapdogs or at Obama for letting this happen.

And don't for one single minute think that Obama isn't on the hook here.

The media was, and still is, quick to blame George W. Bush for 9/11, saying he "ignored many al-Qaida warnings" prior to the attack.  But where are they on this?  Where are they on Obama's failure to attend intelligence briefings in the week leading up to the 9/11 anniversary?

I'll tell you where they are - they're in the press room figuring out how to gang up on Mitt Romney and make him look "unpresidential."  Are you kidding me?!  Ben Smith has a bunch of supposedly Republican, anonymous (of course) sources blasting Romney's statement:

A third Republican, a former Bush State Department official, told BuzzFeed, "It wasn't presidential of Romney to go political immediately — a tragedy of this magnitude should be something the nation collectively grieves before politics enters the conversation." 

Really?

George Bush was relentlessly pounded for being slow to react to the news that America was under attack on 9/11/2001.

He was also widely criticized for his slow response to Hurricane Katrina (even though he could NOT go in without authorization from local officials).

But Mitt Romney, in a presidential moment, responds swiftly in a statement decrying the murder of an American in a terrorist attack and it's too soon!  The nation hasn't grieved yet!

It's just crazy.

Professor Jacobson:

Beginning early this morning, when news was just breaking, the left-blogosphere and mainstream media, led by MSNBC, has attempted to shift the focus from the Obama administration’s failure to protect our embassies and for its apologies (both before and after the attack on the Cairo Embassy) to whether Mitt Romney was wrong to criticize Obama last night. 

No, I’m not kidding.

A very good post from Victor Davis Hanson explains how this happened in the first place:

Egypt is currently a beneficiary of more than $1 billion in annual American aid, and its new Muslim Brotherhood–led government is negotiating to have much of its sizable U.S. debt forgiven. Libya, remember, was the recipient of the Obama administration’s “lead from behind” intervention that led to the removal of Moammar Qaddafi — and apparently gave the present demonstrators the freedom to kill Americans. This is all called “smart” diplomacy. 

Be sure to read the whole thing.

And of course, the press can't be bothered with putting the blame where it lies.  They're more interested in removing the threat to their candidate than exposing the truth.

Allahpundit has the right questions:

 The signs were there; one of the Marines at the consulate apparently even saw Libyan “security” taking photos of the compound beforehand. What did the State Department do to prepare? Why are Marines only being sent now, after the fact, to beef up security? Why was there no evacuation plan in place? Why, apparently, didn’t Obama attend any of his daily intel briefings this week with the anniversary of 9/11 bearing down? Why did his campaign move more quickly to condemn Romney for his statement than the White House did to condemn the mob activity in Cairo and Benghazi? Why do these questions only seem to get asked of presidents from the party disfavored by the concern trolls we call reporters? 

If there was ever any doubt that the press is in bed with Obama, it's gone now.

I pray to God that people will do their own research on the candidates this fall and not listen to the mainstream media.  They are as culpable in this debacle as narcissist that inhabits the Oval Office is.

What if George W. Bush had jetted off to Las Vegas for a fundraiser on the night of 9/11?  Why, the press would be apoplectic!  Not the same thing, you say?  Three thousand lives lost to four?  Not the same thing?  Tell that to the families of the victims.  Tell that to the victims that are sure to come.

This is not the end.  There will be more attacks as long as this bungling Jimmy Carter redux is in office.

Brace yourself.

Much more at Memeorandum.

On Revising (and Erasing) History

Via Instapundit, Victor Davis Hanson has penned another piece that outlines the mass of contradictions that is Barack Obama.  It is difficult not to paste the entire thing here but start with this; after noting Obama's chastisement of the Supreme Court and his warning against overturning law, Hanson writes:

I am confused: I thought we were supposed to welcome such judicial audit. Was not that the charm of the Warren Court? Did not the Obama administration go to federal court to ask justices to set aside the Defense of Marriage Act that it was entrusted to enforce — seeking judicial help not to follow a law that it chose not to seek to overturn in Congress? 

I also thought that a younger Barack Obama once had regretted that the Supreme Court had never addressed “redistributive change” and, per the U.S. Constitution, had confined itself only to defining negative liberties rather than demanding positive “rights” that legislatures were supposed to ensure — or else. And did ObamaCare really pass with broad majorities? I thought that it received no Republican votes in the House and only squeaked by. And it would have been filibustered in the Senate without the Ted Stevens pseudo-scandal and various sweetheart deals to swing senators. Or is that now inaccurate?

Of course Mr. Hanson's memory is correct; it is Obama being the revisionist in this case.  In the mind of a narcissist like Mr. Obama, events exists only as they suit his needs.  If history needs revision, well who better to do it?

There's more:

I need to go to a re-education, or perhaps a re-memorization, camp. What happened to “unpatriotic” presidents running up $4 trillion in debt in eight years, or is trumping that in three then patriotic? Was the presidentially appointed Simpson-Bowles commission the proper bipartisan way to address deficits, or were its findings coopted by the one-percenters? In December 2010, I thought suddenly raising taxes was supposedly the wrong thing to do in tough times. Was it not by March 2011?

Again, it just depends on your point of view, I guess.

E. J. Dionne had a different point of view.  He agrees wholeheartedly with Obama's blast against the Supreme Court:

So imagine the shock when President Obama decided last week to speak plainly about what a Supreme Court decision throwing out the health-care law would mean, and then landed straight shots against the Mitt Romney-supported Paul Ryan budget as “a Trojan horse,” “an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country,” and “thinly veiled social Darwinism.”
...
Progressives would be wildly irresponsible if they sat by quietly while a conservative Supreme Court majority undid 80 years of jurisprudence. Roosevelt wasn’t a wimp, and Obama has decided that he won’t be one, either. Conservatives are unhappy because they prefer passive, intimidated liberals to the fighting kind.

People like Dionne make me want to bang my head against a wall.

Hanson has the last word:

“Truth,” after all, is not the Socratic absolute, but a socially constructed commodity, defined by power and predicated on race, class, and gender, concerns that can be made to serve the greater good, if adjudicated by — well, again, fill in the blanks.

Read the whole thing.

Obama: Our Immigration Laws are "Too Hard"

Is it really "too hard" to follow the immigration laws of the United States?

Obama thinks so.  In his Twitter town hall yesterday he said,

 We’ve got an immigration system that’s broken right now, where too many folks are breaking the law but also our laws make it too hard for talented people to contribute and be part of our society.  And we’ve always been a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.  And so we need comprehensive immigration reform, part of which would allow entrepreneurs and high-skilled individuals to stay here -- because we want to be attracting that talent here. 

Tell that to the 100 immigrants who took their oath during a naturalization ceremony at Mount Vernon on July 4.  Or to the 77 who took the oath at Monticello the same day.  And to the 680,000 who are sworn in year round:

Each year, about 680,000 U.S. immigrants from all corners of the globe take the Oath of Allegiance, in which they promise to "support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies," says the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which conducts naturalization ceremonies year-round.

"Too hard"?  I don't think so.  If these people to which he refers are so "talented" then they can figure out how to go through proper channels.

Victor Davis Hanson points out:

The old liberal ideal of a racially blind, melting-pot society where the law is applied equally across the board has descended into the new postmodern practice of enforcing many laws only selectively — and based entirely on politics, matters of race, ethnic chauvinism, and national origin.

And Hanson has plenty of questions:

Why does the present administration oppose new anti-illegal-immigration laws in Arizona and Georgia that are designed to enhance existing federal law — but not so-called “sanctuary city” statutes that in some municipalities deliberately contravene federal immigration law?

Read the whole thing.

Hanson points out that the people who go through the legal channels are bound to be resentful of those who don't:

In the old immigration narrative of the 1960s and 1970s, affluent, profit-minded white American employers often exploited cheap workers from Mexico. But that matrix has been largely superseded. So-called whites are no longer a majority in California, where large Asian and African-American populations often object to illegal arrivals from Mexico who cut in front of the legal-immigration line, tax social services, and raise costs to the detriment of American citizens.

Yet Obama contends that our laws are "too hard."  If "too many folks are breaking the law" you don't just change the law - you enforce it.  If  "too many people" started robbing banks because the economy is too tough, would you change the law and open the banks?  If "too many people" found the laws restricting drug smuggling "too hard" would you declare amnesty for drug dealers?

He's right about one thing:  "We've always been a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants."  So you enforce the laws.  You don't abandon them.  It's good enough for the 680,000 plus people each year who get it done.






Update:  In a semi-related issue, here's the Memeorandum thread on Obama's statement about White House salaries in the Twitter Town Hall.

Hanson on Obama

Don't miss Victor Davis Hanson this morning on Obama's "meltdown." As always, Hanson just nails it:

The once celebrity Obama has lost that luster, point-by-point over a year, bleeding by a thousand small cuts until he nears 40-percent approval. In themselves, the bad jokes like the flippant remark about the Special Olympics, the lunatic appointments like Anita Dunn and Van Jones, the serial untruths about airing health care on C-SPAN or shunning lobbyists, the phony deadlines on Gitmo and the Iranians, the bribing of senators with hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers' funds, the bowing, the snubbing of the British, the use of the race card against tea-party critics, the Skip Gates mess, the Orwellian NEA business, constant fluff photos ops, but rare real press conferences — all that in the aggregate brought Obama to his present state.

It's not just Obama that carries the burden here - the entire Democratic party is circling the drain right now. Martha Coakley is tanking in MA (and there's that nasty incident with John McCormack last night) which is, I think, evidence of things to come. Campaigning Democrats are feeling the heat and getting frustrated.

Republicans don't seem to have their act pulled together just yet to capitalize on this meltdown, but there is still time. Marco Rubio in Florida is certainly a bright spot. It seems he's about done with Charlie Crist right about now.

Read Hanson's entire post here.

No More Tolly-Bohn

I admit it - I couldn't watch Obama's speech last night. I know it was an important speech. But I just can't stand to listen to him say Tolly-Bohn anymore. Instead I went to Victor Davis Hanson's recap, which you can find here.

Congressman Fleming: What's Good for the Goose...

Update: Welcome Michelle Malkin readers! Look around, as long as you're here!

Via My Bossier, Congressman Fleming has proposed a Resolution which states that members of Congress must also participate in whatever health care plan they choose for the rest of us:

Under the current draft of the Democrat healthcare legislation, members of Congress are curiously exempt from the government-run health care option, keeping their existing health plans and services on Capitol Hill. If Members of Congress believe so strongly that government-run health care is the best solution for hard working American families, I think it only fitting that Americans see them lead the way. Public servants should always be accountable and responsible for what they are advocating, and I challenge the American people to demand this from their representatives.

If you agree with me, sign our online petition below and together we will work to ensure that any plan that is good enough is for American families is good enough for every member of Congress.

View Resolution

It IS curious that they would exempt themselves from the plan, no? Why is that, do you think? Not good enough?

Dear Leader can't be happy today. His health care plan has been shelved "until further notice" as Blue Dog Democrats stand against it, and just yesterday Cap 'n Tax got shelved until at least September.

Jim Geraghty at NRO points out that "if you juggle too many plates at once, sooner or later one or more comes crashing to the floor." Colin Powell had the same sentiment when he said last week, "I think one of the cautions that has to be given to the president -- and I've talked to some of his people about this -- is that you can't have so many things on the table that you can't absorb it all," he said. "And we can't pay for it all."

One has to wonder about Obama's overly ambitious agenda. Is he attempting to accomplish as much as he can while he has the support of a Democratic Congress? With his approval numbers dropping (although is overall numbers are still pretty good), possibly he is beginning to feel the heat?

Victor Davis Hanson has a piece this morning that suggests voters are beginning to understand that our President does in fact have flaws and simply cannot go around constantly apologizing for American sins, spending like a drunken sailor, blaming the previous administration for EVERYthing, take no personal responsiblity for ANYthing, and continually operate on the principal that "the ends justify the means."

It might be time for Obama to slow down and rethink his game plan and his outlook. I don't think that will happen, quite honestly. His normal practice has been the arm-twisting Chicago way and it is possible that his being out of the country and preoccupied with foreign affairs has left him unable this week to wrangle these initiatives through. That's our good fortune. I've never seen Obama admit at mistake, either. He blames someone else or feigns ignorance ("I never knew Reverend Wright to be like that! That's not the man I knew!")

Back to Congressman Fleming, he's got the right idea with regard to the health care issue. If it's not good enough for Congress, it's not good enough for us. During his "town hall" meeting last month Obama was asked if nationalized health care would be good enough for his family:

[Dr. Orrin] Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn't seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he's proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get. The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if "it's my family member, if it's my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.

So, I'm guessing Obama won't be signing Congressman Fleming's Resolution?

Related Posts:
Starting to Look at the Obamacare Bill
John Boehner Says the Republicans Have a Better Plan
"Say Hello to My Little Friend!"
Take a Look at Obamacare
Going Galt Over Obamacare

Quote of the Day

"Because Obama is a revolutionary who seeks to overturn 50 years of doing business in America both at home and abroad, his shortcomings have the potential not only to diminish his own stature through unmet impossible expectations, but to take all those who signed on to his megalomania down with him."

Victor Davis Hanson
Growing Worries about Our Pied Piper

I'd Like My DVD Set Now

Victor Davis Hanson said this morning that "the Obamians need to get a life and govern the country, rather than blaming their gaffes on Bush, Rush, life, etc. . . "

How many times have we heard Obama blame our situation on the "failed policies of the past eight years"? He's a tad disingenuous in trying to lay all of our current crisis off on the shoulders of George W. Bush. We've had a Democratic Congress for the past two years; that is to say that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have been pretty much calling the shots as of late.

Let's be clear, however. The Republicans are not blameless. And there's no need at this point in rehashing the cause of the housing crisis (been there, done that) or any other "failed policy" by Republicans OR Democrats that has put us in the position in which we now find ourselves. The point is that it's time for Obama to quit laying blame for it and actually do something about it.

That being said, some would contend that Obama IS doing something. Well, I agree he's doing something, but I just don't think it's the RIGHT something. Again, specifics on that have already been hashed out here.

In a response to VDH this morning, Mark Steyn says that he had no real hopes for Obama's competency but he did hope Obama would surround himself with competent folks. Consider the British Gift Gaffe, the multiple failed appointments, and the mutliple stumbles and bumbles that lead one to believe that the entire administration is something akin to children playing at being president.

To be fair, nobody comes into the presidency with experience at the job, but we do hope that you've had experience in running SOMETHING if you're going to try to run the country. The dangerous times in which we live do not afford us the luxury of on the job training for the highest office in the land.

More to the point, consider Obama's phone call to the NYTimes regarding their "Are you a socialist" question. He thought they were kidding and blew them off. But, on second thought, he decides he better call them back. So he makes the call. Andy McCarthy calls the phone conversation "cringe-making stuff" and inded, it is.

McCarthy: "To me, what is most startling about the phenomenon VDH and Mark describe is actually listening to the president stuttering and bumbling his way through that follow-up call to the NYTimes. (The recording can be heard by clicking on an MP3 link in this Times story.) It's cringe-making stuff — the poor delivery, the claim that Bush is the real socialist and Obama the free-marketeer."

McCarthy concludes: "If Obama had haltingly spouted this nonsense off-the-cuff at a press conference, that would have been bad enough. But he (or someone) actually decided this would be a good call to make — and they had 90 minutes to think about what he was going to say. That's not just bad, it's scary bad." [Emphasis mine].

Does this alone make Obama incompetent? No, it doesn't. But in combination with all of the other things we've covered, well, it looks a little scary. Hanson called it "that classically unfortunate combination of hubris and inexperience." I wold add to that a total lack of class.

I believe that it displays a lack of class to bash your predecessor at every opportunity. Does Mr. Obama hope to improve his standing by criticizing Mr. Bush? Besides the "failed policies..." that he utters at every turn, he takes shots in press releases and statements, signing ceremonies, etc. You will never raise your own reputation by bringing down someone else's.

Charles Krauthammer said it best last night when he was explaing his decision to decline an invitation to the signing ceremony of stem cell order. He said "...[Obama] had a memorandum which he signed in which he talks about restoring the scientific integrity in government decisions, which is an outrageous attack on Bush."

Robert Stacy McCain, in commenting on the reversal of our Cuban foreign policy, said "When they start trying to change U.S. foreign policy with the fine print of an appropriations bill, you know the Democrats have developed contempt for the voters."

Contempt indeed. Obama and the Democrats seem to hold the voters with the same contempt they hold for the British. I'll be waiting for my DVD set, Mr. President. And I actually have an American DVD player on which I can watch them!

Update: (3/11/09) Camille Paglia is sort of on the same wavelength. Sort of.