You Just Keep Being You, Donald. Please.

Opinion | thepilot.com

Dear Mr. Trump:

I know there are people around who are telling you that you’re blowing this election, that the tactics you’re using are ill-conceived and self-defeating. I know they’re urging you to stay off Twitter and to let the political professionals handle your message.

I can tell you that I only have your best interests and, even more important, the best interests of America, in mind when I say this: Don’t you believe them, Mr. Trump. You keep right on doing what you’re doing. In fact, I think you need to ramp it up. A lot.

Take Paul Ryan, for example. How dare he withdraw his support and tell down-ballot candidates to do whatever it takes to save their own political careers? That was a betrayal of you personally. Worse than that, it was disrespectful, and we all know you’re a man who doesn’t tolerate or forgive disrespect. It’s why your base loves you.

So you should totally keep going after the Republican speaker of the House, calling him “very weak” and “ineffective” on Twitter. You’re not going to need him when you take power.

In fact, you know what? You should do the same to each and every one of the 33 House members and 17 senators from your party who have shown you that same appalling level of disrespect.

You should do a nasty Tweet about each and every one of them individually. Space the tweets out over days. Take your time. Tell them they’re losers. Keep telling them their “poll numbers — and elections — are going down” in November. After all, you tweeted it yourself: “Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary.” Show America you know who the real enemy is.

Hey, I’ve got an even better idea! Tell them that when you win, they’re going to jail! That’ll show them you’re not a candidate to be trifled with. It’ll purge the weaklings and cow the rest into silence. Let the Republicans hate, so long as they fear, right?

And how about those debate moderators? Boy, they sure rigged the thing for Hillary, didn’t they? You should spend lots and lots of time talking about them, and talking in general about how unfair the media is to you.

Tell them how you’re going to single-handedly “open up” the libel laws so you can sue and — dare we even hope? — put anyone in jail who criticizes you in a way you think is unfair. That’ll really show people what kind of leader you’ll be: a strong one. Like Vladimir Putin or Saddam Hussein.

Also, you should totally double down on bringing up the women who’ve accused Bill Clinton of sexually assaulting them. You should bring them to every campaign event, just to remind people that it’s not necessary for anyone to be charged, let alone found guilty, of sexual assault.

The accusation is enough for the guy to be branded a “rapist,” right? Unless of course the person making the accusation is someone like Jill Harth, who’s sued you for allegedly trying to rape her in your own daughter’s bedroom. Or that woman who’s suing you for allegedly tying her to a bed, beating her and raping her at your good buddy and convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein’s house when she was only 13.

Or your ex-wife Ivana, who accused you of raping her while you were married but later, after being pressured by your lawyers, said she was only “violated.” Those gals have, in your words, “real problems,” am I right?

So you keep defending your bragging about sexually assaulting women as “locker room talk.” Keep bringing up Bill Clinton’s accusers and talk about how Hillary “attacked” them. I’m sure no other women from your past will come forward to accuse you of that same behavior.

(Oh, by the way, if you’re tempted to grab a strange woman by her private parts while you’re campaigning in North Carolina, don’t. It’s called “sexual battery” here, and being convicted of it would require you to register as a sex offender.)

In summation, Mr. Trump, I’m glad that, as you recently tweeted, “the shackles are finally off.” Let Trump be Trump. Lead the Republican party to its inevitable, God-ordained destruction — I mean its destiny. Please your base, and everyone else can go pound sand. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Stay the course, Mr. Trump. America depends on it.

Donald Trumps Himself

Opinion | thepilot.com

So the first presidential debate has come and gone, and pretty much everyone who’s not actually on Donald Trump’s payroll agrees, however grudgingly, that Hillary Clinton won the evening.

Trump’s been doing better lately in the polls, I suspect largely because campaign manager Kellyanne Conway has, against all odds, managed to keep him from doing things like attacking the families of dead war heroes and mocking the disabled.

We did get a taste of the Trump we all know and loathe when he responded to reports that Clinton was inviting fellow billionaire and frequent Trump critic Mark Cuban to the debate by tweeting that he might invite Bill Clinton’s former mistress, Gennifer Flowers, to sit in the front row as well.

Because attempting to humiliate a woman by rubbing her nose in an affair her husband had 25 years ago is completely justified by having someone who’s criticized your business acumen sit in at your debate. They’re exactly the same thing, can’t you see?

Fortunately, cooler heads in the campaign seem to have prevailed, and soon they were frantically denying that the candidate had said what he’d said, despite the evidence to the contrary in black and white. As we shall see, this has become a pattern for the Trump folks.

But there was no way to keep the real Trump under wraps for a full 90 minutes, especially since Hillary Clinton appears to have been devoting a good part of her debate prep into figuring ways to push The Donald’s buttons.

And push them she did. For a good chunk of the debate, Hillary Clinton played Donald Trump like a cheap banjo.

As the whole Mark Cuban thing revealed, the quickest way to make Donald Trump overreact is to question his business practices. So Clinton brought up the number of contractors that Trump has stiffed, including one in the audience, to which Trump, the candidate who claims to be on the side of working Americans, snarled “maybe he didn’t do a good job.”

She suggested that the reason Trump didn’t want to release his tax returns is because they showed that, unlike most Americans, he didn’t pay any taxes. “That makes me smart,” Trump shot back.

Here’s a tip: Suggesting that “smart people don’t pay taxes” is an opinion you should probably keep to yourself if you want the votes of those who do.

Then he responded to Clinton’s claim that Trump had publicly rooted for the housing crisis because he’d said that Americans losing their homes would be a great way for him to pick up cheap property. He didn’t try to deny it, but instead snapped “that’s called business.” I seem to remember the phrase “it’s just business” coming from the mouth of another character. It was Michael Corleone in “The Godfather.”

Clinton really managed to lead Trump down the garden path and into a flowerbed full of bear traps by forcing him to deny saying things that, as we previously noted, have been well-documented, such as the canard that he was against the Iraq War.

(“The record says otherwise,” observed moderator Lester Holt, thus enraging the Trumpkins as only someone telling the provable truth can do.)

He also denied saying that he thought climate change was a hoax perpetrated by China, at which point, copies of his tweet saying exactly that spread across the Internet faster than an Instagram of a naked Kardashian.

Finally, Clinton nailed Trump on his sexism and misogyny by bringing up the case of Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe who the then-50-year-old Trump publicly shamed by trotting the then-19-year-old to the gym to work out in front of reporters, telling them “she loves to eat” and calling her “Miss Piggy.”

Confronted with the story of his cruelty to a teenage girl, Trump was reduced to sputtering “where did you find this?” over and over like a husband in a divorce case being presented with his credit card receipts from the Midnight Bunny Ranch.

And since Donald Trump can never, ever, let anything go, he took to the airwaves the next day to insist that he was completely justified in humiliating a young woman less than half his age because she was, you know, really getting fat.

With the first debate behind him, Donald Trump has vowed to “hit harder” in his next meeting with Secretary Clinton. The man who’s been married three times, each time to the mistress he’d been carrying on an affair with while married to the previous spouse, the man who’s bragged in print about his dalliances with married women, is thinking maybe it’s time to bring up “Bill’s women.”

Yes, I’m sure being an even bigger creep, liar and hypocrite will win American hearts and minds. To quote another debate (and election) winning Democrat: Please proceed, Mr. Trump.

'Second Amendment Remedies' Are Back In Style

Opinion | thepilot.com

Hey, look! “Second Amendment remedies” are back!

You may remember that charming little catchphrase from the 2010 campaign of tea party-backed Senate candidate Sharron Angle of Nevada.

She told a radio host that “if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying, ‘My goodness, what can we do to turn this country around?’”

Nice, huh? Sort of like saying, “Nice democracy you got there. Be a real shame if anything happened to it.” Angle’s thinly veiled threat of armed insurrection was a major reason she got her hat handed to her by Harry Reid.

But you just can’t keep the Revolution down, it seems, because nothing gets the “Real America’s” juices flowing like threatening armed revolt against the United States if they don’t get their political way.

This past Tuesday, in Wilmington, N.C., Russian-backed sleeper agent and Republican nominee Donald Trump decided to throw in his lot with the insurrectionists: “If (Clinton) gets to pick her judges,” he said, “nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Now, to be fair, he may not have been talking about an armed uprising. He may have just been talking about shooting Clinton in the head. You know, watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and all.

And to think just the day before, the hacks of our so-called liberal media were falling all over themselves to talk about Trump’s pivot to being “more presidential” because he managed to get through a prepared economics speech without insulting the family of a dead hero or kicking a baby out of the hall. A day later, he’s going full Cliven Bundy.

We all know where it plays out from here, of course. Trump, the guy who his supporters love because he says what he means, will insist he didn’t mean what he said. (Hat tip to my friend and local boy Julian Long for that one.)

In fact, Trump now claims that his reference to the Second Amendment had nothing to do with “bearing arms” against the United States. Just like when Henry II asked, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” he didn’t really mean for his knights to actually kill the Archbishop. Guess what? No one bought that story either.

As for Trump’s rapidly dwindling cadre of hardcore backers, they’ll respond as they always do: not by defending the indefensible Trump, but by raving even louder about Clinton’s emails, Benghazi, and Vincent Foster.

The “both sides do it” crowd that infests our so-called liberal media will attempt to use some statement of anger and disgust by some liberal blogger to try to convince us it’s exactly the same thing when the presidential nominee from the Republican Party suggests that keeping and bearing arms against an elected U.S. president might be a viable option if you disapprove of the president’s judicial nominees.

Of course, she may not even get a chance to nominate anyone, if Republican strategist and Trump insider Roger Stone’s warnings come true.

Referring to Trump’s expression of concern that the election is “going to be rigged,” Stone told Breitbart.com, “He’s gotta put them on notice that their inauguration will be rhetorical, and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath. We will not stand for it.” Mr. Stone did not explain how one has a nonviolent “bloodbath.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s fellow Republicans continue to jump ship. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins published an Op-Ed in The Washington Post saying that she could not support Putin’s preferred candidate because “Mr. Trump lacks the temperament, self-discipline and judgment required to be president.”

Virginia Rep. Scott Rigell left the Virginia Beach Republican Party to endorse Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. Wadi Gaitan, communications director for the Florida GOP, stepped down to promote “free market solutions while avoiding efforts that support Donald Trump.”

Fifty former national security officials, Republicans all, signed on to a letter saying that they are convinced that Donald Trump “would be a dangerous president and would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

The signatories included retired Gen. Michael Hayden (George W. Bush’s former CIA and NSA director); former Homeland Security Secretaries Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge; and former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills. But I’m sure a former reality show host knows better than those folks.

Sigh. I didn’t want to write about Trump again. I really didn’t. You can ask my wife.

But Comrade Trump’s continued implosion is the train wreck you can’t look away from.

I just hope it doesn’t wreck us all.

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: Pathological liar and obsessive gun-humper Frank Staples, who posts incessantly under the alias "skylinefirepest" absolutely cannot see a mention of guns in any column without going off on one of his unhinged rants, and this column was no exception. I'll spare you most of his slobbering, but this part really caught my eye:

"You know, I don't really like the man BUT I will vote for a crazy man over a criminal any day! "

Yeah, well, like cleaves to like, I suppose. 

Trump's Handling of Speech Mess Speaks Volumes

thepilot.com:

You know, I kind of feel bad for Melania Trump.

She seems like a nice enough lady, despite her choice of spouse, and I’m sure she only wanted to help. I’m sure she didn’t mean for a speech which was supposed to be a nice, warm ’n’ fuzzy moment in her husband’s campaign to reveal just how inept and amateurish that campaign is.

At first, Madame Trump’s speech was pretty standard stuff, and a welcome change from a night when we had already endured the ghastly spectacles of, among other things, Chachi from “Happy Days” and a third-tier soap opera star from Italy telling us what’s wrong with America, followed by Rudy Giuliani screaming at the top of his withered lungs like a lunatic on a street corner.

She noted Trump’s loyalty to his family, which must have come as a bit of a surprise to the two wives he’d divorced before her. She asserted Trump’s respect for his former rivals, like “Little Marco,” “Lyin’ Ted,” and the guy whose brother lied us into the Iraq War. And so on.

Then things took a strange turn. Political reporters and pundits who were watching began to realize that, hey, parts of Madame Trump’s speech sounded awfully familiar. And sure enough, a side-by-side comparison of Monday’s speech and Michelle Obama’s speech during the 2008 Democratic National Convention revealed that someone had lifted entire paragraphs from that older speech. We’re not talking about “common words and values,” as Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort lamely tried to assert. We’re talking the exact same words and phrases in the exact same order. We’re talking clear plagiarism.

Now, this may seem like a small thing, easily laughed off, and believe me, I laughed as hard as anyone. Then I started seeing the Trumpista reactions to the situation, and it set me to thinking, which is always a dangerous thing. For one thing, they couldn’t seem to settle on who had actually written the speech. Mrs. Trump claimed she’d written it herself, with “only minimal help” from the campaign. The campaign, however, released a statement saying that Melania’s “team of writers took notes on her life’s aspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking.”

Finally, staffer Meredith McIver came forward and fell on her sword. She said that Mrs. Trump, who’s “always liked” the First Lady (oh! the heresy!) had read her some of Mrs. Obama’s speeches, and neither Ms. McIver nor anyone in the campaign had checked the final draft against their “inspirations.”

Consider this: The Trump campaign sent the woman who would be First Lady out to make a major speech, apparently without any vetting. That speech contained passages that were clearly cribbed from not just any speech, but from a major speech given at an event that a substantial number of the reporters, commentators and other political junkies watching had already seen and would most likely remember. Then, incredibly, they couldn’t get their stories together on who’d written it.

The whole thing speaks of a level of fumbling and incompetence so great that one has to doubt if these people have enough sense to pour water out of a boot even if you printed the instructions on the heel.

But what about Hillary Clinton, you say? Wasn’t her handling of classified information “extremely careless,” in the words of FBI Director James Comey? Isn’t that worse?

First, we don’t know how Trump and his people would handle classified information, since he’s a political novice who hasn’t had to do it very much, but this level of carelessness with what should be simple stuff doesn’t bode well for his competence with complex information.

Second, “you’re just as bad as me” doesn’t make you better. Third and most important, in his later testimony, Comey admitted that even the “very small number” of Clinton’s emails he’d referenced were not properly marked “classified” in the headers as such emails are required to be by the manual controlling such things. Instead, the designation was indicated by a little letter “c” somewhere in the body of the email. Comey told Rep. Matt Cartwright it would be a “reasonable inference” for Clinton to believe that “the absence of a header would tell her immediately that those three documents were not classified” — a detail almost universally ignored by the so-called liberal media.

The Republican party, this past Monday, spent an entire evening trying to frighten us into voting for Donald Trump’s Daddy State policies by yelling at us that the world is a terrifyingly dark place, full of monsters — then proceeded during the course of the night’s keynote speech to show us they’re too incompetent to handle a softball political convention speech. It doesn’t inspire confidence.

When Bros Turn Foes, It's a Sad Thing

Opinion | thepilot.com

You know, it’s always sad when guys who should rightfully be best buddies start feuding. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin. Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble. It just breaks your heart, you know?

The latest bros-turned-foes tragedy happened recently when presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump fell out. Some of us remember the halcyon days when all of the appalling harlequins who’d recently staggered out of the Republican Klown Kar were sniping at each other. But not Ted and Donald.

As far back as last July, Cruz declined an invitation on “Meet the Press” to bash The Donald: “I like Donald Trump. He’s bold, he’s brash. … it seems the favorite sport of the American media is to encourage some Republicans to attack other Republicans. I ain’t gonna do it.”

Trump, for his part, reciprocated. “I like him,” he said of Cruz in September. “He likes me. He’s backed me 100 percent. Ted Cruz was out there and he really backed me very strongly, and I always respected that.”

Then the bromance began to unravel. The New York Times, like a troublemaking Mean Girl, reported that Cruz had questioned Trump’s “judgment” at a private fundraiser in December. Trump shot back on Fox News Sunday, claiming that nuh-UH, it was Cruz who lacked the “temperament” to be president and that he dealt with the Senate like “a bit of a maniac.”

Then he played the birther card by bringing up Cruz’s Canadian birth. Maybe it didn’t actually disqualify him, Trump said, but who wants a candidate who “could be tied up in court for two years” litigating the issue? Cruz shot back by noting that it was Trump whose Real Americanism was suspect because he represented “New York values,” to which Trump replied “9/11. So there.”

At that point, it was, as they say, on. A feud erupted that, for sheer intensity, rivaled the one between the above-referenced Fred and Barney when Barney voted for Joe Rockhead instead of Fred for Grand Poo-bah of the Water Buffalo Lodge.

I’d thought the mudslinging had reached its nadir when Trump responded to a Utah anti-Trump group’s publication of semi-nude photos of Mrs. Trump by taking to Twitter and threatening to “spill the beans” on Cruz’s wife, Heidi (whatever the heck that meant). Donald shot back by Tweeting a picture of Mrs. Cruz (who, for the record, is actually rather attractive) caught in a most unflattering grimace.

But, as with so many things about this election, just when you think they’ve hit rock-bottom, the GOP candidates call for the jackhammers. On the eve of the make-or-break Indiana primary, Trump basically claimed Cruz’s father (who, for the record, is actually bat-spit insane) was an unindicted co-conspirator in the death of John F. Kennedy. His source was a story in the National Enquirer that purported to show a picture of the senior Señor Cruz passing out pro-Castro pamphlets in New Orleans alongside Lee Harvey Oswald a few days before the assassination.

Cruz, as you might expect, completely lost what was left of his mind, raging that Trump is a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” and a “serial philanderer” who “describes his own battles with venereal diseases as his own personal Vietnam.”

All totally true, of course. But sadly, Cruz’s meltdown, however truth-based, availed him nothing. He took a drubbing of epic proportions in Indiana, leaving Trump nearly alone at the top of the smoldering garbage fire this primary process has reduced the Republican Party to. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a hardline right-winger who only looked sane and reasonable because of the whackaloons he was standing next to, exited as well.

So, with the contest all but over, the burning question is: Will these former pals be like Fred and Barney and make up by the end of the show? Or will they be like Martin and Lewis, not speaking for 20-plus years before coming to a surprise reunion and reconciliation on a telethon?

Well, the morning after the Indiana primary, I woke up to hear the New Face of the GOP talking about how his former enemy was no longer “Lyin’ Ted,” but was instead a “tough, smart guy” with a “great future.” So, hopefully, we’ll soon see the “serial philanderer” and the “maniac” hugging it out. Then they can get back to taking the Republican Party over a cliff.

Is Trump Trying to Take a Dive?

 Opinion | thepilot.com

OK, is Donald Trump actually trying to lose this nomination?

I’ve floated this idea a couple of times as a joke, as the GOP’s Gift That Keeps on Giving goes from outrage to outrage, doing and saying things that would be career-ending gaffes for any other person running for the presidency.

Using profanity in stump speeches, attacking a highly decorated former POW for being a POW, admitting that George Dubbya Bush lied us into the Iraq War, etc. etc. … you’ve got to admit, it makes you wonder.

And yet, nothing seems to dent Trump’s armor. The Trump Chumps just love him more. So he keeps ramping up the madness. But it would be crazy to suggest that he was deliberately trying to throw the election. Wouldn’t it?

And then …

This past Monday, Stephanie Cegieleski, former communications director of Trump’s Make America Great Again SuperPAC, wrote an “open letter” to Trump supporters.

She tells of being told when interviewing for the job that Trump’s run was a “protest candidacy.” He had no actual plan or even desire to win, the interviewers told Cegieleski.

“The Trump camp,” she says, “would have been satisfied to see him polling at 12 percent and taking second place to a candidate who might hold 50 percent.” She says she was initially “excited for the change to the debate he could bring.”

But then she began to notice that the man not only has no knowledge of policy, but also lacks “the humility to admit what he does not know — the most frightening position of all.”

The turning point, when she finally broke with him once and for all and decided to write the “open letter,” came when Trump responded to the brutal terrorist attack on Easter Sunday in Pakistan by taking to Twitter, detailing the casualties (and getting the numbers wrong), and proclaiming “only I can solve.”

That was the moment, Cegieleski says, when she realized that the monster she helped create (her words) had broken loose.

He may have started with the “desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman,” but “his pride is too out of control to stop him now.”

So can Trump actually do anything now to derail his crazy train? He certainly seems to be still trying, what with stunts like posting an unflattering picture of Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi, after a pro-Cruz SuperPAC tried to turn Utah’s Mormons against Trump by spreading a picture of Trump’s supermodel wife kinda nude (meaning that she was nekkid, but tastefully arranged so that the naughty bits were hidden).

Wives, everyone agreed, are off-limits — unless wingnuts are circulating pictures of Michelle Obama Photoshopped to look like a baboon.

Then Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, was arrested and charged with battery after surveillance tapes showed him manhandling a female reporter after a Florida rally. Trump, with his usual charm, demanded to know, “If she was being assaulted, why didn’t she scream?”

In a normal campaign, this would have been a serious blow. As you may have noticed, however, this is not a normal campaign. Assaulting an uppity reporter, a female one to boot? That’s not going to hurt Trump a bit. Because, as we’re told over and over, people are angry.

People are so enraged that promises have been broken by the Republican “establishment” that they’ll back someone who promises to be straight with them.

Maybe that’s true. But the problem for Trump is that the promises that people are so upset about are ones that that very “establishment” knew were never going to happen in the first place.

They knew from the get-go they weren’t going to repeal “every word of Obamacare.” They knew they weren’t going to shut the government down until Planned Parenthood was defunded.

They knew they weren’t going to defund Homeland Security over the president’s executive orders on immigration. They didn’t have the votes, and most of them weren’t crazy enough to shut down the government.

So what happens if, God forbid, Trump gets the White House and the angry Trump Chumps discover that, no, Mexico isn’t going to pay for a border wall and we can’t make them? What will those angry people do when we truly can’t deport 11 million people?

What are they going to do when torturing people results not in an end to terrorism, but more of it? What are they going to do when the man who boasts about being the world’s greatest deal-maker starts cutting deals on things they hold sacred?

I don’t know, but I know I don’t want to find out. Trump may or may not be trying to derail his own campaign, but somebody better do it, and soon.

Just Say "Trump"

 Opinion | thepilot.com

You know, some days I almost feel sorry for the Republicans. Almost. Not only has the increasingly inevitable march of Donald J. Trump to the leadership of the party become a massive embarrassment to them, but it’s also robbed them of some of their most beloved talking points.

Some things that Republicans can no longer do, thanks to Trump (at least without people laughing in their faces):

* They can’t say they won’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she’s a “liar.”

Just last week, three reporters from Politico fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches. They found “more than five dozen statements deemed mischaracterizations, exaggerations, or simply false.” It equates, they said, to “roughly one misstatement every five minutes on average.”

I noted a couple of weeks ago that the fact-checking site Politifact looked at 70 Trump statements and found more than three-quarters of them false, rating them from “mostly false” to “pants on fire” false.

Clinton’s gotten called out on some whoppers. I’ve mocked her myself, for example, over her claim to have come under sniper fire in Bosnia. But Trump lies so consistently and so shamelessly that yet another site, Factcheck.org, stated: “In the 12 years of FactCheck.org’s existence, we’ve never seen his match. He stands out not only for the sheer number of his factually false claims, but also for his brazen refusals to admit error when proven wrong.”

And that was just at the end of 2015, before Trump really got wound up. Donald Trump is to lying what the Grand Canyon is to holes in the ground.

* They can’t claim that they’re voting for the GOP’s nominee because it’s the “conservative party.”

Hardly a day goes by now that we don’t see another story about how “conservatives are trying to come up with a plan to stop Trump.” One after another, conservatives have lined up to point out that Trump’s support of Obama’s stimulus programs and bailouts and his implied promise to concentrate more and more power in himself as president are not compatible with the idea of “small government” conservatism.

Trump’s also said he’s not going to touch so-called “entitlements” like Social Security and Medicare. The right-wing National Review, founded by no less a conservative icon than William F. Buckley himself, devoted an entire issue to refuting the idea of Trump as a conservative, even titling it “Against Trump.”

* They can’t complain about “liberal name-calling.”

This is one of the favorite comebacks against people who, like me, have been mocking the clown show the GOP and the right wing have been turning into over the past three decades. “All you can do is call people names!” they sniff.

Well, they’re about to nominate a man who’s made name-calling the linchpin of his campaign strategy. He’s chanted “Little Marco” at Rubio, called various opponents “losers,” “choke artists” and “liars,” and let’s not forget the charming things he says about women who don’t share his views or dare to challenge him.

* They can’t accuse anyone of “flip-flopping” on issues. Trump once supported a single-payer health system, which he now says he opposes. He once proposed a one-time 14.25 percent tax on wealthy Americans to pay off the national debt, which as late as August 2015 he was still calling  “a very conservative thing,” even though he now opposes it. In other words, he was for higher taxes on the wealthy and single-payer health care before he was against them.

* They can’t mock anyone for saying that George W. Bush lied us into the Iraq War. The soon-to-be face at the top of the ticket said exactly that to Dubbya’s brother JEB! at one of the endless debates.

* They can’t call President Obama (or anyone else, for that matter) a “narcissist.” When asked by Joe Scarborough who he was consulting with on foreign policy so he’d be “ready on day one,” Trump’s answer was narcissism personified: “I’m speaking with myself, number one. Because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”

Barack Obama is pretty confident, but I’m willing to bet that he talks to more than just himself on foreign policy.

It goes on and on, as the Republican front-runner embraces the things Republicans claim to despise. It’s gotten to the point where there’s a simple one-word response to anyone who tries to trot out these aged but beloved chestnuts of wingnut rhetoric. Just say “Trump.” That’s all you need to say.

You might even call it playing the Trump Card.

Just What IS Conservatism, Anyway? Even They Don't Seem To Know

 thepilot.com

She’s baaaaack. And some conservatives aren’t as happy as you might expect.

Political humorists recently broke into hosannas of delirious joy at the return of the Mama Grizzly herself, the half-term governor of Alaska, the one, the only, Sarah Palin.

The Quitta from Wasilla recently made a surprise appearance at a rally in Iowa to endorse the current flag-bearer for her patented politics of resentment, Donald J. Trump.

Let me just say, her speech did not disappoint those of us looking forward to the return of authentic Palin gibberish:

“We’re talking about no more Reaganesque power that comes from strength. Power through strength. Well, then, we’re talking about our very existence, so no, we’re not going to chill. In fact, it’s time to drill, baby, drill down, and hold these folks accountable.”

It goes on like this for pages. It’s classic Palin word salad, a barely coherent torrent of buzzwords, talking points, dog-whistles and callbacks to imagined slights. Perhaps the funniest thing about Tina Fey’s inevitable lampoon of Palin’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live” was that many of the biggest laugh lines were lifted verbatim from Palin’s actual speech.

But Trump and Palin’s audience lapped up the original and hooted for more. They seem to adore the illusion of authenticity provided by talented hucksters who dispense with speechwriters and just come out and spout whatever nonsense they think will sell. Who cares that they make no freaking sense? At least they ain’t using no teleprompter, am I right? Haw! Teleprompter! Like Obummer!

This sort of thing is starting to worry those on the right who would like to tell us that “conservatism” is an actual intellectual movement based around rational ideas of small government and lower taxes, rather than the roiling, white-hot ball of xenophobia, bigotry, rage and fear that Trump calls “conservatism.”

The concern has grown to the point where a recent cover story in National Review was titled “Against Trump.” In that issue, various right-wing “thinkers” lined up to take their shots at their party’s frontrunner.

Glenn Beck (the reason I just surrounded the word “thinkers” with quotes) pointed out Trump’s vocal support for Barack Obama’s much-despised yet highly effective stimulus package. The Cato Institute’s David Boaz worried about the cult of personality around Trump, calling him “the American Mussolini … concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat.”

Ben Domenech, publisher of the conservative magazine The Federalist, wrote that “conservatives should reject Trump’s hollow, Euro-style identity politics.”

Problem is, for some people, “conservatism” means exactly “identity politics.” It’s all about Us vs. Them. It’s about “Taking Our Country Back” (from Those People). It’s about the “Real America” (which is not where Those People live).

The GOP calls itself the conservative party, but then it nominates the poster girl for “Euro-style white Christian identity politics” to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. When it started to go south, alleged conservatives like Bill Kristol (who, lest we forget, is always wrong) continued to defend her even as she dragged the party down to a humiliating defeat.

As for Mr. Boaz’s concerns that Trump isn’t a real conservative because he might “concentrate power in the White House” — well, when you have hosts on Fox News swooning over murdering imperialist autocrats like Vladimir Putin because, in the words of Rudy Giuliani, he “makes a decision and he executes it, quickly, then everybody reacts … that’s what you call a leader” — well, then, it’s hard to really know what the conservatives’ beef is with Trump’s alleged prospective consolidation of power.

The response of Gov. Palin to the concerns of those who are supposedly her fellow travelers? “Give me a break! Who are they to say that? Oh, tell somebody like Phyllis Schlafly — she is the Republican, conservative movement icon and hero and a Trump supporter — tell her she’s not conservative. How ’bout the rest of us? Right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud clingers of our guns, our God, and our religions, and our Constitution. Tell us that we’re not red enough? Yeah, coming from the establishment. Right.”

The biggest problem with American conservatives in the past few years is that they’ve passively allowed their brand to be used by people like Palin, Trump, Giuliani, et al., who use the word to describe a philosophy of autocracy, paranoia, resentment and exclusion of everyone not like them. Now, it seems, they’re trying to push back, but it may be too little, too late.

If Donald Trump is allowed to take the Republican nomination and run as a conservative candidate, then “conservatism” will be a dirty word in this country for the next hundred years. And it will have deserved its fate.

Orange Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye (With the Usual Idiotic Poo Flinging by the Right Wing Monkeys)

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

On Friday, Sept. 25, Speaker of the House John Boehner stunned everyone (including, it seems, members of his own staff) when he announced that he was resigning not only his speakership, but also his seat in Congress, effective at the end of October.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about Boehner’s resignation was the way he approached the podium to announce it. The man best known for bursting into tears at the slightest provocation strode jauntily to the podium, nearly skipping, smiling as he literally sang, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.”

“I used to sing that on my way to work every morning,” he added.

From the way he said it, it’s clear he hadn’t done so in a long time. And who can blame him? I’ve frequently slammed Boehner for being the most ineffective speaker of the House in that body’s long history. But I’m not sure that there is any way to actually lead a caucus that’s contained such egregious looney tunes as Michele Bachmann and that still plays host to paranoid whack jobs like Louie Gohmert and Steve King. Not, at least, without a tranquilizer dart gun and a 55-gallon oil drumfull of antipsychotic medication, both of which I’m pretty sure are against the House rules.

I mean, how do you realistically lead people who sincerely tell themselves and each other that “even though it’s never worked before, if we shut the government down this time, the Senate will go along, Obama will cave in and allow Planned Parenthood to be defunded, and everyone will love us. And after that, we’ll hold yet another vote to repeal Obamacare”? If insanity is defined as doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then this Congress is indeed the country’s best-dressed lunatic asylum.

Then again, maybe I’ve been exactly as hard on Orange John as he deserves. Compare his leadership, for example, with that of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She has had some wild-eyed, die-hard fanatics in her caucus. Dennis Kucinich and Bart Stupak come immediately to mind. And yet, when the crucial vote for the Affordable Care Act came up, Pelosi could get her people lined up and deliver the votes for a bill some of them had previously said they hated and wouldn’t vote for.

Whether you like Pelosi or loathe her, that’s what an effective speaker does. In fact, I strongly believe her effectiveness is exactly why the right-wing howler monkeys start screeching and flinging poo at the mere mention of her name. Boehner, in contrast, can’t get his people to stop grandstanding and posturing long enough to vote for things as simple as keeping the government open and paying the debts the country has already incurred.

So what happens now? Well, as the old song goes, “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” Since Mr. Boehner will soon shake the dust of the place off his feet and put the crazies in his rearview mirror, it looks like he’s going to dare to work with both Democrats and the few sane Republicans in the meantime to pass a “clean” funding bill that keeps the government running for a little while longer. You know, do some actual governing.

After that, however, things might just get ugly. There don’t seem to be any candidates for the speakership, at least as of this writing, who have the gumption to sit their people down and go, “Look, we’re not going to do another show vote to repeal Obamacare, we’re not going to shut down the government again because that just makes us look stupid, and let’s face it, if the longest special committee investigation in congressional history hasn’t hung the Benghazi murders around Hillary Clinton’s neck by now, it’s not going to happen. So can we actually try to get some stuff done, even if it means trying to get some Democratic votes?”

No, I fear that the Republican-“led” House of Representatives is going to sink further into delusion and anarchy. There’ll most likely be another threat of a government shutdown and maybe even default when the next funding bill runs out, just in time for Christmas. They may actually figure out a way to drive Congress’s approval rating into negative numbers.Yeah, that’ll show that rascal Obama.

THE HOWLER MONKEYS SHRIEK AND PROVE MY POINT: The idiot who calls himself "Lenny Bo" once again weighs in to tell an uncaring world how much he hates the column he faithfully reads every week:

Dusty,
I am one of millions that loathes the mindless Nancy Pelosi. If she is your model of a good leader, then we are all in trouble.

As usual, the howler monkeys prove my point with every comment.

Obamacare was cited as an example where she got all the dems in line for a vote. How exactly did she do that? Well, she herself said that the bill had to be passed before they read it! Some leadership skills - keep the sheep in the dark and feed them BS.

And get ready Dusty - when the committee busts the lid off of 'ol Hellery's antics, I expect you to write a similar column on her leadership skills.

You know, the wingnuts have predicted Hillary Clinton's downfall since 1992. She's been investigated and investigated and investigated again, over "Travelgate," Vince Foster, Whitewater, Benghazi etc, etc, and...nothing. But with the conviction of the truly obsessed, they tell us THIS one, by God, will get her.  As I said above, they're "doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting a different result." And that's why I call them wingnuts. 

Frequent fuckwit "fugitiveguy" weighs in: 

DR doesn't seem inclined to write about Hillary. If I remember correctly he supported her over BHO in the early going in 2007.

What utter bullshit. I supported Obama from the beginning, and I've written a lot about Hillary, not a lot of it complimentary. Once again, it seems that "conservatism" is a form of brain damage wherein they lose the ability to remember anything.