Please Don't Laugh, It's Donald

Donald

Atlanta, GA – Donald Trump recently said “I am running for president!” And, predictably, everybody is smirking. We shouldn’t be.

A couple of years ago, at a Christian Summer Camp in Wisconsin, a group of us were sitting round at night talking about a strange subject somebody had brought up: Who is the most annoying and laughable American National Figure?

Although I gave my vote to Alex Jones, and somebody said Rush Limbaugh, (I disagreed strongly) the overwhelming consensus was that the person who took the prize by a long shot was Donald Trump. Only one girl in a far corner of the room backed up Trump.

I must confess I never thought he would run. And I always hoped he wouldn’t. Politics is a serious business, and the guy who ran Celebrity Apprentice, has hair that has become a national joke, and has a famous ego taller than the Statue of Liberty really isn’t the sort of person you want joining an already overcrowded Republican Field.

But while it is true, Trump has no chance of winning outside of something more unforeseen happening than an attack from Godzilla on Atlanta, don’t laugh. Really, don’t laugh. Trump won’t win, but he could do a whole lot of damage.

Donald Trump is the kind of guy the media loves to cover. He’s has a massive mouth, and when he opens it, headlines are created. And he doesn’t need anybody’s money, so he doesn’t care what anybody else says. So while a nomination race should be a serious and rational thing, (although they often aren’t) The Donald could make things even worse than usual by opening his big mouth, putting both his feet and hands into it, and causing even more turmoil among the already disturbed GOP.

And then there is that little matter of independent or left leaning voters. The Grand Old Party need em’, they won’t get em’ if Trump makes our whole party look dumb, or if he just turns off everyone by screaming nonsense.

And one last thing. If Trump does well in the primary which he won’t win, he just might find he enjoys his favorite pastime of self-promotion so much that he runs on a third party ticket.

Someone with Donald’s ego and Trump’s power is not the sort of person we should make fun of too much. Its’ easy, and yes, I know it’s fun. There is already an internet meme out with an image of him, saying “We shall overcomb.” But we should avoid laughing at him like we avoid chocolate. It’s good for our taste buds, but not our waist lines. And if we do have to eat, (and sometimes we do) we should eat it in a back room, not our in public. Because if Trump’s ego is hurt, if he finally realizes what most people think of him, then he might just run on a third party ticket.

Anybody remember the last time a billionaire did that? Ross Perot? He cost George Bush the Presidency, and the Republicans the White House, in 1992. And while Trump, who is currently at about 5% support, does not have enough dedicated supporters to give him the oval office, (although, tellingly, he has enough to make it into the FOX Debates) there just might be enough people in far corners of rooms all across America to help Trump to enough votes that he cuts the GOP’s tenuous numbers down so far they don’t win.

So please don’t laugh, its Donald, and he just rocked our world.

Andrew C. Abbott

Weak Candidates Getting Weaker

Last week, without massive fanfare, something happened in Ames Iowa. It wasn’t a gigantic political rally. It wasn’t a huge speech given by some candidate. Rather, it was simply a scheduling change. In Ames, Iowa, at the age of thirty-six, the Iowa Straw Poll died.

On the surface it seems like it was bound to happen. The Ames Iowa Straw Poll never was a good indicator. The sample wasn’t random, and in fact many of the people who voted were actually paid by the candidate’s campaigns. But it did make headlines. And besides that, it was one of the few great friends that weak candidates had.

In 2011, former congresswoman Michelle Bachman won the straw poll.  Of course, Bachman, always a weak candidate, eventually dropped out. But many credited the fact that she won the straw poll as keeping her alive so long.

The Straw Poll was always less of a chance to prove oneself the front runner, and more of a chance to show donors and people who might potentially want to volunteer to help your campaign that you were actually a viable candidate.

Now, that chance is gone, and it will hurt the likes of Donald Trump, who, with plenty of money to buys votes and no obvious need for donors, could conceivably have done well.

The second place for a candidate without much support to do well is the debates. In 2011-12, they helped kill Rick Perry, give Rick Santorum such a spot light he is running again, and even make long shot candidate Herman Cain a nationally known figure.

Now however, with FOX’s new debate platform, only the top 10 people in the polls will be on the platform. CNN will be having something similar, and it is possible that eventually others who are holding debates could follow suit.

Of course, it’s perfectly logical. We don’t need twenty people on the platform. In 2011, candidates complained, (Bachman among them) that they didn’t get enough time to talk. Double that amount of candidates, and the results would be chaos.

But the fact still stands. In a field already hard for any candidate, let alone a long shot one, because of the sheer size of the Republican field, to break free. And now, it’s going to be even harder.

But in the end that will be a good thing. If you can’t run a campaign, you sure can’t run a country. And if the people don’t really want you, you have no business being President anyway.

Andrew C. Abbott

Jeb Bush: Recapture the Glory

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Three Time luck is something that is hard to come by. Just ask all the horses that have lost their bid for a triple Crown on the race track at Belmont between Affirmed almost 40 years ago, and America's favorite, American Pharoah, who finally did it. But as hard as a threepeat in on the race  track, in politics, and in running for president, it has never before happened three members of the same immediate family won the presidency of the United States.

But who ever called the Bush family normal? Or a family that couldn't beat the odds? Well, Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, thinks be can be the first one to do it. Moments ago he announced he's actually doing it-he's running for president.

The original idea of Jeb's non campaign, (he has really been running for a while now, and his announcement today surprised absolutely no one) was to scare everyone away. And nobody ran and hid under their political beds. In fact, since Bush first started toying with the idea of running. In fact, Jeb's "scare them so bad they don't even try" has worked so well we now have historically loaded field of candidates. Jeb is only the eleventh one to announce, and tomorrow Donald Trump will make an announcement of some king as Trump Tower.

Besides his name, which apparently is not scaring away candidates, but is helping Jeb raise money and keep from getting elbowed to the bottom of the pack, Bush's other thing he seems to be relying on his is stability, (in contrast to the likes of Donald Trump,) his seriousness as a candidate, (no one truly believes George Pataki will last very long) and his outreach towards Latino voters, a group which many Republicans have had a hard time getting. Bush's announcement speech itself was held at Miami Dade College, which claims to be the most diverse in the nation, it also has the largest Hispanic student body in America.

Bush however, will have difficulty in gaining the support of the far right of the Republican Party. While in a general election that will not hurt him too badly, the Republicans always end of voting for the candidate, in the GOP Primary, because those that turn out for that are historically more likely to be white, better off economically, and more conservative, and that is just the base that could kill Bush in the run for the wire.

Bush was expected to be the favorite of the elite. And yet in-the-know political bloggers like Nate Cohn say that not only is Bush falling short of the massive amounts of money from former Bush donors that he and everyone else expected, but even the staffers of the two Georges are not running to him. And to top all of that off, outside of his home state, Bush has received no endorsements. Not a single one. And even their support is mixed. Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida and who is considered Jeb's prodigy, is not only not supporting Bush, he's actually running against him.

And beyond all of that bad news, it just keeps getting worse. On the campaign trail last month Jeb was asked a simple question about Iraq. And it took a week to answer it, in the meantime, he had lots of different answers he gave. Early on, Jeb was concerned about distinguishing himself from his father and brother, (neither was at the announcement speech) but one pundit joked that Jeb finally had-when his brother said something, he stuck to it. Jeb didn't.

Editorially, I do not believe Jeb Bush is a great choice for the Republican Party. He has been hypocritical in his attacks on Hillary Clinton, bashing her on money laws, and then avoiding campaign finance laws himself.

The simple and painful truth about Jeb is that he is a man who has not been in office for over a decade, he is the former governor of Florida for two terms. If his last name were not Bush, we never would have heard of him, and he wouldn't be running for president. And no horse has ever won a race based on his name. Just ask that horse Recapture the Glory. Trying to do for his owners what Bush is trying now to do for his family. And the horse did run in the Kentucky Derby, and lost...badly.

Andrew C. Abbott

The American Rage Machine

Atlanta, GA - It used to be when someone got mad about something they heard in the news, they would blurt out their throughly uninformed opinions at the screen, or maybe anyone else who was around and would listen.

We don’t know what is going on. Even in depth reading of the news normally takes a long time to give us a comprehensive understanding the facts of a situation,  and even longer for us to have an informed opinion on it. But of course, waiting till you actually know what on earth is going on before you spout out about it has fallen out of practice with the advent of the greatest misinformer in history since the disappearance of the oracle of Delphi-the internet. And more specifically, the American Rage Machine…Twitter.

Who knew that a venue which only allows 140 characters could lead to misinformation? Twitter is so full of hate, that even the president of the United States has been publicly advised to “get cancer” on there.

That guy that used to be in front of the screen screaming his head off is now on Twitter, with all of that uninformed rage, screaming all sorts of things. Of course, it’s not just Twitter, the entire internet, while an amazing tool, is full of this stuff. But Twitter above all, with its small amount of space, which in itself basically precludes sound, reason arguments, seems to be the place where all of the angry, enraged people whose favorite character died on a show last week or their favorite congressman just did something they didn’t like go to scream at the top of their lungs.

People are told to die on Twitter, and so many curse words are used in arguments I can’t even show screen grabs here. Comedian Bill Maher was told to “die in a fire,” Miss America has been called a member of ISIS, and an Arab, (she's from India) Jonah Hill was told to kill himself, “you unfunny fat piece of trash…die, die, die” Seriously people? What pills must people take to get so angry?

Maybe they think it makes them big and strong to scream out obscenities out powerful people behind an often fake name. Like someone who wears a mask and runs around town lighting fires. I doubt most of these people would ever say the things they say on the internet to someone in person. I guess that's a good thing.

Nobody is going to be connived by these arguments. You probably already knew that. People don't change their opinion because someone uses a racial slur against them or scream, (it happens all the time) "you disgusting idiot, Liberal, go kill yourself!"

Of course, not everyone on Twitter is bad, and there are certainly some who do their level best to be reasoned and informed, but when you don’t even have to use your own name, and when your screaming rant carries just as much weight as anybody else’s screaming rant, well, it becomes all too easy to lose your mind.

People often say that American’s should get a government that is as good as them. If that were true, the government of the average American Twitter user would not look like our often boring but highly dignified senate, it would look like this:

Political argument is important, and so is free speech. But you shouldn’t use it to scream stupid on a crowded internet. And Twitter isn’t, by definition, a place where serious political argument should be done at all, unless you’re willing to send about a thousand tweets in a row.

The Rage Machine is huge, and it crucifies people constantly with a steady stream of misinformation and confusion. Last year, comedian Steven Colbert almost lost his show when the hash tag #cancelColbert began trending because of a false rumor about him that started on Twitter.  Baseball used to be our National Pastime. I think now our National Pastime is rage. We should just stop. After all, tweeting is for the birds.

Andrew C. Abbott