The Donald--The Id of the Republican Party

Now that President Obama released his long form birth certificate, the Donald hasn't yet released his tax returns as promised. The Donald was too busy in Las Vegas saying that our leaders are weak and that he, the Donald, would tell those Chinese mother--f--ers that he would be taxing all their goods 25%--even the Trump fashions? He would make the South Koreans pay for our military presence and would get on the horn to the Saudis and tell them to cut the price of oil. He would stay in Iraq and take the oil and the same for Libya.

Johann Hari, writing in today's The Independent of the UK,says that the Republican Party always seems to adopt new heroes every six month and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale. After Palin, he says,"I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes." Enter instance the "bewigged billionaire" who has "plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator." Hari claims that Trump is every trend in republican politics in the last 35 years taken to its logical conclusion.

The first trend is toward naked imperialism. Trump argues that "The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength."

The second trend is to dog-whistle prejudice--pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear. Hari points to Trump's little campaign on Obama's birth certificate and the suggestions that the certificate said he was a Muslim.

The third Trend is toward the raw worship of wealth as an end in itself--and exempting the wealthy from all social responsibility. Hari points out that Trump inherited his wealth and has filed bankruptcy four times. He points to a 1990 study that showed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4 billion, he actually owed $600 million more than he owned and that you and I are worth more than him.

What Cay Johnston , the author of this study, showed was that Trump's fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favors for his projects--which followed large political donations.

Yet for the Republican party, the simple accumulation of money is proof of virtue. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns and found that he legally didn't pay taxes on two of them.

The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist or can be povercome by sheer willpower. Since every economist known to man says that the United States must extend its debt ceiling or else the world will experience another global crash. But Trump snaps,"What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart."

Hari notes that the denial of reality runs deep. Trump would deal with the rising oil prices by callling in Opec and look them in the eye and say, "You fun is over."

With the Chinese, he would order them to stop manipulating their currency. Hari says that Matthew iglesias has called this "The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics" because the Green Lantern could only use his superhero powers when he overcame fear and showed confidence and then he could do anything. The world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America.

He goes on to Ryan's Ayn Rand fetish that the poor are "parasites" who must "perish".

"The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is crude Nietscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. "

Hari quips that he heard the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running for the Republican nomination but the Teabaggers thought they were too mild-mannered.

Touche--well done.