I hear that Bachman has accepted invitation to Trump debate and has done so because she's a fan [well, and desperately in need of the exposure] - if true I deny with extreme prejudice any claim I've made in the past about her possibly morphing into a legitimate contender - not that I was a supporter, understand, no - just thought I saw something there - but accepting the debate invitation is bad enough, doing so because you admire that farce of a man is mortal sin made manifest - sorry, go take your place beside Cain in the 'embarrassing reject' line. [having said all that now appears Bachman in fact hasn't yet agreed to participate - so my apologies - fact remains though that she is still open to participating but is 'worried' about how unbiased Trump can be given that he hasn't ruled out a run of his own and may have already decided on who he will endorse - so basically you're agreeing that a debate moderated by someone as unsavory as Trump would be a farce which, coming on the heels of the farce that was Cain, really doesn't do the reputation of the republican party any favors - and therefore, why not say no now? So Bachman still gets the thumbs down from me - as if it matters - because of time constraints, it starts to seem fairly certain that the uber right is firmly convinced, having bedded Bachman, Perry and Cain, that it is now madly in love with Gingrich no matter how sullied and unfit the bride may appear to be - I'm sure the marriage will be as pure and blessed and felicitous as all of Gingrich's other marriages].
But the Trump debate is interesting though - not as a legitimate venue, god no - rather in the sense maybe it ends up drawing with more clarity the battle lines I intimated at a while back between the conservative intellectual establishment and the increasingly it seems irrational republican base - because Trump is a perfectly clownish emanation of that irrationality - Paul, Huntsman and Romney have declined the invitation - right wing intellectuals have urged the others to do likewise arguing that empowering cartoonish, self-promoting stooges like Trump can do nothing but diminish the republican brand - if the others don't comply and thus, instead of disenfranchising the fool Trump with a majority opinion, end up enabling him and the bullshit populist line he will then peddle to the base about how Romney et al are typical of the out of touch establishment elite etc etc - well, like I said, the battle lines will be drawn - you will then have a very bad situation on your hands and the potentiality of the primary turning into a circus that sinks any republican hope for 2012 [but, on the positive side, dramatically improves the prospects of a successful third party run].
I wonder if this possible eventuality ever factored into Obama's thinking, especially given his increasingly leftist populist rhetoric [he even referenced the '99%' inanity of Occupy Wall Street yesterday in a speech - when a president of the United States is invoking that kind of socialist nonsense things have truly gotten bad] - but I wonder if Obama was clever enough to see that his leftist agenda could survive by enraging the right into such an idiot like state that it self destructs? Don't get me wrong, I consider Obama a horrible president who embodies an ideology that is entirely out of step with the times, out of step with the necessities and hard decisions the emerging new world order forces on America, hell, forces on the West in general - but I always said, when it comes to his own political interests, he's a cunning bastard and smooth operator - gotta give him that.
