Saturday various & sundry: Trump, et cetera

Your Saturday Steyn:

But the United States Postal Service has now gone the Hollywood apocalyptics one better and produced a somewhat subtler image of civilizational ruin. The other day the post office apologized for its new stamp honoring Lady Liberty. Due to an unfortunate error, the stamp shows not the 19th-century Statue of Liberty that stands in New York Harbor but the 1990s replica that stands at the New York–New York Casino in Las Vegas.

An ersatz statue of pseudo-liberty standing guard over the world’s biggest gambling operation: What better way to round out a week in which the Republicans pretended to pass the most historically historic budget cut in history while the president pretended to come up with a plan to address the debt?

RTR.

Dan Riehl on the joke that is the Trump candidacy:

Seriously, the future of the nation hangs in the balance and some morons want to saddle up with a rich, self-promoting, rodeo clown? Please just turn in your voter registration, or join the idiots on the progressive side, now. That's precisely who you would be helping with this nonsense.

RTR. I haven't been able to figure out why we're supposed to accept Trump as a conservative just because he says he is. Or why in the world anyone would want to replace one unqualified narcissist for another. Or why Rush Limbaugh keeps giving him airtime. It would be nice to have a capitalist in the Oval Office again, but surely we can do better than a blow-hard who lives for the spotlight. 

Via the Right Scoop, Mark Levin "rips Donald Trump to shreds":

Levin points out many things about Trump that show he is no conservative, but a few of the glaring ones are the fact that he support Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio twice, as well as calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush, accusing him of lying to get us in the war. Oh yeah, and he supported Universal Health Care in America, the Canadian style.

Audio here. A third-party candidacy would be sure suicide for conservatives in 2012, which at least explains why the media is trying to promote him as a legitimate candidate.

Steyn on Trump:

MS: Well, I think he is serious about it. And you know the strange thing about this is that the Republicans play into his hands. The more they go the John Boehner line, the more they’re up on TV trying to explain to us why the most historic budget cut in the whole of historic history actually increases spending, the more people roll their eyes and say to hell with, a plague on the entire political class, let’s just take a guy who’s a proven success at something, even if it’s only real estate and reality TV shows, and take a flier on him. And so I think any kind of Trump phenomenon is in a sense a response to the sort of tentativeness and lack of ability to make things happen that the Republicans are currently demonstrating.

HH: Any doubt in your mind, though, that if it was a Perot reprise, and Trump was the third party candidate, he would siphon off enough to just hand the presidency back to Barack Obama?

MS: Oh, yes, I think that’s true. But I think undoubtedly, that a Trump third party run guarantees an Obama second term. But you know, at some point, real Republican candidates have to get in this game, have to get into this game for real. And this is no time, this is no time for the tentativeness we’re seeing from the Republican establishment. That will just, that’s just driving traffic to the Trump end of the spectrum. 

Are you listening, Mike Pence? You can still change your mind.


Qaddafi's back and sporting a stylish new look.


I had totally forgotten Obama's pledge to simplify taxes. And so has he:

When Barack Obama was running for president, he promised voters a simpler tax code. "When I'm president," he said, "we'll put in place a system where 40 million Americans . .. can do their taxes in less than five minutes."

But President Obama hasn't made good on that promise. Not only is there no five-minute tax form, but since he took office the byzantine tax code has grown increasingly complex. This year, it will take the average taxpayer 23 hours just to fill out form 1040 — up from 21 hours last year, according to the IRS. It now takes seven hours to fill out the so-called 1040 EZ.

Read on for the gory details.


Obama's new deficit commission is just silly. Allahpundit:

What’s the difference, you ask, between this and the Bowles/Simpson Deficit Commission whose plan went nowhere last year? I … don’t know. The members are different, for one thing. Plus, the Deficit Commission was designed to let Obama avoid leadership on the debt crisis during his first two years in office. The deficit “working group” is really more designed to let Obama avoid leadership on the debt crisis during his second two years in office. So, there’s a difference.

Even Congress thinks it's dumb.


For the record, I'm skeptical and unfit to evaluate these brain studies. But I'll go along with the conclusion (already generally accepted) that Shakespeare is good for the mind. According to a researcher, his rule-breaking, verbal virtuosity stimulates brain activity:

Consider these examples, in which Shakespeare grammatically shifts the function of words:

An adjective is made into a verb: 'thick my blood' (The Winter's Tale)
A pronoun is made into a noun: 'the cruellest she alive' (Twelfth Night)
A noun is made into a verb: 'He childed as I fathered' (King Lear)

May we call it grammar-shifting? Steyn just did it above, with his use of "apocalyptics." And kids do it all the time, especially turning nouns into verbs, as in "friending." One of my toddlers once told me his pancake-flat pillow "didn't have any comf in it," making up his own brand new noun from the adjective "comfy." I've teased my sons a bit for their propensity to stick -ed's and -ing's on the ends of anything and everything -- like "prestiging" in Call of Duty. But I will no longer mock -- it's a sign of a lively mind, and downright Shakespearean:

For Davis, we need creative language "to keep the brain alive." He points out that so much of our language today, written in bullet points or simple sentences, fall into predictability. "You can often tell what someone is going to say before they finish their sentence" he says. "This represents a gradual deadening of the brain."

Quick, somebody, get Obama's lazy, brain-dead speechwriters a copy of this --

Last item: The Trig Truthers are still out there. Yeah, they're nuts.


Linked at MichelleMalkin.com -- thank you.

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