Jerusalem
I’ve just spent an intense two days of reporting on both sides of the green line, on the West Bank and in Israel, and I’ll be writing for the print magazine, and posting here, about all I’ve learned, starting tomorrow. But I just can’t resist the following:
Acting in silent, but unspoken, mainstream-media conspiracy with my columnar brother Dana Milbank, I’ve spent the last few months not writing about a certain former governor from Alaska and also dry-drunk, paranoid TV Host with declining ratings–on the grounds that they are more part of the world of entertainment than of politics or policy (and real things seem to be happening, in droves, in the actual planet Earth these days). To that list I can now, happily, add Donald Trump, who will not run for President but is pretending to do so now because…he…just…can’t…help…himself. Trump has long believed a sucker is born every minute–hence, the pretense that he’s an actual real estate executive (as he once was), a master builder, instead of a franchiser who gets paid to put his name on other people’s buildings in order to give them marketing cache (one wonders what sort of people would be more likely to buy or rent an apartment because it is called The Trump Dump, or whatever).
In any case, this unerring sense of marketing savvy has now led Trump to latch on to birtherism as his first move in his non-presidential campaign. As Ben Smith points out and every sane human being knows: Obama has made his birth certificate public. It has been certified as real by Hawaii’s Governor. That Trump, a New Yorker–and a Queens boy at that–would stoop to this nauseating trash disqualifies him from any serious consideration for anything–even as a cheesy reality tv host (I mean, c’mon NBC, you’re helping to publicize this?)–and his name is hereby expunged from my little piece of the swamp.
