Archive for April 9, 2011

Short-​​Fingered Vul­gar­ian. Source: andrea​harner​.com

Con­fronted with evi­dence, what does maybe-​​perhaps-​​sorta-​​Presidential can­di­date Don­ald Trump do? Well, he dou­bles down.

His let­ter to The New York Times is a mas­ter­piece of fan­tasy, some­how both para­noid and nar­cis­sis­tic in equal measure.

First, Gail Collins writes a col­umn called “Don­ald Trump Gets Weirder”, so what does The Don­ald do? He gets even weirder.

Equally of impor­tance, there are no records in Hawaii that a Barack Hus­sein Obama was born there-​​no bills, no doc­tors names, no nurses names, no reg­is­tra­tions, no pay­ments, etc. As far as the two notices placed in news­pa­pers, many things could have hap­pened, but some feel the grand­par­ents put an ad in order to show that he was a cit­i­zen of the U.S. with all of the ben­e­fits thereto. Every­body, after all, and espe­cially then, wanted to be a United States citizen.

Just sub­sti­tute your name (assum­ing you were born in Amer­ica) and see how well this rant works.

Equally of impor­tance, there are no records in [insert state of pur­ported birth here] that a [insert your name here] was born there-​​no bills, no doc­tors names, no nurses names, no reg­is­tra­tions, no pay­ments, etc.

It puts me in mind of Hoyt Axton’s famous song lyrics:

Well, I never been to Heaven, but I been to Okla­homa.
Well they tell me I was born there, but I really don’t remem­ber.
In Okla­homa, [or in Nairobi], what does it mat­ter? What does it matter?

Any rant can be jus­ti­fied by the old con­struc­tion “some feel”. Some feel the pyra­mids were con­structed by aliens. Some feel that Sam the Dog speaks to them in the night in a Brook­lyn back­yard and orders them to kill peo­ple. Some feel the grand­par­ents put an ad in the paper. The weasel-​​word “feel” means we don’t need no stinkin’ evi­dence or sci­en­tific fact: we’re epis­tem­i­cally closed, so we just feel stuff and it’s fiiiiine.

I miss the days when not just some peo­ple, but almost all peo­ple, refused to take Don­ald Trump seri­ously. I miss read­ing about him in Spy Mag­a­zine, where they referred to him con­sis­tently as “the short-​​fingered vul­gar­ian”. I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now. And I’m con­sis­tently dis­ap­pointed by the level of polit­i­cal discourse.

Post­script: Factcheck​.org weighs in on the fac­tual basis for the asser­tions in the letter.