Sunday, September 20, 2015

Donald Trump: Dumb rich guy


"If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" was the schoolyard taunt, the implication being that rich people are smart. Otherwise, they would be poor like the rest of us, right? 

The smartest thing Trump did was inherit $40 million from his father. 

If the rise of Donald Trump has demonstrated anything, it shows that rich people can be just as dumb as everyone else. Even dumber in Trump's case, since as a rich political candidate he can hire people to do some of his thinking for him, like he does in his business deals when he hires lawyers and accountants. 

Paying for a relatively thin briefing book on policy issues before he declared his candidacy would have made him a more plausible candidate, though his shallow understanding of everything would have soon been exposed in those pesky one-on-one TV interviews and during press conferences.

Trump demonstrated his stupidity years ago when he became a "birther," challenging the verifiable fact that Barack Obama was born in the United States. It must be a remarkably long-range conspiracy that made Obama president, since it involved planting phony birth notices (like below) in Honolulu newspapers in 1961!

Of course Obama is nominally a Christian, not a Muslim, though I've never seen anything that shows he has any real interest in religion in general, which I think is a good thing.

The so-called Moslem threat voiced by his supporter in the video above would have given a well-briefed Trump a chance to make some important points. No, of course there aren't any "training camps" for Islamic terrorists in the US, unless, as part of the "conspiracy," the authorities are keeping that information from the public.

Except for some "lone-wolf" fanatics inside the country, the most significant Moslem threat to us and our allies is from abroad, like the 9/11 attack itself. That threat will be with us for a long, long time.

But individual jihadists inside the US can do a lot of damage, like the Fort Hood killer, the thwarted underwear bomber, the Boston Marathon bombers, etc.

Trump could have also said that people---like Hillary Clinton and President Obama---should, at the very least, stop saying that Islam is a "religion of peace." It isn't, since it has a lot of ugly language in its holy books and a history of violence and aggression going back to Mohammed himself.


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