Big Talkin’
Jump in your car at 5:30 later this afternoon and tune your radio to WFHB’s Daily Local News. My revived Big Talk interview series continues this week with guest Cathi Crabtree.
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One of the Indiana 9th Congressional District’s delegates to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Crabtree will explain how she became a hard-fightin’ feminist politico after being raised on a southern IN farm by an awfully conservative daddy-o and a mom who kept her aspirations for independence under wraps as long as the old man was alive.
Crabtree will describe her days as a delegate in Philly last week and we’ll even learn how the Party actually votes for a nominee.
Tonight’s DLN Feature will be about nine minutes long but I’ll put up my entire 65-minute gabfest with Cathi as a podcast on this communications colossus, sooner — fingers crossed — rather than later.
And, BTW, my 75-minute interview with IU journalism prof Tom French, who with wife Kelley Benham French wrote the soon-to-be-released book Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon, will be posted herein as a podcast ASAP as well. The Tom French DLN Feature ran a week ago today, the first in the glorious return of Big Talk to B-ton’s airwaves.
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I’m A Jar-head
Congrats to Jar Turner for being named interim General Manager at WFHB. He told me yesterday he’s all in as a candidate for the permanent position.
Turner (L) With The Cat In The Hat™
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Personal to the WFHB Board of Directors: Don’t make the GM search such a comedy of errors this time, savvy? You don’t have to look three-quarters of the way across the continent for a station boss who just might be sitting under your nose right here in B-ton.
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Trump Dumps Trump?
For those of us who fear for the future of democracy due to the ascendance of D. Trump, the Republican Party’s burst appendix [h/t to Samantha Bee], here’s a neat little scenario that just might play out.
Trump entered this race on an ego-trip lark. That’s one thing we can all agree on. Surely even he’s not deluded enough to have thought, back in June, 2015, that he’d get the more than 13 million votes in the GOP primaries — the most votes ever cast for a Republican presidential aspirant. He couldn’t possibly have believed he’d be anointed the Party’s standard bearer.
My guess is he saw the race as a venue for him to pontificate, polish up his brand, and get huge crowds of people waving signs bearing his name at him which, to him, is so far superior to an orgasm that I’m willing to bet he hasn’t even touched Melanoma in nine months.
Acc’d’g to my slant, he figured he’d drop out sometime in March, before all the big primaries rolled around, and walk away from the ordeal with a “statesman” halo around whatever the hell that thing on his coconut is. He’d get his jollies from the adoring crowds, he’d make concrete connections within the Republican Party, and he’d get to tell the world how he — and he alone — could fix it.
Man, that’s an egomaniac’s wet dream. (Again, poor Melanoma.)
But even D. Trump couldn’t have foreseen the depths to which the idiocracy has descended. No observers were willing to acknowledge how many people in this holy land are filled with hate and rage, and certainly Trump wasn’t savvy and tuned in enough to know that either.
In fact, he didn’t even know his constituency would be based almost exclusively on the eternally aggrieved, the bitterly former middle class, and the detesters of brown people, specifically Arab Muslims. He only learned that as he began criss-crossing the country, throwing out little hints of his nativistic, xenophobic bushwa to which his crowds responded wildly. He success was a surprise even to himself, dig?
And the more his crowds threw love at him, the more tumescent he became. Hey, he no doubt stage-whispered to himself in the mirror one dark night, maybe I can win this thing!
This thing would be the presidency of the United States of America, a job D. Trump never had any aspirations of getting because, frankly, it would interfere with his business and lifestyle. But that ego-boost he got again and again from shrieking, blood-lusting, know-nothing, aging white people kicked his personality disorder into the highest gear his stick shift had ever found.
Next thing he knew, he was being crowned by the GOP at the Party’s hate- and fear-fest in Cleveland.
Time for another dark night tête à tête with the orange creature in the mirror. Do you really want to do this? he asked the tangerine image.
Came the response: Goddamn hell no!
So, when he went around trying to convince Republican pols to be his running mate, the (appropriately colored) carrot he dangled was the assurance that as vice president, they would actually be the de facto president in a Trump administration, for he was planning to travel the country — the world, for chrissakes — being the president who would be king. That would-be king would be blissfully unburdened by the grave responsibilities of the office. The first guy he offered the deal to, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, told him to take a hike. The second guy (I assume, unless their were other GOP-ers who respected the White House enough to give him the raspberry) was Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
Our state’s guv long has been rumored to have his heart set on the Oval Office and, like many another desperate lover, he leapt at the opportunity to get it by hook, crook, or Trump.
Okay? So D. Trump’s all set. He’s got his satrap running mate. He’s got his wildly adoring throngs. He’s got the cachet of being first choice of +13 million bitter bastards. He’s on top of the world. Only he can’t stop being Trump.
He insults the grieving parents of a dead soldier. He insults a crying baby. He insults a fire marshall. He insults, for pity’s sake, Macy’s, calling for a boycott of the department store after it dropped his clothing line. Suddenly, he’s gone too far. I mean, a guy can call for an embargo on Muslim immigration to these shores, he can help railroad some juvenile delinquents for a brutal rape in Central Park, he can continue to wonder whether Presdient Obama is a citizen of the United States long after the sane among us have quashed that deranged movement, but, goddamn it, if he goes calling for a boycott of Macy, he’s gone too far!
Anyway, suddenly the outlook for a Trump non-presidency presidency looks bleak. The writing’s on the wall. Some Republicans with a half ounce of guts are pressuring him to quit. Hillary Clinton’s poll number look strong, post convention.
So, here’s my scenario: He drops out. Yeah. He says the election was going to be rigged, his own party is abandoning him, he will not subject his trophy spawn to the punishment any longer. He quits.
What happens next? Well, the Republican Party has emergency plans for just such a scenario. Stanford law professor Nathaniel Persily told The Daily Beast that one of the Party’s by-laws reads:
[T]he Republican National Committee is hereby authorized and empowered to fill any and all vacancies which may occur by reason of death, declination, or otherwise of the Republican candidate for President of the United States or the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States.
Key word? Declination. D. Trump declines to go forward as the GOP nominee. Acc’d’g to Prof. Persily, the Republican National Committee would just select another candidate. It’s that simple.
Mike Pence, though, would remain on the ticket because he was chosen fair and square by a vote of the RNC at the convention after Trump tabbed him.
You wanna know who the RNC would pick to replace D. Trump? Why, none other than Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand’s boy-toy of Wisconsin.
And — guess what — Ryan would be a lot stronger candidate against Hillary.
Hmm.
Personal to D. Trump: Please don’t quit! We love you, man!
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