Article: The Despicable Duo: Donald Trump and Ben Carson

It would seem that most of the news regarding the many, many Republican presidential candidates focuses on The Despicable Duo, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, who recently teamed up to force the network sponsoring the next so-called Republican Presidential Debate to cave in to their demands, such as limiting that debate to a maximum of two hours. Given that The Donald gets even redder-in-the-face than usual as he pontificates at length on all of those matters about which he knows little or nothing, it is indeed understandable that a longer debate might lead him to apoplexy. As for Doctor Ben, he appears unlikely to stay awake much longer than two hours, and we would not want him to fall asleep in the middle of one of his interminable answers.

What is most despicable about The Donald is his seemingly-endless Litany of Lies. As but one example, while boasting about how much of his own money he has been investing in his campaign, which is a sub-category of his endless boasting about his alleged billionaire status, the fact is that he has put very little of his own funds into his presidential campaign, and almost none of those funds recently judging from the required campaign finance records. This deceptive behavior is typical of the man whose own book, The Art of the Deal, mainly focuses on the use of deception to trick lesser men into making major business blunders.

The Donald's considerably broader Fallacies of Falsification include his blaming former president George W. Bush for the September 11, 2001 terrorist tragedy because W was president at the time, and should have used his crystal ball to foresee and prevent the attack; and his blaming Mexicans for everything under the sun, including being criminals and rapists who come to the U.S. to do their misdeeds here. What is truly amazing, though, is that this hateful and spiteful curmudgeon is leading all other Republican candidates for the presidency in 2016. That fact probably says more about the poor judgment of the Party faithful that it says about The Donald.

As for Doctor Ben, who advocates the arming of school personnel as a means of heading off future school violence tragedies such the recent one at a community college in Oregon, and the earlier one at a grade school in Connecticut, one is led to wonder just how far Doctor Ben would go. Would only college students be armed, Dr. Ben, or should high schoolers and grade schoolers also cary guns?

The justification Dr. Ben uses for his views is his allegation that arming Jews during the Holocaust would have given them a chance against the Nazis. If the good doctor actually knew anything about World War II history, he might know that there were indeed armed Jews, who for example held out much longer in the Warsaw Ghetto than did the entire nation of France, which caved to the Nazis in a few days. The unbelievable, but true, irony here, is that years before, when Doctor Ben was confronted with an armed holdup man in a store, he boasts that he told the robber: "You don't want me -- you want the guy behind the counter!" Shame!

Of course, it is early in the 2016 presidential campaign, and the Republican and Tea Party electorate might come to its collective senses in time to sink The Despicable Due in the polls and send them packing from the campaign. The sad truth, though, is that the remainder of the present Republican presidential candidates are little better than the present leaders. But that is a subject for another column. Meanwhile, it would seem that the Republicans have little better chance of finding a viable presidential candidate than they have of finding the next Speaker of the House.