No. Just… No.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3096434/vp/42780813#42780764

I need to talk about this.  Why does this man have a soapbox to stand on?  Honestly, who the heck is Donald Trump?  He has a show on NBC.  This does not make him qualified to run a country either in his capacity as a celebrity reality show host or as a real estate mogul.  He has no business running for office or even pretending to pretend to run for office.

It also sets an extremely dangerous precedent by asking for President Obama’s records…. from life.  Trump has “heard” that Obama was not a good student at Occidental or Harvard or Columbia, so he called for his records to verify.  This is a completely preposterous demand to ask of anyone, let alone the President of the United States.  Two things are at stake with call to see documentation:  privacy and legitimacy.  By graduating, officially, from these accredited universities President Obama was given documents as proof of his merit in the academic realm.  This is as far as it needed to go.  In addition, the legacy of President Obama’s career speaks volumes to his credentials as an academic, capable of more intellectual caveats then, let’s say, hosting a reality television show.  Degrees from universities serve as official documentation of the merits of the individual, in lieu of seeing actual transcripts.  That is because individuals are entitled to a sense of privacy.

The danger of the precedent that is slowly evolving around the Republican Party, the Tea Party, and members of the “birthers” movement, is that one can call into question an escalating set of skepticisms regarding the legitimacy of any and all aspects of an individual’s life.  Let us see Obama’s hard drive, his email account, his blood type.  Let’s look at Trump’s taxes or Sarah Palin’s academic records for that matter.  Legitimacy is afforded to individuals who have proven their merits academically and intellectually.

Now, I understand the logic.  If you’re going to take down a tree, you chop at the trunk, not at the top of the branches.  Since Republicans have unsuccessfully been able to blame the Iraq War, the Afghan War, Hurricane Katrina, oil prices, the financial crisis, terrorism or unemployment on Obama, they have gone farther down the length of the tree to try to topple it.  Start at his birth.  Let us compromise that.  Start at his foundational education.  Let us compromise that as well.  The strategy has been effective, but it is despicable and truly embarrassing for politics, for America and for those who actually believe that any of it could actually be true.

Also, it warrants mentioning, albeit redundantly, that this precedent of disrespecting the office of the president would never happen with a white president.  And yes, people criticised Bush for POLICY, not for the basic credentials required to hold an office.  And it there was disrespect for Bush, it was because he disrespected much of the country.  But President Barack Hussein Obama is a man with brown skin, who has a name that sounds funny.  So, as a result, we get rumours that he’s an Arab or a Muslim or a Communist.  Despite the categorically inept conflation of the three, it is because he is different.  Do you think this would happen with cranky Old Joe Biden?  Do you think someone would dare to yell at Joe Biden, a democratically elected white guy, during HIS first State of the Union.  You’re kidding yourself or not living in America, or both, if you think so.

The point is, most importantly, that Donald Trump is a not fit to hold Obama’s political jockstrap.  This man is a celebrity joke with no foreign policy experience who has never been elected to office.  People will say, well he’s a “successful” businessman!  I mean he’s filed for bankruptcy twice, but he’s successful.  He has executive experience.  One of the fundamental paradigmatic problems in this assertion is the belief that the country can be run like a business; or, in a more alarming vein, that it should be.

And honestly, the Republicans can do better than this.  And if you are a Republican you should demand better because this is a disgrace to the country and a disgrace to both parties that people think this man is qualified.  Who would be his running mate, Flavor Flav?  I seriously doubt his conservative credentials.

But seriously, fuck this guy.  Take away his microphone and put an end to his inane delusions of grandeur that are taking away from America’s real problem:  Obama is playing WAY too much basketball.