Trump Channels Bachmann. Fiorina Does Orson Welles

Plaice Cove 

Sunrise

Donald Trump declared last night at the debate, quite emphatically, that "vaccines" (he didn't specify which) cause autism. He knows this because it happened to a beautiful child, the son of a woman who works for him, which is at least a closer relationship than Michele Bachmann's informant, who was a woman in the parking lot.  He quickly amended his declaration by saying he was all for vaccines, but when you give them all at once, as is the current practice in the United States, THAT definitely causes autism, as was proven by the case study of one child to whom he referred. 

Thus does Mr. Trump illuminate the profundity and subtly of his grasp of pediatrics, public health, epidemiology, prospective, double blind controlled studies and the rigor of scientific thought. Who needs the scientific method when we are talking vaccines and a single child's health?

Well, nobody called him on this, and there were two doctors on the stage. One was Rand Paul.  Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon did not correct Mr. Trump, but then again, he is a surgeon, not a physician so maybe he gets a pass.  Or maybe Dr. Carson does not believe in vaccines. He does not believe in evolution, so he may simply be a doubter. 

Mr. Trump got off the candidates' stage and fled to more friendly environs of Rochester, in our very own state of New Hampshire, where the first question from the audience was actually not really a question but a statement that President Obama is a Muslim and not an American and what about those Muslim training camps where they are teaching kids how to kill Americans and when are we going to wipe those camps out?  Mr. Trump laughed, probably thinking he'd been set up about the vaccine thing and now he was being set up again by the Rochester birther and he muttered something to the effect, "Oh, like this had to be the first question." And then he affably allowed as he would consider all sorts of solutions to all sorts of threats which are clearly multiplying "out there" in the dangerous world in which we live. 

It really did appear to be dawning on Mr. Trump exactly who his crowd is--who he is the hero to in this country.   When a national figure invokes bombast, panders to paranoia, the ten percent of the nation who are  paranoid schizophrenics, or who have personality disorders and such like, surface and start to howl at the moon in chorus.  When Spiro Agnew attacked the effete intellectuals, anti Semitic, anti Black anti immigrant mail poured into Congressional offices, newspapers from all over the country. Now it's Mr. Trump's turn. You wanted to be a hero. Well, now you are, the hero of the certifiably insane. John McCain turned down that mantle, but you are not so clear minded.  Clearly, if the presidential bid thing does not work out, Mr. Trump will be the front runner in the race for the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Then there's Carly Fiorina who saw some anti abortion group's video showing an aborted fetus with a heartbeat and mistook it for the infamous (and fraudulent) video which was supposed to show Planned Parenthood officials driving deals for fetal organs as they popped Chinese food morsels into their mouths at lunch, as if they were not just selling fetal organs but eating them. Anyway, Ms. Fiorina got very choked up talking about what an outrage it is that Planned Parenthood is allowed to exist, especially now that it's been exposed by this video.  Remember when Orson Welles panicked the nation with his hysterical broadcast about the invasion of New Jersey by Martians? It was wonderful theater, but, of course, it wasn't really true and Mr. Welles did not make the distinction between truth and fiction clear enough, so he was taken to the wood shed and chastised.  Ms. Fiorina seems to have similar problems distinguishing truth from fiction.

Ms. Fiorina says she rose from secretary to CEO. The truth is she was a secretary as a summer job during her undergraduate years at Stanford and her father was the Dean of the law school at Duke and she entered whatever big company it was (AT&T ?) in a management training program, not exactly in the secretarial pool. 

One thing about politicians, they are not the sorts who allow facts get in the way of a good story. 

Plaice Cove in the Early Morning Mist