Time for Dave to Rescind this "Apology" to Trump?

Is it time for David Letterman to repeal this half-assed 2012 apology to Donald Trump for having called him a racist on an earlier show?



In case you're wondering why David Letterman had called the slumlord dope a racist, it goes back to Trump questioning President Obama's intelligence:

 "I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?... I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records." -- Donald Trump, April 25, 2011

The insinuation plays into some of the deepest and most common racist resentments -- that somehow a less-intelligent black man was given the place at Columbia University and Harvard Law School that could have gone to a more deserving white right-wing nutjob or a rich child using the more traditional forms of affirmative action known as nepotism and family ties to grease his or her easy path through Yale University and Harvard Business School, or Wharton.

"My point is, it's all fun, it's all a circus, it's all a rodeo, until it starts to smack of racism, and then it's no longer fun." David Letterman on Donald Trump April 28, 2011.  

The quote comes at the 1'30" point in the video up above, but watch the whole thing to see how Letterman won't let Dr. Phil jokingly let his friend Donald off the hook. "If he comes back on this show -- and I'm not sure we want him back on the show under those circumstances -- he ought to be prepared to apologize ... ought to be prepared to apologize just for that kind of behavior."

Speaking of apologies now in 2016, it's time for David Letterman to rescind his "apology" to Donald Trump in 2012, even if it was glib and obviously insincere.

June 3, 2015 : The Day the Telephone Poll Officially Died

Telephone polls will keep reporting results for as long as there are telephone poles and for as long as there are lazy and competitive news outlets looking for ways to draw curious eyeballs to their advertisements.
I've been doubting their utility for years (polls, not poles). However, as of today, all results of telephone polls are officially null and void, and here's the evidence leading me to this final judgment:

1) This morning I saw this Time headline online, "Johnny Carson Reigns as America’s Favorite Late-Night Host, Poll Finds," which seemed a little strange since he's been off the air for 23 years and a large percentage of the adult population able to stay up past 11:30 at night has never seen Johnny host The Tonight Show. Yet he had almost twice as much support as his closest competitors, 'None' and David Letterman. As suspected, this was a telephone poll of 2,105 Americans conducted by Quinnipiac and the only fact it proved is that the only people who are regularly answering calls from unidentified numbers are people over 65. I'm only surprised Jack Paar and Steve Allen didn't beat Letterman too.

2) The clincher came later in the morning when I read this AFP headline: "George W. Bush More Popular than Obama: Poll." This CNN/ORC poll was conducted by telephone from May 29 to 31 on a representative sample of 1,025 Americans who were dumb or old enough to answer calls from strangers. The pollsters claim a margin of error of 3%, which makes Dubya's 52%-49% "victory" over Obama a tie, but I'm leaning toward a margin of error of infinity.

Not only have telephone polls lost their utility and credibility; they've even lost what little ability they had to divert attention from cat videos.

#MittsMissingReturns (Part Two)

When I was tweeting with the #MittsMissingReturns hashtag earlier today, I started getting replies from the dark side of Twitter equating our calls for the release of Mitt Romney's recent tax returns with their calls for the release of "Obama's Sealed Records."  I wasn't sure which records they meant, but a quick search showed what all the fuss was about. Nothing.  Unless you consider it vital to know about the President's kindergarten and baptismal records from the 60s or his parents' marriage license or his college grades from the 80s.  The college transcripts seem to cause the most excitement; this seems to have been started by Donald Trump after the release of Barack Obama's birth certificate took some of the steam out of The Donald's earlier birtherist crusade, back when he was toying with the idea of running for President in the Spring of 2011.

"I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?... I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records."
-- Donald Trump

This insinuation plays into the deepest racist resentments -- that somehow a less-intelligent black man was given the place at Columbia University and Harvard Law School that could have gone to a more deserving white right-wing nutjob. (Of course it probably never bothered these same people that our previous President, a proud C student, used the more traditional form of affirmative action to grease his easy path through Yale University and Harvard Business School.)


"My point is, it's all fun, it's all a circus, it's all a rodeo, until it starts to smack of racism, and then it's no longer fun." David Letterman on Donald Trump April 28, 2011.  The quote comes at the 1'30" point in the video up above, but watch the whole thing to see how Letterman won't let Dr. Phil jokingly let his friend Donald off the hook. "If he comes back on this show -- and I'm not sure we want him back on the show under those circumstances -- he ought to be prepared to apologize ... ought to be prepared to apologize just for that kind of behavior."

Needless to say, I was shocked that this racist call for the President's college records was resurrected by a number of people on Twitter today and equated with the call for Mitt Romney's hidden tax returns. It's a false equivalency, to say the least.

Then it got worse.

There's also the ridiculous new issue of the legitimacy of President Obama's Social Security number that was brought up to me today by a number of people on the Right side of Twitter.

And then I was sent a link to this birther video with the message "Michelle Obama can't remember where her husband was born".  That's when I needed to turn off Twitter for a few hours.

* * *

All of these things may have been disproved over and over again. All of them may be irrelevant to the qualifications of the person who's been serving effectively in the White House since January 2009, but there will be a continued drive to create a false equivalency between these fringe concerns and the very real need for us to get information about the very complicated personal business and taxes of his challenger who is running on a platform of business and taxes.