Liberals Already Had Their Trump Moment...

And it all boils down to perception and ratings. You know, liberals seem to make better policy wonks than other folks more often than not. Well, policy wonks work their tails off, they hit all the right moral and ethical notes, they don't believe in hurting large groups of people to achieve a singular beneficial end for a tiny entrenched group of wealthy oligarchs, and they don't try to dodge tough questions by perching on shifting relativistic arguments. What's right is right.

They are also BORING AS HELL on 24 hour cable TV news segments and they don't like talking in sound bites. If you present tough, complicated questions, they're bound to give you tough, complicated answers and offer complicated solutions, which might be very sound, but again... BOR-R-R-R-R-R-R-ING~!!!

And cable TV news cannot ever afford to be boring.

Know what's not boring? You guessed it, the clowns, the extremists, the revanchists, the populists and the fundamentalist whackos.

I keep hearing the Right trying to suggest that "if Trump had run as a liberal, you guys would be defending him all the way to the edge of the cliff and beyond" or some such nonsense. Nope, nope and nope, and here's why:

We already HAD a Trump-like character running for President MANY years ago. In fact, he could wipe the floor with Donald Trump, all he would need is some careful image consultants and a few miracles. He might not have won but he would have destroyed Trump's chances completely by disrupting Trump's very own game.

I ask you to look specifically through Trump-style rose colored glasses on this one because it's not a focus group study, it's study in comparative styles and I see a lot of what Trump does now in this past candidate from LONG AGO, only he ran as a LIBERAL populist.

Flynt would be Trump's WORST NIGHTMARE

The only reason he ran as a Republican was to piss the Republicans off. The Republicans should be thankful he got shot, they should be thankful he didn't try to run as a Democrat, and they should be thankful that he's too old, too beat up physically and too forgotten today.

But the point is, Larry Flynt wasn't trying to pollute our water and air, he wasn't trying to take away our public schools, he wasn't trying to fatten the rich on the backs of the poor, he wasn't trying to hurt our elderly and disabled veterans, he wasn't kow-towing to white nationalists, he wasn't trying to start wars all over the globe, he wasn't trying to dismantle the entire administrative state, he wasn't trying to put guns in the hands of every idiot in every square mile of the country... And he wasn't into declaring a free press "the enemy of the people". If Larry Flynt had been hale, hearty and rich enough in 2016, he could have diverted a LOT of the low information naive populist vote AWAY from Trump.

Imagine a pay per view event with a clear headed and healthy Larry Flynt going up against Donald Trump in a one on one debate. Trump would be running for the door crying for his Mommy and Daddy in ten minutes.

And, it would have been the ratings bonanza of the CENTURY.