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Health & Fitness

Pompadour and Circumstance—Trump Is the New Republican Real Estatesman

The Donald —a statesman? Who knew?

We were having dinner at the Little Owl tonight, as we often do before City Council meetings, when I caught the tail end of a news clip on the television across from the booth where we were sitting. That can’t be right, I thought. So I whipped out the smart phone and googled it. The search results seemed to confirm the unbelievable fact that Donald Trump had been honored as Statesman of the Year.

I checked the surroundings just to make sure we were still in Geneva on Planet Earth. Unfortunately, this was no alien abduction and we were not being toyed with by beings of superior intelligence. That might have been easier to take. The cruel truth, as the news agencies reported, was that the Sarasota County Republican Party had recognized “real estate mogul” Donald Trump as a statesman in its annual award ceremony on the eve of the Republican National Convention in Tampa. The “real estate mogul” title in the news stories threw me for a moment before I recalled that Trump’s actual business is developing and selling real estate, not promoting and selling himself, which one could easily conclude, given Trump’s public persona.

Just when you think the Republican Party is regaining a modicum of respectability and no longer given to college pranks like nominating Sarah Palin for vice president, they decide to honor Trump as a statesman. Proclaiming Donald Trump as Statesman of the Year is only marginally less inane than honoring Drew Peterson as Husband of the Year. I say this despite the fact that Trump was endorsed for president by none other than the very prescient, although often confused, former Celebrity Apprentice Gary Busey. Now there’s the guy they should have named Statesman of the Year. Busey said that Trump would make an “absolutely good president.” While Trump might be seething that Busey did not say “absolutely great president” instead, there’s no questioning the value of Busey’s endorsement. I’m sure the Sarasota Republicans must have taken that into consideration when deciding to bestow such an honor on the Donald.

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Sarasota County Republican chairman Joe Gruters had this to say about their choice:

He’s a champion of the people and he’s obviously a huge supporter of the comeback team, Governor Mitt Romney and Congressman Paul Ryan, and he’s going to do everything it takes to make sure we take our country back.

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If this isn’t the essence of a statesman, I don’t know what is. Trump, with his usual grace and charm, humbly accepted the honor, telling the Republicans that they had to stop being nice and politically correct. I’m sure Rush Limbaugh will be relieved to know that he no longer has to keep it all bottled up inside. Now Rush can really tell Sandra Fluke what he thinks, and Tod Akin can take back his apology.

Trump was also concerned that we had become a laughing stock as a nation. It’s hard to imagine anyone would consider us a laughing stock when we recognize men like the Donald as statesmen or when our congressmen espouse medieval theories about rape, or engage in “sexting” with on-line acquaintances, or go skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee, or when the Secret Service gets caught in a dispute over payment due to a prostitute, or when our statesmen still cling to repudiated birther theories about the president. How can we not be taken seriously?

All of this makes me feel a bit sorry for the British who have to depend solely on Prince Harry for public embarrassment. We have so much more depth on our team.

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