Let's agree to disagree.

There's absolutely no way to get around that track record.

We have it well-documented from all through campaign season - AND farther back. He has DECADES' worth of huckster/slicky-boy/fast-talking/CONman baggage - out in front in the pop culture spotlight he craves, for all to see. NOBODY can say they weren't warned. NOBODY can say they didn't know. NOBODY can say they had no idea...

Low-brow, lowest-common-denominator stuff wrapped up in glitz and gold-tone tinsel, over-accessorized with long-legged blondes and floozie frippery, by a self-anointed "elite" eager and ready to fleece the gullible masses. He's been a walking/talking headline-hogging attention-whoring human reality show FOR YEARS. Shit - back when I was still covering entertainment, one of the big stories I had to write up for the next morning's scripts was him - with his up-and-down Marla Maples relationship. He's been exploiting desperate America's more prurient fantasy-hunger (those "champagne wishes and caviar dreams&quot FOR YEARS! He's a regular Robin Leach with a bigger ego and no British accent.

Yeah, the whole experience is one of those "you kinda had to be there..." situations.

I've dined out on those years - for years!

Meh - there's such a whirlpool-from-Hell to keep track of, these days, that even the pros are

missing the boat sometimes.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember the Ed Sullivan Show. If so, you may already know what particular act I'm about to describe, but if not...

Every so often, Ed Sullivan, who ruled Sunday nights on CBS with his big-time variety show, would book this act that involved a guy standing behind a row of tall poles, mounted to the floor. He had as many china plates as he had poles. His act involved spinning a plate on the tip of the first pole, and then, once it was spinning smoothly, he moved on to the next pole and set another plate to spinning on its tip. He repeated this all the way down the row of maybe nine or ten poles until all of them had spinning plates on top, and then he'd race back to the first pole to rescue its plate from running out of speed and wobbling towards its crash-to-the-ground death.

And so on. It quickly became high drama - OMG! Is our hero gonna get back to the first one so it doesn't fall? The orchestra, in the meantime, was furiously playing Khachaturian's Saber Dance through the whole bit.

Walter Jones is the ONLY GOPer who came around during the Iraq War.

He was the first, and as far as I can remember, the ONLY GOPer in the House of Reps who came to his senses about the relabeling of French fries to "Freedom fries" in the House dining room. That was back when everybody on that side of the aisle was decrying the French for not going along with the "Coalition of the Willing" and dumping on France, and calling the French such lovely things as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys."

BTW - "Coalition of the Willing" still stands, in my mind, as one of the worst, idiotic, pathetic, pansy-assed "slogan" I think I've ever heard in all my life. DISGRACEFUL.

For whatever it's worth, check this out:

Welcome to DU, BruceWane.

There are other posters here who've offered a correction. And they're right. The Obamas moved WITH their school-age daughters, to the White House.

Perhaps you're thinking of the Obamas NOT leaving Washington until their youngest daughter's high school years are completed? That is certainly true. But they're private citizens now, and their eight years living in OUR White House have officially been completed. Wherever they live from now on is on THEIR nickel, not that of the taxpayers.

ROFL!!!

GOOD one, gopiscrap!

I can see how that would happen, being a Catholic school grad, myself.

You have proven once again:

Why do you go to Catholic school? Answer: to generate material!!!

Fishier and fishier.

If they're so innocent, why are they twisting themselves into Cirque du Soleil contortions to blockade everything?

If everything's on the up-n-up, why are they trying so massively hard to hide it all?

Hey, if you're innocent, isn't your first instinct to want to shout it from the rooftops? And tell everyone who'll listen - and even those who won't - that you're innocent? Wouldn't you be rarin' to go with evidence and proof and exculpatory information - that you'd want EVERYONE to see, read, hear about, and receive - for closer examination? The behavior exhibited here loudly telegraphs something to hide. Ie: GUILT.

Welcome to DU, Pantagruel!

Good questions you bring up. One of the many problems we all face in this madness is - we've never been down this path before. We've never seen shit like this before. We've never seen machinations and sneaky-ass shit like this before. As bad as Watergate and Iran/Contra were, there was NOTHING like what we have now - with this Russian undercurrent running through everything involving OUR White House and this so-called White House occupant.

Unfortunately, we've also never had this kind of partisan divide, where the bad guys really ARE bad guys, putting party and power over country and bipartisan responsibility. We've never had adversaries THIS desperate to take OUR White House back so they can jam their agenda-from-Hell down America's throats. Back during Watergate, we had reasonable, honorable, patriotic, and willingly-accountable Republicans, with a capital "R", like Howard Baker and Lowell Weicker, who really did have the greater good as a priority. Those Republicans are LONG-GONE. Now all we have are mercenaries, apostates, idiots, and a raging cancer of adult-sized three-year-old "No-one-is-the-boss-of-me/I-hate-the-government" types who only want to tear down and destroy because they think that's how they'll get their way. And abysmal, willfully-ignorant collectives that call themselves the "Freedom Caucus" - when it would be more accurate to call them the ANARCHY Caucus.