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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (127618)	4/28/2011 11:02:29 AM
From: Knighty Tin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

Lawrence O'Donnell hates Donald Trump and has called for NBC to fire him. I agree with most of his rant, but he has overexaggerated and misled in places where no exaggeration is needed. Trump is a clown and a race baiter. No doubt. But some of Lawrence's claims are faulty: 1. Real billionaires do not appear on reality shows. Au contraire. Mark Cuban tried a reality show and failed. And I'm not talking about the Mavericks. <G> Richard Branson tried a reality show and failed. Trump made fun of both their failures vs. his one success, after years of failure (I hope I'm not the only one who remembers "Trump, the Game", a poorly designed game show that lasted about 4 weeks. Real money was promised, but the way the game was set up made real money nearly impossible to win. Gee, sounds like doing a deal with The Donald. Lots of promises with nothing delivered.) Trump also failed to gather television viewers to his creation, the U.S. Football League. Here, Trump was right and the viewing public was wrong. The USFL was very exciting and different from the draggy NFL. Even Warren Buffett tried to glom his ugly puss onto ABC shows after he bought into Disney. Billionaires love tv exposure. I am waiting for "The Koch Brothers Drown Puppies" pilot. As Gore Vidal said, "never refuse free sex or tv exposure." 2. Trump did not actually attend the best school in the world. This is a question of definition. Overall, Harvard is the best school in the world and The Donald did not go to Harvard. But Trump majored in business and the best undergraduate business school in the world, according to the US News rankings, is The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania. That is where he went and graduated. True, business is not a tough subject and is very open to bs and dancing around the subject, at which Trump is a master. But Wharton is the number one school. 3. Trump relies on NBC for his salary. Trump may have been on the verge of personal bankruptcy before he landed the "Apprentice" gig. But he did land it and has used it to promote his recent real estate scams. None of them has gone bankrupt in the last few years, so he probably gets more money from selling his name to these projects than he does from NBC. When taking on a character like Trump, you cannot just throw a pile of lies at him the way Fox does decent people. You should be scrupulous with the facts and let him hang himself by his tongue. O'Donnell is too emotional. BTW, O'Donnell challenged NBC to clean the race baiter off their schedule. The show gets pretty good ratings. The new drama is whether O'Donnell joins Keith Olberman as someone who challenged the corporate behemoth that employs him and got canned for his effort.