Money For Nothin' And Your Hicks For Free

...
The raving bigot with the ball-cap and the makeup
Yeah buddy that's his own hair
That raving bigot got his own jet airplane
That raving bigot, he's a millionaire

From The Hill:

Trump saves his own money thanks to $3.8 million in donations

GOP front-runner Donald Trump has promised to pay for his presidential campaign out of his own pockets, but the billionaire is getting off cheap, spending just $100,000 of his own money in the most recent fundraising period, according to his campaign.

Boosted by more network TV coverage than any other candidate, Trump has been able to sit back and let his campaign largely take care of itself.

The billionaire's campaign says it raised $3.8 million from the general public between July 1 and Sept. 30 and finished the quarter with $255,000 cash on hand.

But Trump's cash on hand figure is largely meaningless, as the reality TV celebrity, with a fortune estimated by Forbes to be more than $4 billion, can pay for as much media as he decides he needs.

Trump's campaign says he has not needed to dip much into that fortune.

...

Back in 2013, during an IntelligenceSquared debate which was covered by virtually no one, Mickey Edwards and David Brooks debated Laura Ingraham and Ralph Reed on the proposition that "The GOP Must Seize the Center or Die".

During the course of that debate, Mr. Edwards made it perfectly clear that the Conservative Brain Caste knows the true nature and composition of the crazed and bigoted factions who really make up the base of their Movement and their Party.

The Republican Party we have today could disappear and be replaced by a range of its little subsets, all these other -- a Christian right party, a libertarian party, a no government, no tax party, a gun owner's party, a no gays and no immigrants party, each one with its own small niche of true believers...

Now, as the various factions of what was once the Party of Lincoln continue to hit the ground like so many WKRP Thanksgiving turkeys, I am reminded of that very brief interregnum between the complete collapse of the lies of the Bush Regime and the invention of the Bush-Off Machine.  That moment of political free-fall when it became impossible to deny that one side -- the despised, mocked, outcast, Liberal side -- had been right all along, while the other side -- the Conservative hate machine and their lapdog enablers in the Beltway media -- had been catastrophically wrong all along.  

Once again, it is absolutely clear that, as I wrote in a similar context many years ago, virtually all of David Brooks' recent, hard-won epiphanies about his Party and Movement amount to little more than the well-thumbed history and plainsong lore of our Fucked Up Modern Age as it has been long understood and passed down among those awful Liberals.

And once again, absolutely no one in the Beltway media wants to hear a peep out of those of us who have been right about the Right all along.

Instead, we have a media in which, as the star of the freak show, Donald Trump can literally dictate the terms of the Republican presidential debate:

CNBC agrees to Trump demand for two-hour debate

CNBC has agreed to limit its forthcoming Republican primary debate to two hours and allow for opening and/or closing statements, acquiescing to the demands of Donald Trump and other GOP campaigns, CNN has confirmed.

The Republican National Committee began calling the campaigns on Friday morning to inform them that CNBC had agreed in principal to limit the debate to two hours, including commercials, and to allow for opening and/or closing statements, according to two sources with knowledge of the decision.

"They said those conditions are 'all but certain'," as they still needed all the campaigns to sign off on the new format, a source with one of the campaigns told CNN.

RNC spokesperson Sean Spicer told CNN, "We are having an ongoing conversation with CNBC and the candidates" and that the final format should be determined soon.

The move comes after Trump and Ben Carson threatened to pull out of the faceoff in Boulder, Colorado, if the hosts didn't agree to their demands...

Instead, just as Cuban state media used to stand and wait obediently for Castro to come to the balcony and harangue the crowd, MSNBC continues to fill its empty hours pointing its cameras at empty podia where Donald Trump may or may not show up to bestow some of his ramblings upon them.

I have no idea what in the world I will one day be telling my grandkids about our parlous times, but I am pretty sure they're not going to believe a word of it.