The funny thing about the truth is, it's true no matter who says it. And another thing: the truth is the truth even if its goal is to provoke.

That's the best we can do to set up the latest salvo from the Trumped-up Presidential bid of the Donald — Donald Trump.  

Birther blah-blah notwithstanding, we get the sense that Trump's daily roll out of provocative-but-mostly-true poll tested rhetoric is really tapping into the anger that many Americans are feeling toward their government — and the two political parties who take turns controlling it.

(photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore)

Check what Trump says about OPEC:

Look at what’s going on with your gasoline prices. They’re going to go to $5, $6, $7 and we don’t have anybody in Washington that calls OPEC and says, "Fellas, it’s time. It’s over.  You’re not going to do it anymore."

If the Donald keeps it up, he's going to be relevant a great deal longer than Gary Busey was on Celebrity Apprentice.

We mean it: in a society that celebrates celebrity (that's you Barack and Snooki), a celebrity who kicks the crud out of our weak-suck, hand held, politically correct politics is destined to have some staying power.

Yesterday the Trumpster slayed a new politically correct dragon, saying  the US should excise a couple oil fields from the formerly-tyrannical regimes we helped liberate in lands Middle and East of here. Trump also argued that it's time for America to knock the economic turbines off of OPEC.  On the latter point, it is hard to disagree.

Seriously, Progressives: do you think for a minute that Teddy Roosevelt would let Saudi Arabia play energy extortion with the world's greatest power? We just can't figure out why a credible Republican candidate doesn't say something like the same.

We do not love the Donald. Not even close. We think he's an ideologically untethered populist (at best), and a first degree panderer (at worst).  About Trump, the Club for Growth is probably right.

But that doesn't change the fact that the newly-conservative Trump matters in 2012. And as long as he keeps saying the things that the flim-flam Presidential Republicans won't, he will continue to command attention and drive the debate.

Yes indeed, occasionally those attempting only to provoke are capable of being right.