Faking toughness

The Blob holds no brief for Carly Fiorina, the hapless CEO and champion job-destroyer who the other day became Ted Cruz' desperate Hail Carly. But I'm with her on one thing:

Mike Tyson is no paragon of manliness.

"Sorry, I don't consider a convicted rapist a tough guy," said Fiorina, Cruz' hilariously premature running mate.

The Game Show Host does, however, and so there was Donald J. Trump, the circus act who would be king, bloviating about Mike Tyson and what a great thing it was that Tyson was endorsing him. Because, by golly, he likes it when he gets endorsed by "the tough ones."

That he said it in Indiana, where Tyson raped Desiree Washington and did time for it, would be considered a major gaffe for anyone but the Game Show Host. After all, he'd already stood up for the rapist back in '92, when he said Tyson got "railroaded," and that what happened was Washington's fault because she went to his room. But as always, he's saved by his bewitched followers, who regard these sorts of pronouncements as evidence that the Game Show Host isn't afraid to tell it like it is.

The man apparently can't say anything ridiculous enough at this point to give the rubes even a moment's pause. And that includes this latest, which is as perfectly in character for the Game Show Host as every other ridiculous thing he's said.

Here's the deal: Touting a convicted rapist as a tough guy is no great leap of logic for Trump, a proud misogynist who plays at being a tough guy himself. As with most of his now familiar act, it's a con, a part the Game Show Host plays as smoothly as he plays someone worthy of serious consideration for the highest office in the land. Because, like Tyson, the Game Show Host is no tough guy.

Witness what happened no long ago, when Donny went swaggering over to Scotland to transform a lot of bucolic Scottish countryside into some obscene golf resort. He wound up in a legal wrangle with the Scottish government over a proposed windfarm, lost in court, and eventually went slinking back to the U.S. with his tail between his legs, just another supposed tough guy exposed as a swaggering blowhard.

In that, he shares a curious kinship with Tyson, another phony "tough one." He was presented by an enchanted media as a fearsome engine of destruction back when he was knocking over assorted tomato cans, most of whom took one look at Iron Mike and started searching for a soft place to land. That was before an unremarkable journeyman named Buster Douglas discovered a remarkable thing: If you actually fought back, Iron Mike wasn't so tough. In fact, he was kinda ... soft.

And so down went Tyson, and then off he went to prison after luring Washington, a Sunday School teacher and honor student, to his hotel room. And then down he went again when he found himself in the ring with Evander Holyfield, a genuine tough guy.

Now?

Now here he is endorsing the Game Show Host, another "tough guy" whose toughness begins and ends with his mouth.

Synergy is a wonderful thing.