We’re just days away from the start of the holiday season. Where did this year go? In the meanwhile, here are a few thoughts to kick off a very short work week (at least for me):

This is one time I absolutely believe everything Barack Obama is saying. And it’s not anything any rational person wouldn’t have deduced for themselves based on everything he’s said and done since becoming president.

Like for most folks, I’m guessing, Donald Trump’s campaign continues to fascinate and intrigue. There’s a saying with its origin in the Second World War that you know you’re closest to the target when you’re catching the most flak, and the fact Trump continues to get it in spades (hey, can I say that?) from the mainstream media and the GOP Beltway establishment (both working in tandem, no doubt) tells me everything I need to know. You’ve got the media going out of its way to misquote Trump whenever it can. You have a small handful of protesters attempt to disrupt his thousands (in some case tens of thousands) of attendee rallies, and all they want to talk about are the protesters. And now the Left has its collective panties in a knot over his recent comments on waterboarding.

Look, I may be proven wrong here but I just continue to think Trump has tapped into something that the mainstream media and the GOP establishment refuse to ignore out of their own elitist, obtuseness. If you get away from the relatively small but powerful liberal enclaves on the coasts there is a country that is worn out and beaten down from seven years of Barack Obama and the liberal establishment telling it how wrong, misguided, and evil it is. You have a country immersed in a cesspool of political correctness and division across cultural, political, racial and socioeconomic lines. You see the inmates in charge of the asylum at our nation’s colleges in the uproar over the most juvenile crap you could ever imagine. You have the insipid Black Lives Matter cockroaches and their pathetic attempts to have their equally-pathetic message heard. And, finally, you have conservatives who are tired of the milquetoast McCains, Romneys and Jeb Bushes afraid of saying or doing anything that would offend anyone as the see themselves increasingly as strangers in their own country.

So now comes along Donald Trump, and he’s not afraid to call it as he sees it. He doesn’t speak politically and in phrases and terms couched in political correctness. He exudes a genuine love of a capitalist America that seeks to protect and elevate its own first then worry about the rest later. He looks at radical Islam for what it is. He talks in language and in a way that “Joe 6-pack” understands, and the political elites wonder why he’s caught a spark?

You gotta look for signs, and the signs are everywhere. Look at this Washington Post story, then look at the comments beneath it. For the Post one would expect all kinds of liberal outrage, but I’m guessing the comments are 70-30 for Trump. You look at the national polls for certain trends, and Trump’s support only seems to have hardened and even strengthened after the Paris attacks. You look at Barbara Walters’ Trump family special on Friday, and you see a family of well adjusted, well mannered, articulate, (and yes, beautiful) people who are not transgendered or reality show freaks, and compare that against the Hillary Clintons of the world who can’t seem to call the ISIS killers radical Islamists.

The question is what happens when people start pulling levers in voting booths in just over two months’ time. As I’ve written before, the Iowa caucuses are only 67 days away, and I’m not discounting, even given Iowa’s unique history aside) Trump surprises everyone. Maybe then his candidacy will start getting respect from the national media. We know within the GOP establishment it’s already generating fear, and well it should.