“Carly Fiorina Trips Over Fact, Fiction Distinction”: Caught Once Again Saying Something That Was Plainly Untrue
At this week’s Republican presidential debate, Carly Fiorina hoped to get her struggling campaign back on track by pointing to her military bona fides:
“One of the things I would immediately do, in addition to defeating [U.S. enemies] here at home, is bring back the warrior class – Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn. Every single one of these generals I know. Every one was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn’t want to hear.”
For Fiorina, it was a two-fer – she could boast about personal connections with top U.S. military brass while simultaneously condemning President Obama for dismissing generals who disagreed with him.
The problem, of course, was that Fiorina wasn’t telling the truth. David Petraeus, for example, didn’t retire because of a conflict with the president; he retired from the military to become the CIA director, but was forced to quit after a sex scandal in which he shared classified information with his mistress.
As Rachel noted on the show last night, the even more striking example is retired Gen. Jack Keane, who retired in 2003 – when Obama was still a state senator. The idea that Keane, who has never even met this president, was forced out of the military because of a disagreement with Obama doesn’t make any sense. Keane said as much during a Fox News interview yesterday.
But that’s not the funny part. What makes Fiorina such a bizarre presidential candidate is how she handled the follow-up questions the day after the debate.
Talking with reporters Wednesday after a town hall here, Fiorina was asked if she misspoke about Keane given the timing of his retirement.
“No, I didn’t misspeak,” she said. “But he has been someone of great experience who has been highly critical of the way this administration has not taken threats seriously and unfortunately he hasn’t been listened to. I would listen to him.”
The CNN headline on its piece read, “Despite facts, Carly Fiorina stands by claim about retired generals.”
It would have been easy for Fiorina, less than a day removed from the debate, to say she accidentally referenced Keane, but that’s just not how she likes to campaign. The same thing came up in September, when Fiorina was caught lying about Planned Parenthood, but instead of walking back her bogus claims, the Republican insisted that fiction is fact.
To be sure, Fiorina isn’t the only presidential hopeful to have been caught saying things that aren’t true. But she is the only national 2016 candidate to respond to incidents like these in such a ridiculous way.
As we discussed in September, Americans can learn a lot about presidential candidates by reviewing their records and proposals, but how they respond to challenges tells us something important, too. In this case, a candidate for national office was caught once again saying something that was plainly untrue, which in turn created a test: how would Carly Fiorina defend a lie? What would her defense tell us about her readiness for national office?
The answers should be alarming for her campaign supporters.
Indeed, in recent months, as Fiorina has seen her poll numbers steadily collapse, there’s been quite a bit of chatter about how the Republican businesswoman managed to fall so far, so quickly. There’s more than one explanation for her failures, but incidents like these are a reminder about Fiorina herself creating doubts about her preparedness for the White House.
Disclosure: My wife works for Planned Parenthood, but she played no role in this piece.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 17, 2015
“Dr. Ben Carson Is On Life Support”: Slowly Fading, Just One Step Away From Hospice
Moments before Tuesday night’s fear-mongering GOP debate, Ben Carson gave a preview of the utter strangeness that was to emerge from his mouth during the night’s proceedings.
During a visit to the media spin room, Carson was asked if he would need to ramp up his rhetoric in the ensuing debate. His response was nothing short of bewildering.
“Um, well maybe I’ll bring some weapons with me, spice it up a little bit,” he told ABC News, chortling at his own odd suggestion. This off-hand remark was strangely prescient, characterizing the night was to come.
Instead of the foreign policy “slam dunk” he promised in a campaign video, Carson sunk into the background as the top-tier candidates—Trump, Cruz, Rubio, and to some degree Christie—duked it out in varying dour and vicious tones.
What little stage time Carson got (some 10 minutes and 27 seconds approximately) was consumed by a highlight reel of ill-fated remarks about bombing children and disruptive coughing, and, of course, a complaint about not getting enough time.
Hugh Hewitt asked a question about the former neurosurgeon’s ability to declare war where children would inevitably end up as casualties. The response could have served as a demonstration of strength, a label which often evades Carson next to the bombastic yelling of Trump, but ended up as an ill-fated comparison to his medical experience.
“Well, interestingly enough, you should see the eyes of some of those children when I say to them ‘We’re going to have to open your head up and take out this tumor,’” Carson tangentially responded. “They’re not happy about it, believe me. And they don’t like me very much at that point. But later on, they love me.”
“And by the same token,” he went on, “you have to be able to look at the big picture, and understand that it’s actually merciful if you go ahead and finish the job, rather than death by a thousand pricks.”
Hewitt pressed him by bluntly asking if Carson would be OK with the deaths of thousands of civilians and children in an effort to fight terrorism. Amidst the boos that erupted in the Venetian Casino, Carson awkwardly replied, “You got it,” seemingly not believing the words he himself was actually saying. Even when Carson leaned on what little applicable experience he has, referencing the scholars fund he created to demonstrate leadership abilities, he misfired.
“One of the things that you’ll notice if you look through my life is that I don’t do a lot of talking,” Carson said. “I do a lot of doing.” But Carson gave more than 141 paid speeches between the start of 2014 and the beginning of his campaign, not to mention an extensive, quasi-illegal book tour wedged in the middle of this campaign cycle.
His floundering in the debate may not have been so noticeable if there weren’t as much at stake for Carson. It wasn’t that long ago that Carson bolted to the front of the GOP pack, drawing the attention of Trump’s oxygen-extinguishing ire (remember when he analogized him to a child molester?).
But November’s terrorist attacks in Paris pivoted the conversation to national security and foreign policy, causing Carson, who was woefully unprepared for any in-depth conversation on either topic, to plummet in the polls.
His campaign tried to make adjustments to mold the quiet doctor into an overnight foreign policy wonk, including a trip to Syrian refugee camps, which resulted in the badly worded summarization: They were not that bad. Carson is scheduled to take another trip, this time to Africa, this month.
Carson’s campaign even released a seven-step plan to “protect America” ahead of the debate, that includes a call for a declaration of war against ISIS. Only special ops forces would be needed on the ground for the time being, his communications manager Doug Watts told The Daily Beast yesterday.
Yet in the debate, Carson seemed to be all but certain that there would be ground troops in this war.
“If our military experts say we need boots on the ground, we should put boots on the ground and recognize that there will be boots on the ground and they’ll be over here, and they’ll be their boots if we don’t get out of there now,” he said during a particularly meandering answer.
But the seventh step of the procedural is the one that probably gives the most pause. The final proposal of the Carson Doctrine to make America safe again calls for an investigation of “the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and a supporter of terrorism.”
“Given the precarious situation America is in with sleeper cells and jihadists making threats from within, and CAIR’s background, publicly stated affinity with Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, we believe further investigation is in order,” Watts elaborated.
The United Arab Emirates did in fact put CAIR on its own version of a terrorist watch list in 2014, but experts balked at the suggestion that the organization poses a viable threat in the United States.
“Carson’s remarks are typically silly,” Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institutes in Washington, told The Daily Beast. “He pontificates a great deal about Muslim and Islamic matters, and every time he opens his mouth, he reveals himself to be exceptionally ignorant and informed entirely by bigots and a hateful rhetoric.”
The bigots to whom Ibish is referring include Islamophobe and recent GOP darling Frank Gaffney Jr., who has suggested that CAIR is waging a “stealthy, pre-violent” jihad against the United States. (Gaffney also insists American Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist is secretly working to help Muslim Brotherhood moles infiltrate the U.S. government.)
Ibish explained that while CAIR may have had “origins in Brotherhood-supporting or sympathetic causes,” the organization is by no means “connected to terrorism or in any practical, material sense supportive of terrorism.”
“If Dr. Carson doesn’t realize that CAIR has been ‘investigated’ since 9/11 as thoroughly as any American organizational entity has ever been investigated by the government, he hasn’t got a clue,” Ibish added. “But then again, he is a fool.”
For their part, CAIR condemned Carson a long time ago when he said that he was against a Muslim being president.
“Ben Carson is a failing candidate grasping at straws and seeking payback for CAIR’s previous criticism of his anti-Muslim bigotry,” Corey Saylor, the national legislative director for the organization, told The Daily Beast. “He found that Islamophobia gave him a boost in the past, so he is using it again.”
But there are no obvious signs that it will give him a boost now.
Carson fell from 22 percent to 11 percent in two Washington Post-ABC News polls taken less than a month apart. And even as the campaign attempts to right the sinking ship, private tensions between business manager Armstrong Williams and other staffers are getting played out in public.
And if last night’s debate was any indication, all Carson can do is smile and feign toughness on a stage with loudmouth bigots and opportunistic politicians simply out-muscling him.
It doesn’t work to play nice anymore.
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, December 16, 2015
“Crying About The Deficit Is A GOP Tool”: Can We Stop Pretending That Republicans Care About The Deficit Now?
Congress is about to pass a package that will keep the government operating through next September. And in order to sweeten the deal for conservative Republicans who would rather not spend money to have the government operate, they’ll also be voting on a $680 billion package of tax cuts. These bills contain both things Republicans want (like allowing oil exports, extending a research and development tax break for businesses, and delaying the “Cadillac Tax” in the Affordable Care Act) and things Democrats want (like extending the child tax credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit).
But whether you’re happy with the overall balance of line items in the bill, one thing’s for sure: it will increase the deficit rather substantially.
While there are some Republicans complaining about that, what they’re really mad about is the things they didn’t get, like banning Planned Parenthood from getting Medicaid reimbursements. In short, what mattered for both sides was the substantive details, and to some degree the politics (i.e. Republicans not wanting to suffer the fallout from another shutdown crisis).
Let’s be honest: despite all their talk about what we’re handing to the next generation and how government should balance its books just like a family does, when it comes down to actually making choices, Republicans are no more concerned about deficits than Democrats are. Crying about the deficit is a tool they use to constrain policies they don’t like. When it comes to the policies they do like, how much the government will have to borrow to fund them is barely an afterthought. So can we stop pretending they actually care about deficits?
There’s no denying that Republicans have wielded the fear of deficits and debt with extraordinary effect. They often convince the public that deficits are a serious problem that needs addressing, because most voters have only the vaguest understanding of how the government operates, and words like “debt” become a stand-in for “the economy.” And they have allies among those sometimes referred to as the Very Serious People in Washington, who gravely intone that government can’t do things like mitigate the effects of a recession if doing so will add to the debt. But when Republicans actually have to make choices, there’s a simple calculus at work: the programs they don’t support anyway, like food stamps or Medicaid, should be cut because we just can’t afford them. But the programs they do support, like military spending, not to mention tax cuts that will increase the deficit? Well, we just have to do those things, because they’re necessary.
Consider that the biggest Democratic policy initiative in recent years was the Affordable Care Act, which was completely paid for through taxes and budget cuts within Medicare. The ACA not only didn’t increase the deficit, it decreased it. The biggest Republican policy initiatives in recent years, on the other hand, were the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq War. The former cost somewhere between $2 trillion and $3 trillion (see here and here), while the latter cost around $2 trillion. There was no attempt to pay for either one, meaning the cost was just added to the deficit.
And why wasn’t there an attempt to pay for them? The simple answer is that when Republicans have something they want to do, they do it. Trying to pay for what you want to do just complicates things (as the authors of the ACA could testify). When George W. Bush took office, they wanted to cut taxes, particularly on the wealthy, so they did. They wanted to invade Iraq, so they did. If any Republican said, “It would be nice to do this, but it’s going to increase the deficit, so we shouldn’t,” they would have been laughed out of the room. And all those Republicans who today say that they don’t think Bush was a real conservative because he didn’t curtail spending? If you don’t remember them loudly objecting at the time, that’s because they didn’t.
The main reason Republicans are free to set aside concerns about the deficit right now is that it has dropped so dramatically over Barack Obama’s presidency, so it’s much harder to argue that it’s an urgent problem. The deficit peaked at $1.4 trillion in 2009, Obama’s first year in office, when the country was still in the depths of the Great Recession. By 2014 it had fallen to $484 billion, a decline of two-thirds. It went from 9.8 percent of GDP in 2009 down to 2.8 percent of GDP in 2014.
There are multiple reasons why, including sequestration, the improving economy, and the tax increases Obama negotiated. But if you want to grant presidents credit or blame for what happens with the deficit on their watch, in the last forty years, Presidents Obama and Clinton reduced the deficit as a proportion of GDP, President Carter kept it almost exactly where it was, and Presidents Bush the Younger, Bush the Elder, and Reagan increased the deficit. Notice a pattern?
And all the Republicans running for president have tax plans that would send the deficit into the stratosphere. They wave away the consequences by saying that they’ll come up with some package of (yet unspecified) budget cuts, or even better, that despite all historical evidence, this time cutting taxes will lead to such an explosion of economic growth that the deficit will actually fall (this is known as a belief in the “Tax Fairy”). But the truth is that they just want to cut taxes, and if one of them becomes president, that’s what he’ll do. And nobody on the Republican side will care what it does to the deficit.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, December 17, 2015
“A Terrorist Organization”: Editor Is Fired, But Not Silenced, Over The NRA
Five days after the shootings in San Bernardino, California, Jan Larson McLaughlin sat down in her home office on her day off and wrote her weekly editorial for the Sentinel-Tribune, circulation 9,000, in Bowling Green, Ohio.
McLaughlin has worked for the newspaper for 31 years, the past 2 1/2 as editor-in-chief. She usually writes her editorial in the newsroom, but this one required special care. She was taking on the National Rifle Association, and she was doing it in Ohio.
Her editorial began: “It is time for reasonable gun owners to take back control of the association that supposedly represents them.
“We as a nation are still mourning one mass shooting when the next occurs. Yet the NRA refuses to discuss any type of gun control, any form of background checks, any type of study that might lead to some answers.
“Instead, when legislators consider measures to reduce gun deaths, the NRA and its tentacle groups assign them failing grades and label them as anti-gun.”
She then focused on the Buckeye Firearms Association for its “blasted criticism” of Bowling Green State University faculty members who had written to state Rep. Tim Brown asking that he not support legislation to allow concealed carry of firearms on Ohio college campuses. Brown voted for it.
The gun group used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the list of faculty members who had written to Brown. It published their names and email addresses, singling out geology professor James Evans for special retribution by publishing his photo, too, because he called the NRA a “terrorist organization” in his email to Brown. McLaughlin described the rush of threatening emails to Evans from members of the firearms association. (Evans confirmed this in an interview Tuesday.)
After defending the faculty members, McLaughlin ended her editorial with a plea:
“We’ve tried arming every citizen who is so inclined. It hasn’t solved the problem. So let’s look for other solutions, ones that reasonable gun owners can support. But that will mean responsible gun owners are first going to have to take back control of their national organization, which seems more concerned about the gun industry than the average gun owner.”
Early the next morning, McLaughlin sent her editorial to Publisher Karmen Concannon, whose parents own the broadsheet, which publishes Monday through Saturday. McLaughlin also sent the editorial to three of her six staff writers. This is her practice in the small newsroom so that they can catch errors and offer criticism.
McLaughlin described what happened next: That Tuesday evening, the publisher told her she had killed the editorial, with little explanation. On Wednesday, the six staff writers submitted a letter to Concannon, asking her to reconsider. She refused to read it.
The next day, McLaughlin walked into the publisher’s office, asking for an explanation, but Concannon said she didn’t owe her one.
The following Monday morning, Concannon told McLaughlin she was fired and ordered her to surrender her keys before being escorted out of the building. She was allowed to return to the newsroom that evening to empty her desk.
McLaughlin’s termination letter stated that she was fired for insubordination — for doing what she always does, which is to share her editorial with staff writers. The publisher’s explanation doesn’t pass the straight-face test, which may be why Concannon has refused multiple requests for interviews.
Hours after McLaughlin’s firing, my Gmail and Facebook inboxes began filling with messages from upset readers and fellow journalists. Many McLaughlin supporters tweeted the hashtag “istandwithjan.” Someone, she doesn’t know who, leaked the killed editorial, bringing it back to life on social media and, later, on the Toledo Blade‘s website.
You could reasonably ask, “Why should I care what happened at a small-town newspaper in Ohio?”
I suggest a different question: How often is this happening in our communities?
Earlier this month, it was great to see the front-page editorial in The New York Times under the headline “The Gun Epidemic.” Lots of policymakers surely saw it, but most Americans — most constituents — don’t read The New York Times.
Editorials such as McLaughlin’s matter because they reach the rest of America and can embolden citizens to pressure elected officials for gun law reform. Silencing the Jan Larson McLaughlins in this country emboldens only the NRA.
On Tuesday, McLaughlin was still reeling.
“I’m still kind of stunned,” she said. “I love the Sentinel-Tribune. I care about the staff. This is all I’ve ever wanted to do.”
On Wednesday, she heard there were plans for a rally to protest her firing. Such outpouring of community support moves her. “It feels good that people recognize the value of the work of the Sentinel-Tribune.”
Still, it worries her, too. “I don’t want people to cancel their subscriptions,” she said. “Our writers make so little, and they work so hard. I don’t want them to lose their jobs.”
McLaughlin said that before she left the building, the publisher offered her a severance package.
For her 31 years of service, the paper was willing to pay Jan Larson McLaughlin $5,000 — but only if she agreed not to talk about what had happened.
To the benefit of all of us, she declined.
By: Connie Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning Columnist, The National Memo, December 16, 2015
“GOP Take Heed”: Donald Trump Is The GOP’s George Wallace
Tuesday night, following the fourth Republican presidential primary debate, the pundit class will dutifully declare Marco Rubio the winner, extolling his debate prowess with the usual breathlessness. And then, the overnight polls will find that once again, Donald Trump has won the night (with Washington GOP bête noir Ted Cruz likely coming in second), and establishment GOP heads will explode again.
The Trump phenomenon might feel both interminable and unprecedented to Republican elites, but of course it isn’t. American populist politics has a long tradition, from Andrew Jackson to Huey Long to Joseph McCarthy. But the politician Trump is most like could be George Wallace. And if the rumors of an establishment plot to somehow prevent the current frontrunner from getting the nomination are true, Trump could wind up as the GOP’s Wallace in more than just style and bluster.
Back in Wallace’s day, it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were bedeviled by their extremist flank. The Southern wing of the party was in full rebellion over the push for racial integration in schools and public accommodations; over the civil rights laws pushed through by a majority Democratic congress with the help of Republicans and an apostate Southern Democratic president; and even over the war in Vietnam, which drew a spirited investigation by ardent segregationist Sen. William Fulbright of Arkansas.
Wallace ran for Alabama governor in 1958 touting his ability to “to treat a man fair, regardless of his color.” He lost and vowed to “never be out-niggered again.” He ran for governor in 1962, this time as a hard-line segregationist, and won. The new George Wallace was a political thespian, dramatically “tossing the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny” on behalf of the “great Anglo Saxon Southland” and declaring “segregation now and segregation forever.” He staged his “stand in” at the entrance of the University of Alabama in June of 1963 to dramatize the fruitless fight to keep two black students, and their armed federal escorts, out; and ran his soon-to-be ailing wife, Lurleen, for governor when the Democratic state legislature refused to let him vie for a second term.
In 1966, Wallace declared his independence from the political establishment, calling himself “an Alabama Democrat, not a national Democrat,” and adding: “I’m not kin to those folks. The difference between a national Democrat and an Alabama Democrat is like the difference between a Communist and a non-Communist.” He commiserated with conservative white voters, saying both major parties have “looked down their nose at you and me a long time. They’ve called us rednecks—the Republicans and the Democrats. Well, we’re going to show there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country.”
When he ran for president as an independent in 1968, Wallace did so as a pure populist, capitalizing on a segment of the electorate’s disdain for traditional politicians.
His campaign focused on law and order in the face of hundreds of riots in 1967. He declared it a “sad day in our country that you cannot walk even in your neighborhoods at night or even in the daytime because both national parties, in the last number of years, have kowtowed to every group of anarchists that have roamed the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles and throughout the country.”
He zeroed in on white working-class voters’ anxieties over the decline of traditional values, deriding the Supreme Court for promoting a “perverted agenda” that ripped prayer from public schools while concocting a right to “distribute obscene pornography.” He lamented the inordinate amount of time Washington elites spent pandering to communistic black civil rights scoundrels and “welfare cheats” while prying into the affairs of the common white man who just wanted to run his business as he saw fit or sell his home to someone with “blue eyes and green skin” via restrictive covenant if he so chose.
Like Trump, Wallace rose steadily and improbably in the polls, with consistently high ratings for “saying it the way it really is” and “standing by his convictions.” New Republic columnist Richard Strout in 1967 dubbed Wallace “the ablest demagogue of our time, with a voice of venom and a gut knowledge of the prejudices of the low-income class.” Even John Wayne donated to his campaign, which raised most of its money through small donations.
By December 1967, Wallace made Gallup’s list of America’s 10 most admired men, at No. 8, one notch above California Gov. Ronald Reagan. Gallup would later note that Wallace’s support was strongest among those “with a high school background or less” and those who strongly disliked President Lyndon Johnson.
Wallace ran in some Democratic primaries, as he had briefly in 1964. But; his segregationist views had become an anathema to the party of LBJ, and he got almost no votes. Instead he accepted the nomination of the new, far-right American Independent Party, and he chose retired General Curtis LeMay, who wanted to nuke Vietnam, as his running mate.
Though his principal strength was in the South, Wallace also held large and raucous campaign rallies up North; drawing 20,000 people to Madison Square Garden in October 1968, as anti-Wallace protesters clashed with police outside. One Wallace strategist, arch-segregationist John J. Synon, boasted of Wallace’s Northern supporters in a 1967 column: “Who faced down M.L. King in Cicero, last summer [by throwing bottles and bricks at black civil rights activists who marched through the all-white Illinois town]; who takes the brunt whenever there is trouble? Blue collars, that’s who.”
Wallace’s campaign rallies were characterized by intermittent spasms of violence, including in New York, where several of his supporters notoriously surrounded a group of black protesters and began chanting “kill ’em! Kill ’em!” And Wallace, like Trump, seemed to encourage their bravado, declaring at Madison Square Garden: “We don’t have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, first one of ’em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all. And then you walk over to the next one and say, ‘All right, pick up a brick. We just want to see you pick up one of them bricks now.”
In the end, Wallace’s independent presidential run took more votes from Richard Nixon than from Hubert Humphrey—four out of five Wallace votes would have gone to Nixon were Wallace not in the race, pollsters concluded at the time, and Nixon won by fewer than 1 million votes, while Wallace pulled 9.9 million. Wallace won five states in the Deep South, along with more Electoral College votes, at 46, than any third-party candidate before or since (one “faithless elector” in North Carolina stubbornly cast a vote for Wallace over that state’s victor, Nixon). The results prompted Nixon campaign strategist Kevin Phillips in 1969 to devise the “Southern strategy” to capitalize on Wallace’s popularity with disaffected conservative white voters in the South.
By 1972, it was Nixon and the Republicans who would never be “out-niggered again.”
Wallace ran twice more for president, both times as a Democrat. He finished a close third to George McGovern and Humphrey in the 1972 primary and came in third again in 1976, behind Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter. But he was returning to a party he had helped break, by accelerating the realignment of the two major parties that began in 1964. Wallace never came close to being president, but his 1968 bid helped kill the New Deal coalition of black and white working-class voters. The Democratic Party was forever changed.
Which brings us to the Republican Party in 2016.
If their George Wallace—Donald Trump—wins the nomination, the party’s die is cast with a message that’s doomed among the increasingly multiracial presidential-year electorate. If he loses but his opponents continue to pander, self-protectively, to the most hateful aspects of Trump’s message, that die is cast anyway.
If he loses, particularly through some convention gamesmanship, and his supporters decide he was robbed of the nomination by a party elite who looked down on him, and on them, Trump could launch a third-party effort of Wallace-like proportions and tear the GOP in two. And that, in the end, is what Republican elites fear most.
By: Joy-Ann Reid, The Daily Beast, December 15, 2015
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