“Trump Keeps Insulting Our 9/11 Dead”: Twisting The History Of A Sacred Day Shows Why He’s Unfit To Be President
Because Donald Trump has to destroy everything in his path, why not the true history 9/11? Trump would have us revise and edit our historical memory of 9/11, turning it from a unifying narrative of heroism, tragedy, and war and recast it to serve the political ends of a man unworthy of the presidency.
Let’s be specific, because history matters. Here is Trump’s claim, which he’s been obsessively defending for weeks now:
“I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”
Trump’s Big Lie, as every fact checker from across the political spectrum has verified, is both simple and egregious: “thousands and thousands.” On the most-recorded day of our age, no record exists of “thousands and thousands” because it would have been a story of immediate, devastating consequences not only for the Muslims involved, but for this nation. It would have blown back immediately both on Muslims and on President Bush and Mayor Giuliani, who had called on Americans to refrain from assigning collective guilt.
Did any American Muslim celebrate 9/11? I’m sure some did. There are assholes in every walk of life, and in a metro area with 10 million people and a nation of 350 million, I’d be shocked if a couple of idiots didn’t act out. But it’s not a defense of Muslim extremism to stand for the truth of history.
Despite being called out on this lie repeatedly, Team Trump has produced nothing whatsoever to back up the “thousands and thousands” claim. Instead, they’ve produced a handful of anecdotes, secondhand news stories and hazy memories of what might have been a trivial number of Muslims celebrating the attacks.
They’ve failed—of course—to produce video, photos, news stories, police reports, eyewitnesses, or any other evidence for Trump’s “thousands and thousands” claim, and they never will. And when cornered with the facts, Trump’s talk-radio and online cheerleaders allege that a massive media conspiracy is keeping all the documentary evidence supporting the claim under wraps.
So why is this different from any other part of the Trumpendammerung cycle of outrageous statements, tornadoes of lies, and shoot-from-the-lip populism? Because we owe history, and the dead of that terrible September day something better.
We should tell the true stories of that day to honor the memory and sacrifice of those who perished on 9/11 and in the long wars since. We should remember the real events, not transform them into post-hoc, politically expedient exaggerations meant to amplify Donald Trump’s bravado.
The deaths of thousands at the hands of 19 Islamic radicals dispatched by Osama Bin Laden created an inflection point in our history, leading to tragedies and victories, losses and triumphs, in what is becoming a generation of war. We should tell the honest, painful stories of 9/11 because it dishonors the memory of heroes to invent a phony cast of villains when the actual terrorists were terrible enough to tear open this nation’s heart.
Trump is trying to write himself into a heroic narrative at the cost of truth, and of the memories of the real heroes who perished that day. While Trump sat staring at his television and imagining Muslims celebrating, better men and women than he will ever be died in Lower Manhattan.
They were heroes like Terry Hatton of FDNY Rescue Company 1, who charged in to the Towers without a moment’s hesitation, never knowing his wife was pregnant with their daughter. They were men of faith like Father Mychal Judge, who spent his last moments comforting the doomed as the Towers fell around them, praying “Jesus, please end this right now! God, please end this!”
They were immigrants to this country like Rick Rescorla—people who fought our wars, embraced our values more deeply than many born here, and died as heroes trying to save his charges in the Towers. They were men like Tom Burnett, whose last whispered conversation to his wife from Flight 93 was, “I know we’re going to die. There’s three of us who are going to do something about it.”
They were stockbrokers, secretaries, office techs, lawyers, waiters, firefighters, cops, and EMTs with stories of heroism and grace. They were Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and everything in between.
The families they left behind deserve a truthful recounting of their end and of that day.
I should know by now that arguing with diehard Trump supporters is largely futile but, if any of you are reading this, I pray you’ll take this issue seriously.
Two equally grim prospects can explain your behavior. The first that you know Trump’s claim is untrue, but enjoy living in his Reality Distortion Field simply to tweak mainstream America and the news media. You’ve become inhabitants of a funhouse-mirror version of the liberal culture and media you mock: insular, aggressively contrarian, obsessed with narrative over fact and anger over history.
The second is that you want it to be true so badly that you’ll invent an imagined outrage rather than focus on the actual, terrible problem of Islamic radicalism (as we saw this week in California) because that fight is harder, more complex and more painful than the hokey nostrums of Trump’s “plan” to fight ISIS. (“Take duh oil! Bomb da shit outta dem!” “Muslim database!”)
Playing out Donald Trump’s lies doesn’t mean you’re fighting some political correct media trope about Muslims or that you’re teaching the press a lesson. It doesn’t mean you’re confronting radical Islam. It doesn’t mean you’re bravely revealing a media cover-up. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to teach the Republican establishment a lesson.
All it means is you’re part of the profoundly recursive Trump dynamic; he feeds your fears, prejudices, and atavistic desires for revenge against your catalog of demons, be they Muslims, Mexicans, or Republicans who fail to kneel before the Donald. You feed his monstrous, boundless ego and like the master con artist he is, he shovels you a fresh line of easily-digested outrage and boob-bait rhetoric.
Embracing the thoroughly discredited claims of a serial liar and proven fabulist over on this history of 9/11 isn’t some bold rebellion or principled stand. It’s an insult to the dead.
By: Rick Wilson, The Daily Beast, December 6, 2015
“A Completely Unhinged Embrace Of Firearms”: Easy Access To Assault Weapons Is Still Gospel On The Right
“Violence is as American as cherry pie.” — Black Panther H. Rap Brown
Did Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, suspects in the San Bernardino massacre, just hand the GOP nomination to Donald Trump? Will his poll numbers soar into the stratosphere now that Muslims with foreign-sounding names have been identified as the shooters who killed 14 people and wounded countless others?
Even before Trump came along with propane tanks of bigoted rhetoric, Islamophobia had been burning through the cultural landscape. He and rival Ben Carson poured on fuel, with Carson declaring that no Muslim should be eligible for the presidency and Trump swearing — wrongly — that throngs of American Muslims rejoiced in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities.
After last month’s terror attacks in Paris, Trump’s support wafted ever higher; he now claims the allegiance of nearly 30 percent of the GOP electorate, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. And even some Democrats have endorsed the uncharitable view that Syrian refugees should be subjected to such stringent background checks that they would be virtually disqualified from asylum in this country. Farook and Malik have likely intensified that fearful response.
Still, there was in the couple’s rampage much that was peculiarly American, not foreign. Farook, indeed, was a U.S. citizen, born in Illinois. His wife had a green card, a document allowing her to live and work here legally. And while investigators are still searching for a motive for their homicidal impulses, the attack had many of the hallmarks of the quintessential American mass shooting.
No matter what inspired the couple, whether Islamist extremism or perceived workplace grievances, they were mimicking countless other American mass shooters who find some twisted glory in gunning down other citizens — strangers, passers-by, co-workers, moviegoers, schoolchildren. This is a peculiarly American phenomenon, a homegrown form of madness.
And it centers around an irrational — a completely unhinged — embrace of firearms. Using almost any definition of “mass shooting,” the United States has more than any other country. (Most researchers discount homicides that are gang-related or have robbery as a motive. They also leave out domestic violence, counting only those incidents that occur in public places.) And staging them has only grown more popular. Mother Jones magazine, which has analyzed data for the past 33 years, concludes that there have been more mass shootings in the U.S. since 2005 than in the preceding 23 years combined.
According to University of Alabama criminal justice professor Adam Lankford, we account for less than 5 percent of the world’s population but 31 percent of its mass shootings. From his study of other countries, he has concluded that easy access to guns is a prominent factor.
But a significant portion of the population — and of conservative political leadership — refuses, just flat-out refuses, to see any link between the proliferation of firearms and the increase in mass shootings. Indeed, the gun lobby insists — and I couldn’t make this up — that the country would be safer if there were even more guns in every home, automobile, school, church, synagogue and nightclub.
The lunacy that pervades our worship of the Second Amendment — our warped reading of it, anyway — is so wildly perverse that it eclipses our fear of terrorism. Here’s what the gun lobby has insisted upon: Even if Farook had been on an official terrorist watch list, he still would have been legally permitted to purchase the semiautomatic assault-type weapons he allegedly used to gun down his victims. Yes, you read that right.
And GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina repeated that bit of gun-lobby gospel in the wake of the San Bernardino massacre: Even people on the terror watch list should be allowed to purchase firearms. There you have it — a tightly woven web of crazy that logic simply cannot penetrate.
Whatever motivated Farook and his wife, easy access to high-powered firearms allowed them to kill quickly and efficiently. Indeed, that’s the common element in the epidemic of mass shootings that has shaken the country. Yet that’s the one element we refuse to do anything about.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, December 5, 2015
“Can Marco Rubio Even Win A Primary?”: The Rubio Problem No One Is Talking About—Yet
Everybody I know, I mean everybody, thinks Marco Rubio is the strongest Republican candidate. Yes, there’s a debate about how strong. Some say he’d beat Hillary Clinton, some say that what with some of the extreme positions he’s taken so far in this race, he’d be hard-pressed to do much better than Mitt Romney’s 206 electoral votes plus maybe his own Florida. So there’s a debate about that. But there ain’t much debate that he’s the, shall we say, least unelectable of the lot.
But here’s the thing. To win the general, he has to win the primary. And on this count, as things stand, he’s hurting. I mean he’s in big trouble. Ed Kilgore of New York magazine had a post about this earlier this week, but this is worth digging into in more detail.
Start with the first four big races—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. Rubio is behind in all of them. In three of them, seemingly way behind.
How often does it happen that a presumed frontrunner can lose the first four contests and stay in the race? On the Republican side, it’s never happened. In 2012, Mitt Romney won New Hampshire, and with respect to Iowa, on the night itself, we all thought he’d won that (the state was called later for Rick Santorum, but Mittens got the mo). Romney also won Nevada. In 2008, John McCain took New Hampshire and walloped the competition in South Carolina. Before that, George W. Bush won early states, and Bob Dole (not New Hampshire, but Iowa), and Bush Sr., and so on.
The opposite—a presumed frontrunner blowing off or losing the first few because he’s going to make a roaring comeback starting in state X—never seems to work out. The obvious example here is Rudy Giuliani in 2008. He skipped the first primaries—even though he’d been running second in New Hampshire as late as early December—and bet everything on Florida. But, largely because he’d been such a zero in the early contests (he ended up a distant fourth in the Granite State), he tanked in Florida and withdrew.
In the modern primary era, which started in 1976, almost no one has won a major-party nomination without winning at least one early contest. The one partial exception here is Bill Clinton. But those were very specific circumstances.
First of all, an Iowan was in the race, Tom Harkin, so Clinton and the other Democrats didn’t even bother to compete there, and Harkin won 77 percent of the vote. Second, Paul Tsongas was almost a favorite son in New Hampshire, since he was from Lowell, Massachusetts, right on the border. Third, Clinton was enduring his Gennifer Flowers-draft dodger baptism of fire at the time of New Hampshire, so when he finished a strong second, that was under the circumstances just about as good as a win and enabled him to carry on, arguing that he’d endured the bad press and came out alive. Fourth, Clinton led in most of the national polls then, so he was more able to absorb an early blow or two than Rubio, who is tied for a pretty distant third in national polls. And fifth, everyone knew then that the Southern states, where Clinton was going to romp and rack up delegates, were just around the corner.
So there is basically no precedent for losing a bunch of early primaries and carrying on, let alone winning the nomination. Now, let’s look at some of Rubio’s numbers.
In Iowa today, he’s a distant fourth, with around 12 percent to Donald Trump’s 27 percent. New Hampshire is the one early state where he’s not off the boards completely, but even there he’s not in great shape: He’s second with 12.5 percent to Trump’s 26 percent. In South Carolina, he’s basically tied for third with Cruz, but again, both have less than half of Trump’s 29 percent. Nevada is less obsessively polled than the first three, but the latest one, from mid-October, has Trump miles ahead with 38 percent. Rubio is at 7.
So that’s the big four. If anything, after that, it gets worse for Rubio. Here is the official GOP primary schedule. Here is the most comprehensive list of polling from every state that I’ve seen. Match them up against each other and see for yourself. But because I’m a nice guy, I’ll give you a little taste for free.
After Nevada comes the big date of March 1, Super Tuesday, when 12 states have primaries or caucuses. Most of the big ones are in the South—Texas, Georgia, Virginia. In Georgia, Rubio is right now a distant fourth. He’s also a distant fourth in Texas, where Trump and Cruz are tied for first. In Virginia, things look better: He’s only a distant third.
As for the other nine March 1 states, Rubio leads in none of them and looks to be better positioned in only two, Massachusetts and Colorado. Vermont Republicans are also voting that day, and I could find no polling of Vermont Republicans at all (but they’re so crucial!). So according to today’s polling, the best—best!—Rubio can hope for coming out of Super Tuesday is three wins in the first 16 contests. And two of those wins would be in Massachusetts and Vermont, two states where he or any Republican is going to lose next November by at least 25 points. If you’re trying to tell conservatives in the South and Midwest that you’re their man, it’s literally better to lose those two states. Colorado would be the one state that Rubio could claim as actually meaning something, but even if he overtook Trump there, he’d be 1-13 (tossing out the deep blue states). In the real red states—Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Idaho—as of now, Trump is the guy who’s killing it.
You might be thinking three things. First, well, how good is that polling? All right—some of it is old. October, September, in a few cases even earlier. Ben Carson is still holding his own in some of these state polls, and presumably he’s slipped. But the thing about Carson’s slippage is that we don’t have any reason to think Carson defectors are transferring to Rubio. They’re probably moving to Trump and Cruz at least as much as to Rubio.
And you might also be thinking, well, what about the delegate count, because it all comes down to delegates? OK then, here is a little info on each state’s delegate allocation process. Most states have proportional allocation according to vote share, or they’re proportional with a complicated trigger, or they’re a hybrid. It’s all complex, but the long and short of it is that you can’t keep finishing fourth with 7 percent and expect to be collecting enough delegates to give you any leverage or juice.
And this leads us into the third thought you might be thinking, which is what about Florida? Here’s where Rubio has a reed of a chance to save his skin. Florida votes on March 15. So does Ohio. Interestingly, both are winner-take-all delegate allocation. If somehow Rubio were to win both of those, that’s 165 delegates in one night (1,237 are needed to win), and a huge dose of momentum.
But but but…26 states vote before those two. That’s an awfully long time to expect to be hanging around if you keep finishing third and fourth. And, oh, here’s the current polling in Florida and Ohio: In Florida, Trump leads Rubio by 36 to 18 percent, and in the most recent Ohio poll, Rubio’s in sixth place at 7 percent.
For such a good general election candidate, Rubio is looking like a pretty lousy primary candidate! How can he survive this? He probably can’t. He needs a couple sugar daddies to keep him alive, who don’t mind underwriting a series of out-of-the-money finishes. And what he really needs is for Trump to collapse. If Trump falls apart, Rubio is in the game. If he doesn’t, it’s very hard to see Rubio’s numbers changing much, and if they don’t, it’s just not in the cards for someone finishing third and fourth repeatedly to hang in for that long.
Should make for an interesting January between those two.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 4, 2015
“The ‘Stone The Homos’ Guy”: Gay Sex-Obsessed Pastor Loves On Trump
Pastor James David Manning sat in front of a microphone at his cherry-red desk, a cartoon rendering of Harlem serving as the backdrop in his makeshift TV studio. He wore a gray windowpane three-piece suit, a purple shirt with a white collar that his double chin spilled onto, and a shiny, gold tie.
“I wanna take the time to address those who are supporters of one Mr. Donald Trump,” he said into the camera for his latest installment of The Manning Report. “One of the wisest, most patient, humble, gracious—yet strongest leader I have ever encountered in all the days of my life.”
Manning likes Trump, in case he didn’t make it clear, and it’s not hard to understand why.
Manning likes Trump for the same reason Alex Jones and his ilk like Trump. Manning likes Trump for the same reason white supremacists like Trump.
Manning likes Trump because Trump hates, just like he does.
Trump hates enough that Manning formally endorsed his candidacy on Monday, during a meeting at Trump Tower with other black pastors that Trump had courted. Trump seems to be under the impression that befriending Men of God like Manning is going to make him seem like less of a racist.
Maybe Trump should’ve Googled him.
“I realize that I am a lightning rod,” Manning had admitted on Wednesday’s episode of The Manning Report. “I use language people don’t like. I call people faggots. I call people niggers. I call people white trash. I call people crackers. And I will continue to. I’m not going to stop.”
“But I recognize that because of that, one could easily say, ‘Well, you know, Trump is aligned with James David Manning and James David Manning is known for hating black people or white people,” he said. “But that doesn’t stop me from offering my support, or more specifically, from offering a word of enlightenment to the people in the Harlem Community.”
Pastor James David Manning runs ATLAH Worldwide Missionary Church on 36 West 123rd Street in New York City. ATLAH, which stands for “All the Land Anointed Holy,” is more hate group than parish. Outside the red-bricked building is a hexagonal sign that is used to send messages like, “WHEN THE HOMOS BULLIED THE POOR AND NEEDY IN SODOM LIKE THEY DO IN HARLEM JESUS FIRE & BRIM – STONED THEM” or “OBAMA HAS RELEASED THE HOMO DEMONS ON THE BLACK MAN. LOOK OUT BLACK WOMAN. A WHITE HOMO MAY TAKE YOUR MAN.”
He thinks President Obama is literally “the son of Satan” and that gay people should be stoned to death. Starbucks, he says, flavors their coffee with “sodomites’ semen.”
I sat down with Manning in September 2014 for a wide-ranging interview. I learned that he is as obsessed with publicity as he is gay sex. His office, where he films his YouTube videos, is so jam-packed with lights and wires and cameras that you can barely walk in it. He proudly advertises the fact that he is known in the media (or, the “dung-head media” to quote Manning) as the “Hate Pastor.”
He explained to me, with all the certainty in the world, that homosexuality is wrong because of science.
“Everything in the universe condemns homosexuality,” he said. “There’s opposites in the universe. There’s light, there’s dark. There’s moon, there’s suns around it. There’s planets and there’s galaxies. The same basic physics principles that exist here on earth exist in the universe. You have the atom, which has the neutron, the electron, the proton. So through that process, energy is developed. This is pretty consistent throughout the entire universe. The only thing in the universe that believes that one of one thing is sufficient are homosexuals.”
At the time, Manning sounded nuts. Now, what he said sounds like something Trump or Ben Carson might say at a rally and double down on in a Meet the Press appearance.
Manning’s secretary told me Wednesday that he didn’t have anything to say to me about Trump, and that I should just watch The Manning Report to understand why he supports him.
Two weeks after Trump announced his candidacy in June, Manning released an installment of The Manning Report titled, “More Power To Donald Trump.”
At the time, Trump was just rising in the polls, and Manning said he could explain why. “What is happening now with the liberal media—they are all Obama-ized, they are all demonized, they are all demons,” Manning said. Trump was the only one who knew the Truth and wasn’t afraid to say it.
“Donald Trump, the reason why people are resonating with Donald Trump is because Donald Trump is not afraid of Obama,” he said.
“Donald Trump is the only person that is running for president who knows that Obama is a flat-out communist, socialist, not born in America unconstitutional. Everybody knows that and that’s why Donald Trump can win the presidency if he wants it.”
After his meeting with Trump, he bragged on The Manning Report, “I sat at the table with Donald Trump on yesterday,” (on yesterday), “Let me tell you what I perceived about this man: Donald Trump is a gracious man. He sat for two and a half hours with black church people—black pastors, from different denominations—and kept his composure never once in the midst of them begging him to bow down to black people, never once lost his composure. Two and a half hours patiently and he expressed interest in what every person—if someone said something, he was interested! I’ve got to tell you that takes a lot when you listen to idiots and stupid people! When they’re espousing stupid stuff!”
To show his devotion, Manning said, “I want to start a campaign of Harlem For Trump is what I wanna do…His message is what Harlem needs to hear.”
Asked if Trump had heard Manning’s message, and if he, too, believes Obama is literally Satan’s spawn, his campaign didn’t reply.
Tune in next week, when Trump spots a UFO.
By: Olivia Nuzzi, The Daily Beast, December 3, 2015
“Unleashing Common Jewish Stereotypes”: Donald Trump To Republican Jews; You Can’t Buy Me
Donald Trump’s speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition this morning was a sober-minded and detailed analysis of the security threats Israel faces and the most effective way to eliminate the Islamic State.
Haha, just kidding!
He spent most of the time talking about how Jews are good negotiators and then saying they wouldn’t support him because they couldn’t buy him. A wild, stereotype-filled ride from start to finish, yes, indeed.
The Republican presidential frontrunner kicked off his talk by doing the obvious thing and talking up his poll numbers, as one does, and saying Obama “is the worst thing that’s ever happened to Israel.”
He also sought to connect with the Jewish audience by touting his business experience.
“I’m a negotiator like you folks,” he said.
Like other candidates, he criticized the president’s negotiating abilities on the Iran deal. But unlike other candidates, he suggested the president’s decision not to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” means he is likely harboring a dark secret.
“I’ll tell you what, we have a president that refuses to use the term,” Trump said. “He refuses to say—there’s something going on with him that we don’t know about.”
The line drew immediate, noisy applause. It isn’t the first time Trump has floated curious theories about Obama’s origins; he became a Tea Party darling by vociferously questioning whether the president was born in America. He told Fox News in 2011 that secret religious beliefs might explain the president’s alleged caginess about his birthplace (Hawaii, btw).
Perhaps the most curious part of the speech—which is really saying something—came when he suggested the Jewish audience wouldn’t support him because they couldn’t control him through donations.
“I don’t want your money, therefore you’re probably not gonna support me,” he said.
“Trump doesn’t want our money, therefore we can’t—” he continued, launching into an imagined dramatic inner monologue of what the audience must be thinking, “Even though he’s better than all these guys, even though he’s gonna do more for Israel than anybody else, even though Bibi Netanyahu asked me to do a commercial for him and I did and he won his race, I was very happy.”
That sentence, you will notice, includes both the first and third persons—really terrific. His mention of Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, drew more applause. And he didn’t really make his point.
But a few minutes later in the speech, he found himself back at the same idea: mulling over whether the audience would be able to support him even if he didn’t take campaign contributions that would make them his assumed puppet masters.
“You know, you’re not gonna support me because I don’t want your money,” he said, drawing audience laughter.
The stereotype of Jews using their money to insidiously manipulate global politics is an old one, as Anti-Defamation League founder Abraham Foxman detailed in his book Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype. He notes that anti-Israel Middle Eastern groups often use the ugly stereotype “to claim that Israel’s survival reflects not its moral status as a nation among nations but rather the manipulation of world opinion and, especially, of U.S. policy by wealthy, self-interested Jews.”
Later in his ramble, Trump suggested Jeb Bush’s acceptance of campaign contributions means his donors control him.
“He raised $125 million, which means he’s controlled totally, totally controlled, by the people who gave him the money,” he said.
This has been a theme throughout the mogul’s campaign. He’s argued repeatedly that other candidates are beholden to their donors and won’t prioritize the country’s best interests because of their muddied loyalties.
Trump, without saying it directly, made it clear that his loyalties will remain where they have always been: to himself.
By: Betsy Woodrull, The Daily Beast, December 3, 2015
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