“Donald Trump Vs. Ben Carson; Something Very Ugly Here”: Violent Criminal? Or Pathological Liar? We Don’t Need Either As President
Donald Trump is not being at all subtle in his latest wave of attacks on his current main opponent, Dr. Ben Carson, and it’s triggered yet another round of pundits wondering if The Donald has finally gone too far and crashed his campaign. But recall what has happened every other time people said Trump went overboard, whether he was tearing down Mexican immigrants, John McCain and POWs, or Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly: No matter what, he just keeps rising in the polls.
Carson has built up a following among conservative, evangelical Christian (and largely white) voters in Iowa with his tales of moral redemption from a violent childhood, and The Donald is now setting out to depict Carson as dangerous — and maybe even inhuman.
Carson’s violent behavior in his adolescence is key to the salvation element so integral to his narrative — though lately the press has been inquiring whether the doctor may have fabricated or at least somewhat exaggerated those anecdotes. So it probably helps Trump that Carson has already spiked the ball for him, by putting himself in the uncomfortable position of insisting to the media that, yes, he was prone to violence as a youth.
Thus, Trump sees Carson in the predicament of being either a serial fabulist — and Trump has enjoyed playing up this possibility, too — or the violent menace that Trump wants to paint him as.
So, from that candidate who first made his political mark broadcasting conspiracy theories regarding President Obama’s birthplace, and kicked off his campaign by railing against immigrants, here is the message in brief: Ben Carson isn’t one of the good ones.
“He’s said in the book — and I haven’t seen it — I know it’s in the book that he’s got a pathological temper or temperament. That’s a big problem, because you don’t cure that,” Trump said during an interview Thursday on CNN. “That ‘s like — you know, I could say, as an example: child molester. You don’t cure these people. You don’t cure a child molester. There’s no cure for it. ‘Pathological,’ there’s no cure for that. Now I didn’t say it — he said it in his book.”
The Donald wasn’t done yet, though — far from it. At his rally Thursday night in Iowa, during an epic 90-plus-minute stump speech, Trump upped the ante on grotesque sexual imagery, when he hinted at a literal castration of awful people like Carson.
“If you’re pathological, there’s no cure for that, folks. Okay? There’s no cure for that. And I did one of the shows today, and I don’t want to say what I said — but I’ll tell you, anyway. I said that if you’re a child molester, a sick puppy, you’re a child molester, there’s no cure for that. There’s only one cure, we don’t want to talk about that cure — that’s the ultimate cure. No, there’s two — there’s death, and the other thing.”
Initially, Carson tried to take the high road while speaking to reporters Friday morning, during an appearance at Bob Jones University, a center of religious-right politics. (Note: Bob Jones University did not admit African-American students until the 1970s, as they felt the squeeze of the new civil rights laws — but then prohibited any interracial dating, until changing that policy under political pressure during the 2000 presidential campaign.)
“Now that he’s completed his gratuitous attack, why don’t we press on and deal with the real issues. You know, the reason that I”m in this race is because there are some real, profound issues that affect the trajectory of our country right now. That is what the American people are concerned about,” Carson said.
But then when he did attempt any substantive rebuttal, Carson fell utterly flat.
“I’m hopeful that maybe his advisors will help him to understand the word ‘pathological,’” Carson said, “and recognize that does not denote ‘incurable’ — it’s not the same. It simply is an adjective that describes something that is highly abnormal, and something that fortunately I’ve been able to delivered from for a half a century now.”
In sum, Carson’s response to Trump saying that the doctor is incurably “pathological” was to didactically explain that such a person could be cured!
It wasn’t exactly the kind of response that would make Trump back down. Later on Friday, Trump’s campaign posted a Friday the 13th-themed horror-movie video about Carson, and the stories concerning whether or not Carson was really as angry a young man as he’s made himself out to be.
“Violent criminal? Or pathological liar? We don’t need either as president.”
By: Eric Kleefeld, The National Memo, November 13, 2015
“Why Is Trump Still Talking?”: The Mad Men Throwback, Treating Women As Nothing More Than A Distraction
When the Republican presidential debate began Tuesday evening in Milwaukee, I was still in my car heading home, so I listened to the first part on satellite radio.
As Richard Nixon learned after his 1960 televised debate with Jack Kennedy, listening to a debate without the distraction of participants’ facial expressions changes how we hear them. We tend to focus more on substance. For Nixon, this was a good thing. For Donald Trump, not so much.
A quick aside for political junkies: In 2006, Meet the Press host Tim Russert walked into the show’s greenroom and told my husband and me why Nixon had become such a wet mop of a mess in that same studio during that debate. Bobby Kennedy, knowing of Nixon’s propensity for sweating, arrived early to the studio to turn up the thermostat. Nixon didn’t stand a chance. Remember that story the next time someone goes on and on about how debates were always such an honorable tradition before this circus came to town.
Driving along the streets of Cleveland, I heard Trump without seeing the usual pouty expressions and ubiquitous shrugging of his shoulders. Whenever he spouted in his meandering know-it-all voice, I thought, “Whom does he remind me of?”
I didn’t have the answer until after I walked through the door and made it to the TV in time to catch Trump complaining about Carly Fiorina. She had interjected her opinion about Ronald Reagan and Reykjavik before Rand Paul had finished talking. Her repeated behavior of stepping on the comments of others was no different from that of her male colleagues on the stage. Trump singled her out anyway.
“Why does she keep interrupting everybody?” he said, waving his left arm in her direction. “Boy, terrible.”
A smattering of laughter and applause preceded loud booing from the audience, and for a fleeting moment, I identified with Fiorina. That feeling quickly passed, but I had finally figured out whom — or, more accurately, what — Trump represents to a lot of his fans. He’s that other Donald, albeit a less classy and certainly less sophisticated version of him. He’s the Mad Men throwback, a Donald Draper wannabe.
Even if you’ve never seen an episode of the AMC show, if you are over 50 or wish we still lived in the ’50s, you know the type I mean. He’s the guy who thinks women are either a prop or a problem, and he is incapable of hiding his contempt for women who think otherwise.
His comments about Rosie O’Donnell in the first debate were such an egregious example of misogyny that it was easy for some to dismiss him as a dinosaur. His public display of disgust for fellow presidential candidate Fiorina, however, revealed a more sinister side. Not only does he think it’s ridiculous that he has to compete with this, this woman but also he assumes plenty of others agree with him.
If this were Trump in a vacuum, we could dismiss him as the summer replacement for the prime-time show returning this fall. But he continues to poll as one of the top two presidential candidates for Republican voters, which means a lot of people are, at the very least, getting a kick out of him. They either share or don’t care about Trump’s attitudes toward women.
This doesn’t surprise a lot of women in my generation, who long ago lost count of how many times we’ve been told to pipe down. Certainly, it’s no news to my daughters’ generation, either. The stories they tell.
Our youngest daughter is weeks away from giving birth. She has started sharing with me comments from male strangers and men she barely knows. They point to her belly and let her know she’s pregnant and feel free to tell her she should be napping, not working at her job. They feel free to ask her whether she’s going to nurse, too, as if her pregnancy has given them permission to discuss her breasts.
These men are old enough to know better and way too young to claim an elderly generation’s habits. This is all part and parcel of the same thing. They are Trump, multiplied, and to them, he is a godsend. He’s rich and powerful, and he’s made it popular again to say it out loud — to treat women as nothing more than a distraction and an invitation to misbehave. In that way, we women are no different to Trump from the 11 million Mexicans he wants to march right out of here.
As we lean in to the 2016 campaign, I leave you with this, from Don Draper: “Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”
From your lips, mad man.
By: Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist; The National Memo, November 12, 2015
“Trump’s ‘Operation Wetback’ Delusion”: No, Donald, Most Americans Want Something Very Simple; It’s Called Immigration Reform
I don’t know about you, but I think it says something interesting that in the eight presidential campaigns I’ve covered and written about, this is the first time I’ve seen the need to weave The Daily Stormer into my normal news diet.
But how could one not, with Donald Trump still walking among us? The neo-Nazi Stormer has loved The Donald ever since the famous Mexican rapists speech, so when Trump invoked Dwight Eisenhower last night as the last president who understood how to get those people out of the country, I knew immediately which trusted news source I wanted to go to first.
James Kirkpatrick’s write-up did not disappoint. He opened his dispatch with the complaint (legitimate, it must be said) that Marco Rubio has now walked off the stage of four debates without having been asked to utter a word about his immigration reform support of 2012. When he turned to Trump, the Stormer correspondent first sniffed about the candidate’s “usual lack of polish.”
There followed a string of Trump criticisms, but then came the bolt of thunder: “But none of that matters as Trump stood strong even while being aggressively pressed on immigration… This represents a milestone in the immigration debate. At a stroke, Trump demolished the argument that deporting illegals is not feasible. The only question now is whether we have the will to do it.”
By now, you’ve read all about how Trump was referring, albeit not by name, to Operation Wetback, the program undertaken by the Eisenhower administration in conjunction with the Mexican government to send workers who’d come to America illegally back to the home country. Mexico wanted them back because it was then an under-industrialized country that needed all of its able-bodied men.
This isn’t the first time Trump has mentioned Operation Wetback without mentioning it. He did it on 60 Minutes back in September. At the time, the pro-immigration reform group America’s Voice put out a white paper explaining what Operation Wetback was and what bringing it back would mean. The long and short of it was that we quite simply rounded people up and sent them back at gunpoint. It was ugly business. In the summer of 1955, hundreds of Mexicans we’d sent back got left in the high desert to die.
Would we really do something like that today? No, we wouldn’t. Those were different times. Eisenhower’s attorney general was a fellow named Herbert Brownell. A Nebraska native who went East to Yale Law and practiced at Lord Day & Lord in New York, Brownell was a cultivated man and, as far as I knew until recently, a supporter of civil rights who endorsed Ike’s move to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. But with respect to the “wetbacks,” Brownell endorsed shooting a few border crossers on site to send a message to the rest of them. I don’t think even Trump’s AG would say something like that.
But the main point isn’t even that we wouldn’t do it today. The main point is that we couldn’t even if we had a president who wanted to. In the 1950s, most of the Mexicans in the United States illegally, in fact virtually all of them, were single males (or maybe married men, but alone) who came here to work. So they were solo players. And they were typically located in only a handful of places—Los Angeles, San Francisco, some other cities, the border area itself.
Today, undocumented immigrants are every kind of person, and they live everywhere. “It’s not like today you’re talking about some easily identifiable group of mostly single men,” Frank Sharry of America’s Voice told me Wednesday. “It’s all kinds of people fully integrated into American life.”
The average time living in the United States among the 11.3 or so million here without papers, says Sharry, is 13 years. They’ve put down roots. One third are homeowners! They’re fathers, mothers, grandparents. And many or even most families involved here are what they call “mixed status”: maybe the husband has a green card, the wife doesn’t, two kids came over the border with them, but two other kids were born here and are citizens. What do you do with these people? The United States of America is going to start breaking up loving families? What I do mean start? We’ve done it. It wasn’t one of our more glorious chapters. It was called slavery.
It’s a practical impossibility. And that’s to say nothing of the mountains of lawsuits that would quickly pile up. Oh, and also public opinion, which strongly supports legalization over deportation. Sharry says the ratio is about four-to-one among the general public, but that even among Republicans, it’s 60 percent for legalization, 20 percent who would prefer deportation but don’t think it’s practical, and the remaining 20 percent who are over in the Trump-Stormer corner.
No, Donald, most Americans want something very simple and straightforward. It’s called immigration reform. With a path to citizenship for people who follow the new rules. That’s what America wants, but that’s what America cannot get, because of the yahoo right wing and because of cowards and milksops like Marco Rubio, who are even worse. At least the yahoos are straightforward in their stupidity and hatred. Rubio, who first tried to ride immigration reform to the White House and is now trying to ride opposition to same to the identical destination, should be made to answer for it. On this, at least, the Stormer correspondent and I agree.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 11, 2015
“He’ll Be A Better Boy And Show Up For School”: How Jeb Bush And Donald Trump Have Put A Surging Marco Rubio On Defense
Senator Marco Rubio seems to be deftly swatting away attacks from rivals Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, but the barrage coming his way over missed Senate votes, immigration reform, and mismanagement of personal finances have prompted him to quietly fine-tune his campaign as he rises in the polls and picks up big donors.
Moments before he formally filed for the presidential ballot Wednesday in Concord, New Hampshire, Trump told reporters that Rubio, who posted a strong third-place showing in two national polls released this week, has “very big issues” with his finances—specifically, having put thousands of dollars in personal expenses on a GOP American Express card while in the Florida state house—and is “very weak on illegal immigration. As you know, if it’s up to Marco Rubio people can just pour into the country.”
A few hours later, some 20 miles away at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, Rubio told reporters after a question-and-answer session with students that he’d release currently undisclosed charges on the American Express card “in the next few weeks.” That represents a new concession: in 2010, Rubio told a Florida newspaper he wouldn’t release the statements.
Rubio also toughened his position on immigration, making clear for the first time he’d end President Barack Obama’s program to shield young undocumented “Dreamers” from deportation by stopping new enrollments. Obama’s program is designed to temporarily protect people who were brought to the U.S. by their parents when they were children.
Asked by Bloomberg if he’d end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA) program even if Congress doesn’t pass immigration reform, Rubio responded, “Yes, it will have to end… It cannot be the permanent policy if the United States.” That’s a harder stance than in April, when Rubio left some room to preserve DACA until legislative action: “I hope it will end because of some reforms to the immigration laws,” he told Univision’s Jorge Ramos.
Rubio’s comments Wednesday about ending the executive-level protections so-called “Dreamers” led to a torrent of criticism from Democrat-aligned groups and immigration advocates, including a rebuke from Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. “We should not put 650,000+ promising young people at risk for deportation,” she tweeted, referring to the number that have gained temporary deportation reprieve and work permits. “Sen. Rubio is wrong on this.” The issue is important because the next president can continue or end DACA, set up by Obama in 2012, with the stroke of a pen. Rubio is boxed in by growing criticism from conservatives who suspect him of being soft on immigration because of his 2013 effort to pass a bill that included a path for undocumented immigrants to gain legal status.
“The gang of eight bill—that’s bullcrap,” said Michelle McManus of Bow, New Hampshire, referring to the legislation that Rubio co-wrote. She said she’ll vote for Trump and cannot trust Rubio again. “You blow it once and that’s it.”
While Bush’s now-famous confrontation with his former protégé in the third debate over having the Senate’s worst voting-attendance record appeared to backfire on stage (“It bombed so badly,” one Bush backer confided), it nonetheless appears to have led to a course correction on Rubio’s part.
Two days after the debate, Rubio canceled a scheduled campaign event in Council Bluffs, Iowa, so he could return to Washington to cast a 3 a.m. vote on the budget deal. (He voted no, but it passed.) On Tuesday, he stuck around for two afternoon votes even as he had a fundraiser scheduled in New York later that day. Appearing on CNN the next day, he countered a report that he “hates” his current job, calling it “an incredible honor to serve in the United States Senate.” The first-term senator, who’s giving up his seat after 2016 to run for president, has missed 40 percent of votes since April, including one on Pentagon funding Thursday while filing for the New Hampshire ballot and giving a speech calling for a “21st century” military.
At a packed town hall Wednesday evening in Nashua, New Hampshire, a man confronted Rubio on missing votes and asked, “Why not resign from the Senate?” The questioner said that would allow Rubio to focus on his presidential campaign. Rubio, citing constituent services as the “most important” part of his job, rejected the man’s call. “I don’t actually hate being in the Senate,” Rubio added. “I’m frustrated with the Senate.”
Wednesday on Fox News, the senator hit back at Trump’s ongoing attacks on his immigration record, arguing that “Donald was a supporter of amnesty and of the DREAM Act, and he changed his position on those issues just to run for president.” On Thursday he told reporters that Trump’s attacks on his finances were “ironic” coming from “the only person who’s running for president that’s ever declared a bankruptcy.” Trump makes a point of saying that he has never filed for personal bankruptcy, though his businesses have.
Even though Rubio, however subtly, has appeared to feel compelled to respond to the attacks from Trump and Bush, his backers don’t seem to be fazed.
“Donald Trump will attack anybody just to get the spotlight. And Jeb Bush is frustrated with his 3 or 4 percent,” said Ray Younghans, a Republican who drove to Nashua from Orange, Massachusetts to see Rubio and is strongly considering him. “They’re just attacking to draw attention to themselves.”
To some voters at Rubio rallies, the attacks smack of desperation.
“I guess Donald Trump sees Rubio as the top force that might survive. And I think Jeb doesn’t know what he’s doing right now,” said Kevin Sowyrda, a 51-year-old teacher from Nashua as he held a Rubio placard. Though he’s not personally bothered by Rubio’s missed votes and faors him above all Republicans, Sowyrda said, “I guess the effect of the attacks is he’ll be a better boy and show up for school.”
By: Sahil Kapur, Bloomberg Politics, November 5, 2015
“Stretching Facts To Fit His Preconceptions”: Only Softballs? Transcript Shows Trump Lied About Democratic Debate
By now you may have noticed that Donald Trump exists in his very own reality — a pleasing world where the Mexicans will pay us to build a border wall, where industrial nations will capitulate instantly to his trade demands, and where global climate change is merely a myth “created by and for the Chinese.” Lunatic as The Donald’s confident assertions often may be, not all of them are as easily debunked as certain remarks he made at today’s press conference in New York to introduce his new book.
Discussing the presidential debates, Trump complained more than once about the free ride that Hillary Clinton supposedly enjoyed at the last Democratic debate, which was televised by CNN and moderated by Anderson Cooper. According to the real estate mogul, the questioning by Cooper and his colleagues “was very unfair because Hillary Clinton was given all softballs. They didn’t ask her one tough question! They didn’t talk about the foundation, they didn’t talk about the emails….She only got softballs, that’s all she got…Hillary had only softballs, all night long. ‘Here, Hillary, hit this one over the park.’”
That struck me as a pandering and distorted account of the debate — so I checked.
It is true that Cooper didn’t inquire about the Clinton Foundation, but the questions he did ask (reproduced below without Clinton’s answers, which can be found in the full transcript here) indicate just how far Trump is willing to stretch facts to fit his preconceptions. Not only did Cooper pose several tough questions to her, from the very beginning of the debate, but he seized every chance to pillory Hillary in framing questions he put to the other candidates. (And he did ask her — and the others — about the damned emails.)
Unlike the Republicans, she spared us the post-debate whining.
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, I want to start with you. Plenty of politicians evolve on issues, but even some Democrats believe you change your positions based on political expediency. You were against same-sex marriage. Now you’re for it. You defended President Obama’s immigration policies. Now you say they’re too harsh. You supported his trade deal dozen of times. You even called it the “gold standard”. Now, suddenly, last week, you’re against it. Will you say anything to get elected?
COOPER [following up]: Secretary Clinton, though, with all due respect, the question is really about political expediency. Just in July, New Hampshire, you told the crowd you’d, quote, “take a back seat to no one when it comes to progressive values.” Last month in Ohio, you said you plead guilty to, quote, “being kind of moderate and center.” Do you change your political identity based on who you’re talking to?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, Russia, they’re challenging the U.S. in Syria. According to U.S. intelligence, they’ve lied about who they’re bombing. You spearheaded the reset with Russia. Did you underestimate the Russians, and as president, what would your response to Vladimir Putin be right now in Syria?
COOPER [to Martin O’Malley]: Secretary Clinton voted to authorize military force in Iraq, supported more troops in Afghanistan. As Secretary of State, she wanted to arm Syrian rebels and push for the bombing of Libya. Is she too quick to use military force?
COOPER [following up insistently]: Does she — does she want to use military force too rapidly?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, on the campaign trail, Governor [sic] Webb has said that he would never have used military force in Libya and that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was inevitable. Should you have seen that attack coming?
COOPER [following up]: But American citizens did lose their lives in Benghazi.
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, you are going to be testifying before Congress next week about your e-mails. For the last eight months, you haven’t been able to put this issue behind you. You dismissed it; you joked about it; you called it a mistake. What does that say about your ability to handle far more challenging crises as president?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, Secretary Clinton, with all due respect, it’s a little hard — I mean, isn’t it a little bit hard to call this just a partisan issue? There’s an FBI investigation, and President Obama himself just two days ago said this is a legitimate issue.
COOPER [after Bernie Sanders dismissed the email controversy]: It’s obviously very popular in this crowd, and it’s — hold on.
(APPLAUSE) I know that plays well in this room. But I got to be honest, Governor Chafee, for the record, on the campaign trail, you’ve said a different thing [challenging Clinton’s ethics]. You said this is a huge issue. Standing here in front of Secretary Clinton, are you willing to say that to her face?
COOPER: Governor O’Malley, you expressed concern on the campaign trail that the Democratic Party is, and I quote, “being defined by Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.”You heard her answer, do you still feel that way tonight?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, how would you address this [income inequality] issue? In all candor, you and your husband are part of the one percent. How can you credibly represent the views of the middle class?
COOPER: Secretary Clinton, Governor O’Malley says the presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth between two royal families. This year has been the year of the outsider in politics, just ask Bernie Sanders. Why should Democrats embrace an insider like yourself?
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 3, 2015
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