“Bald-Faced And Blatant Lies”: Debate Fallout; Even Conservatives Are Appalled By Republican Mendacity
For people who so often accuse Hillary Clinton of lying, the Republican presidential candidates seem to feel perfectly free to bend, twist, and shred the truth at will. Unsurprisingly, that is just what several of them were caught doing in their free-for-all CNBC debate. They prevaricated about themselves, their policies, and their opponents, without blinking an eye – and for the most part, they got away with it.
Do nice people tell self-serving lies? Perhaps they do, because it was terribly nice Ben Carson who uttered one of the most blatant whoppers of the evening.
To loud booing from the partisan audience, moderator Carl Quintanilla asked the soft-spoken neurosurgeon about his long and lucrative involvement with Mannatech, a nutritional supplement manufacturer that has been cited for false health claims for its “glyconutrients.” (How bad was Mannatech? Bad enough to provoke a fraud action brought by Greg Abbott, the former Texas attorney general who is now that state’s very conservative governor.)
“I didn’t have an involvement with [Mannatech],” retorted Carson. “That is total propaganda, and this is what happens in our society. Total propaganda.”
What Carson’s noisy fans probably didn’t know is that this was no “liberal media” setup. The doctor’s decade-long relationship with Mannatech – which turns out to have included a written contract, paid speeches, and a video endorsement on the company’s website – was exposed last year by Jim Geraghty of National Review, the flagship publication of American conservatism. Following the debate, Geraghty slammed Carson for “bald-faced lies” and “blatantly lying” about his relationship with the supplement firm.
Equally mendacious about his own personal history was Marco Rubio, who “won” the debate according to many observers. When Becky Quick of CNBC asked a predictable question about his checked financial affairs, which have included foreclosures, liquidations, phony expense accounts, and other embarrassments, the senator from Florida shot back: “You just listed a litany of discredited attacks from Democrats and my political opponents, and I’m not gonna waste 60 seconds detailing them all.”
Discredited attacks? Actually, Quick’s question was premised on facts that are not in dispute – as even Rubio himself acknowledged in his own campaign book. So frontally deceptive was his response that an outraged Joe Scarborough, his fellow Florida Republican, called him out on MSNBC’s Morning Joe the next day.
“Marco just flat-out lied to the American people there,” Scarborough complained. “And I was stunned that the moderators didn’t stop there and go, ‘Wait a second, these are court records. What are you talking about?…Becky was telling the truth, Marco was lying. And yet everybody’s going, ‘Oh, Marco was great.’ No, Marco lied about his financials.” Not incidentally, Rubio also lied about the effects of his tax plan, claiming his tax cuts would mostly benefit lower-income families when in fact its biggest benefits would accrue to the top one percent, as Republican tax schemes almost always do.
Another brand of lie was pronounced by Carly Fiorina, who drew attention at the last GOP by insisting she had watched a grisly Planned Parenthood video that doesn’t exist. This time, she reached back to the 2012 Republican campaign to invent a factoid about women’s employment.
Fiorina tries to sell herself as the candidate tough enough to take down Clinton, and tries to prove it by making stuff up. At this debate, she huffed:
It is the height of hypocrisy for Mrs. Clinton to talk about being the first woman president, when every single policy she espouses and every single policy of President Obama has been demonstratively bad for women. Ninety-two percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.
But as PolitiFact quickly established, that statement was false in every particular. Not only did women not lose “92 percent” of the jobs in Obama’s first term, the number of women employed during the period from January 2009 to January 2013 grew by 416,000. Naturally, as she did with Planned Parenthood, Fiorina angrily repeated the lie when challenged.
Fiorina isn’t the only Republican who doesn’t like being exposed. Rubio ridiculously claimed that the “mainstream media” is really a Democratic SuperPAC. And now RNC chair Reince Priebus has reneged on the party’s debate agreement with NBC News. He and his candidates just couldn’t handle two hours of sharp but thoroughly polite questioning.
They constantly insult Clinton, but how would any of these slippery blowhards survive something like the 11-hour Benghazi grilling she breezed through on Capitol Hill? If you want to understand who they are, just listen to them whine.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 30, 2015
“Whispering ‘Sweet Nothings’ In Conservatives Ears”: How Ben Carson’s Snoozy Demeanor Masks His Bonkers Views
Ben Carson is calm — calm like a cool spring breeze, or a long nap on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The Republican presidential hopeful speaks softly and slowly. He doesn’t wave his arms about. He shows barely any emotion at all. But Ben Carson is also the possessor of ideas that are positively bonkers, not just about policy questions, but about the world and how it works.
This odd combination of a gentle manner and extremist ideas seems to be just what a healthy chunk of the Republican electorate is looking for. Carson is running a close second to Donald Trump nationally, and leading in Iowa. As The New York Times recently reported, Iowa voters in particular are enraptured with Carson’s manner. “That smile and his soft voice makes people very comforted,” said one farmer. “I believe someone as mild-mannered and gentlemanly as Ben Carson is just about the only kind of person that could” get things done in Washington, said another Iowan.
You’d think they were talking about someone with moderate views who’d be able to get along and work with anyone, not someone who wants to outlaw abortion even in cases of rape and incest, thinks we should ditch Medicare, and holds to all manner of weird conspiracy theories. And that’s not to mention all the stuff the retired neurosurgeon says about slavery and Nazis, his belief that Muslims should be barred from the presidency unless they offer a public disavowal of their religion, or his latest proposal to turn the Department of Education into something that sounds like it comes out of China’s Cultural Revolution, in which he would have students report professors who displayed political bias to the government so universities’ funding could be cut.
Most of the time, we expect that when politicians take radical stands, they do it with raised voices and fists pounding on lecterns. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Barry Goldwater thundered in his 1964 convention speech, and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” We assume that ideologues will be the angry ones, while moderates will come across as sensible and ordinary.
In primaries, though, it’s often the loud candidates who burn brightly, at least for awhile. Deliver a stem-winding denunciation of the other party, and you can get at least some of your partisans to rally to your war banner. The mild-mannered don’t tend to have as much success, which is part of what makes Carson’s candidacy so unusual. But maybe his supporters are on to something. Mike Huckabee used to say that he was a conservative, he just wasn’t angry about it — an acknowledgement that to lots of voters in the middle, conservatism is associated with disgruntlement and contempt, as though the GOP were a party built on the fundamental principle that you damn kids better get off my lawn or else.
For the last eight years, conservatives have been angrier than ever before — mostly at Barack Obama, but also at a world that continues to change and evolve in ways they don’t like. Of late their anger has turned most particularly on their own party, which many of them view as feckless and cowardly.
In that context it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Donald Trump has done as well as he has. If nothing else, he’s untainted by any association with GOP leaders. Carson can say the same, but instead of grand pronouncements about how super-luxurious America will be once he’s in charge, he whispers sweet nothings into conservatives’ ears, at a volume so low they have to strain to hear.
But there’s no question which one is the more ideologically radical. It’s hard to tell how many primary voters understand that, particularly since most Americans don’t have a fine-grained understanding of where everyone in politics stands ideologically. Many don’t even have a particularly good grasp on what the ideological differences that distinguish the two parties are.
One thing we do know is that Ben Carson’s string of offensive and bizarre statements hasn’t hurt him at all with primary voters; if anything, they’ve helped. So it’s unlikely that too many people are being fooled by his calm into thinking he’s some kind of moderate; perhaps they think other people might be fooled. But if any of them actually think that he could change the way business is done because he’s gentle and genteel, they haven’t been paying much attention to politics in America lately.
Of course, Carson’s chances of becoming the GOP nominee are still less than great, even if he is doing surprisingly well now. Whoever that nominee is, when the general election begins he’ll claim to represent the soul of mainstream thinking, while his opponent is a dangerous extremist whose beliefs and proposals are strange and frightening. That opponent will say the same about him. And one of them might be right.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, October 27, 2015
“Why Don’t We Grow Up?”: Kasich Slams Carson And Trump; ‘Do You Know How Crazy This Election Is?’
At a rally Tuesday in his hometown of Westerville, Ohio, Republican presidential candidate John Kasich gave a possible preview for his performance in Wednesday’s national debate — calling his far-right competitors in the race, particularly Ben Carson and Donald Trump, completely crazy.
Kasich did not directly name the other candidates, but he listed their proposals in ways that would leave no doubt about whom he was speaking. And if either of those two men were to end up as the Republican nominee, you can pretty well expect that Kasich’s attacks will end up in Democratic campaign ads in Ohio.
Kasich began by talking about all the people he’s met on the campaign trail, particularly in the early state of New Hampshire. “But you know, I want to let you all know: Do you know how crazy this election is?” he said, to laughter from the crowd of his local supporters. “Let me tell you something: I’ve about had it with these people.”
Kasich continued:
And let me tell you why: We got one candidate [Carson] that says that we ought to abolish Medicaid and Medicare. You ever heard of anything so crazy as that — telling our people in this country who are seniors, or about to be seniors, that we’re gonna abolish Medicaid and Medicare? We’ve got one person [Carson again] saying we ought to have a 10 percent flat tax that’ll drive up the deficit in this country by trillions of dollars — that my daughters will spend the rest of their lives having to pay off.
You know, what I say to them is, why don’t we have no taxes? Just get rid of them all, and then a chicken in every pot on top of it.
We got one guy [Donald Trump] that says we ought to take 10 or 11 million people and pick them up, where the — I don’t know where, we’re gonna go in their homes, their apartments. We’re gonna pick them up and we’re gonna take them to the border and scream at them to get out of our country. Well that’s just crazy. That is just crazy.
We got people proposing health care reform that’s gonna leave, I believe, millions of people without adequate health insurance. What has happened to our party? What has happened to the conservative movement?
Here are some more choice bits of Kasich from the rally, as he rails against other candidates for offering no constructive ideas, but lots of irresponsible promises that would wreck the country.
“Why don’t we grow up?” he asked. “Why don’t we get a reality check on what the heck needs to be done in this country?”
By: Eric Kleefeld, The National Memo, October 27, 2015
“Rubio Struggles In Senate, But Wants A Promotion”: A Career Politician With No Real Accomplishments To His Name
It’s not exactly a secret that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) doesn’t show up for work much anymore. Even among sitting senators running for president, the far-right Floridian just doesn’t make an effort to keep up appearances on Capitol Hill.
Part of this, of course, is the result of his campaign schedule, but part of it also relates to the fact that Rubio appears to dislike his job quite a bit. The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold has a terrific piece on this today.
Five years ago, Rubio arrived with a potential that thrilled Republicans. He was young, ambitious, charismatic, fluent in English and Spanish, and beloved by the establishment and the tea party.
But Rubio had arrived at one of the least ambitious moments in Senate history and saw many of his ideas fizzle. Democrats killed his debt-cutting plans. Republicans killed his immigration reform. The two parties actually came together to kill his AGREE Act, a small-bore, hands-across-the-aisle bill that Rubio had designed just to get a win on something.
Now, he’s done. “He hates it,” a longtime friend from Florida said, speaking anonymously to say what Rubio would not.
It’s entirely possible, of course, that Republican primary voters won’t care. If much of the GOP base is enthralled by a blowhard New York land developer and an unhinged retired neurosurgeon, there’s no reason to think they’d balk at a senator who’s had an unsuccessful, five-year tenure.
But for a mainstream audience, the fact that Rubio effectively wasted his Capitol Hill career, achieving practically nothing despite all the promise and hype, isn’t much of a selling point.
I suspect many Rubio supporters will naturally want to draw parallels between his record and President Obama’s Senate tenure. And at a certain level, they have a point – Obama was quickly frustrated by Congress’ pace. David Axelrod later admitted that the Illinois Democrat “was bored being a senator” and quickly grew “restless.”
It seems the same words could be applied to the junior senator from Florida.
The difference, though, is that Obama put in far more effort than Rubio, and as a result, he had more success. As a senator, Obama developed a reputation as a work horse, being well prepared for briefings and hearings, introducing a lot of bills, and developing an expertise on serious issues like counter-proliferation.
There’s a great story from 2005 in which the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a day-long hearing on U.S. policy in Iraq, and then-Chairman Dick Lugar (R-Ill.) praised Obama for being the only other senator who was on hand for the entire thing, start to finish. As Simon Maloy noted, “It was minor stuff, but it gave Obama a reputation as someone who was willing to do the basic work needed to get things done.”
Rubio has never developed that kind of reputation among his colleagues. On the contrary, he’s seen as a senator who misses a lot of votes, skips a lot of hearings, and fails to show up for a lot of briefings.
To date, not one Republican senator has even endorsed Rubio’s presidential bid.
Eight years ago, there was a talking point that made the rounds in GOP circles when going after then-candidate Obama: he’d never run a city; he’d never run a state; and he’d never run a business. The trouble is, the exact same talking point can be applied to Rubio, and can even be made a little worse: he’s never built up a legislative record, either.
It’s not fair to say Rubio never passed a bill, but it’s awfully close. According to congress.gov, the far-right Floridian, over the course of five years, took the lead in sponsoring a measure that was signed into law. It’s called the “Girls Count Act,” and it encourages developing countries to register girls’ births. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the policy, but it was a largely symbolic measure that passed both chambers without so much as a vote.
He also helped name September as National Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Month.
That’s about it.
Rubio hoped to succeed on comprehensive immigration reform, which could have been a signature issue for him, but his party ended up killing the bill he helped write. The senator himself has to now oppose his own policy to pander to the Republican base, which considers the Rubio bill “amnesty.”
The result is an unfortunate situation in which Rubio is burdened by the worst of both worlds: he’s a career politician with no real accomplishments to his name.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 26, 2015
“Settling The Issues Of Honor At 40 Paces”: Forget Debates; The Republicans Should Have A Duel
The possibility of fisticuffs breaking out at Wednesday’s GOP debate is not an entirely fanciful one. (Indeed, it could be the solution for Jeb Bush’s flailing campaign.) The Republican presidential campaign has focused all along on matters of honor more than matters of policy. Sure, all the major candidates are offering right-wing fantasies of one sort or another, ranging from Jeb Bush’s promise of 4 percent growth to Donald Trump’s huge border wall to be paid for by the Mexican government. But thanks to Trump, even farcical policy proposals have taken a backseat to a much more personal contest to prove who is the toughest hombre in town.
The Republicans desperately need a way to resolve these disputes so they can talk about something else. I’m here to make a suggestion: Why not resolve the personalized differences by fighting old-style duels? Otherwise, as long as Trump’s in the race, the insults will continue to fly—and threaten to suck up all the oxygen in the debates.
Trump is a master of the schoolyard taunt, and many of his jibes carry with them the suggestion that his opponents are less than virile. Trump’s jeers that Jeb Bush and Ben Carson are “low-energy” and “super low-energy,” respectively, have certainly carried that connotation. While Trump’s male rivals have been stung by these rebukes, the only time the real-estate magnate has been dented is when he’s challenged women—most notably Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina—with a different set of insults, focused on menstruation and personal appearances. Those attacks backfired, suggesting that that the front-runner is at a loss when an argument isn’t about comparative manliness.
Trump’s male competitors have tried to answer in kind, with little luck. Before he dropped out, Rick Perry challenged Trump to a gym contest: “Let’s get a pull-up bar out here and see who can do more pull-ups,” said the former Texas governor. On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Carson implicitly responded by calling attention to how tough he was before he became a surgeon and politician. “As a teenager, I would go after people with rocks, and bricks, and baseball bats, and hammers,” Carson told Chuck Todd. “And, of course, many people know the story when I was 14 and I tried to stab someone.” (If you don’t know the story, read here.)
But pull-up bars and tales of youthful brawls won’t hack it. The Republican candidates need a more formal way of settling the issues of honor that Trump has placed at the center of GOP politics. They should look back at the history of Europe and the United States. Traditionally, matters of honor have been settled not by discussion but by a contest of arms. When someone insults your family, as Trump has with his snide comments about Jeb Bush’s brother and wife, the normal response isn’t to continue politely debating, but rather to ask the creep making the remarks if he wants to step outside.
Duels are the ideal solution. It’s true that duelling fell out of fashion after the end of the Civil War, because the slave South was the last place in the United States where the institution was valued. Still, duelling has a venerable place in American political history. Most famously, Alexander Hamilton was killed by Vice-President Aaron Burr in a duel. Andrew Jackson loved challenging men to duels, and survived at least 13 of them. When a famous marksman named Charles Dickinson insulted Jackson’s wife in 1806, for instance, the future president had no choice but to challenge him to a duel. The battle left a bullet permanent lodged in Jackson’s chest, causing persistent pain for the rest of his life, but he was still glad for the outcome. “If he had shot me through the brain, sir, I should still have killed him,” Jackson averred. If Bush had responded to Trump’s gibe about having Mexican wife in the same manner, we’d already have a very different nomination race for 2016.
As Globe and Mail editor Gerald Owen noted in an informative 1989 essay for The Idler magazine, duels were not mindless displays of violence but helped regulate disagreement. “The duel is not, as its enemies have often said, a mediaeval remnant, but a fashion from the Italian Renaissance, and no older than the protests against it,” Owen noted. “It is not to be confused with several related institutions. It is not the same as single combat in the course of war, for it is concerned with personal honour. It is not a sport like jousting; only in the Southern United States were spectators permitted. It is not a feud or vendetta; it is between individuals, not families; instead of festering, it settles disputes finally, giving rise to what lawyers call res judicator. It is not a spontaneous brawl, as in a bar or hockey game, for it has its rituals and conventions.”
As Owen’s remarks suggest, the duel has much to recommend it for precisely the type of disputes that are tearing up the Republican Party. As the main candidates are divided primarily along issues of honor, the ritualistic combat to decide who is the better man (or in Fiorina’s case, the better woman) is the best way to go. And surely a party as firmly committed to NRA dogma would have no objections.
A modest proposal, then, for the remaining GOP debates: Make them open-carry. And if (or when) Trump insults Jeb or any of the others, settle the dispute at once at 40 paces. The two combatants would of course have to agree on weapons and seconds, but this could be arranged through the same negotiations that go into making up the rules for the debates. (As a bonus, this would also provide a test for Trump’s self-proclaimed mastery of the art of the deal.) Depending on how good a shot he proves to be, this might be the only way that Trump can be defeated on his own terms, allowing the reminder of the debates to edge into actual policy arenas.
By: Jeet Heer, Senior Editor at the New Republic, October 26, 2015
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