“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
“A Lot More Than Two Sides”: Winning Isn’t Everything — Especially In Syria
An awful lot of people think about foreign relations the way they think about football. That is, they view the United States as the beloved home team perennially competing for victories in a season that never ends.
Trumpism, you might call it. To hear him talk, you’d think his followers’ personal prestige and happiness depended upon Team America being perennially ranked Number One.
The New York blowhard is far from alone. Lots of people are yelling: “Let’s you and him fight.”
Talking to a group of Gold Star Mothers recently, President Obama said, “Right now, if I was taking the advice of some of the members of Congress who holler all the time, we’d be in, like, seven wars right now. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve been counting.”
Challenged, a National Security Council spokesman listed seven places where Obama has sent combat forces: Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
Anybody who’s paying attention could add Iran, Ukraine, and the South China Sea. Sarah Palin wants troops sent to Lithuania and Estonia, although NATO just completed war games there. I’ve lost track of the countries John McCain and Lindsey Graham want to bomb.
So no, Obama wasn’t exaggerating.
“Nationalism,” Orwell wrote in 1945, “is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.” With the smoke still rising from Europe’s ruins, he distinguished militant nationalism from patriotism, or love of kin and country.
He saw it as a kind of moral and intellectual disease: “The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”
Few are immune. Even normally sensible Washington thinkers are troubled by Obama’s disinclination to kick ass. Washington Post editorial page director Fred Hiatt concedes that “the next president will inherit an America in better shape—better positioned for world leadership—than the nation that George Bush bequeathed to Barack Obama.”
“So why doesn’t it feel that way? Why does it feel as if we’re losing?”
Brilliant New York Times’ columnist Roger Cohen is made deeply uneasy by what he calls the president’s Doctrine of Restraint. “Not since the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago” he frets “has Russia been as assertive or Washington as acquiescent.”
He concludes that “Obama has sold America short…Not every intervention is a slippery slope.”
“Syria,” Cohen thinks, “is the American sin of omission par excellence, a diabolical complement to the American sin of commission in Iraq — two nations now on the brink of becoming ex-nations.”
It’s a clever formulation, gracefully expressed. But what should Obama do? Cohen never really says. Is there any reason why Syria and Iraq should remain intact because Britain and France drew lines on a map to divide their spheres of influence 100 years ago?
Should the United States send ground troops to fight there? Against whom? In support of what? There are a lot more than two sides, you know. Spend a half hour pondering the interactive maps and charts on the New York Times website, and then tell me which should be our allies, and which our enemies.
OK, the Kurds. We’re already on their side, although our other allies, the Turks, continue to fight their own Kurdish separatists. Does anybody believe that Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites can live together in peace?
The 2003 U.S. invasion that deposed strongman Saddam Hussein broke the country apart, and the fabled “Surge” so beloved of GOP pundits basically created ISIS. “Quit making us kill you, and take this money and these weapons,” Gen. Petraeus essentially told the remnants of Saddam’s army. “We’ll soon leave you to each other.”
As for Syria, University of Michigan Middle East expert Juan Cole explains that he has no dog in the fight: “I despise the al-Assad regime, which is genocidal and has engaged in mass torture. But I absolutely refuse to support any group allied with Ayman al-Zawahiri’s al-Qaeda or which envisions Syria as a hardline Salafi emirate where Christians, Alawites, Druze and Kurds (altogether maybe 40% of the population) as well as secular Sunni Arabs (another 45%) are second class citizens…. For the fundamentalists to conquer Alawite Latakia or the Druze regions would result in an enormous tragedy.”
“Fundamentalists” includes just about all the “moderate rebels” the Russians are bombing. Putin argues that even the Assad government beats no government, and represents the only hope of avoiding genocide.
Is he wrong just because he’s Russian and a cynic?
Yes, President Obama’s 2011 “red line” was a bad mistake. So were Secretary Clinton’s toothless pronouncements that Assad had to go.
But that was then. This is now.
Fareed Zakaria gets it right: “[I]f Russia and Iran win, somehow, against the odds, they get Syria — which is a cauldron, not a prize.”
And if the U.S. fights and wins? Same deal.
By: Gene Lyons, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 21, 2015
“Deathwatch Coverage”: Why The Media Are Digging Jeb Bush’s Grave
Why hasn’t Jeb Bush started complaining about the liberal media yet? Maybe it’s because he knows that at this critical moment for his campaign, it’s important to look sunny and optimistic. But he’d have a much better case to make than his primary opponents, who are all whining about how CNBC was mean to them at their last debate. The coverage of Jeb’s campaign right now is unremittingly negative, in ways that are, if understandable, not exactly fair. The Jeb Bush Deathwatch has begun, and it’s going to be awfully difficult for him to get past it.
Back in 1983, scholars Michael Robinson and Margaret Sheehan first wrote about “deathwatch coverage” in their book about the media’s role in the 1980 presidential campaign, Over the Wire and on TV. “The deathwatch generally begins with a reference to the candidate’s low standing in the polls,” they wrote, “moves on to mention financial or scheduling problems, and ends with coverage of the final press conference, in which the candidate withdraws.” Even before it gets to that terminal point, however, the press can decide as one that you’re circling the drain, and the result will be a wave of intensely negative coverage.
Let’s take a little tour of the articles about Jeb in the media just from one day, last Friday. “Can Jeb Bush Come Back?” (Washington Post). “Jeb Bush’s Existential Crisis” (CNN). “All the Money In the World May Not Save Jeb Bush’s Campaign” (Los Angeles Times). “Jeb Bush Campaign Faces Criticism, Skepticism Following Debate” (USA Today). “Jeb Bush Seeks to Recover Momentum After Debate” (Wall Street Journal). “Jeb Bush: Campaign ‘Is Not on Life Support'” (NBC News).
The headlines only partly convey how brutal things are getting for Bush. All the questions he now faces are about process—not “How would your tax plan work?” but “Why aren’t you doing better?” They’re questions about the campaign itself, not about what he wants to do if he becomes president. Reporters have also taken to asking Jeb whether he’s having fun on the campaign trail, which has a whiff of cruelty about it. He plainly isn’t, but what is he supposed to say? It’s almost as though they just want to see how he’s going to squirm. They might explain that they’re asking him this question because in January 2014 he said he intended to campaign “joyfully,” and there’s not much joy in Jebville right now. But that’s an excuse, not a justification.
So the frame of almost every story about Bush is how he’s floundering, struggling, and sinking. When you’re operating within that frame, it determines the kinds of questions you ask, not just of Bush himself when you get the chance, but of the other people you interview, and of yourself as you’re writing your story. Those questions will be things like: What’s he doing wrong? Why don’t people like him? What mistakes has he made?
When you set out to answer those questions, everything you produce will reflect poorly on Bush. That doesn’t mean there’s anything inaccurate about the coverage, just that it focuses on one particular aspect of reality and not others.
Now let’s compare that to Marco Rubio, whom most knowledgeable people have now concluded is the most likely Republican nominee. If you wanted, you could ask similarly uncomplimentary questions about him. Why has this guy who was once hailed as the savior of the Republican Party been unable to get more than 10 percent or so of the vote in national polls? Why is he stuck in fourth place in Iowa and sixth place in New Hampshire? How come he’s being beaten in fundraising by the likes of Ben Carson and Ted Cruz?
Those are perfectly legitimate questions, but if the focus of your story about Rubio is how he’s on the rise, they’re the kinds of things you’ll either leave out completely or deal with quickly (in the inevitable “To be sure…” paragraph).
Now for my own “To be sure…” paragraph: To be sure, there are perfectly good reasons why a reporter would describe Jeb’s campaign the way it’s being described and ask the questions he’s being asked. Expectations for him were very high. He was supposed to be this year’s version of the well-established, middle-aged white guy the GOP always nominates, and his super PAC quickly raised a staggering $100 million. For a time, he was indeed the frontrunner (though he never averaged more than 15 percent in the polls), so the fact that he’s now in fourth place or so is a significant fall. And Jeb hasn’t been particularly compelling on the stump, to say the least. He has struggled with things like trying to figure out whether the Iraq War was a mistake, and he seems flummoxed by the competition he’s gotten from other candidates, particularly Donald Trump.
But let’s not forget that no one has actually voted for president yet. The Iowa caucuses are still three months away. Super Tuesday isn’t until a month after that. The voters of California, our most populous state, don’t vote until June, a full seven months from now. A heck of a lot is going to happen just between now and Iowa.
Not only that, while Jeb’s place in the polls is certainly nothing to be proud of, other candidates getting much more positive attention aren’t doing much better. In the Huffpost Pollster average, Jeb is at 7.5 percent, admittedly no great shakes. But Rubio, who is now luxuriating in an invigorating bath of positive press coverage, is at a whopping 8.5 percent. Everyone seems to think Rubio is probably going to be the nominee, but the voters themselves don’t seem to be aware of it yet. Ted Cruz, whom insiders think has shrewdly positioned himself to be a strong contender as the race winnows? He’s at 5.5 percent.
One of the attractions of the deathwatch story for reporters always looking for a new angle on the presidential race is that it’s novel and, in its way, rather dramatic. And like much of what the press does, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Say that a candidate is toast often enough, and before long donors won’t want to contribute to him and voters won’t bother to support him. But we’re still far enough away from the primaries that another new story, the exciting Jeb Comeback, is still a possibility. He might even earn that exclamation point after his name. Is it likely? Maybe not. But you never know.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, November 2, 2015
“An Unhinged Rant That Smacks Of Sedition”: Back To The Dark Side; Dick Cheney’s Pax Americana
Exceptional, the new book from former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz, is not. It is nothing more than an unhinged rant that smacks of sedition.
“The children need to know the truth about who we are, what we’ve done, and why it is uniquely America’s duty to be freedom’s defender,” the prologue proclaims. The book, however, is not about who we are but who Cheney wants us to become. It is a call for Americans to reject constitutional government and those values that have guided our nation for 227 years and replace it with imperial rule in the name of “freedom”––even when that rule includes wars of choice, intrusive violations of our privacy and civil liberties, and of course, an aggressive regime of torture.
This review assumes that Exceptional represents Dick Cheney’s ideas, and so we will refer to the author only in the singular. (To the extent the book reflects Liz’s original thinking, consider it a mind meld.)
Part One begins with Uncle Dick recounting how “the American Century” has been marked by a fight that he and a few other white-hatted cowboys have waged to keep the world safe for “freedom.” In Cheney’s telling, pro-war and wartime leaders were strong and “right,” and the others weak and feckless. World War II is reduced to: “We liberated millions and achieved the greatest victory in the history of mankind, for the good of all mankind. America––the exceptional nation––had become freedom’s defender.”
Manichean World View
In Cheney’s Manichean worldview, Truman was right to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and Eisenhower’s farewell speech was not a warning of the growing power of the military-industrial complex as is commonly understood, but, rather, a strong endorsement of it. Reagan’s unwillingness to give up America’s right to missile defense (SDI) was “an exercise of diplomacy that should be studied by all future policy makers.” Obama’s foreign policy strategy is simply, “don’t do stupid stuff.”
Left out of Cheney’s idyllic tale of American exceptionalism in that era are such inconvenient freedom-defending events as the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 and the imposition of the oppressive Shah who ruled with an iron fist until his downfall in 1978; the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile, replaced by the military dictator, Pinochet; the Reagan administration’s support of the Contras in Central America in the 1980s; and the slavish support of African dictators like Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko.
Cheney conflates the Gulf War, conducted when he was George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, with the Iraq War (“We were right in 1991 and we were right in 2003.”) but without noting important differences. The Gulf War was a true coalition off the willing, with 32 nations contributing forces operating under the authority of the United Nations and very specific Security Council resolutions, and the rest of the world paying 90 percent of the war’s costs. At its conclusion, the United States was at the pinnacle of its power, which it used to advance the cause of conflict resolution in the region. By contrast, the Iraq War was essentially a United States operation to remove Saddam with limited support, no U.N. resolution, and the entire cost borne by the United States. The consequences are abundantly clear: the region is in chaos, overrun by the same brutal terrorists and radical forces that the Cheney doctrine was supposed to eliminate.
Cheney’s selective memory is again on display as he recounts the events surrounding 9/11. Absent are the infamous CIA memo of August 2001,“Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” the reports of missed signals such as suspicious pilot training, and the fact that the CIA was on the highest possible alert while Bush was cutting brush in Texas and Cheney fishing in Wyoming.
The recounting of the war on Afghanistan is rich in bravado (“we have to work the dark side”) and ultimatums (“the Taliban will turn over the terrorists or share their fate”), but poor on facts. Cheney omits the meeting at Camp David where Paul Wolfowitz kept turning the conversation from Afghanistan to Iraq; the directive Bush gave to Richard Clarke to go back and find some link between 9/11 and Saddam; and Donald Rumsfeld’s observation that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq. There is no discussion of the pivot to Iraq just when we were on the verge of finding Bin Laden.
Defending Torture
Cheney then turns to a vigorous defense of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the torture policies he championed. Rather than share with the reader the influence he and his key staffers exerted on the decision-making process, Cheney instead recounts the statements of Democrats who voted to support the war, spreading the blame. He neglects to mention the massive propaganda operation directed by the White House or the fact that the whole case was built on lies. Other omissions: Yellowcake, aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapon labs, 9/11 attacker Atta’s supposed meeting with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, and intelligence conclusions cooked up in the Pentagon Office of Special Plans and foisted on Colin Powell by Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby for presentation to the United Nations. Instead, “History will be the ultimate judge of our decision to liberate Iraq,” Cheney tells us, “and it is important for future decision makers that those debates be based on facts.” But only those facts he cares to share.
Smearing Obama
By the end of Part One Cheney has fully transitioned from defender of the indefensible to bare-knuckled attacker of President Obama. The Cheney snarl is on full display as he engages in an extended personal smear, complete with dog-whistle comments questioning the president’s patriotism and allegiance. The tirade is a new low, even for those of us who have personally experienced the depths to which Cheney will go to destroy an adversary. The opening paragraph of Part Two says it all: “The . . . level of self-regard was apparent, as was his underlying belief that America had played a malign role in the the world . . . . He [Obama] assessed the last fifty years of American foreign policy through the lens of Indonesia, a nation he called ‘the land of my childhood.’”
“Where some see an exceptional nation, unmatched in the history of the world in our goodness and our greatness, in our contributions to global freedom, justice and peace,” Cheney writes, “Barack Obama sees a nation with at best a ‘mixed’ record.”
Cheney combs the record for every quote and factoid that might be used to undermine the authority and legitimacy of the administration. Former senior intelligence officials are selectively quoted to criticize President Obama’s decision to end the torture program. Cheney would have us believe that
Ending programs that kept us safe, revealing the details about those programs to the terrorists, and spreading untruths about our policies was misguided, unjust, and highly irresponsible. . . . President Obama, having so consistently distorted the truth about the enhanced interrogation program and the brave Americans who carried it out, is in no position to lecture anyone about American values.
The personal attacks are unremitting and obnoxious, but they have a purpose: to whip up resentment, hatred, and every other base emotional reaction that makes civil discourse impossible. It is sedition, plain and clear.
One example is the Benghazi tragedy, where Cheney cannot resist offering his own interpretation: “At the most fundamental level it is the difference between being honest about what happened in Benghazi . . . and adopting a false narrative because it serves political purposes. It is the difference between lying to the American people and dealing with them truthfully—which is what we deserve.” The irony drips from the words.
Cheney saves his harshest attack for the Iran nuclear deal, flatly accusing the president of lying to the American people. The most comprehensive arms control deal with the most intrusive inspection regime ever negotiated, it is a deal not just between the United States and Iran but between the world and Iran, unanimously approved by the U.N. Security Council and lauded by nuclear arms specialists worldwide. To Cheney it is presidential “falsehoods.”
After concluding “In the seventy years since World War II, no American president has done more damage to our nation’s defenses than Barack Obama,” Cheney’s solution to Obama’s perfidy is simple but profoundly disturbing: return to the past failed policies. He advocates massive additional infusions of money to the Pentagon, abandonment of key agreements, further attacks on civil liberties, and imposition of an American Diktat on the rest of the world, by force of arms if necessary. It is difficult to imagine a more ill-advised approach to American national security or international relations.
Exceptional deserves to be dismissed and ignored, except that to ignore it is to risk that the subversive ideas therein actually gain some currency, if left unchallenged. They are an affront to our history, to our values, to our culture, and must be fought.
By: Ambassador Joe Wilson (ret) and Valerie Plame, The National Memo, October 26, 2015: This book review originally appeared in The Washington Spectator
“Trump Speaks The Truth”: The Donald Has The Better Of Jeb Bush In Their Spat Over 9/11
Here at the Country Mart, on the edge of Brentwood and Santa Monica, politics is not on the menu. The Sunday talk shows are no big thing. Imagine, people are not that excited about Hillary Clinton’s upcoming date with Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the House Benghazi committee.
This is Hillaryland, a rare state with two Democratic women senators. But one flare from the presidential primary season has made its way west: Donald Trump said something simple and true, which needed to be said. I never thought I’d say it, but thanks for clearing the air on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Trump.
The failing presidential contender Jeb Bush has made this absurd statement his signature as a candidate: “My brother kept us safe.” No, President George W. Bush did not do that. Trump only pointed out that almost 3,000 died on that day and the World Trade Center towers fell. That’s the record of a day that broke the nation’s heart.
It happened on President Bush’s watch, while he was ignoring his CIA August intelligence briefings that a plot involving planes was in the air, so to speak. Most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan nor Iraq. We stayed friends with the desert kingdom for some reason; the Bushes were chummy with Prince Bandar. Bush fell down on the job, to say the least.
We are still paying dearly for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The fearsome Islamic State group is not keeping us safe, little brother. President Barack Obama had to own that grim truth, keeping more troops than planned in the warring Middle East neighborhood. Much of Syria has been destroyed, like a contemporary Carthage.
“My brother kept us safe” shows a tragic chorus of Bush blind loyalty at work again. Jeb Bush has clearly not learned any lessons from the past, asking the same family crowd of foreign policy advisors to help him, including that shrewd player and hawk, Paul Wolfowitz.
It’s his birthright, his inheritance. Jeb is very proud of being a Bush team player.
Finally, as a matter of finesse, “my brother” sounds like he’s running for home room president. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy always referred in public to his late brother, John F. Kennedy, as President Kennedy. That has more dignity, not the Bush strong suit.
Trump spoke the plain truth. It’s refreshing. Let’s have more of it from Republicans running for president.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, October 19, 2015
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