Hillary? On “Between Two Ferns,” Just Call Her “Hillary-ous!”
Both of these people are truly funny.
Tag: Campaign 2016
Trump Denounces Birtherism As a ‘Smear,’ Calls Birthers ‘Nasty,’ ‘Vicious and Conniving’
On Friday Donald Trump, the Republican Party nominee for president, reluctantly admitted that the issue he’d used to launch his political career was a lie.
“Who should have been demanding answers about a nasty smear? If it’s bogus, nobody.”
– CNN host Michael Smerconish
– CNN host Michael Smerconish
“President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period,” Trump said, in a sound bite at the end of 20-minute news conference at his new White-House adjacent hotel in Washington, D.C.
True to form, Trump refused to accept personal responsibility for the racially tinged falsehood that made him the darling of the GOP base, of course. Instead, he blamed someone else.
“She started it,” Trump said, in effect. Literally, he said, “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” which is a lie.
And then he told another lie. “I finished it,” he said. “I finished it.” In fact, after the president released his long-form birth certificate, Trump refused to acknowledge its authenticity.
Trump’s announcement was preceded on Thursday by a bizarre, amateurishly constructed statement issued by his campaign (but likely written by the candidate himself) that laid the groundwork for blameshifting the rise of birtherism onto Clinton. In doing so, however, Trump inadvertently excoriated the birther movement and the 61 percent of his own followers who believe the president is foreign-born and thus ineligible to be president.
In the statement, he called birtherism a “smear” and an “ugly incident,” and described those who peddle it as “very nasty” and “vicious and conniving.”
Is Clinton Not Getting or Not Taking Good Advice?
It’s interesting to watch Hillary Clinton’s highly schizophrenic campaign. On one level, in terms of strategy and tactics, organizational abilities, use of technology, and the like, it is a very impressive effort, a blending of the best from her 2008 campaign with the cream of the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential efforts. … But as the concentric circles get closer to the candidate, the people occupying the inner circles are heavier on longtime Clinton loyalists rather than political pros, the campaign becomes more opaque, and the tactics get more baffling. Whether it is pre-campaign decisions on handling emails, going eight months without a press conference, or the bumbling handling of her health situation in recent days, the question keeps recurring: Is Clinton not getting good advice or just not taking it? One wonders whether there are enough people willing to stand up to her and tell her what she needs to know but may not want to hear.
— Charlie Cook
Polls Show Clinton Was Right about Trump’s Alt-Right ‘Basket of Deplorables’
After shrugging off Donald Trump’s steady stream of lies and incendiary remarks about African-Americans, Latinos, women and Muslims for more than a year, the media is now in a full pearl-clutching froth over this “politically incorrect” statement by Hillary Clinton a fundraiser late last week:
You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic?—?you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites…He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
The fury with which Trump and surrogates have responded is evidence that Clinton struck a nerve. Predictably, their retaliation is based on lying. They insist that Clinton’s statement was a smear against all Republicans and conservatives when, in fact, she was specifically referring to the white supremacist alt-right base of Trump’s support.
Of course, as these things always go, the pundits are focused on whether Clinton’s statement was politically damaging while ignoring the fact that what she said is true.
Did Trump Bribe Florida, Texas GOP Attorneys General in Trump University Scam?
Donald Trump has made it clear that he views campaign donations as bribes.
“As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do,” Trump said in July 2015. “As a businessman, I need that.”
At a rally in Iowa in January, he put it even more plainly. “When I want something I get it,” Trump said. “When I call, they kiss my ass. It’s true.”
Now it is becoming clearer every day that Trump has given donations to at least two Republican state attorneys generals — Greg Abbott, who is now governor of Texas, and Pam Bondi of Florida — who then decided not to pursue fraud investigations into his Trump University get-rich scheme.
This scandal in which the Republican presidential nominee appears to have bribed state officials has largely been ignored by the Beltway media, who are instead fixated on Hillary Clinton’s ineptitude as a webmaster when she served as secretary of state.
But with new reports that Trump paid a $2,500 fine related to one of the donations, it appears unlikely that the “liberal media” can continue to ignore what could well be the biggest scandal of the 2016 campaign.
When It Comes to Trump, Little Marco Might Be Sore But He’s Also a Whore
“Little Marco,” as Trump christened him during the debates, stands by his assessment of Trump as “a con man,” but he says we should put him in the White House anyway. That astonishing position reveals more about Rubio’s fitness for office than it does about Trump’s.
— Columnist and author Carl Hiaasen, explaining the awkwardness of the Republican custom of disavowing Donald Trump while continuing to endorse him.
Putin Says Prez Race Should Be More ‘Dignified’
They’re both using shock tactics, just each in their own way. I don’t think they are setting the best example. … All this should be more dignified.
— “Vladimir Putin, blasting both Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s tactics on the campaign trail while refusing to publicly take sides in a U.S. presidential race in which he’s been accused of secretly favoring the New York real estate billionaire,” Bloomberg reports.
Trump’s Crappy Campaign Might Do as Well as Romney’s Decent Campaign
Here’s a sobering sign of the state of our politics: It’s becoming very plausible that Donald Trump, despite running one of the worst presidential campaigns in modern history, could lose the presidential race by the same Electoral College vote margin as Mitt Romney. A campaign that doesn’t believe in television ads, offers insults instead of policies, and lacks a full-fledged campaign staff, could end up performing nearly as well as a high-character candidate who ran a respectable losing campaign against President Obama.
— Josh Kraushaar, National Journal
Trump Can’t Stop Lying about Opposing the Iraq War
In his speech on terrorism last week Donald Trump repeated the lie that he opposed the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq in 2003.
“I was an opponent of the Iraq War from the beginning – a major difference between me and my opponent,” Trump said, reading prepared remarks from a teleprompter.”Though I was a private citizen,whose personal opinions on such matters were really not sought,I nonetheless publicly expressed my private doubts about the invasion. I was against it, believe me. Three months before the invasion I said, in an interview with Neil Cavuto, to whom I offer my best wishes for a speedy recovery, that quote, perhaps we shouldn’t be doing it yet and that the economy is a much bigger problem.”
Factcheck.org, the rigorously nonpartisan fact checking organization, says this statement is not true:
