Friday Open Thread [9.18.2015]

He’s evil. Not hyperbole.

Via CNN:

“We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims,” said the unidentified man who spoke at a question-and-answer town hall event in Rochester, New Hampshire. “You know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”

A seemingly bewildered Trump interrupted the man, chuckling, “We need this question? This is the first question?”

“Anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us,” the man, wearing a “Trump” T-shirt, continued. “That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”

“We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things,” Trump replied. “You know, a lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening. We’re going to be looking at that and many other things.”

Gov. Chris Christie said on a Friday interview with “The Today Show” that Donald Hitler has “an obligation” to correct the misinformation about President Barack Obama. Given the fascism and racism of your average Republican, that probably means Christie just ended for good his campaign.

Carson has caught Hitler.

MICHIGAN–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—MRG: Carson 24, Hitler 22, Bush 8, Fiorina 3, Rubio 4, Cruz 3, Huckabee 6, Kasich 2, Walker 2, Christie 1, Paul 2, Santorum 0, Jindal 0

NEW HAMPSHIRE–PRESIDENT–REPUBLICAN PRIMARY—WBUR: Hitler 22, Carson 18, Kasich 9, Fiorina 11, Bush 9, Cruz 5, Paul 4, Rubio 2, Christie 2, Walker 1, Huckabee 1, Graham 1, Pataki 0, Jindal 0, Santorum 0

NEW HAMPSHIRE–PRESIDENT–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY—WBUR: Sanders 35, Clinton 31, Biden 14, Webb 2, O’Malley 1, Chafee 1

“While Republicans are splintering into factions and debating the merits of another shutdown fight and yet another coup attempt against Speaker John Boehner, Democratic leaders put forward a united front Thursday after huddling with President Obama for an hour and a half,” Roll Call reports.

Joe Biden “may have more time to make up his mind about running for president than most people assume,” Politico reports.

“Various deadlines have been floated: End of summer, Oct. 1, the first Democratic debate on Oct. 13, the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner Oct. 24. But none of these is looking like a hard deadline. Neither are any of the cutoff dates for getting his name on state ballots. … It turns out that instead of simply deciding yes or no on a presidential run, Biden may have a third option — make no announcement at all, wait until December (or longer) and hope Clinton gets out of the race or is pushed to the sidelines without him having to get in.”

Jonathan Chait on Republicans keeping us safe:

“Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate focused heavily on foreign policy, and the implicit — and at times explicit — question before the panel of hopefuls was ‘Are you comfortable with giving somebody like Donald Trump access to nuclear weapons?’ It’s a perfectly valid source of worry; I, for one, am not. And yet the focus on this scenario distracted from an equally worrisome problem: Should we feel comfortable giving the likes of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio access to conventional weapons?”

The “President Bush with his finger on the military button” scenario is not difficult to imagine, because it was the reality the country lived through for eight years. The exercise did not go well. […] It is bizarre to center your defense of Bush having “kept us safe” with a photograph of him standing on the rubble from the worst domestic mass-casualty attack in American history, one that took place under his watch.

Ryan Lizza on whether Donald Hitler has a second act:

“Trump realized all of this and he has had a great first act. But Wednesday night’s debate suggested that he has no plan for a second act. First acts are famously easy to pull off.”

“The struggle of the second act in a political campaign, as in any drama, is that the problem identified at the beginning—the one that seized our attention—must be translated into the more mundane tasks that propel the protagonist toward his or her goal. Won’t even the most committed Trump supporter start to wonder why this self-proclaimed savior hasn’t prepared himself to answer standard policy questions? Will Trump build a staff and campaign infrastructure in Iowa and New Hampshire to handle all the dull mechanics of finding voters and getting them to the polls? Again, Obama’s historic 2008 campaign is a good point of comparison: the vague promise of ‘hope and change’ was married to an enormously sophisticated national operation that tended to the mechanics of winning the delegates needed to capture his party’s nomination.”

The New York Times’ take on the Republican debates this week:

Peel back the boasting and insults, the lies and exaggerations common to any presidential campaign. What remains is a collection of assertions so untrue, so bizarre, that they form a vision as surreal as the Ronald Reagan jet looming behind the candidates’ lecterns.

It felt at times as if the speakers were no longer living in a fact-based world where actions have consequences, programs take money and money has to come from somewhere. Where basic laws — like physics and the Constitution — constrain wishes. Where Congress and the public, allies and enemies, markets and militaries don’t just do what you want them to, just because you say they will.

Matt Bai on whether the GOP Establishment is getting ready to dump Bush:

“If you were in Washington watching the Republican debate last night, you might have felt a small tilt in the floor, or heard the plates rattling gently in their cupboards. That was the sound of the Republican establishment shifting its collective weight away from Jeb Bush — and inching a little bit closer to their best available alternative.”

“And no, it’s not Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina.”

“Not to overstate the crisis here, because one poll can change everything at this stage of a race, but the way I saw it, last night was another minor disaster for Bush. He seemed, yet again, oddly tentative and squirmy, the earnest student body president shoved aside by the boorish quarterback at the pep rally. That performance probably didn’t do much to help Bush among the millions of Republicans who tuned in, especially in the early primary states. But make no mistake: His most important audience right now is the one that pushed him onto that stage in the first place.”

First Read says the GOP is so divided on so many issues that the only winners from their debates is the Democratic nominee.

“[T]he GOP remains divided on so many different issues. Immigration. Foreign policy in the Middle East. How to deal with Planned Parenthood. Marijuana. Bottom line: Winning parties typically don’t usually have this many major differences. And one of the reasons why the GOP remains divided is that it’s still litigating the past GOP administration (the Bush-Trump exchange over the Iraq war captures that perfectly). In 2016, the eventual GOP nominee will be arguing: ‘Trust me — I’m not George W. Bush or the Republicans in Congress.’ But boy, that’s a tough argument to make. Today’s Republican Party is still searching for its core. And as a result, one of the winners from last night’s debate by default was Hillary Clinton or whoever the Dem nominee will be.”

Joe Klein: “We now know how to make Donald Trump disappear: talk policy. He simply has nothing useful to say. He’ll deal with it when the time comes. He’ll hash out Syria with Putin. He’ll hire people. ‘Killers,’ no doubt, as he likes to say. He’ll call Carl Icahn. Carl Icahn? And we now know that Trump will almost certainly lose altitude: his boorishness will grow old, his insults increasingly desperate.”

Adam Nagourney: “For nearly 30 minutes, not long after the debate began, this most colorful of candidates faded to the sidelines as his rivals debated in detail issues like Syria and how to deal with Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, subjects that Mr. Trump appeared to struggle with when the questions came to him.”