Wednesday Open Thread [7.20.16]
The New York Times on Donald Trump’s long history of lying: “As Mr. Trump prepares to claim the Republican nomination for president this week, he and his supporters are sure to laud his main calling card — his long, operatic record as a swaggering business tycoon. And without question, there will be successes aplenty to highlight, from his gleaming golden high-rises to his well-regarded golf resorts, hit TV shows and best-selling books.”
“But a survey of Mr. Trump’s four decades of wheeling and dealing also reveals an equally operatic record of dissembling and deception, some of it unabashedly confirmed by Mr. Trump himself, who nearly 30 years ago first extolled the business advantages of ‘truthful hyperbole.’ Indeed, based on the mountain of court records churned out over the span of Mr. Trump’s career, it is hard to find a project he touched that did not produce allegations of broken promises, blatant lies or outright fraud.”
No idea if this is true, but story is Melania rejected all drafts, wrote most of speech herself using the Internet. Actually seems plausible
— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) July 19, 2016
Reports are, from NBC, that two Republican contract speechwriters drafted a speech, and gave it to Melania and the campaign, and the speech she ended up delivering bared no resemblance to that speech. Paul Manafort continues to insist, as does Melania, that it was Melania that wrote the speech. If that is really true, it means two things: 1) the Trump campaign is more amateurish and incompetent than we could ever possibly imagine, and 2) Melania Trump is a liar and a plagiarist. Perhaps we should jail her immediately for theft, since that seems to be the Republican answer for everything these days.
And now there are reports this morning that Donald Trump, Jr. plagiarized in his speech last night.
GOOD LORD WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM!?!?!!?!> Here We Go Again: Language In Trump Jr.'s RNC Speech Lifted From Article https://t.co/JN1WBeLlHJ
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 20, 2016
Today was a rather remarkable one in the degeneration of the conservative movement. The Trump convention has gotten off to a scary, shambolic, near-comic start. And Roger Ailes – whose foul propaganda helped create the toxic atmosphere in which this vulgar thug of a nominee could thrive – is about to be defenestrated, because of sexual abuse.
Imagine if Fox News changes from being a poisonous propaganda entity into a more conventional right-of-center news organization. Imagine if this neo-fascist experiment we’re now witnessing in Cleveland goes down in flames this November. Over eight long, brutal years, Obama played it on the ropes, waiting, waiting. And the over-reach now seems tangible and potentially transformative.
I can’t believe this quite yet. But I can hope. Obama has been like a poultice, bringing so much pus to the surface of American life. Trump is like some giant whitehead waiting to pop. It will be ugly but it might ensure that America can begin to move forward again.
More:
Hard to know what to add re: Melania’s plagiarized blather. If this were Veep, it would be a stretch. But it’s hard to get a better refutation of the entire racial text (subtexts are so pre-Trump) of this convention than the fact that Trump’s wife actually plagiarized Michelle Obama. Yep. She relied on the words of the unmentionable other! So delicious.
But it’s depressing to note that the big story is an incompetent embarrassment of a speech – rather than what we actually saw last night. We witnessed a national convention in which raw emotions of grieving mothers were deployed to demonize a secretary of state, in which illegal immigrants were described entirely as murderers, in which the president was described as a secret ally of this country’s enemies, deliberately destroying the American way of life. We witnessed a senior military officer lead a chant of “Lock Her Up!” when discussing Hillary Clinton’s extreme and arrogant carelessness which no prosecutor would nonetheless treat as a crime.
We heard not a single policy proposal, and not a smidgen of substance.
We saw a neo-fascist movement take over a major political party. This is slightly more pertinent than plagiarism.
Every campaign day is a test. If Trump can't run a decent convention, why should voters trust him w/ their country? https://t.co/3QFX892CCH
— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) July 19, 2016
Whether Melania knew she was reading plagiarized text or not (and I think it’s quite likely she did not) it’s just devastating to see a campaign premised on the imagined notion of Obama incompetence get caught stealing from Obama’s own operation.
But the power of the images is actually much deeper. They don’t just negate something central to Trump’s appeal. They amplify one (actually more than one) of the main knocks on Trump himself: That he’s sloppy, erratic, in so many ways the opposite of the virtues he claims to embody. And, let’s not gloss over it, this is a depiction of a campaign—a campaign that nurtures white grievance and resentment—trying to profit off the work of a black woman, from an African American family that Trump and his supporters regularly belittle. The fact that the plagiarized text in question was about the value of hard work just makes matters worse. A mortifying, calamitous, self-immolating moment.
Dems have opened up a big (+8) lead in the race for House. We'll see if holds after move to LVs (@pollsterpolls) pic.twitter.com/BhOtx0Jxl7
— (((Patrick J Egan))) (@Patrick_J_Egan) July 18, 2016
Donald Trump is not qualified to be president. And the American people know it.
As the GOP convention gets underway in Cleveland today, three national polls released over the weekend showed Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump: A CNN poll putting Clinton up by 49-42; an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll putting her up by 46-41; and a Washington Post/ABC News poll putting her up by 47-43.
But buried beneath the toplines is evidence of another dynamic that gets at something important about the state of this race: While both Clinton and Trump are very unpopular, large majorities in two of these polls believe that only one of them is qualified for the presidency, and equally large majorities believe that the other one is not.
The new WaPo poll finds, for instance, that Americans say by 59-39 that Clinton is “qualified to serve as president,” but they also say by 60-37 that Trump is “not qualified to serve as president.”
The WaPo poll also finds that 59 percent of Americans say that Clinton has the “better personality and temperament to serve effectively as president,” while only 28 percent of Americans say that about Trump.
Epic gum trolling by CAIR at the RNC convention. #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/7sucUXPrcI
— Rex Huppke (@RexHuppke) July 18, 2016
Ten Reasons Why Melania Trump’s Speech Will Have a Lasting Impact. Since Sunday, every journalist at this convention has been collecting examples of the Trump campaign’s failures and incompetence: the quarrel with Ohio Governor John Kasich, the absent senators and governors, the no-show donors, the convention’s financial embarrassments, the floor fight over rules, the lack of a proper schedule, and the defective apps and other technology. Suddenly, there is one easy-to-understand incident that encapsulates in one grim joke all this convention’s cavalcade of derp.
This is not normal behavior in America. This is banana republic politics. https://t.co/Mk8GKXsk0J
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) July 20, 2016
The graphic from the Economist is great because it very eloquently ans imply reveals a lot of truth. If the ever formed a coalition with the Social Democrats and stopped trying to chase the affections of the Conservative Party, we could have one very effective government.
Looks like Clinton is trying to make this race as close and stressful as possible by narrowing the VP slot to Tim Kaine and Tom Vilsack.
2 utterly uninspiring selections.
I would have been in the Castro camp, were it not for his apparently breaking the the Hatch Rule… A ticket already a wash in (real or fake, doesnt matter to reality) scandal, needs a boy/girl scout. It can be only Booker or Warren.
My theory is that the Trump campaign deliberately palagarized for Melania’s speech with the express hope that it would be caught. This is a campaign run on the cheap and it counts on free media attention, even negative attention, to keep itself present in the minds of voters. So when, for example, Trump spokespersons get interviewed about it, they can slip in positive comments about Trump’s positions and try to sell to the American people they are being persecuted to gain sympathy from voters. They make everything an opportunity.
You’d think someone from the American “Liberal Party” would pick someone from the “Social Democratic Party” to shore up the base…. but Noooooo.
Very good point Dana. Look at how Trump has conducted business throughout his career, always on someone else’s dime, and at the little man’s expense.
Trump campaign deliberately palagarized for Melania’s speech with the express hope that it would be caught.
Which means that Donald Trump hung his wife out to be deliberately dishonest so she could suffer all of this ridicule and disdain that was heaped on her.
I need a better word than despicable now.
Roger Ailes built the Republican party – now both are crumbling in plain sight
I doubt the plagiarism was intended to be discovered, but they certainly benefited from having the news cycle devoted to Melania instead of the rest of the shitshow or Steve King’s racist comments or anything else Republicans were doing that day. If it was intended to be discovered they would have copied from anybody other than MIchelle Obama.
Michelle Obama has high favorability ratings. If you want to be caught palagarizing someone, then select someone people like so they can make the association between the palagarizer and the palagarized.
The band Third Eye Blind was signed up to play at some RNC venue and they used the occasion to troll Republicans and Trump.
What a useful feature and apparently we need the Brits to do this for us: Lyin’ Trump: a weekly fact-check
The GOP is dying because it can no longer sucessfully advance the interests of the corporations and the 1%. Mainstream Republicans are not coming to its defense, because they are OK with it dying, having already transferred stewardship of their economic philosophy and agenda to Democrats. They are ready to let the GOP go.
The idea that the parliamentary Liberals should form a coalition with social democrats flies in the face of observed reality. Liberals (really neo-liberals because there are so few actual liberals left) are heavily invested in defending interests of corporations and the wealthy, and social democratic economic ideas are anethema to them.
In the graphic, which group would receive the support of corporations and wealthy individuals? That party seems to be missing. Unless the Trump/People’s party evolves to be that party.
In a parliamentary system, liberals would likely split. Some would join the social democrats, and others would join a “pro-business” party not represented on the graphic.
The Republicans are such hypocrites with their anti-porn rhetoric.
It looks like porn use is up 184% in Cleveland this week.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/20/opinion/campaign-stops/Opinion-Donald-Trumps-Convention-Day-3.html
What a disgusting bunch!