Delaware Liberal

Open Thread – Thursday, September 8, 2016

Delaware Dem

Donald Trump suggested that when he seeks the military’s advice on how to defeat the Islamic State “they’d probably be different generals, to be honest with you,” Politico reports.

“The comments could make for an awkward introduction between Trump and Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the current Joint Chiefs chairman, the top adviser to the commander-in-chief. Dunford has a two-year term that ends September 2017 — a position that is normally extended for another two years.”

That was just the first of his whoppers last night. He lied about his stances on the Iraq War and Libyan Intervention. He said that allowing women to serve in the military means they will get raped. He praised Putin, said Putin is a strong leader, has an 82% approval rating (which is unusually low for dictators), and says good things about Trump, which is why Trump says good things about Putin. He said our current generals are all trash. He said he has a SECRET plan to fight ISIS, but the trashy generals he wants to fire may have a better plan than his SECRET plan. Oh yes, and he also lied about intelligence briefing by suggesting that his briefers hate Obama and have recommendations about how to defeat ISIS that the President is just not listening to. LOL. First off, intelligence briefers present simple facts, not recommendations. They would not tell Trump, explicitly or otherwise, about their opinions. And if they did, it would be a crime for Trump to tell a television audience. Fortunately for him, he was lying.

Los Angeles Times: “Around 1 in 5 voters nationwide report themselves as undecided or flirting with third-party candidates, with the exact share depending on the poll and how the question is asked. That’s far higher than in the past several elections, where fewer than 1 in 10 voters were still up in the air at this point, and reflects the distaste that large numbers of voters have for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.”

“Those who remain uncertain include a couple of groups that may play an outsized role in determining the election’s outcome — young voters, many of whom loathe Trump but lack enthusiasm for Clinton, and college-educated suburban Republicans, who often find Trump scary but struggle with the idea of voting for a Democrat.”

Matt Lauer is a horrible piece of shit as a journalist. All he is a morning show fluffer of celebrities, so perhaps we should stop giving him important tasks. He is clearly not up to the challenge. To allow Trump to lie about his support for both Iraq and Libya was malpractice of the first order. NBC should be sued. Is there now any doubt that NBC has been the worst network this election cycle? I may have to go back to CNN.

Josh Marshall’s take on the NBC Shitsho, oh, I mean Commander in Chief Forum:

Trump said a lot of stuff that should and I suspect will get scrutinized going forward – like literally time bombs lit tonight and exploding over the coming hours. He claimed again that he opposed the Iraq War; tons of evidence to the contrary. He essentially said the same about Libya; not true. He suggested that the current general staff and upper officer corps is a “rubble” and that he could and would fire the top military leadership. That’s not how our system works. The top military leaders are not political appointees. You can’t make General Flynn COO Commander-in-Chief.

He doubled down on the inane idea that we “should have taken the oil with us” and deprived ISIS of oil revenue. Setting aside international law and morality, which I’m not naive enough to believe entirely govern American elections, how on earth do you take the oil with you? It’s really big. It’s in the ground. You can put it in a box or a hundred boxes and ship back home. Sure we could have topped off the tanks before we left and even spent a couple years pumped and shipping as much as we could haul out. But it would barely make a dent. It takes a lot longer than that. This is an idea that isn’t so much wrong as ridiculous in a way that transcends ideology and politics. It is the kind of nonsense that can be repeated and make Trump look like a buffoon. […]

The last point is I think the big one. You couldn’t watch Trump and be under any illusion that he has any idea what he’s talking about about really anything. I think we can dispense with any idea that Trump is going to bone up on a handful of policy points and use them during the debates. He totally winged and it showed. Someone I respect greatly said on Twitter that watching the debate we should dispense with the idea that Clinton will mop the floor with Trump in the debate. I’ve never thought she’d mop the floor with him. But I thought my friend greatly misjudged Trump’s performance. The exchange where Lauer kept asking him why he wouldn’t discuss his ISIS plans and then asked why he had to ask the generals if he had a plan and then Trump said well, maybe I’ll combine the two plans … this is a case where people are selling Lauer a bit short. That made Trump look like a jackass. People know from a young age when someone is trying to bullshit their way out of question. Trump has no idea what he’s going to do about ISIS. It was just nonsense and word salad. I think that was clear in a way that would transcend ideology.

Many people will say, well, people don’t listen closely, they’re easily snowed. Look how well George Bush did and he obviously knew nothing. I think the truth is a bit different about Bush. He was green and ill-versed in policy. But he went into the debates with a handful of broad themes and stuck to them. That’s not what happened here with Trump. He was all over the place and I think his ignorance and boastfulness was on a display in a not at all helpful way.

Bush was a thespian compared to Trump.

The New York Times has some nerve criticizing other members of the supposed “press,” but here is there take on Lauer:

In fact, Mr. Trump initially said he supported the war, a point that Mrs. Clinton had raised earlier in the evening, citing an interview that Mr. Trump had given to Howard Stern. But Mr. Lauer left the assertion unchallenged, zipping along to his next question about Mr. Trump’s professed tendency to “say things that you later regret.”

Journalists and longtime political observers pounced. “How in the hell does Lauer not factcheck Trump lying about Iraq? This is embarrassingly bad,” wrote Tommy Vietor, a former aide to President Obama. Glenn Kessler, the chief fact checker at The Washington Post, posted a link to NBC’s check of Mr. Trump’s claim and wrote: “@MLauer should have been prepared to do this.”

“Lauer interrupted Clinton’s answers repeatedly to move on. Not once for Trump,” Norman Ornstein, the political commentator, wrote in a Twitter message, adding: “Tough to be a woman running for president.”

Brian Beutler of the New Republic on the Media’s coverage of Hillary Clinton being out of whack.

The problem isn’t the scrutiny of her emails or the Clinton Foundation, but treating such sins as comparable to Donald Trump’s.

At bottom, this isn’t a debate over whether Clinton scrutiny is merited, but over the judgment news outlets use when devoting resources to stories, and how they gauge competing stories in proportion to one another, in ways that shape public perception of candidates….

Like conservatives, liberals are rarely satisfied with the bent of campaign reporting. But this election, they view the onus on the press corps differently than they have in past elections: not just to report on the election in substantive ways, but to be consistently mindful of the asymmetry between the candidates. An ignorant, unethical, racist authoritarian who horrifies the political leaders of his party on the one hand; and a conventional, if flawed and unpopular politician on the other. The overarching expectation isn’t that the press should campaign for Clinton or help her escape scrutiny, but that they resist the urge to normalize Trump by portraying both candidates as inhabiting similar moral and ethical planes.

In a memo to employees, FBI Director James Comey said the decision to not recommend charges against Hillary Clinton wasn’t a close call.

Said Comey: “At the end of the day, the case itself was not a cliff-hanger; despite all the chest-beating by people no longer in government, there really wasn’t a prosecutable case.”

He concluded: “Those suggesting that we are ‘political’ or part of some ‘fix’ either don’t know us, or they are full of baloney (and maybe some of both).”

Booman says Hillary learned her mistakes from the 2008 campaign, or more accurately, she learned how Obama beat her and replicated it. Which is what smart people do. In 2016, she ran Obama’s 2008 (structurally and politically, though not thematically or substantively), while Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were/are running her 2008 campaign. Read the whole thing and learn about Elan Kriegel.

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