The Washington Post By Karen Tumulty September 16 at 5:35 PM What makes Donald Trump such a singular figure — in modern politics and, perhaps, ever — is his refusal to take ownership of the outrageous things he has said and done. It is the essence of his leadership style, the defiance that exasperates his foes and makes his supporters love him all the more. The one thing that is consistent about him is inconsistency. Not only does Trump refuse to apologize, he blames others for his own actions. His campaign staff may claim to speak for him, but he will leave even his aides twisting when it suits his purposes. Never had the GOP nominee done all of this in such a fun-house-mirror fashion as on Friday, when he disavowed a crackpot con that he had once promoted. He even went so far as to claim credit for rectifying the situation. “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it,” Trump said, falsely, in an appearance at his newly opened luxury hotel, which is just a few blocks from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. “President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.” Trump was referring to the false, racism-tainted theory that the nation’s first African American president was born outside the United States and, therefore, is not a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office. The impulses of the former “Celebrity Apprentice” host are those of a showman, not a traditional politician encumbered by a record and a governing philosophy. “There is something of the reality-TV culture in this. What’s going on right now is all that really matters,” conservative intellectual Yuval Levin said. That was the same instinct for expedience that led Trump earlier this year to revive long-discredited theories that Clinton White House official Vince Foster had been murdered, and to speculate that the father of his GOP primaries opponent, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), had somehow been mixed up in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. “I fully think apologizing is a great thing, but you have to be wrong,” Trump told “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon a year ago. “I will absolutely apologize sometime in the distant future if I’m ever wrong.” Instead, Trump just moves on, without a backward glance at the many pronouncements and positions that he has left by the roadside when he no longer finds them useful. His unsubstantiated theories also delve into serious policy questions. On Monday, for instance, Trump told CNBC that Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen has been keeping interest rates “artificially low” and creating a “false stock market” to make Obama look good. “She’s obviously political and doing what Obama wants her to do, and I know that’s not supposed to be the way it is,” Trump said. “She should be ashamed of herself.” Friday was not the first time Trump had falsely claimed that Clinton had been responsible for the lie that had been perpetuated about Obama’s birthplace. “You know who started the birther movement? You know who started it? Do you know who questioned his birth certificate, one of the first? Hillary Clinton. She’s the one that started it. She brought it up years before it was brought up by me,” Trump said during an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in May. It was typical of Trump to justify his own transgressions with the argument that someone else had done it first. But, in fact, Clinton has never made any such claim, although some in her 2008 primary campaign organization had argued for talking more about her rival’s diverse background and the fact that he had spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. The recommendations were rejected. Trump’s accusation also glosses over the fact that the rumor has largely taken root within his own electoral base, and that his political rise had been fueled by his zealous cultivation of the Republican Party’s fringe elements. Trump even claimed in 2011 to have sent a team of investigators to Hawaii, to discover whether Obama had really been born there, as he — and all the public records — attested. “I have people that have been studying it, and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” Trump said at one point. In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, more than a quarter of Republicans and one-third of those who identified themselves as tea party supporters said that they believed Obama was born overseas, compared with only 19 percent of independents and 12 percent of Democrats. Rarely, if ever, has a candidate so regularly undercut the credibility of his political handlers. “Don’t believe the biased and phony media quoting people who work for my campaign. The only quote that matters is a quote from me!” he tweeted in May. As recently as late Wednesday, he had refused to say whether he believed Obama was born in the United States, and had shrugged off his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway’s public statements that he did. “It’s okay,” Trump said of Conway. “She’s allowed to speak what she thinks.” To Trump and his supporters, his refusal to apologize is yet another measure of his strength as a leader. He wears the scorn of a legion of media fact-checkers as a badge of authenticity. Before he made his brief statement about Obama’s birthplace on Friday, Trump basked in the testimonials of the Medal of Honor recipients assembled by the campaign at the hotel. “We do not need any more bureaucratic leadership from Washington, D.C. We need true leadership from the top. Mr. Trump has never failed in anything, because he listens to his advisers, he listens to his people,” said Mike Thornton, who had received the medal for saving his commander’s life during the Vietnam War. “For the last eight years, our president hasn’t listened to anybody,” Thornton added. “We cannot stand for four more years of leadership like that. We need somebody who’s going to lead from the front like Donald Trump.” But, as Trump inspires his supporters, he has also given the other side a new dose of motivation. His comments in Washington came as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation was gathering for its annual legislative meeting. “One of the things that we all are used to in this business is dog whistles, but the thing that we’re not used to, and I’m finding it very difficult to getting used to , are the howls of wolves,” Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), the dean of the caucus, said at a news conference. He and other caucus members said that Trump had served to remind African American voters what is at stake in November. “We’re going to vote and send a message,” said Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.). “Not only to the United States of America but to the world that is looking at us.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-never-wrong-never-sorry-never-responsible/2016/09/16/88446d0e-7c1c-11e6-ac8e-cf8e0dd91dc7_story.html?wpisrc=nl_p1wemost-partner-1&wpmm=1 Rudy Mancuso has just put out a clever, funny, and all too real YouTube video showing those of us who have inquiring minds — just what the world might look like through the eyes of a Trump voter. By Leslie Salzillo Monday Aug 29, 2016 William,
I am writing you today to express my deep pride in the movement – the political revolution – you and I have created together over the last 15 months. When we began this historic campaign, we were considered fringe players by the political, economic and media establishment. Well, we proved them wrong. We showed that the American people support a bold, progressive agenda that takes on the billionaire class, that fights for racial, social, economic and environmental justice and that seeks to create a government that works for all of us and not just the big campaign donors. We mobilized over 13 million voters across the country. We won 23 Democratic primary and caucus contests. We had literally hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country. And we showed – in a way that can change politics in America forever – that you can run a competitive national grassroots campaign without begging millionaires and billionaires for campaign contributions. Most importantly, we elevated the critical issues facing our country – issues the establishment has pushed under the rug for too long. We focused attention on the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality in this country and the importance of breaking up the large banks who brought our economy to the brink of collapse. We exposed our horrendous trade policies, our broken criminal justice system, and our people's lack of access to affordable health care and higher education. We fought aggressively to address the crisis of climate change, the need for real comprehensive immigration reform, the importance of developing a foreign policy that values diplomacy over war, and so much more. We have shown throughout this election that these are issues that are important to voters and that progressive solutions energize people in the fight for real change. What we have accomplished so far is historic – but our work is far from over. This movement of ours – this political revolution – must continue. We cannot let all of the momentum we have achieved in the fight to transform America be lost. We will never stop fighting for what is right. It is true that in terms of winning the Democratic nomination, we did come up short. But this election was never about me or any candidate. It was about the powerful coming together of millions of people to take their country back from the billionaire class. That was the strength of our campaign and it will be the strength of our movement going forward in the months and years ahead. In the coming weeks, I will be announcing the creation of successor organizations to carry on the struggle that we have been a part of these past 15 months. I hope you will continue to be involved in fighting to transform America. Our goal will be to advance the progressive agenda that we believe in and to elect like-minded candidates at the federal, state and local levels who are committed to accomplishing our goals. In terms of the presidential election this November, there is no doubt that the election of Donald Trump as president would be a devastating blow to all that we are fighting for. His openly bigoted and pro-billionaire campaign could precipitate the same decades-long rightward shift in American politics that happened after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. That rightward shift after Reagan’s election infected not just politics as a whole but led to the ascendancy of the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party – an era from which we are still recovering. I cannot in good conscience let that happen. To have all of the work we have done in elevating our progressive ideals be dashed away by a complete Republican takeover of Washington – a takeover headed by a candidate that demonizes Latinos, Muslims, women, African Americans, veterans, and others – would be unthinkable. Today, I endorsed Hillary Clinton to be our next president. I know that some of you will be disappointed with that decision. But I believe that, at this moment, our country, our values, and our common vision for a transformed America, are best served by the defeat of Donald Trump and the election of Hillary Clinton. You should know that in the weeks since the last primary, both campaigns have worked together in good faith to bridge some of the policy issues that divided us during the election. Did we come to agreement on everything? Of course not. But we made important steps forward. Hillary Clinton released a debt free college plan that we developed together which now includes free tuition at public colleges and universities for working families. This was a major part of our campaign’s agenda and a proposal that, if enacted into law, would revolutionize higher education in this country. Secretary Clinton has also publicly committed to massive investments in health care for communities across this country that will increase primary care, including mental health care, dental care, and low-cost prescription drug access for an additional 25 million people. Importantly, she has also endorsed the enactment of a so-called public option to allow everyone in this country to participate in a public insurance program. This idea was killed by the insurance industry during consideration of President Obama’s health care program. During the Democratic platform proceedings in St. Louis and Orlando, we were victorious in including amendments to make it a clear priority of the Democratic Party to fight for a $15 an hour federal minimum wage, expand Social Security, abolish the death penalty, put a price on carbon, establish a path toward the legalization of marijuana, enact major criminal justice reforms, pass comprehensive immigration reform, end for-profit prisons and detention facilities, break up too-big-to-fail banks and create a 21st century Glass-Steagall Act, close loopholes that allow big companies to avoid taxes by stashing their cash in offshore tax havens and use that revenue to rebuild America, approve the most expansive agenda ever for protecting Native American rights and so much more. All of these progressive policies were at the heart of our campaign. The truth is our movement is responsible for the most progressive Democratic platform in the history of our country. All of that is the direct result of the work that our members of the platform committee did in the meetings and that you have been doing over the last 15 months. But none of these initiatives will happen if we do not elect a Democratic president in November. None! In fact, we will go backward. We must elect the Democratic nominee in November and progressive Democrats up and down the ballot so that we ensure that these policy commitments can advance. It is extremely important that we keep our movement together, that we hold public officials accountable and that we elect progressive candidates to office at the federal, state, and local level who will stand with us. As part of that effort, we still have a tremendous amount of work left to do in the Democratic Rules Committee that will be meeting in the coming weeks. We have to enact the kinds of reforms to the Democratic Party and to the electoral process that will provide us the tools to elect progressive candidates, to allow new voices and new energy into the Party, and to break up the excessive power that the economic and political elites in the Party currently have. As with our fights on the platform committee, that will only be possible if we stand together. You should know that I intend to be actively campaigning throughout this election season to elect candidates who will stand by our agenda. I hope to see many of you at events from coast to coast. In conclusion, I again want to express my pride in what we have accomplished together over the last year. But so much more must be done to make our vision a reality. Now more than ever our country needs our movement – our political revolution. As you have throughout this historic campaign, I ask for your ongoing support as we continue through the fall and beyond. On a personal note, I cannot say with words how appreciative Jane and I are of the kindness, dedication and love we experienced from so many people across the country. We are deeply touched by it and will never, ever forget it. Please let me know that you will stand with me to defeat Donald Trump, and to elect candidates who will stand by our agenda as part of the future of our political revolution. Add your name now. Forever committed, forever fighting, forever forward, Bernie Sanders We cannot let his lies go unanswered or uncorrected. That’s why we’re launching TrumpLies.com: a website to catalog and expose Donald Trump’s many, many repeated lies. As part of our launch, we’ve compiled almost 40 minutes of clips from Donald Trump’s lies at rallies, in interviews, and during his speeches -- a video that’s spans the entirety of Mozart’s longest symphony! Watch and Share: Donald Trump Lying to the Entirety of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 http://trumplies.com/trump-lies-video/ That reminds me of a cartoon featuring a Trump supporter.
Posted 20 hours ago by Evan Bartlett in people
Muhammad Ali, boxing legend, champion of social justice and one of the greatest sportsmen ever to walk the earth, has died age 74. As well as his peerless performances in the ring, Ali became known for having one of the sharpest minds, and sharpest tongues, in the game - something that clearly didn't diminish with age, despite his long battle with Parkinson's disease. At the back end of last year, as businessman Donald Trump rose to prominence in the US presidential race - with all the Islamophobia that entailed - America's most famous Muslim knocked him down a peg or two in one 132-word statement. After Trump announced his plan to ban all Muslims from entering the US, Ali condemned it and the Republican loud-mouth without even having to mention his name: "I am a Muslim and there is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino, or anywhere else in the world. True Muslims know that the ruthless violence of so called Islamic jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion. We as Muslims have to stand up to those who use Islam to advance their own personal agenda. They have alienated many from learning about Islam. True Muslims know or should know that it goes against our religion to try and force Islam on anybody. Speaking as someone who has never been accused of political correctness, I believe that our political leaders should use their position to bring understanding about the religion of Islam and clarify that these misguided murderers have perverted people's views on what Islam really is." While Ali, a three-time world heavyweight champion who converted to Sunni Islam in 1975, did not explicitly refer to Trump, the statement was issued under the headline: 'Presidential Candidates Proposing to Ban Muslim Immigration to the United States’. View image on Twitter While I was in Miami last week, I sat down with a local television news anchor to discuss a wide range of topics. We discussed everything from the spread of the Zika virus to the current presidential race. |
About Bill PritchardBill is a Liberal Democrat, DEC and DWC member, volunteer photographer, and a graduate of Penn State University College of Science, Biology. He spent over 30 years at U.S. Steel Gary Works managing the operation and maintenance of waste water treatment and water recycling facilities. He retired to Panama City, FL, in 2001--where he is needed and he's not going away. Categories
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