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Month: March 2016

Simple reality from the president

Published by digby on March 23, 2016

Simple reality from the president

by digby

If the collective right wing howl of outrage at this obvious statement is any indication, this is not something they want to hear.  Evidently they truly believe that,i n the words of Ann Coulter, this ragtag group of religious zealots in the middle east are going to invade our country, kill our leaders and convert us to Islam. In fact,  the thought seems to stimulate them.

Why do they hate America so much?

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Trump’s not a mystery #believeme #ok?

Published by digby on March 23, 2016

Trump’s not a mystery

by digby

There are a lot of reasons why people like Trump, but one of the most important is his willingness to be “politically incorrect.” And mostly what his supporters mean by that is that he’s willing to do something about this:

His plans to build a wall and ban people and deport millions and “let police do their jobs” all comes down to that.

Yes, they like his strongman approach to foreign countries and his violent approach to terrorism and other threats too. It’s part of the same thing: putting Real Americans back on top where they belong, whether it’s inside the country or around the world.

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Chilling headline of the day

Published by digby on March 23, 2016

Chilling headline of the day

by digby

Oh my God:

PIERS MORGAN: When it comes to terror, isn’t it time we started listening seriously to Trump? 

That’s just one blowhard. But still …

Here’s an excerpt of his silly pants-wetting rant:

By coincidence, I had an interview scheduled today with the world’s most controversial man, Donald Trump, for my UK show, Good Morning Britain.

It was set up a couple of weeks ago, but the timing was eerily prescient.

Here is one man who definitely has a plan to deal with ISIS terrorism. Several plans in fact. 

The problem is that people don’t like them. Well, a lot of people don’t anyway.

Trump, current front-runner for the Republican nomination, wants to hit ISIS ‘so hard they never recover’.

(As he told me: ‘You’ve got to take them out and you’ve got to take them out harshly and you’ve got to take them out fast.’)

He also wants a short-term ban on Muslims entering the U.S. until, as he puts it, ‘we figure out what the hell is going on?’

And he wants to torture suspects like Abdeslam with techniques like water-boarding to try and extract information about future attacks.

Oh, and he wants to build a giant wall to stop illegal immigrants pouring over the Mexican border into America.

George Clooney hit out at Trump yesterday, as he endorsed Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton for the presidency, saying: ‘If you listen to the loudest voices out there today, you’d think we’re a country that hates Mexicans, hates Muslims, and thinks that committing war crimes is the best way to make America great again.’

I spoke to Trump for 40 minutes. He was, as you’d expect, bombastic, defiant and self-congratulatory. Why wouldn’t he be? He’s ripped up every political rulebook to take this presidential race by storm, a scenario that is hardly going to deflate the ego of New York’s most cock-sure billionaire tycoon.

But he also spoke in more detail about his plans to combat ISIS and I found myself nodding more than I expected.

Trump told me countries must tighten their borders in light of these terror attacks, especially to anyone related to an ISIS fighter in Syria.

Is he so wrong?

He told me he wants law-abiding Muslims to root out the extremists in their midst, expressing his bafflement and anger that someone like Abdeslam was able to hide for so long in the very part of Brussels he had previously lived.

Is he so wrong?

He told me America must make it far harder for illegal immigrants to enter the U.S. and thinks European countries should follow suit.

Is he so wrong?

He told me he believes there are now areas of many major European cities which have become poisonous breeding grounds for radicalized Islamic terror.

Is he so wrong?

I didn’t feel I was talking to a lunatic, as many seem to view Trump.

I saw a guy, a non-politician unfettered by PC language restraints, who is genuinely furious at the devastation which ISIS is wreaking, and seriously concerned for the security of his fellow Americans and indeed, the citizens of Europe.

(Remember, Trump’s from New York and felt the horror of 9/11 very personally and very deeply like all New Yorkers.)

His plans for tackling this extraordinarily dangerous threat to the world have been widely condemned as ‘bigoted’ and ‘racist’.

But although I publicly criticised him for the Muslim short-term ban suggestion, I’ve known Trump for ten years and I don’t believe he’s a racist.

I think he’s someone who has spent his life responding to metaphorical punches on his nose by punching even harder back.

And right now, he firmly believes that ISIS will murder countless more Americans and Europeans if somebody somewhere doesn’t stand up and punch them hard in the face.

Someone prepared to stop spewing politically-correct niceties after these attacks, hoping nobody gets offended, and actually DO something.

Let’s be honest with ourselves, right now ISIS is winning this war and will continuing committing utter carnage on our streets on an ever graver and more barbaric scale until they are stopped.
I don’t have the answers to how to do that.

But I don’t hear any good ideas coming from any world leaders at the moment either, and it’s their highly paid jobs to work it out.

Instead, I see a global paralysis driven by fear, confusion and woeful lack of leadership.
And it will only get worse.

Hate Donald Trump all you like, but at least he seems to recognise the magnitude of the threat and at least he has firm proposals for how to try to defeat it.

They may not win him the Politically Correct Pontificator of the Year award. But how many more scenes like this morning’s appalling images from Brussels are we going to tolerate before we try a non-PC option to beat these disgusting excuses for human beings?

At the end of our interview, I asked Donald Trump to send a message to the large majority of non-violent, decent Muslims who are as disgusted by these attacks as the rest of us.

‘I have great respect for Muslims,’ he said, ‘I have many friends that are Muslims. I’m just saying that there is something with a radicalized portion that is very, very bad and very dangerous. I would say this, to the Muslims, when they see trouble, they have to report it, they’re not reporting it, they’re absolutely not reporting it and that’s a big problem.’

Is he so wrong?

Yes. He’s a sociopath and a moron. And so is Piers Morgan for buying into his nonsensical notion that there’s a way to “hit ISIS ‘so hard they never recover” and “take them out and you’ve got to take them out harshly and you’ve got to take them out fast.”

That’s the way children and screenwriters think about a problem like terrorism, not leaders or even slightly sentient adults.

What’s he going to do? Kill millions and then put the rest in camps? Oh right, he is. In true Orwellian fashion he calls them “safe zones”:

“What should happen is the United States and a bunch of other countries should get together—funded by the Gulf States, because they have tremendous amounts of money—and we should build a safe zone,” Trump said. “It should be in Syria. Or a number of safe zones, in different parts of Syria, where you build until the war ends and they can go back—if they want to—they can go back to where they want to be.”

And yes, he has said he will round up and “send back” every Muslim refugee who’s come into the country in the last few years. He will send them all to a “safe zone”. Until the “war” is over. Presumably he thinks Germany should do the same thing. After all, they have the kind of expertise he’s looking for.

By the way, Piers Morgan wasn’t born yesterday so someone should remind him of this:

None of that is to say the attacks in France and Belgium are not horrible. But they are not unprecedented. And Europe managed to deal with it in the past without completely losing their minds. If anyone’s going soft it’s people like Trump and Morgan. If Trump’s favorite general, George Patton, were alive, he’d slap the hell out of both of them.

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The GOP race comes down to Torquemada or Vlad the Impaler

Published by digby on March 23, 2016

The GOP race comes down to Torquemada or Vlad the Impaler

by digby

I wrote about the Trump Cruz race last night and their scary day of terror mongering for Salon this morning:


Last night’s Republican primaries were always considered to be something of a watershed for the “Stop Trump” gambit. But there was an extra layer of interest in the outcome since both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz spent the day horrifying the entire world at the prospect either one of them might come anywhere near the presidency.
As for the “Stop Trump” gambit, obviously if Trump had seriously faltered in Arizona yesterday it might have signaled that his run had finally hit a roadblock. After all, it’s hard to imagine a state more congenial to his message of building a big beautiful wall than the one which once passed a law requiring anyone a policeman suspects of looking like they might be “illegal” to show their “papers.” He was endorsed by both former Governor Jan Brewer and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, two of the most virulently anti-immigrant icons in the nation. For him to lose that state, something would have had to go terribly wrong. It didn’t. He won a big victory.
Ted Cruz, having lost decisively last Tuesday, needed to prove that he could actually be the vehicle to block the Trump juggernaut. While the delegate math doesn’t look any better for his quest to win the nomination outright, his big win in Utah does help him stay in the hunt and make a decent case for himself at the convention if Trump does not come in with enough delegates to take it on the first ballot. Everyone said that the people of Utah prefer “nice” candidates but unfortunately they didn’t have any to choose from so they apparently figured that Cruz was the least offensive. He got over 50 percent and took all the delegates.
The pundits all say the Stop Trump movement is now looking to Wisconsin in two weeks where they hope once more to deny him the delegates to become the legitimate nominee. So the fight goes on.
And after what we heard yesterday, it appears that Republican voters will be choosing between someone who could give Torquemada a run for his collection plate and the second coming of the Vlad the Impaler.
Upon hearing the news of the horrific bombing in Brussels, both Trump and Cruz took the opportunity to race to the media to condemn President Obama and set forth their own barbaric agendas of police state tactics. Their voters were impressed, giving each of them a big turnout and large victories in two different states.
Trump was naturally the cruder of the two and that’s just how they like him. He tweeted this out early in the day, obviously unconcerned that anyone might think it crass to get out the vote on election day by using the bloody deaths of innocent people as proof of his superiority. But then crass is his middle name:

On CNN, Trump very excitedly explained to Wolf Blitzer,
“Look, I think we have to change our laws on the waterboarding thing where they can chop off heads and they can drown people in cages and heavy steel cages and we can’t waterboard. So we have to change our laws and we have to be able to fight at least on an almost equal basis.” 
Once again he came this close to admitting that when he says we have have to do “much worse” than waterboarding, he’s talking about using their methods.
Blitzer followed up by asking, “So should you start torturing him right away or would you see if he would cooperate and share information because Belgium Authorities, Belgium police say he has been talking?”  The answer was predictable:
“Well you know he may be talking but he’ll talk a lot faster with the torture. If he would have talked you might not have had to blow up all these people dead and all these people horribly wounded, because he probably knew about it.  I would be willing to bet that he knew about this bombing that took place today.”
He has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about, but when has that ever stopped him? In truth this is an improvement on his original endorsement of torture, when he said, “Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would. In a heartbeat. I would approve more than that. It works. And if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.”
And then there was this ignorant nonsense:
BLITZER: The military people say they oppose torture, that it’s not part of the U.S. Military Code of Conduct.
TRUMP: I disagree. I don’t believe they do. I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it. I think they’re told to say that politically. I think they believe in in 100 percent. You talk to Gen. Patton from years ago, you talk to Gen. Douglas Macarthur, I will guarantee it, these were real generals, and I guarantee you they would be laughing. Well right now they’re crying, and right now they’re spinning in their graves as they watch this stupidity go on.
Apparently dead generals are among his national security advisers.
Blitzer went on to patiently instruct Trump about how the CIA does our torturing because the military won’t do it. We’ll have to see if the lesson sticks over the next few weeks when the subject comes up.
Trump then gave a long interview to Breitbart in which he seemed to indicate that he thinks Brussels is part of America, when he said, “The terrorists are totally winning. The terrorists are making us look like fools.”  And he got really worked up over Hillary Clinton:
“The terrorists will cause Hillary Clinton to lose the election. She’s weak on borders. She’s weak on crime. She’s weak on anything having to do with controversy other than controversy with herself. She’s weak on the police. She’s weak on anything having to do with strength.”
Later on Fox, he opined that the Paris and Brussels attacks are “just the beginning,” saying once more that he’s “a pretty good prognosticator. Just watch what happens over the years, it won’t be pretty. We’re going to get worse and worse … it’s at least a small part of the reason why I’m the number one frontrunner, people are very concerned about this, and they’re very concerned about the security of this country.”
After that bleak “prognostication” they asked him what other steps he might take beyond “bombing the shit out of ’em”, torturing, killing their families, building walls, setting up massive surveillance programs and banning Muslims, and Trump laid out his secret plan to end the war on terror:
“I guess I would just talk to the people and give them, frankly, a pep talk. We need spirit in our country, okay.”
But lest anyone fool themselves into thinking that perhaps the alternative might be better, Ted Cruz’s press conferences and interviews were nearly as terrifying. Not that this was surprising. Last week Cruz unveiled his list of foreign policy “advisers” and it was quite a rogues gallery of assorted right wing extremists. As Graham West of the National Memo wrote:
One the one hand, Cruz has poached traditional neoconservatives, including names like Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra indictment fame or Michael Leeden, Iraq and Iran war advocate extraordinaire. Yet on the other, he has courted some of the most extreme single-issue Islamophobes on the fringe of the right. Chief among these is of course Frank Gaffney, whose insane brand of Islamophobia includes believing that Saddam Hussein was behind the Oklahoma City bombing and warning against the infiltration of the American government (including the Republican Party) by members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Upon hearing of the terrorist attack in Belgium, he issued a statement in which he said,
“Radical Islam is at war with us. For over seven years we have had a president who refuses to acknowledge this reality. That ends on January 20, 2017, when I am sworn in as president. We will name our enemy — radical Islamic terrorism. And we will defeat it.”
He too seems confused about the location of Brussels, thinking perhaps it’s located somewhere in Pennsylvania rather than on another continent. While it’s certainly true that Americans are alarmed by terrorist attacks in other countries, it’s a bit much to become hysterical and behave as if we were the victims and our government is responsible for the failure of security that allowed it to happen. (It’s particularly rich coming from someone who’s being advised by Michael Ledeen, who once wrote a famous screed declaring that the U.S. should attack France and Germany for failing to back America’s invasion of Iraq, thus proving their true allegiance to the terrorists.)
Later in the day, Cruz issued yet another statement entitled, “We can no longer surrender to the enemy through political correctness,” in which he declared:
We need to immediately halt the flow of refugees from countries with a significant al Qaida or ISIS presence. We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized. We need to secure the southern border to prevent terrorist infiltration. And we need to execute a coherent campaign to utterly destroy ISIS.”
He tried to walk it back a bit under questioning but ended up sounding as ill-informed about effective counter-terrorism as Donald Trump, which isn’t a good look.
He talked very tough all day, trying to look presidential, and then finally settled on his usual wing-nutty silliness about using the magic words “radical Islamic terrorism” and condemning President Obama for failing to cut short his historic diplomatic visit to Cuba to rush back to the White House and launch an invasion of a country that didn’t attack us. Luckily, the president we currently have understands that keeping a cool head in a crisis is an essential attribute for a powerful world leader.
The two remaining candidates for the Republican nomination proved yesterday that they are anything but cool in a crisis. If this hysterical, over-the-top reaction to a terrorist attack in another country is any indication, if either become president we can expect they will shriek in horror and dive under their desk in the oval office with a copy of “My Pet Goat” if one were to happen here. They are, in Trump’s words, panic artists.

The cheapest patient is a dead one by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 23, 2016

The cheapest patient is a dead one
by Tom Sullivan

A doctor’s letter to the editor:

I had the pleasure of taking care of a North Carolina constituent recently. She is in her early 60s with severe heart failure acquired as a genetic abnormality. She works in a small diner here and makes $9,000 a year. She needs a defibrillator, which costs from $50,000 to $80,000.

She does not have health insurance since she cannot afford to buy on the open market. She tried the Affordable Care Act. The cutoff is above her pay so she is not eligible. Since Republican lawmakers are fiscally responsible, she understands why they rejected money that was coming from Washington to expand Medicaid. After all, they have to do what is best for the people in other states that expanded Medicaid or what is best for their friends in the insurance and pharmaceutical industry.

She fully supports GOP policies because, after all, what is one life worth? She also understands that the general Republican thought that Medicaid expansion is a Democratic socialist ploy had nothing to do with why they did not adopt it.

I regret to inform you that she died a few days ago. I am pretty sure she and her family are thankful to Republicans for saving all this money. She totally understands the position that the cheapest patient is a dead patient.

PRADEEP ARUMUGHAM, M.D.
KINSTON

The letter might have been written in any of the 19 states that have refused Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

Count her as “died quickly.”

GOP RIP?

Published by digby on March 23, 2016

GOP RIP?

by digby

Samantha Bee held a wake:

I wish I agreed that it’s all over.  But it isn’t. For every action there’s a reaction, especially in American politics.

But the crack-up is  here for sure.  The only question is what it’s going to look like once all th smoke has cleared.

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The Great Whitebread Hope is back in business

Published by digby on March 22, 2016

The Great Whitebread Hope is back in business

by digby

Good old Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker can always be counted upon to stick it to the most vulnerable.   This week in a move ostensibly designed to make it easier for people to vote Walker signed a bill legalizing online registration. That’s very nice.  But get a load of this:

The most harmful provision buried in the bill effectively stops groups from organizing community voter registration drives. 

Lawmakers justified the provision by claiming that online voter registration would make community registration drives unnecessary because anyone will be able to promote voter registration by directing people to online registration. However, the online system will require a driver’s license or state-issued identification card number. Local and national groups, including Project Vote, joined together to show lawmakers that the proposed online registration system would not be available to all eligible electors, disproportionately impacting students, veterans, older individuals, low-income people and people of color. We explained that it is community registration drives that often register the very people unable to use online registration. 

Presented with this information, lawmakers refused to amend the law to preserve community registration drives or to expand access to the online registration system. We then asked Governor Walker to veto this provision, as no other state has tied online voter registration to the dismantling of community registration drives. But this request was swiftly ignored.

So no more organizing drives to get people to register to vote. How convenient.

It’s hard to see how it can be legal to stop people from doing this.  It seems to me this violates freedom of speech.  How can the government tell citizens they’re not allowed to talk to fellow citizens about anything? How can you make it illegal for someone to help another person fill out forms? I assume we’ll find out.  If this is legal, it could mean the government could outlaw all sorts of organizing activity. Even Tea Parties. Or Republican women’s clubs.

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Trumpie’s instincts

Published by digby on March 22, 2016

Trumpie’s instincts

by digby

In yesterday’s press conference, Trump asked a woman from the audience to come up on stage and pretty much hired her on the spot, testifying to his own great instincts as being his guiding light in business. Here’s how it went:

Trump: Do you mind if I do a job interview right now? We need good people! How are you? So what’s your experience?

Woman: Well, I design, I do wreaths, all types of decorations…

Trump:And you like this building?

Woman: nods

Trump: So here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s the man. Stand right over there. If we can make a good deal in the salary she’s going to probably have a job, ok?

When asked why he did that he said:

I felt good about her. I said she , you know, I have gut instinct, ok? We’re allowed to have that. And I looked at her and she asked a question and it was a very positive question. She looks like she’s got a great look and she’s … look at that with the tears. How nice.

She just seemed like a good person to me. She just looked like a good person. Now maybe she won’t qualify because you have to qualify for … but I think she will. I think she, to me, looked like a good person. I have instincts about people.

And while I agree it’s a big audience. She’s going to become a super star. Tomorrow she’ll move out to Hollywood, look at her. Don’t leave me.

It turns out the woman got a hold of a media badge to sneak into the press conference. And she’s not just a wreath maker:

Some reporters in the Trump scrum wondered about her press credentials. CNN media reporter Dylan Byers reported that the Trump campaign told him Watkins worked for “a site called Troops Media which focuses on military and veterans issues” a site that doesn’t appear to exist, as Byers noted in a tweet.

Reached by phone on Tuesday, Watkins herself did little to clear up the mystery surrounding her unusual turn in the spotlight. She says she hasn’t finalized job discussions with the Trump camp. “It’s way too soon — I’m still in the works with that,” she said. And she wouldn’t talk about how she wound up at the event. “My goal was to ask a question,” she said. “And not only was my question answered, but I was given the opportunity to become an employee.”

As for suggestions that she was some kind of plant, Watkins sounded a Trump-ian note. “Most of the stuff out there is false, but that’s just reporters who have nothing good to say about anything.”

Here’s what we do know: The 38 year-old is a beauty queen, racking up titles including Ms. Maryland 2015 (the organizer of the small pageant recalls that Watkins was “very, very passionate” about her cause, wounded warriors) and Ms. Massachusetts U.S. in 2014.

She’s a reality TV figure (she appeared on an episode of TLC’s “Say Yes to the Dress” last weekend in preparation for her upcoming wedding to Gaithersburg resident Kenneth Davis.) She appears to be a local: news reports variously describe her as living in D.C. or Gaithersburg, Md.

And she is a 10-year Air Force veteran who retired from the service in 2008 with the rank of staff sergeant, according to military records.

Beyond that, Watkins has a Zelig-like media profile, always seeming to drift in front of cameras.

In 2010, Oprah Winfrey featured her story in a segment titled “A Day in the Life of a Homeless Female Veteran,” in which Watkins documents her own struggles, living in a rented car and using hotel bathrooms, all the while while searching for a job.

In 2011, a photographer from Getty image snapped a photo of Watkins at a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Watkins, identified as the survivor of the Pentagon bombings, was laying a purple heart by the name of a friend killed in the attacks. “Since then Watkins has created a charity in the name of her friend and roommate,” Getty reported.

In 2013, MassLive.com interviewed her as she waited for the arrival of President Obama in Boston following the Boston bombings, a small American flag in hand. The story describes her as an Air Force veteran injured in Afghanistan. “I never though I would have to deal with a war-time situation in Boston,” she told the reporter.

In 2014, she appeared in a local ABC news report about a “horse whisperer” who brings veterans with PTSD in contact with horses to help heal them. “I experienced IEDs, suicide bombers,” the story quotes Watkins saying. “I went through traumatic brain injury, also, within my military service, I was sexually assaulted.”

In a 2015 update to the Oprah segment, Watkins said she had moved in with a friend and pulled her life together. In 2012 she was accepted to Harvard, she said, and her college expenses are covered by the G.I. bill. She also said she’d recently gotten engaged on her birthday.

An internal Harvard directory identifies Watkins as being enrolled in the Harvard Extension School, a lower-cost program where students typically take classes part-time or online.

Her ambition is obviously to be on Reality TV. No wonder she broke into Trump’s press conference.

If his instincts tell him to hire con artists, swindlers and grifters that’s his business. He certainly attracts them:

He’s obviously flattered by their good looks and flattery. (He likes beauty queens so much he even bought himself a whole pageant.)

But it’s a little weird for him to extol these “instincts” as a qualification to make America Great Again, particularly since his entire pitch is about being better at business than any old bureaucrat. We’d better hope China, Japan or Mexico don’t send in a pretty woman to negotiate all these deals or we’re in big trouble.

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Headline O’ the Day #Trumpshame

Published by digby on March 22, 2016

Headline O’ the Day

by digby

As do most Americans, I’m sure.

Unfortunately, while Republicans may be embarrassed by their presidential campaign Trump still gains in popularity:

Alarmed by the harsh attacks and negative tone of their presidential contest, broad majorities of Republican primary voters view their party as divided and a source of embarrassment and think that the campaign is more negative than in the past, according to a New York Times/CBS News national poll released on Monday.

The dismay has not set back their leading candidate, however. While about four in 10 Republican voters disapprove of how Donald J. Trump has handled the violence at some of his rallies, Mr. Trump has also picked up the most support recently as several rivals have left the race. Forty-six percent of primary voters said they would like to see Mr. Trump as the party’s nominee, more than at any point since he declared his candidacy in June. Twenty-six percent favored Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and 20 percent backed Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. Fully three-quarters of Republican primary voters expect Mr. Trump to be their party’s nominee.

That last pretty much tears it. It’s him. The question is whether these people willdecide that it’s ok to vote for an unqualified, fascist, megalomaniac Bond villain for president rather than see a Democrat win.

How many of them will put the country first?

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The Donald’s Big DC Adventure

Published by digby on March 22, 2016

The Donald’s Big DC Adventure

 by digby

I wrote about Trump’s trek to the capitol yesterday for Salon this morning. Just … oy:


 On Monday morning, millions of Sarah Palin fans woke up to an epic Facebook rant complaining that she and other Trump endorsers are being blacklisted by Washington insiders. This was apparently based upon some Breitbart News “reporting” which quotes some members of the conservative movement compiling a list of Trumpish apostates who will be denied membership in their club. This was somewhat ironic since the Trump campaign actually is keeping an enemies list of reporters it will not allow into its events. But such is the state of the conservative crack-up.  And it perfectly signaled the beginning of a very busy day. Donald Trump went into the belly of the beast, Washington D.C. —  and once again dominated the news cycle on the entire day before an election.

Trump started the morning with a trek to the Washington Postfor an interview with the editorial board. The first question they asked was about his foreign policy team. Up until now he’s said that he watches “the shows” and would listen to himself because he has “a very good brain.” This time he named some people who are not know to be on the A-list, including a conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe and a former general who was dismissed for covering up Bush administration contracting corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He whined like a tired toddler about how unfairly the Washington Post treats him and chattered excitedly about his new building project for some time. He babbled incoherently about how the country’s debt was a bubble and said we need to charge foreign governments to protect them so we have money to rebuild at home. He was asked about the issues of African Americans and the police and said that the problem was unemployment — he believes that black youth have a 58 percent unemployment rate. When pressed about whether there are racial disparities in law enforcement he affirmed his very, very strong support for the police and suggested they need to do whatever is necessary to prevent violence.
He promised to create economic zones and business incentives in the inner cities (he seems to think he just thought of that concept) but mostly he’s convinced that the answer is to lift people’s “spirit.”
He said,
“I actually think I’d be a great cheerleader for the country. Because a lot of people feel it’s a hopeless situation. A lot of people in the inner cities they feel that way. And you have to start by giving them hope and giving them spirit and that has not taken place.”
I’m sure his policy of having the cops bring the hammer down as hard as possible will be a great spirit lifter.
They asked him if he had any regrets about getting down in the dirt with all the “hands” business and he went on and on and on about it. This is just a short excerpt of what he had to say on the subject:
No, I had to do it. Look, this guy. Here’s my hands. Now I have my hands, I hear, on the New Yorker, a picture of my hands….A hand with little fingers coming out of a stem. Like, little. Look at my hands. They’re fine…My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay?
Issues? What issues?
But this exchange with the publisher was downright chilling:
RYAN: You [MUFFLED] mentioned a few minutes earlier here that you would knock ISIS. You’ve mentioned it many times. You’ve also mentioned the risk of putting American troop in a danger area. If you could substantially reduce the risk of harm to ground troops, would you use a battlefield nuclear weapon to take out ISIS?
TRUMP: I don’t want to use, I don’t want to start the process of nuclear. Remember the one thing that everybody has said, I’m a counterpuncher. Rubio hit me. Bush hit me. When I said low energy, he’s a low-energy individual, he hit me first. I spent, by the way he spent 18 million dollars’ worth of negative ads on me. That’s putting [MUFFLED]…
RYAN: This is about ISIS. You would not use a tactical nuclear weapon against ISIS?
TRUMP: I’ll tell you one thing, this is a very good looking group of people here.  Could I just go around so I know who the hell I’m talking to?
That is not a typo or a garbled transcript. (You can listen to the whole interview here.) When Donald Trump was asked whether he would use nuclear weapons against ISIS, he said didn’t want to “start the process of nuclear” then explained that he’s a “counterpuncher,” reminding them how he vanquished his rivals in the presidential primary. Then he noticed some attractive people in the room.
That’s how his mind works. It’s not normal.
But that was just the beginning of Trump’s big day in D.C. After his “hands on” interview with the Post. he headed over to a private meeting with some current and former members of Congress, including Senator Tom Cotton, the audacious Arkansas freshman who wrote the embarrassing “Iran letter,” Senator Jeff Sessions, former Senator Jim DeMint, disgraced former congressmen Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston, Calista Gingrich and a small number of backbench Representatives. No one is quite sure what it was all about, but Trump had a press conference afterwards and seemed to believe it was a very, very impressive group.
That press conference rivaled his notorious Super Tuesday Trump brand infomercial. He talked about the building he’s building for what seemed like hours, even discussing the bathroom fixtures at one point. A woman in the audience asked a question he seemed to like and he brought her up to the podium and promised to hire her on the spot. He said, “I looked at her, gut instinct, she asked a question and it was a positive question and she has a great look and she looks like a great person to me, I have instincts about people.” This is the world famous business acumen he will bring to running the government.
He was asked about the violence at his rallies and he reiterated his claim that the protesters are very bad people and explained that the man who hit and punched a protester over the weekend had a wonderful family and was angry at a member of the Ku Klux Klan. (He actually beat a protester who was dressed in red, white and blue. A different protester was wearing a white hood to protest Trump’s association with the Klan.)
He downplayed any threats from the GOP establishment to his campaign saying,
“I don’t see threats. I see people who are trying to go against me … I think they’re very misguided. I think the people who go against me should embrace me and then I would embrace them very easily … If they don’t embrace me, then it’s a threat… There has never been an event like what we’re going through in the history of politics — people are talking about this all over the world.”
He’s right about that, but one suspects he may not fully comprehend the horror with which his campaign is being greeted here and around the globe.
With that bizarre public appearance under his belt Trump popped over to CNN’s studios for an interview with Wolf Blitzer as part of their evening special with the “Final Five” candidates. He said the usual stump speech nonsense and was typically unresponsive. He did take the opportunity to thoroughly trash Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, saying that he must “let people know that she’s a third rate talent.” But he assured the nation “nobody respects women more than I do. Nobody will take care of women better than I do,” so that’s a relief.
And just hours away from delivering a big speech for which he used a teleprompter, he took a shot at Hillary Clinton for using a teleprompter.
That big American Israel Public Affairs Committee speech was heavily anticipated among the political media, mostly because everyone wondered if Trump could give a prepared speech. And yes, there was some curiosity about whether he would go before such a typically hawkish crowd and repeat his claim that he would stay neutral between the Israelis and Palestinians. He did not do that. Instead, his Israel policy, if you can call it that, was pretty much GOP boilerplate. And despite the fact that he delivered it via teleprompter it was just as puerile and self-centered as any interview or stump speech he’s ever given.
His most notable line (after his bragging about taking the huge physical risk to be the Grand Marshall of New York City’s Israel Day parade in 2004) was this one:
My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. I have been in business a long time. I know deal making. And let me tell you this deal is catastrophic, for America, for Israel and for the whole middle east. We’ve rewarded the world’s leading state sponsor of terror with 150 billion dollars and we received absolutely nothing in return.
I’ve studied this issue in great detail. I would say actually greater, by far, than anybody else, believe me. Oh believe me
The audience roared with laughter. He may be able to convince some of the people at his rallies that he knows what he’s talking about in foreign affairs, but the AIPAC crowd isn’t fooled about his knowledge of Israel and Iran. Nonetheless, they gave him a polite reception. He didn’t challenge the status quo in any way so it was a successful speech for him. But would it have really mattered if it wasn’t?
All in all, Donald’s Big Washington Adventure succeeded in doing what what he set out to do. He had the press corps following him all over town like a bunch of One Direction fans hanging on his every silly boast and ignorant rant. Today he will probably win a bunch more delegates to the Republican convention thus proving once again that it doesn’t matter what he says it only matters that he says it on TV.