It must stop now: The media can’t allow Trump to make this election about Bill Clinton

Listen to Military Veteran Talk Radio iHeart.SmythRadio.com
Facebook.com/SmythRadio

Salon

TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2016 10:21 AM EDT

SEAN ILLING

Share402WhatsApp169

(Credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking/Mike Segar/Photo montage by Salon)

Donald Trump has fired his first shots of the general election campaign. Predictably, they have nothing to do with anything that matters. In a new video released on Instagram, Trump features audio interviews with women who’ve accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault. Against the backdrop of shadowy audio clips, the accompanying text asks if Hillary Clinton is “really protecting women.”

We hear the voices of Monica Lewinsky, Kathleen Wiley, and a clip from a 1999 Dateline interview with Juanita Broaddrick. Near the end, as the sound of Hillary Clinton’s cackle fades, the words “Here we go again” flash on the screen.

I’m no great defender of Bill Clinton. He was a competent president and did a lot of things well, but he’s also received a paats on a number of fronts. The triangulating, the serial lying, the capitulations to white Southerners – it was all transparent and nauseating. But here’s the thing: Bill Clinton isn’t running for president, and what he did with his penis 30 years ago is irrelevant.

Hillary Clinton is the nominee. To the extent that she’s aligned herself with her husband on policy issues, it’s fair game. But all the noise about Bill’s philandering is a ruse, and you can expect to hear more of it. “The Clintons collectively have dodged many, many, many bullets,” said Trump surrogate Roger Stone. “So much that was suppressed is going to get re-analyzed. So many of the things that they slipped by on will get reexamined. That’s something they should’ve counted on before getting into the race.” Translation: The goal is to make this campaign a referendum on Bill Clinton and the ’90s rather than a debate about the future.

This is a diversion. Worse still, we’ve been down this road already. As Rep. Peter King (R-NY) noted, “We’ve been here before, and for most it’s probably old news that people get a little squeamish about. Especially when he [Trump] brings it up in the abstract, he risks making the same mistake that Republicans made in 1998 when we got caught up in this stuff.” People are free to dig into Bill’s background all they want. But his sordid history has nothing to do with this election. If Trump is talking about Monica Lewinsky instead of his ethno-nationalist rhetoric or his incoherent policy positions, he’s winning.

The media has an obligation not to countenance this. This is what Trump does: stoke controversy, divert the media, control the narrative. It’s a rather naked attempt to avoid the issues. Trump blankets his opponents with insults and white noise in order to force them into the mud, where he’s most comfortable. It’s a brutally simple but effective tactic. Naturally, he lies about his motivations. “They [the Clintons] said things about me which were very nasty. And I don’t want to play that game at all. I don’t want to play it – at all,” Trump told The Washington Post. “But they said things about me that were very nasty. And, you know, as long as they do that, you know, I will play at whatever level I have to play at.”

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Dow Chemical CEO: Why Sustainability Should Be A Business PurposeFortune I Dow Chemical

LG 21.8 Cu. Ft. Bottom Mount Refrigerator with French Doors ® ...rentacenter.com

  

by Taboola 

Sponsored Links 

Nonsense. Trump is a one-trick pony. He knows only one level, one tone, one style. He’s a bully, and that’s all he is. A candidate who references his penis on a presidential debate stage isn’t interested in civil discourse. Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said Monday that Trump’s latest attack was part of a “strategy to try to distract from an issues-based campaign,” and he’s absolutely right. Trump founders when forced to defend his half-baked proposals; talking about Vince Foster or some other conspiracy theory ensures he doesn’t have to.

ADVERTISEMENT

Trump will drag this debate to the floor and hope it stays there. There’s no other way forward for him. The Clinton campaign would do well not to play this game with Trump – it’s a no-lose proposition for him. The media, for their part, has to push back. Every time Trump mentions Bill or some sexcapade from the past, the response should be: Ok, but how will you build that wall? Or what does it mean to make America great again? Or why did you lunge into presidential politics by embracing birtherism? Or explain how you can cut a deal with Kim Jong-un? Or how can you undo the process of globalization without starting a trade war?

These are the issues that matter. Trump will do everything possible not to talk about them. If he wants to be president, the media must force him to.

Sean Illing is a USAF veteran who previously taught philosophy and politics at Loyola and LSU. He is currently a staff writer for Salon. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Read his blog here.

MORE SEAN ILLING.

The Marco Rubio post-mortem: How a supposedly ready-made GOP nominee crashed and burned

Listen to Military Veteran Talk Radio iHeart.SmythRadio.com

www.salon.com

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come not to praise Marco Rubio – dear God, never, ever that – but to bury him. And then to salt the earth in the hope that he will never come back.

The Rubio campaign is on its last legs, stumbling dehydrated and desperate through the Florida Everglades like the heroine in the second act of a Carl Hiaasen novel, trying to stay one step ahead of the bloodhounds who want nothing more than to drag the Florida senator into the swamp and tear his throat out, or at least convince him to join with Ted Cruz on some sort of unity ticket to stop Donald Trump, which might be an even worse fate.

The establishment is telling Rubio his dropping out would be for the good of the Republican Party. Which is why he’ll probably at least consider it. He is a party man through and through, and since he gave up his Senate seat to run for president, he’s going to want to come out of this cluster-screw of a campaign with something to show for it besides the humiliation of a crushing defeat in his home state’s primary on Tuesday. Run for vice-president on a ticket with Cruz, the party will whisper in his ear, and when he gets destroyed in the general election in the fall and the country suffers through four years of socialism under a Democrat, you’ll be perfectly positioned to be the 2020 nominee. What’s not to like about that scenario? And why wouldn’t you trust a GOP establishment that has displayed such a sharp political acumen this cycle that it just about handed its nomination over to a jar of orange marmalade in a bad wig before it knew what hit it?

Rubio might not be smart, but he’s a politician who can read poll numbers. It must have sunk in by now that his “Baghdad Bob” primary strategy (claim victory even when you came in a distant third/the American military is a block away and roaring towards you unopposed) has been a galactic failure. With even his financial backers and editorial page cheerleaders telling him it’s time, he must feel like Butch Coolidge getting the order to take his ass down in the fifth.

The post-mortem on Rubio’s campaign will point to many, many moments that sealed his fate. The base never fully trusted him after his role in the Gang of Eight immigration reform bill in the Senate, which he later had to renounce in the hope of pacifying the conservative mouth-breathers who were inundating his office with hate mail. There was his apparent circuit-breaker malfunctionin the New Hampshire debate against Chris Christie. There was his late-in-the-campaign attempt to turn into Don Rickles in order to stand up to Trump, which only seemed to cause his poll numbers to crash. There were his ham-handed attempts to get to the farthest right edge of the Republican field on every issue from abortion to fighting terrorism, the latter of which resulted in his spouting the sorts of fearful, doom-laden paranoia about ISIS terrorists coming ashore in Biscayne Bay that might tickle the GOP base but erased Rubio’s image as the sunny and optimistic young man who could lead America into a booming future.

It is that last one that I think comes closest to explaining his flameout. It stems from the 30,000-feet view of Marco Rubio the politician, an ambitious young man with no accomplishments or real-world experience to qualify him, who would don whatever suit – neocon hawk, religious extremist, crazy guy hollering about a war on Christianity from a steam grate – he or his advisers thought the GOP electorate wanted at any given moment, no matter how awkward the fit. He was the best example of a blow-dried establishment candidate this cycle, so perfect he might have been grown in that space station lab in “Alien: Resurrection” where they kept all those malformed Ripley clones, and raised to be the great hope of the Republican Party. In an era where carefully maintaining and presenting a focus group-approved persona to the world is the paramount goal of almost every politician at the national level, Rubio still stood out for how many of his edges had been sanded off.

You Might Also Like

Rubio was the product of personal ambition in overdrive and married to a Republican Party that has bought so fully into the idea that our current president was elected despite being an unaccomplished lightweight, all it had to do was roll out another young, telegenic pol with a non-WASPy last name and the White House would be the GOP’s to lose. Never mind the lack of accomplishments, or the fact he was a career politician who had barely seen a time in his adult life when he wasn’t collecting a government paycheck while dining with lobbyists. Never mind that when he spoke in debates, his talking points, which were mostly warmed-over standard-issue conservative pabulum, all sounded so memorized that you could half-imagine him cramming with flash cards the night before in a dorm room decorated with a Dan Marino poster. Never mind the awkward attempts to connect with young people – did you know that Marcoloves the rap music? – while spouting anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage positions that are as out of place in the twenty-first century as a horse and buggy.

It would have been much more hilarious, if it hadn’t also felt so desperate.

Rubio and his handlers seemed to think he could cruise to the nomination on the strength of an appeal that was as chimerical as a unicorn. To that end, he never really built much of a ground game for his campaign, a fact that observers have been harping on for months. His team seemed to think that it was running some sort of high-tech, futuristic operation where retail politics didn’t matter, where you could, as one adviser infamously put it, save on office rent by having your entire team set up in a Starbucks and use the free wifi. Meanwhile, he seemed to spend as much time huddling with wealthy financial backers behind closed doors as he did getting in front of voters. And while he was flying around being not quite as visible as he needed to be to voters, Rubio missed so much time at his day job, and publicly proclaimed he didn’t care because the Senate bored him anyway, that it became easy to view him as a lazy, entitled dilettante. No amount of repeating the story of his humble beginnings – did you know his dad was a bartender? – was going to overcome that.

It’s possible he could still come back and run for statewide office in Florida, but one has to think Rubio’s career in national politics is over. Whatever has been loosed in the electorate that gave rise to Donald Trump is not likely to fade anytime soon. There is no room in that space for a guy so transparent, if you squint hard enough you can see what he ate for lunch. All the image consultants in the world can’t cover that up.

More Gary Legum.

COMMENTS

SALON.COM SURRENDERS "SHE JUST CAN'T WIN"

Listen to Military Veteran Talk Radio iHeart.SmythRadio.com

Hillary Clinton just can’t win: Democrats need to accept that only Bernie Sanders can defeat the GOP

www.salon.com

In one major poll, Bernie Sanders is now leading Hillary Clinton nationally. In most others, he’s not far behind from the former Secretary of State. Vermont’s Senator already has an “edge over Clinton in matchups with GOP opponents,” dispelling Clinton’s electability myth. In an average of national polls, Bernie Sanders is less  than eight points from Hillary Clinton, after being over 50 points behind in 2015. In addition, there’s only one person capable of challenging a Republican in 2016 without James Comey declaring national security was jeopardized by a private server.

Bernie Sanders is the only Democratic candidate capable of winning the White House in 2016. Please name the last person to win the presidency alongside an ongoing FBI investigation, negative favorability ratings, questions about character linked to continual flip-flops, a dubious money trail of donors, and the genuine contempt of the rival political party. In reality, Clinton is a liability to Democrats, and certainly not the person capable of ensuring liberal Supreme Court nominees and President Obama’s legacy.

The precious and all-knowing polls already show Bernie Sanders defeating Republicans in a general election and Robert Reich has already explained why Sanders can easily win the presidency. In a Huffington Postpiece titled “6 Responses to Bernie Skeptic,” Reich debunks the trusted myth of Clinton supporters and Republicans:

“He’d never beat Trump or Cruz in a general election.”

Wrong. According to the latest polls, Bernie is the strongest Democratic candidate in the general election, defeating both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in hypothetical matchups. (The latest RealClear Politics averages of all polls shows Bernie beating Trump by a larger margin than Hillary beats Trump, and Bernie beating Cruz while Hillary loses to Cruz.)

“America would never elect a socialist.”

P-l-e-a-s-e. America’s most successful and beloved government programs are social insurance – Social Security and Medicare. A highway is a shared social expenditure, as is the military and public parks and schools. The problem is we now have excessive socialism for the rich (bailouts of Wall Street, subsidies for Big Ag and Big Pharma, monopolization by cable companies and giant health insurers, giant tax-deductible CEO pay packages) – all of which Bernie wants to end or prevent.

As Reich points out in his article, America is already a nation of Democratic-Socialists, but many of us (Democrats and Republicans) simply uphold “excessive socialism for the rich.”

Bernie Sanders, unlike Clinton, defeats Donald Trump in a landslide of  “epic proportions” in a general election and is the antithesis of a Republican. If you don’t believe me, then watch my friend Brian Hanley’sanimated rap videos about Bernie Sanders demolishing Donald Trump.

Most importantly, and something the naysayers should learn, is that Bernie Sanders does better than Clinton against the GOP in a general election.

In addition, American voters don’t trust Hillary Clinton. At what point will critics of Bernie Sanders realize that American voters will never vote for a candidate they don’t trust and don’t like? In October of 2015, I explained in the following YouTube segment why Clinton is unelectable, and in another segment why Clinton must always evolve on key issues.

53.8% of all American voters have an “unfavorable” view of Hillary Clinton.

67% of American voters find Hillary Clinton “not honest and trustworthy,” compared with 59% for Donald Trump. Yes, more people trust Donald Trump.

After all, it’s difficult to trust a politician who completely fabricated a story about being fired upon by snipers. Like POLITIFACT states, “it’s hard to understand how she could err on something so significant as whether she did or didn’t dodge sniper bullets.”

71% of men and 64% of women find Clinton “not honest and trustworthy.”

You Might Also Like

74% of Independent voters find Clinton “not honest and trustworthy.”

35% of Democrats find Clinton “not honest and trustworthy.” Yes, even Democrats.

In contrast, Kathy Frankovic of YouGov.com states “Bernie Sanders is the most widely trusted presidential candidate of either party.”

Quinnipiac’s Feb. 18 report states “Sanders has the highest favorability rating of any candidate and the highest scores for honesty and integrity, for caring about voters’ needs and problems and for sharing voters’ values.” Sanders also ties Clinton on “having strong leadership qualities.”

In terms of Clinton’s leadership qualities, they haven’t translated to good judement. If the Clinton campaign expects to build upon President Obama’s accomplishments, then it should first discuss things with a former Obama intelligence official. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn explains his view of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal in a CNNarticle titled “Former Obama Intel Official: Hillary Clinton Should Drop Out”:

President Barack Obama’s former top military intelligence official said Hillary Clinton should pull out of the presidential race while the FBI investigate her use of a private email server for official government communication while secretary of state.

“If it were me, I would have been out the door and probably in jail,” said Flynn, who decried what he said was a “lack of accountability, frankly, in a person who should have been much more responsible in her actions as the secretary of state of the United States of America.”

“This over-classification excuse is not an excuse,” Flynn said Friday. “If it’s classified, it’s classified.”

Flynn, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency from July 2012 to August 2014, told Tapper that Clinton “knew better…“

No, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn isn’t part of the GOP. He actually worked for President Obama. If you think the FBI, a former Obama intelligence official, the State Department’s own“internal watchdog,” and all the other elements of this expanded investigation make for a great presidency, then you’re certainly ready for Hillary in 2016.

Yes, a former Obama intelligence official suggests Clinton “drop out” of the presidential race. The FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s emails is“not letting up” and there is no end in sight. Good luck with nationally televised debates against a ruthless opponent like Trump (who will certainly make the email scandal a primary issue of every discussion), if you fear the loss of Supreme Court nominees and the future of our country. It’s doubtful any GOP challenger would gracefully declare, “Enough of the emails.”

Even if you believe Clinton would win a general election, remember that the FBI, or even the State Department, could uncover yet another group of“Top Secret” emails well into Clinton’s first term. The FBI could also urge the Justice Department to take action; even if Clinton wins the presidency. We’ve already seen one Clinton White House defend against scandal.

By the way, can anyone at The Daily Beast, The Daily Banter, or The Daily Hillary Clinton Inevitability Press please explain why Hillary Clinton felt the need to own a private server?

Vermont’s senator will become our next president and it should come as no surprise to people actually paying attention, and not repeating establishment talking points. I’ve been saying this since June 25, 2015, when 730,000 people on Facebook liked my article titled “It’s Official — Bernie Sanders Has Overtaken Hillary Clinton In the Hearts and Minds of Democrats.” True, I was wrong about Iowa, but at least I got the winner right, and I’ll be right about my greatest prediction: On Jan. 20, 2017 Bernie Sanders Will Be Sworn In as America’s 45th President.

More H.A. Goodman.

COMMENTS