GOP Debate Lowlights Featuring Donald Trump’s ‘Sarah Palin Moment’

Fox Business Network is patting itself on the back for pulling off the most boring primary debate to date (transcript). They led the candidates through what amounted to a two hour Republican infomercial. The moderators were so detached that when Donald Trump flew off on a tangent about China in response to a question about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, they failed to inform him that China was not a party to the deal. Rand Paul stepped in to correct the record, but they never followed up to get a straight answer from Trump.

And speaking of Donald Trump, he contributed some of the most hair-brained comments of the evening. Most notably, Trump may have delivered what will become his “Sarah Palin Moment.” He was asked what he would do in response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, Trump said “I got to know [Vladimir Putin] very well because we were both on 60 Minutes.” That’s about as delusional as Palin’s belief that her geographical proximity to Russia gave her insight into the region’s labyrinthine complexities.

The Republican Foreign Policy Dream Team:
Donald Trump Sarah Palin

Furthermore, Trump never actually met Putin who taped his 60 Minutes segment in Moscow. Trump was interviewed in his Manhattan penthouse. So what he meant by being “stablemates” is incomprehensible. It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that he was being deliberately misleading.

In addition to his fudging a close relationship with Putin, Trump came out against raising the minimum wage because he thinks that people “have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum.” He continued saying that if wages were higher it would make the U.S. less competitive. In other words, he expects American labor to compete with the slave-wage earners of China and other nations that abuse their working class. That should make a good campaign bumper sticker.

But a Trump rant wouldn’t be complete without his descending into rancid bigotry. And Trump didn’t disappoint. While answering a question about his utterly ludicrous proposal to round up and deport eleven million undocumented residents, Trump sought to validate his approach by comparing it to a program implemented by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. And as if to put a sunny disposition on the controversial program, Trump introduced the comparison with a reminder of Eisenhower’s chummy campaign slogan, “I like Ike.” What Trump left out is that Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback (yes, that was what it was called) resulted in dozens of fatalities and a taint of racism. Approximately 1.2 million people were deported to rural areas of Mexico with none of their possessions or other resources necessary to survive. Trump is calling for ten times as many deportations and still won’t explain how he will do it.

Now we don’t want to pick on Trump exclusively. Ben Carson also indicated his opposition to raising the minimum wage saying that “Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases.” Once again, Carson is pulling data out of a human body part far removed from area that he generally operated on. There is ample evidence that raising the minimum wage has no negative impact whatsoever on job creation. But not satisfied with merely misstating reality, Carson went on to actually call for lowering the minimum wage for some workers.

Marco Rubio weighed in on the matter of wages and education. Apparently he is not too anxious to encourage Americans to seek higher education. Consequently, he advocated for vocational training as opposed to college. Of course, there isn’t anything wrong with vocational schools, which may be superior alternatives for some students. But Rubio reduced the argument to “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.” However, Rubio’s argument is not based in reality. The median salary for philosophy professors is almost $64,000. The median salary for welders is about $37,400. And philosophy majors (who often go into many other lines of work where an understanding of people and society is required) command higher average salaries throughout their careers. We need both welders and philosophers, but no one should be persuaded based on dishonest applause lines from self-serving politicians.

Rand Paul’s breakout moment in the debate came during a discussion on income inequality when he said that “If you want less income inequality, move to a city with a Republican mayor or a state with a Republican governor.” Not surprisingly, this is another Republican distortion of the truth. Of the ten states with the worst income inequality gaps, six are run by Republicans. Do these people ever get tired of being wrong?

Apparently not. Because Carly Fiorina joined the parade in a rant against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She inexplicably said that “We’ve created something called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a vast bureaucracy with no congressional oversight that’s digging through hundreds of millions of your credit records to detect fraud.” What Fiorina considers a “vast bureaucracy” is a relatively small agency with fewer than 1,000 employees. For comparison, the IRS has about 90,000. What’s more, it has the same measure of congressional oversight of almost every other federal agency. It’s director must be confirmed by the Senate, and it is subject to budgetary constraints imposed by Congress. Finally, you’ll have to ask her what she finds so offensive about uncovering fraud and protecting America’s consumers.

To give credit where it’s due, there some questions that where genuinely probing and worthwhile. Sadly, not one of them got a direct answer. The candidates exercised the old debate strategy of not answering the question you are asked, but the question you wish you were asked. And the moderators did nothing in the way of follow ups to attempt to get a responsive answer. Here are three outstanding, and unanswered, questions:

Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal: Now, in seven years under President Obama, the U.S. has added an average of 107,000 jobs a month. Under President Clinton, the economy added about 240,000 jobs a month. Under George W. Bush, it was only 13,000 a month. If you win the nomination, you’ll probably be facing a Democrat named Clinton. How are you going to respond to the claim that Democratic presidents are better at creating jobs than Republicans?

Maria Bartiromo, Fox Business: [Hillary Clinton] was the first lady of the United States, a U.S. senator from New York, and secretary of state under Barack Obama. She has arguably more experience, certainly more time in government than almost all of you on stage tonight. Why should the American people trust you to lead this country, even though she has been so much closer to the office?

Baker: Income inequality has been rising in the United States. Fifty years ago, for example, the average CEO of a big corporation in this country earned 20 times the average salary of one of his or her workers. Today, that CEO earns about 300 times the average salary of a worker. Does it matter at all that the gap between the rich and everyone else is widening?

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

This debate was a peculiar creature from the start. The Fox Business Network has program ratings so low that Nielsen doesn’t even publish them. The only explanation is that it was a gift from the Republican Party to Rupert Murdoch and the Fox News family. As it turns out, it was a generous gift in that the debate drew a record number of viewers (13,500,000) for the tiny network. Although it was still the smallest audience of any of the debates held so far this election cycle. The next debates are scheduled for November 14 (Democrats on CBS) and December 15 (GOP on CNN).

What We Learned From The GOP’s Trainwreck Debate On CNBC: Republicans Hate The ‘Liberal’ Media

In the best of circumstances, a political debate should be illuminating in a manner that allows voters to assess the fitness of candidates for public office. However, the best that can be said about the Republican primary debate on CNBC (transcript) is that it illuminated the rabid opportunism of the candidates and the penchant for provocation on the part of the moderators.

CNBC GOP Debate

While there was an attempt by the moderators to inject some substance into their questions, they inexplicably capped their queries with an inappropriate zinger that only left them wide open for criticism. For example, John Harwood constructed a perfectly legitimate question for Donald Trump that called on him to explain how his wall building, tax slashing, immigrant deporting policies could be achieved without wreaking havoc on the economy. But then Harwood finished off with “Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?” Regardless of the aptness of the imagery, the only conceivable purpose for that framing would be to give Trump something to complain about. This pretentious strategy was repeated throughout the debate.

And the complaints veritably gushed from debaters who were eager to hear some reasonable questions and avoid answering them (which they did all night). The backlash directed at the media and the moderators easily became the dominant feature of the debate, and it was almost the only thing that was discussed in the post-debate analyses. The most replayed moments included Marco Rubio tagging the mainstream media as a SuperPAC for the Democrats, and Ted Cruz lamenting that “The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media.” Consequently, the only takeaway from this debate was that Republicans hate the media, something everybody already knows.

Cruz went on to argue that the media treated Democrats differently, “fawning” over “Which of you is more handsome and wise?” That characterization of the Democratic debate is wholly inconsistent with reality. From the transcript of their CNN outing, moderator Anderson Cooper asked Democrats the following questions:

  • [To Clinton] Plenty of politicians evolve on issues, but even some Democrats believe you change your positions based on political expediency. […] Will you say anything to get elected?
  • [To Sanders] A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?
  • [To O’Malley] Why should Americans trust you with the country when they see what’s going on in the city that you ran for more than seven years?
  • [To Clinton] Russia, they’re challenging the U.S. in Syria. According to U.S. intelligence, they’ve lied about who they’re bombing. You spearheaded the reset with Russia. Did you underestimate the Russians?

Those were not fawning, softball questions by any stretch of the imagination. But Republicans only retain information that comports with their preconceptions. Therefore, the liberal media is invariably portrayed as fiercely pro-Democrat and virulently anti-Republican. What’s more, the conservatives never apply the same standards to their benefactors at Fox News, to whom they still suck up despite the tough questioning they got when Fox hosted their debate.

One of the more shameful exchanges of the CNBC debate was when Becky Quick posed this query to Trump: “You had talked a little bit about Marco Rubio. I think you called him Mark Zuckerberg’s personal senator because he was in favor of the H1B.” Trump interrupted to insist that “I never said that. I never said that.” So Quick quickly apologized. The problem is that Trump actually says exactly that on his own website. When the debate came back from a commercial, Quick noted that fact but never challenged Trump’s denial. And to make matters worse, this segment of the debate was discussed on Fox News the next day and host Jon Scott falsely asserted that it was Quick who was wrong, saying that “it seems that the research was not necessarily done.” This was after he already knew that she was correct and had cited her source during the debate.

In addition to that, the debate featured a couple of statements that were highly significant, but are not likely to garner much attention. First, Carly Fiorina said that “There is no Constitutional role for the Federal Government to be setting minimum wages.” Apparently ignorant of the Commerce Clause, Fiorina boldly came out in favor of ditching the minimum wage. Secondly, Carl Quintanilla directed a question to Trump with the preface that the site of the shootings at Umpqua Community College in Oregon “was a gun-free zone,” Trump readily agreed. But not only is that untrue, there were actually people there with guns who did not engaged the shooter.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

So aside from all of the misinformation, the inter-party hostilities, and the failings of the moderators, the one thing that will persist as the defining characteristic of this debate is the intense loathing that Republicans have for the media. It is that rancorous acrimony that will supplant any useful knowledge that might have been gained about the candidates. And since everyone already knew that Republicans hate the press, the whole affair was a complete waste of time.

Donald Trump Is Just A Symptom. Republicans Are The Disease

Republican presidential candidate and loony cartoony narcissist Donald Trump has been dominating the media and the polls for the past three months. The degree of obsession exhibited by the press is unprecedented as they rush to cover every scrap of data related to Trump and broadcast all of his public events live as if they were actually newsworthy. The environment surrounding the GOP campaign has devolved into a freak show featuring overt bigotry and stupefying ignorance.

Donald Trump Voter

More often than not the blame for this is laid at the feet of Trump, whose own bigotry and ignorance are displayed prominently every time he opens his mouth. But that is somewhat unfair. While Trump is certainly responsible for some of the most memorably ludicrous moments of the campaign, the fact that his hateful idiocy has caught on with a significant faction of the Republican electorate isn’t his fault. Trump’s support isn’t coming from the back seat of his limo. There are actual voters lining up to align themselves with his noxious brand and without them he would be an asterisk in the polls.

A real world illustration of this occurred this week when Trump failed to rebuke a questioner who maligned Muslims and cast doubt on President Obama’s faith and citizenship. The press properly reported Trump’s response, but then portrayed it as if it were peculiar to him. The fact is that a majority of his supporters believe the very same things. That questioner was not an aberration (or a liberal plant as some wingnuts have been alleging). He is a typical representative of Trump’s base and the GOP’s as well.

Trump is not creating the bigotry that is so evident on the right. He is exploiting it, he is benefiting from it and, in the worst instances, he is fanning it. But it was there long before he began his campaign, and it will persist after he inevitably flames out. Whoever the Republican nominee is, he or she will be leading a party that still harbors the prejudices that we are seeing today. If anything, Trump’s campaign is serving a purpose by bringing these views into the light.

However, these tendencies on the part of conservatives are not reserved for the Trump contingent. A new poll by CNN shows that Carly Fiorina has jumped to second place following the CNN debate. What is significant in that is that her boost was the result of her telling the biggest lie of the whole debate. She said that she had seen video showing Planned Parenthood harvesting body parts from an aborted fetus with a beating heart and kicking legs. However, numerous independent journalists who watched all twelve hours of the videos she referenced reported that no such video exists. Nevertheless, her demonstrable lie has thrust her into the upper tier of Republican candidates. This is more proof that the GOP electorate is not only bigoted and ignorant, but they also have no respect for the truth.

There are plenty of other examples of this behavior. Mike Huckebee falsely asserted that Planned Parenthood was caught selling baby body parts for profit. Scott Walker thinks his confrontation with union members in Wisconsin is equivalent to doing battle with ISIS. Ben Carson just today said that he doesn’t believe that Muslims should ever be considered for president. Jeb Bush actually said that using big words makes the world more dangerous.

News Corpse Presents: The ALL NEW 2nd volume of
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Ignorance and bigotry? They are the indicators of a Republican Party deeply infected with a disease that is making the nation sick. The Republican candidates are simply the opportunistic symptoms taking advantage of a weakened immune system. So the next time you see Trump, or any other GOP nut case, say something stupid or offensive, remember that they are saying it to fellow Republicans who feel exactly the same way.

The GOP Debate’s Biggest Winner Was Also It’s Biggest Liar

The second Republican primary debate is in the books and this chapter was pretty much just repetitions of everything the party has been spinning for months (years). While there were some entertaining fireworks at times, they were mostly irrelevant to any policy discussion and consisted of childish insults, whining, and bragging (and that was just Donald Trump).

Donald Trump

Prior to the debate, the pundit class had speculated feverishly about what was at stake for each of the candidates, some of whom would be facing elimination without making some sort of impression. Following the debate the consensus in the media was that Carly Fiorina was the one candidate who surpassed expectations and most helped her own cause. That assessment was based primarily on the confidence with which she expressed herself and her alleged command of the issues. The only problem with that is that she badly mangled some of the answers that she is being credited with answering confidently.

Most egregiously, Fiorina gave an impassioned soliloquy lambasting Planned Parenthood. She referred to the videos produced by an anti-abortion group that has stirred up the GOP and incited members of Congress to call for defunding the women’s health care provider. She said…

“I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, to watch these tapes — watch a fully-formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’ This is about the character of our nation, and if we do not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us.”

The only problem with that dare is the there is no such video to watch. Reporters have watched all twelve hours of the videos and the gruesome scenario that Fiorina described simply does not exist. She is either lying or has developed false memories that reflect her personal biases. On a side note, her demand that Obama “veto this bill” doesn’t make sense because there is no bill for him to veto. She seems to think that there is legislation pending to fund Planned Parenthood, but the only bill that is being considered in Congress would revoke their funding, which I expect Fiorina would want him to sign. She is clearly confused on numerous levels. But she does express her erroneous views confidently.

To make matters worse, Fiorina gave a post-debate interview to George Stephanopoulos (video below) who informed her that the video scenario that so enraged her was non-existent. But she held firm and told Stephanopoulos that he should “Rest assured I have seen the images that I talked about last night.” And no doubt she has seen them – in her vivid and warped imagination.

Fiorina’s “beating heart” hallucination was one of her two most memorable moments in the debate. The other being her smackdown on Trump for his sexist statements about how her face somehow disqualifies her from running for president. She said succinctly, and without commentary, that the women of America had heard him. Trump then made things worse with a disingenuous compliment saying that he thought Fiorina’s face is beautiful. What he still doesn’t get is that both his insults and his compliments are sexist. He is still judging her on appearance rather than merit.

For his part, Trump couldn’t manage to say anything that was truthful. He lied about not having declared bankruptcy (he did four times). He lied about his lobbying for a casino in Florida (he did that too). He lied about Mexico not having birthright citizenship (it does). And the rest of his performance was typically lacking any substance or detail. Nevertheless, he believes he won the debate because – well, because he’s Trump.

So now we wait a few days for a new set of polls to see what the Republican electorate thought of their candidates. Even though not a single one offered anything resembling a policy statement other than that America is a Hell hole, it’s all Obama’s fault, and Hillary Clinton is poised to destroy western civilization. But they can’t escape the pitiful situation they find themselves in where the candidate hailed as the biggest winner of their debate achieved that status by telling the biggest lie. They must be so proud.

News Corpse Presents: The ALL NEW 2nd volume of
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.