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Talking Points Memo: The Phony Firestorm Over Biden’s Gaffe

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2024 //
13

David Kurtz writes about the media’s supercharged response to President Biden’s comment about the comedian who called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage.” He said that the people at the Madison Square Garden event were garbage, but he meant that calling Puerto Rico a garbage island was garbage.

The media and the Republican Party leapt on the story because it diminished attention to Kamala’s excellent speech in Washington, D.C.

Kurtz writes:

Here We Go Again

Like sharks with blood in the water, leading national political reporters went into a feeding frenzy last night after Republicans faked outrage at remarks from President Biden that they construed as calling Trump supporters “garbage.”

This dance is so predictable, rehearsed, and tired that everyone has their roles to play and feels compelled to play them despite how intellectually and journalistically bereft the whole exercise has become.

Among the tells in the coverage:

  • Top-tier political reporters quickly jumpedon the perceived gaffe;
  • The parsing of what Biden said quickly gave way to “meta” analyses that it didn’t matter because it was a gaffe anyway;
  • Republican professional fake outrage was treated like a genuine groundswell of umbrage.

On that last point, “firestorm” was the word of choice:

  • Axios: Biden sets off election firestorm with “garbage” comment
  • Politico: Biden sparks a firestorm on the right over ‘garbage’
  • NBC News: Biden sets off a firestorm with his response to Trump rally comedian’s Puerto Rico comments

Among the bigs, the WaPo managed to come closest to capturing the actual dynamic: White House, Trump campaign clash over whether Biden called Trump supporters ‘garbage.’

I’ve grown weary of explaining how these kinds of journalistic set pieces require suspending good, independent news judgment; rely on old, hackneyed journalistic tropes; and traffic in erroneous assumptions about Republicans (and journalists themselves) representing the “real America.”

This kind of coverage has been deeply problematic for a long time, as TPM has pointed out relentlessly for two decades. It has become more egregious and even less defensible when gaffe-based, double-standard coverage is deployed in covering an election with democracy on the ballot.

The coverage lacks intellectual rigor in too many ways to list here, but here’s one example to illustrate the point. When Biden – who isn’t even on the ballot any longer – says something imprecise or wrong-headed, he and the White House scramble to correct the record, say that’s not what he means and not what he thinks, and emphasize what he does actually mean and think. It’s an elaborate self-disavowal. When Trump says something truly outrageous, on purpose, he usually doubles down in the face of withering criticism and confirms that’s exactly what he meant. It’s the former and not the latter that is prone to getting the “firestorm” coverage.

The fact that this manufactured outrage and the race to cover it comes five days after Trump called America a “garbage can for the world” makes the whole thing beyond absurd.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Trump

Washington Post: Trump’s Vulgarity Drags the Nation’s Politics into the Gutter

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2024 //
22

I did not cancel my subscription to the Washington Post despite the fact that I was outraged by billionaire Jeff Bezos’s censorship of the editorial board, which intended to endorse Kamala Harris.

I expected that the response of the editorial board and the opinion writ were a would double down on their contempt for the insurrectionist, lying former president.

As this editorial today shows, the editorial board will not be silenced. In this editorial, it draws a straight line between democracy and civility, a character trait that Trump knows not.

Unless Bezos replaces the editorial board with MAGA types, the WaPo editorials will dole out contempt for Trump every day that remains of the campaign. The last paragraph, in particular, is a gem.

Think of it as slow-walking its endorsement of Kamala.

Democracy depends on many things: institutions, traditions, public legitimacy and, yes, a culture of civility. The peaceful transfer of power requires people to have at least a minimum degree of trust in their fellow citizens — that the stakes are not existential. In this regard, former president Donald Trump showed, in his closing argument at a raucous rally at Madison Square Garden, that whether he wins or loses on Nov. 5, he has already done severe damage to American politics by coarsening and corroding public discourse.

Seeking to limit the fallout after a rally speaker referred to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt lamented on Monday on Fox News: “It’s sad that the media will pick up on one joke that was made by a comedian rather than the truths that were shared by the phenomenal list of speakers that we had.”

Here are some of the “truths” from the other “phenomenal” speakers, none of which the Trump campaign disavowed: Businessman Grant Cardone likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute. “Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country,” he said. David Rem, billed as a childhood friend of Mr. Trump’s, called Ms. Harris the “Antichrist” and “devil” while waving a cross onstage.

Radio host Sid Rosenberg called Hillary Clinton a son of a b—- and dropped an f-bomb as he said that all Democrats are “degenerates … lowlifes.” Rudy Giuliani, disbarred over his misconduct as a lawyer for Mr. Trump’s effort to block the 2020 election results, said Ms. Harris is “on the side of the terrorists” in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Donald Trump Jr. claimed Democrats want to “replace” Americans with immigrants.

The stand-up comedian who made that nasty crack about Puerto Rico, Tony Hinchcliffe, made other tasteless ethnic jokes about African Americans, Latinos and Jews. The Bulwark reported that Trump campaign staffers reviewed a script of Mr. Hinchcliffe’s routine in advance and asked him to excise only a line that referred to Ms. Harris as a “c—.”

Even so, a pro-Trump group funded by Elon Musk, who also spoke at Sunday’s rally, posted on X, the platform he owns, and later deleted a video that referred to Ms. Harris as the c-word. After some innuendo, the video’s narrator clarifies that they mean she’s a communist.

To be sure, Mr. Trump has been destabilizing civil discourse since even before he started his 2016 campaign: It was in 2011 that he started voicing support for the false notion that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Yet in the final weeks of this election, he seems to be making the normalization of incivility one of his campaign’s de facto objectives.

He opened a rally this month in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, by commenting on the size of golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia. Mr. Trump told the crowd that night that his wife, Melania, has urged him to use less foul language and that evangelical leader Franklin Graham wrote him a letter pleading the same case. His punchline is that he cannot help himself because Ms. Harris has been a “s—” vice president and everything she touches turns to “s—.” The crowd started chanting “s—” in Latrobe. A top-selling shirt outside his rallies describes Ms. Harris as a “hoe.”

True, Mr. Trump’s campaign is not only a cause of this society’s spreading incivility but a consequence of it. Moreover, norms regarding profanity follow a cultural dynamic separate from politics, and the culture is more permissive about such things than it once was. This may explain why Ms. Harris has also occasionally been using four-letter words on the stump. She swore up a storm in a Rolling Stone interview and said being vice president has made her more profane. Her running mate, Tim Walz, called Mr. Musk “a dips—” during a rally last week. Not a great example. But Mr. Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and events like it are in a class by themselves, not least in their threatening tone.

When he finally took the stage on Sunday, the former president declared without irony: “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion.” Then, over 80 minutes, he promised to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport undocumented immigrants, called Democrats “the enemy within” and the mainstream media “the enemy of the people,” described the United States as “an occupied country,” and predicted Nov. 5 will bring “Liberation Day.” Even without a vulgarity, it was the most offensive language of all.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Media, Trump

New York Times: Trump’s Public Profanity Brings American Politics to a New Low

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2024 //
14

We used to expect our Presidents to be role models. We encouraged our children to emulate them. We hoped that our children would learn from their example of service, valor, and dedication to principle. Sometimes we airbrushed their flaws or mythologized them. But we expected them to act and speak with dignity, as befits the Office.

But not Donald Trump. He has made a mockery of the Presidency. Imagine Abe Lincoln or Harry Truman or Dwight D. Eisenhower hawking tennis shoes or watches for his personal profit in the middle of his campaign.

Worse, however, is his crude language. He has brought locker-room talk onto the public stage, which no other American President has ever done. It is literally impossible to imagine any previous President talking in public with admiration about the size of Arnold Palmer’s genitals. Trump and his campaign hit a new low at the infamous event at Madison Square Garden.

The New York Times noticed:

Four-letter words were flying everywhere. One speaker flipped his middle finger at the opposition. Another made what was interpreted as an oral sex joke regarding Vice President Kamala Harris. Another suggested she was a prostitute. Still another discussed the supposed sexual habits of Latinos rather explicitly.

All in all, former President Donald J. Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday was a cornucopia of crudeness, punctuated by the kind of language that once would have been unthinkable for a gathering held to promote the candidacy of a would-be president of the United States. But among the many lines that Mr. Trump has obliterated in his time in politics is the invisible boundary between propriety and profanity.

Mr. Trump has always been more prone than any of his predecessors in the White House to publicly use what were once called dirty words. But in his third campaign for the presidency, his speeches have grown coarser and coarser. Altogether, according to a computer search, Mr. Trump has used words that would have once gotten a kid’s mouth washed out with soap at least 140 times in public this year. Counting tamer four-letter words like “damn” and “hell,” he has cursed in public at least 1,787 times in 2024

What minimal self-restraint Mr. Trump once showed in his public discourse has evaporated. A recent New York Times analysis of his public comments this year showed that he uses such language 69 percent more often than he did when he first ran for president in 2016. He sometimes acknowledges that he knows he should not but quickly adds that he cannot help himself.

He often relates that Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader and son of the Rev. Billy Graham, has chided the former president about his language. “I wrote him back,” Mr. Trump said at a rally this month where he discussed the golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis size and invited the crowd to shout out a four-letter word to describe Ms. Harris. “I said, I’m going to try to do that, but actually, the stories won’t be as good. Because you can’t put the same emphasis on it. So tonight, I broke my rule.”

The crowd typically does not mind; quite the opposite. The thousands on hand at Madison Square Garden cheered and laughed at the F-bombs, S-bombs and other bombs thrown out by the various speakers and warm-up acts for Mr. Trump. It clearly is part of the testosterone-driven appeal: Real men curse. Mr. Trump is a real man. What they want is a real man for president.

In total, a computer search of 17 of the speakers at Madison Square Garden found epithets used at least 43 times. One of the most prolific was Sid Rosenberg, a conservative radio host. “What a sick son of a bitch,” he said of Hillary Clinton. “The whole fucking party, a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew haters and lowlives. Every one of them.”

Scott LoBaido, an artist, flipped the bird to the Democrats and called Mr. Trump “the greatest fucking president in the world.”

Tony Hinchcliffe, the comic who made insulting jokes about Latino sexual practices, likewise disparaged Jews and Palestinians and called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” the only comment the Trump campaign later disavowed.

Mr. Trump himself was somewhat more reticent at Madison Square Garden, deploying an “ass,” a couple of “damns,” eight “hells” and a “shit.” But at other recent rallies, he has called Ms. Harris “a shit vice president” and used the same word at a Catholic charity dinner in front of New York’s cardinal.

At one appearance in February before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump spiced his speech with no fewer than 44 epithets. “I got indicted four times by this gang of thugs for nothing, or as I say respectfully to the people from foreign countries, for bullshit,” he said at one point.

The computer analysis showed that Mr. Trump’s use of curses has been on the rise particularly in the past few months as the campaign heated up. But Mr. Trump, now 78, did not resort to such language nearly as much during the final months of the 2020 campaign, according to the analysis, and some experts point to his increased profanity as an example of “disinhibition,” a trait often found with aging as people become less restrained in what they say.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Shame, Stupid, Trump

Trump Calls Madison Square Garden Rally “an Absolute Love Fest”

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2024 //
11

The day after Trump’s Madison Square Garden, the media reacted with shock to the raw racism and misogyny on display. The New York Times reported:

Former President Donald J. Trump sought to head off the major speech Vice President Kamala Harris was planning to deliver Tuesday night by casting her as responsible for all of the nation’s ills while also attempting to draw attention away from bigoted and racist remarks at his rally in New York.

Two days after he hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden where several speakers made racist and vulgar statements, Mr. Trump accused Ms. Harris of running “a campaign of absolute hate.”

Mr. Trump then headed to Pennsylvania, a crucial battleground state, for two campaign stops. Ms. Harris is expected to speak at the Ellipse, the same park near the White House where Mr. Trump marshaled his supporters to descend on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The setting for Ms. Harris’s remarks will provide her campaign with a symbolic moment to go along with its increasingly blunt warnings about the dangers posed by Mr. Trump, who Democrats say is unstable and will run roughshod over democratic norms if he returns to the White House.

Mr. Trump’s allies have shown anxiety that the backlash to the Madison Square Garden event, and descriptions of him as a racist and a fascist, may be breaking through to segments of voters in battleground states. On Tuesday, however, the former president sought to attack Ms. Harris with the very accusations he himself has been facing, telling a group of supporters and reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida that her message “has been a message of hate and division.”

In his remarks, Mr. Trump continued to push back against criticisms of his rally — which he called, unprompted, “an absolute love fest” — mocking Democrats who have pointed out that a pro-Nazi rally was held at Madison Square Garden in 1939.

Election Day is one week from today. Here’s what else to know:

  • Madison Square Garden rally fallout: Republicans moved swiftly to distance themselves from remarks disparaging Puerto Rico made by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who was one of the opening speakers at Mr. Trump’s New York rally. The island’s Republican Party chairman is demanding an apology, and the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny stepped up his condemnation of the remarks on Tuesday.
  • Hinting at a vulgar taunt: An ad from Elon Musk’s PAC refers to Ms. Harris as a “C Word” — eventually calling her a “communist” — in an allusion to an insult against women that is one of the most obscene words in American English.
Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Racism, Trump

Washington Post Editorial: If January 6 was “a Day of Love,” What Does a Day of Hate Look like?”

By dianeravitch
October 30, 2024 //
13

Jeff Bezos may have killed the Washington Post’s editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris, but he certainly didn’t muzzle the editorial board, which lacerated Trump about his behavior on January 6, which he recently called “a day of love.”

The editorial on Monday said:

Vice President Kamala Harris will deliver her closing argument in a speech Tuesday at the Ellipse in D.C. This location, where President Donald Trump incited a mob to ransack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is fitting and proper. Mr. Trump’s unprecedented efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, combined with promises to pardon supporters convicted of crimes committed that day, represent Ms. Harris’s strongest argument for why voters shouldn’t return him to the White House.

Mr. Trump has shown no contrition for what happened during the worst assault on the Capitol since the British set it ablaze in 1814. Instead, he’s attempted to rewrite history.

During a Univision town hall on Oct. 16, Republican Ramiro González, a 56-year-old construction worker living in Tampa, expressed concern to Mr. Trump about his inaction on Jan. 6. Mr. Trump said, not for the first time, that it was actually “a day of love” and referred to the rioters in the first person plural. “The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns,” he said. By “others,” Mr. Trump is referring to law enforcement officers, some 140 of whom were assaulted by his supporters that day. Moreover, it’s not true “we” didn’t have guns.

Six people were arrested on Jan. 6 while possessing guns in the vicinity of the Capitol, and more than a dozen have been charged with bringing weapons into D.C. Police officers testified that they observed more people with weapons but didn’t try to arrest them because they were regaining control of the Capitol.

Former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson, a star witness during the Jan. 6 congressional inquest, testified under oath that the president was angry that Secret Service agents weren’t letting armed supporters through security at the Ellipse. “I don’t even care that they have weapons,” Ms. Hutchinson recalled Mr. Trump saying. “They’re not here to hurt me.” (Mr. Trump denies this.)

This month alone, Mr. Trump played footsie with a conspiracy theory that the insurrection was some kind of FBI inside job, sharing a meme on social media that said: “January 6 will go down in history as the day the government staged a riot to cover up the fact that they certified a fraudulent election.” As he reiterated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, Mr. Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday that “the enemy from within” poses a greater threat than North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

During an interview with radio host Dan Bongino, he compared the incarceration of his supporters for Jan. 6 crimes to the internment of 112,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, even though Japanese Americans were interned entirely because of their ethnicity and without due process.

When pressed, Mr. Trump added that he told attendees at his “Stop the Steal” rally to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” But he also urged them to “walk down” to the Capitol. “And I’ll be there with you,” he said. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he continued. “You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing.”

More than 1,500 people have been criminally charged by federal prosecutors in connection with breaching the Capitol that day. Of those, about 1,200 have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial. About 600 were charged with assaulting police or rioting. Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman has said he’ll consider pardon requests on “a case-by-case basis.” Mr. Trump himself has declined to rule out clemency for members of extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, whose leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Over the past four years, Mr. Trump has sounded an increasingly sympathetic tone for all of them. He evolved from referring to the Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners” to calling them “hostages.” He has said the real “insurrection” took place on Election Day. He contributed his voice to a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by the “J6 Prison Choir,” which he played at the kickoff rally of his 2024 campaign.

Mr. Trump himself faces criminal charges for trying to subvert the election. In an Oct. 2 filing, special counsel Jack Smith laid out forensic evidence to prove that Mr. Trump watched Fox News and scrolled through Twitter as he sat alone in the Oval Office on Jan. 6. When he was told that Vice President Mike Pence had been evacuated to a secure location after insurrectionists chanted for his hanging, Mr. Trump allegedly responded, “So what?”

Mr. Pence does not support Mr. Trump’s bid for another term. Should he win, Mr. Trump pledged last week to fire Mr. Smith “within two seconds” of taking office. In addition to retribution, the GOP nominee has promised not to be a dictator, “except for Day One.” If Jan. 6, 2021, was a day of love, it’s unsettling to imagine what that “Day One” of a second Trump term might look like, as well as the days after it.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Shame, Trump

Kamala Agreed to Do “The Joe Rogan Show” But He Set Conditions She Would Not Meet

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2024 //
16

Jonathan V. Last writes on The Bulwark about why Kamala won’t be heard on Joe Togan’s podcast. It is a wildly popular podcast, especially among young men. He set conditions that she could not meet in the last week of the campaign.

Last writes:

This morning we got word that Kamala Harris tried to do the Joe Rogan show. She proposed a date and was willing to sit with him for an hour.

Rogan balked.

Rogan posted on Twitter @joerogan

Also, for the record the Harris campaign has not passed on doing the podcast. They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her and they only wanted to do an hour. I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin. My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being. I really hope we can make it happen.

Jonathan Last commented:

So Rogan’s demand was that the sitting vice president detour from her campaign in swing states to come to him in Austin and also that she give him—what?—three hours?

And if she was only willing to give him an hour, and he had to travel to her? Well, then he thought his audience would be better off not hearing from her at all.

I am sorry but that is not on the level.

This is just one more area in which Kamala Harris has done—or tried to do—everything that was asked of her in the name of outreach to the great and good American people who get their news from a guy who talks about sucking his own dick.

Kamala Harris has a 50-50 chance to win this election.

But I want to head off arguments that if she loses it was somehow her fault. That she did something wrong, or didn’t do something important.

Because here is the rock-bottom fact: No reasonable observer could have asked her to run a better campaign.

Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee a hundred days ago. In that time she:

  • Unified the Democratic party.
  • Reversed Biden’s polling deficit and took the lead over Trump.
  • Organized a successful convention.
  • Created a policy framework for her prospective administration.
  • Pivoted to the center on nearly every issue: From domestic energy production, to gun reform, to immigration.
  • Absolutely schlonged Trump in their debate.
  • Performed somewhere between adequately and exceptionally in every single media interview.
  • Spent time with several non-traditional media outlets.
  • Gave almost unfailingly good speeches in front of giant crowds.
  • Performed heroic levels outreach to Republicans and swing voters by appearing on Fox News and campaigning with the likes of Liz Cheney—while explicitly inviting and welcoming Republican voters into her coalition.

Harris did not play perfect baseball—you or I could sketch out a handful of things we wish she had done differently. Or better. But the perfect campaign does not exist. 

Seriously: This has been the most error-free presidential campaign in memory and yet Harris hasn’t played it safe. She combined aggressive strategy with disciplined execution. In terms of campaigns as they exist in the actual, real world? This is as good as it gets.

Which is why, if Harris loses, it will be incorrect to say that it was somehow her fault. That if only she had done [this thing I like] or said [this other thing that’s important to me], then she would have beaten Trump.

Because not only has Harris run the best possible campaign, but Trump has run an entirely mask-off campaign. He has told America who he is and what he wants.

He wants to round up immigrants and put them in camps.

He wants to deploy the military against domestic groups he disfavors.

He wants to eradicate the “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

He wants to put crazy people like RFK and Elon Musk in charge of large swaths of the federal government.

He wants to fire Jack Smith and make the criminal charges against himself go away.

He wants to force Ukraine to negotiate a ceasefire in terms favorable to Russia.

Believe me: If Trump wins, it isn’t going to be because Kamala Harris gave a bad answer to a question on The View.

It will be because some large percentage of the American public looked at these two candidates and decided that they wanted Trump.

Attempts to blame Harris or find an alternate reason for why voters didn’t consciously choose an authoritarian strongman will be an exercise in reality avoidance. It will be an attempt to avoid grappling with who, and what, our country is.

2. Stories We Tell Ourselves

In a sense, the 2024 election has been an exercise in creating rationalizations in order to avoid reality.

The pattern was simple: People would come up with a rationalization for why 47 percent of the country wanted Trump. Said rationalization would be demolished. Someone would come up with a new rationalization.

  • The only reason people supported Trump was inflation.
    • Then inflation came down, and people kept supporting Trump.³
  • The only reason people supported Trump was high interest rates.⁴
    • Then rates got cut, and people kept supporting Trump.
  • The only reason people supported Trump was crime.
    • Then we had two years with the steepest drops in crime rates in history, and people kept supporting Trump. ⁵
  • The only reason people supported Trump was Biden’s age—they were deeply concerned about his mental ability to do the job.
    • Then the Democratic nomination went to a nimble and vigorous Kamala Harris; Trump became the addled geriatric in the race; and people kept supporting Trump.

How many times do we have to do this? 

Imagine that it’s November 10 and Trump has lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. People will be desperate to come up with explanations.

  • It was immigration. Sure, the Democrats passed the toughest immigration bill ever, only to have Trump kill it. And sure, Biden closed the border.
    • But if only they’d done that sooner. Then voters would have rejected Trump.⁶
  • It was Harris’s liberal past.
    • If only she had the exact same policy positions as Tim Ryan or Joe Manchin. Then voters would have rejected Trump.⁷
  • It was Joe Rogan.
    • If only she’d gone to Austin and given him three hours. Then male swing-voters in [Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, whatever] would have rejected Trump.

But none of these rationalizations will be any more true than the arguments that what voters really cared about was crime, or Biden’s age.

Categories Elections, Harris, Kamala, Media

Barbara Bush, Daughter of GW Bush, is Campaigning for Kamala

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2024 //
6

Barbara Bush, daughter and granddaughter of Republican presidents, endorsed Kamala Harris and is campaigning for her in Pennsylvania.

According to People magazine:

Barbara Pierce Bush, the daughter of former President George W. Bush and granddaughter of former President George H.W. Bush, spent part of her weekend in Pennsylvania campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris with just days to go before the 2024 presidential election….

“Barbara’s Republican father served as president from 2001 to 2009. Her mother, former first lady Laura Bush, 77, broke with the party’s stance in 2010 by saying she supports same-sex marriage and abortion. At the time, Laura said abortion should “remain legal, because I think it’s important for people, for medical reasons and other reasons.”

Categories Education Industry, Elections, Gender, Harris, Kamala

Ronald Reagan vs. Stephen Miller on Immigration

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2024 //
6

At the infamous Madison Square Garden hate rally, Trump’s close advisor Stephen Miller railed against immigrants. If Trump is elected, Miller will be in charge of the program to round up and expel millions of undocumented immigrants.

And Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who has shaped many of Trump’s immigration policies, said Americans are having their jobs “looted and stolen from them” and sent to foreign countries. 

He went even further: “America is for America and Americans only,” he said, a starkly anti-immigration view that advances what has already been said throughout the campaign. 

But President Ronald Reagan had a different message. This was his last message as President. He devoted it to welcoming immigrants. During his time in office, he passed legislation to reform the immigration system so that all immigrants entered legally. He extended amnesty to those who were in the U.S. without documents.

An immigration website describes Reagan’s bipartisan legislation:

President Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan

A few months into his presidency, Ronald Reagan issued a “Statement on United States Immigration and Refugee Policy” in which he outlined his goals to continue America’s tradition of welcoming people from other countries, especially those fleeing oppression. He called for the millions of undocumented “illegal immigrants” present in the country to be given recognition and a path to legal status — without encouraging further illegal immigration.

On Nov. 6, 1986 Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the most far-reaching immigration law passed during his presidency. The Act’s most significant effect was that it allowed immigrants who had entered the U.S. illegally before Jan. 1, 1982 to apply for legal status, provided they paid fines and back taxes. This provision — which Reagan himself referred to as “amnesty,” allowed around 3 million immigrants to secure legal status after paying $185, demonstrating “good moral character” and learning to speak English.

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Immigration

Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally: A Disaster

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2024 //
42

Trump’s campaign may have launched the “October Surprise”–the game-changing event in the last days of the campaign–as a boomerang. The political columns, like Politico, are filled with reactions to the comedian’s line about Puerto Rico being “an island of garbage.” The outrage is loud and bipartisan, since Republicans realize the “joke” offended an important voting bloc.

The Archbishop of San Juan demanded a personal apology from Trump.

JD Vance said at a rally that people should not be so easily offended by a joke. But they are. Calling the island garbage means calling the people on it garbage. Why shouldn’t they be offended? Would Vance be so complacent if someone called Ohio “a garbage state?”

And the controversy revived memories of Trump throwing paper towels to people in Puerto Rico after a devastating hurricane, as well as Trump’s indifference to the island:

On the NBC website was news about the joke:

Apart from Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican singer Marc Anthony slammed Trump for his actions during Hurricane Maria as he endorsed Harris, posting on Instagram: “I remember after Hurricane Maria devastated our island… Trump blocked billions in relief … while thousands died. I remember that when our families lacked clean water and electricity, Trump threw paper towels and called Puerto Rico ‘dirty’ and ‘poor.’” He added he was not “surprised,” because Trump “launched his campaign by calling Latinos criminals and rapists.”

After the 2017 hurricane, Trump repeatedly opposed disaster funding for Puerto Rico as he disputed and failed to acknowledge Maria’s death toll — almost 3,000 people in the U.S. territory, making it the deadliest hurricane in the U.S. in 100 years. Trump also drew attention for disparaging statements about Puerto Rico after Maria, including “they want everything to be done for them,” and for tossing paper towels in a visit to the island after the deadly hurricane.

During his presidency, Congress approved a total of $20 billion in federal housing funds for Puerto Rico’s post-hurricane reconstruction, a historic amount. But the Trump administration blocked Puerto Rico from receiving such funds and obstructed a government probe looking into officials who withheld the aid, according to a Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General report.

All good news for Kamala, who had just released her plans to help Puerto Rico’s economy.

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Stupid, Trump

Eugene Robinson: Harris, Trump, and the Media’s Double Standard

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2024 //
9

Yesterday, Trump was interviewed by podcaster Joe Rogan, and as usual, he said crazy things. He said, for example, that there were people in this country who are more dangerous than the dictator of North Korea; they are “the enemy within,” whom he previously identified as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. He said days ago that “the enemy within” should be arrested and tried for treason. He also told Rogan that if George Washington came back from the dead and ran for president with Abraham Lincoln as his vice president, they wouldn’t beat Trump.

If Harris said crazy stuff like that, the press would go wild criticizing her.

Eugene Robinson, a regular columnist for The Washington Post, is baffled by the disparate treatment of Harris and Trump. He spouts nonsense so often that it is not news. She tries to make the case for reasonable and responsible policies, and the media nitpick every word she says.

What’s going on? It’s not that the media is biased; the mainstream media understand what Trump is. As one commenter on this blog wrote yesterday, “It’s okay for him to be lawless, but she must be flawless.”

Robinson wrote:

Something is wrong with this split-screen picture. On one side, former president Donald Trump rants about mass deportations and claims to have stopped “wars with France,” after being described by his longest-serving White House chief of staff as a literal fascist. On the other side, commentators debate whether Vice President Kamala Harris performed well enough at a CNN town hall to “close the deal.”

Seriously? Much of a double standard here?
Somehow, it is apparently baked into this campaign that Trump is allowed to talk and act like a complete lunatic while Harris has to be perfect in every way. I don’t know the answer to the chicken-or-egg question — whether media coverage is leading public perception or vice versa — but the disparate treatment is glaring.
This week, it became simply ridiculous.

Retired Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly — who served as Trump’s homeland security secretary for six months, then as his White House chief of staff for a year and a half — said in an extended interview with the New York Times that Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

This followed a similar shocking assessment by retired Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the final 16 months of Trump’s presidency. Milley is quoted in Bob Woodward’s latest book, “War,” as saying that Trump is “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”

It is hard to overstate how extraordinary this is. Two of the nation’s most honored and respected warriors, both of whom worked closely with Trump for extended periods, warned the nation about the grave danger of returning him to the White House. Respecting the tradition of keeping the armed forces out of partisan politics, neither Kelly nor Milley went so far as to explicitly endorse Harris. But they clearly intended their remarks to be understood by those who might vote for Trump as flashing red lights and blaring sirens.

The Times published audio of the Kelly interview, in which he describes how Trump “commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’” In a separate interview with the Atlantic, Kelly recalled Trump telling him that he wanted obedient generals like “Hitler’s generals.” Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Kelly told the Times.

During Wednesday’s town hall, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Harris whether she believes Trump is a fascist. “Yes, I do,” she replied — and that was the headline from the event. But news stories and commentary also questioned her decision to pivot from questions about specific policy positions — almost all of which she has already spelled out in considerable detail — to attacks on Trump and warnings about the danger he poses to our democracy.

Let’s review: First, Harris was criticized for not doing enough interviews — so she did multiple interviews, including with nontraditional media. She was criticized for not doing hostile interviews — so she went toe to toe with Bret Baier of Fox News. She was criticized as being comfortable only at scripted rallies — so she did unscripted events, such as the town hall on Wednesday. Along the way, she wiped the floor with Trump during their one televised debate.
Trump, meanwhile, stands before his MAGA crowds and spews nonstop lies, ominous threats, impossible promises and utter gibberish. His rhetoric is dismissed, or looked past, without first being interrogated.

Imagine if Harris were promising to end the war in Gaza on her first day in office but wouldn’t say how. Imagine if she were proposing a tariffs-based economic plan that economists say would destabilize the world economy and cost the average family $4,000 a year in higher prices. Imagine if she were promising a “bloody” campaign to uproot and deport millions of undocumented migrants who are gainfully employed and paying taxes. And imagine if Harris were vowing to use the military to go after her political opponents, as Trump repeatedly pledges.

Kelly and Milley are hardly the only career servicemen to sound the alarm about a potential second Trump term. Two of Trump’s defense secretaries, Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis and Army Lt. Col. Mark T. Esper, and one of his national security advisers, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, have also warned about Trump’s erratic performance as commander in chief.

They join a long list of civilians who worked in the Trump administration and say there should never be another one. Never has there been such a chorus of officials who served a president telling the nation that under no circumstances should he be elected again.

Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Hypocrisy, Insane, Trump
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