Tag Archives: Donald Trump

media news, national news, political news

Take a bow, Cool Hand Chuck Todd

todd and trump

Chuck Todd deserves a pat on the back for keeping his cool this morning in the face of an astonishingly boorish comment from — yep, that’s right — Donald J. Trump.

The “Meet the Press” moderator was interviewing Trump early today. The exchange took my breath away.

Todd asked Trump about the guy in Ohio who rushed the stage where Trump was speaking; Secret Service agents intervened to keep the guy away from Trump.

Trump then said something about “hearing on the Internet” that the fellow as a follower of the Islamic State. Todd said the reports were false. Not so, said Trump, repeating that he “heard it on the Internet.” That — right there — told me plenty of Trump’s (lack of) judgment, that he would take anything he “heard on the Internet” as gospel.

But I digress …

Trump then said the guy was dragging an American flag on the ground, which he said proved he was an ISIS follower. Todd said once again the report was proven to be false.

Then Trump said he “loves the flag more than you apparently do,” implying that Todd, well, doesn’t love the flag and what it stands for.

So. There you have it.

A major presidential candidate buying into Internet gossip as truth and then implying that a veteran broadcast journalist doesn’t love Old Glory simply because he sought to dispel the bogus report about an ISIS connection.

I salute Chuck Todd for maintaining his professionalism in the face of what I considered to be a serious affront.

Here’s the interview in its entirety.

 

 

 

national news, political news

Not exactly a repeat of ’68 in this campaign

RFK

Those talking heads are comparing the anger we’re hearing at Donald J. Trump’s campaign rallies to what we heard 48 years ago when that year’s presidential campaign turned really ugly at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

I beg to differ.

Yes, the convention turned into a bloodbath. Anti-Vietnam War protesters stormed the streets outside the convention hall and battled with police. Reporters and delegates were beaten up on the convention floor.

But prior that tragic event, we heard at least one candidate seek to speak to our better angels, to try to quell the anger.

Robert Francis Kennedy was that man. He had entered the Democratic campaign relatively late. He launched a frenetic, mad dash for his party’s nomination. President Johnson bowed out. Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s young legions were rising up against the “establishment.” Vice President Hubert Humphrey was in the race, too.

Then, as columnist Mike Barnicle notes, tragedy struck in Memphis, Tenn. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death.

Sen. Kennedy got word of it. He climbed aboard a truck bed in Indianapolis and told the largely African-American crowd what had just happened. They gasped.

He went on.

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

“So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.”

Many cities erupted in violence that night. Indianapolis did not.

I watched that campaign unfold in the spring and early summer of 1968 before I was inducted into the Army, at which time my own life changed forever.

Not one time did I hear a candidate in either party exhort his supporters to punch protesters in the face. Nor did I hear any candidate offer to pay an assailant’s legal fees after being arrested for sucker-punching a demonstrator.

Sure, we were an angry nation back in 1968. We had reason to be worried. A bloody war in Asia was going badly and many Americans wanted an end to that conflict.

It came to a head at the Chicago convention that year.

One reason for the violence was that the man who sought to tell us the truth about our anger and sought to offer solutions to ending it himself was gunned down in that Los Angeles hotel kitchen.

Robert Kennedy’s death came nearly two months to the day after the night he stood on that truck bed and offered words of consolation and healing.

 

legal news, national news, political news

Is it better to deal with the ‘devil you know’?

Supreme_Court_US_2010

The word this morning is that President Obama might reveal his selection for the U.S. Supreme Court as early as, oh, Monday!

Excellent. Let’s get this going-away party for the president started.

He reportedly has narrowed the field to three men. One is an African-American, one is an Indian-American, one is a Caucasian. They’re all reportedly able individuals who’ve been confirmed to spots on lower federal appellate courts. The president said he’s going to consider someone whose credentials are impeccable. Moreover, he appears to be zeroing in on someone who’s already passed GOP muster in the Senate.

But, hey. Hold on. Republicans who control the Senate — which must approve the nominee — say they ain’t budging in their refusal to even consider an Obama selection. They want to wait until after the November election.

Here’s where it might get dicey for the Republican leadership in the Senate that is digging in its heels and refusing to do its job — which is to consider and decide whether to confirm a Supreme Court nomination.

Suppose the Republican nominee is Donald J. Trump, who the GOP “establishment” despises. Suppose the Democrats nominate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who the GOP despises perhaps even more.

Suppose, too, that Clinton wins the election in November. Suppose she wins big, as in really, really big.

Do the Republicans believe they’re going to get a more suitable nominee from a President Clinton than they would from the current president? After all, the next justice is going to replace the iconic conservative jurist Antonin Scalia, who died a month ago while on a hunting trip in West Texas.

The balance of the court is likely to change, meaning that the appointment is, shall we say, h-u-u-u-u-u-u-ge!

We might know a thing or two about how this shakes out on Tuesday, when voters in five states decide in primary elections in both parties. Clinton might be able to tighten her vise grip on the Democratic nomination. And Trump could establish himself even more firmly as the GOP frontrunner.

So, with a Clinton-Trump contest shaping up in the fall — and with Republican power brokers scared spitless at the prospect of their party being led by a demagogic know-nothing blowhard — the GOP might want to rethink its resistance to whomever Barack Obama selects for the nation’s highest court.

As someone said this morning on one of those Sunday news talk shows, it might be better to “deal with the devil you know than the one you don’t.”

Let’s all stay tuned. This week well could shake the political ground under our feet.

 

national news, political news, religious news

Which religious liberties have we lost?

liberty religion

My wife and I are going to start our day tomorrow the way we usually start every Sunday.

We’ll get up. Have our morning coffee. We’ll eat a light breakfast. Read the newspaper. We’ll get cleaned up. Get dressed. Then we’ll go to church … more than likely.

We’ll pray. Sing a few hymns. Listen to the preacher deliver his message from Scripture. Pray some more. Then we’ll leave the church and go through the rest of our day.

I keep wondering in the context of this hyper-heated presidential campaign: Which religious liberties have my wife and I — as red-blooded, taxpaying, patriotic Americans — lost?

One of the remaining Republican candidates for president keeps insisting that our “religious liberties” are being peeled away.

Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz keeps harping on the notion that “we are one liberal justice away from having our religious liberties” stripped away. That’s what he says. The crowds to whom he speaks eat it up. He says he won’t “compromise away our religious liberties.”

Thanks, Ted. From where I sit, young man, we’re still quite free in this country to worship as we see fit. Or not worship. The Constitution that Cruz and others say they revere spells it out quite clearly: Government shall make no law that establishes a state religion. That means, as most of us understand it, that we are free to adhere to any deity of our choice.

You want a real threat to religious liberty? How about banning individuals from entering this country solely because they happen to be Muslims? Yes, I know that Cruz opposes the idea put forward by his fellow Republican candidate for president, Donald J. Trump. But if he’s going to raise hell from the campaign stump, he ought to take his best shot at that patently idiotic and unconstitutional idea.

My family has made our religious choice. We did so all on our own. Our religious liberties are quite intact and I am quite certain they are as strong as they’ve ever been.

I thank God every day for those liberties.

So let’s quit dangling those dubious threats, Sen. Cruz, to the liberties that our Constitution’s very First Amendment guarantees for all of us.

Cruz and others suffering from some form of political paranoia might perceive those threats to be real.

I don’t.

national news, political news

Anger is feeding on itself at rallies

04firstdraft-trump-blog480

Talking heads all over the political spectrum seem to be speaking with one voice on critical point.

Donald J. Trump’s frontrunning bid to be the next president of the United States has been fueled by angry Americans. He leads the Republican field of primary contenders because, they say, he has tapped into that anger.

As the fellow who delivers my mail every day told me this week: “Trump is saying what everyone is thinking.”

Yeah, whatever.

The anger is presenting itself at these rallies. Protestors are showing up to disrupt the Trump events, which by itself isn’t anything new. I’ve been to more than few political rallies in my lifetime — dating back to 1972 — to understand that fundamental American demonstration of political expression.

What’s different this time has been the behavior of the candidate, who from the podium is fomenting aggressive resistance to what the protestors are seeking to express.

Now the candidate — Trump — has laid blame on a Democratic candidate for fomenting the protests. He says the noise is coming from those supporting U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. Sanders, quite understandably, has denied such an accusation.

I am not going to take sides on who’s starting these disruptive events.

Instead, I want to focus for a moment on how Trump has handled himself when these outbursts occur.

It’s the strange behavior from the podium that has me most troubled. Never in my entire life have I watched and listened to a supposedly mainstream American political figure actually egg on his supporters to punch protestors “in the face.” One of those Trumpsters seemed to take that exhortation quite literally when he sucker-punched a protestor who was being escorted from a rally venue in North Carolina.

How can we tamp down this visceral anger?

One place to start would be for the candidate to change the tone of his campaign rhetoric. Do we need to keep hearing the same one-note samba about how “stupid” we’ve become, or how “we don’t win anymore” or whether we’ve succumbed to weakness displayed by “political correctness”?

I’m prepared to hear some constructive solutions.

Enough of the condemnation and recrimination.

national news, political news

Trump needs to start acting like a ‘unifier’

A supporter of Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump scuffles with a protestor during a rally in Richmond, Va., Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2015. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Donald J. Trump today postponed a campaign rally because of the threat of violence.

Hmm. Where do I begin?

The Republican presidential campaign frontrunner has been the focus of some unseemly and potentially dangerous confrontations of late. Protestors have shown up at his campaign events; they’ve been shouted down by Trumpsters seeking to silence the anti-Trump voices; fights have broken out; one man has been arrested for assault after he sucker-punched a protestor being escorted out of a rally location in North Carolina.

Trump’s reaction to all of this? Well, it’s been — shall we say — a bit muted. Except, of course, when he’s exhorted his supporters to punch protestors in the face or exhibit some other form of forceful retaliation.

I listened to some commentary this evening after the postponement of a Trump rally in Chicago. An interesting thought came from David Gergen, a CNN political analyst and a former official in several presidential administrations: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton.

Gergen’s advice to Trump: If you’re going to proclaim yourself to be a unifier, then you need to do a lot more to tamp down the anger upon which you’ve built your (so far) successful campaign for president.

Gergen said tonight previous campaigns have drawn hu-u-u-u-u-ge crowds.

He mentioned Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign and John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign.

None of them fostered the violence we’ve seen at these Trump rallies, Gergen noted. Why? “They were positive,” he said. All three men promoted positive agendas for change and they all sought to appeal to the voters’ better angels.

Gergen noted he disliked including Trump with Reagan because, he said, “It does a disservice to President Reagan.” Indeed, it does. Trump, though, needs to heed the words of this bipartisan wise man.

The violence has to stop. One individual has it within his power to restore order, civility and decorum to the important task of delivering a campaign message.

That would be the candidate who is seeking the votes of Americans across the land.

Tone down the angry talk, Donald Trump.

media news, national news, political news

Why not endorse in this GOP contest?

untitled

Rosemary Goudreau O’Hara is a first-class journalist working for a first-class newspaper, the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

She and I also are acquainted. I got to know Rosemary while traveling with her and several other journalists in 2004 through Thailand, Cambodia and India on a trip that explored the impact of HIV/AIDS in Asia.

So, I say this with great trepidation: O’Hara and the paper where she works erred in declining to make an endorsement in the Republican Party presidential primary election coming up next week in Florida.

The Sun-Sentinel has backed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. It has declined to make a call in the GOP primary — even though O’Hara has said that one of the Republicans, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, is actually qualified to be the next president of the United States.

The other three aren’t, O’Hara — the Sun-Sentinel’s editorial page editor — has said in numerous interviews with TV cable news networks. She’s made the rounds on CNN, Fox and MSNBC. I’ve listened to what she’s said. Frankly, I’m baffled.

O’Hara says quite emphatically that Donald J. Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio all lack the temperament, judgment, record and the experience to become president. I happen to agree with her wholeheartedly … and then some!

Why not back Kasich? O’Hara says the Ohio governor — and a former member of Congress — is the longest of the long shots; he hasn’t built a significant campaign presence in Florida; he is not going to be the nominee. If I heard her correctly, she’s saying, in effect, that Floridians shouldn’t waste their vote on someone who’s not going to win.

Man, I disagree with that outlook.

The way I see it, if you have a field of candidates and one of them is at least marginally qualified — and Kasich is more than marginal — then you go with the individual who is the best of the bunch.

I suppose you could couch an endorsement with some language that acknowledges the individual’s slim chance of winning. But then you offer your reason for why the individual has earned your nod and why you think your constituents — your readers — should heed your recommendation.

I hope if Rosemary sees this post she won’t think ill of me. I hope we’ll still be friends. I make this comment with great respect for her.

It’s just that a major Florida newspaper has seen all four of these fellows up close. The editors there know them well. They’ve determined one of them — John Kasich — is qualified to be president.

From where I sit way out yonder, he’s earned the paper’s nod.

 

 

 

national news, political news

Hey, these guys got along, too!

1 Comment

newt

The politics of the moment has this way of inflicting a case of selective amnesia among politicians.

Take last night’s 12th — and possibly final — Republican Party presidential debate with Donald J. Trump, Rafael Edward Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich as providing an example of that peculiar malady.

One of them (I can’t remember who) brought up President Reagan’s famous buddy-buddy relationship with House Speaker Tip O’Neill. The two men — one Republican, one Democrat — worked well together.

Sure they did. I honor them for that cooperation.

So did a couple of other well-known pols. Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich also managed to find common ground when the need arose. And it did, particularly as it regarded the need to balance the federal budget.

None of these current GOP candidates, though, mentions that political partnership.

We all know why that is the case, of course.

It’s because the president’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, wants to ascend to the office her husband once occupied.

Why, we just can’t give Bill Clinton any props for doing what the current president and the current congressional leadership seem unable — or perhaps unwilling — to do.

I’m the first to acknowledge that the Clinton-Gingrich relationship never evolved into the personal public friendship that Reagan and O’Neill developed.

The Gipper and the Tipper would share some spirits once they were off the clock, setting politics aside; it’s been reported widely how they would swap stories between them and laugh at the foolishness of the day.

I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of similar moments of non-political fellowship involving Bill and Newtie.

However, they certainly did form a valuable political partnership during the time Gingrich was speaker. It’s understandable, I suppose, that the Republicans running for president would choose to ignore it.

I’ll just have to rely on Hillary Clinton to remind the rest of us how bipartisan cooperation can work.

She was there, too.

 

 

International news, national news, political news, religious news

No, Mr. Trump, ‘Islam’ doesn’t hate us

islam-at-war

Islam hates America?

That’s what Republican Party presidential campaign frontrunner Donald J. Trump has asserted in his latest broadside against nearly 2 billion of the world’s residents.

No sir. You are wrong!

Trump’s assertion goes far afield from what we know.

It is that a radical portion of the Islamic religion has perverted the doctrine espoused by a great religion. They are not true Muslims. They are cultists. They are murderers. They are religious perverts.

The men who flew the airplanes into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon on 9/11 were not God-fearing Muslims. They were murderers, pure and simple.

Sure, these individuals hate Americans. They also hate Europeans. Moreover, they also hate fellow Muslims.

Let us realize that the largest number of casualties who’ve been injured and killed by terror attacks around the world are Muslims.

Trump’s false assertion became a brief talking point tonight at the Republican debate in Miami. Sen. Marco Rubio challenged Trump by suggesting that the reality TV celebrity is wrong to suggest that hatred for America is somehow codified in the Quran.

It’s not.

Donald Trump cannot be allowed to get away with this continued fear- and hate-mongering along the presidential campaign trail.

 

International news, military news, national news, political news

In other news, U.S. kills another ISIL leader

AAekCUC

Americans went to the polls today in a couple more states to vote on the next president of the United States.

Meanwhile, the guy who still holds the office — Barack H. Obama — can claim another victory in the nation’s fight against the Islamic State.

Another ISIL leader has been smoked.

Abu Omar al-Shishani, aka Omar the Chechen, reportedly has been killed in a U.S. air strike, giving the United States another notch in its belt as it seeks to seek out and destroy ISIL leaders.

The strike occurred in Syria, which is where Russian, Jordanian, French and British air forces have joined the Americans in the air campaigns against the monstrous terror organization.

Omar the Chechen was the minister of war for the Islamic State, which I guess means he helped plan the strategies that ISIL is carrying out against those who oppose the organization’s effort to bring misery to anyone on Earth.

According to reports, the strike involved waves of manned and unmanned aircraft targeting Shishani, who reportedly had been sent to Syria to shore up terrorist troops that had suffered setbacks on the battlefield.

Against the backdrop of the presidential campaign, it’s interesting to note what one of the Republican challengers has suggested. Donald J. Trump has actually proposed letting ISIL overthrow the Syrian regime. Yes, let the terrorists take over a sovereign nation. That’s what Trump has suggested.

That, I dare say, is an utterly insane idea.

I’d rather continue doing the course on which we’ve embarked, which is to keep bombing the daylights out of ISIL troops and their key leaders.

We possess the firepower to bring extreme misery to the enemy.

We’ve done so yet again. Would it be the final ISIL leader to be killed if Omar the Chechen’s death is confirmed? No.

Still, it still looks like a victory in our war against the Islamic State.