He’s so comfortable saying it, though. Too comfortable.
I have to say, I don’t envy Billy Bush. Barbara seems able to strip the skin off you with her eyes alone. Hopefully he’s getting verbally beat down for his comments.
Kissing them, grabbing the pussy. From where do you get the notion that not kicking him in the nuts = ‘letting him do it’?
Seriously, you are defending the indefensible here.
Jill Harth.
And if some guy grabs me by the pussy, without waiting [for consent], I’m going to feel assaulted and violated, even if I don’t react “the right way” for a victim. Maybe I’d freeze up, maybe I’d slap him, who knows?
“She let me do it” isn’t that far off from “she didn’t fight me off hard enough”.
Reasonable to say the video makes it easy to imagine Trump committing a crime, if you really dislike him. Ridiculous to say the video is evidence of a crime. The posts trying to twist it into that immediately demonstrate it. ‘Say Trump did X under Y circumstance to some woman…’. Hypothetical.
The video makes Trump out a creep. Be glad it came out if you don’t want him elected, since it’s not going to help him, except in the unlikely case the Clinton team goes similarly overboard and starts talking about the video as evidence of some hypothetical crime.
And the other real way it could hurt him is if there was actually some crime (before or after) where release of this video shakes loose credible evidence or witnesses.
This is one reason early voting sucks. I wonder how many people voted for Trump and want their vote back now?
Look. If you’re asking me if I think Trump has ever sexually assaulted a woman, I’d say “yeah, probably”. For men of his generation, in his position of power… it would be odd if they didn’t, at some time, behave in that manner.
But am I going to convict him on his little bragging routine with Billy Bush? No. It really is the kind of locker room talk you hear all the time among guys. It could be true, it might not be true. And Trump is not exactly known for telling the truth, is he?
Let the women step forward, as they did with Bill Cosby, and tell the world what happened. Then we can all judge one way or another. It looks like that might be starting to happen, per the link provided by monstro. But it would be much better, more credible, if the claim were made by someone not afraid of identifying herself.
One victim’s lawyer was on MSNBC. Her husband had been cheated by Trump, then she was assaulted. She filed a case against him, and he immediately settled with the husband so she withdrew it.
As for the police - some random woman against Trump? That would go well.
Trumps word could be considered as just bragging if we didn’t have lots of cases of him trying to grab women by the pussy. And more will be arriving any day now.
ETA: Ninjaed. My example was indeed Jill Harth.
As you said, that link mentions a number of Representatives who’ve done likewise. Still, one it doesn’t yet mention is Brigadier-General-turned-Congressman Joe Heck, who is running for a Senate seat and apparently just called on Trump to step down.
He did not do anything to the woman mentioned in the video - but his words make the stories of women who claimed he assaulted them a lot more believable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/opinion/sunday/donald-trump-groper-in-chief.html
Groping and kissing (sexual assault) was standard operating procedure for Trump.
As proof, he held up recent letters of support from Bill Cosby, Brock Turner, and Brandon Vandenburg. Other letters of support are expected to arrive once they are released from the prison mailrooms.
I’d suspect a lot of the press knows a lot more dirt about candidates than they publish. They may not print stories they believe in which don’t have enough evidence, but they may know they are true. Besides Clinton timing the releases, the press might be doing it themselves. But a lot of this stuff just showed up in reporters mailboxes, so that might be the DNC.
As for me, I think they should paint out Trump’s name on his plane and write “Dead Meat” instead.
Just saw on Bill Maher that there is a meme going around on the right that this is the “Flight 93” election, the idea being that things have gotten so bad under Obama, it is time to rush the cockpit of the nation. If you don’t at least try, death is certain.
You can keep telling yourself that, but that’s exactly what you’re doing.
Sure, I have no idea what prompted Access Hollywood to be going through its archives now. But the act of searching through their archives for hot mic B-roll is not anything surprising - they own and store that footage.
The assumption that the Clinton campaign obtained the video from these privately-owned archives seems less plausible. How did they get it? It isn’t like someone can flash a campaign operative badge and march around LA, going through production company footage.
I heard some talking heads wondering aloud what sort of stuff Mark Burnett, producer of The Apprentice, must have in his archives.
Holy shit.
Oh, don’t get me wrong - I absolutely agree with the above. My objection is not “he admitted to committing sexual assault”, but rather “he is boasting about committing what would functionally be sexual assault.” Now if he had actually said he walked up to Nancy O’Dell and specifically groped/kissed her without a by-your-leave, THEN I’d accuse him directly.
Do I think he sexually harassed people? Yeah, absolutely. He’s just that type of vile narcissist. Do I think he could get convicted on these schoolyard boasts on this tape? No.
But it would sure be a nice bit of character evidence at a trial.
This much I agree with: there’s nothing in these tapes to spearhead a conviction, any more than there would be if he described going to poor neighborhoods and shooting homeless people in the head. The fact that he bragged about committing a crime in general doesn’t mean he can be convicted of a crime in general; that’s not how our system works.
But just because there’s no specific crime to prosecute doesn’t mean we must pretend he’s describing legal behavior.
Pence is refusing to defend Trump.
I’ll bet Trump will show what’s in his heart.
While Reed and Perkins are undoubtedly two of the most visible Evangelicals in the media they are really little more than lobbyists. Someone like Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention would be a person positioned to have greater influence on the Evangelical rank and file. If you check out his Twitter feed it’s pretty clear he isn’t standing with Trump. There appear to be a substantial number of Southern Baptists listening to what Moore is saying who don’t intend to vote for the GOP candidate. I’m not saying they will vote Hillary but if they withhold their votes from Trump it isn’t really necessary.
And this is a quote from the article you linked that makes it clear Reed and Perkins don’t speak for all Evangelicals, as much as they might like to think they do.