Donald Trump's 2016 General Election Campaign

Politics & Elections
401

I did not pay too much attention to Trump’s denial of he impersonating a spokesperson in the 90’s, but after seeing this explanation from Rachel Maddow and the original reporters that caught Trump in the lie, it is (again) clear that Trump is either the biggest compulsive liar ever to run for the presidency or the candidate with the most diminished memory than the one he used to had before being nominated.

I mean, it is clear that the record showed that Trump accepted back then that he had impersonated a staff member or someone that did not exist in an attempt to fool the media; and instead of accepting and dismissing the media for forgetting that acknowledgment he is now forgetting or ignoring what he did say before and doubles down now claiming that he never did impersonate anyone.

And the Republicans are telling everyone how glad they are in supporting a guy like him for the presidency. :rolleyes:

402

It’s really funny to hear supporters of Clinton (and presumably her husband before her) behave as though any lie by a Republican candidate for president should be a deal breaker to anyone thinking of voting for him.

403

[QUOTE=Starving Artist]
Back in the day when people were taught coping skills instead of having been convinced of their own victimhood, schoolboys weren’t shooting up schools…
[/QUOTE]

You aren’t talking about the 1950’s, are you? Just from a look on Wikipedia:
July 22, 1950 New York City, New York, A 16-year-old boy was shot in the wrist and abdomen at the Public School 141 dance during an argument with a former classmate.[108]
January 24, 1951 Alton, Illinois, 61-year-old Henry Suhre, quartermaster at Western Military Academy, was killed in the cadet store on campus.[109]
March 12, 1951 Union Mills, North Carolina, Professor W.E. Sweatt, superintendent and teacher at the Alexander School, was killed by students, 16-year-old Billy Ray Powell, and 19-year-old Hugh Justice, whom he had reprimanded.[110]
June 4, 1951 New York City, New York, Carl Arch, a 50-year-old intruder to a girl’s gym class, was killed by a police officer at Manhattan’s Central Commercial High School.[111]
November 27, 1951 St. Louis, Missouri, 15-year-old student, David Brooks, was fatally shot as fellow pupils looked on. Two former students were sought by police.[112]
April 9, 1952 New York City, New York, A 15-year-old boarding school student shot a dean rather than give up his pin-up pictures of girls in bathing suits.[113]
July 14, 1952 New York City, New York, Bayard Peakes walked into the offices of the American Physical Society (APS) at Columbia University, where he killed secretary Eileen Fahey. Peakes was reportedly upset that the APS had rejected a paper of his.[114]
October 2, 1953 Chicago, Illinois, 14-year-old Bernice Turner, killed 14-year-old Pasquale Coletta inside the science classroom at Kelly High School. The shooting was later ruled to be accidental.[115]
March 31, 1954 Newton, Massachusetts, 14-year-old John Frankenberger, was accidentally killed in a classroom at Day Junior High School when a pistol being held by a classmate discharged.[116]
May 15, 1954 Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Putnam Davis Jr. was killed during a fraternity house carnival at the Phi Delta Theta house at the University of North Carolina. William Joyner and Allen Long were wounded during the exchange of gunfire in their room. The incident followed an all-night beer party. Long told police that, while the three were drinking beer at 7 a.m., Davis pulled out a gun and started shooting.[117]
January 11, 1955 Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, After some of his dormmates urinated on his mattress during hazing, Robert B. Bechtel, a 22-year-old student proctor at Swarthmore College, returned to his third floor Wharton Hall dorm with a shotgun and killed fellow student, 19-year-old Francis Holmes Strozier.[118] Betchtel was acquitted of murder by reason of insanity and spent five years in a psychiatric hospital.[119]
May 4, 1956 Seat Pleasant, Maryland, 15-year-old student, Billy Ray Prevatte, fatally shot 32-year-old teacher, Frazer Cameron, and injured 25-year-old athletic coach, Francis Daniel Wagner, and 31-year-old teacher, Robert Hicks, at Maryland Park Junior High School. He just left, after growing tired of waiting outside the principal’s office awaiting a reprimand for failing to turn in a written physical education assignment, and returned with a rifle.[120]
October 20, 1956 New York City, New York, A Booker T. Washington Junior High School student was wounded in the forearm by another student armed with a home-made weapon.[121]
October 2, 1957 New York City, New York, A 16-year-old student was shot in the leg by a 15-year-old classmate at a city high school.[122]
March 4, 1958 New York City, New York, A 17-year-old student shot a boy in the Manual Training High School.[123]
May 1, 1958 Massapequa, New York, A 15-year-old Massapequa High School freshman was killed by a classmate in a washroom.[124]
September 24, 1959 New York City, New York, Twenty-seven men and boys and an arsenal were seized in the Bronx as the police headed off a gang war resulting from the fatal shooting of a teenager at Morris High School.[125]
Now, to save you the gotcha moment, one of those appears to be a “good guy with a gun” situation where the police shot an intruder. But accidental shootings, rage killings, and irrational teenagers with violent tendencies have been a fact of life for generations.

I think you are projecting idyllic memories of childhood - where we are all naïve about our surroundings - with the actual facts regarding quality of life. I mean, If I told you that the 80’s were the best time to grow up because I could ride my bike to school, and TV was kid-friendly, you’d rightfully laugh me off the page.

It seems to me that one who would adopt the mantra that people should learn to cope would be accepting of people expressing their individuality; after all, it’s up to each of us to “cope” with the differences we are seeing. Not everyone will be like me - and for me to be fine with that is the ultimate form of dealing with the harsh and cold reality of life.

404

LOL of course they will. :rolleyes:

405

If this is not a lie then the other choice is that Trump really is showing signs of dementia. The main point stands, the Republicans are, like The Weekly Standard said, making a suckers bet with Trump. Mind you, this is a case were the lie was acknowledged before and now a new lie has been made **in an attempt to deny an apology that was made **and that it was accepted by the parties involved then. What the Standard also pointed out was we can expect months of issues like that coming from Trump.

And the Republicans will have to own them too if they want to keep up with the pretense that they are very happy with him.

406

I happened to be binge-watching some West Wing episodes earlier (definitely in my top 5 all-time series), and I saw the one where John Goodman (Speaker Walken) takes over as acting President from Jed Bartlet while Zoey has been kidnapped. He’s walking down the hall toward the Oval Office and meets the staff and tells them to relax, and eventually goes on to the press conference and displays his presidential demeanor.
It was at that point that I was struck, not for anywhere near the first time, by the awesome responsibility reposed in the office of the Presidency. That, of course, led to a re-realization of just how unprepared and unsuitable Trump is for the duties of governing.

407

This is a lie about at the same level as “I did not inhale.” It’s trivial, and it’s grist for opponents to make fun of him. If this is the deal breaker that decides a vote, then we’ve pretty much defined low-information voter, haven’t we?

408

The issue isn’t the commission of the act itself; it’s the lying to cover it up, when he’s already gone on record as having done it before and the tape really is pretty clear. This is not supposed to be the behavior of a future President of the United States. It goes not only to the inability to trust him at all, but an utter lack of wisdom. (Not that it’s anywhere near the only example.)

409

To make the “I did not inhale” to be the same it would be like if Clinton had apologized and explained like that and then having Clinton now telling every reporter** that he never apologized and that he never told reporters about that lack of inhalation**. When one looks at what Trump is doing now it is really sad, he is really demanding that we all ignore the past that he acknowledged and that we should believe in him rather than our “lying” ears and eyes.

410

You do know that the U.S. had a population of around 150 million at that time, don’t you? I can assure you that virtually every crime imaginable was happening somewhere back then.

Only in the Bizzaro world of liberalism would someone come under fire like I have for promoting the idea that coping skills are a good thing to have. And even more bizarre is the apparent notion that referring to people having better coping skills in the 50s equates to saying no violent crime happened at all and that I’m viewing the era through rose-colored glasses.

I remember plenty of criminal activity going on back then. At my schools were a contingent of kids who were real-life Fonzies, and believe me they were nothing like Fonzie. They wore horseshoe and Continental-toe taps on their heavy wedgie shoes and carried switchblade knives and were often violent and up to no good. I remember when Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate were in the news. And the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas before Truman Capote made it a cause celebre. Further, my grandfather was a career police officer who helped chase some of the 30s’ more well known gangsters, got shot in the process (several times over the years) and regaled me with stories of the actions of petty and not so petty criminals from his 50-year career. He also had a couple of cigar boxes full of switchblade knives and brass knuckles that he’d confiscated from one or another ‘juvenile delinquent’. So yeah, plenty of crime happened back then and I’m fully aware of it.

But I can guarantee you that people back then weren’t getting their panties in a twist over every imaginable grievance under the sun. People didn’t feel they had a Constitutional right not to be offended by anything and everything under the sun, nor did they feel it was incumbent upon society to accommodate their every whim or desire. And they certainly didn’t feel they had the right to get in the face of and be abusive toward anyone whose behavior didn’t fall in line with what the aggressor (read SJW) thought it should. And most importantly most people managed to get through life not thinking of themselves as helpless victims of some sort who needed to be protected and shielded from life.

Put simply, most things weren’t a big deal to most people back then. People tended to react to things they didn’t like or approve of with a shrug and a realization that life wasn’t perfect. Then they put it behind them and got on with their lives.

I realize that the impulse is strong to denigrate any positive reference to the era of the 50s and early 60s, and the defensiveness it’s borne of is understandable. If my ideology were responsible for the millions of deaths and ruined lives that drugs and crime have wrought since that time, and the ridiculous extent that social activism and combativeness have gone overboard and set so much of the populace against one another I think I’d be hyper-defensive about it too.

But the fact is that there were many good things about pre-counterculture America. They had developed over a long time because society over the years had learned that they paid off and coping ability was one of those things. If some kid got bullied at school he or she was taught ‘sticks and stones’ and not to let it bother them, that some people in life were just jerks, and they learned to put it behind them and get on with their lives. But now with everyone so eager to be a victim, kids are killing themselves right and left because someone was mean to them at school or said something nasty about them on Facebook. The pushback I usually get for saying things like this is that I want a return to segregation and women kept barefoot and pregnant (which to your credit, Moriarty, you haven’t done) but I defy anyone to explain to me why it was necessary to abandon the belief that coping ability was a virtue in order to further racial or sexual equality.

411

Of course I do continue to see Trump’s non repudiation of people like Joe Arpaio and Sarah Palin as more appalling than a lie that also points to his lack of character.

I see this lie of Trump as not just a trivial matter, but then it is not as important as the “quality” of friends that Trump is telling us that are traveling with him.

412

The issue was about blaming the counter culture for the millions of deaths and that is not a fact as the evidence that was pointed before and in the previous post showed. Claiming that we are denigrating the positive sides of the 50’s and early 60’s is a straw man.

413

I didn’t say it wasn’t a lie. I said it’s funny to see enthusiastic supporters of the Clintons, two the most prolific liars and skullduggery practitioners in history, behaving as though any obvious lie by a Republican candidate should be adequate reason to expect Republican voters to turn away from that candidate and vote instead for a candidate who will govern and make judicial appointments in pretty much the exact opposite way a Republican voter would want.

414

Sorry, but it showed no such thing. All it did was point out that by the mid-seventies most counterculture types had moved on and were no more. But the counterculture revolution itself was the catalyst for pretty much all left-wing activity that has gone on since. And that would include drugs, about which disapproval and anti-drug activism even now marks one as a square and uncool.

One would think that if the left were really as concerned with human suffering as they attempt to project through attempts to eliminate any form of offense and see to it that society is forced to accommodate whichever whim or inclination anyone might want to indulge, it would turn all its SJW power on drug use and fight it with at least a modicum of the intensity brought to bear on…oh, I don’t know…such issues as whether mothers can breast feed in public or people can use whatever bathroom they want.

But no, it seems social justice is more concerned with upsetting established standards than it is about genuine suffering and human welfare.

415

Not going to quote your wall of text above, but you just seem to have blithely ignored the fact that you cannot compare now and 60 years ago, and claim that anyone in that time wouldn’t be affected by these. As I’ve already said and you haven’t responded to.

The Clintons are two of the most targeted and mudslung candidates in history. But whatever, I’m not going to debate you out of your beliefs, just as you will have equally no success with me. Except that I’m not some kind of starry-eyed camp-follower. I know what I see and I judge for myself, thank you very much.

Nor did I ever say anything about expecting Pubbies to vote for Hillary (well, not many, anyway). I fully expect that GOP pols and Kool-Aid drinkers will mostly vote for the worst thing to happen to American politics in a century. I just hope that enough of the rest of the electorate won’t be snowed by the BS that both Trump and his new, strange bedfellows are slinging.

416

It did show more than you ignored. Again do not ignore that the counterculture was not there when the crime rate was in the 30’s as high as it was in the late 60’s and do not ignore the other factors such as lead.

As for drugs, the evidence has been here for years already, in reality it is the drug war what has caused more crime.

[QUOTE] The war against drugs has been a terrible disaster for everybody involved. Why? And can we do something differently?

[/QUOTE]

As history shows you are really ignoring it (history that is, and particularly the history about the drug war) and the lessons it has given us, and that war has been a factor in giving us less social justice.

417

That sentence. A weary trudging of words, stumbling on, hoping for the rest and release of a period, but finding only commas.

418

I know you think this little bon mot of yours is effective, but has it really paid off for you any of the dozen other times you’ve posted it? You’re getting to be like Dean Martin in the old days with his ‘How did all these people get in my room’ gag. It’s funny/effective the first time, eye-rolling the twelfth.

419

So, are you planning to vote for Trump, Mr. Starving?

I’m not well-informed on Clinton lies. (For Bill I guess it was “No, I won’t come in your mouth, Monica.” :stuck_out_tongue: For Hillary, I dunno — denying that she murdered Vince Foster?) But it shows bizarre confusion not to reserve the superlative for Bush-Cheney, who lured America into one of the most stupid wars in history with their willful lies.

Trillions of dollars, millions of lives, developing into the tragedies of Daesh — you ignore all this to dote on Bill Clinton’s philosophic query on the meaning of “is”? :eek:

ETA:

I love your wit, 'Luci! If you’ve used this one before, Google doesn’t know about it.

420

You mean I stole it from me? Well, shit!