Posted on 02/06/2016 9:42:23 AM PST by conservativejoy
Ever since Iowa, Donald Trump has spent all of his time fighting the good fight on behalf of wronged victim Ben Carson. Trump says that he was robbed, too, of course, but his heart truly goes out to Carson. Why? Well, Carson's team told CNN on Iowa caucus day that Carson was leaving the campaign trail to go to Florida, and that Carson would be skipping New Hampshire and South Carolina altogether. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash had the following conversation:
Tapper: "It's very unusual, to announce that you're going home to rest for a few days, not going on to the next site."
Bash: "Very unusual...Look, if you want to be president of the United States, you don't go home to Florida. That's just bottom line, that's the end of the story. If you want to signal to your supporters that you're hungry, that you want them to get out and campaign, you have to get out there too, it's very unusual."
Tapper: "Very unusual."
Wolf Blitzer: "Very significant news indeed."
CNN tweeted the news: "After the #IACaucus, @RealBenCarson plans to take a break from campaigning."
The Cruz campaign seized on this news and began telling precinct captains to tell potential Carson voters that Carson was taking a break from campaigning, and so they might consider moving their votes over to Cruz. Cruz later apologized to Carson, but that wasn't enough - Carson held an oddly-organized press conference in which he suggested that Cruz's tactics weren’t Christian, and that Cruz ought to fire his campaign workers for their error. Trump, meanwhile, continued to claim that he had in fact won Iowa, but that Cruz cheated.
Well, now it turns out that both CNN and Cruz had it right.
Today, Carson announced that he wouldn't be heading to New Hampshire until Saturday night, for the Republican debate. The Washington Post also announced that his campaign had chopped 50 staff positions as "part of an overhaul and downsizing of his entire campaign." The Post continued:
Salaries are being significantly reduced. Carson's traveling entourage will shrink to only a handful of advisers. And instead of flying on private jets, Carson may soon return to flying on commercial flights. The employees being released - about half of Carson's campaign - mostly work in field operations and at his headquarters in Northern Virginia. Campaign officials, who confirmed the moves after The Washington Post obtained an internal memo about the layoffs, stressed that key aides in upcoming GOP primary contests will remain in place and that Carson is determined to stay in the 2016 race. But they acknowledged that Carson's funds have diminished as he has fallen from the top tier, forcing him to make sweeping changes to a campaign that swelled into a bustling operation of about 125 people.
All of that followed on Carson's campaign manager quitting at the beginning of January along with 20 other staffers.
This campaign is done, in other words.
And Carson kept all of this cutting secret, knowing he'd have to do it after Iowa. So who was the real fibber here? The Cruz campaign, which correctly forecast Carson's drop out, or Carson's campaign, which insisted that he wasn't going anywhere, then proceeded to slash half its workforce and remove its candidate from the campaign trail?
Trump is a cheat. Telling people the lie that Ted Cruz is not eligible to be president. What a slimy politician, Trump.
Sarcasm?
I remember Trump and Trump supporters saying the opposite.
Thank-you for the picture of Gilmore. Perfectly timed in the thread;)
"Ben received the same number of votes as the polling indicated he would."
A silly rationale. Here's why. The caucus is an real event with real consequences. Any tampering during that event is actionable whether it results in damages or not. A poll is a guess, a hypothetical, a possible outcome of that event. Using that "guess" to quantify damages, or a lack thereof, particularly when the history of such data is laughably inaccurate, is absurd.
Problem is Cruz apologized, which is acknowledging that possible damages did occur.
IMO Cruz was going to win. What's surprising is how slim the margin is.
Cruz and Carson were both on Levin’s show caucus night. Cruz early then Carson about 7:20-7:30 Iowa time. Carson never mentioned any of this.
LOL!
“Ben received 100% of the votes he was expected to receive.”
and Rubio received more than expected, why not realize the errors by Cruz, Rubio with twisting the CNN & Tweet info and using to their advantage may have changed the number of votes Carson would have gotten had they not twisted the reported info?
By your thinking Rubio should not have been able to get more than EXPECTED!
by your comments on this thread of what constitutes fraud by Carson (miss-using things and not running campaign as you think proper) you also label Cruz a fraud.
“Well Trump better quit today.”
I quite reading there. Liberal tactic. The other guy did it too/worse...
You are mixing up two stories. Carson "took a break" from campaigning, starting on the day of the Iowa caucus. That is what CNN was reporting about on the day of the caucus. See the transcript in the OP.
Who knows? Maybe six of Gilmore’s 12 voters had planned to vote for Carson until the inaccurate rumor that Carson was dropping out. He may have benefited proportionally more than Cruz or Rubio.
Trump would have retweeted that CNN tweet, if it had been in his interest. And rightly so.
By all means, don’t change your mind, the truth hurts.
All this could have been seen from the absence of ANY campaign events on Carson’s schedule on his campaign site. When the Carson campaign “corrected” what people were concluding from the CNN report, the correction was that Carson would be on the campaign trail on Wednesday (which presumably took him to DC for the National Prayer Breakfast), but he is not campaigning, anywhere, so that claim by Carson’s spokesman was false, unless his Prayer Breakfast appearance was more about campaigning than about prayer, which would create its own problems...
Carson’s NH team quit on Sunday, the day before the IA caucus - so they could join Cruz’s campaign because they wanted their efforts to have a chance at making a difference. That was right before their big hour to fight, if Carson was intending to actually campaign. Presumably he told them that he wasn’t planning to campaign and that told them they would be wasting their time on his campaign.
In a vote where conservative voters COULD make a difference, IA voters who supported Carson deserve to know if their vote would be wasted because Carson wasn’t in it to win. The CNN report correctly made it clear that he wasn’t, and Carson’s website made it clear that he hadn’t been in it to win for some time.
I like Carson but I don’t like what his campaign has been doing this week. I don’t like Carson claiming that he shouldn’t be blamed for his staff telling CNN what he, his wife, and his staff later claimed was untrue (but which now appears to be true after all).... while at the same time claiming Cruz personally responsible for his staff’s actions, especially if he didn’t fire the ones who spread the claims from CNN.
I had to go back a LOT of pages of my comments to get back to posts not related to this Carson thing - posts about the danger we face because of the hole in our southern radar defense. I was ashamed that I had gotten so sidetracked. These political antics serve one person: Barack Obama, the figure-head for the communist-Islamist alliance that wants the USA to cease to exist.
People, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE join with me in resolving not to let the distraction work. Let’s fight the real enemy, not each other.
Nonsense. There are no Cruz voters in Iowa saying that they would have supported Carson if only they had not been mislead. Clearly this is a manufactured scandal to beat up on the only real conservative in the race because Trump’s record of supporting nationalizing healthcare among other left wing positions or Rubio’s betrayal of his constituents supporting amnesty have somehow become unimportant to some people in choosing our nominee for President.
So do I, in fact I ended it over a month ago. Just something not right with that man...and definitely not Presidential.
Right now our biggest enemy is Marco Rubio.
I think it screwed Ted going forward.
YES he is....as well as a cowardly cry baby, whiner in all that challenge him, filthy mouth, backstabber & slanderer to those that dare to say anything about him that he does not like, brings us back to cry baby. ugh
Holding his cards close to his vest!
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