Posted on 09/09/2016 6:58:16 AM PDT by Puppage
For months, Hillary Clinton’s supporters have griped that she’s held to a higher, harder standard than Donald Trump. After Wednesday night’s forum on national security, those complaints became a rallying cry.
In the opening segment of the made-for-TV event, moderator Matt Lauer interrupted Clinton’s answer to his first question, about what it takes to be commander in chief, to set up 10 minutes of questions about her use of a private email system and her vote for the Iraq war.
Trump seemed to skate by a half hour later as he repeated — unchallenged — the false claim that he was against the war, even though he voiced support for it in a 2002 interview. When Lauer introduced a question about how the Republican nominee is boning up on issues, he told Trump, “nobody would expect you” to have delved deeply into foreign policy.
The forum underscored a debate that’s rapidly becoming a focal point in the race: Is the first female presidential nominee of a major U.S. party being judged fairly? Clinton’s answer, unsurprisingly, is no.
“I don’t understand the reason for it,” Clinton said Thursday. “I find it frustrating, but it’s just part of the landscape that we live in and we just keep forging ahead.”
Throughout his White House campaign, Trump has repeatedly defied the conventional rules of politics, winning his party’s nomination despite a history of corporate bankruptcies and lawsuits that would have sunk a more traditional candidate. With impunity, he repeats statements debunked by fact checkers.
Two months before Election Day, Trump’s policies remain largely unformed. In some cases, as with his plans to defeat the Islamic State group, Trump says they’re purposefully shrouded in secrecy. At the forum, he said the best way to address sexual assault inside the armed services would be to “set up a court system within the military” — something that has existed since the Revolutionary War.
Meanwhile, Clinton’s campaign this week published a 250-page book detailing her various policy plans.
Trump has refused to release his tax returns, while she’s disclosed decades of filings.
And while she’s apologized for a long list of past policy ideas and personal choices, including her use of a private email account while serving as secretary of state, he’s acknowledged just once that there are statements “I do regret.” He’s never specified what, exactly, he was sorry about.
Clinton’s campaign acknowledges that some of her liabilities stem from self-imposed errors, including her difficulty explaining the decision to install a private email server in her New York home.
Republican opponents have no shortage of examples which they say demonstrate that it’s Clinton who expects deferential treatment. Even some Clinton supporters will admit that she has mishandled — and often completely avoided — questions about her email and her family’s charitable foundation, fueling scrutiny of both.
But they also believe her missteps have been given far more weight than those of Trump.
“He’s displayed a reckless level of ignorance and intolerance and that needs to be called out,” said Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon. “He should be held to the same standard of truthfulness of his statements.”
As part of their effort, Clinton and her team have begun tip-toeing into a topic they’ve often tried to avoid: sexism.
After Wednesday’s forum ended, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, tweeted a critique of Clinton’s performance as “angry + defensive the entire time – no smile and uncomfortable.”
“People. Reince actually said HRC needed to smile more. This is real,” tweeted Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri. Stuart Stevens, a vocal Trump critic and senior strategist to 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, tweeted: “In front of a weather map, smiling a lot might be a job requirement. In the Oval Office, it’s not.”
In a Facebook post published on the page Humans of New York on Thursday, Clinton recounted taking a law school admissions test at Harvard University in 1969 and being harassed by male students.
“I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off,'” she wrote in the post. “If I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional.”
Some of the pushback is clearly strategic. A fundraising email sent out by the Clinton campaign on Thursday used Lauer’s failure to “fact-check Trump” to rally supporters.
With the first debate scheduled for later this month, Clinton’s campaign is trying to ensure that Trump is positioned for a tough evaluation, recognizing that expectations can matter even more than actual performance. Aides fear a scenario in which a single misstep by Clinton gets a tougher assessment than repeated mistakes by Trump.
In the Republican primaries, Trump’s opponents were repeatedly frustrated by his ability to dominate the news cycle with provocative comments and his failure to suffer any consequences for his words. Republican strategists say Clinton should have been more prepared for that to happen in the general election.
“Trump has an ability to manipulate situations like that to his advantage, which we saw over and over in the primary,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, the former campaign manager for Republican candidate Carly Fiorina. “She can complain about the rules of the game, but she also knows the rules of the campaign.”
Poor Hillary. The press is so mean to her! No wonder she won’t give any press conferences.
As I type through tears...
Democrat good....
Republican bad...
Derp, I journalist good....hu Lenny?
Hillary Clinton’s supporters: At this point, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE!!
Like Cruz, she can’t make the case even in the friendliest of venues.
As the election slips away from Hillary, her media friends are in a frenzy over what to do to save her. These next two months will be full of garbage reporting, name calling, lies and anything else they can do to try and save her.
It doesn’t matter if Trump was for or against the war in 2002. He was a private citizen who held no political office and had no influence on the war.
Who even CARES if Trump was before or against the war in 2002? How is that relevant to anything?
They have no idea they're actually endorsing Trump when they do it.
The left is so unbelievable. Never in the history of this country has the media so conspired against a single candidate to take him down by any means, including lies, spin, distortions, cherry picking, and conspiracy theories, as they have with Donald Trump. I have never before seen this level of bias, even though the press has a grand tradition of extreme bias. At the same time, Hillary, the most corrupt major party candidate in our nation’s history, has not been called to account for anything vaguely resembling the extent of her crimes, corruption, and lies—but there’s only so much debris her press pets can sweep under the rug and pretend doesn’t exist.
What the left/media are currently upset about is that Lauer didn’t just give Hillary softball questions and, even though he interrupted and badgered Trump and tried to damage him, he was unable to lay a solid glove on him. The presstitutes radically underestimate Trump, who is clearly superior to the whole lot of them, so they think Lauer’s inability to harm Trump (his job in their mind), even though he was clearly trying, must have been a failure of will on his part. Our propaganda force media is one of the biggest threats to the survival of our nation and a fair and open democratic process.
Here is the transcript of that section. Did this article report correctly what was said?
Audience Question: Mr. Trump, I have a daughter who is interested in joining the service, but when she researched the military, she saw the stats on sexual assault and decided not to go. I have a concern about the rape of women in our armed forces. As president, what specifically would you do to support all victims of sexual assault in the military?Donald Trump: It’s a great question. And it’s a massive problem. The numbers are staggering, hard to believe, even. But we’re going to have to run it very tight. I at the same time want to keep the court system within the military. I don’t think it should be outside of the military. But we have to come down very, very hard on that.
And your daughter is absolutely right, it is a massive problem. But we have to do something about that problem. And the best thing we can do is set up a court system within the military. Right now, the court system practically doesn’t exist. It takes too long.
Matt Lauer: In 2013, on this subject, you tweeted this, quote, “26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military, only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men and women together?”
Donald Trump: Well, it is — it is — it is a correct tweet. There are many people that think that that’s absolutely correct. And we need to have a…
Matt Lauer: So this should have been expected? And does that mean the only way to fix it is to take women out of the military?
Donald Trump: Well, it’s happening, right? And, by the way, since then, it’s gotten worse. No, not to take them out, but something has to be happen. Right now, part of the problem is nobody gets prosecuted. You have reported and — the gentleman can tell you, you have the report of rape and nobody gets prosecuted. There are no consequence.
When you have somebody that does something so evil, so bad as that, there has to be consequence for that person. You have to go after that person. Right now, nobody’s doing anything. Look at the small number of results. I mean, that’s part of the problem.
Matt Lauer: So many of the issues that we’ve talked about with you, Mr. Trump, tonight, and Secretary Clinton, are so complex that even career military people and career diplomats and politicians have trouble getting their arms around them.
Donald Trump: Right.
His very first comment was "I want to keep the court system within the military."
This article is either grossly wrong, or it grossly lies.
Garbage reporting? Name calling? I’m lovin’ it!
“This war can go on!” Robert Shaw, aka Colonel Kessler -Battle of the Bulge.
Please review DSM-IV and DSM-5 Criteria Narcissistic Personality Disorder
A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high status people (or institutions).
4. Requires excessive admiration.
5. Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.
6. Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.
7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes. self-centeredness; firmly holding to the belief that one is better than others; condescending toward others. The essential features of a personality disorder are impairments in personality (self and interpersonal) functioning and the presence of pathological personality traits.
To diagnose narcissistic personality disorder, the following criteria must be met:
A. Significant impairments in personality functioning manifest by:
1. Impairments in self functioning (a or b):
a. Identity: Excessive reference to others for self-definition and self-esteem regulation; exaggerated self-appraisal may be inflated or deflated, or vacillate between extremes; emotional regulation mirrors fluctuations in self-esteem.
b. Self-direction: Goal-setting is based on gaining approval from others; personal standards are unreasonably high in order to see oneself as exceptional, or too low based on a sense of entitlement; often unaware of own motivations.
AND
2. Impairments in interpersonal functioning (a or b):
a. Empathy: Impaired ability to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others; excessively attuned to reactions of others, but only if perceived as relevant to self; over- or underestimate of own effect on others.
b. Intimacy: Relationships largely superficial and exist to serve self-esteem regulation; mutuality constrained by little genuine interest in others‟ experiences and predominance of a need for personal gain
B. Pathological personality traits in the following domain:
1. Antagonism, characterized by: a. Grandiosity: Feelings of entitlement, either overt or covert;
b. Attention seeking: Excessive attempts to attract and be the focus of the attention of others; admiration seeking.
C. The impairments in personality functioning and the individual‟s personality trait expression are relatively stable across time and consistent across situations.
D. The impairments in personality functioning and the individual‟s personality trait expression are not better understood as normative for the individual‟s developmental stage or socio-cultural environment.
E. The impairments in personality functioning and the individual‟s personality trait expression are not solely due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, medication) or a general medical condition (e.g., severe head trauma).
“the false claim that he was against the war, even though he voiced support for it in a 2002 interview.”
When encouraged to support the idea of an invasion several months before it occurred, Trump very hesitantly responded, “Yeah, I *guess* so...uh...I wish the first time it was done correctly.” That to the left is the same as voting for the war in the Senate and helping to cause it to happen. Of course, we have zero idea what Trump thought about the war once it looked like it was really about to happen. The left obviously doesn’t believe someone can go from kind-of-sort-of-maybe supporting something to opposing it over the course of half a year.
The only evidence we have on what he thought then is his word; yet these dishonest pukes have the nerve to insist Trump was a “supporter” of the Iraq War. They apparently just don’t want to face the fact that they are supporting someone who is a total warmonger, except when it comes to fighting actual terrorists targeting us.
Trump will win in a landslide, and Hillary will be installed as president. It has been ordained. I would be surprised if only a few million peasants can win out over the media and a handful of globalists. Yes, a little sarcasm here. They can do what they want as long as the people get their nightly dose of TMZ.
Great post. DMS is the “Bible” for mental health. It is recognized in every venue in the US. I guess Hillary will have to ban the book as she fits the description to a T.
Hillary bumped the glass ceiling and got a hematoma.
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