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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSeth Meyers rips Trump to shreds, just by using Trumps own words
Meyers has been on fire lately and what he did Friday night is just brilliant.
He had a Trump 'answer' to a question at the CiC forum, Meyers said that Trump can be so animated it can distract from what he is actually saying
So instead of playing a video clip of Trump, they just put a copy of Trumps words up on the screen and Meyers read them out loud
Trump is so stupid and simpleminded it is just jaw dropping
Check it out here:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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malaise
(269,157 posts)Nice
roamer65
(36,747 posts)Beartracks
(12,821 posts)Demit
(11,238 posts)More people should experience what Trump says by having to read them on the screen, and hear them read out the way Seth M did here.
onehandle
(51,122 posts)Who knew?
pnwmom
(108,994 posts)the President to enforce the UN resolution, which required Iraq to allow inspections for WMD's. Those inspections were still being carried out -- and no WMD's had been found -- when Bush decided to invade Iraq anyway.
That is NOT what any Democratic signer of the IWR (including Kerry and Biden) had authorized him to do.
Demit
(11,238 posts)And Kerry? There wasn't a peep in 2004 when he was running, only that he "flip-flopped" on his vote.
I'm pretty damned sure that if beloved Uncle Joe had run for president, the way a lot of Hillary haters wanted him to, his vote in favor of the resolution wouldn't have mattered One. Little. Bit.
bullwinkle428
(20,630 posts)for the IWR on his record, and knew it would make him vulnerable. Maybe you weren't here at DU in 2004, but it was a major point of contention.
pnwmom
(108,994 posts)And Iraq was COMPLYING with the UN resolutions when Bush decided to invade.
The mistake Kerry, Biden, Clinton and others made wasn't in approving the war -- they didn't -- but trusting Bush not to use the IWR as an excuse for invading Iraq in the midst of the inspections.
Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)And that although I've long admired Kerry and voted for him in the general election.
Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)pnwmom
(108,994 posts)not to use the IWR as an excuse to invade Iraq while we were still doing inspections, and without finding any WMD's.
But it is FALSE to claim that she voted FOR the Iraq war. The IWR didn't approve Bush's action. It allowed him to enforce the UN resolution and to carry out the WMD inspections.
Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)If you think that Bush's action was completely unforeseeable, then you could argue she did not vote for the war.
If you think that trusting Bush's words was not merely a mistake, as in an erroneous choice among plausible options, but was instead not reasonable at all, then you would agree with the critics who at the time of the vote said that it would inevitably lead to war. People are presumed to intend the natural and inevitable consequence of their actions.
This, of course, assumes for purposes of argument that your statement of her position is correct (i.e. correctly states her position at the time, not what she now says her position was). This rationalization omits a key part of the record. As Arianna Huffington argued in summarizing Her Way, a biography of Clinton:
pnwmom
(108,994 posts)he voted against the IWR.
He said their votes made sense in light of the information they had at the time. He explained that he had access to classified briefings that gave him more information -- information he wan't allowed to share with others. That was why he opposed the IWR and they didn't.
Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)First, the important classified information about the Iraq-WMD scam was in the National Intelligence Estimate. I've never heard it asserted that any Senators were barred from reading the NIE. In a quick search, I find that Senator Bob Graham urged his colleagues to read the NIE, but Clinton chose not to:
But she decided to support going to war anyway. She even rejected the advice of fellow Democratic senator Bob Graham that she read the full National Intelligence Estimate, which would have further challenged some of the Bush administrations claims justifying the war. {from "The 5 Worst Excuses for Hillary Clintons Vote To Invade Iraq", by Prof. Stephen Zunes}
In a debate in 2007, Clinton was asked whether she regretted not reading the National Intelligence Estimate before the Iraq war vote. In response, she did not assert that she wasn't allowed to read it. Instead, she said that she felt that she had been totally briefed. {"Hillary Clinton on War & Peace"}
If your unlinked assertion about classified information is correct, therefore, it must refer to something other than the NIE (the document that persuaded Graham to vote No). But Clinton has said that her mistake was in trusting Bush's intentions. Are you suggesting that there was classified information about what Bush would do if the bill passed? That makes no sense. Literally millions of people with no access to classified information knew what Bush would do if the bill passed. Furthermore, I don't find it plausible to suggest that, while Bush was President, the intelligence agencies under his control produced a classified report explaining that he was a liar.
pnwmom
(108,994 posts)that showed there were no WMD's. Kennedy knew that Colin Powell was lying about that, but he couldn't share that information with the rest of the Democratic Senators.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/20/lkl.01.html
KENNEDY: And that really was -- influenced me to the greatest degree. And the second point that influenced me was in the time that we were having the briefings and these were classified. They've been declassified now. Secretary Rumsfeld came up and said "There are weapons of mass destruction north, south, east and west of Baghdad." This was his testimony in the Armed Services Committee.
And at that time Senator Levin, who is an enormously gifted, talented member of the Armed Services Committee said, "Well, we're now providing this information to the inspectors aren't we?" This is just before the war. "Oh, yes, we're providing that." "But are they finding anything?" "No."
Because the answer was because they're moving things, because when we tell the team they're all infiltrated by Saddam's people and they're leaking that so that's the reason we're not finding anything.
They started giving all the places where we said there were places and they still couldn't find any. And at the end of now, history will show we never gave any information to the inspection team at all.
But I kept saying, "Well, if they're not finding any of the weapons of mass destruction, where is the imminent threat to the United States security?" It didn't make sense.
_______________________________
Here is Ted Kennedy's Foreign Policy address a year after the invasion, where he spoke about how the Bush administration manipulated and distorted the intelligence information they were presenting to Congress -- intelligence information that most of Congress, including Hillary, didn't have access to. He lays the blame squarely on the Bush administration, not the members of Congress who were deceived.
http://www.cfr.org/iraq/foreign-policy-address-edward-m-kennedy/p6834
Our men and women in uniform are still paying with their lives for this misguided war in Iraq. CIA Director Tenet could perform no greater service to the armed forces, to the American people, and to our country, than to set the record straight, and state unequivocally what is so clearly the truth: the Bush Administration misrepresented the facts to justify the war.
America went to war in Iraq because President Bush insisted that nuclear weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein and his ties to Al Qaeda were too dangerous to ignore. Congress never would have voted to authorize the war if we had known the facts.
Gabi Hayes
(28,795 posts)explanations of her handling of the faux email scandal with willfully ignorant disdain.....
the narrative is all, and it's what destroyed both Gore and Kerry's campaigns (of course, along with vote fraud and voter suppression, which will happen again)
Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)Consider these two possible explanations for Clinton's IWR vote:
1. Because of the way the Bush administration misrepresented the facts, she thought that Iraq had WMDs and that it would be necessary for the United States to begin a war because of this alleged imminent threat to our national security.
2. Clinton did not know whether Iraq had WMDs but she voted for the bill because she wanted more inspections and she believed that Bush would not go to war unless Saddam Hussein refused to cooperate with the inspectors.
Note that your entire argument about the phonied intelligence on WMDs is in support of the first explanation, but what Clinton has actually offered, in her own defense, is the second explanation. She has said that she made a mistake about what Bush would do, but there was no classified information about Bush's intentions.
I hadn't previously known of that Kennedy speech you linked to. Thanks for that reference! It's an absolutely devastating recap of the official malfeasance and it's not surprising that, in the Q&A, someone asked Kennedy, does this not fit the criteria for high crimes and misdemeanors? (Kennedy's reply, incidentally, was, Well, I'll leave that for another day to be talked about.)
With regard to that first issue, about Iraq's alleged WMDs, it's not clear whether Kennedy had access to any information that Clinton wasn't entitled to. He certainly said that some members of Congress didn't have the kind of balanced information that many of the rest of us had. That doesn't refer to access, though. It's in the context of denouncing the administration's presentations. Legislators who relied only on those presentations didn't have the full information. Kennedy agreed with another questioner who pointed out the deception that was going on:
I'm not convinced that there was classified information that Kennedy couldn't share with other Senators, as you assert. Even if there was, however, it's clear that the full, classified version of the NIE was available to all Senators. That by itself was enough information to disprove the wild claims about Iraq's alleged threat to the U.S.
pnwmom
(108,994 posts)Since she didn't know that the Bush administration was lying about the intelligence, she had to make the decision based on what she was told -- AND she had to trust them not to be lying about anything else. Members of the opposing parties used to trust each other to be acting in good faith. That presumption is now gone, unfortunately.
Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)As a practical matter: For Clinton and her supporters to say that she didn't vote for the Iraq War is a distraction. She voted for the bill that is very widely referred to as the Iraq War Resolution. Quibbling about the meaning of "for" just reinforces her image as someone who's less than fully honest.
It's to her credit and to her political advantage that she's admitted her vote was a mistake. Leave it at that. It will help her much more for the focus to be on Trump's dissimulations about his own stance(s). She should take the opportunity to come across as the more straightforward of the two, by admitting to a mistake. (Has Trump ever done that, about Iraq or any other subject? No instances occur to me offhand.)
AllyCat
(16,222 posts)They knew exactly what they were voting for and who was at the helm.
pnwmom
(108,994 posts)to classified reports -- as he did, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations committee -- didn't have the understanding he did about the true state of affairs in Iraq at the time. So, though he voted against the IWR resolution, he didn't blame other Dems who trusted Bush, Powell, etc., to be telling the truth.
vkkv
(3,384 posts)eppur_se_muova
(36,289 posts)Bush often seemed syntactically challenged, as was W, of course.
Of course, it all goes back to this ...
apparently NBC won't let you post the clip from The Tonight Show where he did the lyrics of a Donna Summer hit.