In late July, Donald Trump’s new spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, accepted an impossible mission that even Jim Phelps would have turned down:
Convince Americans that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were responsible for the death of Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed by a truck-bomb in Iraq in 2004.
Appearing on CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on August 2, Pierson said: “It was under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that changed the rules of engagements that probably cost his life.”
Katrina Pierson
Totally ignored in that scenario:
- President George W. Bush lied the nation into a needless war that cost the lives of 4,486 Americans and wounded another 33,226.
- The war began in 2003–and Khan was killed in 2004.
- Barack Obama became President in 2009–almost five years after Khan’s death.
- Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State the same year.
- Obama, elected Illinois U.S. Senator in 2004, vigorously opposed the Iraq war throughout his term.
Pierson’s attempt to rewrite history touched off a frenzy on Twitter, leading to the creation of the hashtag #KatrinaPiersonHistory. Its purpose: To mock Pierson’s revisionist take on history.
Among the tweets offered:
- Hillary Clinton slashed funding for security at the Ford Theater, leading to Lincoln’s assassination.
- Obama gave Amelia Earhart directions to Kenya.
- Remember the Alamo? Obama and Hillary let it happen.
- Obama and Clinton kidnapped the Lindbergh baby.
Not content with blaming President Obama for the death of a man he never sent into combat, Pierson claimed that Obama started the Afghanistan war.
Appearing again on CNN, Pierson said the Afghan war began “after 2007,” when Al Qaeda “was in ashes” following the American troop surge in Iraq.
“Remember, we weren’t even in Afghanistan by this time,” Pierson said. “Barack Obama went into Afghanistan, creating another problem.”
In fact, President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Millions of Americans who lived through 9/11 remember that.
When your spokeswoman becomes a nationwide laughingstock, your own credibility goes down the toilet as well.
In July an Associated Press/GfK poll found that half of Americans saw Donald Trump as “racist”–and only 7% of blacks viewed him favorably.
There are numerous reasons for this:
- His enthusiastic support by racist white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party.
- His “birther” attacks on President Obama as a non-citizen from Kenya–and thus ineligible to hold the Presidency.
- His attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement and calling on his supporters at rallies to rough up minority protesters.
Since 1964, blacks have overwhelmingly voted for Democratic Presidential candidates. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s won their loyalty with his support for and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
President Johnson signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act
Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater opposed it–as did the majority of his party.
Since 1964, fewer than six percent of blacks have voted for Republican Presidential candidates. Whites have not only remained the majority of Republican voters but have become the single most important voting bloc among them.
John McCain received four percent of black votes in 2008 and Mitt Romney received six percent in 2012. When a Republican collapses into single digits among blacks and other minorities, it reduces the number of white votes a Democrat needs to win the presidency.
To counter this, Donald Trump has turned to his Director of African-American Outreach: Omarosa Manigault.
Trump made the appointment just hours before the first night of the Republican National Convention.
Omarosa Manigault
Manigault is best known as the villain of Trump’s reality-TV show, “The Apprentice”–where she was fired on three different seasons. Her credentials include a Ph.D. in communications, a preacher’s license, and topping TV Guide’s list of greatest reality TV villains in 2008.
During the Clinton administration she held four jobs in two years, and was thoroughly disliked in all of them.
“She was asked to leave [her last job] as quickly as possible, she was so disruptive,” said Cheryl Shavers, the former Under Secretary for Technology at the Commerce Department. “One woman wanted to slug her.”
In her role as Trump’s ambassador to blacks, Omarosa has inspired others to want to slug her. Appearing on Fox Business, she ignored Fox panelist Tamera Holder’s question on why blacks should support Trump,and then mocked her “big boobs.”
Manigault isn’t bothered that blacks regard Trump so poorly in polls: “My reality is that I’m surrounded by people who want to see Donald Trump as the next president of the United States who are African-American.”
Appointing as your public relations director a woman who gratuitously insults and infuriates people is not the move of a smart administrator. Nor the move of a smart Presidential candidate.
If Donald Trump becomes President, he will inherit the authority to appoint thousands of officials to domestic and foreign agencies. Voters have a right to judge him on the quality of the appointments he has already made to his own campaign.
A review of those named within this series gives serious cause for concern.
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DENYING THE PAST: DAVID IRVING AND DONALD TRUMP: PART ONE (OF TWO)
In History, Law, Military, Politics, Social commentary on October 24, 2016 at 12:22 am“Certain things are true,” says the American historian Deborah Lipstadt in the newly-released movie, Denial. “Elvis is dead. The ice caps are melting. And the Holocaust did happen.
“Millions of Jews went to their deaths in camps and open pits in a brutal genocide which was sanctioned and operated by the leaders of the Third Reich. There are some subjects about which two points of view are not equally valid.”
On September 5, 1996, the British author and Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall in the movie) filed a libel suit against Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) and her British publisher Penguin Books.
In 1993, in her book, Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt had called Irving a Holocaust denier and accused him of distorting evidence and manipulating historical documents.
Irving had authored a series of books about the Third Reich and World War II. Among these: The War Path; Hitler’s War; The Trail of the Fox (a biography of Erwin Rommel); and The War Between the Generals (on the infighting among the Allied high command).
Of these, Hitler’s War (1977) was–and remains–the most controversial. Although Irving admitted that the Holocaust had occurred, he claimed that Hitler hadn’t ordered it–or even known about it. He blamed Reichsfuhrer-SS Henirich Himmler and his number-two deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, as its architects.
David Irving
For decades, Irving boasted that no one had ever found a written order from Hitler ordering the Holocaust–and offered to pay £1000 to anyone who could find such an order.
In later years, Irving completely denied that the Holocaust had occurred. He claimed that gas chambers had never been used to exterminate Jews and there was no officially-sanctioned Third Reich plan to slaughter European Jewry.
But Irving claimed that Lipstadt’s labeling him a Holocaust denier had tarred him as a disreputable historian–and had thus damaged his professional reputation.
Irving sued in a British court because the burden would be on the defendant to prove that s/he had not committed libel. (In American courts, the plaintiff must not only prove s/he has been libeled, but with actual malice.)
Lipstadt faced a second hurdle: Her lawyers ordered her to not take the witness stand. They wanted to put and keep the focus entirely on Irving–and to make his virulent anti-Semitism the issue in the case.
In her 2005 autobiography, Denial, Lipstadt described the agonies she endured in preparing for–and sitting through–this trial:
“For four years I immersed myself in the works of a man who exuded contempt for me and much of what I believed. I lost many nights of sleep, worried that because of some legal fluke Irving might prevail.”
Deborah Lipstadt
For Lipstadt, more was at stake than the possibility of losing a big chunk of money.
Above all, she feared that an Irving victory would give anti-Semites a legal precedent for “proving” that the extermination of six million Jewish men, women and children hadn’t occurred.
The case was tried in a London court from January to March, 2000.
Entering court on the first morning of trial, Irving assured the assembled reporters that he would be victorious.
Asked where his legal team was, he said he had chosen to represent himself: They might know the law, but he knew the topic–Hitler and the Third Reich.
The outcome was a disaster–for Irving.
Among the expert witnesses testifying on behalf of Lipstadt was Richard J. Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University and author of a three-volume history on the Third Reich. In his examination of Irving’s work, Evans found:
“Not one of [Irving’s] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject.
“All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about. … if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.”
Judge Charles Gray found that:
“Irving had for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence” and that “for the same reasons, he had portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews.”
The judge also found that Irving was “an active Holocaust denier; that he was anti-Semitic and racist and that he associated with right-wing extremists who promoted neo-Nazism.”
Irving was discredited as a historian and ordered to pay all of Penguin’s costs of the trial, estimated to be as much as £2 million ($3.2 million in American currency). When Irving didn’t pay, he was forced into bankruptcy and lost his home.
Asked by a reporter, “Will you stop denying the Holocaust on the basis of this judgment?” Irving replied, “Good Lord, no.”
Denying the truth about the past didn’t work for David Irving. Soon America will discover if it works for Donald Trump.
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