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Posts Tagged ‘BEN CARSON’

TRUST ONLY ME–EVEN WHEN I’M LYING: PART TWO (END)

In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 17, 2017 at 12:16 am

Since taking office as the Nation’s 45th President, Donald Trump has attacked or undermined one public or private institution after another.

Among these:

  • The Secret Service: Trump has kept his longtime private security force, and combined its members with those of the elite federal agency. By marginalizing the Secret Service, he has clearly sent the message: You’re not good enough, and I don’t trust you.
  • The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS):  As a Presidential candidate Trump slammed the agency’s employment numbers that showed the economy improving under the Obama administration.  His response on March 12, 2016: “The numbers are phony. These are all phony numbers. Numbers given to politicians to look good. These are phony numbers.”
  • In February, 2017, the BLS said  that American  businesses had added 235,000 workers to their payrolls.
  • On March 10, a reporter asked Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, whether, given his past statements, Trump thought this jobs report was “accurate.” Spicer replied: “I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly: ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.’”
  • The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): Trump believes that climate change is a hoax. He didn’t offer any proof for this. Instead, he appointed an EPA director–Scott Pruitt–who claimed that climate change wasn’t caused by human activity. 
  • Pruitt ordered EPA staffers to remove pages from the agency’s website concerning climate change, threatened to review all of the agency’s data and publications, and cut the budgets of all scientific research in government.
  • The Congressional Budget Office (CBO): Fearing the CBO’s verdict on the costs and coverage of his proposed Trumpcare replacement for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Trump ordered a preemptive strike on the agency’s credibility. Said Sean Spicer to assembled reporters: “If you’re looking at the CBO for accuracy, you’re looking in the wrong place.”
  • The director of the CBO is a Republican economist and former George W. Bush administration official who was chosen for his position by the Republican Congress in 2015. 
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  • President Barack Obama: For five years, Trump, more than anyone else, popularized the slander that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya–and was therefore not an American citizen.
  • On March 23, 2011, Trump said: “I want him to show his birth certificate. I want him to show his birth certificate. …There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” 
  • Even after Obama released the long-form version of his birth certificate–on April 27, 2011–Trump tweeted, on August 6, 2012: “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama‘s birth certificate is a fraud.”
  • On November 23, 2014, he tweeted this: “@futureicon@pinksugar61 Obama also fabricated his own birth certificate after being pressured to produce one by @realDonaldTrump“.
  • Then, in June, 2015, Trump declared himself a candidate for President. By September, 2016, he found his popularity steadily dropping among black voters. Even the managers of Trump’s campaign urged him to put the “birther” issue behind him. 
  • On September 16, 2016–10 days before his scheduled first debate with Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton–Trump made his version of a reversal: “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. “I finished it.  I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.” 

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Barack Obama

  • On March 4, 2017, in a series of unhinged tweets, Trump accused former President Obama of tapping his Trump Tower phones prior to the election: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”  
  • “Is it legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!” 
  • “I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!” 
  • “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”  

Thus, without offering a shred of evidence to back it up, Trump accused his predecessor of committing an impeachable offense. 

* * * * *

Donald Trump isn’t crazy, as many of his critics charge. He knows what he’s doing. His strategy is two-fold–both immediate and long-term.

In the short-term, he’s attacking anyone who dares to disagree with him. Much of this is driven by his own natural aggression–he can’t tolerate criticism or dissent.  

The long-term reason for his assaults on public and private institutions is far more sinister.

He intends to strip every potential challenger to his authority–or his version of reality–of any credibility with the public.  

If he succeeds, there will be:

  • No independent press to reveal his failures and crimes.
  • No independent law enforcement agencies to investigate his abuses of office.
  • No independent judiciary to hold him accountable.  
  • No independent military authorities to dissent as he recklessly hurtles toward potential nuclear showdowns.
  • No candidate–Democrat or Republican–to challenge him for re-election in 2010.
  • No candidate–Democrat or Republican–to challenge his remaining in office as “President-for-Life.”

TRUST ONLY ME–EVEN WHEN I’M LYING: PART ONE (OF TWO)

In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 16, 2017 at 12:28 am

On February 19, Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, posted a scathing–and accurate–attack on Donald Trump.

Writing on his Facebook page, Reich pointed out a series of statements Trump made during the 2016 Presidential campaign–and how each of them has proven to be a lie [italics in blue are added]:

Robert Reich at the UT Liz Carpenter Lecture 2015.JPG

Robert Reich

1.  He called Hillary Clinton a crook.  

You bought it.  

Then he paid $25 million to settle a fraud lawsuit.

2. He said he’d release his tax returns, eventually. 

You bought it. 

He hasn’t, and says he never will.

3. He said he’d divest himself from his financial empire, to avoid any conflicts of interest. 

You bought it. 

He is still heavily involved in his businesses, manipulates the stock market on a daily basis, and has more conflicts of interest than can even be counted.

4. He said Clinton was in the pockets of Goldman Sachs, and would do whatever they said.  

You bought it.  

He then proceeded to put half a dozen Goldman Sachs executives in positions of power in his administration.

5. He said he’d surround himself with all the best and smartest people.

You bought it.

He nominated theocratic loon Mike Pence for Vice President. A white supremacist named Steve Bannon is his most trusted confidant. Dr. Ben Carson, the world’s greatest idiot savant brain surgeon, is in charge of HUD. Russian quisling Rex Tillerson is Secretary of State.

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Steve Bannon

6. He said he’d be his own man, beholden to no one.

You bought it.

He then appointed Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, whose only “qualifications” were the massive amounts of cash she donated to his campaign.

7. He said he would “drain the swamp” of Washington insiders.

You bought it.

He then admitted that was just a corny slogan he said to fire up the rubes during the rallies, and that he didn’t mean it.

8. He said he knew more about strategy and terrorism than the Generals did.

You bought it.

He promptly gave the green light to a disastrous raid in Yemen- even though all his Generals said it would be a terrible idea. This raid resulted in the deaths of a Navy SEAL, an 8-year old American girl, and numerous civilians. The actual target of the raid escaped, and no useful intel was gained.

9. He said Hillary Clinton couldn’t be counted on in times of crisis.

You bought it.

He didn’t even bother overseeing that raid in Yemen; and instead spent the time hate-tweeting the New York Times, and sleeping.

10. He called CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times “fake news” and said they were his enemy.

You bought it.

He now gets all his information from Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, and InfoWars.

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Donald Trump

11. He called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief” and accused him of playing more rounds of golf than Tiger Woods. He promised to never be the kind of president who took cushy vacations on the taxpayer’s dime, not when there was so much important work to be done.

You bought it.

He took his first vacation after 11 days in office. On the taxpayer’s dime. And went golfing. And that’s just the first month.  

* * * * *

Since taking office as the Nation’s 45th President, Trump has attacked or undermined one public or private institution after another.  

Among these: 

  • American Intelligence and military agencies: A Trump executive order allows the Director of National Intelligence and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to attend the Principals’ Committee only when it pertains to their “responsibilities and expertise.” 
  • Senior Adviser and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon–an anti-Semitic white supremacist–will now wield influence over the National Security Council.  
  • In February, Trump approved and ordered a Special Forces raid in Yemen on an Al Qaeda stronghold. The assault resulted in the death of Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens.
  • Disavowing any responsibility for the failure, Trump said: ““This was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something they wanted to do. They came to me, they explained what they wanted to do–the generals–who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan.”
  • Medicare: During the 2016 campaign, Trump said he would allow Medicare to negotiate down the price of prescription drugs. At his January 10 press conference he charged that pharmaceutical companies were “getting away with murder.”
  • But after meeting with pharmaceutical lobbyists on January 31, Trump said: “I’ll oppose anything that makes it harder for smaller, younger companies to take the risk of bringing their product to a vibrantly competitive market. That includes price-fixing by the biggest dog in the market, Medicare.”
  • The press: On February 17, Trump tweeted: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews,@ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
  • And, appearing before the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 24, Trump said: “I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s fake, phony, fake….I’m against the people that make up stories and make up sources. They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name. Let their name be put out there.”