Category Archives: 2016 presidential campaign
Trump and Carson Foreign Policy
The two Republican front runners are better at brain surgery and bluster than foreign policy.
In the last debate Donald Trump was asked about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. He went on about Chinese currency manipulation. Rand Paul piped up that China isn’t a partner in the deal. In fact the point of the deal is to contain China.
You knew that, right? Neither did I. But The Donald claims he did. The WSJ has its doubts about that.
So does Charles Krauthammer:
Ben Carson had an awful night — the Chinese intervening in Syria? But it was bookended and thereby saved by two good moments: an early answer, the preemptive “Thank you for not asking me what I said in the 10th grade,” and his closing statement about the suffering in the country being overcome by America’s inner strength.
Trump shares with Carson the GOP’s vast anti-politics constituency, now fully half of the Republican electorate. Carson’s antidote to the nation’s failed politics is moral strength. Trump’s is unapologetic brute strength.
Trump did not have a particularly good night, either. He was again at sea on foreign policy. And when asked about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-nation trade deal he opposes root and branch, Trump did his riff on the Chinese economic menace — to which Paul calmly pointed out that China is not party to the TPP. Indeed, the main strategic purpose of the TPP is precisely to contain China by binding its Pacific neighbors to the United States, thus blunting Beijing’s reach for regional hegemony.
Never mind. As long as the anti-politics mood prevails, neither Trump nor Carson is even dented by such policy misadventures.
Really Cool Things
According to Politico, “Jeb Bush has had it with you.” Maureen Dowd thinks that Trump has gotten into Jeb’s head.
A week ago, Jeb griped “I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable…”
Dowd says, “we all know he doesn’t.”
Kasich Fantasy
Ohio governor John Kasich is trying to position himself as the grownup in the Republican free-for-all. He has solid credentials. He’s a two term governor of a swing state with a 2 billion budget surplus. He was chairman of the House Budget Committee when the federal budget was last balanced in 1997.
It’s an impressive resume, and he’s impressed by it.
Kasich Fantasy
Kasich does not take The Donald or The Doctor (Ben Carson) seriously. They annoy him.
In Wednesday’s debate he called the various Trump and Carson immigration and tithing tax plans a fantasy. Given the hostility of the CNBC moderators you’d think someone might have picked up on the theme. Instead they asked about fantasy football.
Speaking of fantasy, this morning’s Real Clear Politics poll average has Trump at 27, Carson at 22.2, and Kasich at 2.2.
CNBC Cage Match
The candidates bit back at the moderators during the CNBC debate. For good reason.
John Harwood got things started by asking Donald Trump if he’s a comic book presidential candidate. Chris Christie didn’t like being asked about fantasy football while ISIS is chopping off heads in the real world.
Cage Match
Ted Cruz told the moderators the debate was not a “cage match“.
Think Progress called the debate “a total train wreck”.
LLoyd Grove writing for the Daily Beast, said it was pretty clear who the loser was – the mainstream media:
The mainstream media—as represented by the business cable network’s principal moderators, Carl Quintanilla, Becky Quick, and especially John Harwood—took it on the chin as candidate after candidate, to hearty applause from the partisan audience at the University of Colorado, pointed out that their questions were inaccurate, unfair, or otherwise plain silly.
Hillary and Trump on 9/11
Hillary told Chelsea, via email on the night of 9/11 2012, that the Benghazi attack was a planned terrorist attack. Yet two days later Suzan Rice appeared on 5 Sunday talk shows claiming it was an angry reaction to a movie. Hillary then promised parents of the dead she would hunt down the movie maker.
9/11
Dr. Krauthammer says, “We’re living in an age where what you say and its relation to the facts are completely irrelevant.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is driving Dan Henninger up a wall at the WSJ by implying George W. Bush was responsible for the original 9/11:
Just as Mr. Trump suggested responsibility for 9/11 lies somehow with former President Bush, Mrs. Clinton’s view has been that responsibility for the failure in Benghazi is so diffuse that no one is responsible, that asking questions about what happened is a political attempt to “come after me. ” …
What a spectacle it would be to have America’s highest office contested next year between these two.
