Rodney Dangerfield of Jihad
ISIS is becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of Jihad.
Last week Trump called Obama the founder of ISIS. The next day Hugh Hewitt threw him a life line saying, “I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.”
But The Donald doubled down calling Obama the “ISIS MVP” and adding Hillary as “cofounder” for good measure.
Mollie Hemingway in The Federalist points out that Trump has made the same claim for a long time. He did it three times in January and nobody made a big deal of it. Yet this time the media got all literal insisting that Obama did not actually incorporate ISIS.
Joe Biden claimed Republicans would put “y’all in chains”. That has yet to happen. Nobody took it literally.
Trump did say later in the Hewitt interview:
“I mean, with his bad policies, that’s why ISIS came about… If he would have done things properly, you wouldn’t have had ISIS… Therefore, he was the founder of ISIS.”
Still, Politifact gave him a Pants on Fire rating on the ISIS foundation issue.
Rodney Dangerfield of Jihad
Hemingway says the real point is that Americans are fed up with way Republicans and Democrats fight wars “where enemies receive decades of nation building instead of crushing defeats.”
Crowds are cheering Trump’s hard statements about Obama and Clinton’s policies in the Middle East because they are sick and tired of losing men, women, treasure and time with impotent, misguided, aimless efforts there.
She says Buzz Feed’s Andrew Kaczynski got more to the heart of what’s wrong with Donald Trump. He reminds us that Trump himself repeatedly called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
Does that mean ISIS has two daddies?
Robbed in Rio
It’s not all Zika virus and green diving pool water in Rio. There’s armed robbery too.
Robbed in Rio
Olympic gold medalist, Ryan Lochte and three other swimmers were pulled from a cab and robbed at gunpoint. The bad guys, dressed as cops, held a gun to Lochte’s head. Locate was like, “whatever”:
And then the guy pulled out his gun, he cocked it, put it to my forehead and he said, ‘Get down,’ and I put my hands up, I was like ‘whatever.’ He took our money, he took my wallet. He left my cell phone, he left my credentials.”
Maybe Ryan was just throwing up his hands.
Update: The WSJ reports that the athletes didn’t report the robbery to police. The cops began an investigation after seeing media reports. The International Olympic Committee initially denied those reports because it claimed the United States Olympic Committee told them the heist never happened. Later in the day the USOC changed its story and said it did happen. Locate says the swimmers were under the influence at the time.
Update to the Update: Two of the allegedly robbed swimmers were pulled off their flights home for further questioning in Brazil. CNN says officials are suspicious of discrepancies in their stories and their “jocularity” following an armed robbery. Ryan Locate got out of town ahead of the the law.
Trump Baby Kick
I know. Donald Trump did not kick a baby out of a campaign speech. He was just kidding.
Kick
Me too.
Coincidence
Bill Clinton just happens to show up on the same tarmac as Attorney General Loretta Lynch the weekend before Hillary’s interview with the FBI.
An unmarked plane delivers a pallet stacked with $400 million in cash to Iran moments before five hostages are released.
Coincidence.
Let The Olympic Games Begin
Let the Ri0 Olympic games begin.
Here’s Jonathan Turley in USA Today:
Rio is the IOC’s most signature moment: games held in a lethally polluted area with some athletes who are viewed as equally dirty. Dirty air, dirty water, dirty games.
