I was flipping around the dial the other night before going to sleep and I came upon Fox News. One of the empty-headed, hostile Roger Ailes whores (whore in the most literal sense, not in a figurative use of the world) was giving short shrift to the new #NeverTrump guy from the CIA, Evan McMullin, and abruptly cut him off and as though she had to break for a commercial. But instead of a commercial, she just had some Trumpist ready to denounce him on another camera. Then she started repeating the latest right-wing Hate Talk Radio conspiracy theory about how a Hillary e-mail killed the Iranian nuclear scientist.I guess in a media age of uncurated infotainment and gossip, people can get away with any kind of claims at all. How is Trump's assertions about Hillary any different from Fatah's election claim that they killed 11,000 Israelis? Drudge and the right-wing echo chamber have been pushing their "Hillary has brain damage" conspiracy theory again. By the end of the week, I'm sure this will be all over the Trumpanzee twitter feed. Trump is like a gossip bottom feeder and in the case of the Iranian nuclear scientist, he picked up a slur manufactured at Drudge and promulgated by right-wing closet case Tom Cotton, someone who's entire life is a lie. Josh Rogin:
Despite what you might read on Donald Trump’s twitter feed, the Iranian execution of a nuclear scientist who defected to the United States and then changed his mind was not caused by Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. The scientist outed himself; it wasn’t Clinton’s fault.The Iranian government announced Sunday it had executed Shahram Amiri, a nuclear scientist who spent about 14 months in the United States in 2009 and 2010. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) noted on Sunday’s Face the Nation that Amiri’s case had been discussed by top Clinton State Department officials on emails that passed through her private server.“I’m not going to comment on what he may or may not have done for the United States government, but in the emails that were on Hillary Clinton’s private server, there were conversations among her senior advisors about this gentleman,” Cotton said. “That goes to show just how reckless and careless her decision was to put that kind of highly classified information on a private server.”The Drudge Report ran the story with a banner title, “Clinton email led to execution in Iran?” which Trump promptly retweeted without comment to his 10.7 million followers....In 2010, I covered Amiri’s strange case for Foreign Policy magazine and watched in real time as the Clinton State Department struggled to deal with Amiri’s story. When Amiri arrived at the Pakistani embassy, he was asking to be sent back to Iran. He had an elaborate story for how he had gotten there.According to what Amiri told Pakistani and Iranian officials, he was kidnapped in Medina, Saudi Arabia in 2009, on his way to the mosque, thrown in a van, drugged, and taken the United States. He claimed he never gave any information to the U.S. government and that he was moved around a lot, staying mostly in Arizona and Washington, DC.For some unknown reason, 14 months into his capture, the U.S. government put Amiri in a cab and had him shipped back into Iranian hands, according to the story Amiri told just before he returned to Iran. He never explained how or why he was able to record Youtube videos during his alleged capture, each of which had different accounts of what happened to him.U.S. officials at the time told me and many other journalists that Amiri had defected to the United States of his own free will and had helped the U.S. for many years while he was in Iran by providing essential intelligence information about Iran’s nuclear program. The Washington Post reported at the time the U.S. government had paid Amiri $5 million.Clinton talked publicly about the case at the time. “He’s free to go. He was free to come. These decisions are his alone to make,” she said on July 13, 2010.There are several possible explanations as to why Amiri decided to go home and face the judgment of the Iranian justice system, which concluded he was a traitor. The Iranian government may have threatened his wife and 7-year old son. He may have hated life on the run. He may have had a change of heart.But there’s no reasonable connection between the discussion of Amiri’s case on email by Clinton’s staff to Amiri’s eventual execution. There’s no evidence her server was hacked. The Iranians knew all about Amiri well before the emails were released publicly. His kidnapping story never held water and his fate was sealed long before his sentence was carried out.Add Shahram Amiri to the list of deaths Trump has carelessly speculated that Clinton is responsible for with no real evidence. At least he can’t blame her for the Kennedy assassination; he’s already got a conspiracy theory for that one.
By the end of May, the NY Times' Jonathan Martin was already writing about Señor Trumpanzee's penchant for falling in with fringe right-wing media pushing their own manufactured conspiracy theories. It's one of the ways in which Trump really is a true Republican, even if he disagrees with so much of Paul Ryan's agenda. "Political operatives would secretly place damaging information with friendly media like the Drudge Report and Fox News and with radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh-- and then they would work to get the same information absorbed into the mainstream media," explained Martin. "Candidates themselves would avoid being seen slinging mud, if possible, so as to avoid coming across as undignified or desperate." And then, along came Mr. Trumpy-the-Clown, a man who truly knows no bounds.
Yet by personally broaching topics like Bill Clinton’s marital indiscretions and the conspiracy theories surrounding the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., a Clinton White House aide, Donald J. Trump is again defying the norms of presidential politics and fashioning his own outrageous style-- one that has little use for a middleman, let alone usual ideas about dignity.“They’ve reverse-engineered the way it has always worked because they now have a candidate willing to say it himself,” said Danny Diaz, who was a top aide in Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign. Mr. Diaz spoke with a measure of wonder about the spectacle of the party’s presumptive nominee discussing Mr. Clinton’s sexual escapades.With Mr. Trump as the presumptive Republican standard-bearer, the line separating the conservative mischief makers and the party’s more-buttoned-up cadre of elected officials and aides has been obliterated. Fusing what had been two separate but symbiotic forces, Mr. Trump has begun a real-life political science experiment: What happens when a major party’s nominee is more provocateur than politician?That the Republican Party has embraced someone willing to traffic in the most inflammatory of accusations comes as wish fulfillment for an element of the right that is convinced that the party lost the past two elections because its candidates were unwilling to attack President Obama forcefully enough....Roger J. Stone Jr., the political operative who is Mr. Trump’s longtime confidant and an unapologetic stirrer of strife, called Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney “losers” for their more restrained approaches.“Comity gets you beat,” he said, adding, “It takes guts to win-- and Trump doesn’t look at polls, he just swings.”But that is precisely what has many Republicans, and some Democrats, nervous.“He’s never been involved in policy making or party building or the normal things a candidate would do,” said Jon Seaton, a Republican strategist. “His whole frame of reference is daytime Fox News and Infowars,” a website run by the conservative commentator Alex Jones.Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s former chief of staff, said Mr. Trump was making common cause with “the lunatic fringe,” citing his willingness to appear on the radio show of Mr. Jones, who has said that Michelle Obama is a man.
That seems to go a long way towards explaining why voters with college educations have abandoned Trump en masse but why the poorly educated are still embracing him despite the non-stop spew of nonsensical ravings. He sounds like Hate Talk Radio and Fox News-- which is where they get their information to begin with. Even before Señor Trumpanzee called on NRA types to assassinate Hillary yesterday, 19% of Republican voters told an August 5-8 Reuters/Ipsos poll that they want Trump to drop out of the presidential race. Kind of makes sense that that number is only going to grow? Brent Scowcroft went beyond his "not voting for Trump" stand to "I'm voting for Hillary" this morning.
