Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
I want to start this post off by taking a closer look at what Donald Trump actually said in his now infamous “2nd Amendment speech” yesterday. Here’s the part that generated all the controversy:
If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know. But — but I’ll tell you what. That will be a horrible day. If — if Hillary gets to put her judges — right now, we’re tied. You see what’s going on.
First of all, I agree that this is an incredibly stupid and dangerous thing for a Presidential candidate to say. So while I don’t think he should’ve said it, I also don’t think it’s the biggest deal in the world. Moreover, mainstream media and pundits across the land are unanimously interpreting it as a call for the assassination of Hillary Clinton. I didn’t read it that way at all.
For instance, he starts off his thought by creating a hypothetical scenario “if she gets to pick her judges.” So at that moment he seems to be thinking about a post-Clinton presidency; a time after which she has already picked the judges. If the judges are already in place, what would an assassination of Clinton accomplish? Absolutely nothing.
As such, I interpreted Trump’s subsequent words to reflect his opinion that “2nd Amendment people” might resort to armed resistance in the face of gun control measures implemented under a Hillary Clinton administration. While I don’t think this is a wise thing for him to publicly ponder, it’s not a remotely outlandish scenario. For example, should “assault weapons” be banned during a Clinton presidency, there remains that lingering issue of the millions upon millions of such weapons already in the public domain. Thus, if legislation is eventually passed to confiscate these weapons, I have no doubt that armed resistance to confiscation would be widespread. This isn’t a call to arms, it’s just stating what I believe to be an obvious fact.
However, if that was the point he was trying to make, he chose a really stupid way of doing it. If you’re going to use that type of language you’d better be really smart about clarifying exactly what you’re trying to express. Nevertheless, I still think it’s significant that Trump’s comments appear to be him blabbing about what response might be considered by “2nd Amendment people,” in a world after which aggressive gun control has already been passed and signed off on by the Supreme Court.
Further evidence to back up my interpretation can be found a few moments later when he says the following:
You know, when the bad guys burst into your house, they’re not looking about into Second Amendments, and, do I have the right to do this? OK, the bad guys aren’t going to be giving up their weapons.
But the good people will say, “oh, well, that’s the law.” No, no, not going to happen, we can’t let it happen. We can’t let it happen.
As you can see, he’s clearly thinking about a hypothetical post-2nd Amendment world. This is clear when he says “the bad guys aren’t going to be giving up their weapons.” Trump’s mind seemingly wandered into an imagined future world where gun confiscation is a reality, and he muses that only 2nd Amendment people can stop it. Personally, I don’t think a Hillary assassination ever crossed his mind, he was just being flippant about a potential future confrontation.
Moving along, what bothers me so much regarding the media uproar about his statements is not just that what he said seems to have been intentionally misinterpreted, but that we are focusing on words as opposed to actions. All the while, there are plenty of things Trump has actually done that make him a highly offensive candidate who isn’t really as anti-status quo as people think. I’ll give you two examples. First, let’s look at the man who Trump picked to head his campaign finance team: Steve Mnuchin.
Here are a few snippets about the man from an article published in the New Republic titled, Donald Trump’s Finance Chair Is the Anti-Populist From Hell:
Donald Trump’s first major staff selection since securing the Republican nomination, national finance chairman Steven Mnuchin, co-founded and manages the hedge fund Dune Capital. Not only did he make partner at Goldman Sachs, so did his father in the 1960s. With over 30 years of experience at the top levels of finance, Mnuchin was present for every recent major banking innovation, including those that brought the country to the brink of economic collapse.
Mnuchin’s presence in the campaign reveals how the qualities Trump loyalists projected on their hero don’t measure up to the truth. They have venerated him throughout the Republican primary for rejecting the dirty business of pay-to-play politics, and for populist vows to protect the ordinary worker. But in selecting Mnuchin, not only has Trump submitted to the realities of presidential campaign finance; he’s chosen one of the most notorious bankers in America to carry it out.
When I heard Mnuchin’s name last week, I immediately remembered the front lawn of his mansion. Back in 2011, local housing activists and the Occupy movement in Los Angeles camped out on that lawn to save the home of Rose Mary Gudiel, a La Puente, California, resident who faced eviction after being just two weeks late on one mortgage payment. The activists threatened to move all of Gudiel’s furniture into Mnuchin’s $26 million Bel Air estate if the eviction wasn’t stopped. Twenty police officers and a helicopter met the protesters.
Why was Mnuchin’s front lawn the focal point for the protest? Because years after forming Dune Capital in 2004, Mnuchin’s hedge fund purchased the failed lender IndyMac, one of America’s largest home lenders and a leading distributor of Alt-A mortgages, a subprime hybrid which did not require borrowers to accurately state their incomes. After IndyMac failed, Dune led the investment group that purchased it from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 2009, renaming it OneWest Bank. Mnuchin became OneWest’s principal owner and chairman.
OneWest accomplished these foreclosures through fraud. Erica Johnson-Seck, a vice president of foreclosure and bankruptcy for OneWest, explained in a July 2009 deposition that she “robo-signed” 6,000 foreclosure-related documents per week, spending just 30 seconds on each sworn affidavit that attested to the veracity of all relevant information in the case. Johnson-Seck admitted to not reading the documents before signing them, to not knowing how the records were generated, and to not signing in the presence of a notary, all of which made the affidavits she signed false evidence in court.
The OneWest subsidiary Financial Freedom executed 39 percent of all foreclosures on reverse mortgages between 2009 and 2015, despite servicing only 17 percent of the market, according to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) obtained by the California Reinvestment Coalition. OneWest disclosed in its most recent annual report that it’s under investigation for this disproportionate share of “widow foreclosures” by HUD’s Inspector General. The victims include 103 year-old Myrtle Lewis of North Texas, who OneWest put into foreclosure after her insurance coverage lapsed; Karen Hunziker, who got a foreclosure notice from OneWest ten days after her husband passed away in 2014; and a host of others.
Trump’s loyal fans aren’t likely to scrutinize Mnuchin’s record, but they should. You can measure political candidates in part by who they associate with. The foreclosure history in Mnuchin’s past reflects an extreme mentality of profit at all costs, and hardly a viewpoint of standing up for the little guy. Trump as populist was always something of a pose, covering for a deep nationalism and antipathy to immigrants. The Mnuchin pick just brings that into sharper relief.
Trump’s main money-chaser has profited off the suffering of ordinary Americans for years. There’s no reason to believe Trump will offer a better deal to the working class.
A President Trump isn’t going to lay a finger on Wall Street. Not a finger.
So what about foreign policy? He talks a good anti-interventionist game, but look at who he just named to play a senior role in his transition team: Mike Rogers.
So who is Mike Rogers? Let’s turn to the Wall Street Journal:
WASHINGTON—Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) will play a senior role on Donald Trump’s presidential transition team, advising on national-security matters, several people familiar with the process said.
Mr. Rogers’s involvement in the transition team was described as preliminary and not finalized. He is close friends with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is leading Mr. Trump’s transition team, and he could lead the national-security group within the transition team or play another top role, these people said.
Mr. Rogers is in some ways not an obvious choice for the Trump campaign. During his 14 years in Congress, Mr. Rogers was seen as a member of the GOP’s interventionist wing. In 2014, he called for sending ground troops to fight Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Mr. Rogers was also one of Congress’ leading critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a foreign leader with whom Mr. Trump has suggested he could repair relations.
After leaving Congress, Mr. Rogers launched an organization, Americans for Peace, Prosperity and Security, that hosted a series of town-hall events with GOP presidential candidates in Iowa. The goal, according to the group’s website, was to “enhance the knowledge base of citizens in the early states to help elect a president who supports American engagement and a strong foreign policy.”
All of this makes me further doubt the honesty of Trump’s Wall Street critiques and his supposed anti-interventionist foreign policy. Moreover, the bigger point is that there are plenty of genuinely troubling things about Trump, yet the media chooses to focus obsessively on his gaffes and stupid statements. It’s essentially the whole “social justice warrior” mindset gone wild, and it takes the political debate down to a 3rd grade level, which is exactly where much of the media prefers it.
For example, by focusing in on the things that Trump says, as opposed to the things that Trump does, the media gets to do the same for Hillary. As such, American political coverage degenerates into a analysis of gaffes, counter-gaffes and witty tweets composed by staffers. This serves to give Hillary Clinton a free pass on all the horrible things she actually has done over the decades. Moreover, this obsession with gaffes and gossip ensures that her current scandals, which should be at the top of the news cycle, are replaced with the latest idiotic thing that Trump said.
As an example, what about the latest revelations related to her email scandal. We learned the following from today’s New York Times article, Emails Renew Questions About Clinton Foundation and State Dept. Overlap:
WASHINGTON — A new batch of State Department emails released Tuesday showed the close and sometimes overlapping interests between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.
The documents raised new questions about whether the charitable foundation worked to reward its donors with access and influence at the State Department, a charge that Mrs. Clinton has faced in the past and has always denied.
In one email exchange, for instance, an executive at the Clinton Foundation in 2009 sought to put a billionaire donor in touch with the United States ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor’s interests there.
In another email, the foundation appeared to push aides to Mrs. Clinton to help find a job for a foundation associate. Her aides indicated that the department was working on the request.
The State Department turned the new emails over to a conservative advocacy group, Judicial Watch, as part of a lawsuit that the group brought under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents included 44 emails that were not among some 55,000 pages of emails that Mrs. Clinton had previously given to the State Department, which she said represented all her “work-related” emails. The document release centers on discussions between Mrs. Clinton’s aides and Clinton Foundation executives about a number of donors and associates with interests before the State Department.
None of Hillary Clinton‘s work-related emails discovered by the FBI after being deleted from her private server have been released, raising questions about whether any will be seen in public before Election Day.
The FBI says it found “several thousand” work-related emails Clinton deleted, but the State Department has not committed to a schedule for their release, and it will be up to a federal judge to determine when they could be made public.
“As we have just received this material from the FBI we are still assessing what our process will look like,” State spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said in a statement to The Hill on Tuesday.Multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and lawsuits have been filed to recover the emails. Litigants include conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch and Vice News journalist Jason Leopold.
Last Friday, the FBI sent the final batch of emails it had recovered to the State Department, which is responsible for going through them to redact any information that is classified or otherwise exempt from public disclosure.
“Just as we appropriately processed the material turned over to the Department by former Secretary Clinton, we will appropriately and with due diligence process any additional material we receive from the FBI to identify work-related agency records and make them available to the public consistent with our legal obligations,” Trudeau said.
Notice she says, consistent with “legal obligations,” not consistent with the public interest.
The ongoing delay complicates the odds that Clinton’s deleted emails are made public before the election in November
The first opportunity for a judge to weigh in on the deleted emails is Aug. 22, when Judge James Boasberg is scheduled to oversee a hearing as part of a Judicial Watch case.
“Should the State Department prevail in that argument or otherwise obtain delays beyond Election Day in Plaintiff’s and in other similar cases, it would leave Plaintiff and the public without information guaranteed to them under the FOIA,” Leopold, the journalist, argued in a Monday evening court filing.
The best tweet summarizing all of this was composed by Michael Tracey earlier today. He noted:
Finally, I want to end this post with a quote from the only genuine anti-establishemnt candidate (with ballot access) still in the race: Dr. Jill Stein. In a recent interview with MSNBC she stated:
I don’t think what Donald Trump says is worse than actually what Hillary Clinton in fact has done.
They’re both terrible, and I’m glad somebody isn’t afraid to say it. I suggest watching the following interview.
via http://ift.tt/2bjoOSO Tyler Durden
