Surveillance video of Paul/Rubio staffer brawl emerges. And, well, if this what Team Rubio calls a “punch” I think the national security numbers may begin to fall. Watch!
Press failures, especially massive ones, tend to be right there in plain site and yet totally invisible, entirely ignored. And yet we have a massive one coming out of Wednesday night’s Republican debate that the press seems inclined or insisting on totally ignoring. Commentators are toasting Carly Fiorina as the break-out winner of the debate. And yet she not only made a string of false statements, or claims that showed a willful disregard for or ignorance of reality, she almost certainly manufactured a bogus memory entirely out of whole cloth. And all of this is cast into particularly high relief since Fiorina went into the debate intent on branding Hillary Clinton as a liar. “Her track record of lying about Benghazi, of lying about her e- mails, about lying about her servers,” is something Hillary will have to answer for, Fiorina bellowed in the debate.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) on his plans to boycott Pope Francis’ speech to Congress: “[W]hen the Pope chooses to act and talk like a leftist politician, then he can expect to be treated like one.”
Special bonus quote: “If the Pope wants to devote his life to fighting climate change then he can do so in his personal time.”
Rubio staffer allegedly punches out Rand Paul aide at Michigan bar.
Beth Van Duyne is Mayor of Irving, Texas, the city where the now famous Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school. When Beth isn’t mayoring she spends her time as a high-profile anti-Sharia law activist.
From BusinessWeek, a fascinating look at how the brutal Obama “machine” beat an over-nice AIPAC on the Iran Deal, as told by Senate Republicans and AIPAC staffers. As disinterested observer Sen. Lindsey Graham puts it, “Aipac went to the Democrats and said, ‘We need your help as a friend.’ Obama said, ‘If you cross me you are going to make an enemy of my machine forever.'”
The whole crazy “shut down the government over Planned Parenthood” pyschodrama continued to unfold in the House last night even as the GOP presidential debate was droning on. GOP leaders now have a new plan to let anti-abortion hardliners “vent” but to avoid shutting down the government.
Great! But …
Commentators seem to agree that once the early Trump/World Wrestling phase of last night’s debate ebbed it moved on to a more substantive discussion from which Trump was largely absent. That may be so. Trump may have been silent because he just doesn’t now enough details or doesn’t care enough about them to engage. But there was a far more consequential reality that largely escaped attention. The debate turned not so much to foreign policy as to each candidate trying to outdo the other in embracing the sort of petulant unilateralism that made the aughts such a disaster for the United States.
It was, to put it simply, a race to embrace Bush foreign policy on steroids.
Yeah, Chris Christie fudged a bit last night on when he became U.S. attorney, but Jeb dragged out one of the defining tropes of the Bush years: W’s presidency began on Sept. 12, 2001.
NPR has the candidate-by-candidate breakdown from the debate: