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The Left’s Emmanuel Goldstein and Today’s Two Minutes of Hate
Many of you have heard the waves of derision being dumped on Donald Trump following his failure to appropriately “correct” a questioner who had, astonishingly, questioned the nature of President Obama’s religious convictions. The exchange which followed, the first question of what appears to have been Trump’s first town-hall type event, was related as follows in the Huffington Post:
The first man to grab the microphone at an event in Rochester, New Hampshire, said: “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. You know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”
Trump’s rebuttal?
“We need this question? This is the first question?”
The unidentified man in a “Trump” t-shirt continued: “Anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us… That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?” Trump’s rebuttal?
“We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. You know, a lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening. We’re going to be looking at that and many other things.”
When asked after the event why the property tycoon didn’t correct the questioner, his campaign manager ran to a familiar excuse: He didn’t hear the question.
Beleaguered apologist Corey Lewandowski offered the following mitigation: “All he heard was a question about training camps, which he said we have to look into. The media want to make this an issue about Obama, but it’s about him waging a war on Christianity.”
Well, I was there. In fact I was sitting about 20 feet from the man who asked the question. The distortion of the event by the liberal media (such as in this clip from MSNBC) is revealing. It is also rather sad.
But first, let me tell you what happened.
The man stood up and for about five seconds, before actually saying anything, he swayed and gesticulated erratically. Then, he sputtered out his question in a barely coherent fashion as can be made out on the MSNBC tape. As soon as he stood up I felt – and I suspect most of the rest of the audience felt – uh-oh, this guy has a couple of screws loose.
Trump was (again as the MSNBC tape makes clear) surprised and a bit amused by the question and tried to make a joke out of it initially. “This is the first question,” he said with a wry smile and a laugh. What he did next was to basically pacify the guy and say something bland like: “a lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying bad things are happening … we’re going to be looking at that and a lot of other things.”
In other words: next question!
It was clear to everyone there that all Trump was doing was trying to get past this seemingly troubled individual (assuming, of course, that he wasn’t planted there by people who were setting this up). Suppose Trump did start engaging and challenging the guy? First, the guy came across as unstable and might have blown up. Even if he didn’t explode, he probably would have pontificated even more about his demons. There was simply nothing to be gained – and time to be lost – by arguing with a man who by all appearances was a kook. Trump didn’t need it and neither did anyone else who had come to see him.
As for Lewandowski saying that Trump had not heard the question, I suspect that even before the guy opened his mouth Trump was no longer paying any attention to what he was saying. (“Oops. Got a live one here…”)
If this was not, in fact, a set-up for a media storm by the left (or similarly, the GOP establishment) then it was just the little jewel our left-wing media had come to extract from a Trump event. And it shows how pathetic they are. In the course of a free-flowing Q&A that went on for at least a half hour, the most damaging thing they could come up with was this one, unbalanced guy. And Trump’s sin? He did not pull a John McCain moment by dressing down the questioner.
They are desperate.
Published in General
1) This may have been a false flag operation, but I doubt that someone engaging is such an operation would have acted unstable, because that would undermine the objective.
2) Trump said, “This is the first question?!” and he should have followed that with, “Next question!” That he did not shows how unskilled he is as a politician.
3) I would argue his response was not a way to shut the questioner down and move on, but was rather a typical Trump response: vague, lacking in specifics, and expressed with a very limited vocabulary. He reminds me of a cocky but not particularly bright high school student faking his way through an oral exam.
He handled it just fine . . . that’s the point. What fuels Trump-mania, in part, is the Left’s success at leading their opponents around by the nose while kicking their butts over every utterance the Left decides is some sort of transgression. Enough. All GOP candidates should refuse to play the Left’s game. Trump actually does refuse, which makes this otherwise bizarre candidate seem like a hero to many conservatives.
BTW – did anyone happen to notice how Trump managed to dominate the news when it otherwise would have been all about those who did better than he did in the GOP debate? Those who think his Town Hall answer showed his lack of political experience might want to reconsider. Trump took momentum away from his opponents, let the Left wing sputter on irrelevantly, and managed to bolster support among his fans. No one will talk about this again once the Sunday shows have filled their obligatory 5 minutes of programming with it. It’s called “Winning!”
HVT, agree 100% on both points! Thanks for that!
For the same reason progressives use “teabagger” as an insult.
Thought for a long time-
If Obama says he is a Christian then maybe we have to accept that he is a Christian.
(Leaving aside the principle of Taqiyya, that it is considered acceptable according to the Koran for Muslims to lie in the advancement of Islam).
My question though is, what is he effectively– could he have done any more in advancing the Muslim cause and undermining the Western Christian cause than he has done?
As conservatives we judge people by their deeds, not their words, do we not?
Well, we can’t run history backward, and I’m not among the people who’s certain that US intervention in Syria would have been successful. But I’d guess that anyone who had any deep sense of concern about Muslim lives would have heeded the cautions about the probable effects of a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq and taken a more interventionist approach to Syria.
Most of the 300,000 dead in Syria (that will probably prove an underestimate) and 12 million displaced are Muslims. It would be a pretty hard sell to convince them that Obama had advanced their cause, or was even remotely moved by it.
No we don’t. Is there something magic about expressing “faith” that means I have to suspend all critical thinking?
Obama is nothing if not a doctrinaire Leftist. Among the hallmarks of Leftist thinking is that religion is atavistic; if not destined for history’s ash heap, certainly it’s to be relegated to its Compendium of Myths.
So why do we then wonder about Obama’s religious beliefs? The answer is obvious from the first premise. He has occasional political uses for religious symbols and the appearance of religiosity. Certain adherents of particular religions fit well into the Left’s all-purpose “imperialistic oppression” meta-narrative. Beyond that, although far too cleaver to say it aloud, Leftists like Obama hold religion akin to leprechauns, tooth fairies and to Easter’s candy-laden bunnies rather than its tale of redemption through resurrection.
For a committed Left wing ideologue like Obama, beyond certain utilitarian political functions, religion has no purpose whatsoever and religious conviction is an oxymoron. There’s no “there” of which to be convicted with any religion. To argue about which flavor of crazy Obama prefers is itself crazy: to him all religion is the same flavor of crazy.
Hopefully, this is the stage where Trump self-destructs since it is still early enough for the rest of the field to recover from. I am a bit surprised to see the MSM helping him self-destruct, but it could still be a positive development if it allows us to get past Trump and have a more serious, substantive primary process.
The main question I have is “why do the other candidates feel the need to go down the tubes with Trump?” Why does Carson feel the need to say no Muslim should be in political office? Others simply refuse to comment and thereby let their passivity “prove” to the MSM and LIV’s that they are racist birthers.
All of them should know that this question is coming to them and should have a standard response that puts the question back on Obama or the MSM or someone besides themselves or other Republicans.
Why not use the opportunity to highlight Obama’s attacks on Catholicism? Why not mention Obama’s lawsuit against the nuns who provide free healthcare to elderly, disabled people? Why not point out all the Muslim nations that have suffered since Obama/Hillary foreign policy went into effect? As Claire intimated, if Obama was a Muslim he probably wouldn’t design a foreign policy to make millions of his fellow Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, etc suffer and die.
The other 15 candidates had 24 hours to prepare a response and we get…this?
What Mark Steyn said:
steynonline.com/7188/get-lost-you-palace-guard-creep
Steyn in good voice on this one!
Because The Base ™ is Angry, and apparently insulting Trump will inspire these True Conservatives ™ to hand the election to Hillary (or worse) because the candidate hurt their feelings.
Attacking Obama and his personal religious beliefs is a pitfall: he is a leftist. Most Democrats would probably be very similar to him if they were president. We should be talking about the big picture more and attacking left-wing beliefs, and not attack Obama as a person too much.