Bill Maher last night examined Orange Hitler's "inexplicable" surrogates, and questions whether this cast of misfit toys would be fit to serve in a Presidential administration.
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“I do know that even talking about her scandals will irritate some of you, given that her opponent is an unambiguously racist scarecrow stuffed with scrunched-up copies of Jugs magazine, and that’s fair,” Oliver stated. “But not being as bad as Donald Trump is a low bar to clear, and if you focus on nothing but him, you fail to vet a woman who might be president.”
“We’ve spent several frustrating weeks trolling through all the innuendo and exaggerations surrounding Hillary’s email and foundation scandals, and the worst thing we can say is that they both look bad. But the harder you look, the less you actually find,” he maintained. “There’s not nothing there, but what is there is irritating rather than grossly nefarious.”
“Bear in mind: we know nothing about Trump’s finances, and that is not good. He’s the first major party nominee since 1980 not to release his tax returns, and his justification is pathetic,” said Oliver, showing a clip of Trump saying he couldn’t release his returns because he’s being audited — which the IRS has disputed saying he’s free to release them at any time."
“After this election, the Republican Party does have some soul-searching to do,” he explained. “But to say that it is permanently changed, implies that I think this guy will have some permanent influence on how we think about the world, and I think, from the perspective of someone who hopes that isn’t true — I hope that isn’t true.”
The reality that it is, the hateful racist base that is Trumps followers - they are deplorable, and they thrive on knowing that.
“I mean they didn't want Trump, a lot of them,” he continued. “And we see a lot of these Vichy Republicans who go along because they don’t want to upset the apple cart. They know better. They know where their bread is buttered, where their voters are. But you can get rid of the Trump, you can’t get rid of the voter. That’s who they want.”
“We see that poverty is at an all-time high underneath this administration,” he opined.
“The poverty rate has actually dropped,” Camerota pointed out.Davis disagreed, arguing incorrectly that poverty had only decreased for whites under President Barack Obama.
“That’s not true, that’s not true,” Davis said, talking over Reed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Reed shot back.
“The pastor is doing what Donald Trump does: lies,” Reed insisted.
“Are blacks experiencing the worst they’ve ever had?” Camerota asked Davis.
“That’s a euphemism!” Davis shouted back. “It’s the worst it’s been under this administration with these liberals in office! ‘Ever’ is a euphemism!”As Reed rattled off statistics to prove that things were not worse for the black community than “ever, ever, ever,” Davis refused to let him be heard.
“That’s nonsense!” Davis exclaimed.
“Gentlemen, we can’t hear you!” Camerota pleaded before finally giving up. “Alright, guys, thank you for both of your perspectives. Thank you for the debate.”Davis and Reed could be heard continuing to argue as CNN finally cut their audio feeds.
“Hopefully that’s not what we’re going to see four days from now when we have the first debate,” co-host Chris Cuomo quipped.
“Do we need more proof that New Yorkers are the best?” she began. “The reason that they caught the bombing suspect is because a couple of New Yorkers saw his suitcase bomb on the sidewalk and thought, ‘Hey, free suitcase!’ threw the bomb away and made off with their new luggage!”VIDEO COURTESY OF TBS
“Terrorists, when are you gonna learn that you can’t scare us, “she began as she showed a picture of a cockroach. “New Yorkers aren’t afraid of this and we’re not afraid of you.”Showing a picture of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, she continued, “Only one thing scares us, the thought of people voting for a crazy person who exploits their fear of terrorism.”
“This guy is not qualified to be the president,” Obama said. “And he shows no interest in even gaining the rudimentary knowledge required to make really hard decisions on a day-to-day basis. There’s no curiosity, there’s no desire to get up to speed. It’s an infomercial. It’s a reality show. And more disturbingly, it’s tapping into some of our worst impulses as a country — ones that divide us rather than bring us together; ones that seek to put down people who have been historically vulnerable as opposed to lifting them up.”Obama also said that one of the reasons the U.S. hasn’t had a female president is because the national character is still coming to terms with its view of strong, independent women.
“We as a society still grapple with what it means to see powerful women,” the president said. “And it still trouble us in lots of ways, unfairly. And that expresses itself in all sorts of ways.”
“You just said you can’t support someone who ‘lies for a living,'” Maher replied. “When I read a list of provable lies.”
“‘I don’t know anything about David Duke.’ Utter lie. ‘Vladimir Putin and I are best friends.’ He never met him,” said Maher. “He ‘got a letter from the NFL,’ which was proved never happened. He gave money to the veterans when he didn’t. ‘I was against the Iraq war,’ when it’s on tape that he was not.”
“These are campaign leaders, surrogates, friends of Mr. Trump,” Olbermann pointed out. “If they’re not talking to a basket full of deplorables, who are they talking to? Why would you have them there? You stuff like that at work, you get fired.”
“He has stayed on message consistently,” she remarked. “That’s why he’s leading in Florida not only in one poll, two polls, but the three latest polls, all reputable polls. He’s leading in Ohio by two polls by four points. He’s within five points in Pennsylvania and Michigan.”
“This is momentum that could develop into a landslide,” she insisted as one panel member could be heard laughing.
“He’s not just tightening the race, he’s opening up gaps now, ” she continued, before addressing former Bernie Sanders strategist Jonathan Tasini, “I know John thinks it’s anyone’s to dig in there–” as the rest of the panel could be heard joining the laughter.Tasini was then seen shaking head saying, “Momentum into a landslide? I mean…” before dissolving into more laughter.
“I bet the veterans have some things they’d like to ask a draft dodging, Gold Star family insulting, a war-crime advocating torture-phile whose worst Vietnam flashback involves scrambling for the last plane out of Gonorrhea,” she suggested.While stating, “Why can’t the media just tell us what’s true and what’s bullshit?” she saved most of her ire for NBC’s Lauer.
“Oh, come on, Matt,” she ranted. “Do you really think there is an email smoking gun that the Inspector General, a House committee, the FBI and 18 months of nonstop news coverage couldn’t find, that will be magically uncovered by seven minutes of questions from a human Splenda whose crowning journalistic achievement is not knowing where the fuck he is?”
“This is an election year where the Republican Party is running as their candidate for president a candidate who is so self-centered and narcissistic that a flippant — and apparently misquoted — compliment from another foreign leader was enough to put enough stars in his eyes that the Republican Party’s presidential nominee now really does say that he prefers the president of Russia to the president of the United States,” she fumed. “This is crazy. And it’s irrelevant. But this is the highest level of our politics right now.”A night earlier, Maddow’s colleague Matt Lauer presented as fact that Putin called Trump “a brilliant leader” during their interview at the “Commander-in-Chief forum” aired on the network.
“Well, I think when he calls me brilliant, I’ll take the compliment, OK?” Trump responded.But Maddow played footage of Putin himself correcting CNN’s Fareed Zakaria earlier this year regarding the matter, telling him, “I only said that he is a bright person. Isn’t he bright?”
“And you know what? It really shouldn’t matter,” she said. “On the one hand, who cares? On the other hand, we now have to. Because this is an election where the Republican presidential campaign at the number-one online ‘debunker’ of 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing and the Challenger disaster, and the Aurora movie theater massacre, and the Sandy Hook shootings, and the Boston bombings because ‘all of those things didn’t really happen — they’re all government conspiracy theories.'”
“I don’t think that it holds water,” Blow insisted. “If she is, in fact, that criminal who has been investigated for 25 years, she’s the best criminal ever. Right? Because none of this sticks.”
“Trying to make these kind of equal issues that Donald Trump is a pathological liar,” he continued, noting that CNN recently aired documentaries about both candidates. “One, you see a public servant over a lifetime, which is what Hillary Clinton’s was. And with Donald Trump, you literally saw a pathological liar.”
“From the moment he started to run and was introduced to the public, every one of his business deals was shady. From the very beginning! And I sat there thinking to myself, this is a pathological liar.”McEnany shifted the argument back the Clinton’s private email server.
“She said that she could not recall if she owned a flip phone,” McEnany charged. “I’m sure the American public can recall if they owned a flip phone over a period of eight years. These are remarkable statements of, I guess, incompetence or outright deceit.”“I do see a pathological liar,” Blow shot back. “I genuinely believe that he is fundamentally and uniquely unqualified to be president, that there is something really wrong with the character of that man.”
“All politicians lie,” he observed. “His relationship to the truth is just a different level of lies.”Clearly frustrated, McEnany pivoted to the terrorist attack in Benghazi.
“You have two Benghazi families coming out and they claim she told them it was about a video,” McEnany opined. “You’re going to ask me whose word I take? Someone who has been caught in a lie time and time again or two Benghazi families? I’m going to err with the Benghazi families.”
“That is part of what you do,” Blow replied. “Donald Trump should never be president of the United States. He’s a pathological liar. It’s just the truth. If you look at the fact checkers of all the things he’s said, the number of times they have caught him lying is off the charts.”
“He’s exposing the system,”McEnany blurted as the entire panel burst into laughter. “That’s the way Washington works. He’s exposing the system and he’s admitting what he does. This was not the case with Attorney General Bondi and it’s very important to point that out and here’s what Donald Trump does!”
“With my economic altitude, I don’t feel any of this,” Rollins said. “Donald Trump’s going to suck if you’re brown, black, lower middle-class or poor … I’m just going to enjoy the tax breaks that rich guys get from guys like him and keep on grooving.”The former Black Flag singer said he’s concerned about how Trump supporters will react if the real estate developer and former reality TV star loses to Hillary Clinton.
“Trump fans are going to be very dangerous losers,” Rollins said. “And, if he wins, liberals will be very whiny and hilarious losers. There’ll be lines out of Starbucks, people wanting quadruple lattes; there’ll be more hand-wringing, more poetry – that’s a liberal on a bad day. The angry Tea Party person on a bad day, you lock and load, and go find a Muslim or brown-skinned person.”But he’s confident the United States will survive, no matter what happens after the election.
“America gets what America deserves,” Rollins said. “America’s a tough place full of tough people, and I’m an example of a tough American. If you can’t take a punch in the teeth, you should move to Canada.”
“If you look at Hillary Clinton’s speech where she basically pointed out that what Donald Trump has done — actually quite well — has normalized white supremacy,” O’Brien explained to CNN host Brian Stelter on Sunday. “I think she made a very good argument, almost like a lawyer. Here is ways in which he has actually worked to normalize conversations that many people find hateful.”VIDEO COURTESY OF CNN
“Ive seen on-air, white supremacists being interviewed because they are Trump delegates,” she noted. “And they do a five minute segment, the first minute or so talking about what they believe as white supremacists. So you have normalized that.”
“And then Donald Trump will say, ‘Hillary Clinton, she’s a bigot.’ And it’s covered, the journalist part comes in, ‘They trade barbs. He said she’s a bigot and she points out that he might be appealing to racists.’ It only becomes ‘he said, she said.’ When in actuality, the fact that Donald Trump said she’s a bigot without the long laundry list of evidence, which if you looked at Hillary Clinton’s speech, she actually did have a lot of really good factual evidence that we would all agree that are things that have happened and do exist. They are treated as if they are equal.”
“softening the ground for people — who are white supremacists, who are white nationalists, who would self-identify that way — to feel comfortable with their views being brought into the national discourse to the point where they can do a five minute interview happily on national television?”
“And the answer is yes, clearly,” she said. “And there is lots of evidence of that.”O’Brien observed that cable news outlets were effectively being rewarded for bad behavior.
“So hateful speech brings a really interested, angry audience,” she noted. “This is genius! We should do this more often. What shall we do when this election is over? We’re going to have to think about ways to really rile people up, make them angry and divide them.”
“Because that is something that cable news, frankly, and everybody can cover really well,” O’Brien lamented. “So, I find it very frustrating. I believe he was over-covered at the beginning.”
“Now, it is ‘he said, she said’ all the time. We have lost context. We actually don’t even cover the details of something. We just cover the back and forth of it. It’s funny to watch if it weren’t our own country and our own government actually operating.”
“I know that many surrogates and many supporters of Donald Trump like to take the man away from his baggage,” Sellers said, “but you can not sit here and not remember that Donald Trump is the one who supported the ‘Birther’ movement — and just yesterday in Philadelphia he refused to even apologize for it.”Sellers pointed to Trump’s refusal to rent to black tenants in New York City and the full-page ad the former reality TV star took out in the New York Times calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five.
“Unfortunately, as we have seen this campaign season, the press has tried to trap him in different aspects,” she said.Klansman turned Louisiana politician David Duke’s endorsement of Trump, she went on, pales next to Clinton’s endorsement by the “California grand dragon KKK leader today, who is out there making promotional videos on his own accord but still putting out there. Hillary Clinton has yet to disavow him, so there’s ties on both sides.”
“Scottie, what are you saying there?” Harlow asked.
“I’m saying that Hillary Clinton has actually stronger ties, that has not disavowed a KKK endorsement,” Hughes said.
“Bakari?” asked Harlow. “Your response?”
“Scottie and any other surrogate and Donald Trump himself are going to have an extremely hard time with this argument,” said Sellers. “I think they’re actually going down the wrong path that somehow Hillary Clinton is the bigot in this situation, or has some racist past or racist history, because that’s simply not the case.”Hughes made a hail-Mary pass, trying to pin the Birther movement on Hillary Clinton, saying it was a member of her staff who brought it up during the 2008 campaign.
“Scottie, that is not factual,” said Harlow. “That is not factually correct. Hillary Clinton never questioned the birthplace of Barack Obama when she was running against him.”
“I didn't agree to that,” Blackwell said before again pressing Burns on his bio.
“This is not fair at all,” Burns replied. “I thought we were doing a profile and all of a sudden you’re here to try to destroy my character.”
“I’m not here to destroy your character,” Blackwell replied.
“The Washington Post reported on Aug. 10 that there are Democrats who are going to the convention in Charlotte who want their plank expanded,” Conway said. “They feel that it’s too draconian. It doesn’t allow for partial birth abortion bans. It doesn’t ban sex selection. You’ve got all these little baby girls being killed just because they’re girls in this country.”Host Anderson Cooper interrupted incredulously: “Wait, what? Excuse me, where is that happening?”
“The House just passed a bill to ban that,” Conway said. “I’m not sure it ever went to the Senate, and I’m sure President Obama would veto it if it was put on his desk.”Critics say that bill, which lawmakers considered earlier this year, was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” that twists feminism and uses racial stereotypes about Asian immigrants to restrict abortion rights.
“But statistically, there’s not really much evidence that that is actually occurring in the United States,” Cooper said. “Amongst some immigrant groups in small numbers it may be occurring but in no statistical measure is it significant.”Conway urged Cooper to look at Guttmacher Institute’s statistics, so during a commercial break, he did.
“Before the break, Kellyanne, you mentioned the Guttmacher Institute information on sex-selective abortion in the United States,” Cooper said. “Here’s what they actually say in a May 30 press release titled ‘Sex Selective Abortion Bans: A Disingenuous New Strategy to Limit Women’s Access to Abortion.'”
“The study acknowledges the practice does go on overseas, as we mentioned, and perhaps in certain Asian-American communities in the United States in small numbers,” Cooper continued. “But, quote, ‘In the United States, meanwhile, there is limited data indicating that sex-selective abortion may be occurring in some Asian communities. Although the U.S. sex ratio at 1.05 males for every female is squarely within biologically normal parameters.’ So I just wanted to put that out there.”
“He claimed it would be a detailed policy address, and yet from the start his tone was a seething, angry attack on what he described as a world of dangerous murderers and rapists who seem to be roaming ‘sanctuary cities.’ Focusing on a few isolated and already well-documented tragedies, he painted the entire undocumented world with the casual brush of violence,” Rather wrote.
“…He would say “and 3”, “and 4” as if it were a detailed list of proposal, but any sense of order was swamped by a tsunami of rhetoric and tone.”
Rather also commented on the speech’s intended audience. “The crowd – nearly all white from the looks of the cutaway shots – ate it up with a hostility that seems in keeping with those who have flocked to Trump’s angry march through this campaign season,” Rather continued.
“But any details are beside the point. With a raspy roar, leaning over the podium, Trump delivered his message with glee – This is our country and we are being overwhelmed by hordes not fit to be in our country. He suggested that “These People” are well known to law enforcement and could be rounded up with ease. It was a line that seemed more in keeping with the culture of the old East Germany than the United States. ‘We have got to have a county folks’ he summed it up. ‘Under a Trump Administration it’s called America first.'”
“Right now I’m writing something for next week and as you’re writing and thinking about things you’re going to talk about, it’s occurred to me that there’s no point in writing anything about Donald Trump in advance because he moves the needle so much on a day-to-day basis,” Bee told the website.
“What you write right now will not be fresh tomorrow,” she continued. “Each day is a complete reinvention of reality. It’s so uncommonly sad, strange, and impossible to follow. I feel like the ground is moving underneath my feet all the time — and I think everybody feels that way. It’s hard to even analyze what he’s up to because it just changes so much. My god!”She described Trump, who many Americans first became aware of on TV’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” as a “1980s-style chauvinist” and a less-than-worthy opponent for the Hillary Clinton — the first woman presidential nominee for a major U.S. political party.
“She’s going up against a character from the end of ‘Boogie Nights,’ basically, and here we are reaping the comedy benefits,” Bee said. “It’s hardly funny anymore, though. It’s amazing that he says and does such offensive things, and every new day he says something more offensive that you forget about all the offensive things he’s said before it. You can’t even enumerate them.”Bee said she would almost certainly tackle the so-called “alt-right” movement of internet racists who back Trump and bully critics — especially after the Republican nominee named Steve Bannon, who runs the right-wing Breitbart website, as his campaign CEO.
“We definitely live in a trolling culture now,” she said. “The amount that I get trolled is unbelievable. There’s so much abuse, and so much stuff that goes on. It’s very ugly right now. Very. And it feels very unrestrained in a way that feels new, also. I’m not sure how much goodness it’s putting back in the world — I would say none. I think it’s erasing goodness from the world. You can’t even engage with it on a certain level, because there’s no amount of — I don’t know. It’s an interesting world to live in. I want my children to never go on the internet!”
“A couple of things. One is — gun violence specifically — the overall crime rate has been on a steady decline since the 1980s,” Rye said in response. “But I think that it’s really important to watch the words that we use. When we say, ‘Those communities, those people,’ who are we talking about?”Rye then alluded to an interview aired earlier in the segment in which three black women whose sons each died as a result of shootings expressed skepticism regarding Trump’s boast that he could solve Chicago’s crime issues in “a week.”
“Donald Trump was busy calling people who look like me thugs, blaming the victim in these instances of gun violence and police brutality,” said Rye. “That is deeply troubling to me and not only to me, but I’m sure to several other — I can’t speak for all African-Americans — but to other African-Americans.”
“He’s built his entire campaign around this idea,” she said. “He separated himself from Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and John Kasich by this idea of ‘get everybody out.’ Right now, he sounds just like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.”
“Yes or no!” Setmayer demanded. “You’re just going around and around! Just say yes! You’re not going to like spontaneously combust if you admit your candidate changed his position!”
“Please, don’t be rude folks, it doesn’t look pretty,” Hughes begged, before continuing.
“It’s a seismic shift! This was a core value!” Bolden continued. “It’s one thing to pivot, to explain and evolve,” but he said it’s another to change your entire position.
“Would a pivot be acceptable?” Sciutto asked, curious if the word would work to describe Trump’s new position. Hughes said that it was more about what Congress would consider acceptable in terms of legislation.
“Condescending laughs have no place right now,” Hughes said as Bolden and Setmayer continued to laugh.
“Oh, Scottie, get over it, please. If your candidate would learn some policy we would have a solution. It’s been 15 months and he still doesn’t know what he’s doing and that’s the concern,” Setmayer slammed.
“Well it is not really complicated,” she replied. “Mr. Trump is simply trying to have a discussion about what needs to happen and what he wants to do. He has said many times in many rallies that he doesn’t want to be like Barack Obama and start signing executive orders, and he will have to work with Congress to get some of the more complex things done. But his overall message has not changed. There is no path to citizenship. There is no path to — those here illegally will have to leave.”
“He’s just not using those words anymore, and he does want to work with people, which is why he said that in order to get this process done,” she remarked.