Thursday, August 17, 2017

Trump tells it like it is

Is he the only one who is immune to the tidal wave of media hysteria and lies? He is immensely valuable if he is.  Anyone who has seen the graphics coming out of Charlotteville must be aware of the violent attacks on the marchers by Antifa but that seems to be unmentionable to the Left.  Trump saw it and tells what he saw.  He will not let pass the claim that the Left were peaceful.  Ever since the French revolution, the Left have NEVER been peaceful unless they had to be. So it's a sad day when it needs the President to tell people what the media will not.  I am pleased to say that I have been saying much the same as Trump on my various blogs

Donald Trump launched an extraordinary and angry defense of his performance in the wake of the Charlottesville riots Tuesday in a free-wheeling, finger-pointing confrontation with the press at Trump Tower.

He lashed out at his critics following a botched response to the weekend's Charlottesville murder, insisting that a violent 'alt-left' mob came to protests ready for war but a dishonest news media is shielding them from blame.

The president even defended elements of the far-right protest, claiming some were 'fine people' protesting against the removal of Confederate symbols.

'You had some fine people. But you also had trouble makers,' he said during a Q&A session in the lobby of Trump Tower – an event that was supposed to be a press event about infrastructure projects.

'You see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and the baseball bats,' he said, describing what he said had happened in the Virginia college town.

While the vehicular homicide of a liberal protester, allegedly by a neo-Nazi who is now charged with her murder, has grabbed the nation's attention, Trump insisted that 'you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.'

His aides had expected him to address infrastructure and the press conference began with praise for his new plan to make it simpler to build, but quickly veered off course.

He offered the comment as a defense of his Saturday statement in which he ad-libbed that there had been 'bigotry and violence on many sides.'

Those words prompted a second statement on Monday that more forcefully denounced white supremacists.

'What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?' he asked reporters on Tuesday, answering questions with questions. 'Do they have any semblance of guilt?'

'Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs. Do they have any problem? I think they do.'

'And you had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent,' Trump said. 'And nobody wants to say that.' 'But I'll say it right now.'

'I think there's blame on both sides,' he added as he attacked the political press. 'And I have no doubt about it, and you don't have any doubt about it either.'

Trump's reference to the 'alt-left' is a nod to so-called 'Antifa' protesters, short for 'anti-fascist,' a movement that has seen its own violent protests aimed at conservatives.

But Ku Klux Klansmen and white nationalists in Nazi regalia stole the spotlight over the weekend. The protest was explicitly planned as 'Unite the Right' and sought permission under that name.

Behind the scenes, Trump aides reacted with a range of emotions that ranged from fist-pumping to head-shaking. 'That's our president,' one White House official aligned with the populist, nationalist wing of the Trump camp, told The aide was glad that Trump 'said the truth, no matter what the reporters think.'

Another, from a different wing, however, was shell-shocked. 'That wasn't in the plan. None of it was supposed to happen,' the aide said.

There was equal shock among some of the most senior Republicans.  Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeted a lengthy statement about the danger of suggesting anyone other than neo-Nazis shares the blame for Saturday's violence

'The organizers of events which inspired & led to #charlottesvilleterroristattack are 100% to blame for a number of reasons,' he wrote in a series of tweets. 'They are adherents of an evil ideology which argues certain people are inferior because of race, ethnicity or nation of origin.'

'When entire movement built on anger & hatred towards people different than you, it justifies & ultimately leads to violence against them. These groups today use SAME symbols & same arguments of #Nazi & #KKK, groups responsible for some of worst crimes against humanity ever.

'Mr. President, you can't allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of blame. They support idea[s] which cost nation & world so much pain. The #WhiteSupremacy groups will see being assigned only 50% of blame as a win. We can not allow this old evil to be resurrected.'

House Speaker Paul Ryan didn't fault Trump directly, but made it clear that he agreed with Trump's statement on Monday condemning neo-Nazis. 'We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive,' Ryan tweeted. 'This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.'

Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen struck a more aggressive chord. 'Blaming "both sides" for #Charlottesville?! No,' she tweeted. 'Back to relativism when dealing with KKK, Nazi sympathizers, white supremacists? Just no.'

Trump's words were quickly denounced by Democrats as an attempt to draw moral equivalence between Nazis and liberal activists. 'As a Jew, as an American, as a human, words cannot express my disgust and disappointment. This is not my President,' tweeted Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz. 'There has to be room for people of all political stripes among the coalition of the sane. We all need to take our country back together.'

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, issued a scathing statement saying that Trump's 'continued talk of blame 'on many sides' ignores the abhorrent evil of white supremacism, and continues a disturbing pattern of complacency around acts of hate from this President, his Administration and his campaign for the presidency.'

'There is only one side to be on when a white supremacist mob brutalizes and murders in America. The American people deserve a president who understands that,' she said.

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter was quick to defend Trump, however, 'Nearly the entire quisling 'conservative' media immediately caved to the B.S. left-wing media narrative on Charlottesville. NOT TRUMP!' she tweeted.

Trump insisted Tuesday that many on the political right who gathered in Charlottesville were peaceful protesters themselves who aimed to save a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from the scrap heap.

The city is removing it in line with many others across the old South, under pressure to renounce ties to slavery.

'Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue,' he said.

Trump's claim at the 15-minute question-and-answer in Trump Tower that leftists 'came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs' has some basis in reports of what happened in Charlottseville.

The Washington Post on Monday described the situation in Charlottesville on Friday night, at the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the lawn of UVA as around 250 white far-right protesters met a group of 30 counter-protesters - and that both sides were armed in some form.

'Within moments, there was chaos. Shoves. Punches. Both groups sprayed chemical irritants,' the paper reported.

The next day, it said, armed anti-right wing protesters were present in Emancipation Park from around 8.30am.

'Members of anti-fascist groups yelled at the rallygoers. Many of them also carried sticks and shields,' the paper said.

 And the New York Times reported that not all the anti-far-right protesters were violent. It noted the presence of a group called Redneck Revolt, which had up to 20 people present carrying rifles and which describes itself as 'a pro-worker, anti-racist organization that focuses on working class liberation from the oppressive systems which dominate our lives' and claims to be inspired by John Brown, the anti-slavery rebel.

Trump challenged reporters to imagine the nation stripped of symbols of its slave-owning Founding Fathers, while conceding that local communities should ultimately decide the fate of statuary dedicated to Confederate war heroes.

'George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status?' he asked.

'Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner.'

'You're changing history, you're changing culture,' Trump carped, saying of the right's more thoughtful, permitted protesters that 'the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.'

'You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest.'            

Speaking of James Alex Fields Jr., the 20-year-old white nationalist accused of running down a woman with his car as fellow racists egged him on, Trump called him 'a disgrace to himself, his family and his country.'

He wouldn't say if the murder was an act of terrorism, calling the question a quibble over 'legal semantics.'  But 'the driver of the car is a murderer,' Trump said without naming him. 'And what he did is a terrible, horrible thing.'

He also defended his chief strategist Steve Bannon, whom Democrats and some news outlets regularly clobber as a racialist at the very least who guided the Breitbart News to prominence by kowtowing to alt-right bigots and at worst is a white supremacist.

'He's a good man. He's not a racist, I can tell you that,' the president said, while not offering the embattled Bannon his full-throated approval as he fights to keep his job. 'He's a good person, and I think frankly the press treats him very unfairly,' he said.

Trump said Tuesday that his widely panned insistence on Saturday that there had been bigotry and violence 'on many sides' – an ad-libbed line that prompted Monday's do-over – was a prudent step to make sure his statement didn't get ahead of the facts as investigators knew them.

'I'd do it the same way,' he declared. 'And you know why? Because I want to make sure when I make a statement that the statement is correct. And ... there was no way of making a correct statement that early.' 'I had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters.'

Trump claimed that on Saturday he was unaware that David Duke, the infamous former Klan leader, was present at the scene of the riot.

'I wanted to see the facts,' he said again. 'And the facts as they started coming out were very well-stated.'

'In fact, everybody said, "His statement was beautiful; if he would have made it sooner, that would have been good." I couldn't have made it sooner because I didn't know all of the facts. Frankly, people still don't know all of the facts.'



What motivated the fatal car collision?

A reader writes:

I've seen the videos of the "car plowing into the crowd". Several things become evident to anyone watching the video. First the car was slowly following other cars down a street with protestors crowding both sides, at one point someone steps off behind his car and swings at it, despite the distance you can hear the impact.

That evidently startles the drivers who then plows into the demonstrators who had stepped between his car and the previous car. A number of other protestors mobbed the car at that point striking it and attempting to break out its windows. The driver quickly backed up striking those who had jumped behind his car which is where the majority of those who were struck got hurt.

By that time it was apparent that there was no way he would be safe in that violent crowd. Those are all points his lawyer is going to be raising when this goes to trial.





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