There were a lot of really awful things that came out of Trump’s mouth tonight, including the reiteration of the correctness of this tweet:
26,000 unreported sexual assults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 7, 2013
“What did you guys expect? Our guys are rapists, amirite? Our military men have no self control!” Just disgusting.
But for me, the absolute worst moment of the night was this:
LAUER: Sir, thank you. Thank you very much for your question. Secretary Clinton, let’s talk about your vote in favor of the war in Iraq. You’ve since said it was a mistake.
CLINTON: Mm-hmm.
LAUER: Obviously, it was not something you said you would do again. I asked before for people to raise their hand if you served in Iraq. Can you do it again? How do you think these people feel when the person running to be their commander-in-chief says her vote to go to war in Iraq was a mistake?
When he asked how many of them would do it again, the camera panned to them, and they all had their hands raised.
BECAUSE OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DID. Had I been in there I would have raised my hand, too. These guys and gals are professional soldiers. They aren’t there to judge the worth or merit of the missions they are sent on, they are there to carry them out. And they do. He was trying to use the ingrained sense of duty of our vets as a weapon against Hillary.
It was disgusting.
redshirt
Men just want to rape??
Joeff
I doubt he’s that clever
Trentrunner
After all these months (and years) of media fuckery, I am now actually surprised at how much awfulness and malpractice was crammed into just 60 minutes.
Villago Delenda Est
As Lauer is and always has been and always will be fucking civilian slime, I wouldn’t expect him to know any better.
redshirt
@Trentrunner: Is there anything we, the people, can do to change the media?
Omnes Omnibus
@redshirt: You are an idiot.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
so…. the Iraq War was a good thing now?
aimai
I refused to watch any of it. Just sent Hillary a ton of money right afterwards. Because fuck them, that’s why.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I wonder if Lauer has enemies at NBC who are going to make sure he sees these
Aleta
Why does that genius think that of the 26,000 unreported rapes, all were of women?
amk
some moron pundtwit on teann – trump changes his stance so often that hillary will not know how to react.
John Weiss
I dunno who said it, but I wholly agree: ‘War is the last resort of the incompetent’.
Fuck Trump and everyone who approves of him. I’m not going to leave the land ’cause D’rump gets elected. But if he is, I’m gonna buy me a lever-action shotgun.
Aqualad08
I still can’t get over the non-mention of liking soldiers that don’t get captured, the smearing of the Khan family or his deferments. Lauer deserves every ounce of shit being heaped upon him tonight.
John Weiss
@amk: Whelp, I’ll bet that she does know how to react. In fact, I suspect ‘attack’ more than ‘react’. That lady has – well – stones.
redshirt
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: You know Hillary voted for it and thus caused it, solely, yes?
John Weiss
@Aqualad08: OK, Lauer is a dickhead. Maybe a write-in?
amk
Tony Schwartz Verified account @tonyschwartz 4h4 hours ago
Trump reveres Putin. He wants Putin’s power. He wants to be a dictator. Every American — every American — should be terrified about that.
1,922 retweets 2,426 likes
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@redshirt: managed it, made every decision, hired Bremer and Dan Señor and the whole gang in the Green Zone, picked Maliki as president….
James E Powell
The military has been used to call Democrats weak, naive, treasonous, and all kinds of un-manly un-American things every since they stabbed Our Brave Troops in the back in Vietnam. (My entire adult life.)
Members of the military – God keep them safe! – are often willing participants in this bullshit. Can anyone explain why?
Members of the military – according to polls – support Trump at better than 2 to 1. Can anyone explain why?
Frankensteinbeck
@redshirt:
To people who do not respect women’s sexual autonomy, rape is obvious and inevitable, and will naturally happen if men get the chance. This attitude got so prevalent that it has left a cultural assumption that there is a significant and unacceptable risk of leaving a man alone with anyone or anything he finds sexually attractive.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@James E Powell:
Tail hook scandal.
redshirt
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Heh. I hope Hillary apologizes for Katrina in specific and Global Warming in general in the first debate.
redshirt
@Frankensteinbeck: Exactly. Not to be trusted.
John Weiss
@James E Powell: I would suggest (forgive me) that the average IQ (if you believe such stuff) is 100. That’s not very bright. No knock on the military, and no knock on the general populace (it is what it is). To me that explains quite a bit.
Frankensteinbeck
@redshirt:
I should note, I do not believe the cultural assumption is healthy or justified. Only that it exists because of people like Trump’s assumptions.
amk
When the enemy beats you in a war, he is stronger.
When the enemy fucks you in mind games, he is smarter.
donnie dick will be a pitiful loser in both scenarios.
redshirt
@Frankensteinbeck: Oh, I get you. It doesn’t actually exist.
But because the Wingnuts believe it, it exists. They can create whatever they want in order to hate upon it.
Mike in NC
@srv: A point, you fucking moron?
RK
Trump’s clueless and a transparent dissembler to boot. How this guy this is leading in some polls doesn’t speak well for either this nation or Hillary Clinton. That Lauer didn’t challenge the Iraq War lie was derelict and pathetic.
Wapiti
@James E Powell: I think that the poll of “members of the military” asked people if they were veterans or the family member of a veteran. I assume a few people answered yes, just because they served (or had a family member serve). Of those who answered yes because they or their family member had served overseas in wartime, I’d guess that the draft-era generations are over-represented because of the large cohorts of Korea and Viet Nam veterans. My guess could be off.
greennotGreen
Interesting that people who agree with Trump on the inevitability of rape when men and women are together are buying into the same mindset that the dreaded Islamic fundamentalists have: women should be completely covered head to toe and accompanied by a male relative so they won’t be raped…apparently because men just can’t control themselves.
I have read, though I don’t have multiple sources, that at least at one time among Australian Aboriginal peoples a woman alone was asking to be raped. And certainly among some Latin American cultures, a woman alone is considered fair game for a sexual proposition.
Women are not different species from men. Why are there so many men who seem to believe we are subhuman, unworthy of respect and autonomy?
amk
Paging Tom and hon’ble nyt.
Michael Cohen @speechboy71 2h
Tenar Darell
Did I read that tweet right? It basically implies that the US military is full of rapists. WTF?
Sickening rule of thumb here is that this is an assumption that potential rapists tend to make. i.e. That all other men, if given the opportunity, will rape. It’s a red flag that a guy who thinks like this has really problematic attitudes towards women, sex & relationships.
Just, I mean how is this human stain getting away with calling all men in service potential rapists? I worked with service guys, this is just disgusting. I can’t even –
Enhanced Voting Techniques
This is the US army we’re talking about, not the Russian Army Donny,..
scav
Well, given that Trump knows his service in the New York Military Academy stands in as a superior substitute for actually being in the military experience, no doubt his expensive prep-school environment taught him that universal inability of men to avoid raping women when in close proximity with them. See fellow soldier in arms Owen Labrie of the St. Paul’s School Brigade.
amk
while the other comment is under mod
Michael Cohen @speechboy71 2h2 hours ago
TriassicSands
Matt Lauer: Professional Journotainmentalist — specializing in reducing everything to trivial entertainmush.
Ruckus
Don’t ever forget, for Trump it is always projection. The reason he thinks all men think like this is that he thinks like this and as he is, in his own mind, great and always right, therefore all men think like this. Projection.
divF
@John Weiss:
The usual quote is
But in that case was referring to war, IIRC.
RK
From a biological perspective that would generally be correct wouldn’t it?
John Weiss
@James E Powell: I would suggest (forgive me) that the average IQ (if you believe such stuff) is 100. That’s not very bright. No knock on the military, and no knock on the general populace (it is what it is). To me that explains quite a bit.@divF: Thanks.
John Weiss
@RK: I don’t think so. That might be true about men who don’t like women. What does that say about those men? I’d say, “Not very manly”.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Tenar Darell:
and did Trump just told all the women vets their just sluts asking for it because they aren’t June Cleaver. Words fail me,…
scav
“When
Mexico sendsthe Military enlists its people, they’re notsendingenlisting their best. They’re notsendingenlisting you. They’re notsendingenlisting you. They’resendingenlisting people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”Loopy looping loopback of his greatest hits? But amusing in that he’s saying it to their faces, after his soft-pedal approach when faced with actual breathing Mexicans en masse.
shomi
I don’t watch news channels. Especially during election season. However, I was in a public place that had CNN on and I gotta say I was horrified by what I saw. They were promoting the Clinton/Trump debates like it was a boxing match. No exaggeration. You could take a promotion video for Manny Pacquiao vs Jessie Vargas or whatever and substitute Trump vs Clinton. It made me want to vomit.
hitchhiker
@James E Powell:
The part of the USA with the highest enrollment in the military is the southeast, which is also where the most Republicans are.
shomi
@hitchhiker: Yes, the sad fact is that Military personnel tend to lean to the right and therefore tend to vote against their own self interests.
Aleta
Frankensteinbeck
@RK:
Nope. Super-reductive sexual arguments like that don’t work in evolutionary biology at all. The exact same logic would say that all women, if given the opportunity, would kill other women’s children.
Applejinx
@RK: I think the word you mean is ‘fuck’. And the point some people never get is that women sometimes WANT to fuck.
Because that would entail paying attention to what a woman might want, and interacting in such a way that you’re communicating with a woman like another intelligent being, and agreeing on a thing you might like to do together (and often, how to go about it).
Jesus Christ, even I have managed it, and I have some severe problems in such interacting and am relatively useless with such mating-dances.
You’re assuming that men as a rule have no capacity for the basic sort of social interaction that wolves and dogs manage, where one sort of slavering panting dick-swinging beast has URGES and then those are tested in the social milieu and get a ‘yes, time to fuck’ or ‘no, best you run away yiping’ sort of answer. You’re assuming the only outcome is rape. Not true. As a rule, social behavior is stronger, though with any sort of creature you can generally break down their ‘rules’ by obliterating their standard of living enough.
We don’t live in ‘Mad Max’ world yet, so fuck off ;)
Bobby Thomson
It doesn’t just imply that male soldiers are rapists.
sherparick
And the media keeps wondering about why Hilary avoids press conferences? They have loved the “gotcha” questions since Mike Wallace rode it stardom and fortune at 60 Minutes and Dan Rather did a star turn as White House correspondent during Watergate. And Hilary unfortunately, despite all the years of experience, plays the perfect sap for these questions.
By the way, she finally did put out an answer about the E-mail that should start shutting everyone up, and that is by pointing out that the State Department’s unsecured e-mail system, and lots of other Government systems, have been hacked the last 8 years, but there was no evidence after a forensic exam by both the FBI and her own experts that her system was hacked and spillage of “classified” information into the unclassified systems happens frequently and is corrected administratively.
S-Curve
Just to clarify for our estimable host, I think when Lauer asks, “Can you do it again?” he was asking the audience members who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan to raise their hands again. I don’t think that was about *going back* to fight in further battles.
That said, that was a particularly vile move, to set up the visual of “these are the men and women you’ve betrayed by your lack of judgment” in that way. And Lauer’s performance was both a shitshow and a clusterfuck, which is difficult to bring off.
Carry on.
nutella
@Aleta:
I don’t have the link, but I remember reading that if you go by numbers, considerably more servicemen have been raped than servicewomen.
The percentage for women is higher,
Blueskies
I don’t agree with the votes for the AUMF. I knew that Bush/Rice/Rummy/Powell/Cheney were not to be trusted. But at that point, many people couldn’t bring themselves to believe the duplicity of that cabal. Further, the AUMF was not a vote for war. The intent was to give Bush a seriously big stick to threaten Saddam with. Of course it was like handing a can of gas and a match to an arsonist, but the actual decision to go to war rested entirely with the cabal, not with the Senate.