... which I watched and then said:
Are we supposed to know the names of the current leaders of ISIS? I only notice these names when I read the news that we killed one. Well, now that one's gone, so I can forget that name. I guess there's another that I'll hear about when I read he was important and now he's dead. This has gone on for so many years.That is, Trump says things ordinary people think:
"Hugh was giving me name after name—Arab name, Arab name, Arab—and there are few people anywhere, ANYWHERE, that would have known those names. I think he was reading them off a sheet."My chief resistance to Trump is that he's so weird, but one way that he's weird is that he's ordinary.
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Ya' know, you could be in a deli or a diner in Manhattan eating next to the man and he would just be another guy fron NYC. Dressed better but nust another New Yorker...
My chief resistance to Trump is that he's so weird, but one way that he's weird is that he's ordinary.
Women stylize life so that there's narrative complexity. That's why they're awful voters.
surfed said...
Ya' know, you could be in a deli or a diner in Manhattan eating next to the man and he would just be another guy fron NYC.
That alone would be enough reason to vote against him...
What I love about Trump is that he's eating the media's lunch. They're trying to do to him the same thing they did to Sarah Palin and it's not working. Can you imagine if he had been asked "What do you read?" or "What's the Bush Doctrine?" He'd say, "I read my news off of news feeds on the internet, just like you do." And "Bush Doctrine? What, did you pull that out of your ass?"
I admire Johnson for owning up to it, but he should have just said "In what context do you mean "What do I should about Aleppo?" - the interviewer just came out of the blue and said "What about Aleppo"
How often do we all sit there and have one train of thought and get a question on something else and blank. He just reacted with midwest bluntness rather than buying himself time to think.
I am no fan of Gary Johnson's, but I think this is a bum rap. Barnicle asked his question out of a blue sky with no lead-up that it was the Middle East he was talking about.
And it was a stupid question. There is nothing that can be done about "Aleppo." The horrors of the fighting in the city of Aleppo is just one facet of the Middle East mess that is vastly too much to be sorted out in a TV Q&A "gotcha" session.
This is such crap.
If Hillary were asked about "A - Leppo" - She wouldn't know either. Because the questioner knew it was a trap. He pronounced it as a trap. A... Leppo.
Do you know what A Leppo Is? Nope. No one does!
He was kind of setup, Mike Barnicle could have helped him by providing a little more perspective while asking the question. I still have more respect for Gary Johnson than I do for Mike Barnicle who has a history of fabricating stories. Regardless, I would never vote Gary Johnson unless the only other choice was crooked Hillary..
I still have more respect for Gary Johnson than I do for Mike Barnicle who has a history of fabricating stories.
That's a really big set of individuals Johnson joins there, I suspect. Why is Barnicle still working, again?
Call Trump weird if you want, but one thing he isn't, is a politician, and that's a good thing.
We, the weird, salute you. But we know our weirdness interests you. Bob Dylan is weird on first impressions. Maybe the better word to use is "peculiar."
We're voting for POTUS like it's a spelling bee?
New York Times Tries To Factcheck Gary Johnson On Aleppo, Repeatedly Steps On A Rake Instead
LOL.
Gary Johnson needs to forego smoking dope. It's had an obvious effect.
And he needs a better barber. His haircut looks like Forest Gump.
So it turns out the Aleppo is not an Indian tribe.
Hillary knows the population of Aleppo, and how many Starbucks are there.
Johnson had to be destroyed on this 'gaffe', because it makes Hillary's knowledge of trivia more important.
Ot,
And 95 generals led the big parade .... (or 88 for Trump's)
This is unseemly.
I would hope that at the very least, the person we consider electing as president, is extraordinary. Ordinary is disqualifying.
Do you know what A Leppo Is? Nope. No one does
Lepers? We have them in California now thanks to illegal immigration with no health screening process.
A Leppo in your child's school.
Hagar: And it was a stupid question. There is nothing that can be done about "Aleppo." The horrors of the fighting in the city of Aleppo is just one facet of the Middle East mess that is vastly too much to be sorted out in a TV Q&A "gotcha" session.
I think Johnson is a complete clown, but I don't form my opinion of any candidate from "wrong answers" on Clown TV interviews.
Still, I was puzzled by the commenters in the previous thread who claimed not to know Aleppo from shinola in current event context.
I would hope that at the very least, the person we consider electing as president, is extraordinary.
I can think of quite a few "extra" ordinary people who I wouldn't want to be in charge of anything.
Ted Bundy, Andy Wharhol, Hitler, Ayn Rand, Steven Hawkings, Orson Wells. I'm sure others can be brought to mind. I would prefer someone who can relate to the ordinary people who daily grind out their lives and just try to survive.
"What is Aleppo?" was a great answer. He should have run with it.
The medias front paging of a minor gaffe by a minor candidate simply tells us that Johnson was draining more votes from HRC then Trump. If Johnson's presence in the race was hurting Trump then only the 500 or so people who actually watch Morning Joe would have heard this.
I love that the media is talking to a candidate whose formal platform is less international involvement and focus more on internal freedom and reduction of government, and that they gaffe him for not having extensive expertise and planning to deal with a civil war in another country.
Hagar wrote -
"Barnicle asked his question out of a blue sky with no lead-up that it was the Middle East he was talking about."
If this is accurate, then I have no doubt that Barnicle was explicitly trying to embarrass Johnson by referencing a particular in the Syrian conflict rather than the larger situation itself. This is disgusting but par for the course.
I also agree that outside of "gotcha" it's a meaningless question. One could react to or opine about at least half a dozen topics concerning Aleppo and the Syrian conflict. Asking "What about Aleppo?" smply begs the reply "What about it?" If that's what John A. Cohen was implying by his "arab name" comment, then I am in agreement. If Cohen was drawing an equivalency between Johnson and Trump, then no I don't agree.
A polished candidate has to have ways to finesse answers to questions that are not understood. Gary Johnson has a disarming approach, saying "I don't know" and other similar things like "What is Aleppo?"
DBQ - I'd laugh, but it's not even funny.
"Ordinary is disqualifying," opined the pefectly ordinary commenter.
Cacimbo Cacimbo said...
The medias front paging of a minor gaffe by a minor candidate simply tells us that Johnson was draining more votes from HRC then Trump. If Johnson's presence in the race was hurting Trump then only the 500 or so people who actually watch Morning Joe would have heard this.
This is the only logical conclusion to draw. Everything else operates to accept and legitimate the MSM. Doing so is to surrender to Leviathan.
I can't distinguish from what Althouse wrote about dead ISIS people and what Trump would say about dead ISIS people. Awesomesauce!
And one way that Trump is ordinary is he says what he thinks, as he is thinking it.
Which sometimes gets him in trouble; he needs to learn some circumspection.
But compare to Clinton, who lies whenever her lips are moving... if I have to settle for a flawed candidate, I prefer Trump's flaws to hers.
Anne - right now, I don't think that a lot of us are looking for that traditional candidate. They are the ones who got us where we are now, including a runaway national debt, crashing govt healthcare systems, terrorism growing, while our military shrinks, longest recession since the Great Depression, etc, with the preferred candidate for the Presidency having been caught red handed selling govt favors for cash, and everyone is telling us to just ignore it.
I am reminded about the scene where Dr Watson explains something about the moon to Holmes, and Holmes tells Watson that he will endeavor to quickly forget it. And, I find my partner routinely asking me about facts that are irrelevant to my life, and after her finally imparting such wisdom, I immediately try to forget it (such as who two of the guest actors were on Bones last night). My point is that it is good many times to not get bogged down in the details. This is esp true when working in some CEO type position (and esp the Presidency). Far, far, more important is being able to pick and then delegate well to people who will know what is needed. This is one of those things that both GW Bush and Mitt Romney learned at Harvard Business School, and why the former had Colin Powell as his Secretaries of State, while Obama, who is very bad at competently staffing and delegating, first had Crooked Hillary, selling our foreign policy for Clinton Cash, followed by Lurch (aka John Kerry).
Does it really matter if a Presidential candidate doesn't know what, or where, Allepo is? I don't think so. If elected, they would have daily briefings on what is happening in the world (unless, like Obama, they would routinely skip them for their golf games). They have an army of aides throughout the govt. beavering away all night, condensing the previous day's happening down to a manageable amount of information. By the time that a new President takes office, it is likely that Allepo will again be irrelevant to US national interests.
Aleppo is a tempo instruction.
Aleppo accelerando
Aleppo maestoso
and always in the soap opera news
Aleppo affetuoso
no one "did" anything to Palin...
...and shouldn't the folks vying to be our leaders know who the leaders of our enemies are?
excuses are lamo...
Dr. Althouse, exactly. We've become inured to government by wordsmiths extensively trained in saying exactly nothing in the greatest number of words drawn from a handy thesaurus possible. Trump shocks because he says things with actual content using plain speech, with all its ambiguities, exaggerations, figures of, etc. and doesn't turn into a shrinking violet when people react to it.
The sad thing is that, either way, we, the listeners, have to parse and read into too much—in the former case due to the vacuousness, in the latter due to the ambiguity and exaggeration. In this sense, Trump is not an improvement on what's come before him. But stylistically, they're worlds apart, and I suspect the ultimate measure of Trump's influence on the future of American politics will be some enduring effect of the reintroduction of this vernacular mode of speaking.
no, he doesn't...
My chief resistance to Trump is that he's so weird, but one way that he's weird is that he's ordinary.
@Althouse, no, Trump is not "ordinary" at all. Trump is normal. It's something you're not used to.
"Ordinary is disqualifying," opined the pefectly ordinary commenter.
Which may be true. But then again, I am not running for President.
Oh, please tell us, Freder, who the extra-ordinary candidate is in this election.
Freder Frederson:
Exactly so. It's just that the person you support for president is responsible for an intelligence leak of unknown, but demonstrably epic, proportions.
That truly is extraordinary, even for Democrat politicians.
We had almost forgotten what normality sounds like.
Every time I hear that Trump remark about Arab names I think of the Robert de Niro Homeland Security SNL opening (was trying to link but my IPad isn't cooperating.)
I would hope that at the very least, the person we consider electing as president, is extraordinary.
There are no extraordinary men... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.
--William Halsey
I would differ with Halsey, EMD. There really ARE extraordinary men. Or, at least, there were.
"Bob Ellison said: We're voting for POTUS like it's a spelling bee?
That would be a vast improvement over the current options... voting for them like it's a team sport (We're from Madison! Go Packers! Go Dems! Go Female Candidates!), or a beauty contest (oh, the crease in his pants! So well-dressed he is!)...
I DON'T WANT AN ORDINARY PERSON AS PRESIDENT. George Bush was "ordinary", and it turns out we actually need a fucking smart person who has done homework.
Hillary, who had her staff destroy phones and Blackberries with hammers to avoid turning them over during criminal investigations in a workable manner, is to my way of thinking, also a bit weird, but her weirdness manifests itself as criminal and corrupt, which you cannot say about Trump.
Do you want, then, an ordinary man as president or a criminal, corrupt woman?
Oh, by the way, Bush had better college grades, and an MBA, compared to Kerry.
And you want us to think Kerry was supposedly the smart one in that race, right?
"And you want us to think Kerry was supposedly the smart one in that race, right?"
Kerry was a very low bar. A bump, actually.
Hillary surrounded herself with people at State that were willing to break the law--break multiple laws--every day of the week. Would so do no less as President?
Would she do . . . [Updated from my Etch-a-sketch]
Bush was "ordinary", and it turns out we actually need a fucking smart person who has done homework.
He was smart enough to realize that radical Islam was, and still is at war with the west. Smart enough to know there are 23 "whereas"'s in the authorization for the use of military force against Iraq, instead of just one (WMD). Smart enough to win the war and win the peace in Iraq. Smart enough to know that we should have stayed to keep the peace. Smart enough to plead his case before the UN, instead of illegally dragging NATO into a war which was of no concern to any NATO member. Smart enough to know that the enemy combatants we encountered in the field were prisoners of war, and not someone who should be tried in the courts. Smart enough to know that stem cells can come from more than just embryos. Smart enough to understand the difference between an immigrant, and an illegal immigrant.
I could go on, but my point is, as smug as liberals are, they are suffering from delusions of adequacy.
Smart would have been if Hillary had used a state.gov email address for all professional correspondence, and had set up her own server for all private correspondence.
"That would be a vast improvement over the current options [...]"
...or voting for them like we were a clique of high-school kids ("Did you hear what she said about Debbie? And about the Volleyball team?" "Oh, totally! We can't vote for her for Prom Queen now...")
Trump can think on his feet, and he's no fool. Kerry still has the hat, and Hillary still has the Reset button- and it still says "Overcharged"... Hillary said "We came, we saw, he died!", and millions of Islamic men moved into Europe as a result- they came, they saw, and we died. Trump doesn't give a damn what their names are, as long as they know his name, and know that he stands up for the interests of America.
Harry S Truman was kinda ordinary. He spoke pretty good 'Murican too.
Harry S Truman was kinda ordinary. He spoke pretty good 'Murican too.
From what I've read, it seems he was a pretty good President, for a Democrat. He didn't lack courage or plain speaking.
The stupidity of Johnson is that when he finally made a press release hours later, he had nothing to add! We give you six hours and all you come up with is holding hands with Russia and singing Kumbaya?
Why not say, "Fuck Aleppo", though in a more politically correct way. (Because, seriously, from the beginning I've said that there's no solution for Syria--it's all a question of which bastards you want to back. Or none. I said, and still say, none.)
@mockturtle
I saw him on TV a couple of times. My Dad sure liked him. Dad had his orders to ship out to the Pacific when old "Give em Hell Harry" dropped the bombs.
Why not say, "Fuck Aleppo", though in a more politically correct way.
No, in those very words! It would get bleeped out but everyone would know what was said.
""If Donald Trump had made Gary Johnson's Aleppo gaffe, he would have said it's just an 'Arab name.'"
Of course he would, because in progressive democrat party members fever dreams, Trump is always saying something awful, doing something stupid, and hiding something wicked. In reality, Trump meets with president of Mexico, travels to Louisiana to survey the catastrophe, and visits black churches to listen to the voices of the congregants. In the words democrats used to describe Obama's speeches in foreign countries, he's acting presidential.
Meanwhile, CrookedHillary is embroiled in the Mother Of All Scandals, but the Journolist democrat party members say that topic is out-of-bounds. CrookedHillary is also suffering seizures and coughing fits, disappears for weeks at a time, and hides her medical records as if they were listings of her foreign donors, but the topic of CrookedHillary's health is off-limits. It's almost like the only things the Chrissy Tiegen democrat party media wants to talk about are moronic things they imagine Trump would do and say.
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