I'm trying to understand "Why [Maggie Haberman] Needed to Pull Back From Twitter."

Much of this column, by Haberman at the NYT, is what you always read about social media: some mean and trollish things are said. But that's been true all along, so it doesn't explain why Maggie Haberman needed to get out of a place where she'd been writing for a long time. I'm slogging through the generic critique of Twitter, looking for the specific.

Haberman's announcement that she was taking a "break" from Twitter came last Sunday, and her new column begins, "I woke up last Sunday morning feeling anxiety in my chest as I checked the Twitter app on my phone...." So it's possible that it's all about a worrisome physical symptom. Or perhaps she'd already hated the pressure to tweet and the physical symptom gave her the nerve or the leverage to tell the people at the NYT she wasn't going to do that part of the job anymore.

She presents herself as free to make her own choice not to tweet:

The evening before, I had complained to a close friend that I hated being on Twitter. It was distorting discourse, I said. I couldn’t turn off the noise. She asked what was the worst that could happen if I stepped away from it. There was nothing I could think of. And so just after 6 p.m. last Sunday, I did.

After nearly nine years and 187,000 tweets, I have used Twitter enough to know that it no longer works well for me. I will re-engage eventually, but in a different way.

Is it a purely individual decision like this and not part of what her employers expect her to do?

I remember when I started blogging and loved it and began encouraging my law school colleagues to do it too, nearly all of them were wary — mostly about the time it would take and the distraction — and many of them quickly leapt to the question: Are we going to be required to blog? So, often, over the years, I've thought about how different blogging would be if it were required. Basically, it would be no good at all! The intrinsic good feeling of self-expression would be overwhelmed by annoyance at a disembodied Ghost of Obligation leaning over me, judging me: Have I done enough? In fact, part of what made blogging so energizing for me was the concern that I shouldn't be doing this, that it was transgressive. I've never had the feeling that I'm doing what I'm supposed to, and if that feeling crept into my blogging, I'd change my pattern one way or another.

You may notice that I hardly ever tweet. I'm immersed in the blog, where I have so much choice about what to talk about and how things look on the front page. On Twitter, you have to continually throw things into a big flowing river, and you don't know how or if they float by in whatever it is someone else is seeing when they look at Twitter. It's so unstable and ephemeral. The only way to be more than a meaningless glimmer is if you get other people to boost you with retweets and responses, making people do things — that is, manipulating. And you have to do it constantly, or you're nothing in Twitter. Where did all your work go? You can click on your name and see a page of all you've written, but that doesn't seem to be where anyone else goes. Why are you participating in this immense group project?

But then blogging isn't my job. And tweeting really isn't my job. I would have thought tweeting was part of Haberman's job and that she has extracted an accommodation from her employer. But she does not address the journalist's obligation to tweet.

She does say that what's bad about Twitter has become worse lately: "The viciousness, toxic partisan anger, intellectual dishonesty, motive-questioning and sexism are at all-time highs..." Who knows if that's true? Oh, no! I'm motive-questioning!

And it's not just the quality, it's the quantity:

Everyone I follow on the site seems to be tweeting more frequently, so I had to check in more frequently. No matter the time of day or night, I felt like I had to plug back into the Matrix, only to be overwhelmed by the amount of content.

And, finally, she sneaks up on the subject of Trump:

On Twitter, everything is shrunk down to the same size, making it harder to discern what is a big deal and what is not. Tone often overshadows the actual news. All outrages appear equal. And that makes it harder for significant events — like Mr. Trump’s extraordinarily pliant performance with President Vladimir Putin of Russia — to break through.

Well, yeah, but Haberman pulled back on Twitter the day before the summit. But I see the awful problem. Everyone's writing constantly trying to be seen and that requires even more writing so that you can be seen. And it's got to be galling when what you want seen is how terrible Trump is, and there's Trump, not just being President, but dominating on Twitter...

Will the Dems and Fake News ever learn? This is classic! pic.twitter.com/kSX3ROI4QG

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2018

Ooh! Must we talk about that?!

Back to Haberman:

[P]eople on Twitter have started... treating me as if I am a protagonist [antagonist?] in the president’s narrative. I found myself in the middle of swarms of vicious Twitter attacks, something that has happened to many other journalists in the Trump era. He creates the impression that the media is almost as powerful as he is in his incessant, personalized attacks on reporters on Twitter. But here’s the thing: Most of us don’t want to be part of the story.

Or... don't want to be part of the story when he's able to be right there on the same platform and taking the liberty to attack you directly and by name. But why wouldn't you want to stay in there, putting up your tweets, defending your work and your reputation, where it will surely be retweeted and amplified by other journalists?

ADDED: Rereading this post, I'm seeing "what made blogging so energizing for me was the concern that I shouldn't be doing this, that it was transgressive" and thinking Trump... that's how Trump feels about tweeting... and maybe about being President.

Buttons.

The CNN headline — when you click through — becomes "Kim Jong Un offers rare olive branch to South Korea."

Olive branch... nuclear button... ???

Kim wants to "work together to alleviate the tensions and work together as a people of the same heritage to find peace and stability" — but you have to accept him as an equal:

"The entire mainland of the US is within the range of our nuclear weapons and the nuclear button is always on the desk of my office. They should accurately be aware that this is not a threat but a reality. No matter how much America wants to attack us with their military might and nuclear power, they know that now we possess such great nuclear power and therefore they will not dare."

Is there really a button on his desk? Or is that just a figure of speech... or a fake button...



Now that was a fake laugh, but give the lady credit for laughing her brains out when she must have been enraged that some staffers got the word wrong (and wrote "overcharged" instead of "reset" on the button they broke off the hotel whirlpool for that embarrassing cutesy ceremony).

Well, if you haven't heard: It's cold out there.



"Listen, big boy/You’ve got me hooked, and how/I would die if I should lose you now!/Button up your overcoat/When the wind is free/Take good care of yourself/You belong to me!/Oh, eat an apple every day/Get to bed by three...."

"Attorney Lisa Bloom Resigns as Advisor to Harvey Weinstein Amid Sexual Harassment Claims."

People Magazine reports.

“I have resigned as an advisor to Harvey Weinstein,” Bloom, 56, wrote on Twitter Saturday. “My understanding is that Mr. Weinstein and his board are moving toward an agreement.”

She did not say whether she plans to continue working with Weinstein on adapting her book about Trayvon Martin into a television show, which Bloom had planned to do through his company.

ADDED: The NYT writes that board members of the company, Harvey's brother Bob and Lance Maerov, confronted Bloom after Bloom said she was going to put out “photos of several of the accusers in very friendly poses with Harvey after his alleged misconduct," which Maerov said would "backfire as it suggests they are exculpatory or negate any harm done to them through alleged action."

Maerov also accused Bloom of having a conflict of interest: “You have a commercial relationship with TWC via a TV deal so how can you possibly provide impartial advice to Harvey or address this group with any credibility?”

A third of the board members have resigned, and the rest have "hired an outside law firm to investigate the allegations."

The Times also tells us:

Lanny Davis, another adviser to Mr. Weinstein, is also no longer representing him, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Davis, a lawyer and crisis counselor who served as special counsel to President Bill Clinton, declined Saturday to discuss his departure. But he and Mr. Weinstein had disagreed over how to handle the sexual harassment allegations, with Mr. Davis advising a more conciliatory tone and approach than Mr. Weinstein seemed willing to adopt....

Lanny Davis. Why did he drop Weinstein? Too much connection back to the Clintons? I was surprised that I already had a Lanny Davis tag, and clicking back to old posts, I see that he was acting chair of the Clinton Foundation in 2015 when he was grilled by Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" over a $2.35 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation by the chairman of Uranium One, "that uranium company that the Russians wanted to buy," which Davis brushed off as "not major, even by any definition." Wallace asked Davis:

Do you think it was a coincidence all these Canadian mining executives are giving millions to the foundation, that a company with close ties to Vladimir Putin's government in Russia is giving half a million dollar speech? Do you think that's a coincidence that's happening while the Russian company that wants to buy Uranium One has business before the State Department? Do you think that's a coincidence?

Sorry. I'm reminiscing about the 2016 presidential campaign... you know, the one about which there's been so much talk about "collusion" with the Russians.

"The State Department has opened a formal inquiry into whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her aides mishandled classified information while she was the nation’s top diplomat..."

"... Fox News has learned. Despite being under investigation, Clinton and her staffers still have security clearances to access sensitive government information. The department’s investigation aims to determine whether Clinton and her closest aides violated government protocols by using her private server to receive, hold and transmit classified and top-secret government documents...."

It never ends. Why should it? 

12 things I learned from the Weekly Standard interview with Camille Paglia.

(Full transcript here.)

1. Paglia hopes to vote for Kamala Harris in the next presidential primary.

2. In the 2016 campaign season, Scott Walker "shrank into a nervous, timid mouse with a frozen Pee-wee Herman smile." (I disagree with this. I think Jeb Bush blocked the flow of money that Walker could have used to get somewhere.)

3. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "doggedly piled up air miles while accomplishing virtually nothing except the destabilization of North Africa."

4. After the election, Chuck Schumer "asserted absolutely no moral authority as the party spun out of control in a nationwide orgy of rage and spite."

5. As President, "Trump seems to be methodically trying to fulfill his campaign promises," but the "mundane GOP leadership" has been "passiv[e]" and "petulan[t]."

6. "[E]lite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard." (This observation is especially funny because Paglia herself obviously belongs in the first group, with the abstract language and the subjective emotion.)

7. Comey is "an effete charlatan" and his testimony was "maudlin."

8. "Political correctness represents the fossilized institutionalization of once-vital revolutionary ideas, which have become mere rote formulas."

9. Liberals have a "usual animosity to religion," and their avoidance of criticism of Islam is "because it is largely a religion of non-whites." Paglia attributes this idea — the racial patronizing of Islam — to "some commentators" instead of taking ownership of the idea. Later she says (in one of her most labyrinthine sentences): "Right now, too many secular Western liberals treat Islam with paternalistic condescension—waving at it vaguely from a benevolent distance but making no effort to engage with its intricate mixed messages, which can inspire toward good or spur acts of devastating impact on the international stage." (If I weren't already so far into making a list, I'd use that sentence for one of my "sentence of the day" posts. I mean, try to diagram that. And my point isn't a technical one about writing. It's: What's motivating you to get so contorted right there? It means something.)

10. There's a theory that "the pharmaceutical industry, having lost income when routine estrogen therapy for menopausal women was abandoned because of its health risks, has been promoting the relatively new idea of transgenderism in order to create a permanent class of customers who will need to take prescribed hormones for life."

11. Paglia describes herself as transgender, but she's "highly skeptical about the current transgender wave," because there are "far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows." And she sees the "prescription of puberty blockers... as a criminal violation of human rights," and she "reject[s] state-sponsored coercion to call someone a 'woman' or a 'man' simply on the basis of his or her subjective feeling about it." 

12. Liberals only pose as pro-science. Global warming is "a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence," and: "Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now."

"Trump’s strike on Syria disrupts the narrative that he is Putin’s pal."

A good headline... for a column at WaPo by Callum Borchers.

What I like about it is that we don't really know the relationship between Trump and Putin. It's only a narrative. And we don't really know how far apart Putin and Trump really are about the strike or how close they were before. I like the carefulness in speaking only about what you know and the awareness that our sense of experiencing these events and relationships is fake.

My appreciation for Borchers' approach to talking about Putin and Trump is heightened by my irritation over what I had just read (over at Forbes): "Russia Responds To Syria Strike, As Putin-Trump 'Bromance' Gets Tomahawked" (by Kenneth Rapozo):

Anyone who worried that close ties between Trump and Putin was bad for the U.S. -- and maybe even the world -- slept much better on Thursday. Just days after a chemical weapons attack in Idlib, Syria, the U.S. government responded like actors to a script by launching tomahawk cruise missiles in defense of human rights. From Moscow and from Washington, no matter where you sit on this fence, the air strike is seen as damaging to yet another "Russia reset."

Ooh. Ouch. Writing this post, I hit the "Russia reset" link...



... and I hit the button to play but found it so embarrassing that after one second, I impulsively hit another video in the sidebar. I picked "I SHOULD'VE NEVER DONE THAT !! - CRUSH BATTERY WITH HYDRAULIC PRESS - THE SMASHER SHOW" and damned if I didn't find relaxing respite... in this:

"Can't we just drone this guy"

Said Hillary Clinton about Julian Assange, according to Wikileaks.

"No Tie to Global Terrorism Is Seen" headlines the NYT.

That appeared at the NYT yesterday, at the top of the front page, and you can see the time stamp: 3:20 PM.

That caught my eye because of the way the NYT, in an earlier report, blogged here, made Donald Trump seem bad for for saying "I must tell you that just before I got off the plane, a bomb went off in New York and nobody knows exactly what’s going on." The Times followed that by saying that Hillary Clinton "seemed to scold Mr. Trump for his quick assessment. 'I think it’s always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions,' Mrs. Clinton said." The Times omitted what Hillary said right before that: "I've been briefed about the bombings in New York and New Jersey." All we had were 2 candidates having heard about what happened and calling it a bomb. But the NYT presented it to look as though Trump was impulsive and Hillary was sober and thoughtful.

How little should it take before we jump to impugn others for "making conclusions"? If we're going to be super-sensitive, no one will escape reproach. How was it possible for the NYT to say "No Tie to Global Terrorism Is Seen" less than a day after a bomb explodes with an investigation getting underway?

Meanwhile, this morning, we're getting a new report — "Police Raid New Jersey Home in Search of Manhattan Bomber":

Hours after five pipe bombs were discovered near a train station in Elizabeth, N.J., federal agents and the police raided a home nearby early Monday morning as part of the sweeping search for the person or people responsible for Saturday night’s bombing in Manhattan.

The police released a photograph of a 28-year-old man, described as a naturalized citizen of Afghan descent, , [sic] Ahmad Khan Rahami, who is wanted in connection with the attack.

It's just a name. Just a place of origin. Remember: It’s always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions.

ADDED: It's dangerous to elevate Hillary Clinton for issuing the sober bromide "it’s always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions," because it makes me want to think of the times when she made a conclusion before she had information. For example: "We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with."

"House Benghazi Panel Finds No New Evidence of Wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton."

That's the headline in The NYT. Key word: new.

The 800-page report, however, included some new details about the night of the attacks, and the context in which it occurred, and it delivered a broad rebuke of government agencies like the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department — and the officials who led them — for failing to grasp the acute security risks in the Libyan city, and especially for maintaining outposts in Benghazi that they could not protect.

The committee, led by Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, also harshly criticized an internal State Department investigation that it said had allowed officials like Mrs. Clinton, then the secretary of state, to effectively choose who would investigate their actions. In addition, it reiterated Republicans’ complaints that the Obama administration had sought to thwart the investigation by withholding witnesses and evidence.

"Trump tweets story claiming 'secret memo' shows Obama supports ISIS."

Headline at The Hill. Excerpt:

The story, from the conservative Breitbart website, says the State Department received a memo from an intelligence agent who claimed al Qaeda in Iraq, a group that splintered off to form ISIS, was one of the "major forces driving the insurgency in Syria."

Based on the memo, the article claims that the Obama administration backed ISIS by setting up a program to train Syrian rebels fighting against President Bashar Assad. The Syrian opposition comprises dozens of different factions, and the Obama administration has struggled at times to find reliable allies not tied to extremists. The Pentagon had focused on vetting the rebels who took part in its "train and equip" program, but it stalled after the Pentagon was only able to train 150 rebels, far short of its goal of 3,000.

Here's Trump's tweet:

An: Media fell all over themselves criticizing what DonaldTrump "may have insinuated about @POTUS." But he's right: https://t.co/bIIdYtvZYw

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2016

I don't trust Breitbart (and I passed on that story when I saw it), but I think we've long understood this problem of who the "rebels" in Syria were and whether it made sense to help them. So why haven't other media been pursuing this story? Trump has been critical of the disarray caused by Obama/Hillary policy in Syria (and Libya). What is Hillary's side of this? It's ridiculous that the media that support Hillary merely attack Trump for pointing at stories that suggest that Hillary/Obama had bad judgment, didn't know what they were doing, or worse. The media have left the opening for Trump to take these easy shots, and now, when he does, they seem to think it's enough to say Trump isn't nice or Trump throws out inconclusive evidence and invites us to think for ourselves and ask questions.

Hillary says "we didn't lose a single person" in Libya.

That's going to get a response.

"The intelligence source said the FBI is 'extremely focused' on the 22 'top secret' emails deemed too damaging to national security to publicly release under any circumstances..."

"... with agents reviewing those sent by Clinton as well her subordinates including former chief of staff Cheryl Mills."

"Mrs. Clinton sending them in this instance would show her intent much more than would receiving [them],” the source said. "Hillary Clinton was at a minimum grossly negligent in her handling of NDI [National Defense Information] materials merely by her insisting that she utilize a private server versus a [U.S. government] server. Remember, NDI does not have to be classified." According to the Congressional Research Service, NDI is broadly defined to include “information that they have reason to know could be used to harm the national security.”...

From: "Source: Clinton IT specialist revealing server details to FBI, 'devastating witness.'"

"The president was wary. The secretary of state was persuasive. But the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi left Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven."

"This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military action in another Middle Eastern country. As she once again seeks the White House, campaigning in part on her experience as the nation’s chief diplomat, an examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state. It is a working portrait rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be, and especially of her expansive approach to the signal foreign-policy conundrum of today: whether, when and how the United States should wield its military power in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.... The New York Times’s examination of the intervention offers a detailed accounting of how Mrs. Clinton’s deep belief in America’s power to do good in the world ran aground in a tribal country with no functioning government, rival factions and a staggering quantity of arms. The Times interviewed more than 50 American, Libyan and European officials, including many of the principal actors. Virtually all agreed to comment on the record. They expressed regret, frustration and in some cases bewilderment about what went wrong and what might have been done differently..."

An excellent discussion of the latest Hillary Clinton email problem on "Fox News Sunday."

This is a bit long and starts slow, but the different commentators bring different perspectives that I'll try to highlight, so stick with me:

CHRIS WALLACE:   In 2011, when an aide was having trouble sending her material by a secure fax, she sent these instructions: "If they can't, turn into nonpaper with no identifying heading, and send nonsecure." Bob Woodward, why is this important? 

The WaPo Fact Checker checks "What Benghazi family members say Hillary Clinton said about the video" and comes up empty.

Instead of Pinocchios, we're left with "No Rating": 

Clinton says that in speaking with the families she did not blame the Benghazi attacks on the video. Most participants we interviewed (four out of six) back up her version, saying they do not recall her mentioning a video.... Perhaps it all started with a comment made by [Susan] Rice.... Perhaps the question of who said what at what moment got jumbled over time. Or perhaps Clinton mentioned the video privately to just two people — and not to others.

Clearly we cannot come to a resolution that would be beyond dispute. Readers will have to come to their own conclusions based on the evidence we have assembled.

That is, the evidence is at least all in one place for your perusal. Make your own judgment. 

"At Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state, she promised she would take 'extraordinary steps…to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.'"

"Later, more than two dozen companies and groups and one foreign government paid former President Bill Clinton a total of more than $8 million to give speeches around the time they also had matters before Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Fifteen of them also donated a total of between $5 million and $15 million to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the family’s charity, according to foundation disclosures. In several instances, State Department actions benefited those that paid Mr. Clinton. The Journal found no evidence that speaking fees were paid to the former president in exchange for any action by Mrs. Clinton, now the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination...."

Google some of the text if you need a nonsubscriber link for "Speaking Fees Meet Politics for Clintons/Former president spoke to groups with issues before State Department," by James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus.

"Clinton talked at this last DNC debate about her failure as Secretary of State as if she was successful," Facebooks Jim Webb...

... because that's where he's speaking from now, not the debate stage anymore.

While she held that office, the U.S. spent about $2 billion backing the Libyan uprising against Qadaffi. The uprising, which was part of the Arab Spring, led directly to Qaddafi being removed from power and killed by rebel forces in 2011. Now some 2,000 ISIS terrorists have established a foothold in Libya. Sophisticated weapons from Qaddafi's arsenal—including up to 15,000 man-portable, surface-to-air missiles have apparently fallen into the hands of radical Islamists throughout the region. For a Secretary of State (and a Presidential administration) this is foreign policy leadership at its worst.

ADDED: Here's a report on the debate. Hillary was asked "How much responsibility do you bear for the chaos" in Libya.

AND: There's some talk about Webb maybe having the idea of running as an independent. Since he never got any traction as a Democratic Party candidate, it's hard to take this seriously. I assume he wants to be a voice, and we are reading his Facebook post. If he were to say he was an independent candidate, would that amplify his voice and boost his stature and credibility? He's just a voice, either way. To me, your credibility is better if you present yourself as what you really are.

Hillary's communications director Jen Palmieri sounded utterly terrified facing questions from George Stephanopoulos.

Palmieri should have been perfectly prepared. She's the communications director so she should be an ace at communications. She knew the precise issue she would be asked to address: Hillary's statement, in the previous night's debate, that Donald Trump is "ISIS's best recruiter" and that ISIS is "going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists." Palmieri knew everyone was demanding to know whether there were actual videos. All she needed was a packaged answer, the best answer under the circumstances, and to deliver that answer with confidence. Here's the video. Here's the transcript.

Why did she fumble, look scared, and speak in a trembling voice?! 

Palmieri's segment followed a phone interview with Donald Trump, Donald Trump had just totally overwhelmed Stephanopoulos, and Stephanopoulos's first question to Palmieri incorporated the formidible Trump: "Your response to Donald Trump?" Maybe she was prepared, but Donald Trump unnerved her. She began:

Donald Trump mockingly imitates Hillary's hand gestures.

Filmed from Trump's appearance today on "Fox News Sunday."

"Everything she does is, like, theatrical. 'Oh, Donald Trump said this'... Looks like she practices in front of a mirror for 2 hours...."

He should know theatrical!

ADDED: When Hillary imitated Trump:



Last September on "The Tonight Show," linked in the comments here.

MORE: I clipped the video to highlight the imitation, but if it were extended a bit, you'd hear something that I can see is getting talked about. From the transcript:

And one of the reasons I’m going to do great with women is that I’m a leader. I’m not Hillary Clinton. She’s got no strength, she’s got no stamina. Everything she does is theatrical. Oh, Donald Trump said this. He -- actually it was interesting. She said -- I watched her last night. It looks like, she practices in front of a mirror for two hours, Donald Trump said, I think he's dangerous. I’m dangerous. She's the one that caused all this problem with her stupid policies. You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria. Look at Egypt. What happened with Egypt, a total mess. They don’t back -- we don’t back any of our allies. You look, she was truly, if not the -- one of the worst secretaries of state in the history of the country. She talks about me being dangerous. She's killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.

WALLACE: What do you mean she's killed hundreds of thousands?

TRUMP: She was secretary of state. Obama was president. The team -- two real geniuses... Look at what happened. The Middle East is a total disaster under her. She traveled back and forth, but look at the problems. Look -- as an example -- Iraq, total disaster. They didn’t get us in, but they got us out badly, OK? Total -- we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, wounded warriors all over. Look at -- look at Libya. Look at Benghazi, our ambassador. He wired her 500 or 600 times asking for help. She'll take her friends' call every time. Hillary Clinton doesn't have the judgment. She doesn't have the strength or the stamina to be president. She will be a terrible president. 

The "hundreds of thousands" is inflammatory. There's a number in that statement — like "thousands and thousands" celebrating on the rooftops of Jersey City on 9/11. That number demands attention. It makes people think he's wrong and the wrongness can be proved. And so attention will be lavished on the problem of Hillary's bad judgment and bad policy in the Middle East and the cost in human life. Even if the number is ultimately shown to be wrong, Trump will have prevailed, because this is now the issue of the week, and the problem he's highlighting is a terrible problem whether he got the number right or wrong.

"Trey Gowdy Says His 11-Hour Benghazi Hearing Didn't Reveal Anything New."

HuffPo paraphrases.

AND: From Amy Davidson in The New Yorker:

Clinton has been immersed in politics for decades, and yet the panel managed to make the contrast between her manner and the ways of Washington look stark. She appeared to be a sensible outsider. At 7:15 P.M., nine hours after the hearings began, Martha Roby, of Alabama, asked Clinton about her movements when she went home on the night of the attack. “Were you alone?” she asked. Yes, Clinton said. “The whole night?” Clinton started to laugh once more. “I don’t see why that’s funny,” Roby said. Not funny, perhaps, but, like the Benghazi committee itself, absurd.