Fact Check: "You can’t fact check leadership, and tonight Donald Trump showed himself a leader. Viewers saw a Trump who was better than the liberal talking points"-USA Today, James Robbins

9/26/16, "Trump pulled off presidential: James Robbins," USA Today, columnist

"Like Reagan in 1980, viewers saw a Trump who was better than the liberal talking points"

"You can’t fact check leadership, and tonight Donald Trump showed himself a leader.

In the run-up to the Hofstra presidential debate, the Clinton campaign mounted a concerted effort to make fact-checking the centerpiece of the event. Campaign manager Robby Mook argued that "it’s unfair to ask that Hillary Clinton both play traffic cop with Trump, make sure that his lies are corrected, and also to present her vision for what she wants to do for the American people." Mook said that if Trump “lied,” it was moderator Lester Holt’s responsibility to point that out."...

[Ed. note: Hillary did state her "vision for what she wants to do for the American people" which is that she wants them to admit they have substandard characters and submit to "hard questions" on the matter. Her message to the world is that Americans must be scolded on a global stage like street children without parents. Mrs. Clinton was asked: "Do you believe police are implicitly biased against black people?" She replied: “I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think unfortunately too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other and therefore I think we need all of us to be asked the hard questions ‘why am I feeling this way?’” The world has terrible problems today, most of which have been caused by the "experienced" Mrs. Clinton and others in the US political class. None of that class, least of all Mrs. Clinton, is fit to shine the shoes of average Americans much less pass judgement on their character.]

(continuing): "Fact-checking has never been an accepted role for debate moderators. Janet Brown, head of the Commission on Presidential Debates, said that a moderator should not “serve as the Encyclopedia Britannica.” And moderator Candy Crowley’s ill-advised intervention against Mitt Romney in 2012 showed why fact checking on the fly is a bad idea. 

It was strange that the truth-challenged Clinton would want to make an issue of facts. But there was certainly no shortage of checking. Veteran debate moderator Bob Schieffer said that “the chief fact-checkers are the candidates,” and Clinton and Trump agreed, vigorously challenging each other over facts, policies and opinions. In addition, the social media hive-mind was scrutinizing every word in real time. Anyone who needed to track down a fact had the entire connected world at their disposal.

Even in the pre-internet age, moderators did not see themselves as real-time arbiters of the ground truth. There were five journalists on the stage in October 1980 during the debate between Democratic President Jimmy Carter and Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, and none of them felt compelled to question the facts. Carter and Reagan took care of that. Fact checking was the occasion for Reagan’s memorable comment, “there you go again,” when he was taking exception to Carter’s representation of his views on Medicare.

Overall, Carter kept Reagan on the defensive, and the president probably won on points. However, Reagan’s affability and easy manner wore well against Carter’s stern lecturing. Reagan did not come off as the cartoonish, conservative cowboy of Democratic talking points. The Lowell Sun observed, “Ronald Reagan had not self-destructed. He had not made any ill-advised statements that were clearly foolish, as Carter had hoped. Reagan appeared calm under Carter’s attack. With his polished stage manner, he went a long way in presenting himself as presidential timber.” Many Americans agreed. A Gallup poll two days before the debate showed Reagan trailing Carter 39% to 47%. A week later, Reagan won the election 51% to 41%.

The same words could apply to 2016. Donald Trump did not self-destruct, he did not make foolish statements (whether you agree with him or not), he gave as well as he got. And despite Clinton’s numerous mocking remarks to the contrary, he came off as presidential. And that’s a fact."

"James S. Robbins writes weekly for USA Today and is the author of  Native Americans: Patriotism, Exceptionalism and the New American Identity."


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April 2016 article:

(Hillary) Clinton may claim she has lots of foreign policy experience, but the hard truth is that much of her experience has involved making grievous mistakes and bloody miscalculations."

April 1, 2016, “Cleaning Up Hillary’s Libya Mess,” Consortium News, Robert Parry

"Exclusive: U.S. officials are pushing a dubious new scheme to “unify” a shattered Libya, but the political risk at home is that voters will finally realize Hillary Clinton's responsibility for the mess, writes Robert Parry."

"Hillary Clinton’s signature project as Secretary of State – the “regime change" in Libya – is now sliding from the tragic to the tragicomic as her successors in the Obama administration adopt increasingly desperate strategies for imposing some kind of order on the once-prosperous North African country torn by civil war since Clinton pushed for the overthrow and murder of longtime Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The problem that Clinton did much to create has grown more dangerous since Islamic State terrorists have gained a foothold in Sirte and begun their characteristic beheading of “infidels” as well as their plotting for terror attacks in nearby Europe."...

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"Who would have thought that the neocons would have succeeded in destabilizing not only the Mideast but Europe as well." (6 parags. from end of article) "The truth is that this accelerating spread of human suffering can be traced back directly to the unchecked influence of the neocons and their liberal fellow-travelers who have resisted political compromise and, in the case of Syria, blocked any realistic efforts to work out a power-sharing agreement between Assad and his political opponents, those who are not terrorists." (parag. 5)

Sept. 2015 article:

9/7/2015, "How Neocons Destabilized Europe," by Robert Parry, consortiumnews.com
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"Exclusive: The neocon prescription of endless “regime change” is spreading chaos across the Middle East and now into Europe, yet the neocons still control the mainstream U.S. narrative and thus have diagnosed the problem as not enough “regime change,” as Robert Parry reports."
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"The refugee chaos that is now pushing deep into Europe...started with the cavalier ambitions of American neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks who planned to remake the Middle East and other parts of the world through “regime change.”
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Instead of the promised wonders of “democracy promotion” and “human rights,” what these “anti-realists” have accomplished is to spread death, destruction and destabilization across the Middle East and parts of Africa and now into Ukraine and the heart of Europe. Yet, since these neocon forces still control the Official Narrative, their explanations get top billing – such as that there hasn’t been enough “regime change.”
 
For instance, The Washington Post’s neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt on Monday (2015) blamed “realists” for the cascading catastrophes. Hiatt castigated them and President Barack Obama for not intervening more aggressively in Syria to depose President Bashar al-Assad, a longtime neocon target for “regime change.”

But the truth is that this accelerating spread of human suffering can be traced back directly to the unchecked influence of the neocons and their liberal fellow-travelers who have resisted political compromise and, in the case of Syria, blocked any realistic efforts to work out a power-sharing agreement between Assad and his political opponents, those who are not terrorists....

A Dozen Years of Chaos

So, we can now look at the consequences and costs of the past dozen years under the spell of neocon/liberal-hawk “regime change” strategies. According to many estimates, the death toll in Iraq, Syria and Libya has exceeded one million with several million more refugees flooding into – and stretching the resources – of fragile Mideast countries.

Hundreds of thousands of other refugees and migrants have fled to Europe, putting major strains on the Continent’s social structures already stressed by the severe recession that followed the 2008 Wall Street crash. Even without the refugee crisis, Greece and other southern European countries would be struggling to meet their citizens’ needs.

Stepping back for a moment and assessing the full impact of neoconservative policies, you might be amazed at how widely they have spread chaos across a large swath of the globe. Who would have thought that the neocons would have succeeded in destabilizing not only the Mideast but Europe as well.

And, as Europe struggles, the export markets of China are squeezed, spreading economic instability to that crucial economy and, with its market shocks, the reverberations rumbling back to the United States, too.

We now see the human tragedies of neocon/liberal-hawk ideologies captured in the suffering of the Syrians and other refugees flooding Europe and the death of children drowning as their desperate families flee the chaos created by “regime change.” But will the neocon/liberal-hawk grip on Official Washington finally be broken? Will a debate even be allowed about the dangers of “regime change” prescriptions in the future?

Not if the likes of The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt have anything to say about it. The truth is that Hiatt and other neocons retain their dominance of the mainstream U.S. news media, so all that one can expect from the various MSM outlets is more neocon propaganda, blaming the chaos not on their policy of “regime change” but on the failure to undertake even more “regime change.”

The one hope is that many Americans will not be fooled this time and that a belated “realism” will finally return to U.S. geopolitical strategies that will look for obtainable compromises to restore some political order to places such as Syria, Libya and Ukraine. Rather than more and more tough-guy/gal confrontations, maybe there will finally be some serious efforts at reconciliation.

But the other reality is that the interventionist forces have rooted themselves deeply in Official Washington, inside NATO, within the mainstream news media and even in European institutions. It will not be easy to rid the world of the grave dangers created by neocon policies."
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"Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s."...





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