March 5, 2020
Hillary Clinton appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” last night to promote her upcoming Hulu documentary “Hillary.”
While on the show, she took the opportunity to push the false story that President Donald Trump called the coronavirus a “hoax.”
“I wish I could say I was surprised,” Clinton said when asked how the Trump administration has responded to the coronavirus outbreak.
“This is something that you can’t just insult or pretend is a hoax, despite how hard [President Trump’s] trying.”
“You really have to listen to people who actually know something,” the failed 2016 presidential candidate continued.
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“There’s a terrible shortage of testing kits. They need to make sure state and local health departments, governors, mayors, and others, have the resources they need with hospitalization. There’s a lot of work to be done and if he will quit calling it a hoax and actually let the experts do their job, I think that’ll work out better.”
This comes as the media has been lying for days by claiming that Trump called coronavirus a “hoax,” which isn’t what he said at all. Politico was one of the first outlets to push this myth, publishing a story titled “Trump rallies his base to treat coronavirus as a ‘hoax.’”
“President Donald Trump on Friday night tried to cast the global outbreak of the coronavirus as a liberal conspiracy intended to undermine his first term, lumping it alongside impeachment and the Mueller investigation,” reporters Nancy Cook and Matthew Choi wrote.
In reality, Trump never called coronavirus a hoax. Instead, he called the Democrats’ efforts to politicize the virus a hoax.
“‘Hoax’ referring to the action that they take to try and pin this on somebody, because we’ve done such a good job,” Trump explained this week, according to Breitbart News. “The hoax is on them, not—I’m not talking about what’s happening here; I’m talking what they’re doing. That’s the hoax.”
Clinton was also lying when she claimed that the Trump administration is not doing enough to fight coronavirus. Dr. Marc Siegel, professor of medicine at New York University, argued this week that Trump has been doing more to fight coronavirus than previous presidents in his position.
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“I’ve been handling these emerging contagions for about 20 years now, and I have to tell you, I’ve never seen one handled better,” said Dr. Siegel.
It’s sad that Clinton is still not over her loss to Trump in the presidential election. One would think that after three years, she would have moved on with her life by now, but that is clearly not the case as she still enjoys speaking out against Trump like it’s her job.
Despite what Clinton and her fellow bitter liberals say, most Americans know that Trump has taken care of us over the past three years in a way that few other presidents would be able to. There’s no reason to doubt that Trump will overcome the coronavirus just like he’s overcome every other challenge as president.
Perhaps Clinton is just mad because, deep down, she knows she could never be as good a president as Trump.
This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
Read more at LifeZette:
Rumors swirling that President Trump may drop Pence, name Nikki Haley VP
Bloomberg drops out of race
House Democrat-turned-Republican Van Drew says more may join GOP
The post Hillary Clinton Pushes False Story that Trump Called Coronavirus a ‘Hoax’ appeared first on The Political Insider.
Need a mood lightener today? Sen. Susan Collins is 4 points behind her leading potential general election opponent in the latest PPP poll, trailing Sara Gideon 47-43. A year ago when PPP polled a potential Collins-Gideon match up, "Collins led by 18 points at 51-33." Yes, that's a 22-point shift in a year's time. Why such a cratering of support? The PPP polling memo says "that in the wake of opposing impeachment, Collins has lost most of the crossover Democratic support she's relied on for her success over the years."
Her vote for Brett Kavanaugh didn't do her any favors, either. But the double whammy of Kavanaugh and impeachment pretty much seals that deal. In April of 2019, Collins had a 32% approval rating with Mainers who were Hillary Clinton voters, trailing Gideon with them 59-28. Now she has a 9% approval with them, trailing Gideon 81-10. Overall, Collins’ approbate rating is 33%, with a disapproval of 57%. That leaves an undecided or no-opinion of just 10%, not a good look for a four-term senator.
Collins' fall from electoral grace is the most stunning this cycle, but she's far from the only Republican incumbent who's going to be having some serious fret over PPP's polling. In polling over the last weeks, it has found Mark Kelly leading Martha McSally 47-42 in Arizona, Cal Cunningham leading Thom Tillis 46-41 in North Carolina, and in Colorado John Hickenlooper over Cory Gardner 51-38.
That's worth kicking in some dough, no?
A note on our fundraising for the Maine Senate seat and others on the slate: this is the escrow fund that will go to the winner of the primary in each state. We're not going to put the official Daily Kos thumb on the scale in primaries where there isn't a crappy incumbent. All the money raised in this effort will go to the Democratic challengers once they're official.
In a new Hulu documentary, former President Bill Clinton said he had sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky to manage his “anxieties.”
The four-part documentary, “Hillary,” focuses on the life of former Secretary of State, starting with her exploration into student politics and the Goldwater campaign, and finishing with her crushing defeat to President Donald Trump in 2016. The documentary also includes a close look into the affair that Bill Clinton had with Monica Lewinsky, his intern at the White House during his 2nd term in office – the affair, and his reaction to it, resulted in his impeachment, becoming only the 2nd President to be impeached.
Bill Clinton told the documentary team that having the affair with Lewinsky was his way of relieving stress and anxieties as the leader of the free world.
“You feel like you’re staggering around, you’ve been in a 15 round prize fight that was extended to 30 rounds and here’s something that will take your mind off it for a while, that’s what happens,” Bill said, adding:
Because there, whatever life – not just me. Everybody’s life has pressures and disappointments, terrors, fears of whatever. Things I did to manage my anxieties for years. I’m a different, totally different person than I was, a lot of that stuff 20 years ago… Maybe it’s just getting older but I hope it was also going through a lot of this. But whatever, what I did was bad but it wasn’t like – how can I think about the most stupid thing I could and do it. It’s not a defense, it’s an explanation. I feel awful.
In an interview in 2018, fomer President Clinton refused to apologise to Lewinsky for the affair, but this time he came closer.
“I feel terrible about the fact that Monica Lewinsky’s life was defined by it, unfairly I think,” he told the documentary team. “Over the years I’ve watched her trying to get a normal life back again, but you’ve got to decide how to define normal.”
I’ll tell you something Bill – I don’t define cheating on my wife as “normal,” or something that will “take my mind off” work! I wonder if Juanitta Broderick was just a stress reliever too? This documentary is clearly trying to make people sympathise with someone who has had multiple women allege he sexually assaulted and abused them, not to mention the number of corruption allegations against both Bill and Hillary. He’s the same old sleazebag he was back decades ago, and we shouldn’t forget it!
The post Bill Clinton: I Had Sex With Monica Lewinsky to ‘Manage Anxieties’ appeared first on The Political Insider.
As President Donald Trump prepares to unleash a fusillade against former Vice President Joe Biden over his son’s ties to Ukraine, Biden’s allies on Capitol Hill have some advice for their candidate: Be ready to punch back — hard.
Trump previewed this week that he intends to hammer Biden over widely discredited claims that the Democratic frontrunner sought the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor in order to shield his son Hunter from an investigation of his work on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma.
Democrats have privately fretted that Biden hasn’t responded to these attacks forcefully enough, even though Trump’s allies have raised them for months. And now that Biden is favored to become the Democratic nominee for president, lawmakers say he needs to showcase a clear and effective response that can withstand months of Trump attacks.
“I believe in that old political maxim that an attack unanswered is an attack agreed to,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said in an interview Thursday.
More than a dozen Capitol Hill Democrats, many of whom are backing Biden’s candidacy, said in interviews that the vice president needs to fine tune his response, pivoting away from the at times emotional and defensive rebuttals he’s offered on the campaign trail.
Their advice was wide-ranging: Some said Biden surrogates should attack Trump’s adult children for benefitting from the presidency anytime Trump goes after Biden’s son. Others said he should be prepared to lay out the facts of the Ukraine case, which debunk the allegations of corruption Trump has leveled. Others still said Biden should simply remind voters that it was precisely this attack that led to Trump’s impeachment last year.
But regardless of their advice, Democrats widely agreed that the Burisma matter wouldn’t weigh heavily on Biden’s chances because it’s been thoroughly debated for months and the facts are on his side — even as the president’s allies in the Senate are planning to use Burisma as a cudgel against Biden.
“Not one bit, not one bit,” said House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), a prominent Biden ally. “You can make anything you want an issue. You can eat too much ice cream and make that an issue. And I think the president is eating too much ice cream.”
Other Biden supporters pointed to the swell of support he’s received on Super Tuesday as proof that voters don’t buy into Republicans’ claims.
“As we've seen, the president has been saying that for months and Vice President Biden has received overwhelming support and I think it will continue,” said Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), a House impeachment manager who endorsed Biden earlier Thursday.
Democrats’ comments came amid growing expectations that Trump and his allies in the GOP-controlled Senate are preparing to unleash a tsunami of Burisma-related attacks on Biden in an attempt to tarnish his campaign.
Trump's legal team and allies in Congress spent months launching attacks on Biden and his family — based on the disputed testimony of two former Ukrainian prosecutors removed for their own alleged corruption — to allege Biden leaned on the Ukrainian government to protect his son from a corruption investigation into Burisma.
The charge has been refuted by senior State Department officials, who said Biden championed anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine in partnership with U.S. allies. His efforts, they said, made it likelier that companies like Burisma would face legitimate scrutiny, rather than escape it.
But Trump pressed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation of Biden last year, a push that ultimately led the House to impeach Trump for abusing his power by soliciting foreign help in his reelection. The president was acquitted in the Republican-controlled Senate trial.
Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani has been mounting a year-long campaign to promote the discredited attacks on Biden and on Thursday echoed a call to revive them now that Biden has emerged as the Democratic frontrunner.
And on Capitol Hill, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) this week announced a new phase in his long-simmering Burisma investigation, including a plan to authorize subpoenas next week related to Hunter and the release of an interim report over the next two months. Johnson said he believed Democratic primary voters should see his findings before casting their votes.
Johnson’s push has led to some unease even among Republicans. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the only Republican to support Trump’s removal from office in the impeachment trial, said Johnson’s investigation appeared political in nature.
Democrats raised concerns during the impeachment process that Biden often failed to clearly articulate a rebuttal to the Burisma attacks — he even memorably tussled angrily with a voter who questioned him about it, calling him “a damn liar.” Some also acknowledged that Hunter’s work for Burisma did present at least the appearance of a conflict, even if there was no underlying wrongdoing.
“The reality is, optically, it doesn’t look good, but I think the facts speak for themselves,” said Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.). “We need to put to bed any rumors about Joe Biden’s involvement at all on Burisma by just the facts, making sure the facts were out there.”
But some now say it wasn’t as urgent for Biden to develop a concerted response then because he was facing a field of Democrats that wasn’t mounting similar attacks. That’s about to change.
“His democratic opponents didn’t go after him on those — maybe a light blow here and there,” Beyer said. “With Trump it’ll be much different. One of the things I’m sure the Biden campaign won’t do is treat this the way John Kerry did the Swift Boats.”
For some Democrats, the key to neutralizing the impending attacks is for Biden to turn them right back around on the president, questioning the Trump children’s many financial and business entanglements as they continue to advise their father -- both formally and informally -- while he’s in the White House.
“If Donald Trump wants to talk about children, let’s talk about the president’s children and the immense amount of money they’re making off of their father’s name,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), who hasn’t endorsed in the Democratic primary. “I’m Irish too, so you fight back hard. When somebody throws this kind of sleaze at you, you respond.”
But some longtime Biden allies on Capitol Hill said they didn’t expect the vice president to take that advice, noting it just wasn’t in his nature to attack politicians’ children, no matter what he is being accused of in the interim.
“Biden is a good guy. He wants to be tough but he wants to be completely clean,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.). “I know there are people on our team who wanted him to say, ‘Look, let’s talk about your kids.’ But Biden is not a hater.”
Some senior Democrats have not been shy in their criticism of Biden’s campaign. Cleaver, who endorsed Biden last fall, said Biden’s responses to the Ukraine questions so far have not been effective. And Clyburn, speaking more broadly about the campaign over the weekend on CNN, said there needs to be some “retooling,” a sentiment Biden later agreed with.
With Biden consolidating his grip on the primary, though, allies see an influx of resources and support that could help him recalibrate his campaign to respond to those types of attacks.
“I think you’re going to see his message fine-tuned now that he has resources,” Cleaver said. “He hasn’t had the resources and so he hasn’t had the people who can sit around and craft the response he needs.”
But whatever the message Biden settles on, Democrat say he must be prepared for the issue to get ugly.
“The president will pound on whatever the president can pound on,” said Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.). “This isn’t pattycake. It’s going to be a tough, bloody fight.”
Sarah Ferris contributed reporting.