There was a debate on Saturday night, and Donald Trump started screaming like an unhinged psychopath not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES.
Red State introduces the meltdowns:
In Saturday’s CBS Republican presidential debate Donald Trump was the biggest loser. It wasn’t even close. Worse, the Donald was whiney, uncivil and so very un-presidential. He threw Trumpertantrum after Trumpertantrum, interrupted again and again and was booed over and over.
Here they are:
- Trump’s support for Vladimir Putin, an aggressive dictator who murders journalists, murders critics, and invaded Ukraine
- Trump says G.W. Bush lied to get us into the Iraq war, but three investigations found Bush didn’t lie, and we found WMDs there
- Trump says he opposes Planned Parenthood, but this video shows him saying that they do good things and deserve partial funding
You can listen to all three meltdowns and read the transcripts in the Red State article. Let’s look at them.
The third statement about Planned Parenthood has already been turned into an ad by Ted Cruz, who was called a liar by Trump in the debate. The new Cruz ad shows Trump saying exactly what Cruz said that he said about Planned Parenthood on the Sean Hannity show.
I’m going to cover the “George W. Bush lied us into war and there were no WMDs there” statement below, and then this afternoon, I’ll cover the “Putin is a leader and there’s no evidence that he assassinated anyone” statement.
Here’s the part of the transcript that’s relevant:
DICKERSON: … On Monday, George W. Bush will campaign in South Carolina for his brother. As you’ve said tonight, and you’ve often said, the Iraq war and your opposition to it was a sign of your good judgment. In 2008, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, talking about President George W. Bush’s conduct of the war, you said you were surprised that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi didn’t try to impeach him. You said, quote: “Which, personally, I think would have been a wonderful thing.” When you were asked what you meant by that and you said: “For the war, for the war, he lied, he got us into the war with lies.” Do you still believe President Bush should have been impeached?
[…]TRUMP: You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.
Two points to make about this.

First, we did find WMDs in Iraq – lots of them. And this was reported in the radically leftist New York Times, of all places.
Read it:
Five years after President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, these soldiers had entered an expansive but largely secret chapter of America’s long and bitter involvement in Iraq.
From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.
In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Second point, three different reports found that George W. Bush did not lie about the WMDs, nor did he pressure the intelligence agencies.
Excerpt:
Everyone was convinced that Saddam had WMDs. It remains a fact Saddam used WMDs against and his own people. The intelligence and common wisdom that Iraq still possessed such weapons at the time we liberated Iraq proved to be wrong, but that doesn’t equate to a lie. So lets go over the facts again.
The Bipartisan Senate Select Committee Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs. At pages 284-285 the report states:
Conclusion 83. The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
[Redacted]
Conclusion 84. The Committee found no evidence that the Vice President’s visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, or did pressure analysts to change their assessments.
Besides that report, two other independent investigations came to the same conclusion.
The Robb-Silberman Commission On The Intelligence Capabilities Of The United States Regarding Weapons Of Mass Destruction likewise found “no evidence of political pressure.” At pages 50-51 the Robb-Silberman report states: The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community’s pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs. As we discuss in detail in the body of our report, analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments.
The British Butler Report, Review Of Intelligence On Weapons Of Mass Destruction similarly “found no evidence of deliberate distortion.”
Trump can say anything he wants, but the facts are what they are.
Trump supporters in denial
I know 3 Trump supporters, and I’ve tried to speak to them about things like eminent domain, support for bank bailouts, single payer health care, touchback amnesty, Planned Parenthood support, support for Vladimir Putin, adultery and divorce, support for the gay rights agenda, four bankruptcies, etc. Their response has been do deny the evidence. Trump never did those things, all the news articles are lies, and all the videos of Trump saying those things are fake. I expect better than that from Trump supporters. This time, the stakes are as high as they could be: 4-5 Supreme Court picks. This is the ballgame for America.
You’re not telling the whole story however:
American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West….
The American government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent into harm’s way and from military doctors. The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds.
Aside from that, there is a big difference between an an ongoing program to create new WMDs – which is what created the urgency to invade, and finding old weapons that were largely the result of an earlier (1980’s) alliance with the US.
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No one ever claimed otherwise. The concern was that after kicking out the UN inspectors and violating UN resolutions, that Saddam could quickly reconstitute his WMD program. We know he was aggressive enough to invade Kuwait, we know he had WMDs from previous programs, we know he could reconstitute his WMD programs in the blink of an eye, we know he was paying the families of suicide bombers to attack Israel, and we know that he was harboring terrorists.
What we were looking for from Saddamwas a response like that of Qaddafi in Libya: hand over ALL your WMD, and allow inspectors to come in and make sure you aren’t making more. Saddam wouldn’t do it. He was in violation of many UN resolutions, and that’s why we built an international coalition to take him out.
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I was watching the whole thing very closely, because my wife was involved.
Again:
* It was not evident that “Saddam could quickly reconstitute his WMD program”
* Yes he was aggressive, but your phrase “blink of an eye” is challenged by the very fact that he never did so, despite his aggressiveness
* “What we were looking for” mattered little to him. However,
* There is a huge difference between the international coalition that “took him out” of Kuwait, and the one that “took him out” in 2003. While he was an ongoing problem, he wasn’t an ongoing problem that wasn’t being contained. He was just a big mouth by that point.
It is generally agreed by virtually everyone except for the neo-conservatives that the 2003 invasion was wrong-headed. And if the most important result of that “war” effort was that we found 5000 WMDs that we (the US) helped him get, then that was a sore loss indeed.
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Here’s a declassified NIE briefing that makes the point I was making about quick reconstitution of WMD programs:
http://fas.org/irp/cia/product/iraq-wmd.html
Quote:
And in particular, these efforts:
The Center for Security Policy (Frank Gaffney) says this:
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2001/02/26/truth-and-consequences-for-saddam-2/
Quote:
You’re entitled to your opinion, but I’m citing actual intelligence briefings and intelligence reports, here. This is what Bush was looking at after 9/11.
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I don’t really have time to argue this, but the “actual intelligence briefing” turned out to be wrong, insofar as Saddam was importing the wrong kind of aluminum tubes for centrifuges. No matter what the alarmists were saying, there was no danger that he was going to be able to develop weapons-grade uranium any time, if ever.
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I’d think you’d pretty much have to be in denial to support Donald Trump. Which says something about us as a people…
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It says that we care more about feelings and charisma and mockery than about substance, record, and proven ability. We’ve been entertained into imbecility, in short.
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Agreed.
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Maybe after this latest meltdown people will finally, FINALLY begin to see this guy for what he is: a carny barker, a bloated egomaniac who’s never even been elected dogcatcher, a Democrat in wolf’s clothing, and the shortest path to a Hillary presidency I can think of. For heaven’s sake, conservatives, WAKE UP!!! WK is absolutely right about this guy. He is NO conservative, NO Christian, and NO Republican. Nominate Trump, and we lose the Presidency, probably lose the Senate, maybe even lose the House, and now even lose our conservative majority on the SUPREME COURT for the next 30+ years. You thought the last eight years of Obama have been bad? Just wait until Comrade Clinton takes the reins for the next eight.
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Interestingly, in the Hannity interview the Cruz ad clips, Hannity actually persuades Trump to defund Planned Parenthood if they don’t stop providing abortions. The full interview, shows a Trump of weak convictions who doesn’t really care about the lives of babies and is hence uneducated on the issue, changing his position on the fly to say what he thinks people want to hear. Full interview queued to the Planned Parenthood section: https://youtu.be/VBaQCE4GCXg?t=16m50s
Trump 1999: even partial birth abortion should be legal, but I’m personally against it, bc back then it was popular to be personally against it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsOlXidHXRE
Trump 2015: My pro-partial-birth-abortion judicial activist sister (Judge Maryanne Trump Berry) would make a phenomenal Supreme Court Justice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQFXYEIpdhU&feature=youtu.be&t=16m30s
Maryanne Trump’s pro-partial-abortion views: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/423196/trump-praises-his-sister-pro-abortion-extremist-judge-ramesh-ponnuru
Sure maybe he was just praising his sister and didn’t mean what he said- or more likely, Trump sees grandstanding both ways on baby’s lives as a useful tactic to get things Trump cares about.
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