Carson: Trump Privately Admitted to Me Attacking the Judge Was Wrong
I take it all back -- well, most of it. Evidence is mounting that Ben Carson is the greatest deep-cover double agent of all time. In public, Donald Trump insists his racial attacks on an Indiana-born judge of Mexican descent have been "misconstrued." But in private, Trump concedes he made a mistake, according to Ben Carson, a top advisor and former rival for the Republican presidential nomination. "He fully recognizes that that was not the right thing to say," Carson said in an interview, noting he's heard Trump say so himself during a private meeting this week at Trump Tower. Now it's a near-certainty that Trump will get asked about Carson's comments. Can anyone envision Trump saying, "Yes, in private, I told Ben Carson that what I said was wrong?" It's much more likely Trump will insist Carson's account is false and Carson doesn't know what the heck he's talking about. It's theoretically possible Trump will just say, "I'm not talking about this issue anymore." Trump on Judge Curiel: 'I Don't Care about the Mexican' A couple days ago, Trump declared via statement, "I do not intend to comment on this matter any further." Hours later, he appeared on Bill O'Reilly's program and declared: TRUMP: Look, I have had very, very unfair decisions. People said this should have gone away a long time ago in summary judgment. The defendant in the case was a horror show for the other side. So they asked that the defendant get out -- you know, the plaintiff, the plaintiff in the case was an absolute disaster for them. And they asked whether or not -- they went to the judge and asked whether or not the plaintiff could get out of the case. I mean, she said all great things about the school. She has a tape of her saying great things and she has a written statement signed by her saying great things. And the Judge dismissed her from the case but left the case stand. We felt we were going to win the case. I don't care if the Judge is Mexican or not. I'm going to do great with the Mexican people because I provide jobs. So, I don't care about the Mexican. But we are being treated unfairly, Bill, very, very unfairly. Notice Trump keeps referring to the judge as "the Mexican." I have had vehement disagreements with friends over this, but I'm going to call it as I see it. I can't see Trump's repeated referral to Judge Gonzalgo Curiel as "Mexican" or "the Mexican" as anything other than Trump unsubtly arguing to his mostly white supporters, "If I lose this case, we all know why, right? The judge isn't even really American, he's Mexican. You know, one of those people. A real American judge would have dismissed the case." The contention is that no judge of Mexican or Latino heritage is capable of being fair or evenhanded, and that is racism. When you raise this point, more Trump-friendly voices inevitably ask: "Why didn't you criticize Sonia Sotomayor for her 'wise Latina' comments?" I did! I did! And for what it's worth, during her confirmation hearing, Sotomayor had to run away from her comments and insist she didn't mean that she was a better judge because she was a Latina: But Tuesday, Sotomayor argued that she meant the precise opposite -- that she agreed with O'Connor, and the words just came out wrong. Horribly wrong. Again and again, and sometimes in written texts, they just came out wrong. Meaning even Sonia Sotomayor realized, with the nation watching her, that asserting her Latina heritage makes her a better judge than a white male amounts to racism. Perhaps the oddest moment in those hearings was watching Senator Lindsey Graham just tear her to shreds on this statement . . . GRAHAM: "I would hope that a wise Latino (sic) woman, with the richness of her experience, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male." And the only reason I keep talking about this is that I'm in politics. And you've got to watch what you say, because, one, you don't want to offend people you're trying to represent. But do you understand, ma'am, that if I had said anything like that, and my reasoning was that I'm trying to inspire somebody, they would have had my head? Do you understand that? SOTOMAYOR: I do understand how those words could be taken that way, particularly if read in isolation. GRAHAM: Well, I don't know how else you could take that. If Lindsey Graham said that I will make a better senator than X, because of my experience as a Caucasian male makes me better able to represent the people of South Carolina, and my opponent was a minority, it would make national news, and it should. Having said that, I am not going to judge you by that one statement. I just hope you'll appreciate the world in which we live in, that you can say those things, meaning to inspire somebody, and still have a chance to get on the Supreme Court. Others could not remotely come close to that statement and survive. Whether that's right or wrong, I think that's a fact. GRAHAM: Does that make sense to you? SOTOMAYOR: It does. And I would hope that we've come in America to the place where we can look at a statement that could be misunderstood, and consider it in the context of the person's life. Then Graham turned around and announced he would support her. The Hillary of 2016 Commits the Same Sins as the Hillary of 1993 An all-too-frequent complaint -- and one I'd argue is undeserved -- against the #NeverTrump crowd is, "Why don't you ever criticize Hillary?" Anyway, for everyone who's been yearning for a rhetorical flamethrower aimed at Hillary's career in politics and the notion that her status as the first woman nominee means we should ignore her 24 years of arrogance, secrecy, mendacity, and implausible claims of victimhood, check out yesterday's article. There are a lot of long-forgotten chapters of Hillary's life from those early days, and you see a lot of recurring patterns. As architect of the administration's health-care reform proposal, she launched one of the most spectacular displays of hubris in modern political history. The pre-Clinton Democratic party was certainly liberal, but hadn't quite yet fully embraced a philosophy of subjugating the private sector to the will of those running the state. The Democratic party wasn't as top-down and hierarchal then, but Hillary Clinton made it clear early on that she expected Capitol Hill to fall in line. Clinton legendarily dismissed businesses' concerns about the costs her plan would impose: "I can't be expected to go out and save every undercapitalized business in America." Less remembered is that she said this in response to a Democratic congressman from Virginia, Norm Sisisky, who wanted to support her proposal but needed reassurances about its impact on small businesses. Even less remembered is Clinton's answer to Lori Proctor, an insurance broker from Ohio, who asked what she would do under a proposal that would effectively ban her job: "I'm assuming anyone as obviously brilliant as you could find something else to market." Proctor was not reassured. And the lying! Oh, the lying. It started from day one without shame. 
If you're full of contempt for people, it's easy to lie to them. Hillary Clinton lied to the public from the first moment they saw her, which for many Americans was January 27, 1992, during a 60 Minutes interview broadcast after the Super Bowl. In that broadcast, Bill Clinton, with his wife at his side, categorically denied having an affair with Gennifer Flowers. Together, they painted Flowers as a mentally troubled woman making up a story about an affair for attention and money: Hillary Clinton: When this woman first got caught up in these charges, I felt as I've felt about all of these women: that they had just been minding their own business and they got hit by a meteor. I felt terrible about what was happening to them. Bill talked to this woman every time she called, distraught, saying her life was going to be ruined, and he'd get off the phone and tell me that she said sort of wacky things, which we thought were attributable to the fact that she was terrified. Bill Clinton: It was only when money came out, when the tabloid went down there offering people money to say that they had been involved with me, that she changed her story. There's a recession on. Flowers, of course, wasn't hit by a meteor. Years later, under oath, Bill Clinton admitted that he had had sex with her. ADDENDA: On this week's pop-culture podcast, Mickey describes the joy of bringing her new puppy home, I detail the risks of relying on Amtrak; we note the sale of the Playboy mansion and Hugh Hefner's quixotic lifelong effort to convince everyone he's more than just a smut-peddler; investigate Mickey's new favorite true-crime show The Vanishing Women; shudder at the increasingly unnerving tone to the preparation for the Rio Olympics and ask whether you want to see your favorite athletes risk exposure to Zika. Father's Day is a week from Sunday. For some reason, some guy on Twitter named Michael Martinez blurted out this morning, "So @jimgeraghty's manly advice is to be this guy? Holding a baby with puke on his shirt. Thanks, but no thanks." A guy bragging about how happy he is that he isn't married and hates the thought of having kids, and how marriage and fatherhood are unmanly . . . well, that's just about the single-best promotional material I could get for Heavy Lifting, now just $7.01 on Amazon.  | 
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