Hillary Clinton flat-out lied during the Democratic Debate on Saturday night.
Throughout the debate, even when not the subject of a question, the candidates tried to out-do each other in condemning Donald Trump. It was a preview of a general election strategy.
At one dramatic point, Hillary claimed that Trump’s comments about a temporary halt to Muslim immigration were being used in ISIS videos as a recruiting tool.
It was not a claim made in isolation. It came as Clinton tried to explain her ISIS and refugee strategies in the face of an American public which strongly (though not majority) supports Trump’s position. This was Hillary’s opportunity to convince the public that people need not give in to fear.
Rather than making the case, Hillary just made stuff up:
There was a collective raising of the eyebrows even among those who don’t like Trump or Republicans. It’s one thing to bash Trump for what he says and does, it’s something else to just make stuff up on national television during a primary debate..
Immediately, the fact checks started:
Even Politifact, not known to lean Republican, called it false:
And so did The NY Times:
WaPo also found no evidence:
The best Hillary defenders in the media could do is admit the claims was false, but suggest it might be true in the future:
So far, so good. Hillary was so brazen in her claim that the mainstream fact checkers couldn’t help but include it in their fact checks.
Sure, Trump is hitting back on it:
But that’s likely where it will die in the media.
There will be no round-the-clock, days-long media frenzy about Hillary making something up and lying the way there was when Carly Fiorina allegedly lied about Planned Parenthood videos. In the Fiorina case, strained arguments that Fioriana lied was all it took for the media to run with it for days.
Defending Donald Trump against Hillary’s brazen lie is not a measure of support for Trump. It’s a measure of opposition to liberal media bias and attempts to put a thumb on the presidential political scale by letting Democrat lies drop.
I made this point after the Gabby Giffords shooting, when liberal media rushed to blame an electoral map used by Sarah Palin. It was a meme created out of thin air by left-wing bloggers which then worked its way into the mainstream media. Shamefully, some Republicans, so blinded by hatred of Palin, not only refused to defend her, they jumped on the media bandwagon.
I called the Palin map falsehood The Media’s Test Run To Re-Elect Barack Obama. So too, the speed with which the media will drop Hillary’s media lie is a test case of how the media will elect Hillary. It’s not just acts of media commission, but also omission.
As a thought exercise, imagine that ISIS actually was using Trump in videos for recruiting. How would that media react? Certainly not with the near complete silence that greeted ISIS’s use of Bill Clinton’s sexual exploitations in a video:
And of course, the media — with the exception of Fox News and Talk radio — has done everything it can to minimize the impact of Hillary falsely claiming a video about Mohammed caused the Benghazi attack.So defend Trump on Hillary’s ISIS lie and keep the issue alive even if you hate him. It’s not about Trump.
UPDATE 12-21-2015: Hmmm:
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is making a rare defense of Donald Trump, rejecting Hillary Clinton’s claim that the businessman has become a recruiting tool for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).“Hillary Clinton suggesting that Donald Trump is being used in an ISIS recruiting video, man, talk about chutzpah,” Bush said Monday on Bill Bennett’s radio show, as highlighted by Buzzfeed News. “There’s no evidence of that. There’s no evidence of that at all.”The defense is unusual coming from Bush, who has been harshly critical of Trump during the Republican race, calling him the “chaos candidate” and saying he can’t “insult his way to the presidency.”Still, even as he backed Trump in the fight against Clinton, Bush emphasized that he doesn’t support Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban most Muslims from entering the United States.“This is how they play the game on the left,” Bush said. “They’re always blaming somebody. This case, I think, while I don’t agree with Trump’s idea, I don’t he has anything to do with being part of a recruiting video.”
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