Paul Manafort, senior advisor to Donald Trump (and torturer lobbyist), proved on Fox News Sunday yesterday, he’s just as awful on the subject of women as Trump is.
Host Chris Wallace gave Manafort quite a grilling on the rift between Trump and Paul Ryan, Trump’s flip-flop on self-financing his campaign and even his attacks on Hillary Clinton.
You know there’s a split in the GOP when a Fox News host challenges a top Republican on behalf of a Clinton!
Wallace played a clip of Trump saying, “Hillary was an enabler” of Bill Clinton’s abuse. “And some of those women were destroyed not by him, but by the way that Hillary Clinton treated them after everything went down.” Then there was this exchange:
WALLACE: Respectfully, I asked you, what did—what did Hillary Clinton do to those women? He says she destroyed their lives. How?
MANAFORT: I will let him speak to it. The point is that, you know, the history is clear, she’s an enabler in the past, I will let him speak to those issues.
But the point is he made it very clear he was not going to let hypocrisy exist on a women’s issue. He is not anti-women. He is very pro women. He has proven it in his business life and proven it more so than her because he has proven it with actions not words.
And so, for her to go after him on being anti-women, he’s going to go back and talk about some of the things that she did that are less than consistent as far as being pro-women.
In other words, Manafort couldn’t come up with a single thing Clinton did to destroy any woman’s life. I doubt Trump can, either.
But Wallace wasn’t done. He moved on to confront Manafort about Trump’s attack on Senator Elizabeth Warren:
WALLACE: Trump also this week got into a nasty Twitter war with Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren. Now, to be fair, she started it. Here’s one of her tweets, “Donald Trump has built his campaign on racism, sexism and xenophobia.” But Trump fired back, “I hope corrupt Hillary Clinton chooses goofy Elizabeth Warren as her running mate. I will defeat them both.”
I guess the question is, Paul, if you’re trying to win over women and you do have a problem with women, according to the polls do you really want to take on a fight with two of them, Clinton and Warren?
MANAFORT: He has taken on a fight with two politicians who are using political terms and being hypocrites about it. That’s what he’s taken a fight on.
As far as women’s issues are concerned, that’s exactly the point he is making. He is not going to allow Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren to hide behind their sex to make cases that are hypocritical.
WALLACE: And how is Elizabeth Warren being hypocritical? She wasn’t involved in the Clinton affairs.
MANAFORT: The statements that she was making there were totally out of bounds and he gave it back to her. If she can’t take it, that’s her problem.
Manafort’s comments are reminiscent of Trump’s attack the day before, in which he complained that women have it better than men and suggested that men are the truly oppressed sex:
TRUMP: I mean all of the men, we’re petrified to speak to women anymore. We may raise our voice. You know what, the women get it better than we do, folks, alright? They get it better than we do.
Trump also boasted about how he has been so generous toward women, even though they apparently didn't deserve it.
Trump added that"‘there is nobody, or certainly very few, that have promoted women within my big company [more] than I have." Mentioning that he probably should not being saying this, the billionaire businessman said he has gone as far as paying women working for him more than men doing comparable jobs. "I have women that make more money than men doing a comparable job. Men, am I okay saying that? And they’re fantastic," Trump said.
Too bad Wallace didn’t confront Manafort about that jaw-dropping misogyny, too.
Watch Wallace grill Manafort below, from the May 8 Fox News Sunday.
That said—well, written—that’s one reason why ANY absentee ballot is recommended to be postmarked and sent ASAP to allow it time to arrive at the election office before Election Day.
As to specifics on “expats,” their votes are more dependent on their status as CITIZENS. Some “expats” have given up their US citizenship so if they’ve cast a ballot dated prior to giving up said citizenship, it will count (basically, it’s really a matter of how quickly the office where their voter registration had been actually processes the form or forms to remove them from the rolls).
That stuff about “only counting if close” is a bit of a misunderstanding. People might think it because those particular voters are a pretty insignificant part of the total vote. An estimate of active-duty military personnel serving overseas (not just those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan but also those stationed in South Korea and Japan and Germany, etc) is only about 150,000. And the State Dept estimates perhaps up to 6 million non-military personnel live overseas. However, all those votes are split up among the states they consider to be their residence for voting purposes (states with smaller populations or less positive economies might be a bit more likely to have more overseas residents but they’re still going be somewhat proportionate to the overall population). Also, these numbers may include underage dependents (especially for military personnel in countries like Germany or Japan) so, obviously, that would drop the numbers a bit more. There’s also no hard numbers of voter participation by overseas voters (again—their numbers are counted in with their home states so all overseas residents might vote at a higher rate than stateside residents or a lower rate or even the same rate but there’s no real way to determine).
Now, military voters DO get a special dispensation on their absentee ballots. Non-military voters MUST have their ballots witnessed before mailing them in—if these ballots aren’t properly witnessed, they may be rejected completely (it tends to be a matter of STATE election laws). Military voters, however, don’t need this witnessing (even though they should have the least difficulty in getting a legal, reputable witness). It’s this “special treatment” that so bugs me when right-wingers claim that military ballots are more likely to be tampered with. And, as noted above, a member of the military is far more likely to postmark his ballot the day OF the election and it not get to the elections office for 2 weeks afterwards, and it WILL still count (whereas, say a missionary isn’t able to get his postmarked until the day of the election and it arrives just 2 or 3 days afterwards and his might not be accepted).
Oh—one last thing. It should be noted that while people living in US territories like Puerto Rico and Guam and the Virgin Islands can vote in the Presidential primaries and caucuses, they can NOT vote for the Presidential candidates in November. If someone from Alabama (just an example) is in Puerto Rico on business and needs to cast an absentee ballot, his ballot, postmarked in PR, WILL count; but come Election Day in November, a native of San Juan will not be going to the polls to elect a President. (The only “non-state” that cast ballots for President is the District of Columbia. No resident of any other “territory” has ever been able to vote for President.)
Is this how we can expect a President Drumpf to deal with individuals in Congress?
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Off topic but hillarious. I’ll never forget the dismay on the face of an American GOP acquaintaince when she learned that Trump expected the RNC to reimburse the loans he’s made to his own campaign. Another friend went in for the kill by wondering out loud how many people lost their jobs and/or the money owed to them by the businesses that Trump ran into bankruptcy and that he, himself, declared with some glee had been very profitable to him personally.
A query: Is it true that the expat vote (civilians, military and civil servants) is counted only if the race is very close?
Um, such as the lawsuit against a female artist who decided to paint the Donald in slightly less than flattering light (ie, nude):
http://wonkette.com/600812/donald-trump-rises-firm-and-hard-to-sue-artist-who-painted-him-with-itty-bitty-peener (note the painting shown on Wonkette is slightly altered—it’s just slightly safer for work than the original which you can probably find pretty much anywhere with a simple search).
(As an aside, I must commend the artist, Illma Gore, for her bravery—one might even say, her balls—in doing the painting. It’s really not something you’d want to see. Then again, many great artists painted horrifying images to stop their own nightmares—maybe this was what she needed to do to get a good night’s sleep. By making sure others wouldn’t. Warning: Once you’ve seen the Naked Donald, you can’t unsee it. No matter how much bleach you pour in your eyes.)
