Monday, May 16, 2016

Both Sides Now

From the New York Times:

Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, urged unity behind Donald J. Trump in a series of interviews on Sunday television shows and said that “people just don’t care” about recent negative reports about his tax returns and his treatment of women.

During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Priebus defended Mr. Trump after an article in The New York Times on Saturday in which dozens of women who encountered Mr. Trump over his career told of unsettling conduct.

Asked by Chris Wallace, the host, if he was bothered by the accusations in the article, Mr. Priebus at first said that “Well, you know, a lot of things bother me, Chris, and obviously I’m the wrong person to be asking that particular question,” but when asked again, Mr. Priebus said that voters were focused on other things.

[…]

Mr. Priebus, who also appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” defended Mr. Trump’s resistance to releasing his tax returns. Asked on “This Week” if Mr. Trump should release his tax returns — an issue that dogged Mitt Romney in 2012, even after he eventually released them — Mr. Priebus repeated his argument that Mr. Trump operated under different political norms. “I don’t think the traditional playbook applies,” he said. “We’ve been down this road for a year. And it doesn’t apply. He’s rewritten the playbook.”

Mr. Priebus ran the same play over at Fox News.

On Fox News Sunday Reince Priebus continued to try to turn attention away from the trainwreck that is his party’s presidential candidate. This week’s news cycle was a doozy, with three straight days of non stop bad press for their candidate – refusal to release taxes, Trump’s “John Miller” Sybil multiple personality alter ego and a hard hitting piece from the New York Times released today regarding Trump’s decades of insulting and mistreating women, both publicly and in the workplace.

What did Reince focus on? Benghazi. Emails. Clinton Foundation. Yes, he did everything he could to push away Chris Wallace’s questions. Wallace never really gave up, though, and many times Reince blinked extra hard and it was obvious his brain wheels were turning to try to come up with anything about Hillary, literally anything, that he could say to distract, deflect and deny.

Okay, well then, if we’re going to play by those rules, why should anyone care about what Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders did or said ten or twenty years ago?  Why bring up Monica Lewinsky if people are focused on “other things”?

If the “traditional playbook” doesn’t apply to Mr. Trump, it shouldn’t apply to anyone.