… which is either corn, or Monsanto. In case you feared our media reps were missing anything important during the intense attention paid to “The Gowdy Boys and the Case of the Smoking Gun That Wasn’t There”, per the Guardian:
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign blamed an intern for a controversial retweet that suggested Iowans had “issues in the brain”.
After a poll from Quinnipiac University Thursday morning which had Trump losing to retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson in Iowa by a margin of 28%-20%, Trump’s account retweeted the following from user @mygreenhippo:
#BenCarson is now leading in the #polls in #Iowa… Too much #Monsanto in the #corn creates issues in the brain? @realDonaldTrump #GOP
— Nicolas R-V (@mygreenhippo) October 22, 2015
The retweet has since been deleted and a Trump campaign spokesperson told the Guardian: “This was mistakenly tweeted from Mr Trump’s account by an intern. Mr. Trump loves the people of Iowa and looks forward to being back in Sioux City on Tuesday.”…
The tweet raised the ire of Iowans not just because it implied that residents of the Hawkeye State were brain damaged; but it also seemed to imply that something was wrong with genetically modified crops with its reference to agribusiness giant Monsanto…
The young intern who accidentally did a Retweet apologizes.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 22, 2015
Meanwhile, an NYU senior walks alone on West 4th Street, clutching a resume with "IDIOT LOSER!" scrolled in red pen. https://t.co/1MhsHbiXYY
— Scott Conroy (@ScottFConroy) October 22, 2015
The original tweeter remains unrepentant:
My tweet to @realDonaldTrump was not intended to insult #Iowa voters but to raise consciousness about poisonous #Monsanto. @FoxNews @NBCNews
— Nicolas R-V (@mygreenhippo) October 22, 2015
My tweet was intended to denounce Monsanto and I used 2nd-degree humor to do so. @TIMEPoliticsn @danielatlarge
— Nicolas R-V (@mygreenhippo) October 23, 2015
Honestly, just waiting for this to crawl back on my TL #Cornghazi pic.twitter.com/ViPfl9Y39D
— Daniel White (@danielatlarge) October 22, 2015
Steeplejack
? The Donald’s hair is like fine corn silk. ??
fedupwithhypocrisy
Just waiting for Trump to go full-on “Lonesome Rhodes.” ha
ruemara
That ear of corn is distinctly more presidential than Trump. 7 hours until I start my first film. Rum is really a post 9 am beverage, right? So… ale should be the breakfast of choice?
srv
Even the liberal Vanity Fair sees reality:
I’m starting to feel sorry for the deniers. Sleep well.
Steeplejack
@ruemara:
Good luck with your film! For the stylish, old-school director, a mimosa or champagne cocktail would be the preferred breakfast.
And, as Mnemosyne said, don’t forget your riding crop!
NotMax
Still don’t understand Twitter (also too, Twitterese) nor why anyone pays a moment’s attention to it.
Now must pause to adjust the onions.
Omnes Omnibus
@NotMax: Have you tried to understand Twitter or have you just dismissed it?
Frankensteinbeck
Okay, this could do it. Bigotry ‘gaffes’ will never bring down Trump, because they’re why the base flocked to him in the first place. Insulting Real Americans and then going derpy trying to recover could implode him. We’ll see.
redshirt
The importance of Iowa and NH to our political process is obscene.
amk
so, the rw’ers can dish it out (and love those who dish it out) but can’t take it ?
Ruckus
@amk:
Are you new here?
Of course they can’t.
Ian
@srv:
You really believe Colorado, which elected a Democratic governor in 2010 and 2014, will go for Trump?
redshirt
I’d like to see Mississippi and New Mexico with the same clout as IA and NH for a political season. Can you imagine the pols invading Mississippi years before the election, building networks of voters?
sm*t cl*de
So tweets sent out on Trump’s account are all to his credit, unless they’re unpopular, in which case blame the unpaid staff. This concept of “the buck stopping here”, I guess it is quaint and old-fashioned, no place for it in CEO-style serial-bankruptcy presidenting.
ETA: I know, “blaming the people who do the work for which you claim credit” is just another way of emulating Reagan.
Oatler.
They can be cold as a falling thermometer in December if you ask about the weather in July.
Mary G
@ruemara: So excited for you! I’m sure it’ll be fantastic fun.
Applejinx
@Frankensteinbeck:
Huh. This could actually be the ‘fuck all of you so hard I’m voting Bernie’ moment. Frankensteinbeck is right. (yes, I’m half joking with all the talk of Trump endorsing Bernie just to fuck with people, but I think it’s funny and it highlights his narcissism)
There’s one thing I overlooked about Trump that now feels very obvious. He won’t tolerate being second. If this is true and he’s second place to a clown like Carson, he’s gonna flip out sooner or later. It might take more than one state to do it, though. Another angle he could take is ‘actually the intern is right, Iowans are idiots’ if he thinks he can get away with it.
Why just be divisive along racial lines?
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus
Yes.
Elizabelle
@ruemara: Good luck, ruemara. Keep us posted on the shoot.
I’ll have a mimosa for you a little later this morning. ;)
Elizabelle
We have our answer on how Morning Joke is going to handle Hillary’s star turn yesterday.
Today, their “first presidential town hall.”
With John Kasich.
Morning Republican begins in two minutes.
bemused
@Elizabelle:
Oh goody, that should be fun.
When watching parts of the hearing yesterday plus clips, the scene from the Airplane movie with passengers taking turns beating up panicked woman kept playing in my head.
Elizabelle
Joe says it was a “TKO” for Hillary Clinton.
Barnicle(?): riffing off a BJ comment last night: “If this committee had conducted the Watergate hearings, Richard Nixon would have finished his term.”
Elizabelle
Morning Republican is still attacking Hillary, though.
Ambassador did not have her email address, but Sid Blumenthal did. Why did she let her Ambassador die?
So: Committee is doofuses and show business, but Hillary is still a murderess.
raven
@Elizabelle: And that it’s too bad Nixon went down. What a fucking asshole.
BillinGlendaleCA
OT: Wednesday night madame and I went to Costco, they had a “Professional Weather Center”. I ended up going back today and picking one up. It’s way cool :).
Weather Bill on Morning Joe was talking about hurricane Patricia, damn that storm looks really awful. I’ve been down to Puerto Vallarta twice on cruises. It’s very pretty, hope it survives.
BillinGlendaleCA
Oh, and for those folk who were questioning why UCLA was wearing black uni’s, they do that for one game a year. They’ve been doing for several years, I think coach Neu started the tradition. I think the game tonight was homecoming(the Cal game traditionally is); pretty low turnout as least from what I could see on the TV.
Elizabelle
@BillinGlendaleCA: Yeah, was hearing the “strongest storm ever!” giddiness from the 5:00 am weather man on MSNBC. He sounded a bit rattled.
Elizabelle
Clip of Trevor Noah. Calling the marathon “Bingeghazi.” Funny.
Eleven hours. If you boarded a flight from DC, where would you be 11 hours out?
Gimlet
It’s time for a House select Committee to hold hearings and investigate the “Benghazi Committee”.
bystander
One of the Moanin’ Joe crew, the British blond (why are these people who are oh so knowledgeable about the US always Brits on MSNBC?), compared the way Gowdy is conducting the hearing to the way the 9/11 hearings were conducted. Her point was that when you act as if you’re interested in why something happened in the hopes you can avoid it happening again, you get better results and information than you do when the goal is to prosecute (or persecute, as the case may be).
Funny how that works, huh? If only Hillary had gotten an email “Attack in Libyan Outpost Imminent,” all of this could have been avoided.
Kay
@bystander:
They’re all as guilty as Dowdy. They never wanted to find out what happened. The entire media inquiry revolved around whether the White House made statements for political purposes. They went off the rails immediately, the next day. They chose to pursue the least substantive (and most subjective) part because that’s what Republicans were interested in. For six months they pretended something substantive was going to come out of that, the White House was “covering up” something with the statements, but they actually never got anything past “the White House statements were politically spun” which is hardly news and certainly not a crime.
bystander
@Kay:
You have to wonder if Issa’s not the winner here. He didn’t have the spectacularly public explosion Gowdy had, and Darrell could never have dreamed of having the host of company Trey enjoyed as co-exploders.
In a just world, there would be an SNL skit with an actually funny Hillary impersonator (not that woman who thinks rictus is humor) and a Zippy Pinhead with sweat gushing down his forehead.
Gimlet
Need to wait for polls to see whether the Benghazi strategy was successful.
Kay
@bystander:
I knew they were going to do this. The problem wasn’t that they had no theory of what she did wrong and instead held a hearing on the entire universe of what she might have done wrong, the problem was they didn’t have a “skilled prosecutor” who could find the alleged crime during the hearing.
They’re supposed to find the alleged wrongdoing in the investigation and then hold a hearing. If they don’t find anything they can’t just hold the hearing anyway, in hopes something comes up, or they CAN but it will look like yesterday’s hearing. This crazy idea they have that if they manage to trip up the witness that will provide the justification after the fact is just wrong. It isn’t how that works. They have it backward. It isn’t an indication of “partisanship” if they have a theory of what she did wrong. That’s an indication that it ISN’T a witchunt. They’re supposed to have a theory, and they have to have it before the hearing.
Kay
@bystander:
To me, listening to that, it was like “let’s call the witness so we can find out why we called the witness- the witness might tell us what our theory is if we go long enough”. There’s a fundamental flaw there that a “skilled prosecutor” probably can’t fix- they don’t have anything.
Clinton looked in control because she was in control. They were waiting for direction and a focus from her.
Amir Khalid
@Kay:
So Trey Gowdy and his committee wound up looking like fools, while Hillary now looks like a stronger candidate for president than ever. With enemies like these, who needs friends?
Docg
I am behind the curve. What exactly did Apple Pan Gowdy prosecute? Shoplifting crack whores?
Paul in KY
@Docg: Who had already confessed to their crimes & it was on video.
Bobby Thomson
@Ian: it’s a vanity fair article. But having Trump and his wall in the race locks down Colorado for Democrats.
Bobby Thomson
@sm*t cl*de: that’s been Trump’s MO since forever. Just watching his show a few times shows that. And it’s also typical CEO behavior.
Samuel Knight
Fun story – But Q-pac polls have been pretty clearly click bait this season. Consistently off in a way to make the MSM lazy journalists so very happy. Appears that they are just using the 2014 election voter screen to skew their results, completely ignoring the fact that 2016 voters will be very different.
Took awhile for the bloggers to realize Rasmussen were garbage, will take some time with Q-pac too. Q-pac won’t quit on their own, since they are getting lots of press by skewing the numbers.