So, Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall is demanding that ABC News turn over all of its e-mail and text messages related to the Sept. 10 presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Well, as my dad used to say, you can demand with one hand and spit in the other, and see which fills up fastest.
There’s not much new to Marshall’s complaint against ABC — mostly it’s just a rehashing of right-wing talking points that the moderators in the ABC-run debate were unfair to Trump for fact-checking him on his wildest claims, including that (legal) Haitian immigrants are eating the dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, and that OB-GYNs (of which Marshall is one) are executing newborns.
I’d like to think that as a United States senator, Marshall would have better things to do with his time than try to leverage the power of his office on a weird crusade to try to rehabilitate Trump’s disastrous performance on the debate stage.
I’d like to think that. You probably would too. But the counter-proof is right there in black and white — with the senator’s signature on his official Senate letterhead with 15 footnotes in a 2 1/2 page letter.
About all Marshall’s grandstanding can accomplish here is to remind everybody how badly Trump lost the debate.
In a CNN post-debate poll, 63% said Harris won their face-off. That was just slightly less than the 67% who said Trump won his June 27 debate with President Joe Biden, which ultimately ended Biden’s reelection campaign and political career.
One of Marshall’s big beefs with the moderators was that they didn’t call Harris out on her statement: “There is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world, for the first time this century.”
As counter-evidence, Marshall points out that three U.S. soldiers were killed in Jordan this year, seven wounded in a raid on ISIS militants in Iraq and eight injured in a drone attack on their base in Syria, and 50,000 are deployed to the Mediterranean and the Middle East, supporting Israel in its ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.
This is what you call a debatable proposition, whether those areas qualify as a combat zone or war zone.
One could easily take the position that they do — that when fighting a global war against terrorism, our soldiers are always at war overseas because the enemy can and does strike well outside areas of immediate conflict.
But that’s the exact opposite of the position that Marshall took 28 days ago, when he signed on to a letter by 50 members of Congress blasting Minnesota Gov. and Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz for saying in a 2018 speech on gun control: “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.”
Last month, Marshall called that a lie and accused Walz — a 25-year veteran of the National Guard — of “stolen valor” because his overseas deployment supporting Operation Enduring Freedom, the Afghanistan War, was in Italy providing base security.
So which is it senator? Is the Mediterranean a war zone or not? I don’t see how you can credibly say it wasn’t when the United States was actively engaged in mass daily combat with the terrorists, but it is now that we’re not.
The pattern here is obvious. Having Trump in the Oval Office is the only thing that matters to our junior senator.
He demonstrated that graphically on Jan. 6, 2021, when his own legislative chamber was violently attacked and captured by “stop the steal” weirdos — and Marshall supported their cause, voting to continue trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the face of overwhelming evidence that Trump simply lost.
As for his demand to ABC, the network should answer with a demand that Marshall turn over all his e-mail and texts demonstrating his ongoing waste of government time and resources in support of the MAGA Man.
Sen. Marshall, if you show them yours, maybe they’ll show you theirs.
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Publish date : 2024-09-20 07:26:00
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