BustedKnuckles
Footballguy
whats goin on guys?
is everyone playin nice yet?
is everyone playin nice yet?
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Official Donald Trump Player Haters Club (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Captain Cranks
- Start date
McGarnicle
Footballguy
You're making two extremely contradictory statements here which I don't think you even realize....the "SIDA doctrine" of "blowing it all up" is an acknowledgement that Trump is toxic to the GOP. For the sake of this discussion, the GOP is assumed to be a party that wishes to advance a political/fiscal/foreign policy agenda that will be beneficial to our nation for the foreseeable future. You know -- peace, prosperity, ribeye steaks on sale at Safeway, cute kids flying kites at the beach, evil terrorists defeated at every turn.....GOP are good people in this discussion. Let's skip any debate of whether they actually are beneficial but agree that they have honorable intentions toward governance.
Now you're trying to portray yourself as open-minded, thoughtful, and worthy of even-handed debate with the likes of [insert names of FBGs you most respect here].......AND.....AND!!!!! you say without qualification that you wholesale agree with and "support" "almost all" of Trump's "positions". So Trump isn't just a toxic, dangerous, unpredictable element that would discredit the Republican Party for years....you're saying he's bringing forth the best case for how this country should be governed for the next 4 years?
I won't bother repeating the myriad statements by Trump that have been discredited because that's a huge reason these Trump threads are unreadable anymore. Just please try to reconcile the above two ideas, if you can. I'm truly interested in the cognitive process that navigates toward the conclusion you've found.
massraider
Footballguy
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
APR 12, 2016
106
The followers of He, Trump appear to be planning ahead quite nicely.
The emails warn that the delegates are being watched and imply they could be targeted. Some send ominous wishes to delegates' families. Trump's Indiana campaign called the threats "deplorable." Craig Dunn, a delegate and Republican chairman of Indiana's 4th Congressional District, was among the Trump critics who received the threatening messages. "You sorry (expletive)!" one email said. "I hope the worst for you and yours!" Dunn was stunned by the response. "Little did I know that in expressing your 1st Amendment rights, that they'd come after you so hard," he said. "It's very disappointing. I probably received 25 to 30 hate emails, phone calls and voice mails, posts on Facebook that I deleted. Now they're hunting down friends of mine and posting that kind of stuff on their Facebook pages."
Dunn is an interesting character. He is an anti-choice stalwart who champions, at least in his public statements, a solid economic safety net for the mother and the child.
Howard County Republican Chairman Craig Dunn in his Howey Politics Indiana column earlier this year, observed of pro-life organizations: "They seem to labor under a thought process that says, 'If you have an unwanted pregnancy, have the baby. If you have been told that you will have a baby with congenital birth defects, have the baby. If you've been raped and are pregnant, have the baby.' Then, when the baby arrives, their attitude transforms to, 'It's your problem, deal with it!'" Dunn continued, "We simply can no longer demand that a woman give birth to a baby and then feel no sense of responsibility for the well-being of the child."
So, at the very least, Dunn seems to be a more a reasonable person than either of the two putative Republican presidential frontrunners. Over the weekend, as the state party met to select delegates to next summer's convention—all of whom are pledged to the winner of the state's primary only on the first ballot—Dunn gave an interview to Tiger Beat On The Potomac.
"If Satan had the lead on him and was one delegate away from being nominated as our candidate, and Donald Trump was the alternative, I might vote for Donald Trump," Dunn told the website.
Several other delegates spoke to TBOTP as well. And then the roof fell in.
One of those delegates, Kyle Babcock, said he'll support the party's nominee, but has doubts about Trump's viability in the general election. "Donald Trump talks about polls, polls, polls," he said. "That's been the theme of his campaign. Using that methodology, I'm looking at polls, and that leads me to believe at this point that Donald Trump can't beat Hillary Clinton." Such comments earned him disdain from Trump supporters. "Wrong side Kyle," said one email. "Hope the families well. Your name and info was sent to me on a list that is going public. Think before you take a step down the wrong path, the American people want to have faith in your but it looks like a future in hiding is more appealing." The email was signed, "The American."
He, Trump is ginning up the rhetoric again. (On Monday, at a rally in Albany, the customary ugliness was on display again.) Now he's telling his audiences that The Establishment is trying to steal a nomination that is rightfully his. Since his most devoted followers are willing to swallow whatever bilge he spoons out to them, and since many of them appear to be new not only to politics, but to human interaction itself, this cannot end well in any way. Yes, I continue to believe that the Republicans brought all of this on themselves—after all, it was the anti-choice movement that pioneered the harassment of targets at their homes and in their offices, Mr. Dunn—but that doesn't mean the rest of the country deserves what might be coming.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a43884/anti-trump-delegates-hate-mail-threats/
APR 12, 2016
106
The followers of He, Trump appear to be planning ahead quite nicely.
The emails warn that the delegates are being watched and imply they could be targeted. Some send ominous wishes to delegates' families. Trump's Indiana campaign called the threats "deplorable." Craig Dunn, a delegate and Republican chairman of Indiana's 4th Congressional District, was among the Trump critics who received the threatening messages. "You sorry (expletive)!" one email said. "I hope the worst for you and yours!" Dunn was stunned by the response. "Little did I know that in expressing your 1st Amendment rights, that they'd come after you so hard," he said. "It's very disappointing. I probably received 25 to 30 hate emails, phone calls and voice mails, posts on Facebook that I deleted. Now they're hunting down friends of mine and posting that kind of stuff on their Facebook pages."
Dunn is an interesting character. He is an anti-choice stalwart who champions, at least in his public statements, a solid economic safety net for the mother and the child.
Howard County Republican Chairman Craig Dunn in his Howey Politics Indiana column earlier this year, observed of pro-life organizations: "They seem to labor under a thought process that says, 'If you have an unwanted pregnancy, have the baby. If you have been told that you will have a baby with congenital birth defects, have the baby. If you've been raped and are pregnant, have the baby.' Then, when the baby arrives, their attitude transforms to, 'It's your problem, deal with it!'" Dunn continued, "We simply can no longer demand that a woman give birth to a baby and then feel no sense of responsibility for the well-being of the child."
So, at the very least, Dunn seems to be a more a reasonable person than either of the two putative Republican presidential frontrunners. Over the weekend, as the state party met to select delegates to next summer's convention—all of whom are pledged to the winner of the state's primary only on the first ballot—Dunn gave an interview to Tiger Beat On The Potomac.
"If Satan had the lead on him and was one delegate away from being nominated as our candidate, and Donald Trump was the alternative, I might vote for Donald Trump," Dunn told the website.
Several other delegates spoke to TBOTP as well. And then the roof fell in.
One of those delegates, Kyle Babcock, said he'll support the party's nominee, but has doubts about Trump's viability in the general election. "Donald Trump talks about polls, polls, polls," he said. "That's been the theme of his campaign. Using that methodology, I'm looking at polls, and that leads me to believe at this point that Donald Trump can't beat Hillary Clinton." Such comments earned him disdain from Trump supporters. "Wrong side Kyle," said one email. "Hope the families well. Your name and info was sent to me on a list that is going public. Think before you take a step down the wrong path, the American people want to have faith in your but it looks like a future in hiding is more appealing." The email was signed, "The American."
He, Trump is ginning up the rhetoric again. (On Monday, at a rally in Albany, the customary ugliness was on display again.) Now he's telling his audiences that The Establishment is trying to steal a nomination that is rightfully his. Since his most devoted followers are willing to swallow whatever bilge he spoons out to them, and since many of them appear to be new not only to politics, but to human interaction itself, this cannot end well in any way. Yes, I continue to believe that the Republicans brought all of this on themselves—after all, it was the anti-choice movement that pioneered the harassment of targets at their homes and in their offices, Mr. Dunn—but that doesn't mean the rest of the country deserves what might be coming.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a43884/anti-trump-delegates-hate-mail-threats/
McGarnicle
Footballguy
Ditkaless Wonders
Footballguy
Do you own a cardigan, an Andy Williams album and have you eaten both haggis and lutefisk? If not you could be whiter.
I can't believe I missed my chance to usewhen DitkaB and Higgs were trying to tell me I wasn't white
You hate to cast a wide blanket about Liberals...then you cast a wide blanket.
Now a serious question: how is what you said different from people casting a wide net by saying that most Trump supporters are thin-skinned bigots?
Edit to add: For the sake of fairness, you can remove the word "bigot" since it could be considered an insult.
The important point of my question is about using the word "most" when describing a group of people, especially a group that you (or I) think negatively of.
Last edited by a moderator:
massraider
Footballguy
Top Trump Aide Led the ‘Torturers’ Lobby’
Paul Manafort and the partners at his firm made a fortune repping some of the most despicable dictators of the 20th century.
Over the course of a long lobbying career in D.C., top Trump aide Paul Manafort and his firm made a fortune fronting for a group of clients once referred to as the “torturers’ lobby.”
So when Manafort accused opponent Ted Cruz of using “gestapo tactics” to court Republican delegates on Meet the Press this past Sunday—it’s something he may have quite a bit of experience with firsthand.
Manafort was a principal at the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly (along with another top Trump ally, Nixon alum Roger Stone) a K Street powerhouse with close ties to the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, as well as top Republicans on Capitol Hill.
But over the years, they made millions by representing a rogue’s gallery of clients far away from D.C.’s genteel corridors of power: dictators, guerilla groups, and despots with no regard for human rights—including one man responsible for mass amputations, and another who oversaw state-sanctioned rape.
One such client was Jonas Savimbi, who led a guerilla army trying to wrest control of the Angolan government from Marxists during the country’s brutal civil war. Savimbi hired Manafort’s lobbying firm to help him get financial support from the U.S. government for his guerilla army, UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola).
And Manafort and co. delivered.
“What the firm achieved was quickly dubbed ‘Savimbi chic,’” reported Time magazine in 1986. “Doors swung open all over town for the guerrilla leader, who was dapperly attired in a Nehru suit and ferried about in a stretch limousine.”
Savimbi paid the firm $600,000 in 1985 for their trouble, The Washington Post reported. The lobbying paid off: then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole urged the State Department to send heavy arms to Savimbi’s guerilla army. Savimbi came back for more in 1989, putting the firm on retainer to orchestrate a media blitz. They got him booked on 60 Minutes and Nightline, as the Post noted, and they shelled out more than $200,000 to put him up at the Waldorf-Astoria and Grand Hotel.
“It greatly helped repackage Savimbi as a valiant anti-communist ‘freedom fighter,’” reported Nairobi’s The Daily Nation.
And that so-called freedom fight was quite lucrative for Manafort’s firm—so lucrative, in fact, that they didn’t want it to stop. Spy Magazine reported that the firm’s “hawkish congressional lobbying for more military aid” may have kept a ceasefire in the country’s civil war from coming sooner.
“Clearly, Savimbi wanted peace negotiations for a longer time than Black, Manafort wanted negotiations,” said one conservative Hill aide sympathetic with Savimbi, according to the magazine.
In his memoir, former Sen. Bill Bradley credited Savimbi’s lobbying team with lengthening the war.
“I thought we were making a colossal blunder in Angola,” he wrote. “I had no sense that Jonas Savimbi, our client guerilla warrior, was any more committed to democracy than was the country’s dictatorial leftist leadership. When Gorbachev pulled the plug on Soviet aid to the Angolan government, we had absolutely no reason to persist in aiding Savimbi. But by then he had hired an effective Washington lobbying firm, which successfully obtained further funding.”
The slow peace process meant protracted violence. From 1986 to 1987, the Reagan administration sent a total of $42 million to UNITA. According to Joy James’s book Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture, Savimbi’s army “maimed or killed tens of thousands, creating one of the largest amputee populations in the world through its laying of landmines in farm fields, roads, and school yards.”
As is often the case, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. And Savimbi’s army was particularly violent.
“Indiscriminate killings, mutilation of limbs or ears, and beatings were used by rebels to punish suspected government sympathizers or as a warning against betraying UNITA,” reads a Human Rights Watch report. “UNITA continued to forcibly recruit men and teenage boys to fight. Girls were held in sexual slavery and used as a source of forced labor.”
Savimbi and UNITA were not the only Manafort clients comfortable with brutality.
A 1992 report from the Center for Public Integrity listed Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly as one of the lobbying firms to profit the most by doing business with foreign governments that violated their people’s human rights.
From 1991 to 1992, the firm made $3.3 million from what the Center for Public Integrity dubbed “the torturers’ lobby.”
From 1990 to 1993, the Kenyan government paid Manafort’s firm more than $1.4 million to lobby the U.S. government to send them more aid. In that window of time, the U.S. was highly critical of the country’s human rights record, as the Center for Public Integrity detailed.
Severe police brutality, prisoner abuse, and crack-downs on hunger strikers all drew opprobrium. The country still raked in $38.3 million in aid from the U.S. government—thanks in part to the hard work of Manafort and his partners.
Mobutu Sese Seko, dictator of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of congo) also benefitted from Manafort’s lobbying expertise. The Guardian described him as “one of Africa’s most flamboyantly corrupt leaders.”
He was also one of its worst. Human rights activists hold the dictator responsible for government-sanctioned torture, detainment, and rape.
“Quantitatively, I think Zaire has the worst human rights record in Africa,” one UN official told the Chicago Tribune in 1997. “In terms of social and economic rights and the number of state actors violating those rights, it’s massive. And the bulk of human rights violations in this country never will be known. It’s a black hole.”
And the black hole had a powerful ally. The dictator retained Manafort’s firm in 1989 to help remedy some longstanding PR problems—for a cool $1 million a year.
Manafort partner Charlie Black, who backs Ohio Governor John Kasich in the presidential race, pushed back on the assertion that his firm’s foreign clients were anything but above board and said they “never (1981-present) accepted a foreign client without informally clearing with the State Department that our scope of work is in U.S. interests.”
“In the case of Mobutu, he told US he would have democratic elections for a parliament. US State asked us to organize those elections,” Black said. “We did. He did not like the results and fired us.”
But, of course, there’s more. In 1985, Manafort himself announced that his firm would take on the Chamber of Philippine Manufacturers, Exporters, and Tourists Associations as a client. That group had close ties with dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whose regime put the country under martial law and was responsible for hundreds of cases of torture. In 2004, Transparency International listed him as one of the world’s 10 most notorious leaders of the previous two decades (along with Mobutu Sese Seko, another Manafort client). They estimate Marcos embezzled between $5 and $10 million from his people. Almost 50,000 Filipinos have filed claims for reparations for crimes against them during Marcos’s era of martial law, according to the Philippine news site Rappler.com.
Marcos enlisted Manafort’s team as part of an effort to appear more democratic. Time reported that he paid the firm $900,000, and that they said they were trying to make Americans have more faith in the country’s democratic process.
“What we’ve tried to do is make it more of a Chicago-style election and not Mexico’s,” Manafort told the magazine.
When the Reagan administration finally soured on the dictator—the whole “Chicago-style election” thing didn’t exactly work out—they helped out their pals at the firm.
“The firm was so entwined with the Reagan White House that administration officials gave it a heads-up so it could cancel its contract with a client, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, two hours before Reagan withdrew his support,” reported The New York Times in 2008.
Another dictator who both made Transparency International’s list and Paul Manafort’s was Sani Abacha of Nigeria. He hired a different Manafort firm—Davis, Manafort & Freedman—in 1998 as part of “an aggressive public relations and lobbying campaign to persuade Americans that he was the leader of a progressive emerging democracy,” according to The New York Times. Richard Davis, one of the principals in that firm, took a leave of absence to run John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. When a reporter asked McCain’s campaign about his campaign manager’s association with Abacha, the campaign pointed to Manafort.
“Howard Opinsky, a press secretary for the McCain campaign, said tonight that Mr. Davis did not actually work on the Nigeria account and that it was handled by a partner, Paul Manafort,” The New York Times noted in a 2000 report.
Highlights of the Nigeria account include lots of torture. A 1997 State Department report detailed persistent torture and abuse under the Abacha regime.
“[D]etainees frequently died while in custody,” reads the report, “and there were credible reports that security officers seeking to extract confessions regularly beat suspects, detainees, and convicted prisoners. Security officers tortured prisoners with whippings, suspension by the limbs from the ceiling, burning with candles, and extraction of teeth.”
Then there was Manafort’s work for Putinite Viktor Yanukovych, who became president in 2010. Manafort had been introduced to Yanukovych by Ukraine’s richest man, an industrialist named Rinat Akhmetov, The New York Times reported.
It was Manafort’s most recent high-profile political consulting job, and while his candidate was victorious, Yanukovych was eventually drummed out of office in disgrace in 2014 after accusations that he undercut freedom of the press and tried to suppress opposition political parties.
At the time of the election, Manafort had spun that Yanukovych was merely misunderstood, and that “the West has not been willing to move beyond the cold war mentality and to see this man and the outreach that he has extended.”
As the seminal Euromaidan protests, which pressed the pro-Putin Yanukovych to develop closer ties with Europe, grew to a climax and reports of Yanukovych’s lavish spending became public, he was removed from the presidency—but not before being accused of using a special police force to violently disband protesters. Even his own political party would eventually condemn him and cast him out.
Supporters of transparency and reform in Ukraine are appalled that a former Yanukovych advisor is now involved with the American presidential elections.
“Now we hear that an advisor of Yanukovych, Paul Manafort, has been hired by the Donald Trump campaign. This is someone who took part in perversion of democracy in Ukraine and if [Manafort’s] role in that fiasco turns out to be substantial, then he should not be allowed within 100 feet of government buildings of any self-respecting democracy,” Pavel Yarmolenko, a spokesman for the Ukraine Freedom Support Group, told The Daily Beast. The UFSG is dedicated to urging Congress to approve aid to Ukraine.
The list of unsavory clients continues on: In the mid-1980s, during the Reagan era, Manafort peddled influence on behalf of Saudi Arabia, urging Congress not to pass legislation to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—a long standing contention in the broader Arab-Israeli dispute. Manafort’s lobbying then is counter to Trump’s current position on the issue, and most political candidates seeking support from the pro-Israel community have advocated for moving the embassy to Jerusalem, which Israel has declared to be its capital.
To this day, Saudi Arabia continues to have one of the world’s worst human rights records—but that never seemed to bother Manafort: Ultimately for his efforts to lobby for and advise the Saudi government, he was paid what with inflation would today be more than $1.5 million.
Manafort’s firm also made $450,000 a year from the now-deposed Somalian dictatorship of Siad Barre, according to the now-defunct Spy Magazine in 1992.
Barre, who took power as president through a coup, ruled for 22 years before he was overthrown during a civil war. The dictator sought ties with the Soviet Union and attempted to implement an official ideology called “scientific socialism,” but later attempted to switch course and seek U.S. aid. Barre’s exile left the country on the edge of mass starvation, The New York Times reported in the dictator’s obituary, and his time as its president was most notable for a war with Ethiopia and numerous human rights abuses.
Trump’s campaign has stirred controversy not only for his contentious comments and puzzling proposals, but also for the company he keeps. He has hired as senior staffers a lawyer who doesn’t think spousal rape is a crime and a campaign manager who has been charged with assault, for example.
So a lobbyist to the world’s most reprehensible dictators might fit in just fine.
Paul Manafort and the partners at his firm made a fortune repping some of the most despicable dictators of the 20th century.
Over the course of a long lobbying career in D.C., top Trump aide Paul Manafort and his firm made a fortune fronting for a group of clients once referred to as the “torturers’ lobby.”
So when Manafort accused opponent Ted Cruz of using “gestapo tactics” to court Republican delegates on Meet the Press this past Sunday—it’s something he may have quite a bit of experience with firsthand.
Manafort was a principal at the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly (along with another top Trump ally, Nixon alum Roger Stone) a K Street powerhouse with close ties to the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, as well as top Republicans on Capitol Hill.
But over the years, they made millions by representing a rogue’s gallery of clients far away from D.C.’s genteel corridors of power: dictators, guerilla groups, and despots with no regard for human rights—including one man responsible for mass amputations, and another who oversaw state-sanctioned rape.
One such client was Jonas Savimbi, who led a guerilla army trying to wrest control of the Angolan government from Marxists during the country’s brutal civil war. Savimbi hired Manafort’s lobbying firm to help him get financial support from the U.S. government for his guerilla army, UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola).
And Manafort and co. delivered.
“What the firm achieved was quickly dubbed ‘Savimbi chic,’” reported Time magazine in 1986. “Doors swung open all over town for the guerrilla leader, who was dapperly attired in a Nehru suit and ferried about in a stretch limousine.”
Savimbi paid the firm $600,000 in 1985 for their trouble, The Washington Post reported. The lobbying paid off: then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole urged the State Department to send heavy arms to Savimbi’s guerilla army. Savimbi came back for more in 1989, putting the firm on retainer to orchestrate a media blitz. They got him booked on 60 Minutes and Nightline, as the Post noted, and they shelled out more than $200,000 to put him up at the Waldorf-Astoria and Grand Hotel.
“It greatly helped repackage Savimbi as a valiant anti-communist ‘freedom fighter,’” reported Nairobi’s The Daily Nation.
And that so-called freedom fight was quite lucrative for Manafort’s firm—so lucrative, in fact, that they didn’t want it to stop. Spy Magazine reported that the firm’s “hawkish congressional lobbying for more military aid” may have kept a ceasefire in the country’s civil war from coming sooner.
“Clearly, Savimbi wanted peace negotiations for a longer time than Black, Manafort wanted negotiations,” said one conservative Hill aide sympathetic with Savimbi, according to the magazine.
In his memoir, former Sen. Bill Bradley credited Savimbi’s lobbying team with lengthening the war.
“I thought we were making a colossal blunder in Angola,” he wrote. “I had no sense that Jonas Savimbi, our client guerilla warrior, was any more committed to democracy than was the country’s dictatorial leftist leadership. When Gorbachev pulled the plug on Soviet aid to the Angolan government, we had absolutely no reason to persist in aiding Savimbi. But by then he had hired an effective Washington lobbying firm, which successfully obtained further funding.”
The slow peace process meant protracted violence. From 1986 to 1987, the Reagan administration sent a total of $42 million to UNITA. According to Joy James’s book Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture, Savimbi’s army “maimed or killed tens of thousands, creating one of the largest amputee populations in the world through its laying of landmines in farm fields, roads, and school yards.”
As is often the case, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. And Savimbi’s army was particularly violent.
“Indiscriminate killings, mutilation of limbs or ears, and beatings were used by rebels to punish suspected government sympathizers or as a warning against betraying UNITA,” reads a Human Rights Watch report. “UNITA continued to forcibly recruit men and teenage boys to fight. Girls were held in sexual slavery and used as a source of forced labor.”
Savimbi and UNITA were not the only Manafort clients comfortable with brutality.
A 1992 report from the Center for Public Integrity listed Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly as one of the lobbying firms to profit the most by doing business with foreign governments that violated their people’s human rights.
From 1991 to 1992, the firm made $3.3 million from what the Center for Public Integrity dubbed “the torturers’ lobby.”
From 1990 to 1993, the Kenyan government paid Manafort’s firm more than $1.4 million to lobby the U.S. government to send them more aid. In that window of time, the U.S. was highly critical of the country’s human rights record, as the Center for Public Integrity detailed.
Severe police brutality, prisoner abuse, and crack-downs on hunger strikers all drew opprobrium. The country still raked in $38.3 million in aid from the U.S. government—thanks in part to the hard work of Manafort and his partners.
Mobutu Sese Seko, dictator of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of congo) also benefitted from Manafort’s lobbying expertise. The Guardian described him as “one of Africa’s most flamboyantly corrupt leaders.”
He was also one of its worst. Human rights activists hold the dictator responsible for government-sanctioned torture, detainment, and rape.
“Quantitatively, I think Zaire has the worst human rights record in Africa,” one UN official told the Chicago Tribune in 1997. “In terms of social and economic rights and the number of state actors violating those rights, it’s massive. And the bulk of human rights violations in this country never will be known. It’s a black hole.”
And the black hole had a powerful ally. The dictator retained Manafort’s firm in 1989 to help remedy some longstanding PR problems—for a cool $1 million a year.
Manafort partner Charlie Black, who backs Ohio Governor John Kasich in the presidential race, pushed back on the assertion that his firm’s foreign clients were anything but above board and said they “never (1981-present) accepted a foreign client without informally clearing with the State Department that our scope of work is in U.S. interests.”
“In the case of Mobutu, he told US he would have democratic elections for a parliament. US State asked us to organize those elections,” Black said. “We did. He did not like the results and fired us.”
But, of course, there’s more. In 1985, Manafort himself announced that his firm would take on the Chamber of Philippine Manufacturers, Exporters, and Tourists Associations as a client. That group had close ties with dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whose regime put the country under martial law and was responsible for hundreds of cases of torture. In 2004, Transparency International listed him as one of the world’s 10 most notorious leaders of the previous two decades (along with Mobutu Sese Seko, another Manafort client). They estimate Marcos embezzled between $5 and $10 million from his people. Almost 50,000 Filipinos have filed claims for reparations for crimes against them during Marcos’s era of martial law, according to the Philippine news site Rappler.com.
Marcos enlisted Manafort’s team as part of an effort to appear more democratic. Time reported that he paid the firm $900,000, and that they said they were trying to make Americans have more faith in the country’s democratic process.
“What we’ve tried to do is make it more of a Chicago-style election and not Mexico’s,” Manafort told the magazine.
When the Reagan administration finally soured on the dictator—the whole “Chicago-style election” thing didn’t exactly work out—they helped out their pals at the firm.
“The firm was so entwined with the Reagan White House that administration officials gave it a heads-up so it could cancel its contract with a client, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, two hours before Reagan withdrew his support,” reported The New York Times in 2008.
Another dictator who both made Transparency International’s list and Paul Manafort’s was Sani Abacha of Nigeria. He hired a different Manafort firm—Davis, Manafort & Freedman—in 1998 as part of “an aggressive public relations and lobbying campaign to persuade Americans that he was the leader of a progressive emerging democracy,” according to The New York Times. Richard Davis, one of the principals in that firm, took a leave of absence to run John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. When a reporter asked McCain’s campaign about his campaign manager’s association with Abacha, the campaign pointed to Manafort.
“Howard Opinsky, a press secretary for the McCain campaign, said tonight that Mr. Davis did not actually work on the Nigeria account and that it was handled by a partner, Paul Manafort,” The New York Times noted in a 2000 report.
Highlights of the Nigeria account include lots of torture. A 1997 State Department report detailed persistent torture and abuse under the Abacha regime.
“[D]etainees frequently died while in custody,” reads the report, “and there were credible reports that security officers seeking to extract confessions regularly beat suspects, detainees, and convicted prisoners. Security officers tortured prisoners with whippings, suspension by the limbs from the ceiling, burning with candles, and extraction of teeth.”
Then there was Manafort’s work for Putinite Viktor Yanukovych, who became president in 2010. Manafort had been introduced to Yanukovych by Ukraine’s richest man, an industrialist named Rinat Akhmetov, The New York Times reported.
It was Manafort’s most recent high-profile political consulting job, and while his candidate was victorious, Yanukovych was eventually drummed out of office in disgrace in 2014 after accusations that he undercut freedom of the press and tried to suppress opposition political parties.
At the time of the election, Manafort had spun that Yanukovych was merely misunderstood, and that “the West has not been willing to move beyond the cold war mentality and to see this man and the outreach that he has extended.”
As the seminal Euromaidan protests, which pressed the pro-Putin Yanukovych to develop closer ties with Europe, grew to a climax and reports of Yanukovych’s lavish spending became public, he was removed from the presidency—but not before being accused of using a special police force to violently disband protesters. Even his own political party would eventually condemn him and cast him out.
Supporters of transparency and reform in Ukraine are appalled that a former Yanukovych advisor is now involved with the American presidential elections.
“Now we hear that an advisor of Yanukovych, Paul Manafort, has been hired by the Donald Trump campaign. This is someone who took part in perversion of democracy in Ukraine and if [Manafort’s] role in that fiasco turns out to be substantial, then he should not be allowed within 100 feet of government buildings of any self-respecting democracy,” Pavel Yarmolenko, a spokesman for the Ukraine Freedom Support Group, told The Daily Beast. The UFSG is dedicated to urging Congress to approve aid to Ukraine.
The list of unsavory clients continues on: In the mid-1980s, during the Reagan era, Manafort peddled influence on behalf of Saudi Arabia, urging Congress not to pass legislation to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—a long standing contention in the broader Arab-Israeli dispute. Manafort’s lobbying then is counter to Trump’s current position on the issue, and most political candidates seeking support from the pro-Israel community have advocated for moving the embassy to Jerusalem, which Israel has declared to be its capital.
To this day, Saudi Arabia continues to have one of the world’s worst human rights records—but that never seemed to bother Manafort: Ultimately for his efforts to lobby for and advise the Saudi government, he was paid what with inflation would today be more than $1.5 million.
Manafort’s firm also made $450,000 a year from the now-deposed Somalian dictatorship of Siad Barre, according to the now-defunct Spy Magazine in 1992.
Barre, who took power as president through a coup, ruled for 22 years before he was overthrown during a civil war. The dictator sought ties with the Soviet Union and attempted to implement an official ideology called “scientific socialism,” but later attempted to switch course and seek U.S. aid. Barre’s exile left the country on the edge of mass starvation, The New York Times reported in the dictator’s obituary, and his time as its president was most notable for a war with Ethiopia and numerous human rights abuses.
Trump’s campaign has stirred controversy not only for his contentious comments and puzzling proposals, but also for the company he keeps. He has hired as senior staffers a lawyer who doesn’t think spousal rape is a crime and a campaign manager who has been charged with assault, for example.
So a lobbyist to the world’s most reprehensible dictators might fit in just fine.
Tom Servo
Nittany Beavers
He's DEAD, Donald!
Dude is a certifiable idiot.
First off, he died in 2012. Unless he pulls a Jesus, he ain't coming back. Second, Pittsburgh HATES Penn State so why would you mention that? That's not going to get you applause in SW PA. Anywhere else, perhaps, but not Pittsburgh/Allegheny County.
Dude is a certifiable idiot.
Captain Cranks
Footballguy
Trump asks Pittsburgh, "How is Joe Paterno?" Oh, I don't know, Donald. He doesn't send letters from hell anymore.
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/04/donald-trump-forgets-joe-paterno-died
Trump commends firemen and police during 7-11. Must have be a pretty nasty shoplifting incident.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/18/politics/donald-trump-9-11-7-11-mix-buffalo/
Can't wait to vote for this guy. Will make America great again.
ETA - Here's Jim Rome's take on the JoePa flub
Starts 14:40 in hour 3: Rome on Trump
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/04/donald-trump-forgets-joe-paterno-died
Trump commends firemen and police during 7-11. Must have be a pretty nasty shoplifting incident.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/18/politics/donald-trump-9-11-7-11-mix-buffalo/
Can't wait to vote for this guy. Will make America great again.
ETA - Here's Jim Rome's take on the JoePa flub
Starts 14:40 in hour 3: Rome on Trump
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msommer
Footballguy
massraider
Footballguy
I am sure it has been said several times, but I salute the worldwide media, whom have all silently and collectively agreed to include the most unflattering Trump photos possible with each piece.
I never get let down. Every time I click a link, another brutal Trump pic.
My favorite is the white man overbite pic, with his miniature index finger pointing in the air.
http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/55918a4b6da811695ab77f22-480/rtx1gzco.jpg
I never get let down. Every time I click a link, another brutal Trump pic.
My favorite is the white man overbite pic, with his miniature index finger pointing in the air.
http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/55918a4b6da811695ab77f22-480/rtx1gzco.jpg
Chadstroma
Footballguy
I agree but it isn't just the FFA.
There is no such thing as open and honest communication about race in America. If it happens, it does so in the most safest of relationships behind closed doors and hushed voices. In my view, it is a bigger problem than outright racism is in America.
My biggest hope for the Obama Presidency was that he would be able to change that culture to where we might be able to start having real conversations, understanding and healing. Sadly, I think he just flamed the flames further and closed the dialogue even more so.
msommer
Footballguy
Captain Cranks
Footballguy
At this point I hope he wins the nomination so that the Republicans lose the White House and Congress. A lot of people are voting for a Democratic shilacking in November and don't even realize it.
lod01
Footballguy
Captain Cranks
Footballguy
You can take the monkey out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the monkey.
Trump acting presidential
Trump acting presidential
