Donald J. Trump
ISIS gained tremendous strength during Hillary Clinton's term as Secretary of State. When will the dishonest media report the facts!
So this is the editorial where we take on Donald Trump, right?
Wrong.
Donald's actually right.
And since the media has spent the last three weeks on two things he's said, we're sure they'll spend this week exploring the above statement, right?
Wrong.
They are a dishonest media.
MSNBC has allowed Andrea Mitchell to be in the tank for Hillary.
Now most MSNBC faces are jokes.
But Andrea pretends to be news when she appears on NBC NIGHTLY NEWS.
She's not.
Donald Trump is the GOP candidate for president and because of that the media feels they can rip him apart as they work overtime to avoid reporting the various misdeeds and scandals of Hillary Clinton.
This was all reviewed in last week's "Iraq snapshot:"
So Bully Boy Bush signed off on Nouri.
He was an awful prime minister.
Even in his first term, he was awful.
And Hillary noted that and called him a thug. It was her finest Iraq moment in 2008. (Not that there were many to choose from.)
In 2010, Iraq finally holds national elections. (They were supposed to take place in 2009.)
And the Iraqi people want?
Not Nouri.
He loses to Ayad Allawi, the head of Iraqiya -- an inclusive political group. Whether it was THE GUARDIAN, Emma Sky, NPR's Deborah Amos, US Gen Ray Odierno (then the top US commander in Iraq) or, yes, this site, there were many noting what a positive move that was.
Iraqis were rejecting sectarianism and pushing for a national identity.
Nouri refused to step down.
He had US support from US Ambassador to Iraq Chris Hill, from Susan I Mispoke Rice and from The Problem From Hell Samantha Power.
Hillary stayed on the sidelines and made no preference known.
US Vice President Joe Biden believed that Ayad needed to become prime minister. Those were the results.
But Nouri refused to step down.
This put the country into a political stalemate that lasted over eight months.
Urged by Rice and Power (Chris Hill was already on his way out, finally having been fired as US Ambassador to Iraq), Barack decided to back the loser Nouri al-Maliki.
How do you get around an election>
He had the US broker THE ERBIL AGREEMENT -- a legal contract all the political leaders signed off on.
The other leaders granted Nouri a second term and he in turn granted them what they wanted.
On paper.
But Nouri used it to get what he wanted and then trashed it.
After he was installed to a second term via Barack's contract, Nouri declared it unconstitutional and refused to honor it.
Samantha Power was not promoted to US Ambassador to the United Nations.
She was demoted out of the inner circle because of this, Libya and other questionable calls that had Valerie Jarrett (to name one) insisting she but pushed out the door.
Why does the Islamic State have a toehold in Iraq to begin with?
Because of Nouri al-Maliki.
He persecuted everyone but he really went after the Sunnis.
They were rounded up without charges and disappeared into Iraqi jails, prisons and secret prisons. (Ned Parker's work for THE LOS ANGELES TIMES exposed Nouri's use of secret prisons and detention centers.)
Sunni women and girls were tortured and raped in Iraqi jails and prisons.
Sunni journalists were targeted by the government, pulled off the streets and tortured.
Sunni protesters were targeted. The most mild form of targeting was having Iraqi forces publicly follow them to their homes (intimidation). In the worst case?
The April 23, 2013 massacre of a sit-in in Hawija which resulted from Nouri's federal forces storming in. Alsumaria noted Kirkuk's Department of Health (Hawija is in Kirkuk) announced 50 activists have died and 110 were injured in the assault. AFP reported the death toll eventually (as some wounded died) rose to 53 dead. UNICEF noted that the dead included 8 children (twelve more were injured).
Where were you, MSNBC?
Where were you, Mika?
It's not Orlando, it's not Paris, so it didn't matter?
It didn't matter to Barack.
He wouldn't immediately insist that Nouri step down.
It would be over a year later before Barack would do that.
Then there was the targeting of the Sunni politicians.
During all of this, the Sunni people were persecuted.
After the 2010 elections, we noted that they tried the ballot box to be heard.
Then political leaders in Iraq tried to solve the crises -- Ayad Allawi, Moqtada al-Sadr, Ammar al-Hakim, Massoud Barzani and others -- by telling Nouri that he had to honor The Erbil Agreement or they would vote in Parliament to remove him.
We all know what happened there, right?
Oh, we don't.
Because actual news isn't important to MSNBC.
The US government (Vice President Joe Biden led the effort) pressured then-President of Iraq Jalal Talabani to stop the vote. So Talabani created a power that didn't exist and declared the petition for the vote invalid before rushing off to Germany less than 18 hours later and saying he had to have emergency surgery.
He had knee surgery.
He just didn't want to face the fallout.
Karma would kick Jalal in his ass when he suffered a series of major strokes (yes, it was a series) and had to be moved to Germany. He has still not recovered and he never will which is why he is still kept out of public sight.
So the ballot box has been tossed. The political leaders could do nothing.
The Iraqi people take to the street to protest and they get arrested and intimidated and killed.
What is left?
It's that vacuum that allows the Islamic State to get a toe hold in Iraq.
They tried everything. Even carrying signs proclaiming"Obama, if you Cannot Hear Us Can you Not See Us?"
Iraqis in Samarra with a message for the world (photo via Iraqi Spring MC).
That's March 15, 2013. One month later, the Hawija massacre would take place.
Barack was still pretending not to see or hear the cries of the targeted in Iraq.
The world was looking the other way.
Into this vacuum, the Islamic State could and did enter promoting themselves as a group that would defend the Sunni people.
And had they just stayed with their terrorist attacks, they'd probably be more of an influence today.
But somewhere they decided they could govern -- they couldn't.
But for many Sunnis, the Islamic State was seen as someone fighting the government and the government was seen as something hostile to the Sunni people.
So the view was let them fight it out, we don't have a stake in this.
That's what happens after the world let Nouri al-Maliki persecute the Sunnis for eight years and no one wanted to even voice a defense of the Sunnis.
So that's Barack's fault.
It's Hillary's fault too.
She can claim that as Secretary of State, she couldn't speak out.
Don't agree with that but she left that post in January 2013.
She did not go into hiding.
She went into one public event after another.
And never once called out what Nouri was doing to the Sunni people -- even though she'd publicly identified him as a thug in April 2008.
So that's on Hillary too.
Will the media go over and over and over the latest Trump statement?
Or in their never-ending quest to elect Hillary Clinton, will they again ignore reality?