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PolitiFact: Trump wasn’t against the Iraq War

His line to Lauer was transparently ridiculous – how could a 2004 interview supply evidence of having opposed a war that began in 2003?

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Replied questioner Mike Barnicle, “You’re kidding me”.

SC senator and unabashed Trump critic Lindsey Graham was withering: “Other than destroying every instrument of democracy in his country, having opposition people killed, dismembering neighbours through military force, and being the benefactor of the butcher of Damascus, [Putin’s] a good guy”. Clinton’s answer, unsurprisingly, is no. Asked to square his request for military options with that criticism, Trump said simply: “They’ll probably be different generals”. “I find it frustrating, but it’s part of the landscape we live in”. With impunity, he repeats statements debunked by fact checkers.

With just two months until Election Day, national security has emerged as a centerpiece issue in the White House race.

During a speech in the state of Florida this week, Clinton said Trump is “temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be President of the US” She added that Trump lacks a plan to fight the terror group Islamic State.

Clinton’s appeal is the traditional Democratic sop: Government will take care of you. Yet enthusiasm for Mr. Trump is greater than for Mrs. Clinton, and momentum seems to be shifting his way. “Given the current numbers, the major question is the size of Hillary Clinton’s electoral vote victory”, Rothenberg wrote last week in The Washington Post. He’s never specified what, exactly, he was sorry about.

But the Clinton campaign acknowledged she had to spend more time focussing her remarks on herself so voters could see the “aspirational” vision she hopes to enact if she becomes the first woman elected US president. “Our leaders did not follow what they were recommending”.

“He’s displayed a reckless level of ignorance and intolerance and that needs to be called out”, said Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon.

“Clinton announced today she will be meeting with a bipartisan group of high-profile security experts in NY tomorrow, including David Petraeus, Michael Chertoff, and Janet Napolitano”, Cordes stated at the end of her report, seemingly impressed by Clinton’s schedule.

“I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions”. And that’s a hard path to walk. “I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional”.

Some of the pushback is clearly strategic.

Lauer is getting raked over the coals by the Left, who contend that he wasn’t as tough on Trump as he should have been.

Clinton told a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, that Trump’s comment that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “far more” of a leader than President Barack Obama “shocked her”. Lauer also could have pointed out Thursday that Trump’s statement about Iraq had been fact checked and voters could investigate it for themselves, said Alan Schroeder, author of “Presidential Debates: 50 Years of High-Risk TV”.

One Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham of SC, volunteered his own thoughts on Putin.

Sixty days out, one senses she has lost momentum – the “Big Mo” of which George H.W. Bush boasted following his Iowa triumph in 1980 – and her campaign is in a rut, furiously spinning its wheels. “If I create that perception, then I take responsibility”. When Clinton was asked by a retired naval flight officer why she had skated on violating rules on handling classified information, when he “would have been prosecuted and imprisoned” for doing what she had done, Clinton responded with a pack of lies about how this was all a silly misunderstanding about the use of email “headers” denoting classified information.

Trump, meanwhile, has said he donated construction equipment to the recovery effort and gave $100,000 to the memorial after touring it for the first time earlier this year.

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Some of those Republicans will join Clinton Friday for what she dubbed at “working session” on the threat of terrorism. Lauer did not press Trump on his claim that the president of the United States behaves in a fundamentally similar way to a dictator who imprisons and kills political critics and journalists.

National September 11 Memorial ground zero