An aide to Donald Trump on Friday fulfilled the businessman's threat to "spill the beans" on Republican presidential rival Ted Cruz's wife, Heidi.
Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson rattled off a list of attacks three days after Trump first made the threat.
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"Spilling the beans is quite simple when it comes to Heidi Cruz," Pierson said in an interview with MSNBC's Steve Kornacki. "She is a Bush operative; she worked for the architect of NAFTA, which has killed millions of jobs in this country; she was a member on the Council on Foreign Relations who — in Sen. Cruz's own words, called a nest of snakes that seeks to undermine national sovereignty; and she's been working for Goldman Sachs, the same global bank that Ted Cruz left off of his financial disclosure," Pierson said.
"Her entire career has been spent working against everything Ted Cruz says that he stands for," she added.
Cruz spokeswoman Alice Stewart responded to the remarks in a statement to The Hill, saying, "There's no low the Trump campaign won't go."
Ted Cruz has repeatedly slammed Trump for attacking his wife, describing Trump on Thursday as a "sniveling coward" and telling the businessman to "leave Heidi the hell alone."
Earlier in the MSNBC interview, Pierson said "this isn't about Heidi Cruz, this is about Melania Trump. Melania Trump was the one that was attacked."
Trump's campaign has pointed to an ad in Utah earlier this week from an anti-Trump super-PAC that showed Melania Trump posing nude from a magazine photo shoot in January 2000.
Cruz has denied any connection to the group or the ad, though Trump's campaign has attempted to continue linking him to it, noting that the ad also encouraged voters to support Cruz in the three-man GOP race.
The feuding between the candidates over their wives escalated late Wednesday when Trump shared a tweet with an unflattering image of Heidi Cruz juxtaposed with his wife Melania, a former model. The image was captioned, "a picture is worth a thousand words."
The retweet stirred a backlash on social media, including a pointed response from Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, with whom Trump has feuded for months. "Seriously?" she tweeted.
Some of the articles I read stated...Rubio put the story out originally and it was ignored by the media......then Hillary Clinton and George Soros ran with it.
Ted Cruz will never be president and has no value as a vice President. By June Kasich will have more delegates and would be a beneficial vice president. He has not burned any bridges with Trump. I seriously doubt that he will be reelected as Senator.
2seaoat wrote:Ted Cruz will never be president and has no value as a vice President. By June Kasich will have more delegates and would be a beneficial vice president. He has not burned any bridges with Trump. I seriously doubt that he will be reelected as Senator.
I think you are underestimating the judgement of Texans . . . .
2seaoat wrote:Ted Cruz will never be president and has no value as a vice President. By June Kasich will have more delegates and would be a beneficial vice president. He has not burned any bridges with Trump. I seriously doubt that he will be reelected as Senator.
I think you are underestimating the judgement of Texans . . . .
Posts : 11865 Join date : 2012-06-14 Age : 72 Location : Pensacola, FL
knothead wrote:
2seaoat wrote:Ted Cruz will never be president and has no value as a vice President. By June Kasich will have more delegates and would be a beneficial vice president. He has not burned any bridges with Trump. I seriously doubt that he will be reelected as Senator.
I think you are underestimating the judgement of Texans . . . .
I surely hope we NEVER see another POTUS coming out of Texas! LBJ and Bush43 were two of the worst presidents of my lifetime. Both undeclared enabled wars which killed thousands of Americans and leagues of innocents as well.
2seaoat wrote:Ted Cruz will never be president and has no value as a vice President. By June Kasich will have more delegates and would be a beneficial vice president. He has not burned any bridges with Trump. I seriously doubt that he will be reelected as Senator.
I seriously doubt Kasich would accept a VP offer from Trump. And I don't think he's gonna pick up enough delegates in the rest of the primaries to amount to much now that the bandwagon jumping has started.
As to Cruz .... he's only ran for elected office once previously in his entire life, Senator from Texas .... and that election was a gimme Further, he hasn't even finished serving his first term as Senator. At least Rubio for all his youth had 10 years in the Florida legislature before getting elected Senator .... and a few of those years in the Florida House was as Speaker.
You don't get the kind of appointments Cruz has had in his life being an outsider. Ted and Heidi are the a Washington power couple/insiders.
Posts : 6467 Join date : 2012-06-14 Location : Pensacola Beach, FL
Vikingwoman wrote:Cruz may have had power in Texas but he is loathed in Washington. He'll never get a national office.
So that leaves Trump. OMG. Hard to know which would be worse. And what happens if something befalls the Democratic candidate (presumably Hillary, but who knows for sure?) before the election? TOO scary. This country is playing with dynamite.
Posts : 6467 Join date : 2012-06-14 Location : Pensacola Beach, FL
knothead wrote:
2seaoat wrote:Ted Cruz will never be president and has no value as a vice President. By June Kasich will have more delegates and would be a beneficial vice president. He has not burned any bridges with Trump. I seriously doubt that he will be reelected as Senator.
I think you are underestimating the judgement of Texans . . . .
LOL, knot!! Good one.
BTW, don't know if you've noticed, but ever since that Second Baptist mega-church in Houston started sending their thousands of high school kids to Pensacola Beach on mega-buses for a 'retreat' each summer -- the kids virtually overrunning Portofino -- the number of Texas plates on our roads at other times seems to have skyrocketed. Guess the kids told their parents how great it is here. (And the kids are coming again this year, June 12-17. Bad time for anyone to rent a place at Portofino.)
What I always say is, if it's so great living in Texas why don't they go to their own daggoned beaches??
Yes, yes, I know: their Gulf beaches are brown and ugly, and the water cloudy and dull -- just like the minds that elected Senator Ted Kruz and former Governor Rick Perry.
What I always say is, if it's so great living in Texas why don't they go to their own daggoned beaches??
I feel your pain Linda . . . . . last year you may recall there was a dust up by the locals decrying continued funding for the local chamber because the infrastructure is woefully inadequate for a sold out island during season which results in visitors, after settling into their accommodations, decide to take a trip off the island only to find themselves stuck in traffic for four hours or more trying to get back to their vacation crib!
I will not be here for the cluster in June since we will be at the lakes in KY but I am happy for the business owners who wholly depend on tourist dollars to prosper but during those times islanders basically know when to come and go, hunker down and watch the show . . . . . . it's a good kind of problem I believe and comes with living here much like the the local Breezers learn coping skills and life goes on . . .
ppaca wrote:The breezers are becoming more and more agitated.
The area as a whole missed a spectacular opportunity for not planning the new bridge overpassing GB . . . . . . . in fifty years what will the trafic snarls look like . . . . leadership from both counties is conspicuously absent.
2seaoat wrote:Ted Cruz will never be president and has no value as a vice President. By June Kasich will have more delegates and would be a beneficial vice president. He has not burned any bridges with Trump. I seriously doubt that he will be reelected as Senator.
I think you are underestimating the judgement of Texans . . . .
I surely hope we NEVER see another POTUS coming out of Texas! LBJ and Bush43 were two of the worst presidents of my lifetime. Both undeclared enabled wars which killed thousands of Americans and leagues of innocents as well.
How LBJ Was Deceived on Gulf of Tonkin August 5, 2014
As war hawks today push President Obama into more and more confrontations, there is an echo from a half century ago when Vietnam War hawks manipulated President Johnson into a bombing campaign in retaliation for the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident, as Gareth Porter recalls.
By Gareth Porter
For most of the last five decades, it has been assumed that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a deception by Lyndon Johnson to justify war in Vietnam. But the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam on Aug. 4, 1964, in retaliation for an alleged naval attack that never happened — and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that followed was not a move by LBJ to get the American people to support a U.S. war in Vietnam.
The real deception on that day was that Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s misled LBJ by withholding from him the information that the U.S. commander in the Gulf — who had initially reported an attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on U.S. warships — had later expressed serious doubts about the initial report and was calling for a full investigation by daylight. That withholding of information from LBJ represented a brazen move to usurp the President’s constitutional power of decision on the use of military force.
Dean Rusk, Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert McNamara in Cabinet Room meeting February 1968. (Photo credit: Yoichi R. Okamoto, White House Press Office) Dean Rusk, Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert McNamara in Cabinet Room meeting February 1968. (Photo credit: Yoichi R. Okamoto, White House Press Office) McNamara’s deception is documented in the declassified files on the Tonkin Gulf episode in the Lyndon Johnson library, which this writer used to piece together the untold story of the Tonkin Gulf episode in a 2005 book on the U.S. entry into war in Vietnam. It is a key element of a wider story of how the national security state, including both military and civilian officials, tried repeatedly to pressure LBJ to commit the United States to a wider war in Vietnam.
Johnson had refused to retaliate two days earlier for a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. naval vessels carrying out electronic surveillance operations. But he accepted McNamara’s recommendation for retaliatory strikes on Aug. 4 based on reports of a second attack. But after that decision, the U.S. task force commander in the Gulf, Capt. John Herrick, began to send messages expressing doubt about the initial reports and suggested a “complete evaluation” before any action was taken in response.
McNamara had read Herrick’s message by mid-afternoon, and when he called the Pacific Commander, Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp Jr., he learned that Herrick had expressed further doubt about the incident based on conversations with the crew of the Maddox. Sharp specifically recommended that McNamara “hold this execute” of the U.S. airstrikes planned for the evening while he sought to confirm that the attack had taken place.
But McNamara told Sharp he preferred to “continue the execute order in effect” while he waited for “a definite fix” from Sharp about what had actually happened.
McNamara then proceeded to issue the strike execute order without consulting with LBJ about what he had learned from Sharp, thus depriving him of the choice of cancelling the retaliatory strike before an investigation could reveal the truth.
At the White House meeting that night, McNamara again asserted flatly that U.S. ships had been attacked in the Gulf. When questioned about the evidence, McNamara said, “Only highly classified information nails down the incident.” But the NSA intercept of a North Vietnamese message that McNamara cited as confirmation could not possibly have been related to the Aug. 4 incident, as intelligence analysts quickly determined based from the time-date group of the message.
LBJ began to suspect that McNamara had kept vital information from him, and immediately ordered national security adviser McGeorge Bundy to find out whether the alleged attack had actually taken place and required McNamara’s office to submit a complete chronology of McNamara’s contacts with the military on Aug. 4 for the White House indicating what had transpired in each of them.
But that chronology shows that McNamara continued to hide the substance of the conversation with Admiral Sharp from LBJ. It omitted Sharp’s revelation that Capt. Herrick considered the “whole situation” to be “in doubt” and was calling for a “daylight recce [reconnaissance]” before any decision to retaliate, as well as Sharp’s agreement with Herrick’s recommendation. It also falsely portrayed McNamara as having agreed with Sharp that the execute order should be delayed until confirming evidence was found.
Contrary to the assumption that LBJ used the Tonkin Gulf incident to move U.S. policy firmly onto a track for military intervention, it actually widened the differences between Johnson and his national security advisers over Vietnam policy. Within days after the episode Johnson had learned enough to be convinced that the alleged attack had not occurred and he responded by halting both the CIA-managed commando raids on the North Vietnamese coast U.S. and the U.S. naval patrols near the coast.
In fact, McNamara’s deception on Aug. 4 was just one of 12 distinct episodes in which top U.S. national security officials attempted to press a reluctant LBJ to begin a bombing campaign against North Vietnam.
In September 1964, McNamara and other top officials tried to get LBJ to approve a deliberately provocative policy of naval patrols running much closer to the North Vietnamese coast and at the same time as the commando raids. They hoped for another incident that would justify a bombing program. But Johnson insisted that the naval patrols stay at least 20 miles away from the coast and stopped the commando operations.
Six weeks after the Tonkin Gulf bombing, on Sept. 18, 1964, McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk claimed yet another North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. destroyer in Gulf and tried to get LBJ to approve another retaliatory strike. But a skeptical LBJ told McNamara, “You just came in a few weeks ago and said they’re launching an attack on us they’re firing at us, and we got through with the firing and concluded maybe they hadn’t fired at all.”
After LBJ was elected in November 1964, he continued to resist a unanimous formal policy recommendation of his advisers that he should begin the systematic bombing of North Vietnam. He stubbornly argued for three more months that there was no point in bombing the North as long as the South was divided and unstable.
Johnson also refused to oppose the demoralized South Vietnamese government negotiating a neutralist agreement with the Communists, much to his advisers’ chagrin. McGeorge Bundy later recalled in an oral history interview that he concluded that Johnson was “coming to a decision to lose” in South Vietnam.
LBJ only capitulated to the pressure from his advisers after McNamara and Bundy wrote a joint letter to him in late January 1965 making it clear that responsibility for U.S. “humiliation” in South Vietnam would rest squarely on his shoulders if he continued his policy of “passivity.” Fearing, with good reason, that his own top national security advisers would turn on him and blame him for the loss of South Vietnam, LBJ eventually began the bombing of North Vietnam.
He was then sucked into the maelstrom of the Vietnam War, which he defended publicly and privately, leading to the logical but mistaken conclusion that he had been the main force behind the push for war all along.
The deeper lesson of the Tonkin Gulf episode is how a group of senior national security officials can seek determinedly through hardball and even illicit tactics to advance a war agenda, even knowing that the President of the United States is resisting it.
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published Feb. 14.
It would be hard to think of a more controversial figure from the Vietnam War era than Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara who died this morning. He was the longest-serving defense secretary in the U.S. He was one of the original Whiz Kids, a corporate chieftain and later World Bank president, but his identity is tied inextricably to Vietnam.
In his 1995 memoir of the war, McNamara said he and his senior colleagues were "wrong, terribly wrong" to pursue the war as they did. He acknowledged that he failed to force the military to produce a rigorous justification for its strategy and tactics, misunderstood Asia in general and Vietnam in particular, and kept the war going long after he realized it was futile because he lacked the courage or the ability to turn President Johnson around.
Once again McNamara was vilified by critics who said he should have spoken up when it might have made a difference and accused him of salving his conscience with a last-minute conversion. A 2004, Oscar-Award-winning film, "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara," addressed what he learned from the war...
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I don't believe LBJ was responsible for JFK's assassination. It doesn't make sense; they were Democrats. It makes more sense and is more likely that George H W Bush and cohorts murdered Kennedy...the CIA...the mob that dominated Cuba...E Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis...Republicans. LBJ died in 1973. It's easy to blame a dead man.
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http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/hunt_sturgis.htm
"Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis became notorious in 1972 with the start of the Watergate scandal. Both men plead guilty on a variety of charges in January of 1973. Frank Sturgis was arrested by police at the Democratic party headquarters on the sixth floor of Watergate. He was found with four other men, wearing rubber surgical gloves, unarmed, and carrying extensive photographic equipment and electronic surveillance devices. He was officially charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other conversations. Sturgis was also apart of the Miami Cuban exile community and involved in various "adventures" relating to Cuba which he believed were organized and financed by the CIA.
E. Howard Hunt was one of the "plumbers" and a former White House aid during the Watergate scandal. He was directly linked to Sturgis and the other four men that broke into Watergate. He was charged with burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping. He served 33 months. Hunt was also a former employee of the CIA, serving from 1949-1970. He typically performed work relating to propaganda operations in foreign countries.
To say this punched all kinds of buttons among JFK conspiracy theorists would be an understatement.
In no time flat the theorists concluded that Hunt and Sturgis were involved in the death of JFK. It was claimed that they were two of the three tramps photographed on the day of the assassination. By 1974, when the Rockefeller Commission was established to investigate the domestic activities of the CIA, Hunt and Sturgis were chief suspects in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The following section from the Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States outlines the Commission's conclusions..."
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George de Mohrenschildt believed Oswald was a "patsy".
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