Monday, October 19, 2015

With the requisite subtlety

Argument by assertion:
"Jeb [Bush] said 'We were safe with my brother. We were safe.' Well, the World Trade Center just went down. Now, am I trying to blame him? I'm not blaming anybody, but the World Trade Center came down, so when he said we were safe, we were not safe. We lost 3,000 people. It was one of the greatest — probably the greatest catastrophe ever in this country," the Republican presidential hopeful said.

If he were president, Trump said, it would have been different.

"I am extremely, extremely tough on people coming into this country," Trump said. And if he were president then, he said, he doubted "those people would've been in the country. … There's a good chance that those people would not have been in the country."
Extremely, extremely tough. Just ask him!

It's a stupid argument, really. You can blame George W. Bush for many things, but you can't make a bureaucracy turn on a dime. "There's a good chance" it would have been different, Trump says. How? What specific measures would he have taken to ensure a different result? Trump doesn't really have answers to these questions.

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