-By Warner Todd Huston
Last week right of center radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt had Donald Trump on his radio show and during the interview began throwing a long string of terrorists’ names and organizations at Trump and needled him to say who he knew, what groups they were with, when they started, and all manner of ultra specific answers. Of course, even during the interview Hewitt claimed that he wasn’t trying to throw “gotcha questions” at Trump, but in fact that is precisely what he was doing, his disingenuous protests aside.
Yes, it is pretty disingenuous for Hugh Hewitt to claim he wasn’t trying gotcha questions with Trump. Throwing out a long list of names is not asking about foreign policy.
Asking “What would you do about Hamas” or directly asking about any other foreign policy issue is totally legitimate, of course. But to say, “do you know” this name, that name, these names, and his name, is not “foreign policy,” it is gotcha stuff. They tried this with Bush, they tried it with Reagan, but never once were questions like these asked of Democrats.
In fact, this tactic of throwing out a long list of names and then demanding that the candidate give a detailed bio or each one of them is always the first resort for interviewers who assume that the person they are interviewing is the “stupid” candidate in the race (again, these gotchas were asked of Bush and Reagan, too).
Hewitt has another question he throws out at people he thinks are insufficiently informed on foreign policy, too. He always throws out “Did you read the book ‘The Leaning Tower’?” as if that is the only determinant fo knowledge of foreign policy. There are a million books on radical Islam. Just because someone may not have read the ONE, obscure book Hewitt thinks is the best one…. so what? Who cares what Hewitt thinks is best?
And who is Hewitt to determine conservatism? Remember, HE is the dope who has been pushing the liberal Mitt Romney on America for the better part of the last ten years. Pushing Romney should immediately disqualify Hugh Hewitt to impugn anyone else’s conservative credentials.
So, Hewitt is simply not telling the truth when he says he wasn’t trying to throw “gotcha questions” at Trump. Anyone who has heard Hewitt’s hostile interviews of candidates or news makers he feels are not up to par will realize that “gotchas” are exactly what Hewitt was aiming for.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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