You have hit the nail on the head here. In fact, I would have one small quibble with the above. I would not say that they were extremely clever, I would simply say that their opponents were extremely stupid. Well, not stupid exactly. I don't know the exact word to use. Clueless? Unaware? I doubt the Trump team did it on purpose, but I think the opponents managed to turn it into a Trump win, as they did all through the campaign season.
What happened is that she made a statement trying to justify a policy, and instead of focusing on the policy, the opponents seized on the "gotcha" moment of the non-existent massacre.
Ok, that's all very well. No actual massacre,, just a couple of bad guys maybe doing some stuff that might have involved thinking about large scale killing, but what about the policy? No. No. She was lying. She made up junk about a massacre that never happened. Well, ok, sort of, I mean, there were a couple of bad guys, but that's not really important. The important thing is that they pushed this blanket ban and they're trying to avoid talking about it by bringing up other stuff that isn't important. Not important?!? She just plain LIED! There was no massacre!!!
I don't like ducking questions, so I'm going to try to answer yours. When I said I didn't feel misled, I was focusing on the statement about the massacre, because that was the focus of the thread, and of the uproar in general. I don't think she invented a story about a massacre, or about terrorists, in order to mislead people.
As to the general contents of her statement, it's hogwash. Of course their policy is a lot different than previous policies. I wouldn't have been able to tell you that Obama put travel restrictions of any sort in place during his tenure, but I didn't have to look it up to know that whatever Obama's policy was, it wasn't very much like Trump's. She's a politician spinning and dissembling. That's not really news.
This travel ban was very questionable policy, implemented in a truly oafish manner. (I started to type, "It's Trump at his worst" but that's wrong. I'm pretty sure we'll see much worse in the remaining 206 weeks of his term.) It's just the sort of think I expected when I watched the returns on November 8, hoping that Detroit and Philadelphia were just late in counting votes.
However, that particular statement didn't really have anything in it that I found noteworthy, including the reference to a massacre.
