Biden Condemned Violence, Trump Defends It

Biden returned to Pennsylvania on Monday to offer his most comprehensive response yet to Trump's claims that he's weak on rioters and looters https://t.co/o0tartwCmu

— POLITICO (@politico) September 1, 2020

It should not have actually shocked anyone that former Vice-President Joe Biden strongly condemned violence and and vandalism in Pittsburgh yesterday, because he had strongly condemned them in Philadelphia back in June:

But there is no place for violence.

No place for looting or destroying property or burning churches, or destroying businesses — many of them built by people of color who for the first time were beginning to realize their dreams and build wealth for their families.

Nor is it acceptable for our police — sworn to protect and serve all people — to escalate tensions or resort to excessive violence.

We need to distinguish between legitimate peaceful protest — and opportunistic violent destruction.

It also isn't that shocking that the Trump Campaign (and the White House, since heaven knows there is no barrier between them anymore) misrepresented Biden's words--as departed White House Counsel KellyAnne Conway said quite out loud and in front of cameras, TrumpWorld thinks that violent images work for them.

It is a bit shocking, however, how nakedly Trump can't even decry an actual case of murder, using a White House press briefing to promulgate a self-defense case for Kyle Rittenhouse.

What is beyond shocking, however, is that in what anyone would consider a friendly interview with Laura Ingraham, Trump compared police shootings to a bad day on the links, dabbled in batshit conspiracy theory (it must have killed him not to use the name "Soros"), and insinuated that America's suburbs were in danger from....Cory Booker.  Basically, he made it pretty clear he was going to actually double-down on racially divisive and inflammatory rhetoric, and that he was A-OK with violence he considered to be "on his side".

The difference couldn't be more stark.

All Their Lies

“It is being contained.” One month ago today Kellyanne Conway chastised me for suggesting #COVID19 was spreading across US. @CBSNews #Quarantine #CornavirusOutbreak #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/L4ApHezmJs

— Paula Reid (@PaulaReidCBS) April 6, 2020

You know that thing where Trump claims he shut down travel between China and the US? He didn't. And where the administration claims they didn't know the potential scale of the spread of the disease? They were warned. And when Trump wants to congratulate himself (or solicit congratulations from anyone else) about the job he's doing right now? He should have his nose rubbed in the 70 days he did literally less than nothing, because he actively made things worse. And when he wants to put Barack Obama's name in his lying mouth about whether the national stockpiles were depleted and what ever was a poor spoiled manchild to do after three years in office, maybe someone can tell him to take responsibility for his shitty choices for once. And everyone who has publicly agreed with these palpable untruths needs to never be heard from, again. There shouldn't be any character rehab for this.

Because they lied. The administration lied. They had the information, and they lied. And Trump's lickspittle right-wing press furthered his lies. (No wonder he thinks the mainstream press is awful--they sometimes call him on it.) Trump can't do his rallies, so he has his press briefings where he lies a lot, and then maybe Pence lies a little, and he encourages others to go on ahead--lie for him. But over time, the things he says don't hold up. We can factcheck what was said.

Trump especially lies, and still does, every day. It's the only thing he knows how to do. But he couldn't lie like this by himself.

The virus wasn't contained. It wasn't going from 15 cases to zero. We crossed 10k fatalities today and may very well cross 12k fatalities tomorrow. And all Trump wants to do is lie.

Lie and get re-elected. Lie about something that is killing Americans right now, pat himself on the back, and expect to be rewarded for it.

I work with math every damn day, but that does not compute.

Her Power?

So, this isn't the type of thing I would thrash out a post about (but I'm trying to avoid another TrumpWorld Grab-Bag and the discussion of how respectable vandals take the handle of politics and create payback opportunities as things turn to fascist diarrhea in a quick flurry--but that post has to come, doesn't it?) but I want to talk about Kellyanne Conway, because she's been caught (or is it "caught"?) being "that woman" out loud where people can hear a few times now. 

One time was when she tried to call something "off the record" in an interview after the fact, while trying to drop a criticism of her spouse's Tweets regarding her boss, Donald Trump, the president, as "disrespectful", in a way that indicated that she did experience tension in her employment from George Conway's regular characterization of Trump as unfit and unwell. This sounds like the most tortured game of passive-aggressive "telephone" to send a message to someone imaginable. 

But that's just, like, my opinion. It does take on a different flavor when you hear Kellyanne ream out a reporter for discussing her marriage in just the same kind of terms, though.  At one point, Kellyanne wanted to vent publicly (if anonymously) that her husband's Tweets were disrespectful. In a later exchange with a journalist, she prefers that not be brought up at all.  Rather vehemently, and with all the "I will speak to your manager" trimmings. 

For the Record

Today's vote to condemn President Trump's racist remarks regarding the House Democrats' "Squad" may not seem like a lot, but it is. For one thing, it is a highly unusual move for Congress to make, for another, the act of taking this move required an actual violation of parliamentary rules forbidding disparaging the president in order to properly characterize the things that he said.  The point, however, is that what Trump has said, and the final vote, are now a matter of record.

All Democrats, four Republicans, and Justin Amash voted to condemn. We now have a record of 187 Republicans who are comfortable, on record, with what the President said.

So, how do House Republicans want to deal with this matter. I would say, chiefly, they would prefer not to. They do want to complain that Speaker Pelosi "broke the rules" regarding decorum which is just a quaint thing to assert when defending Trump (not the greatest fan of rules or decorum). And Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Liz Cheney chose to follow Sen. Lindsey Graham's lead and talk about socialism. Because why not distract from the president's racism with a Red Scare (and, I guess, claims about the disloyalty of a certain "dark underbelly" that "pals around with terrorists" while we're at it, to not forget Kellyanne Conway's very busy day)?

In just the way this vote landed along more or less partisan lines, I think feelings about this vote and what it means will likely be interpreted differently by people based on their affiliation. To my thinking, it demonstrates that House Republicans will stick together even if the president's language is egregious, even if his behavior is egregious, for the most part. Time will tell whether this has any effect on the constituencies of those House members later on.

But the point of the exercise wasn't to shame Trump (he doesn't know what shame is) or even to change his behavior (which seems pretty baked-in at this point).  Based on prior behavior, Trump is likely to even double-down. It was to get the reaction of House Republicans down for the record.

And this is now what we have.

But also, just for the record, Rep. Swalwell also made some "unparliamentary speech"--he just quoted Donald Trump:

Holy crap. @RepSwalwell just went on the House floor and listed numerous racist statements made by President Donald Trump. Republicans were NOT happy. pic.twitter.com/Bntwc1LE4w

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 17, 2019

Kellyanne Conway Is Having A Normal One

“What’s your ethnicity?” Kellyanne Conway asks a reporter when the reporter asks her about the intent of the president’s tweets.

“A lot of us are sick and tired of this country – of America coming last, to people who swore an oath of office.” pic.twitter.com/Tia1VUQluP

— NBC News (@NBCNews) July 16, 2019

Sure, who doesn't ask a reporter about their ethnicity when defending their boss regarding his (checks notes) racist Tweets?

Self-aware people, that's who. People who still had a grip and aren't actually racist might have quit by this point. But damn, she's a trooper.

UPDATE: She has followed up on this on Twitter, and frankly, it doesn't really help--

because not everyone in the US is from somewhere else originally (Native Americans) and not everyone who came from somewhere else necessarily has their ethnicity associated with that geographic area.

It's kind of a hot mess response.

Maybe there's Method in the Madness

President Trump on John McCain: "I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president I had to approve. I don't care about this. I didn’t get thank you. That's ok. We sent him on the way, but I wasn't a fan of John McCain." pic.twitter.com/hG4XwOiIBO

— CSPAN (@cspan) March 20, 2019

I've started wondering if Trump's feud with a Senator and war hero who has been dead for seven months, and his feud with George Conway, husband of KellyAnne, who has strongly indicated that Trump has a mental disorder, are related. Trump does strike me as a malignant narcissist and he's certainly gone off in speeches and on Twitter before, but it seems really extra of late. Maybe a little too extra?

Insanity defense as a last resort, anyone?

Is a Deep State TrumpWorld Grab-Bag a Thing?

Fox News' very awful Jesse Watters had on the Trump Administration's even more awful KellyAnne Conway, and together they managed to perform a duet on the theme of there being a coup attempt on President Trump, and how, boo hoo, everything was rigged against Trump from the very beginning. I love this kind of argument. Trump was trying to soften the blow of his possible loss in the election all through October 2016 by crying "Rigged!' whenever he could. And then he won the electoral college despite losing the popular vote by 3 million votes, got sworn in, and is still in office. It doesn't seems all that "coup-y".

What has happened, though, is a recent obfuscation campaign on the part of Trump associates and supporters to detract from the Special Counsel's investigation, claiming that the FBI investigation that it follows on was tainted by partisans.  This strikes me as really weird. Comey was a Republican, Mueller's a Republican, as of a year or more ago, we understood that the FBI has a lot of people who were not Friends of Hill. Since when was the FBI or law enforcement in general a hotbed of subversives who want to overthrow a Republican president?

Except when that president is engaged in a potential criminal conspiracy to undermine national security. See, I can get why law enforcement professionals would deeply care about that.

Part of this kerfuffle seems to have to do with the thousands of Trump transition emails that SC Mueller seems to have quite lawfully obtained. The GSA basically got a nice polite request for them and handed them over, because they are already government property. To the chagrin of Trump's lawyers, who seemed to have tried calling executive privilege on these emails when I'm not sure they could even necessarily do so even once Trump had become president (the executive), but most likely couldn't assert before he was sworn in. 

I don't know. I majored in lit, not law. But, as with claims that Don Jr. could stay mum about a conversation with his Pops and call it attorney-client privilege just because the Trump's were in the room with lawyers, I think an executive privilege argument might really need to have someone involved who was actually the President. It seems a little dodgy. Also, I think the problem with the trove of emails Mueller and his team got is that whole lines of inquiry may have been obtained by knowledge gleaned from those emails, and Trump's lawyers would very much like those to be thrown out as if they no longer were any good because the emails themselves weren't lawfully obtained, but I'm not even sure that applies for the purposes of this investigation. I am mostly tickled that a campaign that had so much to do with Clinton's emails, has an email problem of their own, like the actual details of record retention and government access were never issues they cared about at all.

Anyhow, in other news, we learned that the FBI warned Trump during his national security briefing in August of 2016 that Russia would be trying to infiltrate his campaign to gather information (this would be a period of time, as when isn't it? that Trump was denying the Russians hacked the DNC or were responsible for trying to break into the election process at all). But as for the "being told" part acting as a warning for the Trump Team (as if everyone involved was already simple enough not to know you don't accept baggage from foreigners and carry it onto a national campaign) well, that ship had already, based on the time-line, probably well and truly sailed.  

Anyway, maybe things will be a bit clearer after Trump's crack legal team talks to Mueller and his folks.  All I know is, all hell is fixing to break loose if Trump fired Rod Rosenstein, who Trump did appoint, and is not a Democrat, as a segue into getting Mueller fired. No, I am not advocating a violent kind of all hell breaking loose. But it would look as very much like more (yes, I said "more") obstruction of justice than has already been tried.  And that will put feet on the street.  

Sometimes Even TrumpWorld Grab-Bags Have the Blues

Focusing on Donald Jr. as a contact-point between Russian operatives and the Trump campaign has certainly kicked up a lot of defenses of Donald Trump Sr's baby boy. Or should I say, middle-aged baby boy. It bothers the hell out of me when a grown man, something like mere days younger than the leader of France, and old enough to be president himself according to the US Constitution, and certainly old enough to run (supposedly without his father's input) the Trump family's international company--and yet, some people think this "kid" should get soft treatment for not knowing that dealing with representatives (or people purporting to be representatives) of a foreign power is not actually normal campaign behavior for a political campaign, and having intel shopped in front of you kind of is mighty collusion-ish (conspiracy to interfere with an election--maybe a promise to facilitate espionage, depending? It's really dumb, what the Trump "kid" is supposed to have done, but I dunno. I think many adults would have known to refrain from what he did.)

What I think is amazing, though, is that the Trump 2020 campaign is already ponying up yon Trump the Younger's lawyer bills, since before the news of his stupid collusive Trump Tower meeting with who even knows how many Russians even broke to the world. As if the Trump Campaign is openly now accepting that whatever Trump the moral baby did is reflecting back on Trump the perpetual candidate, who is having a hard time being loved with all this talk of collusion and shit about! 

Aw hell. Isn't a little recoil to be expected, when even an administration's AG is gangster about his disclosure of assorted contacts, to the point of basically showing a photo of his own extended middle finger?

It strikes me as proof of a problem, though. The pattern of a problem is real. Kellyanne Conway just a minute ago suggested that the goal posts have been moved to "evidence of a systemic, sustained, furtive collusion". What she doesn't seem to see is that she is the one moving the goal posts--but we do have a systemic and sustained coverup in the form of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump not reporting their full financial and other foreign contacts. We have Flynn and Manafort acting as campaign surrogates, while also being paid by foreign governments. They aren't in the mix at the moment, but Kushner and Trump Jr did as badly in their willingness to trade the US cow for the magic beans of dirt on Hillary Clinton, as those other campaign reps had done, and at least Kushner and Ivanka should not still be having security clearances. 

All this gives me the blues. I would surely think more GOP-ers's would find this scenario bent and precarious from a national security pov. They should wonder if Trump is really a prone Russian patsy. I would be ashamed if I thought (and I kind of do) that a POTUS could be so open to blackmail and financial and social leverage. 

Oh, KellyAnne.

See, she went on Fox News and did this:

So now Twitter is gonna do this:

I personally blame the microwaves. 

UPDATE: And here we go--

This is for @darth. pic.twitter.com/L0u8YUXtJm

— Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) July 13, 2017

problematic pic.twitter.com/1ndwUNFB8u

— 🚮 (@tibbspdx) July 13, 2017

I get what she was going for... pic.twitter.com/HGroGajTqP

— Ryan Lewis (@ryanthelou) July 13, 2017

See Kellyanne. See Kellyanne Lie!

Actually, the cuts in Medicaid will be catastrophic for the exact people this program was intended for. Some people who will be impacted, children, nursing home residents, simply can't get jobs. Other people are already working, but don't make enough to afford to buy care out of pocket.

It's worse though--the CBO on the Senate Health care bill demonstrates that 22 million more people would be without health care--people now getting health care through their employer may also be affected. Premiums would rise at first, but then be brought down specifically because the sickest and poorest get opted out. (They don't necessarily choose to not be covered. They just prefer food, rent, and the light bill.)

This plan is a shambles and lying in favor of it is the act of a shambolic human. I don't know if she understands the consequences of the plan she is lying in favor of, but this bill threatens the lives of children who are on Medicaid, and those who have been born or acquire, through no possible fault of their own (unlike, maybe, those folks who willingly flirt with emphysema or black lung in the mines? Yes, Trumpcare will also block out the working class folks he claims to adore) pre-existing conditions that could bar them from obtaining health insurance.

Her alternative facts are leaving out a lot of vulnerable Americans. I don't think pointing this out will shame her, necessarily. But we could always do with a reminder of her utter lack of interest in truth over her personal career expedience.

Simply fascinating.

I did think that when Conway withdrew his name from consideration for DOJ, it was a matter of the family "not putting all their eggs in one basket". This critical Tweet (screen-capped, not directly linked, because, obvious) is fascinating. President Trump really seems to have his heart set on undermining the case for the travel ban going by his recent Twitter communications, though. While Kellyanne Conway made an argument that Trump's Tweets should be ignored (pay no attention to the little man behind the phone?)  it would really be much simpler for the President to not Tweet.


Of course, that is sound from a legal POV--me, I think Trump needs to vent. Vent, baby! Vent!

In summation:

To recap, @realDonaldTrump:
-confirmed the ban is a BAN
-noted Muslim ban 2.0 is a "watered down, politically correct version" of original pic.twitter.com/olVg2HzKmS

— ACLU National (@ACLU) June 5, 2017

UPDATE: More where that came from:

 Like I said--fascinating, right?

What Did the President Know and Did He Know He was Doing it?

I can't get over the idea that President Trump might not even know what the hell he's doing, even if that is the jist of several articles published about him recently. But with a sad, heavy sigh, I look at the very dumb, very obvious latest: the story from the Washington Post, now corroborated by several outlets, that Trump revealed classified intelligence produced by one of our allies to the Russians at the little meet and greet that was so weird as to be notable last week.

Sure, Putin asks him to host Lavrov and Kislyak and try to keep Kislyak on the down-low, and they talk about this and that--and Trump gets around to dishing some classified intel. Well, the POTUS does enjoy the discretion to declassify intelligence if he thinks it's warranted. It's part of the toolkit. It's right up there with firing the FBI Director--a thing he can do if he wants to. A privilege of being the executive. But why that information, to the Russians, in the Oval Office...

It would be great if we could even be assured that Trump was working with the Russians on intelligence on purpose, right? If he could just be normal and say we are working together against ISIS and this is necessary and steps were taken to not fuck everything up by contacting the ally that obtained the intelligence in question to protect the source and not burn our Five Eyes relationship...

But I don't think he is capable of that mature kind of high-functioning decision-making (whether you would agree with the reasoning of my scenario, it would be on the up-and-up). The thing with Trump is, he really is out of his league in this arena and his defining personality trait is to show off. What was he doing in the "Access Hollywood" tape, really, but crudely showing off about what he gets away with when it comes to women? He showed off for Shinzo Abe at Mar-A-Lago, even if that wasn't great security protocol.  He got giddy showing his nice Russian friends that he too, gets information, and blurted out something he shouldn't--

Plausible? Well, the alternative is he knew very well what he was doing, and intentionally wrecked some of our intelligence alliances after having done not a super-great job of conveying his competence to the IC here at home. See, when some serious person like James Clapper conveys the thought that Trump has left our institutions "under assault"--this might not just mean deliberately.  He could do untold damage unknowingly, thoughtlessly, uncaringly, too. And the intent is beside the point, because the result is the same. And we can't even take serious Trump surrogates and cabinet members at their word because this administration has shown public duplicity on numerous occasions. And we are only what, not--116 days in? It feels like an eternity, rather like you might feel if you were in the backseat of a bus being driven by a toddler. Let me be uncharacteristic and say, there is a pretty good take from David Brooks (I don't say that thing, do I?) And, the idea that Trump is just an egomaniac adult baby meets with Josh Marshall's overall Trump's Razor doctrine of assuming the stupidest when it comes to him.

But all the same, whether we think Trump is actually treasonous or just too stupid to be president, he is fulfilling the warnings made about him.

He just can't be trusted.

The Internet of Made-Up Things

I just don't know about this, you guys...

Moment of Zen?

I'm not going all "outrage culture" here--a picture doesn't tell me how long Conway was sitting zazen on her heels (shoes on the sofa) with her knees apart in a knee-length dress in a room full of people. It could have been the fleetingest moment as she took and checked her cell phone picture. But for ladies brought up a certain way, questions come to mind:

"Are you brand-new?"

"Were you raised indoors?"

"Are you part housecat?"

Which is how one's folks might have reminded you how not to sit in front of company. The reason some are registering dismay is partly because of their own home training, but also because of a recognition that manners reflect not just on oneself, but how one feels about the people surrounding one.

Not that anyone asked me.

The Things You Say: Your Purple Prose

So, for the record, KellyAnne Conway said several times that Flynn tendered his resignation himself, because Trump is very loyal to his people, and would have supported him wholeheartedly, but had to accept his resignation because blah blah blah. Even when no less a journalist than Matt Lauer pointed out that her explanation made no damn sense.  In his press briefing, Sean Spicer alleged two interesting things: that President Trump called for Flynn's resignation because of an "evolving and eroding relationship" (not at all what Conway depicted), and that no Trump campaign folks had connections with Russia before the election.

And that was apparently as big a lie as any Conway ever told. Trump aides were talking with Russia all the damn time. And it's pretty damn obvious that Trump knew about at least Flynn longer than a minute ago--because Acting AG Sally Yates, who got fired, told him so. But I don't know whether either Trump or Pence needed to get told about what was up with Flynn contacting  Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak back in December, because nobody has to reach out five times or so to tell a person "Merry fricking Christmas".  Russians celebrate Christmas in January for one damn thing, and Flynn was on it right when Obama was slapping on the sanctions.  Please--it's an insult to pretend away what this implies--

But this is what WH spokesfolks are trying--to pretend it away.

And so are certain people in Congress.

But I will say this--both Spicer and Conway have just about zero credibility right now. I don't think we're ripe to make any odds about impeachment or resignation for Trump himself as yet--although some houses are making book about it. But I'll say there is a race as to whether Conway or Spicer get their separation orders first.

The pity of which is, they were both apparently just doing their jobs--you know: following orders about what to say. And bon chance to Trump&Co about filling their billets. Defending this in public feels like a suicide mission.

Protecting the Brand

It seems like just yesterday, then-candidate Donald Trump was offering us an opportunity to let him fix America's branding. Today, it looks an awful lot like now-President Trump is using the White House to help his (and Ivanka's) brand.

It was kind of hard not to notice that Donald Trump hasn't divested from his various holdings, and that he uses them and sort of promotes them (as does his Press Secretary) to the extent that even the Pentagon is considering renting space at Trump Tower. For convenience, of course. It might be a bit less obvious when Melania Trump's business was promoted on the White House website, although it's really hard to miss her recent lawsuit claiming damages because all the business opportunities she might have expected as First Lady were in jeopardy due to assorted scurrilous allegations. (Said opportunities were not in any jeopardy, apparently, due to possible ethical qualms.)

But Trump's Tweeted "defense" of his daughter Ivanka's brand and her "unfair" treatment by Nordstrom seems to take on a whole other level of interest. The Tweet:

I think the thing that sticks out at me is that he's implying that Nordstrom is making a kind of moral choice rather than a business one--Ivanka is great! Nordstrom is unfair! But Nordstrom has made a point of saying this isn't anything political at all--sales for Ivanka Trump merchandise simply dropped. Are they obligated to keep lines of product in stock that they can't shift? They aren't even the only business experiencing "Ivanka fatigue". (And for a switch, Trump's Tweet about Nordstrom doesn't seem to have hurt their shareholder value.) 

But that is just a father defending his daughter's brand, right? He doesn't like to see his daughter's name-value suffer. That alone would seem touching, right there--but it didn't stay right there. He re-Tweeted this comment under his @POTUS account, which is sort of an official stamp, and then the matter was taken up in a WH press briefing, with Sean Spicer baldly stating that  

"There's a targeting of her brand and it's her name," Spicer said. "She's not directly running the company. It's still her name on it. There are clearly efforts to undermine that name based on her father's positions on particular policies that he's taken. This is a direct attack on his policies and her name. Her because she is being maligned because they have a problem with his policies."

She's not running the company, but she hasn't divested from it anymore than her father has from his. If her business is undermined by association with her father's policies and her support of them, this is happening at the consumer level. People are "voting with their wallets".  Free. Bloody. Marketplace.

And then it got absurd, when KellyAnne Conway literally turned a spot on Fox News into a commercial to promote Ivanka's stuff.  She's a White House Counselor. She's a trained lawyer. She had to know this was not ethical. But there just isn't any separating Donald Trump or his daughter as political entities from their business selves--not least of all because neither of them took steps to do so. So perhaps unpopular political views will hurt their business brand--I'm not entirely sure how this could have been unanticipated.

I do believe, however, that despite the current partnership with the Trump family, America's brand should endure.

Bowling Us Over?

There is something so exciting about "alternative facts"--once someone in Trumplandia makes out with one of their regular shocking falsehoods, it becomes a kind of anthropological study to sort out where their bullshit came from and how it's supposed to support their narrative. It's hair-raisingly awful, but if it wasn't liable to lead to tragedy, it would make a sort of neat parlor game. 

Take KellyAnne Conway's recent bid at Terrorism Cluedo. Two Iraqi refugees, in Bowling Green, with a massacre, by way of IEDs. Except of course, when she says "Bowling Green Massacre", she means to say a massacre may have been prevented because the Obama Administration found out that two Iraqi refugees in Bowling Green had been associated with IED deployment in Iraq prior to their coming over--which resulted in their apprehension and a strengthening of vetting procedures (which was not either the same thing as this "extreme vetting" mishegas the Trumpers have ordered).

The impression she means to make (if she hasn't somehow innocently conflated several terror/immigration-related concepts, and I believe she is too sharp to have done so) is that refugees are dangerous.  Except in reality, there have been zero attacks from people from the seven countries the EO references. Zero.

But conflation and confusion can be useful when you know your intended audience never fact-checks anything, and is already poisonously biased against the idea that fact-checkers are themselves unbiased. So when Sean Spicer invokes the Marathon Bombing as a reason why the EO exists (not to call it a Muslim or Travel ban, because that apparently gives Sean a sad) the intended audience might not note that Kyrgyzstan is also not part of the seven countries. He mentions Atlanta--which must be referencing the Olympic Bomber, but Eric Rudolph wasn't a Muslim at all, he was one of our homebrew terrorists. And San Bernardino was an American citizen and his Pakistani wife. These attacks are real, but they don't have anything to do with the ban, any more than the Quebec Massacre at a mosque--killing Muslim people, by a white, RW, Quebecois substantiates by any means the EO.

The Role of the Press

I guess it's been pretty well documented that the package of KellyAnne Conway and Steve Bannon added to the Trump campaign at it's quasi-ebb was probably a gift from the Mercers. This is why it isn't any real surprise to find them on the same page about something like what the media ought to do--like shut their word holes! KellyAnne Conway put this a little bit more diplomatically, by just suggesting that the journos who were "wrong" about Trump (by probably just reporting things that actually happened that were negative, because OMG, yeah) should be fired. As in, said things that were negative but pretty accurate about Trump. Right. Steve Bannon has referenced the media as the "opposition party". So does Trump--it seems a little paranoid, maybe?

This kind of denial that Trump does anything wrong ever and that people can't actually see what he's doing because of the smokescreen is quaint, but I need to direct your attention to this funny bit of WH propo:

One senior administration official explained the ground rules to reporters gathered at the White House and listening on a conference call, then said: “With that, I'll turn it over to a senior administration official.”

“Thank you,” the other senior administration official said before beginning a 45-minute defense.

Their overarching message: Everything is going exactly according to plan, nothing has changed since the order was signed, and the news media need to calm down their “false, misleading, inaccurate, hyperventilating” coverage of the “fractional, marginal, minuscule percentage” of international travelers who have been simply “set aside for further questioning” for a couple hours on their way into the greatest country in the world.

Hi, I'm a grown adult with a history of reading newspapers and voting--are the massive protests and ACLU suits and all that really that dismissible if we were to presuppose a USA that still had Constitutional rights? Because in my world, it looks to me like Donald Trump took an oath of office to the Constitution with no faith in it at all. Are WH staffers really supposed to just take an open crap on the First Amendment like that?

Press Secretary Sean Spicer was heard not that long ago vowing that the press would be "held accountable" for what they do.  It's the other way about--the job of the press is to hold elected officials accountable to the public they supposedly are here to serve. So they can't just pretend all is well. The many protests at airports all over are not normal and are not just some kind of liberal flash mob.  This is about who we are as a nation, and the so-called SJW's, the lawyers and civil liberties types, the bleeding heart pink hats and multiculturalists and immigrant-lovers--

Are America, too. Yeah, this is the crowd that didn't vote for Trump. But hey, he lost the popular vote, didn't he? Maybe listen to the immigrants, and the vets , and the descendants of immigrants, and the people who have done contract or missionary work in those arbitrary seven countries. Try to listen to the narratives that bubble up from the media, who are just trying to tell the story of the day.

Silence is violence, Conway, Spicer, and Bannon. People need to know what is being done in their name. When Iraqi interpreters and their families are detained and submitted to questions they should not be asked about their allegiance, when little kids and disabled elderly Muslims are held for hours at a time, when they could be of no threat to anyone--how is this going well?

This is not well, or normal at all, and if no president ever was faced with so many well-attended protests so early in his term of office, let it be admitted into the record that Trump earned his disapprobation via the hard work of the bigoted villains he let run his shop.

Alternative Facts and Real Propaganda

On Sunday, Kellyanne Conway tried to cover up for Sean Spicer's peculiarly lying and hostile beration of the assembled media for reporting a verifiable thing--that the crowd for Donald Trump's inauguration was a bit thin--by asserting that he was providing "alternative facts."

"Alternative facts", Chuck Todd was forced to explain, would be "falsehoods". Because facts are things that are true. The alternative to them is things that are not. He did not use the more accusatory term "lie", although if Trump spin keeps trying to soulcycle their way through reality, they might discover that indoor and outdoor spinning ain't the same animal and that no matter how tough an artificial regime is, it isn't the dirt bike trail of actual politics--lying might still be, new political climate or not, an "eat-dirt" wipe-out event where policy rubber meets the human road. (Damn. That extended metaphor. Fuck it. I'm keeping it. Tom Friedman eat your heart out.)

So give it another day, and WH Press Secretary Sean Spicer is back out here "disagreeing with facts".

Yep. Still on about crowd size for some bizarre reason. Which sort of makes me wonder--how is this the thing this poor meaty bloke is forced to make his stand on? Why the insistence on crowd size? It's fucked up! Let's face it--I watched a video after the fact of the inauguration speech because I was at work that day. That was not an endorsement. It was being an interested citizen. Watching the inauguration via any means other than getting your ass down there was the "RT doesn't equal endorsement" of political activity.

But here's another thing that came up--there seems to have been a cadre of Trump staff that applauded at Trump's Saturday showing at Langley. The ones that applauded were his peeps.  This shouldn't surprise--he had staffers applaud at his many file-foldered folderol a couple weeks back. Hell, we know via FEC disclosures that Trump paid (well actually he didn't...) for part of his 2015 presidential announcement audience.