We're Doomed?

by Ugh

I don't know what I think about Politico generally, they do some good reporting at times and other times it fits Charles Pierce's description as "Tiger Beat on the Potomac." That said, uh:

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Trump.

Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter.

Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.

The Deputy National Security Adviser to the President of the United States of America is "slipping" the President internet hoaxes in an attempt to influence his views in the direction she wanted and it would have worked if it wasn't for the meddling kids.  This is not confidence inspiring (other than perhaps they are such colossal fnckups it's holding them back).  Another horrific example at the link.

Of course Politico, instead of its staff grabbing their families and running screaming into the hills over the insanity, discusses this as Trump preferring an "open Oval Office with a free flow of ideas and inputs from both official and unofficial channels."  Alrighty then.  Politico is closer to the mark when they describe this sort of thing as a "seemingly endless Game of Thrones inside the West Wing."  More accurately, it's more like Mean Girls in the West Wing (I stole this but don't recall from where).

This is of course a direct reflection of our 45th President, who doesn't stand for anything but himself and can't remember what he said 3 minutes ago and/or doesn't care.  It struck me this morning that we are ruled by a needy, vindictive, narcissistic goldfish. If the hue fits...

Comments

[Nigel]

I quite like Politico.
I could be mistakes, but it seems to me as though they attempt to avoid editorial stances - other than doing whatever it takes to remain political insiders.
If they were the only source of news, that might be a problem, but they are not.

So long as one bears that it mind, they are a valuable source...like this doozy of an article:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/14/fox-news-scandal-impact-politics-215135

[Nigel]

Mistaken, damn you, autocorrect.

[cleek_with_a_fake_beard]

of all the TV gameshow hosts out there, why did we end up with Trump? why couldn't it have been Drew Carey?

[Ugh]

The fake news is COMING FROM INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE!!!

(stolen from Jamelle Bouie's twitter feed)

[wj]

The question in my mind would be, did McFarland know that the 1970s cover was a hoax? Or was she clueless about that.

Both are reason to worry. But the latter is actually more worrisome, to my mind. Using false information to influence Trump is one thing. Being ignorant enough to not realize it is false (i.e. as ignorant as the boss) removes on of the few checks on Trump going off in ridiculous directions.

[Ugh]

The article describes another WH official saying it was an honest mistake...

[cleek_with_a_fake_beard]

McFarland has long been known to be a whack job and a serial fabulist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._T._McFarland#2006_Senate_campaign

Trump hired her because she's his kind of loon.

[Ugh]

In other Trump news - Spicer wouldn't confirm or deny whether Trump tapes his conversations (specifically or generally).

This has me thinking - if POTUS taping was a crime (not sure what it would be, but could be depending on details), I think Spicer as official POTUS spokesman would be open to criminal liability for helping cover it up. So, he can't deny, but then of course he can't confirm because the higher ups don't want him to.

Perhaps more likely he was just told to STFU about it altogether and say he has "nothing more on the subject."

But overall, there must be recordings, or once were (destruction of evidence?) otherwise they would just deny it, emphatically.

[Countme-In]

"Both are reason to worry. But the latter is actually more worrisome, to my mind."

"The article describes another WH official saying it was an honest mistake ..."

"McFarland has long been known to be a whack job and a serial fabulist."

In the first instance, after the past two years of solid wall-to-wall worry up to the gunwales regarding trump, when the builders of warehouses and storage units can't keep up with the demand for where to put the excess worry over trump, when the pumps now fully submerged in the country's overflowing sewers and septic tanks where we have shat our worry all these months have stopped working, NOW we are parsing what to do with a further two percent more worry if McFarland/trump are knowingly malign or, ye gods, as much as three percent more worry if the two of them are merely stupid in a high castle?

Ah, an honest mistake, is it, mates? The closest thing McFarland ever came to honesty was when I called her a malign, lying, republican c*nt, which I just did, and she's merely one among millions of lying conservative dicks in this country now fucking with us.

But off she goes to be the face of America as Ambassador to Singapore. What is she going to do, pour a filter of poison into the mildew'd ears of that country's leaders, as part of the shithead service America now provides to the world. A foreign service officer she'll call herself.

I hope they get one look at her and immediately align with North Korea in a mutual nuclear ICBM development treaty against America.

Farther down in the article ugh cited there is this:

"More recently, when four economists who advised Trump during the campaign — Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore — wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “now is the time to move [tax reform] forward with urgency,” someone in the White House flagged the piece for the president.

Trump summoned staff to talk about it. His message: Make this the tax plan, according to one White House official present."

Are these four still with us? All of the murders in America with NRA-prescribed weapons over the past 40 years, all of the auto accident fatalities, swimming pool drownings, and fuckers struck down by lightning over the past forty years, all of the deserving deaths from diabetes these past 40 years that Budget Director Mulvaney (that murderous Irish republican c*cksucker; I guess it's too late to place a moratorium on Irish immigration into the U.S., huh?) hopes to add to with the filthy murderous American (and it truly is, having been authored by pigshit conservative Americans) Wealthcare Act, and these four horseman of the fiscal bullshitocalpyse are still among the breathing?

Do they live in a cottage together in the forest, feasting on roasted stray children and roadkill, and trot out together every two years to peddle their poison and fuck with everyone?

Should I worry three percent more than I already do regarding events or, if say, Carrot Top, the conservative trump comedian, had added his name along with the other four rouged dead fucks to the New York Times op ed, should I up that to four percent?

We like to say that America is a violent country.

Not nearly violent enough.

[Countme-In]

https://www.balloon-juice.com/2017/05/15/cry-cry-if-it-makes-you-feel-better-2/

Americans are tired of being fucked with.

[Countme-In]

I didn't know this was a thing:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2017/05/even-military-wives.html

Don't military wives have weapons around the house to counter this sort of disgusting nonsense?

But then I read this, and realized that women can be mercenary asshole dependas too:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2017/05/oh-my-mike-joe-and-kellyanne.html

Conway is a freak among freaks.

[cleek_with_a_fake_beard]

it's cute how Mike and Joe forgot that Conway was Ted Cruz's cheerleader, who cheered about how bad Trump was, for months and months, until Cruz's campaign folded. at which point she joined Trump's team and started cheering for him.

she's in it for the money?

impossible! who would do such a thing?

[Countme-In]

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/05/entire-world-adapting-having-idiot-white-house

Well, trump is saving the Russians money by making it unnecessary for them to hack Hillary's emails.

As Marty might point put, this is what transparent government looks like.

[sapient]

The United States has just compromised a foreign intelligence source.

But what about tax cuts.

[sapient]

Am I allowed to call people traitors now? How much longer do I have to wait? When do we get to our "existential crisis"?

[hairshirthedonist]

Stop insulting goldfish.

[wj]

Last week, President Trump announced that we would be arming the Kurdish forces in Syria. There's no question that doing so is the right move. Indeed, we have been doing so for some time. Whether announcing it was the right move is another story. But they are definitely the only ones there who have a prospect of defeating ISIS.

However the announcement has, predictably, sent the Turks ballistic. They were barely tolerating our relations with the Iraqi Kurds, who are rather less close to the PKK rebels in southeastern Turkey than the Syrian Kurds are.

(I do wonder if the Departure of Mr Flynn, who had previously been a lobbyist for Turkey, had anything to do with this. Given the in-fighting at the White House, someone there may have been pushing for it, just because Flynn was against it.)

And today, President Erdogan is visiting. Will he manage to talk Trump into a 180 the way that President Xi did? My guess is that he may not be skilled enough at pandering to others to pull it off. But the Kurds would have reason to be nervous.

[wj]

Wow, just what Trump needed:

lawmakers from both parties rejected Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s unusual offer Wednesday morning to provide a record of the meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump shared classified information.

Having Putin vouch for him -- what more could a President in Trump's position possibly want?