It’s Monday, April 4th, 2016…but before we begin, here’s wishing the great Stilton Jarlsberg, the brilliance behind Hope n’ Change, a speedy recovery from “minor” injuries suffered when he forgot the last step is a doozy…
…along with a VERY Happy Birthday to TLJ:
Christie Brinkley, eat your heart out!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, the Most Transparently Corrupt Administration in American history is at it again:
“…Here is the transcript of what Hollande said, with strikethrough notation to show what the White House censored in its video of the exchange between the two presidents:
“Europe has been hit more, given that it is also the target of the terrorists and ISIS. We’ve seen it in Paris last year, as well as in Brussels. And together with President Obama, we worked on coordinating further our commitments, our organizations, our services when it comes to fighting against these terrorists. We are also making sure that between Europe and the United States there can be a very high level coordination.
But we’re also well aware that the roots of terrorism, Islamist terrorism, is in Syria and in Iraq. We therefore have to act both in Syria and in Iraq, and this is what we’re doing within the framework of the coalition. And we note that Daesh is losing ground thanks to the strikes we’ve been able to launch with the coalition. We are continuing to support Iraq. This is also a decision we have taken, supporting the Iraqi government and making sure that they can claim back their entire territory, including Mosul.“
In the video, the entire audio of the feed is muted right before Hollande says “Islamist terrorism.” After he says the phrase, the audio returns, but without an English translation. The interpreter’s voice is not restored in the video until 12 seconds later…”
As FOX News reports, the White House responded, as it always does, only when it had to…and then with deliberate deceit:
“The White House told several news outlets on Friday the audio gap was the result of a “technical issue” not an attempt to scrub or censor Hollande’s comments(To borrow a phrase from the most dishonest woman on the planet, “You mean…like with a cloth or a brush?!?”) and that anupdated video with the complete audio was posted on WhiteHouse.gov soon after the problem was recognized.“
Meaning, only after MRC and FOX reported it…and Team Tick-Tock could no longer deny it; which leads us to conclude the Offal Office explanation can only be considered…
Next up, courtesy of NRO, the last installment of Jay Nordlinger’s three-part series on what’s it’s like having a friend run for President, the first two installments of which can be found here and here:
“…Obviously, the Cruz style is not for everyone. But I can say this, to conservatives (and to anyone else, for that matter): If he is president, he will do everything humanly possible to repeal Obamacare. And to prevent Iran from going nuclear.And to do other hard, vital things. I don’t know if these things can be done. But I feel sure that, if they can, Ted will do them. He will go the last mile, and beyond.
Like everyone else, he likes popularity more than unpopularity. But if popularity clashes with the right course of action, popularity will have to go.Ted is used to opposition and scorn. And he would do anything — walk through fire, chew on glass — to keep this country free.
Pardon the campaign rhetoric, but it’s true…”
Of that we have no doubt!
Cruz, albeit imperfect, is the true blue Conservative Republican “leaders”, Beltway pundits and Talk Radio hosts have been clamoring for since the Dutchman faded into the sunset. And now that he’s here, they inexplicably opt for prospective candidates either far less dependable…
…or utterly undependable…
…even going so far as to say they’ll vote for the Devil herself…
rather than support the man whose nomination their actions and inactionmight have made well-nigh inevitable.
In the words of the immortal Staff Sergeant Bob Barnes…
Speaking of Trump, he’s the subject of this analysis from Ian Tuttle, also courtesy of NRO, who opines…
“Put ’em up, put ’em up!”…as if this blustering buffoon’s ever punched anyone in his life!
“There’s a long-observed adage in business: The key to success is hiring people better than you are. Today, the obverse principle was demonstrated: If you want to fail, hire like Donald Trump hires.
…Thuggery, misogyny, and lying are the three pillars of the Trump campaign, courtesy of the candidate himself.Is it any surprise, then, that Trump hired a campaign manager who went on to assault a woman and lie about it (Lewandowski called Fields “delusional” on Twitter)? For that matter, is it any surprise that Trump’s spokeswoman is a bigoted opportunist whose fidelity to the truth is as stalwart as Trump’s fidelity to his marriage vows?
That old adage, about hiring people better than you, is only useful to people with humility, who are invested first and foremost in the success of an enterprise, and able to subordinate their egos to it. Trump has never been like that. He does not want people better than him; he wants people who will flatter him.He doesn’t want a cabinet; he wants a cult of yes men.
On Tuesday afternoon, Trump took to Twitter not simply to defend Lewandowski, but to impugn Fields. He accused her of changing her story. He mused that he should sue her for battery. He tweeted a security-camera photograph of Fields, holding a pen near his arm, and asked suggestively, “What is in her hand??” — as if to suggest that Lewandowski had been protecting him from some imminent threat. In a campaign, or a White House, the culture is set from the top.
Trump doesn’t hire good people, because he’s not a good person himself.He doesn’t hire honest or thoughtful or responsible people, because he’s not honest or thoughtful or responsible.He is a small, nasty, self-absorbed fabulist, and he has gathered a coterie of small, nasty, self-absorbed fabulists to prop him up.“
It’s often been said, not only by us but others far wiser, America would be a better place were each of her citizens required to serve in the Military. It would, if for no other reason than to provide everyone the ability to recognize total bullsh*t when they see and hear it:
This statement alone in our eyes disqualifies this bloviating buffoon from further consideration as anything other than Village Idiot.
In a related item, Jonah Goldberg offers his insight into what we hope is the continuing…and ever-accelerating…decline of The Donald:
A Unified Fields Theory
Until Trump changed the subject to punishing women for having abortions, the Trump obsession of the week was Michelle Fields.
I’m glad that story is largely gone. I don’t think it was good for Fields or for the forces opposed to Trump. And it distracted from more important stories, like Trump’s willingness to nuke Europe.
Without rehashing the whole thing again with reference to frame-by-frame analysis best left for the Zapruder film, let me just say I think all of the important and relevant facts are on Fields’s side. There’s audio of her describing what happened immediately after the Corey Lewandowski incident. There are the bruises captured on film. There’s video and there are eye-witness accounts, all of which corroborate the basic story Fields has been telling.
To listen to Trump’s and Lewandowski’s defenders, this is all a big lie, the upshot being that Fields invented the whole story in a deviously clever gambit to trade her job at Breitbart and her regular gig on Eric Bolling’s show for something so much better. Indeed, I think her plan went something like this:
Step 1: Ask Donald Trump about affirmative action while he’s walking out of a press conference.
Step 2: Walk in just such a way as to dupe Corey Lewandowski into putting his hands on me.
Step 3: Pretend that he grabbed me too hard, convincing eyewitnesses on scene that something bad happened.
Step 4: Bruise my own arm and take a picture of it.
Step 5: Ask for an apology from the Trump campaign, which is like asking Trump to create a boulder too heavy for him to lift.
Step 6: Wait for my own news organization to throw me under the bus, then quit job.
Step 7: Wait for the checks to roll in!
Still, what happened to Fields was not Kristallnacht and Lewandowski should not, in my opinion, stand trial or be sent to even five minutes of jail. I think he’s a boorish lout and he behaved stupidly. If Lewandoswki had any common sense or decency, he would have apologized for overreacting and thrown Fields an interview with Trump to make amends. The whole thing would have been over without any of us having heard a word about it.
Second Thoughts on Trump
But observing common courtesy and civility is not what the Team Trump does. And that’s the real issue here. Donald Trump and his campaign take great pride in overturning the basic rules of politics and democratic discourse. For those who want to see “the establishment” — however defined — torn down, this bull-in-a-china-shop stuff is celebrated. Trump’s fans ascribe a brilliance to his actions that is wholly underserved. Breaking the rules in ways large and small is seen as self-justifying in every case.
Or almost every case. This week there have been some cracks in the façade. Trump’s attacks on Heidi Cruz unsettled evenAnn Coulter. And his abortion remarks are still sending tremors through the granite foundations of Trump can-do-no-wrong-ism.Joe Scarborough and Breitbart’s John Nolte are talking about what a bad week he’s having and gravely warning Trump to get his act together.
As Jim Geraghty has been writing, the problem with such second thoughts is the assumption that something is amiss with Trump or his campaign.This is Trump. This is his campaign.The Trump we see before us is the same Trump. It’s a bit like when Barack Obama said that the Jeremiah Wright he saw denouncing America wasn’t the man he knew. That was nonsense. Obama knew exactly who Wright was, having attended his church for 20 years. It was only when Wright’s act moved to a larger national stage that all of a sudden he became inconvenient to Obama.
The analogy isn’t perfect, of course. But the basic point is the same. The Donald Trump of the last week is the exact same Donald Trump many of us saw a year ago or five years ago. He’s always been full of sh*t. He’s always been a total ignoramus when it comes to public policy, lacking the simple sense of patriotic duty to do his homework on the issues. He’s always been a nasty and boorish cad. He’s always pretended to be a conservative while working on liberal assumptions of what conservatives want to hear.
His “punish the women” comments were of a piece with his refusal to condemn the Klan on CNN. It’s not that he wants to punish women who have abortions — I’d bet he’s paid more abortion bills than he will ever sign — it’s that he thinks that’s what pro-lifers want to hear. It’s not that he’s a Klansman or that the pillowcases at Mara Lago come with eyeholes cut out in advance. It’s that Trump thinks lots of his fans like the Klan and he wants to pander to them. I have heard first-hand stories from people who’ve worked with Trump about how he disparages women’s appearance routinely. That’s who he is. If you’re attacking him because he retweeted a bad picture of Heidi, that’s not you being principled, it’s you getting cold feet.
Indeed, I am sure that the same opportunism that has caused so many supposedly principled conservatives to hitch their wagons to Trump is now causing some of them to question their choices, not because Trump has changed but because the climate might be changing around them.
By all means, if Trump continues to unravel (a huge if), please abandon Trump. But don’t think for a moment that the rest of us will automatically take your word for it when you say this or that statement changed your mind about the man. He hasn’t changed, your calculations have.
The Gravitational Pull of Lies
But can I go back to Michelle Fields for a moment? I think that whole affair was really instructive.
Trump is a master of a kind of passive aggression — though it can often just seem like plain old aggression. When caught in a lie, Trump doesn’t merely stick to the lie, he enlarges it. Not only did Lewandowski do nothing wrong, he saved Trump from an assault!That pen could have been a bomb! A bomb!!! (Remember when he suggested a protester who charged the stage was with ISIS?)
By embracing and enlarging the lie, Trump gives his most ardent fans no escape. They must either fall in line with yet another comfortable story about how their leader is both supremely right and a victim of deceit or open themselves up to the possibility that this one instance of deception and boorishness isn’t unique but utterly representative, which it is.
I think many of us have known people like this. Inveterate liars and other kinds of sociopaths test the limits of polite society. They break the implicit bargain that says you can get away with lying only so long as everyone agrees not to notice. Obvious lies are insults, because they rest on the assumption that the person being lied to is either too stupid to recognize the lie or too weak to say anything about it. In this sense, Trump has been insulting his biggest supporters from day one.
We’ve all had dinner parties or family gatherings ruined by that oaf who refuses to bend to simple politeness. They force polite people to either swallow small — or large — insults for the sake of civility. “I didn’t want to make a huge deal about it because it would have just made things worse,” is a rationalization we’ve given voice to on the drive home.
Trump is doing this on a massive scale. Like all demagogues, he’s using his lies as a loyalty test for his followers. He’s exploiting his popularity and abusing the devotion of his fans to force them into going along with his fictions until they are in so deep psychologically, they have no choice but to carry on. It’s an ancient psychological tactic of authoritarians, Mafia dons, and the like: Force your followers into sharing the blame for your misdeeds so that they can’t break ranks. For instance, when Trump was caught saying something typically ignorant about abortion, he told Eric Bolling that MSNBC cut out the nuance of what he really said.
“You really ought to hear the whole thing,” Trump told guest host Eric Bolling. “This is a long convoluted question. This was a long discussion, and they just cut it out. And, frankly, it was extremely — it was really convoluted.”
Of course, Trump knows that MSNBC ran the clip in its entirety, and Bolling probably does, too.But I am sure that if I went on Twitter and said, “Trump lied about his comments being edited,” within minutes I’d hear from people saying “No, MSNBC edited him!” or “Of course you RINOs would believe MSNBC!” I’ll also be interested to see if Bolling says anything about the fact that Donald Trump blatantly lied to him.
But I won’t hold my breath.
Nor will we…though every word Goldberg’s written is the unvarnished, unadulterated truth.
Since we’re on the subject of pathological liars, next up, given The Great Prevaricator’s penchant for (borrowing a line from Jaws) ignoring one particular problem…
…until it swims up and blows innocent Americans apart…
“They’re blowing up jet passengers and blasting subway trains, and all he wants to do is dance, dance, dance.”
President Obama resembles the airheaded young lady depicted in Don Henley’s 1984 rock hit. As her surroundings grow increasingly perilous, all she wants to do is dance.
Obama similarly debased himself and humiliated his country via a tango in Buenos Aires, a baseball game with Cuban despot Raul Castro in Havana (including with Obama doing the wave), and an Easter-eve round of golf. All this transpired barely hours after radical Islamic terrorists turned Brussels into a slaughterhouse. Just before Obama partied, ISIS killers wounded 316 and murdered 32 innocents, including four Americans, in a NATO-allied capital.
What, if anything, will make Obama abandon his Ringling Bros.–quality clown routine, display a modicum of maturity, and — at long last — get serious about obliterating jihad in general and ISIS in particular? Perhaps once ISIS goes radioactive, it finally will dawn on Obama that Islamic terrorism is no laughing matter…”
Somehow…
…we doubt it, as anyone other than himself isn’t even remotely on his radar screen.
And on The Lighter Side…
Finally, we’ll call it a day with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter:
“…Liliana Vanegas, 25, was charged with grand theft and cocaine possession after she allegedly stole Alvin Malhi’s $28,000 Rolex watch from his Miami Beach hotel room.
Malhi, a Canadian, was in Miami for his brother-in-law’s bachelor party when he met Vanegas at a bar Sunday night on Ocean Drive…The two went back to Malhi’s hotel room at the Loew’s Hotel and downed some early morning shots of whiskey before passing out together on his bed. Malhi said that nothing sexual happened between the two. “Of course I wanted to take her to bed,” Malhi said. “But she wouldn’t let me touch her.”
Around 7 a.m., Malhi noticed that Vanegas put on her shoes and clothes and rushed out the door with Malhi’s prized Rolex…The two got into a heated argument until Venegas hopped into a cab, and then another, as Mahli followed her close behind in a different taxi. At one point, police say, the woman used her cell phone to call 30-year-old Francisco Trujillo, who picked her up in a white Mercedes before speeding off.
The modern-day Bonnie and Clyde did not make it far, however, as police pulled them over on the MacArthur Causeway. For his role in the heist, Trujillo was charged with grand theft and driving without a license. Vanegas and Trujillo were both still behind bars on Tuesday being held on $21,000 and $10,000 bail respectively.
Malhi might have got his pricey watch back, but he might not escape scotch-free from the incident. The executive at a transportation company outside of Toronto will have to explain how he got into the situation with Vanegas…when he goes home to his wife. “I told her 99 percent of the truth,” he said. “I told her [Vanegas] was a stripper we brought back to the room for my brother-in-law.”“
Yeah…like your wife won’t be able to pick up on the internet…or from a friend…that rather important 1% you left out! When it comes to folks like Mr. Malhi, we’re with Bugs Bunny:
Though we do believe, every now and again, the herd requires culling!
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