Ramblin' with Roger

I haven’t written much about a certain resident of New York City AND Washington, DC AND Palm Beach, Florida. It’s not for lack of interest. Some of it has been a lack of time. But mostly, it’s that it’s too hard, with so many issues popping that I can scarcely keep up. I’m amazed how Lawrence White does it. But I’m not inclined to make this blog only about him; I have a life.

It appears that 45 wants to be seen as the sole authority of truth. The sycophants around him have said pretty much the same thing. This is particularly problematic because, as it was the case LONG before he took office and more so now, he lies. He lies ALL of the time. Or as Scott Pelley of CBS News gingerly put it recently: “It’s been a busy day for presidential statements divorced from reality.”

Orange has thrown around the fake news canard as he lied about the murder rate in the US being at a 45-year high. He lied about the media coverage of terrorist activities, making journalists spend their time fighting back.

And then there was the press conference of February 16, 2017 that was fact checker’s dream. Or nightmare.

The man tweeted one morning, “Thank you to Prime Minister of Australia for telling the truth about our very civil conversation that FAKE NEWS media lied about.” The only problem is, no one had any idea what he was talking about. From the Washington Post: “It was unclear exactly what [he] was referring to, however. Turnbull did not deny the candid and frank exchange between the two men, with sources close to him describing [Orange] as a ‘bully’ in news reports.”

I thought I had missed some news detail, which, I suppose, was the point. As a local editor mused, “This is more than a little curious. Did the president just make up what a foreign leader said? Did he imagine it? Is he gaslighting us all? Or, did his administration feed false information to the press so he could accuse it of getting the story wrong? Any one of these scenarios is serious.”

He’s just as politically correct as the ones he criticizes. It “makes it impossible to talk about white supremacist terrorism, or right-wing terrorism of any kind. He can’t criticize Vladimir Putin.”

See John Oliver’s take on the issue.

His lackeys lie as well. Press Secretary Sean Spicer references an imaginary Atlanta terror attack to defend the travel ban.

And in a bit of doublespeak that quite literally gave me a headache, counselor Kellyanne Conway said that the things 45 says that are untrue are less important than the “many things he says that are true.” WTH?

Interestingly, he is always talking about OTHERS lying. It IS quite a clever distraction.

Also:

*He often does not understand what he is talking about

Watching Him Try to Puzzle Out What ‘Asset Forfeiture’ Means Is Deeply Discomfiting: “What’s striking here is the manner in which, over the course of an exchange that lasts perhaps a couple of minutes, he progresses from learning of the existence of a new (to him) concept, to misunderstanding completely what it is and why it’s controversial, to wanting to reinstate and expand civil asset forfeiture so cops can steal your stuff developing a strong opinion about it painted in a childlike understanding of the world and of morality (‘Who would want that pressure, other than, like, bad people, right?’), to expressing outrage that anyone could have an opinion about it that diverges from his own.”

He Is Signing Executive Orders That He Doesn’t Read or Understand. It is well known that he is intellectually lazy.

The conservative publication Foreign Policy says his big mouth has already weakened America.

He and Spicer don’t know, or don’t care, that THEY called the Muslim ban a ban, not the “lyin’ press.” Presidents have always misled. This one seems not to understand what the truth is.

*He runs a White House Devoid of Integrity

The ‘swamp’ he promised to ‘drain’ is growing again

The president is using his continued ownership of Mar-a-Lago to line his pockets. “‘Swanning through the club’s living room and main dining area alongside Abe, he was — as is now typical — swarmed with paying members, who now view dinner at the club as an opportunity for a few seconds of face time with the new President…’ To capitalize on the the premium people are willing to pay for access to the president, the Trump Organization recently doubled the Mar-a-Lago initiation fee to $200,000.” Orange has spent two of his three full weekends as president there.

Conway is hawking Ivanka’s wares, likely violating federal law, after he used his Twitter bully pulpit doing the same thing.

In general, it’s White House, Inc.

*He is petty and vindictive.

He demands an apology from Senator John McCain for saying that the failed raid in Yemen was not a success.

Who disses someone at the National Prayer Breakfast?

Just read the daily links from the relatively apolitical Mark Evanier.

*He surrounds himself with scary folks

Advisor Stephen Miller: “Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” Will not be questioned? He’s been a schmuck for a long time.

I would like to think DT and Steve Bannon’s coup in the making was hyperbolic. America’s Leading Authoritarian Intellectual Is Working for 45. Michael Anton, operating as a senior national security official, has written a “textbook justification for authoritarianism.” This makes Robert Reich’s question about the thugs at Berkeley not very far-fetched.

In other words: he is unfit to serve. I’ve moved from thinking that the Orange one could be impeached to the belief that it’s inevitable.

I’ve said it before, others have said it: this is NOT about Hillary losing. Some of it’s about policy, but it’s as much about the chaotic way it was done, his temperament, his judgment, his distressingly odd vocabulary.

And I was going to throw out there some solutions about how to deal with him. The problem is that I have a LOT of them collected. Some contradict others. Guess I need to synthesize these some more.

But I will say this: we need to be kind to one another. When you’re nasty to your potential ally in this fight, because you’ve been doing it longer, or know more, or have status, or are politically “pure”, you’re doing it wrong. If you drive away folks who mutually dislike Orange, how on earth are you going to reach out to those folks who support him currently, but may be persuaded otherwise down the road? They’re out there and we need to provide them somewhere to go.