[Zipperfish]

But they're having a hayday over at the Daily Mail.



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5239309/New-book-calls-Trump-chronically-unfaithful.html

[ShepherdsDog]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

It's all Clinton all the time on Fox News today. DIVERT DIVERT!!!!

There's no doubt the Clintons are crooks too, but the Trumptards are unable to comprehend the simple fact that disliking Trump doesn't make you a fan/supporter of the Clintons....and some simpleton from the MAGAt mass will come along and confirm this.

[N_Fiddledog]

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

You really think that the North Korean file has been successful? Botched completely, more like...

I don't think that's what was said.

Here's the quote:

$1:

In the Korean peninsula, where old forms of international coercion failed, there are signs of progress.

They support it with this:

$1:

Trump has pressed the Chinese to take the North Korean threat more seriously. They already are. Sanctions have been made harsher, with Chinese support, and Kim Jong-un has now given word that he wants to open talks with South Korea.

On the second part of that, I was reading this today.

"North Korea on Friday morning accepted South Korea's proposal for official talks, setting the stage for the two rivals to have person-to-person dialogue next Tuesday.

South Korea's Unification Ministry Baik Tae-hyun told reporters that North Korea informed them by fax at 10:16 a.m. local time that they have accepted their proposal for talks, CNN reported:

The person-to-person talks will be held January 9th at the Peace House, located on the South Korean side of the village of Panmunjom, located in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two nations, Baik said."

http://freebeacon.com/national-security ... next-week/

[Jabberwalker]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

You really think that the North Korean file has been successful? Botched completely, more like...

I don't think that's what was said.

Here's the quote:

$1:

In the Korean peninsula, where old forms of international coercion failed, there are signs of progress.

They support it with this:

$1:

Trump has pressed the Chinese to take the North Korean threat more seriously. They already are. Sanctions have been made harsher, with Chinese support, and Kim Jong-un has now given word that he wants to open talks with South Korea.

On the second part of that, I was reading this today.

"North Korea on Friday morning accepted South Korea's proposal for official talks, setting the stage for the two rivals to have person-to-person dialogue next Tuesday.

South Korea's Unification Ministry Baik Tae-hyun told reporters that North Korea informed them by fax at 10:16 a.m. local time that they have accepted their proposal for talks, CNN reported:

The person-to-person talks will be held January 9th at the Peace House, located on the South Korean side of the village of Panmunjom, located in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two nations, Baik said."

http://freebeacon.com/national-security ... next-week/

Yeah, the brink of destruction is a sign of progress. That's why the Evangelicals like Trump. He brings the "Biblical end times" closer and closer.

[N_Fiddledog]

That doesn't make sense.

How could talks with South Korea at something they're calling "the Peace House" as explained by something called "South Korea's Unification Ministry" be the "brink of destruction?"

How did you even come up with that one?

[BeaverFever]

Book excerpt

$1:

"You Can’t Make This S--- Up": My Year Inside Trump's Insane White House

4:00 AM PST 1/4/2018 by Michael Wolff

uthor and columnist Michael Wolff was given extraordinary access to the Trump administration and now details the feuds, the fights and the alarming chaos he witnessed while reporting what turned into a new book.

Editor’s Note: Author and Hollywood Reporter columnist Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt & Co.), is a detailed account of the 45th president’s election and first year in office based on extensive access to the White House and more than 200 interviews with Trump and senior staff over a period of 18 months. In advance of the Jan. 9 publication of the book, which Trump is already attacking, Wolff has written this extracted column about his time in the White House based on the reporting included in Fire and Fury.

I interviewed Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked — or not disliked — the piece I wrote. "Great cover!" his press assistant, Hope Hicks, emailed me after it came out (it was a picture of a belligerent Trump in mirrored sunglasses). After the election, I proposed to him that I come to the White House and report an inside story for later publication — journalistically, as a fly on the wall — which he seemed to misconstrue as a request for a job. No, I said. I'd like to just watch and write a book. "A book?" he responded, losing interest. "I hear a lot of people want to write books," he added, clearly not understanding why anybody would. "Do you know Ed Klein?"— author of several virulently anti-Hillary books. "Great guy. I think he should write a book about me." But sure, Trump seemed to say, knock yourself out.

Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around — checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the "system," and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch.

The West Wing is configured in such a way that the anteroom is quite a thoroughfare — everybody passes by. Assistants — young women in the Trump uniform of short skirts, high boots, long and loose hair — as well as, in situation-comedy proximity, all the new stars of the show: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Jared Kushner, Mike Pence, Gary Cohn, Michael Flynn (and after Flynn's abrupt departure less than a month into the job for his involvement in the Russia affair, his replacement, H.R. McMaster), all neatly accessible.

The nature of the comedy, it was soon clear, was that here was a group of ambitious men and women who had reached the pinnacle of power, a high-ranking White House appointment — with the punchline that Donald Trump was president. Their estimable accomplishment of getting to the West Wing risked at any moment becoming farce.

A new president typically surrounds himself with a small group of committed insiders and loyalists. But few on the Trump team knew him very well — most of his advisors had been with him only since the fall. Even his family, now closely gathered around him, seemed nonplussed. "You know, we never saw that much of him until he got the nomination," Eric Trump's wife, Lara, told one senior staffer. If much of the country was incredulous, his staff, trying to cement their poker faces, were at least as confused.

Their initial response was to hawkishly defend him — he demanded it — and by defending him they seemed to be defending themselves. Politics is a game, of course, of determined role-playing, but the difficulties of staying in character in the Trump White House became evident almost from the first day.

"You can't make this shit up," Sean Spicer, soon to be portrayed as the most hapless man in America, muttered to himself after his tortured press briefing on the first day of the new administration, when he was called to justify the president's inaugural crowd numbers — and soon enough, he adopted this as a personal mantra. Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, had, shortly after the announcement of his appointment in November, started to think he would not last until the inauguration. Then, making it to the White House, he hoped he could last a respectable year, but he quickly scaled back his goal to six months. Kellyanne Conway, who would put a finger-gun to her head in private about Trump's public comments, continued to mount an implacable defense on cable television, until she was pulled off the air by others in the White House who, however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic. (Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway's fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.)

Steve Bannon tried to gamely suggest that Trump was mere front man and that he, with plan and purpose and intellect, was, more reasonably, running the show — commanding a whiteboard of policies and initiatives that he claimed to have assembled from Trump's off-the-cuff ramblings and utterances. His adoption of the Saturday Night Live sobriquet "President Bannon" was less than entirely humorous. Within the first few weeks, even rote conversations with senior staff trying to explain the new White House's policies and positions would turn into a body-language ballet of eye-rolling and shrugs and pantomime of jaws dropping. Leaking became the political manifestation of the don't-blame-me eye roll.

The surreal sense of the Trump presidency was being lived as intensely inside the White House as out. Trump was, for the people closest to him, the ultimate enigma. He had been elected president, that through-the-eye-of-the-needle feat, but obviously, he was yet … Trump. Indeed, he seemed as confused as anyone to find himself in the White House, even attempting to barricade himself into his bedroom with his own lock over the protests of the Secret Service.

Read More

Michael Wolff Reflects on a Wild Week and Trump's Anger: "I Have No Side Here" (Q&A)

There was some effort to ascribe to Trump magical powers. In an early conversation — half comic, half desperate — Bannon tried to explain him as having a particular kind of Jungian brilliance. Trump, obviously without having read Jung, somehow had access to the collective unconscious of the other half of the country, and, too, a gift for inventing archetypes: Little Marco … Low-Energy Jeb … the Failing New York Times. Everybody in the West Wing tried, with some panic, to explain him, and, sheepishly, their own reason for being here. He's intuitive, he gets it, he has a mind-meld with his base. But there was palpable relief, of an Emperor's New Clothes sort, when longtime Trump staffer Sam Nunberg — fired by Trump during the campaign but credited with knowing him better than anyone else — came back into the fold and said, widely, "He's just a fucking fool."

Part of that foolishness was his inability to deal with his own family. In a way, this gave him a human dimension. Even Donald Trump couldn't say no to his kids. "It's a littleee, littleee complicated …" he explained to Priebus about why he needed to give his daughter and son-in-law official jobs. But the effect of their leadership roles was to compound his own boundless inexperience in Washington, creating from the outset frustration and then disbelief and then rage on the part of the professionals in his employ.

The men and women of the West Wing, for all that the media was ridiculing them, actually felt they had a responsibility to the country. "Trump," said one senior Republican, "turned selfish careerists into patriots." Their job was to maintain the pretense of relative sanity, even as each individually came to the conclusion that, in generous terms, it was insane to think you could run a White House without experience, organizational structure or a real purpose.

On March 30, after the collapse of the health care bill, 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff, the effective administration chief of the West Wing, a stalwart political pro and stellar example of governing craft, walked out. Little more than two months in, she quit. Couldn't take it anymore. Nutso. To lose your deputy chief of staff at the get-go would be a sign of crisis in any other administration, but inside an obviously exploding one it was hardly noticed.

While there might be a scary national movement of Trumpers, the reality in the White House was stranger still: There was Jared and Ivanka, Democrats; there was Priebus, a mainstream Republican; and there was Bannon, whose reasonable claim to be the one person actually representing Trumpism so infuriated Trump that Bannon was hopelessly sidelined by April. "How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me? Zero! Zero!" Trump muttered and stormed. To say that no one was in charge, that there were no guiding principles, not even a working org chart, would again be an understatement. "What do these people do?" asked everyone pretty much of everyone else.

The competition to take charge, which, because each side represented an inimical position to the other, became not so much a struggle for leadership, but a near-violent factional war. Jared and Ivanka were against Priebus and Bannon, trying to push both men out. Bannon was against Jared and Ivanka and Priebus, practicing what everybody thought were dark arts against them. Priebus, everybody's punching bag, just tried to survive another day. By late spring, the larger political landscape seemed to become almost irrelevant, with everyone focused on the more lethal battles within the White House itself. This included screaming fights in the halls and in front of a bemused Trump in the Oval Office (when he was not the one screaming himself), together with leaks about what Russians your opponents might have been talking to.

Reigning over all of this was Trump, enigma, cipher and disruptor. How to get along with Trump — who veered between a kind of blissed-out pleasure of being in the Oval Office and a deep, childish frustration that he couldn't have what he wanted? Here was a man singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on Fox & Friends or an Oval Office photo opp. "I want a win. I want a win. Where's my win?" he would regularly declaim. He was, in words used by almost every member of the senior staff on repeated occasions, "like a child." A chronic naysayer, Trump himself stoked constant discord with his daily after-dinner phone calls to his billionaire friends about the disloyalty and incompetence around him. His billionaire friends then shared this with their billionaire friends, creating the endless leaks which the president so furiously railed against.

Read More

Read Donald Trump's Full Legal Demand Over Michael Wolff's Book

One of these frequent callers was Rupert Murdoch, who before the election had only ever expressed contempt for Trump. Now Murdoch constantly sought him out, but to his own colleagues, friends and family, continued to derisively ridicule Trump: "What a fucking moron," said Murdoch after one call.

With the Comey firing, the Mueller appointment and murderous White House infighting, by early summer Bannon was engaged in an uninterrupted monologue directed to almost anyone who would listen. It was so caustic, so scabrous and so hilarious that it might form one of the great underground political treatises.

By July, Jared and Ivanka, who had, in less than six months, traversed from socialite couple to royal family to the most powerful people in the world, were now engaged in a desperate dance to save themselves, which mostly involved blaming Trump himself. It was all his idea to fire Comey! "The daughter," Bannon declared, "will bring down the father."

Priebus and Spicer were merely counting down to the day — and every day seemed to promise it would be the next day — when they would be out.

And, indeed, suddenly there were the 11 days of Anthony Scaramucci.

Scaramucci, a minor figure in the New York financial world, and quite a ridiculous one, had overnight become Jared and Ivanka's solution to all of the White House's management and messaging problems. After all, explained the couple, he was good on television and he was from New York — he knew their world. In effect, the couple had hired Scaramucci — as preposterous a hire in West Wing annals as any — to replace Priebus and Bannon and take over running the White House.

There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump's family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.

Most succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia "collusion," Trump, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation, nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.)

There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he'd repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn't stop saying something.

By summer's end, in something of a historic sweep — more usual for the end of a president's first term than the end of his first six months — almost the entire senior staff, save Trump's family, had been washed out: Michael Flynn, Katie Walsh, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon. Even Trump's loyal, longtime body guard Keith Schiller — for reasons darkly whispered about in the West Wing — was out. Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Rick Dearborn, all on their way out. The president, on the spur of the moment, appointed John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and head of homeland security, chief of staff — without Kelly having been informed of his own appointment beforehand. Grim and stoic, accepting that he could not control the president, Kelly seemed compelled by a sense of duty to be, in case of disaster, the adult in the room who might, if needed, stand up to the president … if that is comfort.

As telling, with his daughter and son-in-law sidelined by their legal problems, Hope Hicks, Trump's 29-year-old personal aide and confidant, became, practically speaking, his most powerful White House advisor. (With Melania a nonpresence, the staff referred to Ivanka as the "real wife" and Hicks as the "real daughter.") Hicks' primary function was to tend to the Trump ego, to reassure him, to protect him, to buffer him, to soothe him. It was Hicks who, attentive to his lapses and repetitions, urged him to forgo an interview that was set to open the 60 Minutes fall season. Instead, the interview went to Fox News' Sean Hannity who, White House insiders happily explained, was willing to supply the questions beforehand. Indeed, the plan was to have all interviewers going forward provide the questions.

As the first year wound down, Trump finally got a bill to sign. The tax bill, his singular accomplishment, was, arguably, quite a reversal of his populist promises, and confirmation of what Mitch McConnell had seen early on as the silver Trump lining: "He'll sign anything we put in front of him." With new bravado, he was encouraging partisans like Fox News to pursue an anti-Mueller campaign on his behalf. Insiders believed that the only thing saving Mueller from being fired, and the government of the United States from unfathomable implosion, is Trump's inability to grasp how much Mueller had on him and his family.

Steve Bannon was openly handicapping a 33.3 percent chance of impeachment, a 33.3 percent chance of resignation in the shadow of the 25th amendment and a 33.3 percent chance that he might limp to the finish line on the strength of liberal arrogance and weakness.

Donald Trump's small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would — or, in many cases, should — have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country's future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

Happy first anniversary of the Trump administration.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... se-1071504

[N_Fiddledog]

TheResistance pins its hopes on Michael Wolff, who admits parts of his book may not be true

$1:

Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury” hijacked the news cycle this week.

Fantastical tales of a White House in disarray, administrative turmoil, and anecdotes aplenty meant to justify Trump’s “unfitness” for the Oval Office made for some captivating reading.


Excerpts allegedly quoting former White House aide Steve Bannon ignited a scorched earth flame war between the embittered exiled aide and Trump.

Immediately, certain parts of the story were called to question as they didn’t hold up to basic fact-checking, begging the question: How much of “Fire and Fury” is true?

Wolff himself isn’t entirely sure all parts of the book he’s peddling as the ultimate insider account of Trump’s first year are actually true. In fact, he knows some of his sources were telling tall tales, yet chose to include their stories anyway.

From Business Insider:

The author of the explosive new book about Donald Trump’s presidency acknowledged in an author’s note that he wasn’t certain all of its content was true.

Michael Wolff, the author of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” included a note at the start that casts significant doubt on the reliability of the specifics contained in the rest of its pages.

Several of his sources, he says, were definitely lying to him, while some offered accounts that flatly contradicted those of others.

But some were nonetheless included in the vivid account of the West Wing’s workings, in a process Wolff describes as “allowing the reader to judge” whether the sources’ claims are true.

In other cases, the media columnist said, he did use his journalistic judgment and research to arrive at what he describes “a version of events I believe to be true.”

“Allowing the reader to judge”? What is this, a Choose Your Own Adventure book?

The whole ordeal is garbage and as Professor Jacobson discussed last week, noise.

All the hot takes on why Trump’s presidency is in disarray based solely on a book the author says he can’t be sure is completely true: https://t.co/EETqXJy3KS

— Kemberlee Kaye (@KemberleeKaye) January 6, 2018

I’ll carry no water for Trump, but the constant and steady stream of garbage meant to delegitimize his presidency continues to be a pathetic and petty annoyance.

— Kemberlee Kaye (@KemberleeKaye) January 6, 2018

If Trump is as awful, unstable, and the latest buzzword of choice “unfit” for the Oval Office as we’ve been told, works of fiction “proving” such aren’t necessary. Simply getting out of the way, leaving him to his own devices, and waiting ought to be sufficient.

— Kemberlee Kaye (@KemberleeKaye) January 6, 2018

But that won’t happen. We’ll continue to be inundated with unsourced stories about Trump, most of which will be proven untrue because journalism is gasping for breath on its death bed and instead, we’re living in a garbage time where most news is speculative confirmation bias.

— Kemberlee Kaye (@KemberleeKaye) January 6, 2018

Truth doesn’t matter. What matters to many on both sides of the aisle is that their point of view is continually confirmed by stories that stroke their chosen reality:

Sounds true. And everything Trump says makes it sound even more true.

— Grace Lidia Suárez (@gracels) January 6, 2018

interesting approach to journalism pic.twitter.com/NxKzPry4M1

— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) January 5, 2018

[BeaverFever]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

TheResistance pins its hopes on Michael Wolff, who admits parts of his book may not be true

$1:

Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury” hijacked the news cycle this week.

Fantastical tales of a White House in disarray, administrative turmoil, and anecdotes aplenty meant to justify Trump’s “unfitness” for the Oval Office made for some captivating reading.


Excerpts allegedly quoting former White House aide Steve Bannon ignited a scorched earth flame war between the embittered exiled aide and Trump.

Immediately, certain parts of the story were called to question as they didn’t hold up to basic fact-checking, begging the question: How much of “Fire and Fury” is true?

Wolff himself isn’t entirely sure all parts of the book he’s peddling as the ultimate insider account of Trump’s first year are actually true. In fact, he knows some of his sources were telling tall tales, yet chose to include their stories anyway.

From Business Insider:

The author of the explosive new book about Donald Trump’s presidency acknowledged in an author’s note that he wasn’t certain all of its content was true.

Michael Wolff, the author of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” included a note at the start that casts significant doubt on the reliability of the specifics contained in the rest of its pages.

Several of his sources, he says, were definitely lying to him, while some offered accounts that flatly contradicted those of others.

But some were nonetheless included in the vivid account of the West Wing’s workings, in a process Wolff describes as “allowing the reader to judge” whether the sources’ claims are true.

In other cases, the media columnist said, he did use his journalistic judgment and research to arrive at what he describes “a version of events I believe to be true.”

“Allowing the reader to judge”? What is this, a Choose Your Own Adventure book?

The whole ordeal is garbage and as Professor Jacobson discussed last week, noise.

All the hot takes on why Trump’s presidency is in disarray based solely on a book the author says he can’t be sure is completely true: https://t.co/EETqXJy3KS

— Kemberlee Kaye (@KemberleeKaye) January 6, 2018

I’ll carry no water for Trump, but the constant and steady stream of garbage meant to delegitimize his presidency continues to be a pathetic and petty annoyance.

— Kemberlee Kaye (@KemberleeKaye) January 6, 2018

If Trump is as awful, unstable, and the latest buzzword of choice “unfit” for the Oval Office as we’ve been told, works of fiction “proving” such aren’t necessary. Simply getting out of the way, leaving him to his own devices, and waiting ought to be sufficient.

— Kemberlee Kaye (@KemberleeKaye) January 6, 2018

But that won’t happen. We’ll continue to be inundated with unsourced stories about Trump, most of which will be proven untrue because journalism is gasping for breath on its death bed and instead, we’re living in a garbage time where most news is speculative confirmation bias.

— Kemberlee Kaye (@KemberleeKaye) January 6, 2018

Truth doesn’t matter. What matters to many on both sides of the aisle is that their point of view is continually confirmed by stories that stroke their chosen reality:

Sounds true. And everything Trump says makes it sound even more true.

— Grace Lidia Suárez (@gracels) January 6, 2018

interesting approach to journalism pic.twitter.com/NxKzPry4M1

— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) January 5, 2018

You can say that about any book. This is just the typical Deplorables trying ro make the ordinary seem like conspiracy.

What he said is that when he interviewed Trump staffers, many of them didn’ always seem to be telling the truth or the whole truth. But that’s common in any book. What investigations ever involve interviewees always telling the truth?

But the AUTHORS account is honest. He can write a book truthfully saying “this is what Priebus told me”. Whether or not Priebus was lying to the author when he said it is another matter, which the author then parses or leaves up to the readrr.

Here’s his full comment,

$1:

"Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.

"Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true."

[N_Fiddledog]

The Wolff Book Proves It: Our Journalists Stink

$1:

The self-destruction of Steve Bannon is a terrific story but not an important story. That is, for those of us who love politics for its Shakespearean revelation of character on the grand stage, it's an amazing farewell-to-all-my-greatness moment. But if you are concerned about the threats to liberty at home and abroad, the prosperity of our fellow Americans and allies, and the positive developments — like fresh space exploration — that might emerge from a new American century, well, Steve don't matter much. Or at all.

But Bannon's fall, and the scandal-mongering book that helped it along — Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House — do underscore one thing of real importance: our mainstream journalists are genuinely awful. They will sell any narrative they can to keep from selling the one that seems increasingly likely to be true: Trump is smarter than they are and doing a better job than the last two presidents combined.

Consider this "bombshell" from the book. Bannon thinks Don Trump Jr.'s June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer was "treasonous," and that "the chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father's office on the twenty-fifth floor is zero." It's a fascinating comment, because it indicates that Bannon so miscalculated his power and political acumen that he thought he could knock down the central pillar of his prestige — Trump's friendship — and survive with his career intact. But it has no factual or evidentiary weight. Bannon wasn't at the meeting and didn't even join the campaign until August 2016. So he's just another guy with an opinion — and a guy whose opinions tend to be overblown and melodramatic at that.

Now listen to how Chuck Todd reported it on MSNBC in a tone I can only describe as one of prissy self-righteousness: "Welcome to a five alarm dumpster fire for the White House or shall we call it Bannon’s rebellion? The Russia investigation has been blown open in dramatic fashion. Not by the ‘fake news media,’ not by the ‘deep state Justice Department,’ but by Steve Bannon!" Stephanie Ruhle and political reporter Mark Murray also opined that Bannon's remarks gave the Russia investigation "legitimacy."

Why? Bannon wasn't there. He wasn't part of the campaign at the time. He has an opinion. So do I. How does any of this "blow open" anything besides Bannon's piehole?

All of what I've seen of Fire and Fury so far seems more sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Donald Trump was so ignorant he didn't know who John Boehner was, Wolff writes. It took me a fifteen-second Google search to prove that wasn't true. Trump had spoken about Boehner frequently. He played golf with the guy! It's an important anecdote meant to tell us something about the president of the United States and it's utterly false. What kind of writer — what kind of publisher — doesn't check that stuff?

Or consider this description from Wolff's self-promotion piece for Hollywood Reporter: "Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of [Trump's] repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he'd repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes."

We know this isn't true. As recently as October, we saw Trump speak for 45 minutes off-the-cuff under press questioning. Over Christmas, he talked to the New York Times. He's clearly all there. A big, outlandish character, no question, but no more outlandish than he was in the 1980s. Why should Wolff's assertion get any sort of attention at all?

The nation's journalists cover this obvious nonsense because otherwise, they'd have to enter what to them is uncharted territory: the truth.

If there's anything substantial in Wolff's tales of chaos in the early Trump White House, it shows nothing more than this: Those of us who thought the political neophyte Trump was unprepared to take office in January were correct, and Trump's response — that he would learn in office and appoint the "best people" to help him — was equally correct.

But that would mean that Trump is practically smarter and more adept than the journalists who hate him and those journalists will accept any narrative other than that one. The White House is running more smoothly? Well, that's John Kelly's doing, not Trump's. ISIS is defeated? Well, that's Mattis's work, not Trump's. Great judicial appointments? Well, that's the Federalist Society. Tax cuts? That's Ryan and McConnell. Regulatory rollbacks? Well, that's all those guys running the agencies. Trump is so busy tweeting and watching the Gorilla Channel, he just hasn't had time to get in the way, that's all.

We are watching our mainstream news media implode. They don't just jump on any fake news that might make Trump look bad for the few moments before they're forced to retract it. They're now actually reporting their fantasies — fantasies in which Trump doesn't keep making them look like the idiots they are.

https://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/wolff- ... sts-stink/

[Jabberwalker]

Not winning any converts, I see.


There's an empty rubber room with your name on it, somewhere.

[Sunnyways]

One frequent flaw in those who go directly from civilian life to high politics is an inability to ignore criticism. It's a natural human response that takes years to restrain. Trump seems to have no defences in this area and it looks like we are in for an endless stream of silly tweets and speeches responding to each little slight and thereby giving them far more weight than they deserve. The claim about Boehner is trickier to disprove than might appear at first sight, e.g. just because Trump knows who Boehner is doesn't mean he couldn't have failed to recognize him on one or more occasions, so it's an unfalsifiable statement that should not be taken too seriously. Evidence for or against incapacity will accumulate anyway. Wolff also has a reputation for bending the truth more than a bit.

BTW it's great to see the liberty journalists have in the US to publish this type of book. In many parts of the world, including the British Isles, it would never have seen the light of day during the term of the head of government.

[PluggyRug]

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

Not winning any converts, I see.


There's an empty rubber room with your name on it, somewhere.

What's this... another drive by pseudo comment from a current rubber room occupant.

[N_Fiddledog]

It's kind of humorous, isn't it?

Jabber seems to be telling us if you can't convert Beave you're crazy.

And if that is what it sounds like, wouldn't it be...oh, I don't know...nuts.

[Jabberwalker]

Sunnyways Sunnyways:

One frequent flaw in those who go directly from civilian life to high politics is an inability to ignore criticism. It's a natural human response that takes years to restrain. Trump seems to have no defences in this area and it looks like we are in for an endless stream of silly tweets and speeches responding to each little slight and thereby giving them far more weight than they deserve. The claim about Boehner is trickier to disprove than might appear at first sight, e.g. just because Trump knows who Boehner is doesn't mean he couldn't have failed to recognize him on one or more occasions, so it's an unfalsifiable statement that should not be taken too seriously. Evidence for or against incapacity will accumulate anyway. Wolff also has a reputation for bending the truth more than a bit.

BTW it's great to see the liberty journalists have in the US to publish this type of book. In many parts of the world, including the British Isles, it would never have seen the light of day during the term of the head of government.

Trump has been "THE BOSS" all of his adult life and what he said, went (no matter how whacky, it would seem). Now, suddenly, he is not an absolute ruler. I'll bet that he believed that the Presidency is an absolute monarchy but now he has to both work with and convince those with a whole spectrum of beliefs beyond his. Whether it is because of his lack of appropriate life experience or his innate bullying narcissism, he is simply not up to the job.

[BeaverFever]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

It's kind of humorous, isn't it?

Jabber seems to be telling us if you can't convert Beave you're crazy.

And if that is what it sounds like, wouldn't it be...oh, I don't know...nuts.

You’re inferring a cause and effect that’s not implied You’re crazy AND can’t covert me...not because of.