Sean Spicer hasn’t been fired yet, so I guess that SNL will retain its comedy goldmine. Sean Spicer told the press last week that the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson was on its way to the Sea of Japan, a move that was construed by many as "carrying a message” to North Korea. Then the pesky New York Times got involved, as usual, saying that it didn't go down that way, and so Sean-y had to have yet another press conference today to explain himself, gee whiz. Here's what was said:
“The president said we have an armada that’s going toward the peninsula,” Spicer said. “That’s a fact, it happened — It is happening, rather.”
In a followup, a reporter noted that “when the President of the United States says there’s military hardware going to a region in the middle of a crisis on the Korean Peninsula, the allies of the United States are encouraged,” but “when that happens to not be the case, they can interpret that as a false encouragement” for their efforts.
“How is this White House explaining to South Korea and Japan there was no U.S.S. Carl Vinson?” she asked.
[An unfazed Sean Spicer bore on, digging his hole even deeper.]
“The statement that was put out was that the U.S.S. Carl Vinson carrier group was headed to the Korean Peninsula,” said Spicer. “It is headed to the Korean Peninsula.”
“It’s headed there now, it wasn’t headed there last week,” the reporter shot back.
“But that’s not what we said,” Spicer replied. “We said it was heading there. It was heading there. It is heading there.
Wow, you guys, you reporters, you're so picky and weird. The Navy has boats, okay, and the boats float and eventually the boats or aircraft carriers, whatever, will float to wherever we want them to float. Where we tell them to float, To sail, yeah that's better, "Where we choose to tell them to sail. Where the president orders His Navy to sail." Yeah, that sounds right.
The foregoing is obviously my not so tongue in cheek rendition of a thought process in Sean Spicer's brain -- and its stretching reality thinly to assume that the process is even as cogent or smooth as I've depicted it, but we have time constraints here. Check out what the pesky New York Times had to say if you haven't read it. And hey, is it Sean's fault that the Carl Vinson was in fact going the opposite direction from the Sea of Japan at the time Spicer made his statement?
The New York Times reports:
... the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the four other warships in its strike force were at that very moment sailing in the opposite direction, to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.
The result is the sort of thing that would be comical if it didn’t involve nuclear brinkmanship. The announcement of the Vinson’s movement jacked up the tension between Washington and Pyongyang, which called the travel “reckless” and thundered, in a statement to CNN, “We will make the U.S. fully accountable for the catastrophic consequences that may be brought about by its high-handed and outrageous acts.” Had the North Korean government, unsure how to interpret Trump’s tough rhetoric, actually started a hot war, the Vinson would have been 3,500 miles away, rather than ready to act.
How did this happen? Was it Trump’s vaunted unpredictability? Nah: White House officials said on Tuesday they were relying on guidance from the Defense Department. Officials there described a glitch-ridden sequence of events, from a premature announcement of the deployment by the military’s Pacific Command to an erroneous explanation by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis—all of which perpetuated the false narrative that an American armada was racing toward the waters off North Korea.
The confusion might never have become public if not for another miscue: The Navy posted a picture of the Vinson steaming through the Sunda Strait in Indonesia, far from where the White House had placed it—a case of the government failing to take simple steps to cover its own tracks.
The boat blunder is only the latest example of how failure to communicate between units is undermining the Trump administration’s ability to articulate and execute a policy. In this case, the White House blames the Pentagon for providing misleading information and a premature press release, though a fuller story will probably emerge over time. (It’s important to remember that Mattis, a decorated and respected Marine general, was supposed to be one of the more competent figures in an administration full of thin government resumes.)
Actions always speak louder than words and I disagree with the New York Times writer's statement about how this blunder is yet one more example of how failure to communicate is undermining Trump's ability to articulate and execute a policy. I think that blundering IS the Trump administrations policy, certainly it’s calling card, and will remain so until the entire house of cards falls in and collapses of its own weight. My personal prediction is that foreign diplomacy will be the venue where the Trump administration finally implodes and is brought to its knees. I know that they are belly laughing over this in Beijing, I just know it.