I said this before with “All the Trumpenators have is slander, delusions and strategic ignorance” -— following their attacks on the Intelligence community conclusions over Russia — and now, finally, the White House stenographers Press Corp have realized it too when the newly minted White House Press Secretary angrily and haughtily castigated them for telling the truth about the size of the inauguration crowd in order to back up his boss Kompromat Trump’s own pack of lies about it before the CIA.
In a speech and photo op at CIA Headquarters, the newly sworn in chief executive said that when he turned on the television Saturday morning, “one of the networks” showed “an empty field.”
“I said, ‘Wait a minute, I made a speech.’ I looked out. The field was…it looked like a million, a million and a half people,” Trump said. “They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there. They said, ‘Donald Trump did not draw well.'”
He went on, “It looked honestly like a million and a half people, whatever it was, it was, but it went all the way back to the Washington Monument and I turn on, by mistake, I get this network, and it showed an empty field. Said we drew 250,000 people. Now, that’s not bad. But it’s a lie. We had 250,000 people.”
And what followed after the deluded pronunciations of President Kumquat-Face didn’t improve the reading on the honesty meter.
Following that Sean Spicer had to come out and justify Trump’s wrongful accusation that the press had lied about the size of his crowd. And I think it’s important to watch and listen to the intensity of indignation Spicer brought to this tirade against the Press.
Spicer claimed:
“Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall.
“This was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings had been used to protect the grass on the mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas in which people were not standing.”
“This is also the first time that fencing and magnetometers went as far back on the Mall, preventing hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the Mall as quickly as they had in inaugurations past.”
“We know that 420,000 people used the D.C. public transit yesterday, which actually compares to 317,000 who used it for President Obama’s last inaugural.”
“This was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the globe.”
All of those are lies.
There was no “special framing” of the photo, it was from roughly the same angle and position, in fact you can see the Smithsonian Castle on Jefferson Dr. on the right side of both shots. Floor coverings were used in 2013. There were no magnetometers. Metro ridership was 570,557 trips on the day of Trump’s inauguration, while for Obama’s inaugurations it was 1.1 million trips in 2009 and 782,000 trips in 2013. The US viewing audience was 31 Million, 7 Million fewer than Obama in 2009.
After spewing his fusillade of fatuous crap, Spicer haughtily finished his rant without taking a single question.
Fact is the Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration had far more people attending, and yet he had to whine and whimper about that too.
"Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election!" the commander in chief, 70, wrote on his personal Twitter account, rather than the official @POTUS page. "Why didn't these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly."
Well, since there were 3 Million more votes against you Donny, they very likely did vote. Perhaps the difference in key states were the GOP’s vast suppression and gerrymandering efforts, or it could have been the interference of the Russians and FBI, or IMO most likely both. Also, free speech, redress of grievances and such.
That our newly elected President is this petty and this small claiming he has a “running war with the media” who are “amongst the most dishonest people on the earth” should be stunning, but instead it is sadly predictable. As the lies go with Trump, so do they go with Spicer and also with new Chief of Staff Reince Preibus and his tripling down on the “War with the Media” rhetoric. It’s so bad that even Fox News Chris Wallace said this fight is “ridiculous.”
"President Trump said in his inaugural address that every decision he makes will be to benefit American families. How does arguing about crowd size do that?" Wallace asked.
"It's really not about crowd size," Priebus replied. "What it's about is honesty in the media."
He said that "from day one" the media has been trying to undermine Trump's legitimacy and cited a reporter who tweeted that a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office.
"The point is the attacks, and the attempts to delegitimize this president in one day," he said.
"You talk about honesty, and say that this was about honesty," Wallace said. "Well, there's another issue, though, Reince, and that's the President's honesty, because two things that he said yesterday were just flat wrong."
He showed side-by-side photos from Trump's inauguration and President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009 to compare crowd sizes.
"Take a look at those pictures," he said. "Which one is bigger?"
"Listen, you're also not saying that that picture was taken before he was even speaking," Priebus interrupted. "I could take a picture of the Mall right now—"
"I was there! I was there on the Mall!" Wallace said, speaking over Priebus. "I mean let me say first of all I think this is a ridiculous conversation, but there were huge areas. He said there were crowds all the way to the Washington Monument."
I guess a picture isn’t worth a thousand words if you proclaim it happened before Trump was speaking. Ok, fine were is the picture of when exactly he was speaking because that didn’t come from the New York Times.
As so we see the continuance of the ridiculous with Kellyanne Conway defending Spicer’s lies claiming they are “Alternate Facts”, which were defending Trump’s lies as backed up by Priebus, like a Mobius strip of continuous perpetual bullshit.
"On this matter of crowd size, I think it is a symbol for the unfair and incomplete treatment that this president often receives," Conway told Chuck Todd on MSNBC's "Meet The Press."
"You did not answer the question of why the president asked the White House press secretary to come out in front of the podium for the first time and utter a falsehood," Todd interrupted. "Why did he do that? It undermines the credibility of the entire White House press office on day one."
"No, it doesn't. Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck," Conway replied. "You're saying it's a falsehood, and they're giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point really is—"
"Wait a minute. Alternative facts? Alternative facts?" Todd interjected, looking incredulous. "Four of the five facts he uttered were just not true."
Conway tried to interrupt, but Todd continued.
"Look, alternative facts are not facts," he said.
I could possibly give Trump himself a pass for not being able to see the back end of the crowd from his vantage point at the Capital but to automatically concoct this flurry of bogus “facts” — which Spicer, or someone on his staff had to drum up out of thin air — before angrily berating the press over it, even though the media or anyone with eyes could very easily see for themselves do basic research and knock their claims down like a stack of dominoes, shows something much darker and more serious than fluffing Trump’s fragile glass-like ego.
The size of his crowd makes no real difference in the welfare of the American people. It’s irrelevant. Nobody besides Trump really cares all that much, it’s an anecdote — a footnote. But their desperation and commitment to deliberately deceive us, is a much worse issue than his tiny turnout.
It shows malice and an intent to systematically deceive by all of them. Trump, Spicer, Conway and Priebus. Four people — in some of the most powerful positions in the world — all repeatedly excusing and justifying the same bogus and petty lies. That’s not an accident. That’s not a coincidence. That’s not an honest difference of opinion. That is a plan. That is a cover up. And as with many coverups, the process of maintaining it is far worse that what’s is actually being hidden. If they can’t be trusted to tell us something honestly that is mildly embarrassing how are we going to trust them to tell us the truth when it’s something serious and vital but damaging to their ego?
There’s simply no reason to believe they will. None.
For example what he and they should be far more concerned with isn't the size of the crowd, but the size of his White House and administration staff which continues to lag seriously behind with major director and deputy positions going unfilled.
Via those “dishonest people” at the NYTimes.
As of Thursday, only two of Mr. Trump’s 15 cabinet nominees — John F. Kelly, to head the Department of Homeland Security, and his nominee for defense secretary, Gen. James N. Mattis — had been approved by congressional committees and were close to assuming their posts.
Stories on the presidential transition and the forthcoming Trump administration.In all, Mr. Trump has named only 29 of his 660 executive department appointments, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which has been tracking the process. That is a pace far slower than recent predecessors, falling far short of the schedule originally outlined by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was Mr. Trump’s transition director before Mr. Trump ousted him 10 weeks ago.
All in all, Trump needs to recruit and place 4,100 political appointees.
1,242 presidential appointees who need Senate approval: These are many of the bigwigs, including Cabinet secretaries, agency directors and ambassadors, who have to be formally confirmed by the Senate.
472 presidential appointees who don’t need Senate approval: Most White House staff fall in this category, including senior advisors such as the chief of staff and press secretary, along with heads of smaller agencies.
761 non-career Senior Executive Service positions: About 7,000 people fall under the Senior Executive Service banner, and they oversee nearly every government activity. About 10 percent are designated “non-career” and change with the incoming president.
1,538 Schedule C appointments: These folks report directly to presidential appointees but are not in senior leadership roles. For instance, the OPM press secretary who helped us with this graphic is a Schedule C appointee.
Other than at the Cabinet level the Trump White House hasn’t appointed anyone to the State Dept, Pentagon or the National Security Council. During his rant Spicer complained that there wasn’t yet a Director for the CIA because, he claimed, Democrats are “slowing the confirmation for partisan purposes” but the Trump people haven’t properly vetted all their nominees, they haven’t provided all their ethics paper work, they don’t all have their security clearances, one nominee “forgot” to disclose $100 Million in assets and another, Monica Crowley, had to drop out because she plagiarized parts of her Phd dissertation.
That’s a mess of their own making.
It could be that this “Alternate Facts” plan is just a distraction so the press can’t focus on the fact that our government is functionally decapitated with due to the slowness and incompetence of Trump and his team at bringing in critical people to fill vital positions. At literally the very last minute they asked 50 Obama staffers to stay on to help… but that’s not nearly enough and many now having made other plans, only a few were able to stay.
Mr. Trump will be sworn in at noon Eastern time on Friday, but his team was still scrambling to fill key administration posts when he got here on Thursday, announcing last-minute plans to retain 50 essential State Department and national security officials currently working in the Obama administration to ensure “continuity of government,” according to Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary.
Delegitimizing the media has been a long-standing right wing tactic to enable the GOP and Trump to push “Alt-News” through alt-right-wing resources such a Breitbart, Fox, Newsmax, HotAir, DailyCaller, and cultish online “concern trolls” maintaining a captive audience who refuse to consider any “untrusted,biased” sources like the actual non-wingnutty reporters like Reuters, the Washington Post or New York Times. But it never has,and never will work on the rest of us. And it’s now left America in a deeply precarious position. What could the U.S. have done if the outgoing President of Gambia had not finally decided to step down rather than force of violent confrontation? Who is there at the NSC to answer the call if a shooting war had broken out? How would let any Americans still in that country know that they needed to leave immediately for their own safety through the State Dept?
The West Coast in recent days in the midst of years of drought is now suffering massive rainstorms, flooding and deadly tornadoes.
Strong to severe thunderstorms produced a long swath of damaging wind gusts, large hail and tornadoes across the South Monday into early Tuesday.
Six people lost their lives Monday into Monday night. Among these included four people who died near Dothan, Alabama, in severe storms that likely produced a tornado. One death occurred in Florida due to flooding, and another fatality happened in Georgia.
As I type this 12 people have been killed by tornados in Georgia.
Who is there at FEMA to answer the phone if more and more people continue to be killed by this flooding and these tornadoes? Who’s going to order supplemental resources to rescue, recover and those who remain trapped in the wreckage as the states are stretched thinner and thinner?
What are people in the White House spending their time working on? Coming up with a set of elaborate obvious lies designed to soothe Trump’s tiny paper-thin self-esteem while falsely castigating the media, hastily signing Executive Orders to have Obamacare’s “burdens reduced” or actually having staff personnel in place to implement those executive orders, directives and respond to the needs of the American people?
The answer to that seems rather obvious, and it’s not a good one.
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