No Puppet No Puppet Department

Reports of how the Manafort lawyers and Trump lawyers kept cooperating after Manafort made his cooperation deal with the special counsel's office have led to a bizarre trend of suggesting that Trump's tweets on the investigation represent some kind of privileged knowledge:

In his own recent Twitter attacks on the special counsel, the president seemed to imply that he had inside information about the prosecutors’ lines of inquiry and frustrations. “Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie,” Mr. Trump wrote on Tuesday.

In its most virulent form from, I'm sorry to say, Rachel Maddow:

She pointed out that, in a tweet Thursday morning, Trump referred to the "inner workings' of the Mueller investigation, a phrase he has never used before. Maddow argued that this indicates Trump has used his new dubiously appointed Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to gain an unprecedented look inside the Russia investigation.

And even Digby!

Literary Corner: Trump's Foxtrot

For all its heft and strangeness, the president's poetry has a few defects, of which the one that always bothers me is the lack of a proper pulse: there's rhythmic energy, but it's always getting blocked by a syllable that doesn't belong. If it were a car you'd bring it in to the mechanic, "What's that irregular clanking sound whenever I'm going over 30? Do I need to worry about that?" Something about this morning's Unhinged Tweets made me want to just chop them up and rearrange them a good deal more radically than I'd normally do, to make them sing instead of clanking, with some unexpected results: a lyric for a tune that might be in the same mood as Cole Porter's 1934 When They Begin the Beguine:

The Angry Democrat Thugs Fox Trot

by Donald J. Trump

where’s the Collusion, darling?
they made up a phony crime
they called it Collusion, and then it wasn't there

and when there was no Collusion
they made up a phony crime
they called it Obstruction and it never existed

[CHORUS]

they're enjoying ruining people's lives
they're refusing to look at corruption
the lies, the firings, the emails, and sooo much more!
Mueller's Angry Dems
are looking to impact the election
they are a national disgrace!

those Angry Democrat Thugs
they spent 30 hours with the Councel
only with my approval looking for trouble

if you FIGHT BACK, darling,
about that Rigged old Witch Hunt
or if you say anything bad they'll scream Obstruction!

[CHORUS]

they're enjoying ruining people's lives
they're refusing to look at corruption
the lies, the firings, the emails, and sooo much more!
Mueller's Angry Dems
are looking to impact the election
they are a national disgrace!

For the Record: Pushback

Image by PhotoAtelier (I think).

There's a set of talking points floating around the rightosphere about how Emperor Trump can't possibly be Putin's puppet because look at all the ways he's shown his indepedence and pushed back against the Russian strongman's desires; I heard it on the radio yesterday, and again today from a Twitter wingnut with whom I have one of those civility relationships. So I prepared a response, as follows:

He didn't arm the citizens of Ukraine. He bribed the Ukraine government with antitank missiles (Putin has no intention of using tanks in Ukraine) has to stop them from cooperating with Mueller investigation https://t.co/4lrNxYEtcQ

— Dreams and Yaspirations (@Yastreblyansky) July 21, 2018

No Stalinist! No Stalinist! You're the real Stalinist!

Article from Moskovsky Komsomolets, 2011, cited by Rachael Allen, "Stalin and the Great Terror: Can Mental Illness Explain His Violent Behavior?" which has a pretty good bibliography. Translation of this material welcome.

In the Soviet Union, people with unpalatable views were accused of mental illness. I wonder if those Stalinist tactics are still used today pic.twitter.com/ehgJtyLz6h

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) January 7, 2018

Now that you come to think of it, how many people has our Leader called "crazy"? Mika Brzezinski, Bernie Sanders, Jeff "Flakey", "Wacky" Frederica Wilsoin, "Psycho" Joe Scarborough, "Crazy" Megyn Kelly... Looks like @realDonaldTrump can't stop calling people mentally ill.

— Yas The World Turns (@Yastreblyansky) January 7, 2018

In Stalin's USSR it was the dictator who GOT AWAY WITH calling people mentally ill and "locking them up" for real. Looks like our Fearless Leader would like to do the same. Because he's a paranoid psychopath too. Hopefully he will fail in that as in everything else.

— Yas The World Turns (@Yastreblyansky) January 7, 2018

Hmmm, sort of like this Toady? Not sure Trump is going to be happy being called a Stalinist if he understands the term. pic.twitter.com/Q2rMK12HD3

— Man in Black (@kevinbkelly) January 7, 2018

The Wolff is at the door, but is that inside or outside?

Wolf attack. German engraving, 1517, via Wikipedia.

In March 2017, Kellyanne Conway is telling Olivia Nuzzi what she meant by the peculiar term she'd used in January to explain her contention that Donald Trump was right to claim that a million or million and a half people had attended his inaugural address in the National Mall, compared to a million for Barack Obama's first inaugural in 2009, though aerial photos clearly showed a much smaller audience for Trump—the "alternative facts":

“Two plus two is four. Three plus one is four. Partly cloudy, partly sunny. Glass half full, glass half empty. Those are alternative facts,” she said, further defining the infamous phrase as “additional facts and alternative information.”

Which doesn't make a lot of sense. The expressions "3 + 1 = 4" and "2 + 2 = 4" aren't "alternative facts", they're alternative ways of stating a single fact. The numbers Sean Spicer proposed, 250,000 plus 220,000 plus another 250,000 for different regions of the Mall, don't add up to a million or more no matter how many times you calculate it, and the total 250,000 of the Vox estimate based on the photographs isn't an alternative way of saying "one million". It's a different number.

In April, Conway had refined the explanation, in an interview with Molly Ball:

Hi, it's Stupid

Drawing by wes and tony of amazingsuperpowers.

Hi, it's Stupid to say we understand with complete clarity why James Comey was fired as FBI director. So hold my beer, as the saying goes.

First:

And, yes: The bizarre, petty narcissism even extends to a letter publicly humiliating and firing an FBI director. pic.twitter.com/qruYGjh59D

— Dan Murphy (@bungdan) May 9, 2017

That's not narcissism. I mean, obviously it's narcissism, in the same way as obviously it's English—I mean it's in the only language Trump speaks—but it has a specific argumentative purpose, which is to tell a lie.

J'accuse

Photo by EPA via Time.

There's something I have to say about this horrible gas attack in Syria that I wish somebody else would say instead, but nobody else seems to be noticing this one detail, when the Trump administration denounces the Obama administration as responsible for the horror, as Spicer, reported in this piece by Anne Barnard and Michael Gordon:

 “these heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the last administration’s weakness and irresolution.”

“President Obama said in 2012 that he would establish a ‘a red line’ against the use of chemical weapons and then did nothing,” Mr. Spicer said.

It's that Obama did do something—it's not a secret, and I've written about it from the start—at least after it became clear that Congress wasn't going to give him an authorization for a military assault on Syria in August-September 2013: the US and Russian administrations, working together, created a plan through which the Assad regime would destroy its chemical weapons stores, and stop, at least, this especially upsetting method of murdering Syrian people at bulk rates, so that Obama's Red Line would not have been crossed for nothing.

Emperor Donald Gets Scared

Classic, via TheWrap.

So sometime yesterday morning, before flying off to Orlando at 10:30 for his gig at St. Andrews Catholic School, the Emperor apparently "went ballistic" with his senior staff in the Oval Office over the recusal of attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III from any investigations of relations between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and agents of or with the Russian government—he didn't think Sessions should have done it, and the recusal only "emboldened his enemies". In the course of the tantrum he disinvited Bannon and Priebus from the weekend at Palm Beach, or they "volunteered" to stay in Washington and work, and then he went out to the South Lawn and climbed into Marine One with his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren and disappeared.

Also, at some point or another after around 5:00 yesterday evening and before 6:00 this morning he seems to have been reading stories from Breitbart News in the little pile of Trump-themed printouts Ms. Hicks supplies him with so he doesn't have to use a computer, and the Emperor went nuts by around 6:30 this morning:

The first meeting Jeff Sessions had with the Russian Amb was set up by the Obama Administration under education program for 100 Ambs......

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

That was from a Breitbart story pointing out (fairly enough, I guess) that it wasn't Trump who originally invited Ambassador Kislyak to the Republican National Convention—

No puppet! No puppet! Chris Cuomo's the puppet!

Mrs. McMahon's Senate campaign in 2011 inspired Labor's Pains to download this picture. She does look a little like Barbara Billingsley as June Cleaver, and the Beav, I think, is who Donald would like to be when he's eight or nine, though he never can.

Sen.Richard Blumenthal, who never fought in Vietnam when he said for years he had (major lie),now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2017

Chris Cuomo, in his interview with Sen. Blumenthal, never asked him about his long-term lie about his brave "service" in Vietnam. FAKE NEWS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2017

This is such a dense example of the technique, I want to unpack it.

Trump has to know, for starters, that it's no longer a question of what Senator Blumenthal reported—that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch finds Trump's constitutionally illiterate critique of the judiciary "disheartening and demoralizing"—since Judge Gorsuch's official White House–provided spokesman confirmed its accuracy half an hour after Blumenthal reported it, followed by independent confirmations from #NeverTrump-but-reactionary Senator Ben Sasse and by former Senator Kelly Ayotte, who is Gorsuch's White House–provided liaison to the Senate.

Ayotte's statement allows her to avoid mentioning Trump by name—

Ukaz

JFK International Airport, photo by Kelly Lunde/Al Jazeera.

Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Trump seems to have decided to celebrate by issuing this edict reminding us of the American shame and failure to respond to the European refugee crisis in 1939, and emulating it. Many of those who opposed doing anything to rescue Germany's Jews had a slogan: America First!

The White House is an Imperial Bunker now, where Bannon and his freaks are writing up crazy orders, not executive orders of the sort Barack Obama and other presidents have issued, but edicts or ukazes, some with no real world foundation at all like the one for the "great rebuilding of the military" (Hey, military! Would you go rebuild yourself, bigleague?), or just completely mysterious, like the command for the Wall. Trump is like the Catherine the Great of the myth (not the real one, who was a smart cookie and an excellent sovereign, but the imaginary one invented by Russians who couldn't stand being ruled competently, by a woman, and a German to boot): His trusted henchmen draft these demands, and the rest of the government scrambles to figure out what he wants and try to deliver it, or wait out the storm hoping he doesn't get too angry.

No puppet! No puppet! You're the puppet!

 

Image by REBRN.

In college, "we will flunk you if you use #AlternativeFacts," @FrankSesno says. https://t.co/6zRBTPMCKL

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 22, 2017

Actually the opposite. Academy was incubator for "privileged knowledge," epistemic relativism, and "there's no truth only narratives." https://t.co/TQirmV4Q5s

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) January 23, 2017

.@omriceren Is there a "Protocols of the Elders of Academia" where this shit comes from?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 23, 2017