Sounds like a bargain if it means he has to quit being my Rep.
Yeah, that’s exactly what led him down this path of unbelievable stupidity. If you take your taking points from Neo-Nazis, you maybe shouldn’t be Press Secretary.
Every time some stupid shit starts making the rounds on the whacko right wing sites, it comes out of this Whitehouse the next day.
Yep. You can know what the next day’s talking point will be by going to Breitbart or Infowars.
Or RT.
It’s an over-reaction to say that Sean Spicer is a holocaust denier or an anti-semite. The easier explanation is that he isn’t very smart, and he’s awful at thinking on his feet.
Of course, it’s fair to over-react that our President has chosen a self-evident moron as the official spokesman of the White House. Trump has surrounded himself with the ignorant and incompetent, choosing them based on loyalty to him instead of any actual qualifications for the job.
Spicer really set the tone by making his very first act on the job a press conference focused on saying that Trump had the biggest inauguration in history. Period. 100%. No questions.
That just highlighted how impossible spicers job was going to be.
He has to go out there every day and defend the indefensible. He has to pretend like Trump has some real strategy. That his random bullshit has some grand design. That his syphilis fueled tweets from the night before weren’t just crazy shit.
That first day wasn’t Spicer’s idea, clearly. Trump gave him a direct order to go out there and say crazy shit that was trivially disproven.
The guy deserves all the criticism he gets, because he knew where this train was headed when he got on. But that doesn’t change the fact that his job is essentially impossible.
Yeah, I agree with all of that.
I saw some speculation that Spicer was trying to commit seppuku in order to distract from the story coming out about the Page FISA warrant.
Always assume stupidity unless there’s overwhelming evidence of such strategy.
I disagree, there have been far smarter propagandists out there that have had to do defend worse with less resources. Not that I would want someone more competent being Trump’s mouthpiece, but the job isn’t impossible.
Your phrase ‘defense of the indefensible’ originally comes from (I think) Orwell talking about how that comprises most of the political language at his time, it certainly isn’t new:
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
“Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
So many other great quotes from his brilliant essay Politics and the English Language that are relevant in this Spicer thread.
FTFY.
Yeah. A competent spokesperson would have to reframe Trump’s insane comments as something that makes sense. This is certainly feasible, if not easy. And a semicompetent one can just avoid the question and respond to something else, in the usual slippery way. But Spicer just babbles on without thinking what he’s saying, and like Trump, he often replies in the spur of the moment with imbecilic counterattacks. These provide fodder for opposition media which a more capable speaker would avoid.
Kelly Ann Conway could do Spicer’s job pretty easily. I’m sure she would cause many folks brains to explode, and the level of rage she’d would cause would make it possible to heat all of Washington without using any fossil fuel.
However, at the end of a press conference with Kelly at least some of the time she’d be able to put together a coherent story as to why the President did what he did. Now you have to be willing to ignore many inconvenient facts but there’d be a plausible explanation.
Most importantly she wouldn’t make 1/10th the number of unforced errors that Spicer makes.
Spicer can’t step down now. Melissa McCarthy is hosting SNL next month!
Spicer is Forrest Gump
This is perhaps defamation. I have googled it and I have not found confirmation. Maybe not true?
I’m loving this so much.
My interpretation would be: “Wait, did he just … uh… Sean?.. oh… uh… he’s doubling down. Ohhh boy, gonna have a field day with this one.”
Trump’s 4:00AM twitter response will be “Who is this Anne Frank loser? Just another liberal mad because they lost the election. SAD!”
I’m always horrified by the historical ignorance of the population at large. But that’s also a Western world thing (or maybe Anglo-Saxon world thing). I remember hearing like 2/3 or Britons had no idea who Cromwell was, or something like that. One reason i’m bothered by this trend among young people to attack history as being irrelevant and obsolete since the identity of historical figures or their values does not match their own, and so should be buried and forgotten. It’s one thing to be Serbia and Never Forget the fields of Kosovo after 700 years (history as a proxy for nationalism), it’s another to forget the geopolitical basics of WW2 70 years on.