6134

Remember Jeffrey Epstein?

President Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” back in 2002, saying that “he’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Now, Trump is on the witness list in a Florida court battle over how federal prosecutors handled allegations that Epstein, 64, sexually abused more than 40 minor girls, most of them between the ages of 13 and 17. The lawsuit questions why Trump’s nominee for labor secretary, former Miami U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta, whose confirmation hearing is scheduled to begin Wednesday, cut a non-prosecution deal with Epstein a decade ago rather than pursuing a federal indictment that Acosta’s staff had advocated.

6135

I saw a lot of third-party anti-Hillary commentary calling Bill Clinton a pervert during the campaign, for flying Epstein’s plane on some trips with young women or girls many years ago. Don’t remember if DT or his staff ever spoke about him directly.

6136

what the fuck? ew! ew ew ew!

I need a shower.

6137

Cause the GOP doesn’t ever talk about it and no one passed the 6th grade.

6138

Hey I remember those guys. What happened to them? Barely heard a peep since Trump was elected.

6139

Remember all those millions guilty of voter fraud?
One instance was found in CO after an investigation:

WELD COUNTY, Colo. – The former chairman of the Colorado Republican Party is charged with forgery and voter fraud for allegedly forging his wife’s mail-in ballot from last year’s election, according to court records and sources.

Steven Curtis was the chairman of the state party from 1997 to 1999. He was charged Feb. 1 with one count of forgery of a public record, a fifth-degree felony, and an elections mail-in ballot offense, a misdemeanor.

The criminal complaint for his arrest says that Curtis tampered with a 2016 General Election mail-in ballot. Sources tell Denver7 that he signed the ballot, which was his wife’s, with her name, which led to the forgery charge.

The misdemeanor charge stems from him allegedly filling out her ballot.

If convicted, Curtis faces a maximum of between 1 and 3 years’ incarceration for the forgery charge and up to 18 months and a $5,000 fine on the misdemeanor charge.

Curtis was most-recently back in the Colorado political spectrum in 2011, when he oversaw the advisory board for the Denver Tea Party Patriots.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office says this is the only voter fraud case that has ended in charges stemming from last year’s election.

Curtis spoke about voter fraud ahead of last year’s election.

“It seems to be, and correct me if I’m wrong here, but virtually every case of voter fraud I can remember in my lifetime was committed by Democrats,” he told KLZ 560.

6140

WaPo headline snark

6141

“No, but see, we we meant brown people voter fraud.”

6142

On one level, this was just another of the unending efforts by Trump’s apologists to explain away, one after another, his falsehoods and fabulations as linguistic or rhetorical maneuvers. He didn’t mean it literally, they say; he was being ironic, or joking. At other times, he just was being refreshingly folksy, punctuating the way regular people do. Or in this case, as Spicer tells it, he was deftly using quotation marks to expand the meaning of a word.

Linguistically, of course, that’s nonsense, though it didn’t stop Trump from seizing on Spicer’s interpretation in subsequent days. (“Nobody ever talks about the fact that it was in quotes,” the president told Tucker Carlson, “but that’s a very important thing.”) But over and above what the quotation marks didn’t mean, it’s worth asking why Trump used them in the first place. Because the answer to that question offers an insight into Trump’s abiding insecurity about his profound illiteracy.

Why did Trump put quotation marks around “wire tapped”? Most people took him as using scare quotes, which is what Spicer signaled when he accompanied the expression with air quotes, their gestural equivalent. Scare quotes are the ones we deploy when we want to use a word without signing on for all the associations attached to it, as in “Voters are resentful of ‘elites.’” The device goes back to the nineteenth century; Henry James was besotted with it. But both the term “scare quotes” and the parallel gesture are recent inventions that reflect the modern vogue for the device, which has spilled over from literature to everyday use.

Scare quotes have become something of a modern plague, saturating whole quarters of modern discourse with cynicism, insinuation, and sarcasm. So it isn’t surprising that people would take Trump’s quotation marks as just another instance of the phenomenon. The Guardian said that Trump had used scare quotes to distance himself from the words. In The New York Times, Moises Velasquez-Manoff wrote that Trump’s use of scare quotes had “turned an invention of the urbane and educated against them. He has weaponized irony.”

6143

Trump’s one brief moment of acting presidential—when he read off a teleprompter for 60 minutes and 10 seconds during his address to Congress—served only to show just how low the bar for presidential behavior has plummeted since January. Watching TV commentators applaud him for containing himself for a little over an hour was like hearing a parent praise a difficult child for not pooping in his pants during a pre-school interview. Besides, vintage Trump is not going anywhere anytime soon. A couple of weeks earlier, during a visit by the Japanese prime minister, Shinzō Abe, the president told an acquaintance that he was obsessed with the translator’s breasts—although he expressed this in his own, fragrant fashion.

6144

Is that sattire or did I miss new about this? Trump actually said something along those lines?

6145

I don’t know, I hadn’t heard of it either until the linked Vanity Fair piece. The author is the editor, so as far as I know, it’s not satire.

6146

Speaking of not being able to tell the difference, this is a thing the President of the United States just told Time magazine, and not in fact an Onion piece.

TIME: But isn’t there, it strikes me there is still an issue of credibility. If the intelligence community came out and said, we have determined that so and so is the leaker here, but you are saying to me now, that you don’t believe the intelligence community when they say your tweet was wrong.

Trump: I’m not saying—no, I’m not blaming. First of all, I put Mike Pompeo in. I put Senator Dan Coats in. These are great people. I think they are great people and they are going to, I have a lot of confidence in them. So hopefully things will straighten out. But I inherited a mess, I inherited a mess in so many ways. I inherited a mess in the Middle East, and a mess with North Korea, I inherited a mess with jobs, despite the statistics, you know, my statistics are even better, but they are not the real statistics because you have millions of people that can’t get a job, ok. And I inherited a mess on trade. I mean we have many, you can go up and down the ladder. But that’s the story. Hey look, in the mean time, I guess, I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m president, and you’re not.

The interview does not record whether he then stuck out his tongue and ran away.

6147

They interviewed the interviewer on Morning Joe and the summary was that Trump didn’t actually say that to him in a cross or uppity manner, it stemmed from an earlier comment about him having confidence in himself, the job, his choices, etc. Along the lines of, “there are things that need fixing, I understand that, but I know I was elected to fix them, that’s my job.”

Not so much the flippant comment as it reads.

EDIT: And I cannot believe I’m actually defending the Cheetoh in Chief.

6148

I don’t know that makes it any better, given the interview consists of lies and gibberish. “Look, Mama, I’m helping!”

6149

I agree with you completely. He’s a moron.

6150

Yeah, but he’s President, and you’re not. Booyah!

6151

6152

6153

My issue with it isn’t whether it’s cross or uppity or flippant, it’s the fact that, as always, it’s entirely non-responsive to the actual question.