Month: February 2017

Who’s on first?

by digby

Reuters reports:

In the week before U.S. Vice President Mike Pence visited Brussels and pledged America’s “steadfast and enduring” commitment to the European Union, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon met with a German diplomat and delivered a different message, according to people familiar with the talks.

Bannon, these people said, signalled to Germany’s ambassador to Washington that he viewed the EU as a flawed construct and favoured conducting relations with Europe on a bilateral basis.

Three people who were briefed on the meeting spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. The German government and the ambassador, Peter Wittig, declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of the talks.

A White House official who checked with Bannon in response to a Reuters query confirmed the meeting had taken place but said the account provided to Reuters was inaccurate. “They only spoke for about three minutes and it was just a quick hello,” the official said.

The sources described a longer meeting in which Bannon took the time to spell out his world view. They said his message was similar to the one he delivered to a Vatican conference back in 2014 when he was running the right-wing website Breitbart News.

In those remarks, delivered via Skype, Bannon spoke favourably about European populist movements and described a yearning for nationalism by people who “don’t believe in this kind of pan-European Union.”

Western Europe, he said at the time, was built on a foundation of “strong nationalist movements”, adding: “I think it’s what can see us forward”.

The encounter unsettled people in the German government, in part because some officials had been holding out hope that Bannon might temper his views once in government and offer a more nuanced message on Europe in private.

One source briefed on the meeting said it had confirmed the view that Germany and its European partners must prepare for a policy of “hostility towards the EU”.

A second source expressed concern, based on his contacts with the administration, that there was no appreciation for the EU’s role in ensuring peace and prosperity in post-war Europe.

“There appears to be no understanding in the White House that an unravelling of the EU would have grave consequences,” the source said.

The White House said there was no transcript of the conversation. The sources who had been briefed on it described it as polite and stressed there was no evidence Trump was prepared to go beyond his rhetorical attacks on the EU – he has repeatedly praised Britain’s decision to leave – and take concrete steps to destabilise the bloc.

But anxiety over the White House stance led French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, to issue unusual calls last week for Pence to affirm during his visit to Europe that the U.S. was not aiming to break up the EU.

Pence obliged on Monday in Brussels, pledging strong ties between the United States and the EU, and making clear his message was shared by the president.

“President Trump and I look forward to working together with you and the European Union to deepen our political and economic partnership,” he said.

But the message did not end the concerns in European capitals.

“We are worried and we should be worried,” Thomas Matussek, senior adviser at Flint Global and a former German ambassador to the Britain and the United Nations, told Reuters.

“No one knows anything at the moment about what sort of decisions will be coming out of Washington. But it is clear that the man on top and the people closest to him feel that it’s the nation state that creates identity and not what they see as an amorphous group of countries like the EU.”

Everyone knows that Pence is not as important as Bannon. That was proven when they all sat there and let Pence go on TV and lie for Flynn. (That’s assuming Pence didn’t know, in which case he’s just as untrustworthy as Trump and Bannon.)

So, there is a credibility gap with this White House the size of the Grand Canyon and it’s getting bigger. Nobody knows who speaks for the administration, not even the president. Everyone is assumed to be liars because they lie constantly.

Steve Bannon is an unqualified, white nationalist lunatic who has no more business being at the highest level of the US Government than Justin Bieber does. Yet he’s speaking to foreign leaders and apparently saying whatever he wants to say.

Yeah, this is normal.

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Get ready for some next level stupid

by digby

And that’s saying something these days:

Right Wing Watch has the story:

Furious about national security adviser Michael Flynn’s resignation, Alex Jones posted a video commentary this morning warning about the threats President Trump is facing from what Jones described as a demonic conspiracy out to destroy him.

While railing against a Foreign Policy article (which he misattributed to Foreign Affairs) about the Russian government’s view of Trump, Jones said that there is a plot to sabotage both Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin over their efforts to stop globalism.

Among the plotters, according to Jones, is Barack Obama, whom he accused of living in a “bunker” in Washington, D.C., where Jones believes he is personally directing and “recruiting with [George] Soros an army for a Bolshevik-style revolution.”

He warned that the Foreign Policy article is a sign that globalists are getting ready to “execute really horrible devastation: starting huge wars, setting a nuke off in D.C., anything, talking about ‘time to kill Trump.’”

“There was a coup over America under globalism by stealth, there was a counter-coup with Trump, and they’re launching a counter-counter-coup right now,” Jones said. He added that Trump is trying to “empower humanity” and bring down the demonic systems that secretly run the world.

The article he was probably referring to was this opinion piece in the New York Post:

When former President Barack Obama said he was “heartened” by anti-Trump protests, he was sending a message of approval to his troops. Troops? Yes, Obama has an army of agitators — numbering more than 30,000 — who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.

In what’s shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular “America First” agenda.

He’s doing it through a network of leftist nonprofits led by Organizing for Action. Normally you’d expect an organization set up to support a politician and his agenda to close up shop after that candidate leaves office, but not Obama’s OFA. Rather, it’s gearing up for battle, with a growing war chest and more than 250 offices across the country.

And yes, Trump’s favorite fake news outlet is ON IT:

Some extremist groups (and Fox, of course) think Obama is setting up a "shadow government" in an act of sedition. pic.twitter.com/1KMldwdtFJ— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) February 21, 2017

I have little doubt that this will become an article of faith on the right within a matter of weeks. And there’s nothing unusual in that. But now that we have conspiracy freaks actually running the country it becomes a slightly more important issue. Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times reported today:

Way back on Friday, President Donald Trump declared that several news organizations — ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, The New York Times — were “the enemy of the American people.” You know who’s not the enemy, in his book?

Alex Jones.

Jones, in case you aren’t aware, is the conspiracy-theorizing, flame-throwing nationalistic radio and internet star who’s best known for suggesting that Sept. 11 was an inside job, that the Sandy Hook school shooting was “completely fake” and that the phony Clinton child-sex trafficking scandal known as Pizzagate warranted serious investigation (which one Facebook fan took upon himself to do, armed with an AR-15).

Jones, 43, has been around for a while. Like every media outfit in the Trump era, his platforms have gotten record traffic and, he told me last week, seen increases in revenue, with ads for water purification systems and for supplements to enhance “brain force” and virility.

Get Fast Forward in your inbox:
Forget yesterday’s news. Get what you need today in this early-morning email.

But he is apparently taking on a new role as occasional information source and validator for the president of the United States, with whom, Jones says, he sometimes speaks on the phone.

Millions of listeners and viewers tune in to Jones on his websites (Infowars chief among them), on Facebook and through old-fashioned radio, and their loyalty partly explains how Trump maintains a hard-core faithful who don’t believe a word they read about him in a newspaper like this one.

His audience, Jones told me, is “the teeth of the Trump organization on the ground — the information-warfare, organic internal resistance.” Sure enough, on Saturday the journalist McKay Coppins of The Atlantic tweeted from Florida, “Spotted at Trump rally: More than one InfoWars t-shirt.”

Where Jones’ content fits in Trump’s broad media diet isn’t clear. White House officials declined to talk about it in detail. (Hey, Mr. President, I’m trying.) But as Trump pushes full steam ahead on his effort to delegitimize U.S. journalism, he is lending credence to a number of out-there Jonesisms, adding yet another “pinch yourself, this is happening” element to our national journey into the upside-down.

You can look no further than Trump’s description of the press as “the enemy of the American people” Friday, which was reminiscent of Jones’ use of the same phrase in 2015, as Jones noted Sunday on Twitter.

Two weeks ago, Trump’s quickly debunked allegation that the news media covered up terrorism by Islamic extremists echoed reports on Infowars, including one headline that blared: “Scandal: Mass Media Covers Up Terrorism to Protect Islam.”

Before that, there was Trump’s false claim that millions of unauthorized immigrants voted illegally for Hillary Clinton, which Infowars had asserted in November and then repeated, giving “oxygen to the lies,” as CNN put it then. Then again, others in the right-leaning internet ecosystem had forwarded the illegal voting report, too.

Jones’ influence could be seen more directly last spring when Trump told a crowd in California that “there is no drought” — oh, yes, there was — and suggested that reports of one were part of a plot to protect a “3-inch fish.” It was very similar to reports in Infowars suggesting the drought was manufactured and promoting the fish theory.

Jones demurred when it came to his influence on Trump, which he said the “MSM” (mainstream media) overstated to undermine the president. “MSM tries to say Alex Jones is an eight-headed kook with all these warts and Trump’s copying everything he says,” Jones told me. “It’s just not true.”

For instance, he said, when he urged Trump to address illegal voting allegations during one phone conversation, “he said, ‘I already know, I’m making a speech in two days.’” (Trump, he said, “was an Infowarrior before I was born.”) Jones said that conversation had taken place earlier in the campaign, not on the phone call immediately after the election that my colleague Maggie Haberman reported on, in which Jones said the president had thanked him for his support. Jones told me that he had spoken with Trump since that call, though an aide to the president, communicating on the condition of anonymity, played down the frequency of their contact.

Either way, Jones is hoping his organization will qualify for a coveted White House press credential. He says it’s not something he’s pining for or needs, but he doesn’t see why Infowars shouldn’t get one when “Trump’s calling CNN fake.”

The White House said it had yet to receive a proper application from Infowars and therefore could not comment on whether it would get one. Jones said the delay might be related to a bureaucratic snag. “They say it’s going to get rectified,” he said.

One ally in his corner is Roger Stone, the longtime Republican operative and informal adviser to Trump, whose matchmaking brought them together and led to the 2015 Infowars interview during which Trump told Jones that “you have an amazing reputation.”

Stone said in an interview, “They are reaching millions of people, and these people are steadfast and loyal Trump supporters.”

Two of the major internet tracking companies, Quantcast and Alexa, reported that in January Infowars had an average of around 8 million (Quantcast) or 8.7 million (Alexa) global visitors, who viewed its pages nearly 50 million times. As of Sunday, Quantcast ranked its traffic above that of the fact-checking site Politifact.com.

Those numbers miss the audiences for his national radio show and his team’s videos on YouTube, where the biggest of his 18 channels has 1.2 billion views, and on Facebook, where they draw many millions of views. (One, by his editor at large, Paul Joseph Watson, lists 18.1 million views.)

Jones’ growth has astounded those who have followed a progression that began on cable access in Austin, Texas, in the early 1990s, moved to radio and then to the bigger national footprint he began building online.

“When I was first dealing with Alex, he had a staff of three people and was broadcasting his apocalyptic messages from” a spare bedroom “with choo-choo wallpaper,” said the author Jon Ronson, who wrote about Jones in his 2002 book, “Them,” and revisited him in “The Elephant in the Room” last year. “In the summer, he had a staff of between 50 and 75 people in this huge industrial space as big as a mainstream TV network.”

Jones says it’s hardly CNN-size (and, for the record, he says, he believes Sandy Hook may have happened).

Last week, Jones’ conspiracy workshop was busy making the case that the leaks that forced Michael T. Flynn’s resignation as Trump’s national security adviser were part of a “counter coup” by what he has called “criminal, corporate elements inside the CIA” working “ to basically overthrow Trump.”

It’s the sort of message that resonates with his segment of Trump voters because, Jones said, “the public doesn’t have any trust in the system.”

“They believe the social contract is broken,” he continued, “and they’re able to interact with the new diverse pantheon of the internet-based media.” In other words, with people like him.

It makes you wonder: If Watergate had broken in this media environment, would President Richard Nixon have had to resign? Would enough people have believed it?

I put the question to Bob Woodward, who broke that scandal for The Washington Post with Carl Bernstein. He said it would have turned out the same. “The evidence was so strong, because of the tapes — these things turn on the facts,” he said. “It would be: Can you get information and sources and testimony from witnesses and documents that show what happened.”

Given that no alternative reality was strong enough to save Flynn’s job, for instance, I’d have to agree. That said, if you live in Jones’ world, Flynn’s ouster would seem to be the height of injustice, delivered by the news media on behalf of those “criminal, corporate elements inside the CIA.” So, yes, you would see the press as the enemy.

They like him, they really like him

by digby

… and they voted for him because he’s a Republican and they agree with him:

I’m ecstatic! It’s a breath of fresh air,” Judy Griffin exclaimed when I asked her about the nascent Trump presidency. “The country was going on a near-death experience collision. Political correctness was about to strangle us all.” …

Griffin, formerly the director of development for a Christian school, described herself as “very conservative” and “very pro-life.” She said she wants Trump to take on ISIS because “you have to confront evil.” She also wants him to rebuild the military, reduce the national debt and bring back jobs — things she criticized former President Barack Obama for failing to do…

[Gail] Francioli offered a substantial list of subjects on which she agrees with Trump. “He’s going to increase the military, going to protect this country, build a wall, border control, Obamacare,” she said. “He’s bringing jobs back.” A regular participant in church-led marches outside an abortion clinic, she added that she expects Trump to place further restrictions on the procedure….

[David Searles] favors Trump’s push to roll back regulations that Searles said have “stifled” businesses, including the software company that hasn’t been stable enough to give him a raise in 10 years.

Internationally, Searles said he is optimistic that the US will “have a stronger presence on the world stage.” He appreciates Trump’s tough talk.

“I felt that the Obama administration was preoccupied with not offending people…”

And they too believe the media is the enemy:

Like many Trump supporters, Housel is not troubled by negative news reports about Trump. In fact, she shares his assessment that journalists are not always honest (though she said she felt sheepish about saying that to an actual journalist).

“I was raised as a young girl not to trust the media,” she said. Housel told me that her father, an Army veteran, offered this cold counsel: “If you’re ever in a wartime situation, shoot the guy with the camera and then the enemy.”

What a nice lady.

All of this is contrary to the latest scold coming from certain quarters of the media (and, unfortunately, certain quarters of the left as well) that says  it’s the protests and furious resistance that are driving otherwise lovely, decent people into the arms of Trump. Republican voted for him because they like him and they agree with his policies. They think that Democrats are “politically correct” with all their “identity politics” and even if we were all nice boys and girls and didn’t raise a fuss about the cretinous imbecile in the White House, they would feel exactly the same way.

These people voted for and still support Trump because they agree with him. It’s not complicated.

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It all comes down to Trump’s foreign financial ties


by digby

Mumbai, 2016

I wrote about the Russian thing for Salon this morning:

There’s a joke going around about President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to the effect that he has the dubious distinction of having been fired by both Democratic and Republican administrations. But that’s not really very funny when you consider that he was fired by one for his erratic behavior and from the other because he was implicated in a scandal concerning possible connections to the Russian government.

Something has gone very wrong with our system that such a person could come so close to high levels of power in two administrations. But Flynn did. His short tenure and the circumstances of his departure have brought all the questions about Russian involvement in the campaign to the White House’s doorstep, where they cannot be ignored any longer.

I always had tended to believe that Trump probably didn’t really have any personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. Trump is such a serial exaggerator that his allusions to one struck me as hype. His great pleasure in being stroked with Putin’s compliments indicated that Trump didn’t actually know him. It’s also obvious that he truly admires Putin’s strongman leadership style and that’s disturbing enough.

Still, there has been the nagging sense for some time that there’s something off about the way Trump speaks about Putin. It’s obsequious and submissive, which is very uncharacteristic of his normal style and one cannot help but wonder why that is. Trump is not servile toward anyone in this world — except Vladimir Putin. It would be one thing if we could chalk it up as another one of Trump’s weird psychological tics and hope that he isn’t so subject to flattery that he decides to help the Russian leader carve up Europe just to keep his approval. But it seems there’s more to it than that.

The Russian story has been bubbling under the surface for months, of course. The hiring of Paul Manafort, best known in recent years for his career as a lobbyist for pro-Russian Ukraine politicians — and a stranger to American politics since the 1980s — has seemed odd. Still, there has been no reason for serious suspicion since Manafort had once been partners with Trump’s good friend Roger Stone and had lived in Trump Tower at one time. Anyway, the world of political consultants is very small. So no big deal.

When the word came down that the Democratic National Committee had determined it had been hacked by what its security firm said were foreign actors associated with the Russian government, I don’t think anyone saw an immediate connection. But then came that weird incident at the Republican National Convention in July, when Trump representatives intervened to soften the GOP’s official policy on Ukraine. Again, by itself this would not be a huge deal. But when combined with Trump’s strangely passive attitude toward Putin and the hiring of a man who had spent years working in politics in the region, people started to wonder.

It was only a few days later that Trump made his shocking public invitation to the Russian government to “find” Hillary Clinton’s personal emails and deliver them to the media. He suggested afterward that he had only been joking. Maybe so.

Since that time suspicions have only grown. The U.S. government verified that the Russians had hacked the files of various people and institutions in the presidential campaign, the WikiLeaks dumps happened and we have learned that the FBI had been investigating possible connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government since last spring.

Members of the mainstream media finally revealed that, except for Mother Jones, they had been sitting on an explosive dossier compiled by a credible opposition researcher with deep ties to Russia that suggested members of the Trump campaign, including his handpicked national security adviser, were in touch with Russian officials and that the Russians had some compromising material (or kompromat) on Trump himself. The infamous details of the kompromat have not been verified but other elements of the dossier appear to have some basis in truth.

Since Flynn was prompted to resign due to an inappropriate conversation with the Russian ambassador related to sanctions, one can no longer avoid asking whether Trump was personally involved. After all, those sanctions that Flynn apparently assured the ambassador would be revisited after Trump took office were imposed precisely because Russia had apparently interfered in the election on Trump’s behalf.

So here we are, with members of the GOP-led Congress finally rousing themselves to open a serious investigation. They sent around a memo telling the White House to keep all records pertaining to Russia, which is a start. Over the weekend, a startling new report appeared in The New York Times:

A week before Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security adviser, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia. Mr. Flynn is gone, having been caught lying about his own discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. But the proposal, a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia, remains, along with those pushing it: Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, who delivered the document; Felix H. Sater, a business associate who helped Mr. Trump scout deals in Russia; and a Ukrainian lawmaker trying to rise in a political opposition movement shaped in part by Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

This report was characterized by Michael Weiss, senior editor of the Daily Beast, this way:

Jesus. Trump’s lawyer, a mobster and a Manafort-minted Ukrainian pol are trying to blackmail Poroshenko. https://t.co/loTQd8cuWH

— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) February 19, 2017

Both Manafort and Cohen were among those said to be under investigation by the government. The Trump business associate, Felix Sater, is the Russian-born “mobster” (and convicted felon) who has apparently also been a CIA and FBI informant for years. As Josh Marshall laid out in a Talking Points Memo piece, Sater’s story is bizarre and incredible — but no more so than the fact that the president of the United States has been financially connected with him for years.

We don’t have enough information to come to any conclusions about any of this yet. As Vox’s Matt Yglesias pointed out, however, there is a long list of questions that must be addressed. This growing scandal makes more clear than ever how unacceptable it is that we have a president who won’t properly divest himself of his business dealings around the world and refuses to even reveal what they are. It’s untenable. Trump cannot govern under these circumstances.

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A country run by bigots

by digby

…and fools. I don’t know how many of these people are involved in GOP politics but it seems like there are a lot of them:

When police first found a hunting guide and his client bleeding from gunshot wounds on a south Texas ranch in early January, everyone on the scene had their stories straight. 

The hunters told police they suspected the shooters were undocumented immigrants they had seen on the ranch earlier in their trip. Their story soon jumped into online right-wing circles, thanks in part to Texas Commissioner of Agriculture and Donald Trump ally Sid Miller. 

But it was a lie, according to police and, now, a grand jury. Investigators determined that guides Walker Daughetry and Michael Bryant in fact shot at one another by accident, striking Daughetry and hunter Edwin Roberts in the process. Daughetry and Bryant were indicted for third-degree felonies last Wednesday. 

Miller, who previously courted online infamy with a vulgar tweet about Hillary Clinton during last year’s election campaign, deleted his initial Facebook post about the incident after news broke that police were suspicious of the hunters’ story. But his leap to promote the hunters’ story in the immediate wake of the shootings was more labor-intensive than simply sharing a news report. 

Miller’s initial post included two pictures of Daugherty, including one showing him in his hospital bed hooked up to medical machinery. “The aliendswere ambushing the RV that Walker and his wife. He was shot while trying to protect his hunters from the attack. Walker is a man of God and is now a hero,” Miller wrote (sic). 

“This is why we need the wall and to secure our borders,” he wrote. (You can see the deleted post for yourself here.)[…] 

The actual incident, police say, occurred because Walker Daughetry got it into his head that border-crossers “were inside the RV that Edwin and his wife were in, in an attempt to kidnap them. Instead of announcing himself, Walker allegedly tried opening the RV,” the local CBS news channel reports, prompting Roberts to fire a shot at the door.

The kicker:

Miller was reportedly being considered as a finalist to head Trump’s Department of Agriculture, up until the president nominated Georgia Republican Sonny Perdue for the job.

These morons thought that immigrants were trying to kidnap someone in an RV. And such idiotic nonsense is celebrated by Republican politicians. Donald Trump is a symptom, not a cause.

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Who needs nukes?
by Tom Sullivan

It’s absolutely Rovian. Undercut an adversary by attacking his strongest point. Openness is both democracy’s greatest strength and its Achilles heel. The spread of fake news (with a little help from Donald Trump’s friends) is doing that without requiring expensive conventional weapons. Plus, these attacks leave no bomb parts to trace back to their origin. According to an item in this morning’s New York Times, it is a problem allies across the Atlantic are also struggling to combat:

In their open-plan office overlooking a major thoroughfare in Brussels, an 11-person team known as East Stratcom, serves as Europe’s front line against this onslaught of fake news.

Created by the European Union to address “Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaigns,” the team — composed of diplomats, bureaucrats and former journalists — tracks down reports to determine whether they are fake. Then, it debunks the stories for hapless readers. In the 16 months since the team has been on the job, it has discredited 2,500 stories, many with links to Russia.

In a year when the French, Germans and Dutch will elect leaders, the European authorities are scrambling to counter a rising tide of fake news and anti-European Union propaganda aimed at destabilizing people’s trust in institutions.

It is easier today than when at the height of the Cold War the principle vectors for spreading false stories were limited numbers of print newspapers and television. And it’s not just the Russians. Today the East Stratcom team admits it is “outgunned.”

“There are concerns shared by many governments that fake news could become weaponized,” said Damian Collins, a British politician in charge of a new parliamentary investigation examining the phenomenon. “The spread of this type of material could eventually undermine our democratic institutions.”

It already has. Not to go Ginsberg on you (the other one), but during last year’s presidential election I saw the many of the best minds of a generation virtually destroyed by fake news spread via social media. It was very ugly. The November results were even uglier. Just because there is no shrapnel doesn’t mean there’s no fallout. Attacking “the very idea that there is a true version of events” is no longer just Kremlin geoplolitical strategy. It is Trump White House policy.

FYI, East Stratcom maintains Facebook and Twitter pages.

A-hole in one

by digby

Trump with his foursome golfing this week-end

This is such a small thing but it really illustrates how reflexively dishonest these people are. From Steve Benen:

For the third consecutive weekend, Donald Trump has headed south, spending time at his private club in South Florida, where the president appears to enjoy golfing. And while that ordinarily wouldn’t be especially notable – just about every modern president has enjoyed hitting the links – with Trump, nothing is ever easy.

Because Trump complained bitterly for years about President Obama’s golfing, the Republican’s aides are a little touchy about the subject, to the point that they’ve begun shading the truth a bit. Politico reported this afternoon:

After initially saying Trump had only played a few holes, the White House reversed itself Monday after professional golfer Rory McIlroy posted on his website that he had played 18 holes with the president. 

“As stated yesterday the President played golf. He intended to play a few holes and decided to play longer,” White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders said Monday.

I’ll gladly concede that this White House’s falsehoods are so numerous, giving deceptive information about the president’s golf game hardly registers. For that matter, the president’s own lies are often so serious, it’s hard to get too worked up about this latest misstep.

But even with those caveats in mind, it’s an odd thing to lie about. Have we really reached the point at which Trump World is so accustomed to pushing bogus and misleading information that even the president’s golfing is fair game?

Part of the problem, of course, is Trump’s preoccupation with Obama’s downtime. The Trump Twitter Archive points to Trump whining about his predecessor’s golfing over and over and over and over and over again. As the Republican put it before his own election, Americans should perceive Obama as lazy and easily distracted because of his preferred form of recreation during his personal downtime.

Indeed, Trump said a year ago he’d be a very different kind of president. At an event in New Hampshire in Feb. 2016, while again complaining about Obama golfing, Trump declared that if he were in office, “I’d want to stay in the White House and work my ass off.”

In Nov. 2016, Trump moved the goal posts, saying he might golf a bit, but only as part of his presidential duties. “Golf is fine,” he said the day before the election. “But always play with leaders of countries and people that can help us!”

Now, as the Huffington Post noted, Trump’s whole perspective has changed. 

Since becoming president, Trump has played a lot of golf. Specifically, he has made six trips to the golf course in 30 days. This has caused some people to suggest Trump might be a hypocrite. The White House, which seems sensitive to those allegations, has responded by keeping the press and the public in the dark about Trump’s golfing – sometimes literally, like on Feb. 11, when administration officials made an AP reporter wait in a room with black plastic over the windows while the president played golf.

Trump’s golfing this weekend was similarly secret. Late Sunday afternoon, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a top White House press aide, told reporters Trump had played “a couple of holes” Saturday and Sunday.

It was more than a couple, and it wasn’t at all with world leaders:
Even today, the White House only conceded its original statement was wrong after the facts emerged from those Trump played with.

To be clear, I’m not criticizing Trump for wanting to go golfing. It’s a tough job, and presidents should unwind however they want. It’s not something the public should get too worked up about.

That said, Trump spent years arguing the exact opposite: he was convinced presidential golfing was a very big deal, it was worthy of incessant and whiny complaints; and it was a credible metric for evaluating a president’s diligence and productivity.

There are roughly 1,000 things Trump has done wrong that are more substantively ridiculous than this, but when it comes to combining hypocrisy, dishonesty, and viewing Obama through a fresh lens, this golfing flap nevertheless resonates for a reason.

It sure does.  He’s entirely full of shit and anyone who couldn’t see that before surely should be able to see it now. And yet 40% of the American people still think he’s just terrific.

Trump is bringing everyone together. In England.

by digby

He’s such a uniter: 

Donald Trump state visit: MPs of all parties call for US President’s trip to Britain to be cancelled

A cross-party group of MPs has called on Theresa May to rescind an invitation for Donald Trump to attend a state visit to the UK later this year.

MPs branded the US President “disgusting” and “immoral” as they criticised the Prime Minister for appearing to act in “desperation” by extending the offer to Mr Trump just seven days after he entered the White House.

The debate was triggered after a petition to block Mr Trump’s state visit reached almost two million signatories. A separate petition, defending the state visit, which attracted more than 300,000 signatures, also formed part of the debate.

Calling on the Government to reconsider its offer, Labour’s Paul Flynn compared the US President’s behaviour to a “petulant child”, while fellow Labour MP Daniel Zeichner branded him “a disgusting and immoral man” who “represents the very opposite of the values we hold”.

Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael said Ms May was left looking “desperate and craven” while Labour’s Dawn Butler said the US had a “pretty nasty virus, and it’s important that virus doesn’t spread”.

Green MP Caroline Lucas attacked Mr Trump’s “effrontery to basic climate science” and the SNP’s Alex Salmond suggested there was “desperation for a trade deal” driving Ms May’s Government.

They clashed with several Conservative MPs who insisted Ms May was right to prioritise Britain’s national interest by fostering good relations with its historic ally.

Tory Nigel Evans said he had seen no evidence from the first four weeks of the Trump administration to suggest that the President was “racist”.

“When we stand up in this country and condemn him for being racist, and I have seen no evidence of that, I have seen no evidence of him being racist, we are actually attacking the American people,” he said.
[…]
Much of the debate centred on the timing of the offer, coming just a week after Mr Trump was inaugurated and during a hastily-arranged visit to Washington by Ms May.

Barack Obama only received an invitation after 758 days, while his predecessor, George W Bush, waited 978 days before he was offered a state visit.

Tory MP Crispin Blunt said he was not opposed to a state visit but said it should be delayed until 2020 – the 400th anniversary of the voyage of the Mayflower.

However, Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan said Mr Trump’s state visit to the UK “should happen and will happen”.

He told MPs in the Westminster Hall debate: “This is a special moment for the special relationship. The visit should happen, the visit will happen and when it does I trust the United Kingdom will extend a polite and generous welcome to president Donald Trump.”

The debate over the US President’s impending trip took place against the backdrop of protests across the UK against the state visit.

You can’t help but be proud to be an American.

Remember this welcome in Europe for our last president?

And we’re supposed to believe that the monstrous imbecile Trump will bring about more favorable relationships with the world? Really?

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The NRA call to arms. What could go wrong?

by digby

What’s he getting at?

By the way, these are the actual protesters this man is inciting Trump’s gun-toting cult followers to open fire on: