WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Donald Trump boasted that, if he is impeached, the television ratings will be higher than those of any other impeachment in history.
“Everywhere I go, people tell me that if I am impeached, they’re going to watch it,” he said. “The ratings are going to be through the roof.”
He said that he expected his impeachment ratings to be “many, many times” the size of the audience for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, in 1998.
Yeah OK, Borowitz is weird and goofy and he goes crashing into the absurd pretty regularly, but he makes this kinda thing work because it's towards the logical extreme. There's something about it that doesn't seem all that crazy considering just how nutty 45* behaves almost daily.
So I'm wondering about 45*'s obsession over his Ratings and his Poll numbers (knowing of course, he'll just lie his ass off if they're not good etc etc), but he is in fact obsessed with such things, and it's interesting to connect that up with the usual GOP mantra about how they don't pay attention to the polling and they make their decisions according to good old fashioned Republican values and blah blah fucking blah.
The GOP always loved slagging Hillary (esp) because she was so "Poll-Driven" and "She never says anything that hasn't been focus-grouped to within an inch of its life".
But btw - when you see a focus group on your liberal TV box these days, isn't it almost always Frank Luntz?
How do they reconcile any of that? Is it even necessary to try, especially in light of the pretty simple fact that we rarely hear about any of it anymore, even from the Repubs?
And then also too - 82% of people self-identifying as Republican say the approve of 45*'s performance?
First off: What the actual fuck, Repubs?
But: It seems like that could easily indicate just how down-to-the-bottom-of-the-barrel the GOP has gotten. If 45* is driving supporters away (as it sure as hell looks like he's doing), then the only folks left are those die-hard rubes who're still with him even as he is obviously in the run-up to when he starts shooting people on 5th Avenue.
It's as bad as it gets when the boss ducks responsibility for the decisions he makes - when the boss is POTUS, it's worse than as-bad-as-it-gets. We have a "president" telling us that firing Comey was somebody else's idea, and he was only acting at the suggestion of a subordinate. "It was Reinhard Heydrich's idea to kill all the Jews - I was just following the recommendations of a trusted adviser." And given what we've always known about 45*'s mastery at finding and exploiting the SmarmSpace, we have no reason to be surprised at this. It's what he does.
This is Dick. Dick is a Senator. See Dick's photograph? Dick knows the guy on the left is bad. We're proud of Dick. Go, Dick, go. pic.twitter.com/WXYqzqz8jJ
People in seats of power know all of this. The first question is: Will they act? And the next question is: If they do, in whose interest will they act?
She hits the main point - again - "You're looking at the wrong set of facts."
(Ignore what you see and listen to what I tell you you're seeing)
And also too - I guess this could be Kellyanne getting another chance. Or she's being thrown from the back of the wagon. The Press Poodles will give her some air time, knowing people love to rip into her, which of course, relegates her to the status of a high-priced sacrificial lamb. It buys 45* a little more time. And if that's the case, then somebody at the White House knows things are even worse than before, and they're about to get even worser.
What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation's history. As this column has said before, the problem isn't that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.
I mean, c'mon, it's George Will. Even though his relevancy went out the window along with his credibility back when he decided to hang in there with the home team and took to doing a little cheerleading for Bush43's idiotic tax cuts and Iraq etc, the guy can still turn a phrase: His fathomless lack of interest in America's path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.
The thing here, George - the thing that has to be repeated and remembered and repeated again until guys like you find the balls to step up and say it - you helped create the environment that produced "President" Donald Trump. And you're still part of the media machinery that goes on pimping the Both Sides bullshit; refusing to acknowledge that one side of our political system has gone completely off the fucking rails - and the suits in the executive suite are doing all that pimping because manufacturing melodrama is what brings in the ad revenue.
We have a fucked up Reality TV POTUS because we've allowed ourselves to be made into a fucked up nation of Reality TV junkies, who've been taught to ignore the line between News and Entertainment - and the line between Ideology and Partisanship - and the line between Real and Fake - and the line between Right and Wrong.
HuffPo: WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump has appointed Teresa Manning, an anti-abortion activist who has argued that “contraception doesn’t work,” to oversee a federal family planning program for low-income Americans.
Manning, a former lobbyist with the National Right to Life Committee and legislative analyst for the conservative Family Research Council, will serve as deputy assistant secretary for population affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. The Office of Population Affairs administers the Title X program, which subsidizes contraception, Pap smears and other preventive health care services for 4 million low-income Americans, roughly half of whom are uninsured.
Manning has said she opposes federal family planning funding, and she has a long history of making false claims about birth control and women’s health.
There's still just three things I know for sure about the whole Abortion Issue:
1. Eggs ain't chickens
2. Caterpillars ain't butterflies
3. Ain't nothing goin' on in my daughter's uterus that's any of your goddamned business