...but I'm not going to pretend the kind of bullshit coming from the White House is new in any way. Maybe the sheer mass of the bullshit is something we haven't seen before, but we can't afford to start thinking this is normal.
NYT, Frank Bruni:
It hit me this week, around the time when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was blithely seconding Chief of Staff John Kelly’s Civil War revisionism, that I missed Sean Spicer.
I missed the panic in his eyes, which signaled a scintilla of awareness that he was peddling hooey. I missed the squeak in his voice, which suggested perhaps the tiniest smidgen of shame.
He never seemed to me entirely at home in his domicile of deception; she dwells without evident compunction in a gaudier fairyland of grander fictions. There’s no panic. No squeak. Just that repulsed expression, as if a foul odor had wafted in and she knew — just knew — that the culprit was CNN.
True, she hasn’t told a lie as tidy as Spicer’s ludicrousness about Donald Trump’s inauguration crowds. But her briefings are breathtaking — certainly this week’s were. For some 20 minutes every afternoon, down is up, paralysis is progress, enmity is harmony, stupid is smart, villain is victim, disgrace is honor, plutocracy is populism and Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia if anyone would summon the nerve to investigate her (because, you know, that never, ever happens). I watch and listen with sheer awe.
With despair, too, because Sanders doesn’t draw nearly the censure or ridicule that Spicer did, and the reason isn’t her. It’s us. More precisely, it’s what Trump and his presidency have done to us. Little more than nine months in, we’ve surrendered any expectation of honesty. We’re inured.
NYT, Frank Bruni:
It hit me this week, around the time when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was blithely seconding Chief of Staff John Kelly’s Civil War revisionism, that I missed Sean Spicer.
I missed the panic in his eyes, which signaled a scintilla of awareness that he was peddling hooey. I missed the squeak in his voice, which suggested perhaps the tiniest smidgen of shame.
He never seemed to me entirely at home in his domicile of deception; she dwells without evident compunction in a gaudier fairyland of grander fictions. There’s no panic. No squeak. Just that repulsed expression, as if a foul odor had wafted in and she knew — just knew — that the culprit was CNN.
True, she hasn’t told a lie as tidy as Spicer’s ludicrousness about Donald Trump’s inauguration crowds. But her briefings are breathtaking — certainly this week’s were. For some 20 minutes every afternoon, down is up, paralysis is progress, enmity is harmony, stupid is smart, villain is victim, disgrace is honor, plutocracy is populism and Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia if anyone would summon the nerve to investigate her (because, you know, that never, ever happens). I watch and listen with sheer awe.
With despair, too, because Sanders doesn’t draw nearly the censure or ridicule that Spicer did, and the reason isn’t her. It’s us. More precisely, it’s what Trump and his presidency have done to us. Little more than nine months in, we’ve surrendered any expectation of honesty. We’re inured.
