Putin-Gate

Tuesday I was in a hospital waiting room with a TV tuned to CNN when Bannon waddled into a closed door congressional hearing. I noticed that "Sloppy Steve" was wearing a coat and tie. I didn't know he owned a tie. Maybe he borrowed one.

Señor T may be-- is-- distracting everyone with whatever he's babbling about today... yesterday it was the incoherence of a path to citizenship and deporting thousands of El Salvadoreans, many with American-born children. Just as long as no one is talking about Putin-Gate he's chuckling away.

Charles Pierce shook Esquire readers over the weekend by growling about Paul Ryan, who many of them have probably never heard of.

Any impartial observers would agree that House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes has been doing all he can do to sabotage his own committee’s bipartisan examination of the Russian activities that took place in regard to the 2016 presidential election.

Trumpanzee and Johnson-- without their clown makeupIn his attack on Bannon Wednesday, Señor Trumpanzee accused him of, among many things, being a leaker. And Bannon-- like virtually everyone in the Trump White House-- probably was a leaker.

In response to the subject line above… well of course and there's no chance many DWT readers doubted either premise at any point. This episode of the nasty little back and forth started with a David Smith report in The Guardian, basically a pre-review of Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House.

The Trumpist forces of authoritarianism are circling the wagons. Trump and his allies have no intention of going down quietly and care not a whit of what damages they do to a constitutional democracy— which they abhor anyway— in the process of preserving their own grasp on power.

It would have been-- or at least should have been-- any sentient being to walk away from the Trump NY Times interview without 3 overarching thoughts, listed below in no particular order:

Paul Waldman, writing for the Washington Post Tuesday was almost matter of fact: Russia is going to attack our next election.

It astounds me that a third of voters still fail to understand that Trump is a compulsive liar. But as Daniel Dale , the DC correspondent for the Toronto Star, and many others have pointed out, that’s because a third of voters get their information from crackpot sites— versions of supermarket checkout line tabloids for the 21th Century.