White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is on the job.by NoahThat the Trump White House has become a home for crazy people shouldn't come as a surprise to any sane observer of the events of recent years. Face it: We've seen the Republican Party cross over the edge of sanity since the dawn of the Tea Party. That was the point where it became apparent that the Republican Party had fully become the Crackpot Party. I don't need to recount the Bizarro World antics of the likes of Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Louie "The Bestiality Guy" Gohmert, Paul LePage, et al. Their numbers are legion, and they have been parading across our TV screens for years like the sideshow freaks they are.Nixon's "last press conference" (oops!)In fact, if you're a glutton for punishment, you can trace the origins of this thing of total lunacy the Trumpies call a movement back through the Reagan years all the way to President Nixon. Nixon was a raving maniac who we learned literally ran through the corridors of the White House screaming his head off. Even before he was elected president, America had evidence that Nixon was severely paranoid and given to delusion. Think: "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" (Nov. 7, 1962, at what he said was his "last press conference," after his California gubernatorial loss). Eventually, his White House taping system proved once and for all that he was a racist and, even more, an anti-semite.So, really, the precedent for a President Trump or someone like him was set long ago. Most of America, with the help of the mainstream media myth machine, just chose not to see it.1968-69: THE NIXON PODS DESCEND ON DCI lived in Washington, DC, in all but the last of the Nixon years. The Nixon government aside, I saw the change in the population of Washington as it moved from the LBJ years to the Nixon years. To say the least, no one I chose to associate with had much if any regard for either man. We could look at LBJ and give him his due for ramming civil-rights and voting-rights legislation through Congress, but there was also his role in escalating the Vietnam War. Nixon, on the other hand, had no redeeming qualities other than the creation of the EPA. Please note that all three of the positives I just mentioned are things that today's republicans hate with all their being.What I found most disturbing about Washington in those days was that when Nixon took over, you could see a marked difference in the kind of people that were coming to town to replace the LBJ people. I'm not talking just about cabinet people; I'm talking about the massive numbers of department staff and support staff that come along with the tide when a new president comes in. With Nixon it was an influx of crewcut, wound-tight, pole-up-the-ass types, people who were stuck in a world view of 1953, 15 years out of date; people who really did still believe that Commies lurked in every shadow and that the Earth is only 6000 years old.These people feared a world where males had sprouted long hair. Which made them easy to terrify in the streets of Georgetown, especially after the horrific crimes of the Manson Family, and I admit that I personally had some fun with this. You could just stare at them and they'd start walking on eggshells. Dumb fucks that they were, they thought that any guy with hair over his ears was carrying a machete.The Nixon types also hated those who hated war. War was big business for them, plus it was waged against Commies. Understand: The word Commies didn't necessarily mean Communists in the literal geopolitical sense. To them a "Communist" was anyone who didn't agree with their myopic, narrow-minded view of things. To the vast majority of them, both bread and people should only come in one color: white. Today's republicans aren't that much different. Sure, it's harder to tell them from normal people just by fashion differences. I mean, can you tell those Duck Dynasty freaks from a death-metal band or the Manson gang? But if you notice that wound-tight thing, substitute "Muslim" for "Commie," and listen to the various bigotries they express, it's really the same. The difference now is that there seems to be a larger concentration of them in the general population. Either that or they just feel bolder and more entitled to act out in civilized society. Then again, it could be because social media and more TV and stations have given them a platform where they can reach each other easily and egg each other on.SO HERE WE ARE NOW IN 2017Russia is still an enemy of the United States. Only now that's OK with republicans 'cause the Russians helped put their guy in the White House. The Republican Party went over the cliff and dropped down so low that, to them, there's not a thing wrong with that. They got so insane that they put party over country like no party has ever done before. They got so insane that they embraced a man who is obviously severely mentally ill and now he is our president. If Nixon ever wanted a president in the White House that made him look sane by comparison, he's got him. Somewhere in Hell, a great burden has been lifted from his shoulders.It has now gotten so bad that on Saturday afternoon, when I was in our kitchen and heard an angry, shrieking madman on the TV in our living room, I had to stop what I was doing and see what the commotion was about. At first I thought maybe the authorities had arrested some bonkers terrorist at some airport somewhere. Maybe my wife was watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Vincent Price's House on Haunted Hill."Don't try to escape! You can't!"But no, it wasn't a movie. It was Comrade Trumpinsky's press secretary, Sean Spicer, channeling the Orange Fascist himself. He was clearly off his meds, and was a thing to behold -- emphasize thing.He wasn't wearing a straitjacket, but you could be forgiven if you remembered it that way. That's how intense the crazy shooting out of his mouth, eyes, and entire body language was as he berated and tried to intimidate the assembled press. Mere words cannot do this bizarre incident justice. And this was just his first day! He made a lasting and credibility-destroying impression. It was a tantrum for the ages. I have never seen Facebook explode over an ongoing event like it did with this one.What set Spicer off was the press coverage of the Trump inauguration, particularly the reporting of the simple fact, verifiable by aerial photographs that we have all seen by now, and verifiable by photographs of the empty seats along the parade route, that President Obama's crowd was bigger than President Trump's crowd. Freud would have a field day with this. Obviously Trump had sent Spicer out to combat this reality that Trump cannot deal with and is not mentally equipped to deal with. His megalomania and massive insecurities get in the way.Spicer managed to set some sort of record for speed lying as he spat out an incredible five lies in just five minutes. You can click here for the specifics. It was engrossing. It was both hard to look and hard to look away. I was watching a man disintegrate on national TV.Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo had this to say:
On the one hand it is chilling, bizarre, un-American to see the President's spokesman begin the term excoriating and threatening the press, telling demonstrable lies, speaking with a palpable rage in his voice. On the other, the President and his toadies are on the second day almost vanishingly small. They are embarrassing themselves. They look silly. They look ridiculous. It is hard to be intimidated by ridiculousness. I suspect this will be the abiding duality of the Trump presidency.
Yes, they look ridiculous, and yes, they are embarrassing themselves. But sadly for them and everyone in the world, they have no idea that this is how they come off, just as those who voted for Trump have no idea how this seems to the moral and the sane. Even former press secretaries from both major parties took issue with Spicer's behavior.The thing is, of course, that Trump and his toadies are taking millions of naïve, wounded, and gullible Americans right over the cliff with them, and the rest of us are at risk of being collateral damage. While this bit of Saturday-afternoon horror theater was going on, I checked the FOX "News" twitter feed, where Trump's army of brainwashed souls, in an orgasmic state, were cheering Spicer on in his ranting insanity. There were a lot of "About time!" and "Hell yeah!" shout-outs to Spicer. To them, a star was born.Is Sean Spicer counting hockey crowds now too? Maybe it was the very same "million and a half people" President Trump saw at his inauguration who packed Dallas's American Airlines Center for Saturday's Stars loss to (ahem) the Washington Capitals. [Click to enlarge.]Reading the FOX Twitter feed offered a glimpse at the total Opposite World these brainwashed crazies live in. The danger is that they want to make the rest of us live in their world. It's like they've already gone through the looking glass and blown right past, into a state of ultimate denial. This is way beyond "O.J. didn't kill Nicole" stuff. This is alternate-reality creation that allows them to rationalize and justify, consciously or unconsciously, the criminality of what they have just done to their own country and the world.Trump's lost souls are trying to reverse the polarity of reality itself. It may be that the only way to deal with these people is to constantly throw their vile bullcrap right back in their faces until their heads explode from brain-hemorrhaging apoplexy. Disdain, derision, and zero tolerance should be the order of the day."ALTERNATIVE" REALITY INVADES SUNDAY-MORNING TV The Sunday morning news-talk shows like Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and "This Week With George Stephanopoulos brought out Trump's mistress of spin, Kellyanne Konartist. On This Week she made the point that (crowd) size doesn't matter while saying that it was "completely unacceptable" for the media to call Sean Spicer a liar. Well, Kellyanne, I'll go ya one further: If Spicer keeps it up, soon the word spicer will be synonymous with liar.But it was on Meet the Press that Kellyanne reached the heights of crazy that republicans adore her for, claiming that Spicer wasn't lying, he was just presenting "alternative facts"!It's really something when you are a republican so disingenuous that even a republican water carrier like Chuck Todd puts you on the hot seat. Still, I have to give Ms. Konartist credit. She is very good at her job and proved it in the campaign. She can also go on TV and erect a stonewall like nobody's business. Maybe Trump can send Kellyanne to the Mexican border and she can just talk any would-be "illegals" away.I took some amusement from the moment where Kellyanne appeared to flip off Chock Todd UK-style with a two-finger F-U salute. Was it intentional, or am I making up some of that famous "fake news" that is all the rage?To be fair -- and, like I say, I'm always fair -- I do want to address the bit of unfortunate real fake news that Ms. Konartist brought up on Meet the Press. There was lots of chatter from republikook circles over the weekend about a "fake news" report on the bust of Martin Luther King being removed from the Oval Office (now declared by me to be the Offal Office for the duration of Trump's hopefully short term).In fact, the bust was not removed. It turns out that it was obscured by someone standing in front of it. The reporter who wrote the story should have at least taken a better look. The righties are focusing on this incident as an example of what they term "fake news." Fair enough, but there is a much more serious underlying issue at play here. The issue is: Why would we assume that President Trump would remove the MLK bust. It's only natural to assume that he would because of his previously demonstrated feelings towards African-Americans, which include his having them removed from the floors of his casinos, the rabid support he received from KKK and other white supremacy groups worldwide, and many of his own words.[Click to enlarge.]The silver lining in this is that, if Trump was going to remove the MLK bust, a likely scenario, he will now have to think twice about it. I take pleasure in knowing that, when he is in his new office, he will have to look at something he'd rather not see. Oh well, funny how things can work out! Maybe he can just paint it gold or cover it with a handy white hood.ANDY BOROWITZ OFFERS A TAKE ON THE SPICER STORY
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) -- A man who was described as “visibly deranged” eluded the Secret Service on Saturday and gave a five-minute press conference at the White House.The man, who somehow obtained White House credentials in order to bypass security, unloaded a delusional and paranoid rant that left a room full of experienced reporters shaken.“We were all very, very scared,” Tracy Klugian, a reporter who witnessed the incident, said. “The things he was shouting made absolutely no sense, and he seemed to just get angrier and angrier.”After a stream-of-consciousness tirade in which he accused the reporters of being part of a far-reaching conspiracy to distort reality, the man abruptly walked off “before he could do any real harm,” a Secret Service spokesman said.Reporters who left the White House called the incident the scariest five minutes of their lives and said that they were grateful it did not escalate further.“We were all terrified that, at some point, he was going to ask us if we had any questions,” Harland Dorrinson, a reporter, said. “None of us wanted to say anything that would set him off.”
MEMES OF THE ORANGE WHITE HOUSE INSANE ASYLUM"News Flash! Spicer! Conway! The Trump White House Is Now Officially An Insane Asylum" (1/23)"Trump Press Secretary Spicer Spawns A Cottage Industry Overnight!" (1/24)"Kellyanne Conway Memes: Crazy Lady Now Roams The Halls Of The White House, America’s Newest Insane Asylum" (1/26)
#