This is what journalists have been whispering for months but I don’t remember any of them saying it publicly.
* I spend a lot of time evaluating people who have dementia or incipient dementia and he exhibits some of the same tendencies to make airy statements while having no real grasp of the reality of the underlying details.
For example demanding that the Senate delivers a health care bill without specifying clear cut instructions as to what he expects it to provide. In fact, does he even know the difference between Medicare and Medicaid? I can find no record of anything he has said in public that shows that he does.
* Let’s not forget that Trump did quite a bit himself to get Mueller appointed: suborning the Justice Department into coming up with a false rationale for firing Comey, that he then openly busted in an interview, and to the Russians in the Oval Office (W?T?F?). Trump is the last person to be leveling accusations against anyone working for him about making poor decisions that led to Mueller’s appointment.
Frankly, I always thought Sessions was Trump’s best and most important staff or cabinet pick, and I’d have a hard time continuing to support Trump if he decided to throw Sessions under the bus to save his own ass. Not only because it will make clear that Trump cares first and foremost (and maybe only) about Trump more than he does about the issues he ran on that I voted for and supported him for, but also because it means he or his ill-begotten brood (plus Jared) are probably guilty of something he doesn’t want Mueller to find. I’d rather national conservatism not have it’s epitaph be Trump’s or his idiot children’s personal sleaziness (and possible criminality).
* I didn’t expect Trump to get much through Congress. There is a large open borders majority in the Senate: all of the 48 Dems except maybe Joe Machin + about 15 Republicans.
I did expect him to do all the following:
1. Each year the president sets the number of refugees to be admitted. Under Bush/Obama it has typically been about 100,000. Trump set it to 50,000. He should have set it to zero, or something like 5,000 and limited to a tiny number of people who aided the US military or acted against the governments of our enemies (e.g., significant Chinese/Iranian/Norko dissidents)
2. Trump could end DACA with a stroke of his pen. He specifically and unequivically promised to do so. He is a liar.
3. Trump could effectively end TPS by de-designating all the countries on the list. This is again 100% within the President’s discretion. Not only has he failed to do this, not removing even a single country, he actually renewed Haiti’s designation.
One reason we have so many Somalis is that it is essentially impossible to deport non-felon illegal immigrants if their country is on the TPS list.
So Trump gets a C- on refugees and an F on DACA and TPS.
* Percy, it’s also dealing with the MSM on a case-by-case/contexted basis.
Rather than treating each and every reporter in the MSM-approved mythic structure: as a high priest of a unitary church possessing higher morality than everyone on earth and the special superpower of knowing the complete truth about all things forever. And surely more than the mere chief executive of our republic.
Trump’s team knows who these individual reporters and outlets are. They do background, they pay attention, they know how the MSM function. They follow stories. They follow careers. They understand what the MSM’s mythic framing involves–its details, its nature, its power.
There is always an element of media and institutions having to develop relationships to work together, but what we have witnessed in the past 40 years is the formation of a hermetically sealed/secret cult of MSM and Deep State. The enabling framework for moving information has hardened into a shadow government/opposition party from within.
Remember in fall of 2015 when CNN had dumps of Clinton’s e-mails? Their stance was that the material was classified, and since we, the unwashed audience, was Not Authorized to read and interpret those sacred texts, CNN’s priesthood would do it for us and “let us know what was important.”
Note the date in the URL there…and how the updated story it points to was updated in late October 2016, after the Wikileaks release, as damage control.
In defeating any religious cult there are levels where you have to go after the organization, funders, and people at the top, and there are levels where you have to engage with the foot soldiers. There are also times you have to attack their myths, times you have to attack their doctrines…and times when you simply point to what’s higher with the tip of your sharpened sword…and let them “cover themselves in shit and set themselves on fire,” as Jack Hanson put it so well above.
* Sessions has been a disappointment. Instead of being Trump’s legal attack dog he’s been a scared rabbit begging the Dem’s to eat him last. Politically Session’s is on the right side but he has no stomach for battle. Courtly Southern Gentlemanliness is not the right demeanor for battling berserkers bent on destroying what’s left of traditional America.
to quote Shakespeare’s Henry V on the mental state needed to properly engage Democrats:
… imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Instead on the morning when Session’s meetings with Russian ambassador were disclosed he adopted a deer in the headlights wide eyed look of fear. His first reaction was to recuse himself from anything having to do with the Russia hoax. Someone with more testicular fortitude like Cruz or Gingrich in his prime would have reacted properly by saying this is an absurd lie invented by the Hillary campaign and taken to lunatic extremes by the Democrats. That a US senator meets with diplomats in the course of his normal duties That the Russia fantasy would in no way interfere with prosecuting the Clintons, the Obamas, Holder or Lynch for the crimes they committed during the last 8 years.
* I like Tucker Carlson . He seems to be a sober serious conservative. A wonderful swap for the pseudo conservative O’Reilly. With exception of Hannity who is too dumb to take in more than very small doses the rest of Fox has become CNN lite with all Russia all the time the daily theme. Shep is particularly insufferable.
Carlson is right that Sessions is a good man. That doesn’t excuse Sessions failure to fight for Trump. Obama’s attorney generals were eager willing and able to break any law or man that stood in the way of dismantling of Old America and Western civilization. Meanwhile Sessions comes across as scared of his shadow, apologizing for his existence.
* Steve’s background is as a reporter; a journalist. He observes more than he opines, and he knows as much about all these alleged secret shenanigans as you or I. Would you have him make vapid, unfounded conjectures like all the blathering fools we come here to escape do?
* Sessions lusted after the AG job. He wanted it so bad that he ‘overlooked’ the fact that his first and ONLY priority was to the President, and so he went ahead and took the job when he KNEW from Day 1 that he was going to recuse himself. Rendering himself useless and causing no end of trouble for Trump.
If Sessions had confided in Trump about recusal, then Trump would have (initially at least) appointed another AG, and Sessions would still be persona grata.
Sessions has hobbled Trump for his own personal gain.What kind of loyal soldier does that?
I don’t know what will happen, but I’m a little tired of hearing about how wonderful Jeff Sessions is, and about how much of a southern gentleman he is, and about how much he risked to step forward for Trump in the early.
Truth is, when the crunch came he showed where his loyalty lay, and it wasn’t with his POTUS.
* Sessions represents the genuine conservatives in the party who were fighting for immigration enforcement back when Trump was still supporting amnesty. If Trump dumps Sessions he betrays his strongest supporters. That would be an insanely dumb move.
Additionally, who would Trump replace Sessions with? Sessions gave up a Senate seat to work for Trump. Who’s going to risk their career for what could turn into a very brief, chaotic gig in the Trump Administration.
If Trump fires Sessions and keeps DACA and keeps TPS he is finished.
* The first year of Clinton’s first term – 1993 – was nearly as chaotic as the first year of Trump’s. The Whitewater issue was still mostly dormant*, but Clinton was under constant fire for Wacogate, Travelgate, Fostergate, and even Haircutgate (look them up). The gays-in-the-military brouhaha that erupted in his first days in office, ending his honeymoon even before it began, was a self-inflicted wound. (“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a cynical compromise crafted only after Clinton’s hamfisted attempt to ram gays-in-uniform down the generals’ throats blew up in his face.) Hillary’s health-care initiative was a disaster from the get-go.
There were foreign-policy crises galore. Clinton’s “waffling” over Bosnia became a media obsession. There was much hand-wringing over the disastrous “humanitarian” intervention in Somalia (an utter failure of a military action whose most notorious episode was dramatized in Black Hawk Down), tussling with the Cedras regime in Haiti, and saber-rattling with North Korea. (The crises with the latter two countries both escalated to the point of narrowly-averted full-scale wars.) The rape of Russia and Yeltsin’s struggle to hold on to power, culminating in the deadly tank assault on the Russian White House in early October 1993, was but a colorful backdrop to all of this chaos. (The showdown in Moscow unfolded on the same day as the infamous helicopter crash in Mogadishu.)
And yet Clinton did get a few things done. He nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who sailed through the Democratic Congress. (Clinton was lucky that both of his nominees were confirmed before the GOP took control.) And he got his tax-hike bill through both houses, albeit by the narrowest of margins.
And 1993 was not even Clinton’s worst year.
Trump has a long way to go.
*Whitewater blew up into a full-fledged political crisis in early 1994. On the day that Richard Nixon died – April 22, ’94 – Bill and Hill held unprecedented his-and-hers press conferences, attempting (unsuccessfully) to put the matter to rest. Congressional hearings began that July, and the fateful appointment of Kenneth Starr as the new special prosecutor took place in early August. Starr, of course, ended up massively expanding the scope of an investigation that eventually led to Clinton’s impeachment.
