After being called out on Twitter by Donald Trump…ok, not really…we are the only ones not to have been called out by him yet, we return with another episode of As The Donald Turns, the “Prove It” episode.
- By now everyone has digested all that happened over the weekend with Donald accusing President Obama of illegal wiretapping of the Trump Towers. Of course, Donald could not prove it happened, and so when the White House was called out for the unfounded accusations, the White House then went on to say that Donald welcomes congressional investigative activity into what Obama did. So you made a claim of certainty, others around you could see you had zero chance of proving it, so you handed the ball off to Congress, which clearly wants no part of your early morning gibberish rants. This guy was supposed to be a world class manager, but I certainly cannot prove that either.
- So, where did Donald get this unprovable information? From two other sources with no proof, of course. It’s a chicken or egg thing as to who had it first, Breitbart or Mark Levin. Levin is a darling of the far, far right. He hates every sitting congressman because everyone, except him, is a hack. His claim to political fame is being chief of staff to one of the worst attorneys general in the last 70 years, Ed Meese. Levin’s radio show is worth a listen, just once. They are all the same, so you don’t need to listen more than once. His nasally delivery combined with him always being one rant away from cardiac arrest live on the air is amusing once.
- So, the weekend was spent like a Brady Bunch episode, but instead of “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha,” it was “Russia, Russia, Russia.” The White House, for the 6th week in a row, lost control of its own messaging because Donald could not control his impulses. By the way, 6 weeks is exactly how long they had been in office when the borscht hit the fan over the weekend. No coincidence there.
- In order to try to steer the conversation elsewhere, Donald’s people unveiled the new travel ban on Monday. There was no great Oval Office ceremony for everyone to see Donald’s signature like he has done for everything else. He is not one to admit he made a mistake. This time it was just him sitting by himself, signing and Sean Spicer sending out the photo from his unsecured smart phone. I swear these guys never learn. Interesting thing about the travel ban. In January, when the federal court struck it down, Donald lashed out that this was an emergency and they could not wait and they could announce the date in advance because all the bad hombres would flood into the country like paratroopers invading a third world country. You know what he could not do at the time? Prove it. So it has been a full month since he tweeted “See you in court.” And yet America has survived. The new ban does not even start for another week. You know what that means? I can prove Donald was flat out wrong with those previous proclamations.
- The “pivot” to discussing immigration did not work. It has still been all about Russia and leaks and phone conversations and dead Soviet spies. So Donald went to the media for help. Three People on Sofa, over at Fox, ran a story that at 4am pacific time about an airstrike in Yemen:
@foxandfriends 7h7 hours ago
U.S. airstrike in Yemen kills former Gitmo detainee.
They used file footage of some random airstrike in some random country and had the following narrative; “The Trump administration just killed a former Guantanamo Bay detainee released by Barack Obama. Yasir al-Silmi, once considered the worst of the worst, killed in a U.S. airstrike in Yemen. He had been released back in 2009 even though the Department of Defense recommended that he stay behind bars. One hundred twenty-two prisoners released from Gitmo have returned to the battlefield.”
Right on cue, within 4 minutes of seeing it on Fox, Donald tweeted.
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!
4:04 AM – 7 Mar 2017
Yes, Donald actually got the news for his tweet by watching Fox. The problem is Donald, as he is prone to doing, tweeting something that he could not prove….122 prisoners released by Obama returning to battle. In fact, his own Pentagon has numbers that show George W. Bush released 532 prisoners and 113 returned to the battle field. Obama released 161 and 9 returned to fight. That, Donald, is what we like to call “proof.”
- Just to be fair, Fox did get some of its news from Donald as well….you know…they scratch each other’s back. They shared the great news that Exxon is committing $20 billion in new manufacturing and creating 45,000 new jobs (10,000 of them are more than one year jobs). Donald had tweeted about and Fox ran it in breathless breaking news style. Of course the jobs and capital expenditures were approved back in 2013, and the news is that it will begin this year, but that is just a provable fact and Donald will have none of those.
- When you get criticized for throwing out unprovable garbage, it can hurt. Donald and the White House wanted to be right about Exxon. They got former Exxon CEO and current Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to persuade his buddies at Exxon to put out a press release on the old news. The White House was so careful to be right, they plagiarized the press release. They lifted an entire paragraph word for word without crediting where it came from.
- Donald probably wishes more people had paid attention to the plagiarism. Then they might have missed Dr. Ben Carson’s first address to his new staff as Secretary of Housing and Urban development. He was rambling on about the human brain and enforcing the law of the land and all things having nothing to do with HUD’s role, when he hit this note; “That’s what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.” Slaves = immigrants….if you don’t pay attention to facts and things that are provable you wind up saying things like that.
- The White House cannot get out of its own way lately. It’s probably why they did not have a daily press briefing for 8 days, thus rendering it a “whenever-we- feel-comfortable-talking-to- you-briefing.”
- Tuesday was going to be a big day to talk to the media. It is the day RyanCare was unveiled. That is the current rendition of the Republican health care plan. We won’t spend too much time on it yet, because it has as much chance of passing, as is, as I do of becoming a US Senator. The staff here read the bill this morning. Among the highlights:
- If you have a lag in your coverage, you have to pay a re-installment premium , but the fee goes to the insurance companies who were not covering you, instead of the government/taxpayers who were.
- There is an insurance savings account to help lower income people pay for insurance. Of course the problem is, lower income people usually don’t have extra money kicking around at the end of every month to put in the account.
- Many Republicans hate the proposal because it reimburses states who extended Medicare…a very un GOP thing to do.
- It has not been scored by the CBO…the Congressional Budget Office. That is usually step 1, because they will crunch the numbers and tell you if your plan is revenue positive, negative or neutral. Paul Ryan didn’t want to know the answers before the unveiling, so he didn’t take the critical step.
One thing that we can assume, but not prove; if the healthcare bill does not pass both houses of Congress and become law in the next 30 days, which it will not, the town hall meetings for representatives during the Spring break will likely be more “lively” than the last ones.
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