Tag: Trump

Hating the book about Trump doesn’t require reading it, apparently

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If Kellyanne Conway really isn’t worried about the revelations in Mary Trump’s new book, Too Much and Never Enough, hurting President Donald Trump in the fall, she did a poor job of showing it Tuesday afternoon on Fox News…

After reading aloud a particularly damning passage that covers both Trump’s “blatant racism” and lack of religious faith, Faulkner asked, “What is the reaction from the White House to the book that is coming out?”

“I believe family matters should be family matters. I think the thin-skinned, troubled, living in a glass house, mainstream media members who think people’s families are their business ought to really think thrice the next time they do that,” Conway said, offering up an ominous wink along with her threat.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, meanwhile, deemed everything in the book false despite the fact that she has not read any of it yet. “It’s ridiculous, absurd allegations that have absolutely no bearing in truth,” she said on Tuesday. “Have yet to see the book, but it is a book of falsehoods.”

Eventually, they all will pimp out their own books about their former boss.

NYT asks: How badly is America doing?

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When can schools safely reopen? When will the economy really start recovering? And when will you next eat in a restaurant, go to a movie, watch pro sports or hang out at a friend’s house?

All of these are, in fact, versions of the same question: When will the United States finally start to get the coronavirus under control?

And the answer appears to be: not any time soon.

The U.S. looks ever more like an outlier. Over the weekend, President Trump again played down the coronavirus as a serious threat, falsely claiming 99 percent of cases are harmless…

Much of the rest of the world is taking a very different approach. It is slowly moving back toward more normal functioning, without setting off major new outbreaks.

Trump is an idiot who spent most of his life looking for a village of hs peers to take him in. Unfortunately, the GOP did a skillful enough job at manipulating our out-of-date electoral system to give him a whole country to screw up.

Trump got written briefing on ‘Russia bounties’ — useless to a fool who doesn’t read

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Reports by the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, quoting unnamed US officials, said a Russian military intelligence unit had offered Taliban-linked militants bounties to kill US troops in Afghanistan…

Moscow maintains close links with the Taliban, as it sees the US involvement in Afghanistan winding down, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says.

He says Russia is also waging a “grey” or undeclared war against the West. Under President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin has smarted from every perceived indignity suffered since the fall of the Soviet Union. It was US support for Afghan irregular fighters that contributed to Moscow’s forced withdrawal from Afghanistan in the 1980s.

…The New York Times, citing two unnamed US officials, said the intelligence assessment had been included in the President’s Daily Brief report – a written document with key government intelligence – in late February.

CNN and the Associated Press have also reported that the president received the intelligence in a written briefing earlier this year, without specifying when. Mr Trump is said to largely ignore the President’s Daily Brief, relying more on oral briefings by intelligence officials a few times a week.

Or he’ll just sit on his dead ass and wait for Fox Fake News to tell him what he needs to know — to sound presidential.

Anti-science ignoranus

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…Top U.S. COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci recently blamed the country’s ineffective pandemic response on an American “anti-science bias.” He…compared those discounting the importance of masks and social distancing to “anti-vaxxers” in their “amazing” refusal to listen to science.

It is Fauci’s profession of amazement that amazes me. As well-versed as he is in the science of the coronavirus, he’s overlooking the well-established science of “anti-science bias,” or science denial.

Americans increasingly exist in highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities occupying their own information universes…

In theory, resolving factual disputes should be relatively easy: Just present strong evidence, or evidence of a strong expert consensus. This approach succeeds most of the time, when the issue is, say, the atomic weight of hydrogen.

But things don’t work that way when scientific advice presents a picture that threatens someone’s perceived interests or ideological worldview. In practice, it turns out that one’s political, religious or ethnic identity quite effectively predicts one’s willingness to accept expertise on any given politicized issue.

It’s called “Motivated reasoning”, folks. The American Way.