Washington had its White House Correspondent’s Dinner last night and once again the cowardly bully didn’t show up. He sent his sacrificial dogs, Kelly Ann Conway and Sara Huckabee Sanders to take the shots for him while he went out to dead-broke Michigan and ranted in front of a crowd of pathetic losers who still don’t get it; who still refuse to accept what they see and hear; who won’t even listen to what the Liar-in-Chief tells them when he reverses his own position and lies about stuff he just said. And don’t ask me what, specifically, because at this point it would take twenty pages, single-spaced to list even part of the lies Trump has uttered just since he took office.
But back to the dinner; in years past the siting President was not only in attendance but also often spoke. It was just such an occasion when Barak Obama took some well-deserved shots at an also present Donald Trump. This was obviously in retaliation over Trump’s completely unreal birther claims about Obama. Instead of laughing off the jibes Trump took mortal offense and ran successfully for the Presidency. If there’s anything to hold against Obama it is being responsible for this joke infecting the White House.
So Trump sent the two women who have sold their souls for a place before the cameras. Who have dispensed with their integrity for their fifteen minutes of fame, which believe me has gone on way too long. I didn’t get a good look at Conway’s reactions to the comic’s shots but I got a very good one at Sanders. Like her boss she has no idea how to deal with someone who wasn’t kissing her ass. She should have laughed the jibes off, the way the honorees at roasts do; even when it hurts. She should have showed that she was above this petty nonsense, because after all, that’s what it is. Instead she sat grim faced and smoldered. It’s too bad that someone who spends her days lying to the press can’t see the humor in her wasted life when it is exposed. Or maybe it just depressed her to see that other people understand what a loser she really is.
The Right HAS criticized Michelle Wolf, the comic in question, for her attacks on Trump and the women mentioned above. Considering the current political climate, considering that we have a President who can’t complete a complex sentence without lying, considering that the women she attacked have made a very good living supporting and backing up Trump’s lies and attacks on other women, this writer doesn’t think she went far enough.
Yes, I know some people are offended by raunch, but considering the way Trump conducts his personal life it’s pretty hard to go any further than he already has. He spent the next day attacking Wolf for her language and for her attack on the above mentioned women, who have made careers based on lying to the American public. This attack should seem strange when one considers that the NY Times has listed 446 occasions when Trump himself has attacked people on the basis of their looks or other personal traits just since he achieved the presidency.
If I were to criticize Wolf it would be for her incredibly annoying voice and stumbling delivery. A comic facing this particular audience will only have half of it on her side no matter what she says. If you want your act to work you have to kill the half that believes you. Wolf didn’t, stumbling over punch lines and throwing out just enough bombs to muddy the funny material she did have. I imagine it’s pretty hard to find someone to work this room but they should have chosen better.
The major criticism about her from other sources on the Right was that when she attacked the women she went after for their physical abnormalities and their looks. That just shows that the critics don’t understand English. What Wolf said about Sanders was that she burnedfacts and used the ashes as eye-shadow. That isn’t an attack on anything but Sanders inability to tell the truth. And since when does anyone who backs Trump get bent out of shape because of attacks on physical problems or disabilities? Trump has made it a habit to make fun of people for their looks, their physical disabilities, and their honesty, and isn’t that a laugh.
No, if you want to attack Michelle Wolf about anything, do it about her skill level, don’t do it about her taste because there is no bar lower than Donald Trump’s taste or that of his flunkies like Sara Sanders.
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The news along with the video this week of the leaders of North and South Korea shaking hands and moving back and forth across the border between their countries while announcing a peace treaty between them is only surprising to those who have been listening to the crepe hangers around the world that do not understood the problem on the Korean Peninsula nor what Kim Jung Un has as his ultimate goal for his country’s nuclear buildup.
Kim, who it seems is no one’s fool, took over a country that was failing. People were starving, other countries wouldn’t accept North Korea’s currency and everything was going to hell, at least partly because of international sanctions based on its nuclear policy.
Kim looked around the world and at the American foreign policy and realized that the only thing America understood was strength, and once any leader who ran a country that did not prescribe to our democratic principles got in America’s sights, they better have a nuclear alternative or they were dead meat. Of course being who we are, we showed him that he was absolutely correct when we killed Saddam and Gaddaffi as soon as it was established that they no longer had nuclear protection. So he decided that the proper course was to push ahead with his nuclear program, rather than to surrender to American demands and make himself more vulnerable. What our people failed to realize was that Kim’s threats were defensive rather than offensive. It’s hard to understand why we didn’t see this because one nuclear weapon is not a real threat in a world overflowing with them. But Kim rattled his single bomb and we shivered in our shorts.
Trump, not in any way grasping the problem, did what bullies always do. He made a lot of noise and threatened war. But he actually had the means to blow up the planet so Kim was forced to pay attention. Then Trump having inadvertently done the right thing went, as he always does, too far. He made threats, he bragged about more and bigger bombs and he appointed John Bolton, the mustache that walks like a man, to his defense staff. This being the same John Bolton who pushed George Bush to start a war for no reason in Iraq that pretty much obliterated that country. Kim saw this move and figured that he had better do something before this American nut case turned his country into a fireball.
That became the basis for his overtures to the US and his meeting with President Moon of South Korea.
I know it’s hard to believe but even a series of completely wrong moves can sometime turn out right. Trump can now brag about having brought peace to the Korean Peninsula but before he does that he has to deal with the Iran Treaty. If Kim sees him back out of that it will only panic him and he won’t be able to accept anything the Liar-in-Chief promises him. The stumbling, bumbling progress that the administration has made will go down the drain. What many in our government and among our pundits fail to understand but what they have to realize, is that Kim is getting exactly what he wants. His nation is starving and there is no way he can ever win any kind of war so what he really needs is a protective and stable peace. That’s why the treaty with the South happened. That’s why he speaks to denuclearization. But in approaching this situation we have to understand that he cannot leave himself completely vulnerable or he will end up like Saddam or Gaddaffi and that’s when he might become dangerous.
This Sunday Jonathan Karl asked Mike Pompeo if he could trust anything that comes out of the mouth of Kim Jung Un. Really? He’s asking this of a man who will be representing, the ever truthful Donald Trump. How can we expect Kim to tell the truth when he is confronted by a liar and con man like Trump? We’re asking from the leader of North Korea, something that we can’t deliver ourselves – truth. That’s the problem. Will this meeting end up with Trump and Kim wrestling on the floor? Events, blunders, mistakes and utterly stupid moves have come together in a perfect storm to result in exactly what we, North Korea and the rest of the world want, but we still have two guys, who lie and bullshit, talking to each other. It’s hard to believe that anything really good can come out of such a cage match.
Karl, who seemed determined to present Kim as some kind of dragon who is worse than Trump, pushed Pompeo about how can we trust such a murderer and liar. Carl doesn’t seem to have a clue that Kim is getting exactly what he wants, exactly what his whole nuclear program has been aimed at; achieving safety from America’s empirical tendencies. But Karl has gotten so used to speaking to the thugs of the Trump cabinet that he seems to fail to see that Pompeo is a big jump up from Tillerson who spoke the language of business but not diplomacy. The question becomes, can Pompeo keep his heel on Bolton’s neck long enough to actually get something done in Korea.
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Frank Luntz, the guy who does all the discussion;groups says that Trump isn’t getting the recognition he has earned for getting this far in the Korea problem. Trump doesn’t need recognition; he makes it up for himself. At is anti-Correspondent’s dinner rally in Michigan he “modestly” informed the crowd that he deserved all the credit for what was currently going on in negotiations with the Koreans. Will he take the blame if they fail? If you said yes, you don’t know Donald Trump. He will blame it all on Kim who, like him, has a reputation for being a liar and a thug. And it will be believable just because Kim is no better than Trump.
The Iran treaty says, in the third line, that Iran agrees never to develop nuclear weapons. “Never.” If Trump could read, he would probably have seen this statement and would possibly have a different POV on said treaty. Macron did everything but give the orange man a wedgie but it remains to be seen if Trump can smarten up enough to abandon his announced plans to abandon the treaty and allow Iran to start up its nuclear program again. After all, stupid is as stupid does.
Another thing that seemed to be bothering Jonathan Karl was whether or not we would be making any concessions to Kim before he burned all his facilities to the ground. Pompeo refused to answer these dumb questions. I always thought Karl was smart enough not to ask dumb questions but I guess getting behind the mic and having to act like the big boys changes your whole tone. It’s too bad, as it turned out he never asked Pompeo a question that required a well thought out answer and because he did ask all those unanswerable questions he really let Pompeo off the hook. Either that or Pompeo is light years smarter than anyone else in the cabinet except Mattis. That would be a good thing but if Trump realized it, he would be signing his walking papers.