A Witness Turns to Froth as Interviewers Try to Save Him


 
Sam Nunberg has never impressed folks as a nice guy.

He came to the public eye when he was fired, for a little while, by Mr. Trump for what polite people call racially provocative internet posts. A more accurate description is simpler. They were racist. After basking in notoriety for a few days, Sam denied authorship.

Today, he doesn’t even bother. What was wrong with those posts? he asks. Did they cost any votes?

Okay the fact that I was fired for Facebook posts which were … Fine! … racially intensitive (sic)?

Do you think that would have cost us a vote?

He is fascinated with tough guys who thought it was funny to subvert democracy during the Nixon years. They performed dirty tricks and laughed about various illegalities later.

Sam thought they were too cool for words. He attached himself to Roger Stone, one of the original dirty tricksters. Stone boasted of his own ethical models: Roy Cohn of Joe McCarthy fame, Dick Nixon, and the Duke of Windsor who brought Nazism to English royalty. Sam Nunberg regards Roger Stone as a father figure.

Roger Stone is like a surrogate father. He’s like my father.

Sam has been hired and fired and hired and fired over the years by the man who became our President.

Generating sympathy for such an individual is not an easy task. But this was his week in Bizarro World, as he went on one cable news interview after another. He wanted to talk about his part in the Trump-Russia-election-hacking investigation being conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller.

He is clearly under pressure. To say that he seemed to crack is understatement. He self-scrambled on screen. Print does not do justice to the spectacle. He was not unraveling. He was already there, a rolling mass of torn yarn littering the floor.
Continue reading “A Witness Turns to Froth as Interviewers Try to Save Him”

Russia Wanted Trump to Win and Wanted to Get Caught

found online by Raymond

 
From Cato’s Julian Sanchez:

It’s a Hollywood cliché that’s been adopted by villains from the trickster god Loki in Marvel’s “The Avengers” to James Bond’s “Skyfall” nemesis Raoul Silva: They are captured, only for the heroes to realize — too late! — that being caught was part of the villain’s evil plan all along. With Friday’s release of an indictment detailing Project Lakhta — the information operations component of Russia’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election — it’s worth asking whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been reading from a similar script.

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Beltway Council of Elite Both Siderists Is Now In Session

found online by Raymond

 
From driftglass:

Today we open a Major American Newspaper to find a column in which the author…

…praises Mona Charen’s media-profile-raising exercise at CPAC where she boldly scolded the most recent and rancid fruit of the Poison Conservative Tree while pretending that the Poison Conservative Tree itself did not exist.

For my money, the best op-ed published in The Times this week was Mona Charen’s Feb. 25 barn-burner, “I’m Glad I Got Booed at CPAC.” Charen is a movement conservative who worked for Nancy and Ronald Reagan and is a longtime contributor to National Review. One of her books is titled “Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help.” A Bernie Sanders progressive she is not.

But Charen is also a NeverTrumper who chose to speak her mind during a panel discussion on the #MeToo movement at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference…

…delivers the standard Beltway disclaimer that what is happening with the Republican Party is somehow not Republicanism, but an inexplicable freak of nature called Trumpism.

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More Roy Moore

found online by Raymond

 
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Hey guys, remember him? →

The boy every ’80s mother hoped her daughter didn’t bring home from the mall, especially because he was approaching middle age?

Yeah, him. Judge Roy Moore!

Anyway, it seems he needs Ameros for various law suits being brought against his gawdly self:

“I now face another vicious attack from lawyers in Washington D. C. and San Francisco who have hired one of the biggest firms in Birmingham Alabama to bring another legal action against me and ensure that I never fight again.

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Improving words (2)

found online by Raymond

 
From Infidel753:

Back in December, I suggested (inspired by this) that our language would be much better if words simply meant what they appear to mean, and modestly proposed a few re-definitions to improve things. Since then, a few more have occurred to me:

Bipolar: Attracted to polar bears of both genders

Bishop: A store for bisexuals

Cistern: A non-transsexual bird

Console: To swindle a specific type of fish

Contest: The final exam at scammer school

Contraband: A Nicaraguan rebel music group from the eighties

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UW-Madison Journalism Prof is White and Implicitly Biased

found online by Raymond

 
From Wisconsin conservative Dave Blaska:

Sue Robinson is why Fake News. The University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism professor is why Sean Hannity and Donald Trump, Rachel Maddow and Bernie Sanders.

To every excess there is an opposite and even crazier reaction. Professor Sue Robinson is proof of the postulate. The lady teaches the sneering Don Lemons of tomorrow to scour the ground with righteous indignation — the facts be damned if they don’t serve the cause of “social justice.”

Sue and her ilk are why few real journalists ply their trades these days, entangled as they are by the platitudes of the moment. Healthy skepticism has succumbed to the cant of identity politics, victimhood, and race shaming. The result is that all news is suspect, the wildest conspiracies gain credence. John McCain is a Vietnam traitor, the NRA bayonets babies, and the white power structure murdered Michael Brown in cold blood.

Here’s to you, Sue Robinson. You helped elect Donald Trump with academic piffle like this (from Madison Magazine, January 2018):

… I was attending a three-day workshop on social-justice training. … I was face-to-face with the realization of how much my white, middle-class unearned privileges had played in my success to date. My thoughts drifted to the stories I had written as a white business reporter about “the American dream” [NOTE the ironic quotation marks] and my fervent commitment to the notion that hard work was all it took to achieve success. …

How foolish, the young Sue! Assiduously completing her homework assignments, for what? Those unpaid internships, a waste! Now, properly recalibrated, the professor understands that she was accepted into college thanks only to affirmative action for white folk. Her cushy, tenured faculty position? The Rainbow Coalition of competitors for the job was never seriously considered.

The lady’s guilty whiteness goes back generations.

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I Wish You Were a Bot — and Not a Hateful Human Being

found online by Raymond

 
From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

I came across your Tweet today; the one about these “arrogant snot teenagers” protesting gun violence—how they “stomp, pout, and cry when everything doesn’t go their way.”

I saw you dismiss these young people, by referring to them all as “laundry detergent pod-eaters.”

I shook my head and thought to myself, “These friggin’ bots are out of control.”

Then I looked more closely, and my stomach turned because I realized it was far worse than that.

I realized you’re an actual person.

You’re a supposed human adult; a professed “proud Christian” who raises children and votes and goes to church and drives past me every day.

You’re a 45-year old American man who manages a business and coaches a middle school baseball team.

That grieves me more than anything, because that I can’t fathom.

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