season 11 semifinals
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Testing video embed via early Grace Slick
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Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!
The White House can deny access to journalists; they have that privilege. But it was hypocritical of them to accuse the journalist of assault, use that as an excuse for revoking his access, and later verify the veracity of a fake tape.
Trump, of all people, has no room to make that characterization. He had just had a personal confrontation with the journalist that was caught on tape, As we all know, he confessed — on tape — to grabbing women he did not know by the genitals. He defended a far more violent action — also caught on tape — by his own campaign manager at an event during the presidential campaign.
I don’t see a problem with the action itself. Presidents have feuded with journalists in the past, lots of times. The President can claim personal privilege and deny access to his press conferences. He can’t tell the guy to stop writing, but he can tell the guy to stop asking him questions.
That’s what this really was. President Trump, invoking personal privilege, revoked Acosta’s White House access. That’s perfectly legal, perfectly normal. It’s not even that interesting a story.
But an after-the-fact claim that Acosta committed an assault, followed by a doctored tape from one of Trump’s craziest supporters, is ridiculous on its face. And Huckabee-Sanders should know better than to subborn such an obvious act of public perjury.
She won’t, of course. And the last time Trump willingly admitted to anything other than “oh my GOD I’m so amazing and great and everybody just LOVES me and my penis is GIGANTIC” will be the first time. So let’s just move on.
Let’s take the truth with us, though, ok?
The truth is that Acosta got in Trump’s grill about his invasion claims and Trump doesn’t like being grilled. Acosta, who was already in Trump’s doghouse, lost his job because, well … Trump was in a firing mood.
I don’t blame Trump for kicking him out. We would all love to have the privilege to remove people who get in our faces. Trump simply exercised his privilege. But that’s all it was.
There was no assault. Acosta is a good, honest, responsible journalist, Trump did, in fact, make up a story about an invasion force, and those women did not grab their own genitals.
About the Slack Chats
The slack chats are the brainchild of yammering subversives Johnny “Cake” Hunter and Terry “Insert Nickname Here” Vent. It was inevitable that they would combine their two favorite things — yammering and slacking — into an art form. Plus they stole the idea from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.
These guys have been off the grid for decades. I assumed they were still traveling the Pacific Rim, trading inflatable Strom Thurmond dolls to the natives for Polynesian weed, but a cursory google search found them hiding in the witness protection program, where they had been since they testified in the infamous “we can’t believe it’s not butter” truth in advertising scandal that took down Orville Redenbacher.
I think one’s in a cult and the other one sells insurance, but I can never remember which one of these jokers sold his soul to an evil demagogue and which one sells flowers at the airport. They call themselves radical centrists, which (I think) means they hate everybody.
Their voting record is all over the map. Both have, at times, cast ballots for chronic losers in the major parties, third parties and once (allegedly) for a Care Bear. Neither one of them voted for Trump, but they think Ivanka is super hot.
Enjoy the madness.
Regards,
D.B. Cooper (shhh … )
