Saturday, May 20, 2017

"A Slow-Motion Coup d’état?"

Via Instapundit:

Let me see if I have this straight.

After a conversation in the Oval office with President Trump, James Comey, then the Director of the FBI, remembered a memo to himself in which he recorded Trump saying regarding the investigation of his former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, “I hope you can let this go.” Or at least, as someone who supposedly had read the memo and then supposedly read an accurate quote from it over the phone to a reporter at the New York Times.

First, of course, Trump should have—as usual—shut up. I’d recommend that he move the White House portrait of Calvin Coolidge to the Oval Office and study it daily. (President Reagan hung it in the Cabinet Room not because he needed advice on not talking—Reagan rarely made a verbal slip—but because he admired Coolidge’s exercise of the office). Trump has much to learn from Silent Cal that would benefit himself and his presidency, not to mention the Republic.

But assuming that that’s what Trump actually said, and that that’s what Comey wrote in his memo to himself, and that that’s what was read over the phone to the Times reporter (unlikely since this is third-hand hearsay, inadmissible in any court, analogous to the child’s game of telephone) is
that so bad? Does it really differ substantially from “I hope the weather will be nice tomorrow”? To be sure, it would have been better had he said “I hope you find you’re able to let this go,” or “I hope it turns out that Flynn did nothing wrong.” But no one has ever accused President Trump of excess verbal precision.

(Link to more)

3 comments:

ricpic said...

"First, of course, Trump should have - as usual - shut up."

R-i-i-i-ght. The issue isn't the concerted effort on the part of "The Club" - since before Trump's swearing in - to undo The Will of The People. The issue is Trump's big mouth.

edutcher said...

Interesting to note how the markets have not panicked.

As always, Surber sees through the nonsense

Chip Ahoy said...

ricpic, exactly what I think as I read these things. It's the point where I usually stop. And right there at the beginning too, pretty much always. It signals the writers superiority over Trump. It's some irresistible urge that finds expression between lines and in superfluous adjectives. Were it print we could just go through it and scratch out the childish editorializing and unmerited malinformed claptrap and extra malevolent partisan adjectives inserted childishly all over the place like I just did. All that clawing deprivation and screaming for attention beyond the straight information imparted.

Sounds like this:

Trump landed in Riyadh, and I am better than Trump, and was received with great fanfare, and I'm smarter than Tump, including an elaborate and posh red carpet stretched out to the tarmac, but I am immeasurably more moral than Trump, followed by an elaborate banquet and I do wish the man would stop tweeting, followed by crown prince sharing a hookah with emotionally unstable Trump.

I've seen some fifteen million pieces that include this conceit already. Maybe twenty-five. Just now on one of new sites in my bookmark panel a piece on a solidly red wing site begins, "first of all I want my president to protect the country."

Good. First principles. This is great. We're fine.

"And Trump's inexperience and unpredictability terrify me."

Oh dear. That's serious. Too bad. Be duly terrified.

Sit there and shake and tremble. Piss yourself and publish your fears. Because, have you noticed the presidents of other countries are all quite mad? And madness vs madness in political leaders truly must terrify you. Hold your premise that Trump is untrustworthy and unqualified and flaky to be president and stay terrified. That's my recommendation. That is all so much more frightening than the trials we already endured of feckless incompetence, military reversals, economic stagnation, regulatory insanity, and inability to deal outside one's ideologic constraints, militarization of federal departments across the board, combined with 100% unwilling to reach across the aisle for anything along with daily televised provocations and racial antagonisms for eight solid years.

You poor thing. Bless your heart.

We keep hearing that conservatives want to take us back in history to a presumably simpler time when it is clear to politically unaffiliated observers that Democrat federal policies actually do hold back Americans economically.