“Okay, guys, we need to keep our noses clean and our powder dry. We’re in a war zone.” Apparently not!
Look at the major flubups that have occurred just in the six weeks since the inauguration:
1. Sean Spicer’s demonstrably false statements at White House press conferences.
2. Kellyanne Conway’s demonstrably false statements on the cable news shows.
3. The whole ridiculous Michael Flynn episode, when someone who has worked in the intelligence community and who would therefore know perfectly well that the phones of the Russian ambassador were tapped nevertheless had what appears to have been a highly inappropriate phone conversation with . . . the Russian ambassador. And then denied it. And made the Vice President look like a fool. And had to resign.
4. The whole Senator Jeff Sessions-eerily-repeating-the-whole-Michael-Flynn episode. I find this absolutely mind-boggling. Here’s a man who has spent his entire career in government and the law. He’s tough and shrewd. And yet he says that the questions of Al Franken during his confirmation hearing “flustered” him. Um, I can’t believe that Senator Sessions has been flustered since, oh, maybe 1972. Since he’s from Alabama, may I use the Southern expression “that dog won’t hunt”? All he had to say was, “Yes, I did meet briefly a couple of times with the Russian ambassador, although not about anything to do with the Trump campaign.” And that would almost certainly have been that. There would have been some grumbling, but the whole thing would have blown over. Instead, Sessions did the very worst thing he could have done.
5. The whole mishandled travel ban rollout. Here I’m not talking about the content and philosophy of the ban itself, which is LUDICROUS, but its implementation. If Trump’s inner circle had TRIED to come up with a disaster they couldn’t have done a better job.
6. And, finally, the weird letter Betsy DeVos issued about historically Black colleges and universities being a good example of “school choice,” and then, after a huge pushback, having to issue a clarification saying, “Oh, right. I guess those Black students were going to these colleges because they were the students’ only choice.” What on earth was the purpose of that letter, anyway? And didn’t anybody read it and say, “Um, Betsy, this is pretty ill-advised.” Or, as they say over on Car Talk, “Doesn’t anybody screen these calls?”
So we keep staggering from one crisis to another. Every time we sort of think that things are calming down, a new fandango erupts. Stay tuned later today when I re-post a couple of articles from the dear, dead days of yore about how Trump would be more damaging to the cause of conservatism than Hillary Clinton. There was a real lack of moral and intellectual clarity with some Trump voters. (Not all of them, as I’ve said repeatedly. Some people actually liked his bigotry and vulgarity–their morals, or lack therefore, were perfectly clear. Some agonized over voting for him but decided they had to support him—a failure to take the long view, in my estimation, but at least understandable. But some were conservative Trump cheerleaders, a position I will never, ever be able to comprehend.)
Hoo-boy, as I often say.