Kakistocracy Update
A minor, yet telling, example of the intellectual maturity of this administration.
Somewhat apropos of my post about Lyndsey Halligan and Anna Bower comes the following display of intellectually impressive rhetorical skills from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Via HuffPo: White House Gives Wild Response To A Simple Question Asked By HuffPost Reporter. The piece details a report that Trump would be meeting in Budapest, Hungary, with Putin to discuss the war with Ukraine. The reporter wondered if the symbolism of meeting in Budapest, given its significance as detailed in the piece, had been taken into consideration.
Given all that, HuffPost asked the White House: Who picked Budapest?
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded minutes later with: “Your mom did.”
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung after a minute added the far more succinct: “Your mom.”
To which I can only ask, is the White House Communications operation being run by 12-year-olds?
Then, like with Halligan, Leavitt turned to vituperation.
After HuffPost asked Leavitt if she thought her response was funny, she replied:
“It’s funny to me that you actually consider yourself a journal [sic]. You are a far left hack who nobody takes seriously, including your colleagues in the media, they just don’t tell you that to your face. Stop texting me your disingenuous, biased, and bullshit questions.”
On one level, all of this is just a bunch of silliness from unserious people. On the other hand, this continually seems to be the intellectual level we are playing at these days, which is fine for some random Middle School playground, but rather sub-optimal for the government of a superpower.
What next? Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries?
It’s a new thing in politics, I think, deliberately trying to drag everyone into the gutter. No aspiration, no role modeling, just people smearing themselves with shit hoping it will start a trend. Like the lowest rank of Tik Tok influencers.
No doubt we’ll hear from the Evangelicals who are always so concerned about the coarsening of culture. Any day now.
I love being right about people but there isn’t much joy in realizing that your own cynicism is still too optimistic. I knew they were hypocrites, I knew thy lied about their faith and their morals, I knew they didn’t give a damn for the Constitution or their fellow man, but I’ll admit to being surprised that Church Moms and Daddy Deacons would be happy to just drag themselves through sewage to please a cult leader who spends his days spewing hatred, lies and vulgarity.
Maybe “Idiocracy” would’ve been an even better term here. We’ll know we’ve arrived there when she just says “toilet” as a response to every question and giggles like Beavis for five minutes.
Over at LGM Paul Campos links to an essay by John Ganz, The Scum Manifesto, Or, How to Get a Job in the Trump Administration. Ganz concludes,
Well worth clicking through to Ganz.
The difficulty is that one must avoid saying “scum” out loud, lest one be muddied, like Hillary for her absolutely true statement about “deplorables”. We have to make clear Trump and his minions are scum, somehow without implying GOP voters are scum, or even that they were in any way at fault for voting for scum. (Le sigh.) Perhaps by applying the term carefully to individuals, like Leavitt and Halligan and Reverend Johnson and long list of others.
@gVOR10: Notice how the same media that attacked Hillary relentlessly over her truthful comment have refused to attack Trump for outright insulting and attacking US citizens? Ditto for Biden and his age as Trump outright shows signs of dementia and also falls up stairs etc.
We’re doomed as a country when a handful of billionaires control the national dialogue.
Yeah yyeah social media something something counters that something. The same social media owned by a handful of billionaires who use algorithms that inevitably push right wing talking points at a vastly higher rate than left.
The Budapest summit has been canceled because my Mom was not making travel arrangements for a meeting with Putin. She was an old fashioned hausfrau who was meticulous and detail oriented and very aware of Slavic culture and customs. Putin would have been delighted by every aspect of the trip.
This Trump crew showed its chops in the laughable Armed Forces Parade.
Get rid of botox silicone injected lip bimbos and put Moms in charge.
@reid:
Do you want President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho to sue you? He’s way smarter than El Taco and has a more competent staff.
Minor point, but is that a mock leopard skin Leavitt is wearing in the photo?
International Skank Brigade uniform?
I think we live in a time where many of those evangelicals live in a world that is so closed and so siloed off they are never going to hear about most of this.
Meanwhile, the sort of MAGA supporter who pays attention to things like the White House Twitter feed likes this sort of thing. It’s what they voted for.
I mean, I feel that they have lost the thread of Christianity entirely. This sort of thing has been seen before, but it was once just a thing from the history books.kk
PS. Great photo choice.