Plainly, gorilla dust works: Yesterday morning, on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Reince Priebus a question. Wallace seemed surprised by the initial answer:
WALLACE (3/26/17): Quick questions, quick answers. I promise, these are going to be very easy.Wallace seemed surprised. "No, and I don't accept it," Priebus quickly added.
PRIEBUS: Sure.
WALLACE: Does the president accept the conclusion, from all sides, that President Obama did not wiretap Trump Tower during the campaign, and is he ready to apologize?
PRIEBUS: OK. Well, first of all—well, the answer is no.
Wallace seemed surprised. At this point, Priebus began to wander the countryside, offering the various redefinitions which are familiar to anyone who has watched Anderson Cooper pretend to debate Jeffrey Lord about this three-week-old, gong-show affair.
According to Priebus, when Trump said that "Obama" wiretapped Trump's phones, he really meant "the Obama administration." And when he said that Obama wiretapped Trump's phones, he really meant that someone had subjected someone to some sort of surveillance or something.
Eventually, the discussion ended up as shown below. By now, Wallace has completely rolled over and died in the face of the standard obfuscation:
PRIEBUS: The fact is, reports have come out, for many, many months now, that people on the Trump campaign transition team were surveillanced by potentially some intelligence group, whether they were inadvertently swept up, whether the names were unmasked. Chris, you don't know the full answer to that question, and I don't either.To watch this entire Potemkin exchange, you can just click here.
WALLACE: That's a fine answer, but—
PRIEBUS: But if, but if the people in the Trump transition were unknowingly surveillanced and illegally unmasked on documents, which is what is being alleged out there, I think it's a big problem, and I think ultimately President Trump is going to be proven correct, that this wasn't—
WALLACE: OK, let me—
PRIEBUS: —this wasn't right.
WALLACE: Now, my second question...
In his first question, Wallace asked if Trump accepts the conclusion that Obama didn't wiretap Trump Tower during the campaign. Priebus said Trump doesn't accept that conclusion, because it is "being alleged out there" that people in the Trump transition were unknowingly surveillanced, perhaps inadvertently, and illegally unmasked on documents.
In short, Trump doesn't accept that Statement A was wrong because a different statement, Statement B, could possibly turn out to be right. Or not! We don't even know yet!
This was pure gorilla dust. Wallace just sputtered and watched.
"Is truth dead?" Time magazine asked. Wallace, a college classmate of ours, gave the world a partial answer as he rolled over and died.
Golly, such a performance from the "good" Fox News reporter. I wonder if Bob would be surprised how often such things actually happen. The surprise here is that he got the question in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThat's a fine answer.
DeleteSome of you might recall that when Wallace hosted the Republican primary debate he said he would immediately challenge answers he knew to be wrong.
DeleteWhen he hosted the general election debate, he declared that he was only a timekeeper, and that others could do the fact checking later.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Reporters don't seem to follow up on such questions because it seems they define their job as just getting the answer on the record. They never seem to debate anything. Wallace says OK and moves on. That'a all they ever do.
ReplyDeleteWhen someone accuses Obama of wiretapping Trump, they don't mean that Obama personally attached the wires to rump's phone. They mean that some subordinate did the wiretap, but the tap was either directly ordered by Obama or done with Obama's knowledge and approval.
ReplyDelete"When someone...."
DeleteIt isn't "someone", you braindead Nazi. It is the President of the United States.
How dare that black Kenyan Muslim usurper exercise his sworn duty to defend our country by catching treasonous bastards from the opposition party repeatedly interacting with Russian spies and gangsters who are involved in interfering with our democratic election.
And to think the DinC crowd wanted to jail Hillary because she used a private server, which wasn't hacked.
DeleteAt this point, anyone who thinks these people are anything other than frauds, is a god-damned fool who deserves a traitor as their leader.
Some of us think POTUS should be held to a high standard of "truthiness" in his public comments.
DeleteOTOH, some of us don't.
I didn't think anyone anywhere ever thought or imagined that Trump was saying that Obama personally installed bugging equipment after breaking into Trump Tower. Would anyone take his statements that way?
ReplyDeleteDon't be ridiculous. But the pussygrabbing pervert traitor was saying in no uncertain terms that Obama ordered Trump Tower to be wire tapped. That is clear. We are not required to live in wingnut land alternate reality.
DeleteWe can pick nits and parse tweets all we want, but no one seriously disputes that Trump and members of his administration were being surveilled by the Obama administration, who then leaked the results. Can you imagine the establishment hissy fit if it had been the incoming Obama administration surveilled by the departing Bushes? Heads would have rolled, and rightly so. Trump had every right to be pissed off.
ReplyDeleteIf you are going to assert this, you, like Trump, need to have some evidence of its truth. Otherwise, you too are accusing Obama of a felony.
DeleteI don't have to imagine any hissy fits. I was around when J.Edgar Hoover was surveilling MLK and most of the rest of the lefties at the time. If you didn't have an FBI folder you weren't anyone. That's why this is a big deal today.
At most, Trump's people stumbled into ongoing surveillance of Russians by CIA operations or their names were mentioned in the context of conversations by unconnected people being legitimately tapped. I do not believe there was any tapping or surveillance of Trump or his staff during the campaign or transition. I do believe there was surveillance of the various Russians they may have interacted with. With luck, Trump's wrongdoers will be caught through that net.
Trump has no right to be pissed off over imaginary wrongs arising from his own guilty conscience.
“There’s no question there was a very serious effort made by Mr. [Vladimir] Putin and his government, his organization, to interfere in major ways with our basic fundamental democratic processes,” Cheney said Monday during a speech at the Economic Times’ Global Business Summit 2017 in New Delhi.
Delete“In some quarters, that would be considered an act of war. I think it’s a kind of conduct and activity we will see going forward. We know he’s attempted it previously in other states in the Baltics,” Cheney said, according to video of the remarks.
****************
The amazing question now, Maj, is if it came to war, which side would you and comrade DinC fight for?
bwahahahaha!!!!!
Mr. Trump will be POTUS for the next few years. I am grateful to him for establishing his believability this early. I will measure his words against his performance so far.
ReplyDeleteYou think Trump believes the nonsense he spouts? I'm not so sure. If you have any proof (there's that word again), maybe you can provide it here.
DeleteUnknown,
DeleteHow's the TrumpCare working out for you?
"I will measure his words against his performance so far."
DeleteIt's a dirty job but someone has to do it
BofA CARD ACTIVATION ADDITIONAL TIPS: Basic information for Citibank Card Activation
ReplyDelete