Sarah Huckabee Sanders - a Woman Devoid of Any Credibility

The list of those who have been willing to destroy their own credibility and integrity is lengthy.  A willingness to lie constantly is a prerequisite to any role in the Trump/Pence regime.  It began the day after the inauguration when Sean Spicer began lying about the size of the inaugural crowd despite indisputable evidence to the contrary. Since that day, the lies have been non-stop with the Washington Post calculating that Trump himself has lied over 3,000 times.  Thus, the question becomes one of what type of person would remain in a job where disseminating lies daily is a requirement of the job?  The question is particularly true of those who claim - or at least pretend - to support "Christian values."  In my view, if you continue to lie for a morally bankrupt, pathological liar, the reality is that you are as morally bankrupt as the boss. All of which brings me to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, one of the most dishonest women in Washington, D.C.  She comes by her dishonesty honestly, one might argue, given her father, Mike Huckabee, another perpetual liar who wraps himself in the cloak of religion.  An article in the Washington Post looks at Sanders' position and the derision she justly is receiving.  Here are highlights:

The West Wing shouting match was so loud that more than a dozen staffers heard it.  White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders cursed and yelled at White House Counsel Donald McGahn during the February confrontation, according to two people familiar with the episode. Misleading statements about the domestic abuse scandal that felled staff secretary Rob Porter had dragged the administration into a maelstrom of chaos and contradictory public statements.

Exasperated, Sanders told McGahn she would not continue to speak for the administration unless she was provided more information about Porter’s situation.

The dispute, which erupted in a hallway outside Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin’s office, was resolved after Sanders received the clarity she sought, the people familiar with the argument said. Hours later, Sanders returned to her lectern to field queries from a skeptical press corps, though her answers left reporters with more questions.

Sanders was thrust into an especially harsh limelight over the past week. She was the subject of an acerbic broadside about her “bunch of lies” by comedian Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Then she was forced to explain the inconsistent accounts from her, President Trump and his new personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, about the hush money paid to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. The week was punctuated by an onslaught of commentary about Sanders’s character.

Sanders is inextricably bound in the mistruths of the Trump administration. She is a willing warrior for Trump, and her critics say she should be held accountable for his utterances — from the untruthful to the racist to the sexist.

“When [Trump] the president blithely admits to lying, it makes all those who are paid to repeat and defend his stories liars, as well,” said David Axelrod, who was a senior White House adviser under President Barack Obama. “Their credibility is tied to his. It’s a high price to pay for a job, even in the White House.”

By the time she took over as White House press secretary from Sean Spicer in July, the administration’s penchant for misleading the public at the president’s direction was well established. 

Allies of Sanders say that she often pushes back on Trump, who wants her to attack the media even harder and more frequently, and that other administrations have also faced credibility problems, . . .

Fresh trouble for Sanders arose Wednesday night, when Giuliani, in a freewheeling interview with Sean Hannity, told the friendly Fox News host that Trump had reimbursed his longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for the $130,000 in hush money he paid to Daniels . . .

Giuliani’s disclosure appeared to be at odds with Sanders’s repeated insistence that Trump was not aware of Cohen’s payment to Daniels. The interview, which Sanders did not coordinate, left her in an untenable position,. . .

Reporters pressed Sanders on Thursday: Was she a liar or simply in the dark? And why was the president’s personal attorney authorized to announce news about sensitive hostage negotiations?

Before most briefings, she meets with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss how he would like her to answer news-of-the-day questions, White House officials said. The president sometimes dictates lines for her to read or orders her to use precise words on particularly sensitive matters.

Sanders routinely dodges questions on hot topics by telling reporters she has not asked the president about it — a deliberate strategy to avoid having to wade into delicate issues, according to a Sanders confidant.

I'm sorry, but Sanders is a liar and she knows that she's a liar and it seemingly simply does not matter.  If she was a "godly Christian," she'd resign immediately.  

Don't Cry for Sean Spicer

Last week Sean Spicer resigned as the press secretary for Der Trumpenführer.  Some have congratulated him for finally saying he would no longer prostitute himself for Trump.  Others have, in my view, rightly condemned him for every taking the position in the first place and put himself in the position of having to repeated Trump's lies and untruths on virtually a daily basis.  To me, Spicer embodies the larger problem with countless Republicans today: they are amoral - if not outright immoral - and will do anything to further themselves and/or hang onto power.   Each of us has to make decisions daily as to whether we put morality first or perceived self-advantage.  Perhaps I can't let go of my Catholic upbringing where somethings were simply wrong and immoral, but when in doubt I side on the side of morality.  Would that more Republicans, especially those in Congress did so.  A piece in Politico lays out what Spicer deserves no sympathy.  Read the piece and apply it to Trump supporting Republicans in general.  Here are highlights:

The White House attracts all manner of toadies, suckups and flatterers seeking the president's favor, but never did any staffer demean, degrade and humble himself to the chief executive the way outgoing press secretary Sean Spicer did. Abandoning the arts of both persuasion and elision that have served previous prevaricating press secretaries so well, Spicer flung barb-tongued lies in the service of President Donald Trump.

Starting with Trump’s inauguration weekend, which Spicer declared “was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” through last week, when he lied that Donald Trump Jr.’s Russian meeting was about “adoptions,” Spicer never failed to fib when a fib would serve the president. Had Spicer’s White House Briefing Room comments been sworn testimony, he would face so many years in prison for perjury that a dozen Trump pardons couldn’t secure his freedom. Had his nose grown with every Pinocchio he uttered, it would have reached the moon.

What thanks did Spicer earn for his months of debasement in service to Trump? The early and steady drumbeat from the Oval Office that the president was “disappointed” in his performance, as CNN’s Jim Acosta reported in early February, and never-ending whispers that he would soon be sacked, which finally came true today. He gave Trump the red blood of his undying loyalty. Trump gave him the pink slip.

Reviewing Spicer’s tenure as press secretary, we find no Trump transgression so foul that Spicer would not grovel before it.

When Trump made the baseless allegation that millions voted illegally in the presidential election, Spicer defended him. He slammed the media in general for a “default narrative“ that was “always negative” . . . The one thing that kept Spicer from lying for Trump full-time was poor access to the Oval Office. The Washington Examiner and others have tallied the times Spicer couldn’t answer a reporter’s press briefing question because he hadn’t talked to Trump about the subject.

Professing ignorance became the safest of safe harbors for Press Secretary Know Nothing. It was probably the only time he wasn’t lying.

Spicer wasn’t born a liar. In an oddly predictive utterance, he volunteered in January as he boarded the Trump White House that he never lied because, among other things, lying destroyed credibility and rendered a spokesman useless. If he was being honest about not being a liar, his streak ended with that first press briefing, . . . And he lied so, so willingly.

By the end of his active tenure as press secretary—which we can date to June when the administration started platooning in Sarah Huckabee Sanders for on-camera briefings—Spicer had become the Lord Haw-Haw of the Trump administration. That’s a mighty harsh appraisal. Lord Haw-Haw was, after all, a British citizen who broadcast German propaganda into the UK from Hamburg during World War II.

Lord Haw Haw’s willingness to say everything and anything that would serve his masters finds its parallel, albeit cleansed of the unspeakable Nazi taint, in Spicer’s peacetime opportunism. Nobody took Lord Haw-Haw seriously. Like Spicer, he was just noise on the margins of the signal, a continuing joke that wasn’t very funny considering the stakes involved.