Donald Trump, Jr.'s Growing Lies and Fairy Tales

Personally, Donald Trump, Jr., has never struck me as being overly bright or what most of us would consider an ethical or nice person.  Rather, he's a spoiled rich brat who has grown up always protected by his daddy's money which has allowed him to avoid ever facing accountability.  Until perhaps now.  When Trump, Jr.'s emails with a Russian lawyer that suggested that Russia wanted to collude with the Trump campaign to harm Hillary Clinton's election chances, he spun one unbelievable fairy tale that the meeting was about discussing Americans' adoptions of Russian children.  That effort at disinformation has largely collapsed.  Then yesterday, Trump, Jr., found himself testifying before a Congressional committee where lying - a Trump stock in trade - can carry a very severe penalty.  Indeed, one member of the committee disseminated the federal statute that sets out the penalties for lying. Yet, Trump, Jr., set out a new fairy tale that is even more preposterous than his first effort.  Perhaps he is relying on daddy's pardon powers to save his spoiled ass.  The whole testimony was bizarre.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this latest bullshit from Trump, Jr., here are highlights:

Donald Trump Jr. sat down for more than five hours Thursday to answer the Senate Judiciary Committee’s questions about a meeting he had with a Kremlin-connected lawyer last year.

In the closed-door meeting, Trump Jr. offered a new line of reasoning to explain his eagerness to accept the meeting, which was pitched to him as an opportunity to obtain dirt of Hillary Clinton. He wasn’t looking for politically damaging information, he told investigators, but learning everything he could in order to assess Clinton’s “fitness” for office. In his prepared statement, obtained by the Times, Trump Jr. also said he intended to consult with a lawyer before using any information provided by Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-connected lawyer he met at Trump Tower.

He also revisited a now-familiar excuse from members of the Trump campaign, telling investigators that he was so overwhelmed with the experience of working on a presidential campaign that any mistakes, such as accepting damning information on Clinton from a foreign government, were due more to ignorance than malfeasance.

While Trump Jr. was questioned by Senate staff Thursday, some Democratic Senators reportedly popped in and out of the session to listen to the President’s eldest son. One of them, Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, later said that Trump Jr.’s answers were lacking.

“There are a lot of gaps that will need to be filled,” Blumenthal told reporters. “My being there gives me a sense of his demeanor, his willingness to answer questions, his pauses and reluctance on some questions and eagerness on others.” He went on to say that Trump Jr. will likely testify in an open Senate hearing, where, unlike Thursday, he would be under oath.

As Trump Jr, was wrapping up his testimony, CNN broke the news that special counsel Robert Mueller is also taking a keen interest in the Trump Tower meeting last year. Specifically, Mueller is looking to interview staffers present during the drafting of the first statement explaining the meeting. That statement, written aboard Air Force One with the help of President Trump, said Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” That was later proven to be misleading, at best, and was once again contradicted by Trump Jr.’s own testimony at the Capitol Thursday.

Across town, FBI Director Christopher Wray also spoke Thursday about the White House and the Russia investigation. While on a panel at Washington’s Intelligence and National Security Summit, Wray was asked if the Trump administration has tried to influence the investigation into the campaign’s ties to Russia. “I can say very confidently that I have not detected any whiff of interference with that investigation,” he said, perhaps forgetting that the reason he has a job is because Trump fired Wray’s predecessor for investigating him.

As with his father, if Trump, Jr.'s lips are moving, there is a very high probability that he's lying.  The thought of him being jailed for lying is simply delicious.

Jeb Bush’s Plutocratic Fantasy Land

Bush vacation "compound" Kennebunkport, Maine - Meanwhile, Jebbie wants us to "work longer hours"

Not to beat a news item to death, but Jeb Bush's statement that working Americans suffering from declining wages need to "work longer hours" underscores just how out of touch he is from reality, especially the reality most Americans live in.  Making matters worse, Jebbie supports more GOP voodoo economic measures that will benefit the very wealthy and screw over average Americans even more.  A piece in Salon lays out the case that Jebbie is living in a "plutocratic fantasy land."  Here are excerpts:

It’s possible that you can forgive Jeb Bush for not knowing about regular people, when in an interview with the New Hampshire Union Leader on Wednesday, he demonstrated a complete lack of appreciation for how hard Americans work — and for how little. Perhaps you can also forgive him for not recognizing that, in fact, Americans work more than their counterparts in other industrialized countries, that we get less vacation time, less maternity leave, and retire later than most anyone else, and that that trend is only intensifying. He’s from a family of millionaires, after all, whose parents were the millionaire children of yet other millionaires before them. It’s an unfortunate reality that the elite who enjoy that sort of privilege simply don’t have the means to understand the lives of those above whom they reside in luxury.

So perhaps you can think of him more like a prince than a former governor: Princes perform their princely duties to uphold the family’s prestige. That’s just the way it goes.

[W]hat shouldn’t be forgiven is when someone like Jeb Bush, entirely ignorant of how the rest of us live, seeks to tell us what we’re doing wrong; when he blames us, indicts us and thereby makes demands. And what’s most egregious is when it’s in the service of his fellow elites, when telling us to work even harder and longer is precisely what fills the pockets of his wealthy friends and supporters. It shifts the blame from the banks and the job off-shorers onto everyone else, and then presents the solution as something that hurts us more and pads the profits of those very same culprits.

[Bush is seemingly] unaware of how U.S. worker productivity has risen some 80 percent since the 1970s, or that we’re actually the most productive workforce in the world, yet with little in the way of commensurate wage and salary increases since the time his father joined President Reagan in the White House in 1980.

Jeb? I seem to remember a Wall Street crisis in the last year of your brother’s tenure, and millions of people losing their jobs because of it, but I don’t remember any sort of “productivity crisis” or “laziness crisis” on our end. I saw a crisis of financial capitalism in which the capitalists wrecked the ship and we lost our jobs. We didn’t abandon them. We’ve been taking care of our end of the bargain, us workers. It’s your lot that’s dropping the ball.

Mr. Bush. You have a multimillion-dollar vacation estate built by your great-grandfather. Your campaign donors are a who’s who of corporate elites. A career spent with some of the biggest banks in the world and your own private equity firm has people comparing you to Mitt Romney. And now you’re telling us that we’re the problem. Please proceed, Governor.

He and his ilk aren’t the problem, goes his logic, but rather that “high-sustained growth means that people work 40 hours rather than 30 hours.” You don’t know why Americans are kept working 30 hours per week? How can you not know that? They don’t choose to work less, it’s that their employers (you know, your buddies) have weekly thresholds that determine full-time work, and full-time work means that the company must provide benefits in addition to wages.

The blame he assigns to workers is moral, though: We choose “being dependent on government,” he says, “rather than getting in line.” It’s a moral failing that he’s comfortable assigning to us in what was supposed to be an attempt to mend the mistake he’d made earlier. 

It’s still our fault, according to Bush. A dynastic front-runner of the GOP, swimming in millions and millions in corporate and Wall Street elite donations and literally swimming at his vacation estate, tells us that we’re the problem, that we’re living too easy. 

I'm sorry, but Bush is an arrogant, despicable ASSHOLE.  We do NOT need him in the White House. Hillary has her faults, but at least she grew up in a normal American household and still remembers where she came from.  Unlike Jebbie, she is not utterly out of touch with reality.

 

Romney: Elect Me Or Else the House GOP Will Wreck The Economy

It's a bizarre closing argument for any campaign, but here's part of Mitt Romney's effort to close the deal: elect me or else the GOP controlled House of Representatives  will force a debt ceiling disaster. Yes, it is truly bizarre, but then again today's GOP is way past bizarre.  Rather than allow Barack Obama to be successful in a second term, Romney states that the House Republicans would rather force a debt crisis and drive the nation (and possibly the world) into a new economic depression.  It's an example of the spoil brat syndrome that is today's GOP.  It's akin to a spoil, undisciplined child who cannot have his/her way who then destroys whatever they can get their hands on.  Sadly, in this case what will be destroyed is the lives and finances of millions of Americans.  The GOP has clearly discarded any sense of wanting what's best for the nation or everyday Americans.  

Of course, what makes it all even more perverse and hypocrisy filled is the fact that the GOP claims to be the party of "family values" and "Christian morality."  The GOP simply no longer cares what harm it inflicts on millions of hard working Americans and their families.  It's part and parcel with the desire to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act and leave millions without insurance and the sick Romney/Ryan desire to disband federal emergency relief programs and leave relief and recover work either to the states or vulture like private contractors.  In the wake of Hurricane Frederic in Mobile back in 1979, I saw first had how rapacious contractors can be in desperate situations such as those currently in New York and New Jersey.  Yet this is what Romney in the past says he favors.  But I digress.  Here are highlights from Talking Points Memo where Romney's threat to voters is reviewed:

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In what his campaign billed as his “closing argument,” Mitt Romney warned Americans that a second term for President Obama would have apocalyptic consequences for the economy in part because his own party would force a debt ceiling disaster.  “Unless we change course, we may well be looking at another recession,” Romney told a crowd in West Allis, Wisconsin.

Romney said that Obama “promised to be a post-partisan president, but he became the most partisan” and that his bitter relations with the House GOP could threaten the economy. As his chief example, he pointed to a crisis created entirely by his own party’s choice — Republican lawmakers’ ongoing threat to reject a debt ceiling increase. Economists warn that a failure to pass such a measure would have immediate and catastrophic consequences for the recovery. 

“You know that if the President is re-elected, he will still be unable to work with the people in Congress,” Romney said. “He has ignored them, attacked them, blamed them. The debt ceiling will come up again, and shutdown and default will be threatened, chilling the economy.”

With four days left, Romney may need an exceptionally strong close to overcome the president in the electoral college. The overwhelming majority of polls show Obama with a modest but stable lead in critical swing states, most notably Ohio, and other potentially decisive states like Virginia and Colorado remain tossups at best. 

Many in the GOP seek to describe Obama as "un-American."  One can only assume is what is really happening is that they are looking at themselves in the mirror.