Metaphors, more iii
Tuesday, July 17th, 2018[ by Charles Cameron — continuing from Metaphors, more ii — which has become seriously overloaded and is listing, seriously, to port ]
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Almost all of these are references to Trump’s press conference with Putin, which seems important enough to call for its own post — there may be a couple of earlier statements dropped in..
For example:
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jump to 17.10 in the video, answering “What was your view of Vladimir Putin today?” “Well, Ari, it’s All Star week here in Washington DC. He won the Home Run Derby of all Derbys, Vladimir Putin .. I think this was a big victory for Vladimir Putin..”
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This too:
WILSON: “I do think, though, that a lot of people today saw the real Donald Trump. They saw the Donald Trump who comes out acting like he’s the swaggering alpha male and he sat there on the stage like a whipped dog. I mean, he wanted Vladimir Putin’s approval. He didn’t care about anything else. He wanted Vladimir Putin to pat him on the head and to tell him he’s a good boy and nothing else mattered. He was defending himself with these wild haymaker punches trying to bring Hillary Clinton back into the conversation, but it was very clear today who the boss was in that room and who wears the dog collar. And it’s Donald Trump.”
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And these:
not taking one on the chin..
i don’t know if they’d show up in his ofice and say, game’s up…
trump made a game-time decision to play things his way ..
he could have hit a home run, I’m ashamed he didn’t ..
it was a game-time decision that virtually no one in his white house approved of – ashley parker
was the white house awaree that they were likely gamed .. ?
trump has outgamed himself ..
the democrats are charlie brown, the republicans are lucy — sen chris murphy
the informational dark side of the moon in that meeting..
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Trump & Putin took turns on the tire swing yesterday — rachel maddow
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British economists prove it: Sports destroy happiness
Sports make the world a sadder place. Seriously. We’ve got data.
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Armed with 3 million responses to a happiness monitoring app, plus the locations and times of several years worth of British soccer matches, University of Sussex economists Peter Dolton and George MacKerron calculated that the happiness that fans feel when their team wins is outweighed – by a factor of two – by the sadness that strikes when their team loses.
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Which means, assuming a roughly equal number of fans on both sides, Sunday’s World Cup final between France and Croatia made the world less happy than it was the day before. On net, soccer is a destroyer of happiness.
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Bob Kerrey
He got played by Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin is going to play you, and play you he did ..
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Ari to George Will:
We go into this baroque fugue state
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this sort of Potemkin gun group in Russia ..
while we’re playing bingo.. [Ari]
here’s an easy one for you, here’s softball on hardball .. [chris matthews]
coming up: spy games ..
they do a walk back and a half twist ..
this is a very simple pattern ..
a russian diplomatic vehicle / miracle — and then, game over ..
trump torpedo
moral equivalency, tit-for-tat ..
The people of #Montenegro boldly withstood pressure from #Putin’s Russia to embrace democracy. The Senate voted 97-2 supporting its accession to #NATO. By attacking Montenegro & questioning our obligations under NATO, the President is playing right into Putin’s hands.
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) July 18, 2018
there’s a lot of tit-for-tat in this .. [Jonathan Chait]
this kind of contrition theater ..
keep your bingo card open for a few more minutes, nicolle ..
gone beyond a goat rodeo ..
[ new terms ] helsinki republicans, helsinki humiliation ..
this is a velcro, not a teflon situation for him ..
appears to have walked back his walk back ..
“think of it as a player-trade” 11th hour/ swapping mcfaul for russians
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.@HardballChris says we have a man sitting in the White House singing Moscow's song, sounding as much like Vladimir Putin as Simon sounds like Garfunkel. https://t.co/2eDgNnva0j
— Hardball (@hardball) July 19, 2018
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WotR: THE SHELL GAME: FUELING A FUTURE WAR IN THE PACIFIC
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Will Hurd, Trump Is Being Manipulated by Putin. What Should We Do?
By playing into Vladimir Putin’s hands, the leader of the free world actively participated in a Russian disinformation campaign that legitimized Russian denial and weakened the credibility of the United States to both our friends and foes abroad.
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Axios’ Jonathan Swan broke down how things are, um, movin’ right along in the White House at the end of this very chaotic week, but the way he described it was just too much for Nicolle Wallace.
Wallace brought up how Dan Coats sounded “unshackled” yesterday and asked, “What is the collective feeling among the White House staff about the fact that Donald Trump’s own appointees, who head arguably the most important government agencies… are no longer pretending that Donald Trump isn’t ridiculous?”
Swan noted how some officials are still “pretty buttoned up,” citing DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen, before telling Wallace the following:
“We’re finding more and more often that when we talk to people who work in the White House or at a senior level in the administration is we’ll ask them why did Trump do this thing, whatever it might be… In the early days of the administration, you could expect an answer that rationalizes, tells your game theory and whatever. Now they’re just like [makes an ‘I dunno’ noise].”
Wallace burst out laughing and Swan made the noise a few more times before saying, “They’ve stopped bothering trying to explain him.”
Game theory, see?
But you can hear that laugh, and Swan’s noise, at Mediaite, though I can’t find a way to bring the video here — if I could, I’d have a marbelous DoubleQuote with Andrea Mitchell‘s interview with Dan Coats and the interruption by a White House tweet:
A DoubleLaugh!
Snap!
