President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

For foreign students, demonstrating your financial wherewithal has long been a thing ... and a bit of a joke. Many of my colleagues are Indian, and the standard ploy among them was to get friends & family to loan you X amount of money so that when INS checked it'd look like you had enough (and you couldn't incorporate assistantships and the like in the projections).

 

I consider myself a pretty decent bullshit detector. (Although a shitty writer and reporter who couldn't hack it in the business, we were informed today.)

I feel like I have little doubt that Bannon said this. I have no reason to believe the reporter is just inventing a very detailed quote like that.

 

Nah.

Journalists take notes, right?

This one guy has a quote where Bannon calls himself a Leninist, which Bannon says he doesn't recall.

This one quote has been passed around so many times, folks now have the impression that he must have said it a million times.

But, as with so many things, it all goes back to one report, with no confirmation by anyone else.

Did any other news org -- hell did his own news org -- ask to see the notes, or listen to a transcript? There's no indication they did, but they all pass along the report as factual, despite having no way of determining this.

And, if he had some proof that Bannon had said this, he surely would have presented them in his original piece, when Bannon said he didn't remember the conversation.

 

Yes, yes, we need more proof that a guy who said ...

"It’s going to be an insurgent, center-right populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment, and it’s going to continue to hammer this city, both the progressive left and the institutional Republican Party.”

“There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home, and the global elites that influence them, which impacts everyone from Lubbock, Tex., to London, England.”

“We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class. We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.”

Also said this ...

“Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too,” the site quoted him as saying. “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

I mean, it's just so out of character of Bannon to be so anti-establishment!

 

It was four years ago, at a party. They were just talking. There is not any point in my career when I would have been able to locate four-year-old notes.

 

Kind of an apples/oranges comparison in many ways and it was a trickle of news at first instead of a torrent. The Watergate break-in occurred in June 1972 and wasn't much more than a background issue in the presidential election that year. In fact, it arguably might have gone away if not for the Washington Post's reporting efforts. It was a long time ago and I was in my early teens at the time, but my memories are that it really started gathering steam early in '73 and just kept snowballing from there. And it really reached a point of no return in October '73, when Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre (which happened during the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East; for a while there, nuclear war wasn't out of the question). After Cox's firing, it was only a matter of time until impeachment proceedings began, ending in Nixon's resignation in August '74.

There was no cable TV news or 24-hour news cycle back then. No internet or social media. Had those been around, no doubt Watergate would have taken a lot less than two years to unfold.

 

The issue is closed, Inky. The omtrumpsman has spoken and the story falls short of his consistent and rigorous standards.

 

Here is what you postulate:

1. Reporter makes up detailed four-year-old conversation with Steve Bannon. It wasn't just one quote. It was an entire conversation, about Tea Party campaign tactics.

2. Reporter then contacts Bannon to get him to, I assume, comment on or expand on his prior comments. Comments that you think the reporter invented.

It's preposterous that he invented the conversation. Absolutely preposterous.

 

Word on the street is that it's under control for now, but the being a demon thing is problematic on so many levels.

That sulfur smell alone is a major drag.

I wonder how they got it out of the Oval Office, because Obama is a demon too, you know:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/us/politics/alex-jones.html?_r=0

I know all this to be true because my President vouches for the source in the link:

Mr. Jones enthusiastically endorsed Mr. Trump’s positions on immigration and terrorism and at the end of the interview the Republican candidate praised the host for his integrity. “Your reputation is amazing,” Mr. Trump said. “I will not let you down. You will be very, very impressed, I hope. And I think we’ll be speaking a lot.”

 

This is pretty much true, although it really got rolling when convicted burglar James McCord, facing a lengthy sentence, wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica saying there had been a conspiracy and a cover-up. That was in March 1973. That sparked the Senate Watergate hearings and it spiraled from there.

 

You know what is 1,000 times more common than a reporter making up quotes? A source realizing what they said looks bad and denying it (or legitimately forgetting they said it if they were wound up).

Reporters also have these newfangled things called tape recorders, by the way.

 

Remember: When the Daily Beast piece ran, nobody thought Trump had a prayer of winning the election, and writing about Steve Bannon was as "inside baseball" as it got. This was not some gambit to bring down the sitting president. It was gossipy inside-the-beltway fodder.

Why would he invent that?