Breezy sunshine this late-afternoon Tuesday on California’s north coast.
In the wacky world in which we currently inhabit, the expert wisdom of the T-Rump, from last January: ‘“Having a drone fly overhead — and I think nobody knows much more about technology, this type of technology certainly, than I do.”’ (Source).
Fast forward to yesterday, and the T-Rump’s narcissistic-idiocy first cultivated a dust-up with the National Weather Service on impacts of Hurricane Dorian, and then displayed a foolish-as-fuck knowledge of history, bordering way-close to bad-taste lunacy:
[walks into a Hallmark store] Hi, where are the Congrats On Your Nazi Invasion cards? https://t.co/ZC0FHMyUej
— shauna (@goldengateblond) September 2, 2019
A toast and applause for a really horrific event? WTF! Poland lost about 20-percent of its people, most of the three million Jewish citizens, and became a Soviet satellite, because of what happened 80 years ago. Asshole! The T-Rump just don’t give a shit
Speaking of which, and VP Pence– this afternoon at The Atlantic:
Vice President Mike Pence and his retinue — including members of his family, his aides, and his Secret Service detail — are on a trip to Europe this week, and they will be staying at Doonbeg, Donald Trump’s golf resort on the west coast of Ireland.
While he’s on the Emerald Isle, Pence will participate in a set of meetings in Dublin, on the east coast.
To attend those meetings, Pence will fly more than an hour each way.
That sounds inconvenient for Pence, but it’s convenient for Trump, whose business will pocket payments for the accommodations — a Pence aide didn’t have an estimate, but a conservative guess is tens of thousands of dollars.
Trump has so frequently used the power of the presidency to plump for his businesses that the public has almost become inured to it, but it remains brazenly corrupt and shameless.
…
“I don’t think it was a request, like a command,” Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, told reporters.
“I think that it was a suggestion. It’s like, ‘Well, you should stay at my place.’”
Yet what could the vice president do?
He was in no position to refuse Trump’s suggestion, which Short valiantly tried to spin as a generous offer.
But, of course, Trump was not inviting Pence to stay at his home as a guest.
The president could have comped the stay as a gesture of magnanimity, or he could have discouraged it to avoid the conflict of interest, but instead, he invited Pence to spend thousands of dollars to benefit Trump.
It’s a double victory for the president, because he reaps not only the cash from the stay, but also the free publicity for the resort.
As the president has demonstrated in the past, he is extremely attuned to the nebulous art of enhancing brand value.
And a round-up via Vox this morning: ‘In distance terms, this is like staying at a hotel in Baltimore for your business trip to New York. Except, of course, that the scandal here is not bad transportation logistics but the theft of public funds. The true analogy to what Pence is doing would be something like stealing money from the office expense account and using it to bribe your boss to give you a good performance review.’
Cruel, corrupt and contemptible…
(Illustration: ‘Basic Shapes,‘ by caricaturist/illustrator Chong Jit Leong, found here).