House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) backed down on Thursday and revealed that she won’t actually try and impeach President Donald Trump for a second time to block him from nominating someone to the Supreme Court.
“I Don’t Think He’s Worth The Trouble”
“I don’t think he’s worth the trouble at this point, we have 40 days until the election,” Pelosi told reporters when asked if she will be trying to impeach the president again. “It’s no use orchestrating one thing or another when what really matters in terms of the peaceful transfer of power is that people vote.”
This comes days after Pelosi hinted in an interview that impeachment was not off the table, saying, “we have arrows in our quiver.”
“We have our options,” she told television host George Stephanopoulos. “This president has threatened to not even accept the results of the election with statements that he and his henchmen have made. Right now, our main goal — and I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg would want that to be to protect the integrity of the election — that we protect the American people from the coronavirus.”
Kevin McCarthy Fires Back
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) fired back by warning that he will introduce a motion to oust Pelosi if she dares to launch a second impeachment inquiry.
“I will make you this one promise, listening to the speaker on television this weekend, if she tries to move for an impeachment based upon the president following the Constitution, I think there will be a move on the floor to no longer have the question of her being Speaker. She may think she has a quiver — we do too,” McCarthy told reporters.
As for Trump, he plans to move forward with announcing his nominee on Saturday to fill the Supreme Court seat that was left vacated by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“I think it will be on Friday or Saturday and we want to pay respect, it looks like we will have services on Thursday or Friday, as I understand it, and I think we should, with all due respect for Justice Ginsburg, wait for services to be over,” Trump said.
This piece was written by PoliZette Staff on September 24, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
A professor at the University of Alabama-Birmingham just shamelessly used the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to launch a deranged attack on the millions of supporters of President Donald Trump.
Professor Pays Tribute To RBG
Professor Sarah Parcak initially reacted to Ginsburg’s death in a classy way, paying tribute to the late 87 year-old justice.
“She hung on as long as she could. Icon. Genius. Loving wife, mother, grandmother.” Parcak tweeted. “Powerful arbiter of truth and justice, even when she was in the minority. In her honor, dig deep, fight like hell, VOTE. #rbg”
She hung on as long as she could. Icon. Genius. Loving wife, mother, grandmother. Beloved wearer of Egyptian menat collars adorning Pharaohs of old. Powerful arbiter of truth and justice, even when she was in the minority. In her honor, dig deep, fight like hell, VOTE #rbg
Had she left it at that, there would have been nothing to see here. However, Parcak just could not resist taking the death of an 87 year-old woman and using it to fuel her anti-Trump hatred as she attacked his supporters.
Professor Uses RBG’s Death To Attack Trump Supporters
Somehow, Parcak managed to turn a tribute to Ginsburg’s love of physical fitness into a below-the-belt assault on those who support the president.
“RBG planked for a minute for multiple sets at AGE 86 and did tons of pushups,” Parcak tweeted. “She was stronger in her mid 80’s than any M*GA f*ckstick bootlicker could ever dream of. Take that energy with you tonight and always into the voting booth, the polls, and online to donate.”
RBG planked for a minute for multiple sets at AGE 86 and did tons of pushups. She was stronger in her mid 80’s than any M*GA f*ckstick bootlicker could ever dream of. Take that energy with you tonight and always into the voting booth, the polls, and online to donate.
Parcak appears to have no shame about this tweet, as it has been up for four days and she seems to have no plans to delete it. Instead, she returned to Twitter two days later to launch an apparent attack on conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
“Imagine a SCOTUS filled with qualified judges and not rapist drunken abusers,” Parcak tweeted, referring to the unfounded claims made by Democrats against Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.
Imagine a SCOTUS filled with qualified judges and not rapist drunken abusers
College professors launching deranged attacks on Trump and his supporters is unfortunately quite common these days. Just last week, we reported on a Marshall University professor who was suspended after saying that she hopes all Trump supporters catch coronavirus and “die before the election.”
It’s absolutely terrifying that these lunatics are the academics shaping the minds of the next generation.
Over the weekend, we reported that there was an alleged assassination attempt on President Donald Trump when someone sent a package containing the poison ricin to the White House, addressing it to the president. Now, the person who was allegedly behind this has been identified.
Woman Arrested After Allegedly Sending Poison To Trump
Pascale Ferrier of Quebec, Canada was taken into custody on Sunday for allegedly sending ricin to Trump, according to The New York Post. She was apprehended by US Customs and Border Protection agents at the Peace Bridge border crossing near Buffalo, New York.
Ferrier was scheduled to appear in court on Monday, but her appearance was delayed until Tuesday. She had been living in the United States since last year, and court documents show that she was arrested in May of 2019 in Mission for using a fake driver’s license. Ferrier pleaded not guilty to this charge and spent twenty days behind bars before the charge was dropped because it was her first offense.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokesman Cpl. Charles said that on Monday, officers carried out a search of a condo in Saint-Hubert on Montreal’s South Shore in connection with the ricin-laced envelopes. While he said that there is a link between Ferrier and the condo, he would not confirm that she lived there.
“The RCMP is assisting the FBI in this investigation,” Poirier told reporters. “We believe a total of six letters were sent — one to the White House and five to Texas.”
Ricin Sent To Texas As Well
Though Poirier would not elaborate on where in Texas the envelopes were sent, Sheriff Eddie Guerra of the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office in Edinburg, Texas has since confirmed that ricin was mailed to him as well as to three members of his detention staff. Thankfully, Guerra added that nobody in his department was injured by the letters.
Ricin is a poison that is extracted from the seed of the castor plant, often called a “castor bean,” despite not actually being a bean. ”
“An average adult needs only 1.78 mg of ricin injected or inhaled to die; that’s about the size of a few grains of table salt—which ricin resembles visually,” according to Popular Science.
Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster made a recent comment that will surely leave believers of the ‘deep state’ wondering.
McMaster, during an interview with “60 minutes,” stated there is a group of people within the White House who believe they are saving the world “from the President.”
He believes there are three groups of people operating within the administration.
“There is certainly one group of people there who are there to serve the elected president and to serve the country,” said McMaster.
“I think there are other groups there though, as well, a second group that is there really, instead of providing options to the elected president, they really want to advance their narrow agendas,” he admitted.
The third group is one Raw Story defines as “secret members.”
Regarding competing groups in the West Wing, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster says there’s one group of advisors “who cast themselves in the role of saving the country and maybe the world from the president.” https://t.co/YBUCccl25vpic.twitter.com/w7UMrFBGBx
President Trump recently accused a “deep state” at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) trying to slow down the testing of COVID vaccines.
“The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics,” he tweeted weeks ago.
“Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!”
While McMaster contends there is a ‘deep state’ battling every administration, there hasn’t likely been quite at the level of those battling President Trump.
No. Mindless is having evidence and refusing to look or accept it. Mindless is seeing an impeachment process and allowing the MSM do all of YOUR homework. Mindless, is not believing in a deep state in 16, AND STILL BELIEVING NONE EXISTS IN 2020. #Landslide2020@realDonaldTrumphttps://t.co/QtOTLf73Dg
Recently released documents from the Department of Justice show multiple members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team that investigated the President engaged in some shady activity.
They “accidentally wiped” their phones after the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) requested them.
Meanwhile, the Senate Homeland Security Committee has voted to authorize over three dozen subpoenas and depositions of Obama-era officials.
The officials – which include former FBI Director James Comey – were involved in the 2016 Russia investigation into the Trump campaign.
These seem like ‘deep state’ actors, some of who engaged in a cover-up.
Newly released DOJ records show that multiple top members of Mueller’s investigative team claimed to have “accidentally wiped” at least 15 (!) phones used during the anti-Trump investigation after the DOJ OIG asked for the devies to be handed over. https://t.co/VVUnfZVolmpic.twitter.com/p50PnoCBse
A Daily Beast article from 2018 parrots exactly what McMaster is saying, with some in the Justice Department practically admitting to their ‘deep state’ activities.
“We see ourselves as rebels,” one official told the Beast, laughing at the notion.
They added that a “senior official” in the anti-Trump movement who had written an anonymous New York Times op-ed was cause for celebration.
A separate official admitted actual celebrations took place after the ‘resistance’ op-ed was published.
“We even went around fist-bumping each other,” they said.
By double-digit margins, Republicans think 175,000 Covid-related deaths (and counting) are “acceptable.” These are the same Republicans who now think that Russian meddling in our politics is okay, that “family values” was a cynical joke on our moral discourse, that “law and order” was something that mattered, that no one stood above the law, that leading the world in pursuit of shared democratic ideals is best replaced by boyish fandom of murderous despots, and that the entire purpose of the Republican Party is nothing more than the singular worship of their idiotic man-boy president.
Oh, and the response to anything is whine, whine, whine:
.@GOPChairwoman responds to @CBSNewsPoll showing 57% of Republicans say the number of those dead from #COVID19 is acceptable at 175,000: "I think that is a really unfair poll..Republicans do not want to see people suffering from this pandemic." pic.twitter.com/E43B4p9rck
Republicans literally are okay with people suffering during this pandemic because they—like their dear leader—are utterly devoid of empathy for their fellow neighbors. It’s the reason so many still resist wearing face masks, putting everyone around them at risk. It’s the reason Republicans continue to support their president despite knowing what they know now, which is exactly what they knew then:
Ted Cruz knew. Rand Paul knew. Nikki Haley knew. Marco Rubio knew. Kellyanne Conway knew. Mike Pompeo knew. Glenn Beck knew. Rick Perry knew. Susan Collins knew. They all knew. pic.twitter.com/73XyJkiNkv
Nothing about Donald Trump has been a surprise. Everything that has happened was predictable. We didn’t know we’d suffer a global pandemic, but we knew Trump would be tested during his first term—every president is—and that he would fail spectacularly.
What wasn’t predictable was how quickly his whole party would become as sociopathic as Trump himself, how quickly they’d acquiesce to his rampant lawlessness. The party that once went into hysterics because former President Bill Clinton had a quick chat on an airport runway with Attorney General Loretta Lynch is now silent as the curent attorney general acts as Trump’s private lawyer. The same party that went into hysterics and filed multiple lawsuits over former President Barack Obama’s executive orders now turns the other way as Trump escalates the same practice.
And a whole party that once declared fealty to “law and order” is totally mum as Trump literally thumbs his nose at the Supreme Court. What army do they have, anyway?
USCIS makes it official. They will ignore SCOTUS ruling and, "will reject all initial DACA requests from aliens who have never previously received DACA and return all fees." Furthermore, renewals will be limited to one year. https://t.co/RUIZ3LXw3n
There is a single constitutional remedy for such defiance of our nation’s laws: impeachment. But Republicans decided that they were okay with Trump’s lawlessness, and he’s returned the favor by making an even greater mockery of the very institutions that make our democracy work.
It turns out they're quite fragile, indeed. All it takes is one despot and an enabling party to watch those institutions crumble. Turns out, the only thing keeping them in place was a belief in our democratic system. Republicans don’t care for our system. Or democracy.
The “party of life” never was, but at least now everyone can stop pretending. Their opposition to abortion has nothing to do with “life,” and everything to do with controlling women.
The “party of national security” is a laughable joke. Russia strongman Vladimir Putin pulls the strings.
The party of “law and order”? Trump has literally argued that as president, he is above the law, and Republicans have been happy to play along.
Tax cuts is all that’s left of what Republicanism was all about. The rich and powerful still get their payday. They always do. Nothing like global economic devastation to redistribute even more wealth to the top 0.01%.
But the stuff that was supposed to trickle down to the masses? All of that is shredded, in tatters, as the Republican Party devolves into an outright cult of personality and Q-inspired conspiracy mongering.
Olivia Nuzzi’s stunning look inside the Trump presidential campaign confirms everything we’ve been saying, for so long—that it’s a disorganized disaster of a mess, riven by internal discord and rival factions, with no guiding strategy that could plausibly give the incumbent president a path to reelection.
“The campaign was spending all this money on silly things. Brad’s businesses kept making money,” the first senior White House official told me. “Everyone was like, What does he even do? He’s just milking the family, basically. And nobody could understand why Jared and the family were putting up with it. That was the talk all the time. Why? Why Brad? He’s not some genius. And I guess people just came to the conclusion that, well, who else would be campaign manager? We’re kind of stuck with this guy.”
Note, the campaign is still spending money in silly things, like TV ads in the Washington DC market so that Donald Trump can see himself as he wastes entire days staring slack jawed at the TV screen. And are the partners of the two Trump siblings still making $15,000 every month in a nepotistic fleecing of campaign donors? There are no indications that has changed.
We know that the campaign has no message, and continues to have no message, comically fumbling the response to the Kamala Harris VP rollout. Indeed, this is the campaign that expended serious resources to build a case against Hunter Biden’s work in the Ukraine—an effort that led to a historic impeachment of the president, only to see a bored Trump toss it aside with little use. Also, remember Obamagate, the single most horrible scandal in the history of America? That one lasted like three days. Meanwhile, Trump can’t pivot away from “the best economy in the history of the world” (it wasn’t), even after his mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic drove it into a ditch.
So, having “rebooted” the campaign by ditching Brad Parscale and installing Bill Stepien instead as campaign manager, how has that campaign message changed? Nuzzi asked:
But while replacing Parscale with Stepien has the look of a reboot, at the strategy level it does not seem much has changed or is likely to. Asked how the campaign can formulate a coherent message, given what life is like for most people across the country today, senior adviser Jason Miller said, “It’s very direct: President Trump built the greatest economy in the history of the world, and he’s doing it again.”
Oh well.
Finally, we’ve seen how Trump’s actual actions only serve to shrink his potential base of support, further alienating key demographic groups that have abandoned him, like those suburban college-educated white women who delivered the House to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in 2018. (38 of the Democrats’ 41 House pickups were in suburban districts.)
This is an ongoing Trump feature, from attacking Supreme Court decisions popular with those suburban swing voters (like protecting abortion rights, protecting young immigrants, and defending LGBTQ rights), to demonizing the Black Lives Matter movement, to defending Confederate monuments. So, what is the campaign doing to expand its base and win? Reading the Nuzzi piece, apparently nothing more than engage in wishful thinking. Take this passage, for example:
“I don’t think we’re gonna lose this campaign,” said Bob Paduchik, Trump’s 2016 Ohio state director and a senior adviser to the 2020 campaign. “I don’t think we’re losing this campaign.” He told me the polling averages didn’t show Biden winning Ohio. I said that was wrong. Well, Paduchik said, the RealClearPolitics average didn’t show Biden winning. I told him that was wrong too — that I happened to be looking at that particular website as we spoke. Even Rasmussen, Trump’s preferred polling outfit, had Trump down by five, I said. “No,” Paduchik said, Rasmussen didn’t have a poll like that. When I said it sure did, that I was looking right at it, Paduchik said he couldn’t speak to that poll since he hadn’t reviewed it himself. Either way, he said, the polls were silly, based as they are on the premise that they measure how people would vote if the election were held today. “Well, the election is not today!” he said. “We haven’t had our debates and our convention yet. It’s sort of a fantasy guess.”
This newfound belief that the debates will bail Trump out is a new level of wishful thinking. Debates don’t mean shit. Hillary Clinton wiped the floor with Trump, for all the good it did. Conventions also don’t do much to move the numbers in any lasting way, but they’ll be even less relevant in this year’s online format. But when you don’t have a message or an organization or a viable strategy to win back lost support, then wishful thinking is the final fallback.
There’s one final fascinating piece of news in Nuzzi’s piece, one that we hadn’t really seen before, and that is whether the Trump campaign is truly as organized as it claimed it is. We saw a hint of this during the hilariously botched Tulsa rally, when the campaign claimed it had 1 million people clamoring to attend. In the end, about 6,000 did. The expected overflow area outside the convention hall was dismantled even before Trump took the stage. (Herman Cain, one of Trump’s few Black friends, died because of that rally.)
The embarrassingly empty overflow area outside Trump’s failed Tulsa rally.
But that failure could easily be placed at the feet the pandemic. The campaign could be as organized as it claimed to be, and yet still fail to get a crowd because death is quite the demotivator, right? In Pennsylvania, a must-win battleground state for Trump, and one he won by a sliver in 2016, the Trump campaign claims 1.4 million volunteers and an unprecedented ground game. As Nuzzi summarizes it, “The campaign says it’s the greatest ground game to ever exist, that while you don’t see enthusiasm for the president reflected in the rigged polls, you do see it when you talk to his real supporters where they live in Real America. In fact, they talk about surveys of enthusiasm not just as though they are more reliable than real polls but as though they are the polls — as though the traditional kind simply don’t exist, or matter.”
Nuzzi sets out to find this ground game in action, attending trainings and gatherings advertised by the state’s campaign. It’s a hilarious stream of empty rooms, closed doors, and puzzled campaign staff. Like this vignette:
“What event?,” Kevin Tatulyan, an Allegheny County Republican official, asked as he waved me into the room.
“What event?,” Dallas McClintock, the regional Trump-Pence field director, asked.
One of the women, with lilac-colored hair, whipped her head toward McClintock.
“It’s your email here!” she told him, pointing to the advertisement I’d mentioned.
“My email?,” McClintock said in disbelief.
“Yeah!” she said.
He scrunched up his face.
For the next several minutes, the staffers tried to sort out how, with fewer than 100 days until the election, they had unknowingly advertised official campaign events that didn’t exist to potential campaign volunteers in the most important swing state in the country.
They squinted at their screens and asked questions.
“What time?”
“Where did you learn about it?”
“What was the address?”
The second event had been listed with an apparent misspelling in the street name, a detail that prompted the girl with the lilac hair to laugh.
“Sounds right,” she said dryly.
Trump thrives on good news and rose-colored information. Like a typical despot, he doesn’t want to hear the truth, so his staff tells him what he wants to hear. And they tell him those things were he’s sure to consume them—in the media.
So is the Trump’s campaign entire narrative about its massive ground game a fiction, designed to appease their boss? Nuzzi’s dive into this little slice of Pennsylvania certainly suggests so. Of course, we can’t and shouldn't assume that’s the case anywhere. And in any case, is anyone really staying home this November? I doubt it’s possible to suppress this vote with “good news”.
And even if Pennsylvania’s Trump operation is a mirage, that doesn’t mean it’s equally ineffective elsewhere. Remember, we’re not playing to win the presidency anymore. This is another 2018—we’re playing to deliver maximum electoral pain to the Republican Party.
What this does suggest is that a Republican Party that has surrendered to Trump, both out of fear of his tantrums, and hope that his rabid foot soldiers can bail them out, may have miscalculated to a degree that we hadn’t even dare consider. If the vaunted Trump ground game is a fiction, our down ballot opportunities may be even greater than we hoped.
I’ve said before, we are lucky that Trump is as stupid and ineffective as he is. The dumbass even admitted to gutting the USPS for electoral gain last week, like a cliche movie villain’s monologue. Now no one can pretend that Trump’s efforts aren’t nefarious, even those who wanted to like Fact Check. His penchant for surrounding himself with morons and refusal to follow federal law when making decisions has ensured that the damage he could cause was limited at best. (A quote in Nuzzi’s piece illustrates this perfectly: “What Trump does is take people who are mediocre talent at best, who know they could never have the position they have if it were not for Trump, and it creates this instant loyalty to Trump.”)
Trump has epically messed up the country, but it could’ve been worse. And now he’s bringing his special kind of incompetence, the kind that bankrupts a casino, to his reelection campaign.
That incompetence is a silver lining in what has been among the bleakest four years in our lives. It means we are on path to ridding ourselves of Trump and his party. Because at this point, we’re not fighting for November, we’re fighting for the next generation.
House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Adam Schiff told MSNBC on Wednesday that President Donald Trump would stoop to any level to win the election, saying there was “no tactic beneath him, no bigotry too great, no racist appeal too much, no political dirty trick beyond the pale.”
Guest-host Ali Velshi said to Schiff, “A lot of people just don’t like Donald Trump. They forget the impeachment was about a dirty election trick. A dirty election trick is something you and I talked about I think a week ago with the intelligence that you have had that you like Americans to find out about, but you can’t right now.”
Schiff: We have ‘a president of the United States who will break any law, rule, abuse of power of his office, who will cheat…’
“This is another one,” Ali Velshi said. “If he’s helping Kanye West to run with the aim of defeating Joe Biden, falls into the same basket.”
Schiff replied, “Well, it does. It falls into the basket of a president of the United States who will break any law, rule, abuse of power of his office, who will cheat, and no strategy is beneath him.”
“You know, this idea of recruiting a third party candidate that you hope will siphon votes from your opponent, it is an old ploy, but it is among the dirtiest of the dirty tricks,” Schiff said. “You never wanted to be associated with it. But here it is all out in the open.”
On meeting with Kanye West amid his WH bid, Jared Kushner says, “He has some great ideas for what he’d like to see happen in the country and that’s why he has the candidacy that he’s been doing.https://t.co/oS4vbg3ShG
Schiff accuses Trump of racism: ‘It is not even a dog-whistle anymore. It is a whistle that everybody can hear’
“The president’s son-in-law dispatched to meet with Kanye,” Schiff continued. “They’re not even hiding it.”
The Democrat added, “You know, Barbara Boxer, who was just wonderful on your show, talked about the dog-whistle in terms of the suburban households. It is not even a dog-whistle anymore. It is a whistle that everybody can hear.”
Chairman Schiff: "Donald Trump has clearly not deterred the Russians from engaging. They are at it again. If anything, I think, the sum total of the president's words and actions is to encourage the Russians to help him."https://t.co/uxx6Zt1R7m
Schiff claims ‘Republicans in the Congress won’t say a word’ about Trump supposedly destroying the Republican Party
Schiff went on, “This is where the president has descended to low, no tactic beneath him, no bigotry too great, no racist appeal too much, no political dirty trick beyond the pale. And the terrible thing is the Republicans in the Congress won’t say a word.”
“They are watching their party destroyed,” he said. “They’re watching the ethics of the party leader just tear their party asunder, and they don’t have the guts to do anything or say anything about it.”
On Tuesday, GOP Senator Ted Cruz wondered if Democratic Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono had anything negative to say about the far-left terrorist group antifa at the end of a Senate subcommittee hearing.
Cruz, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, convened the hearing to examine how antifa and other left-wing organizations helped spark and carry out the ongoing riots in major U.S. cities.
Before leaving the hearing, Hirono said “we can all agree” on denouncing “violent extremism of all stripes.”
“So to constantly accuse Democrats of not caring about that is … I can only say that you aren’t listening,” Hirono added. “So I hope this is the end of this hearing, Mr. Chairman, and we don’t have to listen to any more of your rhetorical speeches. Thank you very much. I’m leaving.”
Today SEVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS refused to condemn Antifa terrorists. @SenTedCruz takes them to task. America, pay attention—Antifa is the Democrats armed terror wing. pic.twitter.com/zAvJy5vRyV
Cruz: ‘You’re welcome to say something negative about Antifa right now’
Cruz replied, “I appreciate the, as always the kind and uplifting words of Senator Hirono. And I would also note that throughout her remarks she still did not say a negative word about antifa, nor has any Democrat here.”
“They instead engage in a political game where they depend — you’re welcome to say something negative about Antifa right now,” Cruz chided.
“I think that I’ve covered the subject quite well,” Hirono said, leaving the hearing.
“OK, she declined to speak, so that is the position of the Democratic Party,” Cruz responded. “I would note also that of the seven Democratic senators who spoke, not one of them apologized for or denounced multiple Democrats calling law enforcement officers Nazis, stormtroopers and Gestapo.”
Hirono: We should all denounce violent extremists of every stripe:
“To be fair, I have not heard the word Nazi, but stormtrooper was Nancy Pelosi and Gestapo was another Democratic leader,” Cruz said. “That was less than helpful.”
“Across the country, we’re seeing horrific violence, we’re seeing our country torn apart,” Cruz said during an interview with Fox News on Monday.
“Violent anarchists and Marxists are exploiting protests to transform them into riots and direct assaults on the lives and safety of their fellow Americans,” Cruz finished.
Susan Rice, in an interview with the ladies of “The View,” blamed President Donald Trump for the lives lost during the coronavirus pandemic, claiming the previous administration had set him up for success.
That’s right – Rice, whose only notable accomplishment as Barack Obama’s former National Security Adviser was shirking responsibility for a terrorist attack – believes the President must shoulder the blame.
Co-host Sunny Hostin set Rice up with a perfect slow-pitch softball toss, making her line of questioning seem almost assuredly scripted and coordinated.
“Ambassador, I do want to talk to you then about the coronavirus because President Trump has said nobody could have predicted this pandemic,” she said before walking her through the answer.
“But the Obama administration did predict a pandemic and you personally tried to prepare the incoming administration for something just like this, leaving essentially a pandemic playbook that warned of this type of virus happening,” Hostin alleged.
“So who is really to blame for the abysmal response here and the death of 150,000 Americans?”
Rice smirked prior to answering as if to say “thanks for the setup.” And then she unloaded on President Trump.
“So the fault here, the tragic loss of 150,000 Americans and counting is on Donald Trump and his gross mishandling of this pandemic,” she claimed. “He said it would go away. He likened it to the flu.”
Nowhere did she mention Andrew Cuomo shoving elderly patients into nursing homes. Nowhere did she mention the Democrat impeachment hoax being conducted while the pandemic was hitting our shores.
She did not blame Nancy Pelosi who encouraged her constituents to tour Chinatown in late February because coronavirus fears were “unwarranted.”
She did not blame Bill de Blasio who told New York City residents to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.”
No, every misstep along the path of a historical pandemic was the President’s and the President’s alone.
Maybe he should have just blamed the whole thing on an obscure YouTube video.
Former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice defends handling of 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack: “Eight congressional committees over the next four years investigated every aspect of Benghazi, and not one of them found that I had done anything wrong.” https://t.co/2ZuwuRK54spic.twitter.com/EVKJ2c6URf
Rice, who is desperately angling for the Vice President role for Joe Biden’s campaign, claimed everybody knew the coronavirus pandemic was “inevitable.”
“We prepared the incoming administration with a ‘Pandemic for Dummies’ playbook and a tabletop exercise and so many other briefings,” she said.
The media have been anxiously pushing a narrative that the Trump administration ditched that playbook. The reality, according to White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, is that the Obama pandemic response plan was inadequate.
“Some have erroneously suggested that the Trump administration threw out the pandemic response playbook left by the Obama-Biden administration,” McEnany told reporters. “What the critics failed to note, however, is that this thin packet of paper was replaced by two detailed, robust pandemic response reports commissioned by the Trump administration.”
Additionally, the Obama administration’s response to the swine flu epidemic in 2009 left the nation with a significant shortage of medical masks, something they never bothered to replenish.
Masks, of course, have been the key to fighting off the spread of this virus.
That year also saw Obama scrap the White House Health and Security Office, which worked on international health issues.
Aside from thinking Trump is the only man responsible for the pandemic, Susan Rice has made other wild claims, including the notion that citing the virus’ origin from China is “shameful” and “designed to stigmatize people of Asian descent.”
As House Judiciary Committee member Matt Gaetz has said: “If lies were music, Susan Rice would be Mozart.”
Michelle and Barack Obama took a few childish swipes at President Trump during the former First Lady’s debut podcast on Spotify.
The premiere episode was reportedly designed to be America’s “nationwide reckoning with race” and aims to “show us what’s possible when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to open up, and to focus on what matters most.”
Apparently what ‘matters most’ is taking shots at your successor while never actually having the courage to name them outright.
The Huffington Post reports that Barack at one point discussed how young people’s interest in government is generally limited to when something goes wrong.
“We’re getting a good lesson in that right now,” he derided.
Perhaps he was referring to the Do Nothing Democrats and their impeachment scams, but we suspect this was directed at Trump.
In another not-so-subtle jab at the President, the pair discussed turning out voters in the next election.
Barack considers himself an optimist, trumpeting “I’m the ‘Yes, We Can!’ man. I am the ‘audacity of hope’ guy.”
“I think where we disagree is usually you [Michelle] just think things just have to get super, super bad before folks figure stuff out,” the former President lamented.
Mrs. Obama replied, “Well, I hope we’re at that point.”
She continued, “Well, as you pointed out as a former president who reads and knows history – Let’s just take moment to pause and think about that – But as that person, you understand the arc of progress.”
A pretty clear shot at President Trump, inferring he is ignorant. Bitterness, party of two.
And speaking of audacity, Obama had the gall to suggest he and Democrat Joe Biden always took responsibility for their mistakes when they were in the White House.
“Can you imagine standing up when you were president and saying ‘it’s not my responsibility. I take no responsibility.’ Literally. Literally,” Biden asked his former boss.
“Those words didn’t come out of our mouths when we were in office,” replied Obama.