Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/30/john-kelly-calls-trump-an-idio.html
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I mean, he’s right. At the same time, he signed up to work for the idiot.
What a shitshow.
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Will the last grownup to leave the White House please put up a For Sale sign?
(Asking for a Russian Real Estate speculation group)
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That approach has worked well for all the other bulwarks who’ve been kicked to the curb.
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You’d have to be an idiot to voluntarily work for that idiot.
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You know, after seeing a dozen stories like this about a dozen different people in the white house, I’m starting to get the impression that Trump is not a fun person to work for.
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The guy that made “You’re fired!” his catch phrase? It sure looked fun…
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Not that I would disagree with Kelly if he did call Trump an idiot, because the evidence is on his side.
But I’m getting more than a little tired of journalism-as-gossip, with unnamed sources – sorry, ‘officials’ and ‘senior White House officials’ – supposedly dishing dirt from inside the White House.
Because none of them are ever named, as outside observers we have no way of knowing if:
a. This is entirely true, or
b. The sources are people who want to see Kelly fired, or
c. The sources are people who want to give the idea that the White House is in chaos, or
d. The ‘sources’ were invented by a journalist who wants to give the idea that the White House is in chaos.
Trump has been trying to persuade us that it’s always (d). It could equally well be (a), (b) or ©, and we really don’t have a way to guess which it is or even assign probabilities to each option.
The problem isn’t just ‘fake news’: at least with overtly fake stories, we can usually find reliable material to discredit the fake story (at least for ourselves; convincing people who are predisposed to believe a story because it fits their belief system is another matter). The other part of the problem is the growing quantity of stories like this one where we’re expected to take it on faith that the journalist is honest and diligent, because we have no way to decide for ourselves whether the story might be true or not.
As Wikipedia would say, [citation needed].
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Dental bills. College. He knows the drill (except for The Big Picture and the future of this democracy).
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It still doesn’t make John Kelly look good, or better. That shit will be hard to clean off in this lifetime.
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The operative word is “curb”. That’s when friction makes its entrance.
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I say, “a” because it’s obvious he’s an idiot.
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It’s greedy, unscrupulous morons all the way down.
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I’m not military, but I grew up in it. If the president asks you to serve - even a jerkass president, you serve.
Too bad the idiot in chief found out.
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John Kelly thinks he is saving the United States from certain disaster
He’s not doing a great job of it. Though we’ll see how much worse things get when he leaves, I guess. /shudder
What’s become actually shocking to me is when someone insists Trump isn’t an idiot. I was baffled by Comey’s description of Trump as “above average” in intelligence. It made me wonder why he would say that, or what kind of total idiots Comey usually is surrounded by that made Trump seem more than average in comparison (or raised the possibility that Trump has some sort of feral cunning that we never get to see because it only applies in extremely specific circumstances).
Based on what I’ve read about how Trump treats, well, every single person he knows in every context, I’m getting the impression that Trump is a total asshole who is impossible to be around (unless you like abuse).
Yeah, in this White House, that’s a very likely possibility. Though we’re not going to get anyone on the record admitting it’s true if it is true, so we’ll never know (until Kelly leaves, that is). Although 8 sources suggests it’s true (even if some of them want Kelly fired).
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Colin Powell’s undoing as well.
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Kelly is culpable on all fronts, they’re all f’ing idiots.
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It’s likely both. Any good reporter will tell you that all sources have some kind of agenda. That’s a different question from “is this source credible?”
Thus far pretty much all of the insider dirt from the Trump White House has panned out. Why bother making up fake chaos when the real thing is so easy to come by?
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The reason they won’t let themselves be named is that they would be fired if they were. Look, I appreciate what you say, and in normal times, I would give it more weight. But if an unnamed source tells me that water is wet, I’m not going to insist on learning that person’s name. I know that person is telling the truth because of what I observe, and the number of other people telling me that, yes, water IS wet.
Now, I’m not going to a Trump supporter with this, because they wouldn’t believe Trump is less than a demi-god, even if, well, they never would. But do I believe John Kelly (and Rex Tillerson, and Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, etc. etc. etc.) think Trump is an idiot? You bet I do.
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