An important point about the Anthony Scaramucci New Yorker interview by Ryan Lizza is that this wasn’t any pre-planned sit down.
Earlier in the evening Lizza had tweeted information received by an anonymous White House source about Trump’s evening dinner guests, which included Scaramucci, the first lady, Sean Hannity, Sean Hannity’s big head, and former Fox News executive Bill Shine.
Scaramucci was calling to get Lizza to reveal his source. When Lizza refused, Scaramucci responded by threatening to fire virtually everyone.
“What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,” he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source.
Can we say intimidation? Didn’t work, but that was his intent. He wasn’t after the reporter, though. Issuing death threats and threats of criminal prosecution via reporter is possibly a rather effective means of silencing future leaks.
“You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.”
While I agree that revealing that the President of the United States is conducting a serious meeting with Sean Hannity IS a major catastrophe for the American country, I don’t think Scaramucci means the same thing as the rest of us would when he says that.
Of course, these quotes are above-the-fold quotes. Come behind the curtain for something more suitable for a sticky-floored dungeon in the basement of someone registered for life as a sex offender.
Yes, this was plastered all over facebook today, and Twitter, Instagram, and the inside of Father John Misty’s eyeballs, but the White House Communications Director actually said the following Wednesday night:
Scaramucci also told me that, unlike other senior officials, he had no interest in media attention. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he said, speaking of Trump’s chief strategist.
I thought about this quote as I was riding the elevator at work today. What would happen to me, or you, or anyone, if we said this? We’d be arrested. We’d be a registered sex offender for life. Not the men in our Republican White House.
That he said THAT to illustrate his lack of interest in drawing media attention is irony so glaring we can all probably agree Alannis Morissette even picked up on it.
“I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.”
Autofelatio videos now serve as the basis of allusions in this White House, rather than Lincoln, Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Scarammuci also said this today:
Mama, just killed a man,
Put a gun against his head
Pulled my trigger now he’s dead.
No, wait, that was Queen. Scaramucci said this, though:
“What I want to do is I want to fucking kill all the leakers and I want to get the President’s agenda on track so we can succeed for the American people,” he told me. [Emphasis mine.]
We just put up with eight years of these same people who worship, prop up, and defend this collection of treasonous psychopaths accusing Obama of every conceivable moral atrocity, and yet in the end, scandal-wise, the worst thing he ever did was wear a tan suit and speak respectfully to Boy Scouts.
Every time I see something like this I just get angrier and angrier at the out of control BS perspective they had about Obama all those years, the most decent President we've had in my lifetime.
Every imaginable insult was flung at Barack and Michelle during their time in the White House. If Barack played golf while the Earth continued to spin, they weeped for the nation’s lost glory, while the only thing Trump’s held with his tiny hands since taking office, it seems, is a golf club and an insecure smartphone.
If Michelle wore a sleeveless dress, we were lead to believe that Martha Washington and Abigail Adams had been spun out of their graves and locked in a sticky-floored dungeon in Purgatory, where they were subsequently flogged by sneering, laughing Redcoats, their post-mortal virtues tarnished forever by Michelle Obama’s Bare Arms; and yet we’ve seen how this same crowd pishaws the notion that Melania posing for a little girl-on-girl action is anything other than Mom, baseball, and apple pie territory, while praising powerful men who grab pussy is apparently the New What Jesus Would Do.
Drinking in their hypocrisy is like chugging battery acid, though.
It may be senseless to let this hypocrisy continue to bother me. Perhaps it’s time to get used to the fact that the 35% out there, along with Republican leadership, are probably going to love him for a long, long time, but I’m glad I can’t get used to it, otherwise, the terrorists have won. I’m glad I’m still pinching myself on days like these. I’m glad to still be blessed with such bewilderment and such horror. I’m glad, at long last, to find that I still have some sense of decency.
And we musn’t get used to it, weary though we be, lest we become too accustomed to the bilge, and learn to breathe the filth like common air.
We must retain that sense of decency, perserve it, carry it forward, even if somedays it’s just a quiet whimper where our roar used to be.