I guess right about now would be a good time to revisit something Leighton Woodhouse wrote back in December, less than a month after Trump’s shocking upset of Hillary Clinton. I say that now is a good time because Woodhouse wrote back then about the transformation of Anthony Scaramucci from staunch Trump critic to big Trump booster, and Scaramucci has just been hired as the new White House commmuncations director.
Anthony Scaramucci — his friends call him “the Mooch” — is a blow-dried, gold ringed hedge fund trader straight out of Central Casting. Last summer, when Donald Trump dismissed finance people like him as parasitic swindlers who “move around papers,” Scaramucci snarled that Trump was “another hack politician” who would “probably make Elizabeth Warren his vice-presidential nominee,” considering his “anti-American” insults to the finance industry. “You’re an inherited money dude from Queens County,” the Mooch taunted Trump on the Fox Business Channel, doing his best impression of a guy asking another guy if he’d like to step outside for a minute.
Today, Scaramucci is a member of Trump’s presidential transition team.
Scaramucci’s journey from trash talker of presidential nominee Trump to economic advisor to President-elect Trump tracks Trump’s own abrupt transformation from firebrand populist outsider to Wall Street-friendly insider — an about-face that wasn’t just predictable but repeatedly predicted. As a man without an ideology, Trump is not a change agent but an opportunistic pragmatist. His goal is not to reshape the American economy or even the Republican Party, but to use the presidency to build his global brand and enrich himself and his family in the process. People like Scaramucci and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s choice for Treasury Secretary, a former Goldman Sachs mortgage banker who made his fortune and his legend exploiting the pain of the foreclosure crisis, may have been odd choices for the grenade-lobbing, drain-the-swamp-and-burn-the-whole-system-down presidential candidate version of Donald Trump. But they’re just the right kind of advisors for the self-dealing, oligarchical, President-elect version of Trump: the real Trump, the one who will be crowned Leader of the Free World next month.
Trump’s original plan for Scaramucci was to place him as the director of the office of public liaison, but Reince Priebus reportedly objected to this, citing Mr. Scaramucci’s sketchy overseas investments. I’m not sure why, but it appears that Steve Bannon is also a firm opponent of “the Mooch.”
“This was a murdering of Reince and Bannon. They said Anthony would get this job over their dead bodies,” said one top White House official…
…Scaramucci will replace Mike Dubke, who resigned from the job in May. He is stepping into the role as the White House is battling multiple Russia-related investigations, including whether Trump campaign officials colluded with the Kremlin, and as the White House tries to revive the collapsed Obamacare repeal effort…
One source with knowledge of the conversations between Trump and Scaramucci said the latter’s likely new post could be read as a message to Priebus, a former RNC chairman who has not built a strong relationship with Trump.
“Just hiring Anthony is telling Reince beat it, go find another job,” said the source, who cited the tense relationship between the two.
The first casualty here isn’t the White House chief of staff or his white nationalist chief advisor. The first casualty is Sean “Spicy” Spicer, the former press secretary and land-speed record holder for brazen prevarication.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer resigned Friday, following the appointment of wealthy financier Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director, according to a White House official.
Spicer’s abrupt and angry departure — which caught even senior West Wing staffers by surprise — reflects the latest upheaval in a White House that has been consumed by chaos and staff infighting since almost the day President Trump took office.
CNBC’s Washington Correspondent Eamon Javors reports that there’s a lot of internal dissent to this hiring from the press shop at the White House. These are folks who now work for Scaramucchi:
A source close to the WH press office just emailed me: “This is a joke. Trump wanted Scaramucchi on television as a surrogate.”
— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) July 21, 2017
Surprising to me someone close to White House is calling this a “joke” + “there was simply no understanding by the president” of this job.
— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) July 21, 2017
Most of the early reaction on this hiring is focused on the departure of Spicer, but it looks like it could signal a far greater exodus, starting with Priebus and those loyal to Spicer, and perhaps extending even to Bannon who has been reportedly trying to keep his job through the August recess by maintaining a lower profile.
This is all happening, too, as Trump and his family lose people in their legal team. A lot of his nominees have given up recently and taken their names out of consideration for top posts.
With Special Counsel Robert Mueller closing in and Trump looking like a deer in the headlights, the levee looks compromised and we should expect more people to seek higher ground.
And, with that, I’ll leave you with this classic tribute to Sean Spicer’s short career in the Trump administration:
We’ll always have these memories.
Trump’s back is now against the wall. That’s when people like him are most dangerous. Nowhere to run; nowhere to hide: very few more workable lies available.
Can he foment a war in time to deflect attention on him?
Will he try to cause a constitutional crisis?
Does he even know what a “constitutional crisis” is?
The rats seem to know that they are on a sinking ship, and they are leaving rapidly.
And the drip, drip drip continues.
AG
I’d say North Korea but am thinking that Trump won’t do anything for which he bears clear accountability. Great television, no argument there.
I have a song for you in honor of the new White House Communications Director.
Excerpted from the following.
ha1 Ha! was going to post the same minus the video.
Freak storm that had my power out for 23 hours. Some folks were worse. Half-dollar sized hail. Fox and Des Plaines Rivers overflowing. Got nothing to do with global warming, of course. Uh huh! Uh huh!
So what do we “bet on”? What prompts your “Like dat”?
We wait.
It seems almost preordained that Trump will not be able to withstand the concerted efforts of the entire neocentrist establishment. Eventually he will fall.
Outnumbered, outgunned.
But…the neocentrist system is bogged down in its own profit. You cannot have that sort of massive .01% profit without equally massive losses throughout the rest of the 99.9%. Eventually there will be a correction.
We wait.
Eventually the correction will happen.
How?
Damned if I know.
The resurgence of an FDR-like New Deal?
Could be.
We can only hope.
A seriously reactionary movement that makes Trump look like the carny barker he really is?
Maybe.
Probably somewhere in the middle, though.
Like the Brits…we’ll muddle on through.
So it goes.
AG
Nalbar, marduk et al:
Centrist trolls. Nothing more and nothing less.
Here are the solutions to this ongoing bullshit:
1-If you see them troll rating valid posts, refrain from uprating until there is more than one downrate…a single rating means nothing, only multiple ratings count… then “4” them to death.
2-Downrate them every time they poke their miserable heads above water in a comment or reply.
This is not dKos. Send them back to the centrist hell from which they come.
Thank you and good night.
AG
Brigading will get you banned from just about every community that offers user moderation, troll.
So should unlimited, content-unrelated downrating. I’ve had it with this shit, marduk. If I get banned, it’s the site’s loss, not mine. Your constant efforts to push this site ever further centerward …yours and your own little brigade of downraters and lawyertalkers…have polluted this pond beyond belief. I’ll have no more of it, myself.
If that means I have to go…so be it.
AG
Nobody but you is trying to push this site anywhere. If my policy positions are “centerward” from yours then words have no meaning. Which makes sense because that’s exactly what you argue when challenged on your bullshit. Shield of Post-Fact +1!
You’re rude, ignorant, and incoherent. You pick fights constantly. You have nothing of value to say. It’s extraordinarily rare that one of your posts is even vaguely on topic. You spam unrelated and at times offensive images. Your behavior is toxic and you encourage others to engage in toxic behavior. If you leave, good. If you stay, I’ll be troll-rating you when you troll and ignoring you the rare times that you don’t. Just as I have in this thread.
Bet on it.
And I’ll be uprating everyone AG tries to attack with his passive aggressive ratings of his real or imagined enemies. I don’t care who they are or if I’ve had any rows with any of them myself. If he’s going to start a TR war, he’s going to find himself outnumbered. Personally, I wish he’d just make coherent and constructive comments (that can be done while still being contrarian). I don’t hold out a lot of hope for that. But I can make it crystal clear that blanket troll rating like he did last night, apparently irrespective of content, is not cool here.
I’m still trying to figure out how nalbar’s comment to a tip jar post in my photo diary warranted a troll rating. I thought the comment was a hoot. Saw quite a number of fairly innocuous comments TR’d simply because of the name of the commenter. Not cool. So we have someone who shouts down and talks past others in the Pond, troll rates regardless of content, and who plays victim when called out on it. And he has the nerve to tell us we’d be worse of without him. Booman really needs to lay down the law about now, especially with an impending vacation. This shit has got to stop.
Great.
Lay it down, Booman.
I don’t believe that I ever troll rated anybody during the many years that I’ve been here until this whole marduk/nalbar thing started, and until now I have pretty much restrained myself even with many months of their outrageously stupid troll ratings. In point of fact didn’t rate hardly at all, because I think that it’s a stupid, childish it’s a stupid way of agreeing or disagreeing with someone. It’s a child’s “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah insult.
You want to argue with me?
Feel free.
But give me the finger too many times and we will have it out.
Bet on it.
AG
Whatever. And yet you engaged in the very thing you said is childish. And you go on to threats from there. Class act. Class act.
downrating has been pointed out to him before.
Bet on it.
Easy money.
Have the marduk/nalbar twins not been doing the same thing here for months?
They have.
You could look it up.
AG
Going back in the archives and downrating two weeks after a post is the very definition of a troll.
It’s slightly better than what another republican has done here…going back two weeks and double downrating using their main account and a sock puppet account. But only slightly.
.
You have apparently been tasked…by yourself or perhaps by others… with turning this site into dKos Jr. Tasked with turning Booman Tribune into a lockstepping, DNC-approving, Yesman site that will once again help elect another faux liberal like Obama into power.
You…and centristfield and the rest of the neocentrists…seem to think that you speak for the Booman Tribune “community.” You don’t say shit, you just snipe. Take a look at the posts below that appear in the “Recommended” section. Posts that people actually thought through instead of kneejerking downrates and two-sentence insults.
Here is tonight’s lineup:
“Wealthcare Vote in the Senate This Week“: Essentially a post about how the so-called “representatives” of this country shine on “…constituents who do not approve of these bills. We appear to be in the majority, even in my own red state.”
“Washington Post on the Millennial Left“: An observation about how the mainstream media tries to spin the awakening of younger U.S-ians to the centrist attempts at maintaining the status quo by any means necessary.
“Europe’s Socialism Beats IMF Forecast …”: A refutation by perhaps the most thoughtful accumulator of anti-neocentrist info in this site regarding the mass media meme idea that “socialism” is headed nowhere fast.
“Believing Alternative Facts: Spicer – Bannon – Conway. Why?”: By the same poster, this time outlining the shaky evidence from the spooks about what is really going on. Read the entire interview with Seymour Hersh here. Like Assange and Snowden, Hersh’s rep has taken direct hits from the mass media…described as a tool of Russia, etc. Non-personing is their major tool.
Their only tool, when you get down to it.
Same as yours. Post enough zeroes and ones and you think that you can make people disappear. You are just mass media writ small. Very small.
“Khodorkovsky, Browder and the Magnitsky Act“: Another broadside from Oui, this time taking down the other side of this ongoing hustle, Putin and his own gangsters. As I have been saying here for several years, both sides of the hustle…domestic and/or international…need to be examined with a jaundiced eye.
Just because one side is demonstrably crooked does not mean the the other side is demonstrably not crooked.
Wake the fuck up.
“Why Dems lose: the new DCCC slogan (it’s changed)“: A simple demonstration of how the cowherd middle cannot even hire slogan makers who can cut the mustard. Groupthink at its worst.
“Senate Parliamentarian Delivers Blow to Any GOP HCR Hopes“: A paean to the Sanders forces that are trying to move the DNC further left.
And so on.
You downrating children are not “the community” of this site. You do almost nothing but snipe while people with real ideas…TarheelDem, Oui, Marie3, The Voice In The Wilderness, myself and others…try to make clear what is really happening in UniParty America.
You want to say something in opposition to what is being recommended here on a daily basis?
Go ahead.
Write some standalone posts. Let’s see how many get recommended. But don’t just sit at your computers and potshot away with downratings…unless of course you have no real ideas but the continuation of a failed democracy by any means at your puerile power.
You disgust me.
AG
Now a standalone post.
The War At Booman Tribune Between the Kneejerk Neocentrists and the Thinkers.
Comment there if you have a mind to.
If not?
Just continue to snipe and downrate.
I don’t really give a fuck.
This country is headed wherever it is headed despite anything any of us have to say here.
Buckle up.
When push comes to shove?
Then we’ll know what’s about to happen.
Watch.
AG
To quote Booman:
But that couldn’t be the reason you get troll rated so often. It must be a “neo-centrist” conspiracy to something something dKos.
Anyway, I heartily endorse your plan to move your trolling to the diaries where nobody has to read it.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA
[pause for breath}
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Your unwarranted self-reverence is looking positively Trumpian now.
wear that downrate as a badge of honor.
A cornered rat will fight!
This rarity of a lucid, on-point (even if its observations are so obvious as to be trite) comment from you — not flogging ridiculous pet conspiracy theories or your own (self-perceived) “special” insights and wisdom as fact; not hectoring/lecturing/insulting others who find those “insights” uninteresting and/or unpersuasive . . .
. . . received no downrates, only uprates (disproportionate to the actual quality of the content imo, but still).
Only when you reverted to form downthread did any of your usual critics downrate.
Hmmmm.
I wonder how quickly Shouty Spice can write a book. I’d read it.
Thank goodness for the internet. Shouty Spice might find this a useful template for the book cover.
I hope Spicer saved his Bunny suit.
Yeah, I think a tell-all book would be a seller for him. I expect we will see him on FOX or Breitbart pretty soon. He put up with a lot of crap from Trump, like being denied a meeting with the Pope on Trump’s visit to the Vatican. And whether he cared about being a lying weasel for Trump or not, he’s reached his point of no return. Good riddance.
He’s on Sean Hannity tonight
Look at the rictus grins and anxious voices desperately trying to reassure their credulous audience that “All is well!!”:
Priebus also appeared, desperate to gain Hannity’s help as well:
There goes Melissa McCarthy’s cameo gig on SNL — one of the best bits on the show.
I know! Someone suggested she could do a final Spicer-leaves-the-White-House sketch for the first show of the new season. (Of course, by then so much other poop will have hit the fan that come the Fall it will be ancient history.)
Now the odds on her winning an Emmy go up. From Variety.
Then again, she might lose to Carrie Fisher.
in that list I’d bet on Carrie.
Poor Spicer is worse off than she is, since he can only do the one character, where she’s brilliant in everything she does.
Stick a fork in it, the Spicey Chicken is done.
Funny thing about Trump: He does not seem to like firing people!
Look at how this ends up working. When Trump wants to get rid of someone, he just starts to humiliate them. And then ignore them and undermine them. Spicer’s job was taken away a few weeks ago, and Trump just keeps him sitting there, looking like a fool, doing nothing. It’s like a Seinfeld episode or something. It’s a wonder that Spicer lasted as long as he did.
The Jeff Sessions comments fits the pattern I must say – where will that lead?
At some point you can almost see Trump, getting asked about Sean Spicer and saying “Oh that guy? I guess he worked here for a while. I didn’t really have anything to do with him. I heard he didn’t fit in and left at some point, but I don’t really remember it to be honest.”
It must be really weird working in that White House.
. . . as atrios just put it:
Well, Scaramucci only got a few hours of positive media coverage. Tonights drips, Kushner and Manafort have refused to testify in public, Kushner updated his security clearance paper work with 77 assets he previously forgot, and it’s being reported the former Russian ambassador had talked to Sessions about the Trump campaign. Will he go on the Sunday shows to defend the donald’s team hoping no new thing drops Sunday morning?
. . . quotes” seem practically obligatory in this instance — imo anyway).
There’s something deeply sinister about Scaramucci that isn’t getting brought up much, starting with the famous story about him CNN was forced to withdraw, to Trump’s gleeful howls.
The thing is, Bloomberg had reported the meeting in January with the strong suggestion that Scaramucci was talking about doing business with the fund in violation of sanctions, and Business Insider later reported that Senators (Cardin and Warren, who are not on the intelligence committee but have an interest in financial skullduggery) were indeed interested in investigating it, and nobody ever told them to retract. Whatever CNN did wrong in the June story, the outline of the story itself was probably true.
Scaramucci is deep inside the dirtiest financial aspect of the Russia thing alongside his personal pal Don Jr. and Kushner, and I think the ideologues, Spicer and Priebus and Bannon, however much they may disagree with each other, are united in fearing these people are going to send them all to jail.
Scaramucci: An’ I hope little Seany makes good money now that he’s leaving. Eeze good people. An’ even if he don’t make good money, I know this guy, eeze good people too. Iz name is Vinnie Two Fingers. Any problem you ‘ave makin’ some good money, Seany, you call dis guy Vinnie Two Fingers. He’ll straighten dings out.”
Deck chairs…
Sorry for the too-small format. Here’s the original link
Jesus, all thumbs today. This should work
No worries. Enjoyed the comic.
The Spicer must flow!