Kellyanne Conway Mentions -- TODAY -- That She was Sexually Assaulted

A couple of hours ago, if you had asked me whether I'd ever immediately be suspicious of a woman who'd claimed to have been sexually assaulted, I probably would've said no. Then, on this Sunday morning's political-talk TV, Kellyanne Conway said she'd been sexually assaulted.

The woman who over the past 2 years has been the 2nd most-notorious, most-shameless, most-obvious and most-disgusting liar in the entire world, closely following the man she's been working for for those 2 years, The President of the United States, who has bragged about assaulting women, and then lied and said he never bragged about it, after we all heard him on tape bragging about it.

You may have heard the story of the boy who cried wolf. The point of the story is not whether wolves actually showed up or not. Wolves do show up in the story. The point of the story is that when they did show up, nobody believed the boy who was trying to warn them about the wolves, because the boy had proven himself to be a lying sack of crap.

On CNN this morning, on Jake Tapper's "State of the Union," in a conversation about Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court, Conway said, “I feel very empathetic, frankly, for victims of sexual assault and sexual harassment and rape. I’m a victim of sexual assault.”

First and foremost: if Kellyanne said that the sky is blue, I'd have to go outside and check, because it had been Kellyanne who said it. Secondly, she's claiming NOW that she has been assaulted. The same woman who has been trotted out over and over by the Trump administration during their frequent sexual-harassment and assault scandals in order to criticize the press for using the issue of sexual harassment and assault politically.

But she didn't stop by claiming, TODAY, that she has been sexually assaulted. Tapper, quite naturally, pointed out that this is the first time that she has publicly mentioned being assaulted, and that she works for a President who says that every single woman who claims that he has assaulted them is lying. Conway responded by saying:

"Don’t conflate that with this and certainly don’t conflate that with what happened to me. It would be a huge mistake, Jake. Let’s not do it. Let’s not always bring Trump into everything that happens in this universe. That’s mistake number one."

This is another example of the sheer head-spinning depth and shamelessness of Conway's dishonesty. If she didn't work for Trump, you and I would never have heard her name. If Kavanaugh, the President's nominee for the Supreme Court, weren't under very serious suspicion of multiple acts of sexual assault, the same as the President himself and many other men close to him, nobody would've been talking about sexual assault on the Sunday-morning political-talk shows today. Tapper didn't bring Trump into this conversation: Trump was already right in the middle of it, of his own doing. But today, as always, no matter what the topic, Kellyanne tried to make it sound as if Trump and those with Trump were being persecuted for reasons of unfathomable, unreasonable, fanatical partisanship. As if his critics, and not Trump, were the one doing violence to truth and integrity.

Well, you know Kellyanne: just chock-full of shit, right up to her chin, today as always.

Cooper's Eyeroll At Conway Due To Sexism?

This was onscreen yesterday: Anderson Cooper looking as if he had enough of Kellyanne Conway's defense of Trump.

Conway then accused Cooper of rolling his eyes at her because of sexism.

No, Kellyanne, it's because of your nonstop nonsense in defense of your boss. It's in response to your relentless polishing of that turd.

Cooper, a sexist? That just makes all of us roll our eyes at you more -- much like almost everything else you've said in public since you started working for Trump.

Republicans are suddenly concerned about sexism? Wow. You want to strike a blow against sexism? Quit your job, and tell the public some true things about Trump. That would be a huge blow against sexism. It would also be a public admission about what a bullshitter you've been ever since July 1, 2016, the day you started working for Trump. But we all know that about you already. It's been really, really, really, really obvious. I think the vast majority of people would be very quick to forgive you, if you just -- stopped.

Now, about you, Anderson. Can it be that your now-iconic eyeroll was a sign that you were about to -- express exactly what you were thinking and feeling, right there on the air? I'm a big supporter of Hunter S Thompson's position on objective journalism: that it doesn't exist. I think that you and most journalists make the horrible mistake of not telling your audiences what you know and how you feel about what you know, because it wouldn't be "objective." Well, don't worry about that, Anderson, because objectivity doesn't exist. Just let it rip, just as if the cameras weren't rolling.

I've been wondering whether things like your eyeroll, and headlines in the mainstream media coming closer and closer to just saying "Trump is a liar," are cracks in this useless "objectivity." I hope so. I hope you guys have finally had enough, so that you'll finally just react honestly to things like the Trump administration. Just as if the cameras weren't rolling. That would increase the amount of useful information you impart to your readers by several hundred percent. What are you waiting for: journalists being arrested for criticizing the country's political leadership, as has been happening unter Erdogan in Turkey -- Erdogan, for whom Trump is full of praise? Are you waiting for coast-to-coast martial law? Concentration camps? What? What are you waiting for?

Trump, Brilliance, Capitalism

Don't Dismiss Trump's Attacks on the Media as Mere Stupidity. We should assume they are darkly brilliant, says Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal in Time.

Both Trump and Stephens, who begins his piece in Time with ridiculous assertions about the integrity of his employer, the Wall Street Journal, which in reality has become just another right-wing Murdoch noise machine, should be seen for the morons they are. You've got to be pretty stupid not to see that Trump is stupid, or not to see how Murdoch has turned the Journal into a joke.

I'm tired of claims that Trump is brilliant. He's not merely pretending to be a buffoon, he actually is one, unlike many other leading Republicans, who, although certainly not rocket scientists, are also not the idiots they are currently pretending to be in their agonized efforts to argue that the President is making sense about something, and/or not really saying the idiotic things he obviously is saying. Kellyanne Conway is perhaps the most strikingly obvious example, in the way that she has said utterly different things about Trump before and after he hired her.

Many of the scientists and engineers who are improving solar and wind power and developing other green sources of energy, and many of the entrepreneurs getting them up and running, actually are brilliant. Trump, and his boss Putin, embody the stupid approach to energy policy: double down on petrochemicals. Artists, teachers, philosophers often are downright brilliant, and in the US we are pearls currently cast before the swine Trump.

Trump, along with the AIDS Medication Douchebag Martin Shkreli, embodies pure capitalism, and demonstrates that it requires crudity and insensitivity rather than intelligence. You remember the infuriatingly stupid grin on Shkreli's face as he confronted intense scrutiny by the media and by legislators after he obtained the manufacturing license for the AIDS medication Daraprim and immediately raised its price from $13.50 to $750 per dosage? Of course you remember. That sort of grin, in that sort of situation, is the sort of thing which sears itself into the memory. He was grinning because he knew that he had followed the rules of capitalism perfectly.

What he didn't know -- has he learned it in the meantime? -- is that becoming the most despised jerk in the US was going to have an effect on his life, no matter how closely he followed those rules.

Capitalism teaches that the person with the greatest amount of wealth has achieved the greatest amount of success. That's all that capitalism teaches about success: buy low, sell high, done. Most capitalists realize, sometimes consciously, often not, that there are many other factors in success and failure than the size of one's stack. When a person's ideas of success and failure are really, actually, exclusively about the bottom line, which is actually only rarely the case, the result is horrible and repulsive, like Shkreli, and like the current President of the United States.

Unfortunately, the realization that capitalism has some big problems is often not conscious. In the United States more than in some other places, the unwillingness to treat capitalism as something which can and should be examined critically, is very widespread. Capitalism is often talked about as if it were as inevitable as gravity, and as impossible to wish away, and that nothing better will ever be able to replace it.

It seems to me that the 2007-2008 financial crisis led more people to criticize capitalism as a whole than had done so previously. Maybe Trump will wake up still more people about it.