Sean Spicer: King of Alternative Facts

[GreyhoundFan]

3 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Wait.  Agent just might appoint Jones for a cabinet position. 

Maybe he'll take Bannon's place. That's a scary thought, isn't it?

[onekidanddone]

1 minute ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Maybe he'll take Bannon's place. That's a scary thought, isn't it?

because CHEM TRAILS 

[Curious]

On 4/1/2017 at 1:03 AM, laPapessaGiovanna said:

Curious! You're back! 

I'm working on it   I still haven't fully transitioned to full time sitting, but I'm getting there.  We are using an (over) abundance of caution after I stupidly googled my flap surgery and saw how many of the surgeries failed once people started sitting, even well past the point they had been cleared for normal activity.   I'm trying to make 2017 the year of no hospitals!

On 3/31/2017 at 10:34 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

The WaPo has started "The Daily Spicer". Pretty scary.

Darnit.  This might get me to sub to the WaPo, after all.  They only allow viewing 3 articles per month with no sub, which I personally think is rather draconian in this day and age.  Give us 10 at least.  Right now I have to ration my viewing there due to the low limit.

Put ads on your damn site and let us view it, like everyone else!

[Curious]

On 4/10/2017 at 8:22 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

"The Daily Spicer: Press secretary discusses policy toward ‘Bissaa al-Ashar’"

I admit that watching Spicy has become something I daily look forward to.  I was a little worried they broke him those 2 calm days after the April Ryan deal.  I was watching the day he said this and I was thinking, I know my hearing gets a little muddy sometimes, but I'm pretty sure that is not what Assad's name is.

I felt like it was that moment in The Army of Darkness when Ash is supposed to say the ritual words and he forgets them and finally says "I said your damn words" when the book doesn't work properly after he mumbled the wrong words.

RE: Holocaust bungle

I admit I had a visceral reaction during that particular conference.  I honestly don't think he really meant to be offensive in the way he was.  Yes, it was a monumentally stupid thing to say and yes, he did muff it twice more, once when the reporter gave him a chance to correct course and once in his written statement.  He went on to give a full-throated apology not once, but twice on national television.   He didn't make any excuses and took full blame and said it was something that should never be done.  Given that Trump's team seems to be immune to apologizing, I was glad to see Spicy finally remember that once he had a soul and not everything can be spun.

I admit I will be sad if Spicy is dumped over the one thing he actually did that was the right thing to do after you make a mistake.

Edited April 14, 2017 by Curious
quote on second post got lost in merge

[fraurosena]

She's baaaaack!

 

[bashfulpixie]

Love her!  She does that role almost too well.

[GreyhoundFan]

I laughed myself silly at the Spicey Bunny! The WaPo did a breakdown of all the references in the SNL skit.  Melissa is going to be back as SNL host next month. I can't wait.

 

[candygirl200413]

My personal favorite was the use of bob the tomato and larry the cucumber from veggie tales

[formergothardite]

9 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

My personal favorite was the use of bob the tomato and larry the cucumber from veggie tales

That was the best! Bob and Larry made it to SNL!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Q: How do you know that Spicey is lying? A: He has his mouth open. "White House says Trump won’t release 2016 tax returns because they’re being audited"

Quote

...

“It’s been covered before. It's the same thing that was discussed during the campaign trail. The president is under audit,” Spicer told reporters during the daily news briefing. “It’s a routine audit that continues.”

Presidents and Vice Presidents are automatically subjected to tax audits by the IRS as a matter of routine practice — a fact that has not stopped previous holders of those offices from publicly releasing their returns. Such and audit does not prevent Trump from automatically releasing his returns. The White House has also declined to provide proof of audits of current and past tax returns.

Asked Monday whether the president would authorize the IRS to confirm the existence of audits involving his returns, Spicer did not answer. Instead, he suggested that voters had made up their minds about Trump's taxes.

“We’re under the same audit that has existed, and nothing has changed,” Spicer said. “The American people understood when they elected him in November.”

Later, Spicer was asked whether the White House would say that Trump would never release his tax returns.

“We’ll have to get back to you on that,” he said.

 

Edited April 17, 2017 by GreyhoundFan

[fraurosena]

5 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Q: How do you know that Spicey is lying? A: He has his mouth open. "White House says Trump won’t release 2016 tax returns because they’re being audited"

 

An audit that lasts more than a year?  Yeah, we totally believe that excuse.  We believe that, even knowing that one can release tax returns even whilst being audited. 

[HarryPotterFan]

Spicey wants voters to make up their own minds? Well I made up my mind that Trump is hiding something.

[GreyhoundFan]

11 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

An audit that lasts more than a year?  Yeah, we totally believe that excuse.  We believe that, even knowing that one can release tax returns even whilst being audited. 

2016 taxes are not due until tomorrow. He probably hasn't filed them yet. And even though POTUS and VPOTUS are routinely audited, he wouldn't have received an official notification of that yet.

[fraurosena]

13 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

2016 taxes are not due until tomorrow. He probably hasn't filed them yet. And even though POTUS and VPOTUS are routinely audited, he wouldn't have received an official notification of that yet.

Yes, all true. But I thought people were demanding his tax returns for the last 5 years, like every other president before him in the last 30 years or more (I'm not sure of the details). Are all the Toddler's tax returns for those last 5 years under audit? All this time? I don't think so... 

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Yes, all true. But I thought people were demanding his tax returns for the last 5 years, like every other president before him in the last 30 years or more (I'm not sure of the details). Are all the Toddler's tax returns for those last 5 years under audit? All this time? I don't think so... 

He says his returns are under audit. Of course, he never gives any specifics. He could authorize the IRS to release the fact that they are under audit. And, of course, he refuses to release them, even though an audit doesn't preclude him from doing so. He's just being a ass...an opaque one.

[fraurosena]

Ok, I know Gronk is a player for the Patriots, (owned by Robert Kraft one of the Toddler's cronies), and that he was almost certainly put up to this. I also know Spicey is a lying douchebag. But this is still quite funny though...

 

[fraurosena]

Spicey stumbling, bumbling and fumbling... but he can't seem to find an alternative fact to use as a spin to this question 

 

[candygirl200413]

@fraurosena I went to school with the guy who asked the first question, before I transferred out.

Also does Spicey do like research before he talks? Or is he just bad a of a speaker that he gets so nervous and can't form words?

[GreyhoundFan]

29 minutes ago, candygirl200413 said:

@fraurosena I went to school with the guy who asked the first question, before I transferred out.

Also does Spicey do like research before he talks? Or is he just bad a of a speaker that he gets so nervous and can't form words?

I think he's trying to ensure he represents the tangerine toddler's words and actions, so he ends up saying stupid crap.

[Cartmann99]

Let's take a peek at the latest rankings of who is the dumbest person/thing in America:

1. Bullshit Spice aka Sean Spicer
2. Old Stump
3. Bag of Hair
4. Some reality show about naked cannibal truckers playing bingo in a Wal-Mart parking lot. The winner of each round gets to select another competitor to eat.

Once again, Bullshit Spice wins!

 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

@fraurosena I went to school with the guy who asked the first question, before I transferred out.

Also does Spicey do like research before he talks? Or is he just bad a of a speaker that he gets so nervous and can't form words?

I think he is indeed a bad speaker. But i think he's more so, because he knows full well he's spouting bullshit. I guess he thought he was lucky getting this job. Hurrah, he must have thought, I'm going to be on tv all the time, I'm going to be famous. 

And now he's found out that in order to be famous, in order to have his face on tv, he's got to tell the lies all the time, try to deflect and defend idiotic statements by the presidunce and his cronies, and then get all the backlash for it too. Things haven't exactly turned out how he had hoped.

Stupid, sorry-ass Spicer. 

[GreyhoundFan]

I didn't see this exchange, because I'd rather get multiple root canals than watch Spicey, but found this interesting. "Breitbart’s frustration with President Trump just boiled over". It's an annotated article, so I can't quote it easily, but it's an interesting read.

 

[formergothardite]

On 4/20/2017 at 3:34 PM, fraurosena said:

I think he is indeed a bad speaker. But i think he's more so, because he knows full well he's spouting bullshit.

Yep. You can tell he knows he is lying. The thing with Trump is that when he makes insane claims, he totally believes he is right. Spicy doesn't. You can watch him spinning lies and tell he doesn't believe a single word of this shit. He looks awful, but selling your soul will do that to you. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Not sure if this should be in the main Agent Orange thread or the Spicey thread, so I flipped a coin. "Sean Spicer’s admission: Trump dismissed Obama’s warning about Michael Flynn as sour grapes"

Quote

We've known for a while that the White House ignored Sally Yates's warning about Michael Flynn. Now we come to find out that it also ignored an earlier warning from President Barack Obama himself.

And the White House's explanation for it is oh-so-Trump: It viewed the warning as sour grapes from a loser.

...

In a briefing Monday afternoon, White House press secretary Sean Spicer weighed in on the latter case, and he suggested that Obama's advice was taken with a grain of salt because Flynn had excoriated Obama during the 2016 campaign. Spicer wasn't quite so blunt, but it was clear that Obama's comments were at least somewhat dismissed as the complaints of a loser.

Here's what Spicer said:

SPICER: It's true that President Obama made it known that he wasn't exactly a fan of General Flynn's, which is — frankly, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, given that General Flynn had worked for President Obama, was an outspoken critic of President Obama's shortcomings, specifically as it related to his lack of strategy confronting ISIS and other threats around that were facing America.

…

QUESTION: If a sitting president raises the name of one individual, why wouldn't that give the president-elect pause? I understand what you're saying — the caveat about the fact that he campaigned against Hillary Clinton, et cetera. But wouldn't that give the incoming president pause?

SPICER: I don't know that I agree with your characterization. He made it clear that he wasn't a fan of his, and I don't think that should've come as a surprise, considering the role that General Flynn played in the campaign, criticizing his …

QUESTION: So, it didn't give him any pause at all?

SPICER: No, I think if you know what we knew at the time, which is that the security clearance that he had, had been re-approved in April of that year, and they took — not only did they re-approve it, but then they took no steps to suspend it. So, the question has to be what did they do if they had real concerns beyond just not having — you know, not liking him for some of the comments that he made.

Spicer's point here makes some logical sense: Basically, if Obama knew Flynn was such a liability, why didn't he do something more than warn his successor about it? As Philip Rucker reports, though, Obama didn't offer a damning reason, so much as “a confluence of red flags,” according to a former Obama administration official: Flyinn's job performance, his comments about Islam, and his attendance at an event hosted by Russian state-sponsored television station RT in Moscow.

But the other part of Spicer's comments says a lot about how the Trump team conducts business. Then-President-elect Trump apparently took a warning from the sitting president of the United States not to hire a specific adviser and dismissed it as partisan politics. He didn't think it was all that serious because he thought Obama was just sore about Flynn attacking him. And he apparently didn't see it as any reason to increase vetting of Flynn beyond his security clearance.

In Trump's black-and-white world, there are only winners and losers; Flynn was a winner, and Obama was a loser bent on evening the score.

...

Regardless of whether the actual reason, the explanation for dismissing Obama's warnings is plenty telling. The White House had multiple, relatively early warnings about how the Flynn situation could blow up in its face. It heeded neither of them — in part, at least, because it declined to take the cautioning seriously — and it wound up paying the price.

The White House has shown on plenty of occasions that it is hardly the well-oiled machine it sometimes claims to be. This is turning out to be Case Study No. 1 in that.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Hey Spicey, fuck you: "Spicer doesn’t want to ‘smear’ ‘good man’ Flynn — but is happy to disparage Sally Yates"

Quote

Both Michael T. Flynn and Sally Yates committed about three decades of their lives in service to the United States. Each served various administrations. And each was asked to step down from a prominent position by President Trump.

...

The distinction between the two situations is that Flynn was acting in service to Trump and Yates in opposition. So, when asked about the two during his news briefing Tuesday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer was magnanimous in insisting that the media not “smear” Flynn’s record — then proceeding to cast aspersions on Yates’s.

The Daily Caller’s Kaitlan Collins asked Spicer to explain why the president continues to defend Flynn publicly despite his having been asked to leave the administration.

“I think Mike Flynn is somebody who honorably served our country in uniform for over 30 years,” Spicer replied. “As he’s noted, Lieutenant General Flynn was asked for his resignation because he misled the vice president. But beyond that, I think he did have an honorable career, he served with distinction in uniform for over 30 years, and the president does not want to smear a good man.”

The timeline is correct; Flynn was commissioned in 1981 and served in the military until 2014. His leaving at that point, though, seems germane to Spicer’s praise. Flynn was fired by President Barack Obama, too, asked to leave his position as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the middle of Obama’s second term. Flynn frames this as payback for his opposing Obama’s agenda in fighting the Islamic State militant group, but other reports indicate that he was “disruptive” and “chaotic” in his leadership of the agency. Regardless, Trump tapped him to serve as his national security adviser.

...

“Do you think it’s worrisome that he was still doing that when he was potentially a target of Russian blackmail?” she asked.

Spicer then appeared to suggest that the warning from Yates was dismissed because it was from Yates.

“Let’s look at, again, how this came down,” he replied. “Someone who is not exactly a supporter of the president’s agenda, who, a couple of days after this first conversation took place, refused to uphold a lawful order of the president’s. Who is not exactly someone who was excited about President Trump taking office or his agenda.”

Spicer was asked in subsequent questions to explain his comments about Yates’s loyalty to the administration.

“Appointed by the Obama administration and a strong supporter of Clinton,” Spicer said at one point. Asked to clarify his assertion that she was a “supporter of Clinton,” Spicer later said Yates was “widely rumored to play a large role in the Justice Department if Hillary Clinton had won.”

NBC’s Hallie Jackson pressed him on that point. Was it the right call for Flynn to sit in on meetings despite Yates’s warning?

“What you have is somebody who was an Obama appointee coming in and saying — you have somebody who you have to wonder why they’re telling you something,” Spicer replied.

“You said it was widely rumored that she wanted to be a part of the Clinton White House potentially,” Jackson replied.

Spicer’s rationale? Yates was “somebody who clearly showed by the fact that career attorneys told her that she should sign the president’s lawful order and then chose not to do it — that vindicates the president’s point. This is not somebody who was looking out — my point is, we were correct in the assumptions we made at the time.”

What Spicer appears to be saying is that the Trump White House didn’t trust or believe Yates when she first came to raise concerns about Flynn for no other reason than that she was an “Obama appointee” — a decision that was later validated when she declined to enforce Trump’s immigration ban (which, it’s worth noting, has been blocked by the courts while its constitutionality is evaluated). That opposition to Trump is cause enough to dismiss her as being a Clinton loyalist, apparently. That is enough for her professionalism to be smeared.

We’ll note that the source of the “rumors” about her playing a role in the Clinton White House is unclear. In January, Axios’s Mike Allen published a list of likely Clinton Cabinet appointees had she won in November, compiled after talking to Clinton campaign officials. Yates’s name isn’t included; the picks for attorney general are “Loretta Lynch retained, Jennifer Granholm, Jamie Gorelick, Tom Perez.”

It’s also critical to point out that Yates is an “Obama appointee” in the sense that her elevation to deputy attorney general occurred under him. She began her Justice Department career in 1989 — eight years after Flynn — working as an assistant U.S. attorney in Georgia under Bob Barr, who would later go on to serve in Congress as a Republican. In 2014, she was chosen to serve as Eric H. Holder Jr.’s chief aide and confirmed by the Senate. She served in the Justice Department for more than 11 years under Republican presidents and for 16 under Democrats.

Yates’s role in the Flynn saga was simply to warn the White House about his behavior — a warning that dealt specifically with the cause of Flynn’s losing his job. You’d think that she’d be the hero of the story, especially given that Flynn, too, was an Obama appointee.

But Flynn publicly broke with the Obama administration and embraced Trump, in a manner that his former colleagues found baffling. Yates did neither of those things, remaining neutral except in that she cited a legal rationale for opposing a critical Trump initiative.

Therefore, in the vernacular of the White House press secretary, she is not a “good man” and, thus, is fair game for being smeared.