Steve Bannon is an awful father and a wife beater

[ShepherdontheRock]

Apologies if someone's already posted this, but I feel like this deserves its own thread. 

Since Steve Bannon wants the media to not say mean things about the regime, and wants to run the country into the ground I think it's appropriate that everyone knows he's also a shitty person in his private life. 

I've found, for your perusal and disgust, some links that have, redacted, court papers about his divorce procedings as well as child support proceedings from his second ex-wife, Mary Louise Piccard. They're a hard read, but here are some highlights: 

- Underpaid or outright didn't pay his child/spousal support. When he was making $500,000 a year, and had a lot more money than that, so he really had no excuse.

-Went for long periods of time without contact with his daughters

-Acted abusively towards daughters when he did see them. 

-Threatened administrators of schools where daughters would be enrolled. Flipped out over the possibility of his daughters attending school where Jewish children attended.

-This is less confirmable, but apparently he told Piccard he would not marry her if amniocentesis did not come back normal 

https://theopporeport.com/2016/12/02/the-bannon-files-divorce-records-reveal-marital-discord-and-questionable-parenting/

In addition, here's a link to a police report about Bannon choking Piccard. She dropped charges because he threatened her, from what I understand. 

http://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000156-c3f8-dd14-abfe-fbfbbe310001

I'm not necessarily the quickest to believe everything, but to be honest it looks like Piccard has her story straight and it's not like Bannon has denied it.

If we see fit, maybe we could put these in a sticky, a la the Josh Duggar police reports? I think it's important for these docs to be out there, especially with everything going on. 

[Childless]

34 minutes ago, ShepherdontheRock said:

Apologies if someone's already posted this, but I feel like this deserves its own thread. 

Since Steve Bannon wants the media to not say mean things about the regime, and wants to run the country into the ground I think it's appropriate that everyone knows he's also a shitty person in his private life. 

I've found, for your perusal and disgust, some links that have, redacted, court papers about his divorce procedings as well as child support proceedings from his second ex-wife, Mary Louise Piccard. They're a hard read, but here are some highlights: 

- Underpaid or outright didn't pay his child/spousal support. When he was making $500,000 a year, and had a lot more money than that, so he really had no excuse.

-Went for long periods of time without contact with his daughters

-Acted abusively towards daughters when he did see them. 

-Threatened administrators of schools where daughters would be enrolled. Flipped out over the possibility of his daughters attending school where Jewish children attended.

-This is less confirmable, but apparently he told Piccard he would not marry her if amniocentesis did not come back normal 

https://theopporeport.com/2016/12/02/the-bannon-files-divorce-records-reveal-marital-discord-and-questionable-parenting/

In addition, here's a link to a police report about Bannon choking Piccard. She dropped charges because he threatened her, from what I understand. 

http://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000156-c3f8-dd14-abfe-fbfbbe310001

I'm not necessarily the quickest to believe everything, but to be honest it looks like Piccard has her story straight and it's not like Bannon has denied it.

If we see fit, maybe we could put these in a sticky, a la the Josh Duggar police reports? I think it's important for these docs to be out there, especially with everything going on. 

Sadly, this does not surprise me.  Usually people who are horrible to everyone they meet are horrible to loved ones also.  Shitty people are shitty people no matter who they interact with.

[JMarie]

It's probably better for the daughters that the dad wasn't around.

[GreyhoundFan]

4 hours ago, JMarie said:

It's probably better for the daughters that the dad wasn't around.

Amen. I can't imagine having him as a father.

Not related to his parenting (or lack therof) and domestic violence, the WaPo has published a few articles about Bannon in the last couple of days that are terrifying. "Steve Bannon is Trump’s conscience. Yikes."

Spoiler

Donald Trump seems to think he’s still on his reality TV show shouting, “You’re fired!” while President Stephen K. Bannon is busy drafting executive orders with his favorite black crayon.

Such is the surreal universe in which we find ourselves. Those who thought they were electing Trump to the presidency likely have never heard of Jerzy Kosinski — author of the novel and later the movie “Being There,” in which protagonist Chance the gardener, a simpleton who worked for a wealthy benefactor, is mistaken for an aristocrat named Chauncey Gardiner through a grand misunderstanding born of magical thinking.

When Gardiner’s employer dies and the gardener is forced to enter the larger world, his body of knowledge consists only of what he has seen on television. When he speaks about flowers and plants, others interpret his simple words as insightful and profound observations on economics and foreign policy. They hear and see what they need to see and hear. Finally, Chauncey is selected as the perfect next president based solely on people’s utterly incorrect interpretation of him.

Similarly, candidate Trump shouted nonsense to cheering crowds who decided that he was brilliant and insightful. He’s no simple mind, as far as we know (though one wonders why so much family is constantly in attendance), and the titular president of the United States is currently Trump. But it’s Bannon who seems to be pulling the levers — running the show — unelected, inaccessible and unaccountable.

The rumpled former naval officer and filmmaker must be given credit where due. He obviously has a Soviet’s grasp of the power of propaganda, an admitted mission to restore economic nationalism and a high tolerance for the intolerant. His Breitbart news franchise was a welcoming haven for white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

If Karl Rove was George W. Bush’s brain, Bannon is Trump’s conscience.

The noted parallels to Kosinski’s inspired character, meanwhile, are almost too on the nose to merit further comment. But even those who noticed the similarities much earlier in this electoral psycho-saga may be forgiven if they’re surprised by the accuracy with which life imitates art.

With little more than a week in office, President Bannon has been operating at a frantic pace. As Trump sits dutifully at his desk, signing executive orders and memorandums — banning mostly Muslim travelers and doing away with acting attorney general Sally Yates — Bannon grabs a seat on the National Security Council.

Though true that previous administrations have approved visits by political advisers, including David Axelrod during the Obama years, there’s at least one significant difference. Within a day of the Friday afternoon blitzkrieg that ultimately deleted Yates, two council members specifically required to advise the president on security matters — the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — were stripped of their regular seats on the NSC’s principals committee. Now why would this be?

Perhaps Bannon needed a little more elbow room and fewer ears during discussions about which American citizens should die in the name of national security. Until now, such targets have been limited to al-Qaeda militant Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in 2011. As, too, was his 16-year-old son two weeks later. As, also, reportedly, was his 8-year-old daughter this past Sunday during a raid that also cost the life of a member of SEAL Team 6.

To what end? Was this yet another of Trump’s measuring schticks?

The precedent for killing an American citizen was set by President Barack Obama, to be sure. But who knows where the lines will be drawn now? Every day is a jack-in-the-box — or a dozen — a fresh page from Hieronymus Bosch’s sketchpad. Even some of the so-called deplorables are beginning to get twitchy. At first they wrote me to say, “I’m slightly terrified,” and, more recently, “I’m downright scared,” as just one example.

The smart set says, why are you surprised? Trump is doing what he said he would. He’s a different kind of president. Different rules. The media should sit down and shut up. People who don’t like the president’s policies should get lost.

Whatever tiny ray of hope people held out in the belief that Trump ultimately would behave rationally — respectful of protocol, with caution and care, without haste and with wisdom — has been extinguished by a strategy of maximum chaos executed by shock and awe. With heads spinning, if they’re not rolling, most won’t know what hit them until it’s too late. It’s called distraction.

Just as President Bannon intended.

 

"For Bannon, the game has only just begun"

Spoiler

At the red-hot center of President Trump’s first 11 days in office has been his chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who seeks to organize a global populist movement for “Judeo-Christian” values and against radical Islam.

Bannon is the intellectual center of the new administration. For nearly a decade he has been advertising his desire to turn America and the world upside down. He’s now doing exactly that. Trump’s “America First” trade policies and his anti-refugee travel ban are early glimmers of the revolution Bannon has long been advocating.

As the uproar over Trump’s actions grows, it’s important to distinguish between policies that are politically controversial and those that actually undermine the country’s foundations. The haphazard executive order banning travel by people from seven Muslim-majority countries seems to me the latter: It strikes at America’s core values.

The folly of the travel ban is that it is producing the opposite of what Trump says he wanted. It weakens U.S. alliances, emboldens our adversaries and puts the country at greater risk. It’s not just misguided and heartless; it’s dangerous. It affirms the Islamic State’s narrative that it is at war with an anti-Muslim America.

The weakness of Bannon’s strategy in these first days of Trump’s presidency has been its impatience and disorganization. The White House’s opening salvos have been rushed, poorly planned shots that resulted in what Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called a “self-inflicted wound.” In his seeming counsel to Trump, Bannon appears to have overlooked Benjamin Franklin’s famous advice that haste makes waste.

Some critics have argued that Bannon is a white nationalist and, even, a neo-Nazi. What follows is a more measured account, sticking to his own explanations of how he sees the world — and seeks to overturn the establishment’s network of trade and security policies.

As with many revolutionaries, Bannon’s story is that of a wealthy man who came to see himself as a vanguard for the masses. He rose from a middle-class life in Richmond through an uneventful stint with the Navy; but his life changed after he enrolled at Harvard Business School, joined Goldman Sachs, founded an investment bank and made a fortune. He began directing conservative agitprop documentaries in 2004, but the 2008 financial crisis was a turning point. Bannon saw it as a betrayal of working people, and he embraced the tea party’s conservative revolt against Republican and Democratic elites.

Bannon gained a powerful platform in 2012 when he became chairman of the hard-right Breitbart.com after the death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart. In an April 2010 speech to a tea party gathering in New York that was posted on YouTube, Bannon’s radical rhetoric evoked the 1960s and fused left and right: “It doesn’t take a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows, and the wind’s blowing off the high plains of the country through the prairie, and lighting a fire that’s going to burn all the way to Washington.”

By 2014, Bannon saw himself leading what he called a “global tea party movement” against a financial elite that he described as “the party of Davos.” In a summer 2014 speech broadcast to a conference inside the Vatican, he railed against Wall Street bailouts and “crony capitalists.” Racists and anti-Semites might get attracted to this movement, he said, “but there’s always elements who turn up at these things, whether it’s militia guys or whatever . . . it all gets kind of washed out, right?”

The rise of the Islamic State in 2014 gave Bannon a new rallying cry: “We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism,” he told the Vatican audience. “I believe you should take a very, very, very aggressive stance against radical Islam,” he said.

Breitbart’s London branch became a leading advocate of Brexit, and on the day Britain voted to leave the European Union, Breitbart thundered: “There’s panic in the skyscrapers. A popular revolution against globalism is underway.” Bannon pressed that theme after Trump’s victory, telling Breitbart’s radio show on Dec. 30 it was only the “top of the first inning.”

Last Friday’s travel ban echoed themes Bannon has developed over a half-dozen years. It brought cheers from the right-wing parties in Europe that are Bannon’s allies. “Well done,” tweeted Dutch populist Geert Wilders. “What annoys the media and the politicians is that Trump honors his promises,” tweeted French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen .

Bannon undeniably has a powerful radical vision. But this time, he may have blundered. The travel ban has triggered a counterrevolt among millions of Americans who saw his target as the Statue of Liberty.

 

Finally: "Two theories about why Steve Bannon midwifed such a bad executive order"

Spoiler

It’s been a few days since the White House issued an executive order regarding refugees and visa holders that generated just a wee bit of legal and political blowback. There seems to be a whole lot of confusion about how things went down and why. So let’s stipulate a few facts before speculating on some possible explanations.

FACT #1: This was Steve Bannon’s baby. We know from the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush that Bannon has gained greater influence over Trump at the expense of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and everyone else in the West Wing not related to Trump. Bannon’s appointment to the National Security Council has raised more than a few eyebrows, and it’s indicative of his influence.

According to multiple news reports, Bannon was the architect of much of the first week of the Trump administration. Regarding this order in particular, my Post colleague Karen DeYong reports that, Bannon “was directly involved in shaping the controversial immigration mandate.” CNN’s reporting offers some details backing this up:

Friday night, DHS arrived at the legal interpretation that the executive order restrictions applying to seven countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan and Yemen — did not apply to people with lawful permanent residence, generally referred to as green cardholders.

The White House overruled that guidance overnight, according to officials familiar with the rollout. That order came from the President’s inner circle, led by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. Their decision held that, on a case-by-case basis, DHS could allow green cardholders to enter the U.S.

FACT #2: This executive order was a bad idea that was incompetently drafted and executed. Sometimes in American foreign policy, the U.S. government takes actions that advance short-term interests at the expense of long-standing American values. Sometimes the reverse is true, and the president takes actions that might harm short-term interests because it accords with what Americans think is the right thing to do. Fortunately, America’s enlightened self-interest means that foreign policy actions can often advance both U.S. interests and values.

Trump’s executive order managed the rare feat of harming both American values and American interests at the same time. The setback to American values is so obvious and manifest that no further explanation is needed. But this stupid, panicky order also harms American interests. If the United States wants to prosecute a successful campaign against the Islamic State, it needs the cooperation of locals in Syria and Iraq, not to mention the Iraqi government. By insulting local allies, this order does the exact opposite of that. The propaganda that the Islamic State or al-Qaeda will be able to create because of this idiocy is another windfall for anti-American terrorists.

Don’t take my word for it, take the word of counterterrorism experts. Or U.S. military commanders in the field. Or GOP members of Congress. Or other Republicans sympathetic to Trump’s populist message. Or even the U.S. attorneys tasked to defend the executive order in court.

Take a moment to appreciate the breathtaking own-goal that this order accomplished, in no small part because it appears that it was drafted without any executive branch review at all. Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes is a pretty levelheaded guy when it comes to national security issues. In his analysis of this executive order, however, he doesn’t pull his punches:

NBC is reporting that the document was not reviewed by DHS, the Justice Department, the State Department, or the Department of Defense, and that National Security Council lawyers were prevented from evaluating it. Moreover, the New York Times writes that Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, the agencies tasked with carrying out the policy, were only given a briefing call while Trump was actually signing the order itself. Yesterday, the Department of Justice gave a “no comment” when asked whether the Office of Legal Counsel had reviewed Trump’s executive orders — including the order at hand. (OLC normally reviews every executive order.)

This order reads to me, frankly, as though it was not reviewed by competent counsel at all.

Which bring us to …

FACT #3: Bannon is not a stupid guy. I have talked to a number of people who have known Bannon through the years, and they all say the same thing: Regardless of what you think of his ideology, he is an extremely intelligent individual.

So those are the facts, and yet it seems difficult to reconcile all three of them.

So what explains this? I can think of a couple of possibilities. Let’s go from the least to most far-fetched.

The most plausible story to assume in this instance is incompetence. Ordinarily, when the federal government does something stupid, it’s best to assume incompetence rather than malevolence. This is Bannon’s first week in a White House job and, like most other really smart people who lack high-level government experience, there will be a lot of rookie mistakes at the outset. The Trump administration will be different from past administrations on a lot of dimensions, but screwing up in the first few months is not one of them. This is particularly true given the abject lack of government experience among Trump’s White House staff. Maybe this is just a case of smart people doing stupid things because they are inexperienced.

The trouble with this explanation is that some very smart people don’t think that this was an accident. Indeed, folks not prone to conspiracy theories see something amiss. Here’s Wittes again:

Put simply, I don’t believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose. This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post-9/11 era about which I have ever said this. It’s a grave charge, I know, and I’m not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives.

When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.

And here’s Kevin Drum:

In cases like this, the smart money is usually on incompetence, not malice. But this looks more like deliberate malice to me. Bannon wanted turmoil and condemnation. He wanted this executive order to get as much publicity as possible. He wanted the ACLU involved. He thinks this will be a PR win….

oth sides think that maximum exposure is good for them. Liberals think middle America will be appalled at Trump’s callousness. Bannon thinks middle America will be appalled that lefties and the elite media are taking the side of terrorists. After a week of skirmishes, this is finally a hill that both sides are willing to die for. Who’s going to win?

Drum thinks this was done for domestic politics reasons, which leads to the second explanation: This is security theater. Trump spent his entire campaign whipping up hysteria about the terrorist threat. As previously noted, this executive order does not accomplish that, but it does make a big splash. It’s a highly visible action that might make Americans somehow feel more secure. That it hurts foreigners is just a bonus for Bannon.

This is possible, but it is worth noting that this action, as well as the counterproductive rhetoric toward Mexico, has harmed rather than helped Trump’s approval ratings.

It is possible that we will never know the precise mix of malevolence and incompetence that led to this outcome. What we do know, however, is that the outcome has significantly harmed America’s standing in the world and its national security interests.

As time passes, the foreign policy bureaucracy will push back on these kind of counterproductive actions. As Cabinet secretaries staff up, they’ll soon act as constraints on the Trump White House.

The thing is, the president of the United States is clearly much more simpatico with his staff than his Cabinet. He never admits error. And he’s the most powerful man in the federal government. Right now, Trump is listening to Bannon. And whether due to incompetence or malfeasance, Bannon is making America less safe again.

 

As horrible of some of the extreme right-wingers have been in the past, Bannon has them all beat. He is a scary, scary being (note I didn't write human).

[candygirl200413]

He has been in the background of some of Trumps EO signings and I was telling my sister that he makes a face like an evil person who just can't wait till he achieves white supermacy.

[ShepherdontheRock]

He's just a really slimy human being all around. Even seeing photos of him makes my skin crawl. 

6 hours ago, JMarie said:

It's probably better for the daughters that the dad wasn't around.

You're not wrong, @JMarie. But I imagine it must suck for them to see him in this position. I can't imagine they think very highly of him.

The hypocrisy of the "pro-life" crowd supporting these kinds of people. I mean, Rick Santorum, one of the patron saints of the pro-life evangelical politicians, has a daughter with Edward's syndrome, and his family goes around talking about how this has affected their faith and aren't we so lucky to have this sweet little angel in our home? And this shithead Bannon is all like "well if the twins have any birth defects I'm not marrying you." Such family values. 

[JMarie]

1 hour ago, ShepherdontheRock said:

He's just a really slimy human being all around. Even seeing photos of him makes my skin crawl. 

You're not wrong, @JMarie. But I imagine it must suck for them to see him in this position. I can't imagine they think very highly of him.

The hypocrisy of the "pro-life" crowd supporting these kinds of people. I mean, Rick Santorum, one of the patron saints of the pro-life evangelical politicians, has a daughter with Edward's syndrome, and his family goes around talking about how this has affected their faith and aren't we so lucky to have this sweet little angel in our home? And this shithead Bannon is all like "well if the twins have any birth defects I'm not marrying you." Such family values. 

They got married three days before the twins were born.  I'm guessing the holdup was his doing, not hers.

[Childless]

There is probably one thing that would be better if Trump were impeached and Pence took over.  Pence would at least dump Bannon.  I can't imagine Pence approves of him.  I don't for a second think Pence is actually Christian or gives a fuck about Jesus, but he does care about pretending to be so to garner the evangelical vote.  So, he'd be likely to get rid of the blatant garbage in Trump's administration.

[Howl]

Last week I was wondering about the power behind the throne.  This clarifies and thanks for all of the excellent links.   

Yesterday was Texas Muslim Day, with a rally at the capitol in Austin.  Last year at the state capitol, some crazy anti-Islamic protesters managed to get to the dais and cause a ruckus. This year around two thousand people showed up and linked arms to provide a barrier to any crazies.  

While Trump and Bannon are dog whistling and throwing red meat out to their supporters, a grass-roots movement in this country is gaining some serious momentum and I don't think it's going to go away.  

I mentioned in another thread that two mosques in Texas were burned in the middle of the night in January.  As of yesterday, around $800,000 in donations have poured in to rebuild the mosque in Victoria, TX and the burning has made national news.  I'll be very interested to know if investigations show arson, which is certainly likely.  I'd also think that, unless it's a lone wolf arsonist, somebody is bragging to friends and will eventually be caught. 

[GreyhoundFan]

11 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

He has been in the background of some of Trumps EO signings and I was telling my sister that he makes a face like an evil person who just can't wait till he achieves white supermacy.

He probably spends so much time under the white hood that he's not used to making public faces. I know it's not nice to accuse people of being in the KKK, but if anyone would be a member, he would be a likely case.

[ShepherdontheRock]

He probably spends so much time under the white hood that he's not used to making public faces. I know it's not nice to accuse people of being in the KKK, but if anyone would be a member, he would be a likely case.

Given that he's the CEO of a hate site and is anti Semitic as fuck, I don't think it matters which hate group he's a part of.

[Howl]

And the scariest part? 

 

[Ali]

Cheeto really needs to see this. Perhaps he will fire Bannon due to his fragile ego.

[GreyhoundFan]

17 minutes ago, Ali said:

Cheeto really needs to see this. Perhaps he will fire Bannon due to his fragile ego.

We can dream, can't we?

 

"Steve Bannon’s first major play is shaping up as a full-blown fiasco"

Quote

Steve Bannon gets his Time magazine cover Thursday, and the accompanying piece offers an account of his astonishingly rapid consolidation of power inside the Trump White House. As the article details, Bannon’s fingerprints are all over Trump’s new immigration ban, making this a test case of sorts as to what the disruptions that Bannon and President Trump promised will produce in the real world.

Bannon, Time reports, continues to relish the massive blowback unleashed by Trump’s executive order — which bans refugees and migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries — as proof that he is doing something right. He’s shaking the elites to their core (he didn’t even attend the exclusive Alfalfa Club dinner!!!), which, he crows, heralds the birth of a “new political order.” But, for all of Bannon’s bravado, the better interpretation for what’s going on is that Bannon’s first major effort to translate Trumpism into policy reality is a full-blown disaster:

1) A federal judge in California has just issued a sweeping ruling that puts a stay on key aspects of Trump’s executive order: His ruling holds that the government must now let into the country people with valid visas who are coming from the seven targeted countries and are looking to live here permanently.

2) The underlying legality of the executive order is now in serious doubt. As the judge’s ruling notes, this stay was issued because the underlying legal challenge to it is “likely to succeed on the merits.” Similarly, another federal judge who blocked the removal of detainees at an airport did so out of the belief that those detained and others like them have a “strong likelihood of success” in showing that their constitutional rights had been violated. As one ACLU lawyer put it: “Every court that has ruled on this has seen it as unconstitutional, so that is a strong sign that this is blatantly illegal.”

3) The executive order’s legal vulnerability, as well as widespread confusion about its legal application, may be traceable directly to the process overseen by Bannon and the White House team. Multiple reports have indicated that the Office of Legal Counsel may not have reviewed the executive order (which Bannon mostly wrote) before its release, leading law professor Benjamin Wittes to remark that it reads as if “it wasn’t reviewed by competent council at all.” Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security initially determined that the order should not legally apply to green-card holders, but was overruled by Bannon — yet the White House subsequently reversed in part on that point.

4) In the face of widespread chaos created by the executive order’s lack of procedural clarity and confused implementation, Bannon has sought to convert the resulting outrage into proof that he is doing something right, reducing it to nothing more than frantic whining by media elites terrified of the rise of Bannon’s “new political order.” In other words, the Bannonite belief in disruption as an end in itself renders impossible any self-scrutiny or acknowledgment of error, in a kind of endless feedback loop (the consequences of which could become much more dire over time). And it is precisely the Bannonite contempt for procedural and institutional knowledge that is partly responsible for creating all of the logistical and legal problems to begin with.

5) The resulting mess and intensified media scrutiny of Bannon’s role has ripped the lid off the teeming, ugly reality of Trumpism. The White House has sought to employ comically contorted euphemisms to mask the reality of this executive order. The nonstop claims that this isn’t a ban meant to target Muslims is belied by the history of this proposal and by Trump’s own words about it, which leave little doubt that its intent is discriminatory. And White House press secretary Sean Spicer has taken to insisting that the order isn’t even a ban at all — arguing instead that it’s solely about improving vetting procedures — even though a ban is exactly what it is, and Trump himself described it in those terms.

Meanwhile, the White House’s efforts to recast this proposal as nondiscriminatory in intent — and only about improving vetting procedures — is undercut by new and intense media scrutiny of Bannon’s worldview. A Post report demonstrates that this worldview is driven primarily by a desire to dramatically restrict legal and illegal immigration and by the belief that the west is embroiled in a global war with “an expansionist Islamic ideology.” This has led Bannon to suggest about refugees: “Why even let ’em in?”

6) Even Republicans are acknowledging — and rejecting — the obvious clash-of-civilizations ideology underlying the executive order. Multiple Republicans have rejected the euphemisms offered by the White House and instead have cast it in exactly the terms that critics have — as something that risks sending a global message that the U.S. is at war with Islam. This suggests that even Republicans know that taking concrete steps to implement this aspect of Trumpism is politically untenable.

7) There are some signs that Trump himself is unhappy with the disruptions that Bannon has wrought. But that brings us to our next item.

********************************************************************

* TRUMP IRKED WITH BANNON’S ‘DISRUPTIONS’? In the big Time magazine profile of Bannon, we find this:

Bannon’s prominence in the first 10 days of the Administration — and the scenes of confusion and disorder that are his disruptive hallmark — has rattled the West Wing and perhaps even dismayed the President. According to senior Administration officials, Trump hauled in some half-dozen of his key advisers for a brisk dressing-down. Everything goes through chief of staff Reince Priebus, he directed.

Treat such leaks with caution — they may reflect internal maneuvering — but if this is true, it’s surprising. Aren’t Bannon’s awesome “disruptions” supposed to be confirmation that he’s rattling the old order?

Every single day, I'm in amazement that we have someone like that in the White House.

[Childless]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

We can dream, can't we?

 

"Steve Bannon’s first major play is shaping up as a full-blown fiasco"

Every single day, I'm in amazement that we have someone like that in the White House.

In other words, Bannon has made Trump look incompetent.  One of the things Trump hates is to look like he doesn't know what's going on or what he's doing.  It makes people question his intellect and emotional maturity and heaven forbid he not appear to be the best thing since sliced bread.  He won't fire Bannon because that would send the message that he made a mistake in putting him in this position.  Instead, he'll make him run his plans by those with cooler heads and higher functioning brains so as not to make the Donald look ridiculous again. 

Unfortunately, I have little faith that anyone else in this administration can do things any better.

Edited February 2, 2017 by Childless

[Howl]

I've started thinking in Trump Years (like dog years) as a new measure of time.  Like, when you hit your forehead and say, "WTF, it's only been two weeks?  Just TWO WEEKS? It seems like a year's worth of crazy* since the inauguration!"   

*Which is literally true.  Actually, there was less drama and crazy in 8 years of No Drama Obama than two weeks of the current White House cluster fuck. 

Edited February 2, 2017 by Howl

[Dark Matters]

On 2/2/2017 at 11:37 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

We can dream, can't we?

 

"Steve Bannon’s first major play is shaping up as a full-blown fiasco"

Every single day, I'm in amazement that we have someone like that in the White House.

 

On 2/2/2017 at 2:28 PM, Childless said:

In other words, Bannon has made Trump look incompetent.  One of the things Trump hates is to look like he doesn't know what's going on or what he's doing.  It makes people question his intellect and emotional maturity and heaven forbid he not appear to be the best thing since sliced bread.  He won't fire Bannon because that would send the message that he made a mistake in putting him in this position.  Instead, he'll make him run his plans by those with cooler heads and higher functioning brains so as not to make the Donald look ridiculous again. 

Unfortunately, I have little faith that anyone else in this administration can do things any better.

To the bolded: it doesn't take much work to make Orange Chump look that way.

 

And in other news, Bannon had to be reminded that he is not the president:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/report-bannon-had-to-be-reminded-he-wasnt-the-president.html

Chief White House strategist Steve Bannon tried to order Department of Homeland Security secretary John Kelly to not issue a waiver exempting green card holders from President Trump’s travel ban executive order, according to a new report in the Washington Post. Per two Trump administration officials who spoke with the Post’s Josh Rogin, Kelly ultimately rebuffed the attempt, telling Bannon that he only takes orders from the president. The president never weighed in, and Kelly went ahead and issued the waiver, which was made public on Sunday night. That waiver ended two full days of confusion and chaos around the question of whether or not permanent U.S. residents from the seven predominantly Muslim nations included in the ban would be allowed to reenter the country. The White House itself then confirmed that green card holders were exempt from the order on Tuesday.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Steve Bannon vs. Pope Francis?"

Quote

Stephen K. Bannon disrupted American politics and helped elect Donald Trump as president. Will he disrupt the Roman Catholic Church by joining forces with right-wing Catholics who oppose Pope Francis?

Bannon’s dark vision contrasts sharply with the sunny disposition of a pope who has chided “sourpusses” and “querulous and disillusioned pessimists.”

Bannon believes that “the Judeo-Christian West is in a crisis.” He calls for a return of “the church militant” who will “fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity,” which threatens to “completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.”

Where Francis has insisted on dialogue with Muslims, Bannon points to “the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam” and reaches as far back as the eighth century to praise “forefathers” who defeated Islam on the battlefield and “kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours, or other places.”

“See what’s happening,” Bannon insists, “and you will see we’re in a war of immense proportions.”

Bannon offered these comments in 2014 to the Institute for Human Dignity, an ultra-traditionalist group based in Rome and allied with some of Francis’s sharpest internal critics. They include Cardinal Raymond Burke, who has been so tough on Francis that he had to deny he was accusing the pontiff of heresy.

The New York Times’ Jason Horowitz put Bannon’s Catholic project front and center this week with a Page 1 story reporting that during a 2014 visit to Rome for the canonizations of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII, Bannon met and “bonded” with Burke.

Neither Bannon nor Trump (nor, for that matter, Burke) is likely to dent Francis’s immense popularity with American Catholics. But Horowitz’s story brought into relief the struggle inside the church — and particularly within American Catholicism — over the pope’s stewardship, his emphasis on battling poverty, his insistence on the importance of welcoming immigrants and refugees, and his relative openness to modernity.

Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and a close student of the Vatican, argues that Francis has aroused a similar hostility among some on the Catholic right to that Barack Obama called forth on the right end of politics generally. Francis is the first pope from Latin America, and his vision of economics is inflected by his experiences there. Moreover, Francis accepts the reforming Second Vatican Council in the 1960s “in its entirety and is not just paying lip service.”

The vast majority of conservative American bishops and Catholic thinkers have, of course, pledged their allegiance to the pope. But Faggioli argues that many of them are often critical of Francis’s attitude toward doctrine (the pope, he says, is “pastoral, not ideological”) and toward Vatican II’s reforms, which shifted church teaching toward a greater respect for religious pluralism.

On the surface, some of Bannon’s economic views would seem to match Francis’s. In his speech broadcast to the group in Rome, Bannon spoke against “a brutal form of capitalism that is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people.”

But as Faggioli notes, Bannon links his criticism of capitalism to nationalism, which makes his views more similar to those of far-right groups in the 1920s and ’30s such as Action Francaise, a French nationalist group condemned by the Vatican. Francis’s economics, on the other hand, focus on global concerns, including climate change.

Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at Boston College, argues that Bannon’s view is also at odds with Catholicism’s tradition of rejecting an “apocalyptic” take on the world. The church, she said, has taught that “you don’t get to God’s Kingdom by blowing up what’s here.”

Trump won overwhelmingly among conservative American Catholics last year, and many of them likely sympathize with aspects of Bannon’s nationalist outlook. But the tensions between Trump and Francis are likely to grow. Ironically, given the opposition to him among many American bishops, Obama’s foreign policy was far closer to the Vatican’s approach than is Trump’s.

And Trump’s moves against refugees and immigrants mobilized even conservative bishops to loud condemnations. The fact that about a third of American Catholics are Latino weighs heavily in the church’s thinking.

Bannon is unlikely to want Trump to force American Catholics to choose between their president and their pope. But the battle is on to define the meaning of both Americanism and Catholicism. Bannon’s worldview could incite the same showdown in the church that he has already ignited in politics

Bannon is going to leave no stone unturned.

[unholypoledancer]

You know what confuses me? How Bannon doesn't say anything/tolerates working amongst Ivanka and her husband, who are both Jewish. I personally don't care about the religions of people I work with, but I'm sure Bannon can't be super fond of it. I honestly wonder how that works for him? Like, does he swallow down his hate when he sees Ivanka and her husband? And doesn't that bother Trump-that his beloved favorite daughter would be in the presence of a man who admits to hating Jewish people?

[candygirl200413]

@unholypoledancer I wonder for whatever reason he just isn't going to publicized it? but maybe we are also we are just waiting for the other shoe to drop cause I wonder how long he can manage his "disgust"

Also 10ish years ago, he wrote a play about nazi and well

Steve Bannon Wanted Mel Gibson for His Movie About Nazis, Abortion, ‘Mutants’

[Cleopatra7]

Today I found out that Steve Bannon has ties to Cardinal Burke and others in the traditionalist wing of the RCC who are not happy with the way Pope Francis is running things. In 2014, Bannon gave a speech at the Vatican's Human Dignity Institute:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world?utm_term=.ekLbALbw7#.wmV3Jk3NY

This is a longer article on Bannon's Vatican ties:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/world/europe/vatican-steve-bannon-pope-francis.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0&referer=http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2017/02/steve-bannons-thick-ties-to-cardinal.html?m=1

Quote

Just as Mr. Bannon has connected with far-right parties threatening to topple governments throughout Western Europe, he has also made common cause with elements in the Roman Catholic Church who oppose the direction Francis is taking them. Many share Mr. Bannon’s suspicion of Pope Francis as a dangerously misguided, and probably socialist, pontiff.

Until now, Francis has marginalized or demoted the traditionalists, notably Cardinal Burke, carrying out an inclusive agenda on migration, climate change and poverty that has made the pope a figure of unmatched global popularity, especially among liberals. Yet in a newly turbulent world, Francis is suddenly a lonelier figure. Where once Francis had a powerful ally in the White House in Barack Obama, now there is Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon, this new president’s ideological guru.

This provides further fuel to my theory that the clash between Francis is Burke is not so much about conservatism vs liberalism (which makes no sense in the context of the Vatican) but rather between a Eurocentric RCC that acts as a repository of "Western values" and is a bulwark against Islam vs a more global Catholicism where the strength is increasingly among black and brown people.

[Howl]

Wow @Cleopatra7, that is fascinating and your take on it is fascinating as well.  I think we haven't even scratched the surface carapace of Bannon, a cunning, enigmatic cockroach of a man.  There's something scuttling about his nature, with his little antennae always sensing the wind.  Unsavory comes to mind. Kellyanne is also a practicing RC. Must make for interesting conversations at the WH.  

[fraurosena]

Here's an interesting opinion piece on the parallels between Bannon's and Islamist Jihadi's views:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/steve-bannon-white-house-donald-trump-islamist-terrorism-jihadist-world-views-alarming-parallels-a7566886.html

Quote

(...)

Where his attitudes merge most closely with those of the radical Islamist, however, is on strategy. Both see conflict as the only way to win. In an interview last year Bannon stated unambiguously, “We’re going to war in the South China Sea ... there is no doubt about that”. A few months before that he stated, “We’re clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East again.” 

Note the recent declaration by Trump’s national security adviser that Iran was officially now “on notice”, as well as the US Defence Secretary’s newly inflammatory remarks over the weekend about Chinese presence in the South China Sea. 

Scary stuff...

[onekidanddone]

The evil just keeps piling on.

[Howl]

On 1/31/2017 at 10:56 PM, ShepherdontheRock said:

The hypocrisy of the "pro-life" crowd supporting these kinds of people. I mean, Rick Santorum, one of the patron saints of the pro-life evangelical politicians, has a daughter with Edward's syndrome, and his family goes around talking about how this has affected their faith and aren't we so lucky to have this sweet little angel in our home? And this shithead Bannon is all like "well if the twins have any birth defects I'm not marrying you." Such family values. 

Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and Santorum are all practicing Catholics.  @Cleopatra7 posted on another thread about Bannon's ties to and affinity for the ultra conservative (!) wing of the Catholic church. 

Ivanaka and Jared are Orthodox Jews.  A news item pointed out  that Trump generates his most transgressive tweets when Ivanka and Jared are off line during Shabbos (the Orthodox sabbath that precludes doing work of any kind) and are not available to monitor or rein in Trump.  (edits welcome if I'm not understanding Shabbos correctly)

Edited February 11, 2017 by Howl