Sarah Huckabee Sanders Version of Covfefe

[Gobsmacked]

On 27 April 2018 at 7:27 PM, onekidanddone said:

Good gracious Kellyanne Contwit is younger than I am? Miller is in his thirties? I guess hate, racism, and Islamophobia takes a toll

They should all arrange for their portraits to be placed in the attics of the Whitehouse. ASAP. 

[47of74]

 

[fraurosena]

There is something about all of this brouhaha about Wolfe's speech that is bothering me. Why are people saying that she can say whatever she wants under the guise of 'humor' because the presidunce says terrible things as well? Why on earth would that make it ok? Why lower yourself to his level? What happened to dignity and class? Snarky and irreverent humor does not have to be mean and crass.

Michelle Obama said it so well. I wish people would keep her wisdom in mind:

"When they go low, we go high."

[GreyhoundFan]

I am torn about Michelle Wolff's performance. Yes, it is her First Amendment right to say what she wants and Dumpy has said far worse. However, I wish we could be above the third grade atmosphere. On the other hand, some of the responses have been interesting. Case in point:

 

[candygirl200413]

Michelle Wolf’s WHCD Roast Was Exactly What Access Journalism Deserves

Quote

Sarah Huckabee Sanders gets up in the White House press room on a regular basis and tells outright lies about everything from policy to prostitutes to pies. And while the media has been wringing its hands since January 20, 2017 over when it’s okay to call a lie a lie, comedian Michelle Wolf stood a few feet from Sanders this weekend and called her a liar, to her face, and with real writerly flourish too: “I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. Like, she burns facts, and then she uses the ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Like, maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.”

This is the line that both conservative and mainstream media folks are choosing to focus on in their critiques of Wolf as unnecessarily cruel and unfairly attacking Sanders’ looks. Which they somehow manage to call out earnestly, despite having stayed mostly mum on Trump’s running commentary on women’s looks, from his comment that Morning Joe co-host Mika Brezinski looked like she was “bleeding badly from a face lift” to his tirade against former Miss Universe contestant Alicia Machadeo (calling her “Miss Piggy” and “disgusting”) to his skeevy come-ons to everyone from the first lady of France (“look at you; you’re in such good shape”) to his own daughter (“if she wasn’t my daughter…”). And that’s without mentioning the infamous pussy-grabbing comment or his numerous outbursts about Mexicans, Muslims, and so-called “shithole” countries. Trump’s comments have never drawn as much outrage from all sides as Wolf’s comparatively tame (and true) jokes. And they’ve certainly never received as much attention from the Beltway press, which has now officially been discussing Wolf’s jokes 12 hours longer than any other piece of news lasts in the current outrage-driven news cycle. Why? Access, and the desire to keep it.

Hey look, in my opinion, that Sarah lady’s eyeliner looks like a raccoon with a hangover, but that’s not what Wolf said. The smoky eye joke is a red herring. Because what Maggie Haberman of The New York Times and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and White House Correspondents Association head (and senior Bloomberg White House correspondent) Margaret Talev, who publicly thanked Mike Pence’s press secretary for a tweet about Wolf and how her “classless” routine had ruined Talev’s hard work, are really pissed about is not that Wolf may have criticized Sanders’ appearance—and she didn’t, that was the media’s weird interpretation—but that she took solid aim at their own failings.

And she was right. Because here’s exactly what access journalism looks like, folks:

A fucking journalist thanking the VP’s press secretary for ripping on free speech.

Access journalism is a classy sounding term for the smarmy gentleman’s agreement that underlies political correspondents’ tendencies to gloss over certain politicians’ failings in order to maintain their access to them. So when Maggie Haberman, for example, allows Trump to ramble through various lies and half-truths in an “interview,” without questioning or pressing him in any way, or paints the story of Jared Kushner’s secret phone line with Russia in a slightly better light, that’s so the Trump clan will continue to let her in. Which she sometimes uses to the benefit of the public—noting when Trump is behaving the way he tends to before he fires someone, for example—and sometimes uses to simply butter him up again. As Haberman’s colleague Will Saletan mansplained on Twitter last year, “Reporters work with sources to gradually elicit more info. Be patient.” This is just how reporting works, guys, you have to keep your sources happy so that they will give you more info. Otherwise known as access.

A journalist who lets Trump’s remarks roll off his or her back is more likely to gain access to the White House press corps than one who raises a loud or public fuss about it.

One of the more insidious forms access journalism has taken in the Trump administration is when journalists downplay the seriousness of the president’s attacks on the press itself. Having the President of the United States routinely tell the public that the media is “dishonest,” that anything reported about him that he doesn’t like is “fake news,” is the classic move of the autocrat. It boggles the mind that so many mainstream journalists would go along with it, often advising the public not to take it too seriously, that, as Jay Rosen has noted, “it may look like a fight, but it’s actually a dance.” Here again, it’s likely a question of access: a journalist who lets Trump’s remarks roll off his or her back is more likely to gain access to the White House press corps than one who raises a loud or public fuss about it. Meanwhile, during the same 24 hours that brought us hundreds of tweets, interviews, and think pieces from Beltway journos concerned about poor Sarah Huckabee Sanders being mean-girled, Buzzfeed revealed that the DOJ has quietly been removing mentions of press freedom from its manuals. But hey, it’s just a dance, right?

Haberman has more access to Trump than any journalist in the country at the moment. That’s due in part to her continued, and often public, deference to Trump, his family, and his administration. She was one of the few reporters who leapt to Mike Pence’s defense back in 2016 when he was booed at a performance of Hamilton, chastising people for not showing Pence—a man who would eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts if he could, and send all homosexuals to conversion camp, but yet chose to make a grand entrance at a famed Broadway fucking musical—a “level of respect.” So it was not a huge surprise to see her rushing to suck up to Sanders after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, calling Sanders “impressive” for not walking out during Wolf’s routine.

Many in the public, on the other hand, think it’s “impressive” that Haberman and her cohort have not yet walked out when Sanders starts blatantly lying to them in a press conference. Surely we should be at least as concerned about the norms being flouted by the president and his staff as those being ignored by a comedian at the WHCA dinner, no? Also “impressive” is the way Haberman’s fellow NYT White House correspondent Mark Landler managed to tuck his balls entirely inside his anus in order to pen this spineless love letter to Melania Trump last year. Anyway, I digress. Wolf articulated the problem with access journalism precisely:

“There’s a ton of news right now; a lot is going on, and we have all these 24-hour news networks, and we could be covering everything. But, instead, we’re covering like three topics. Every hour, it’s Trump, Russia, Hillary. You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him.”

Zing. That’s what the Habes is habing about. And look, I get it. I mean, first, who the fuck am I to be questioning Maggie Haberman? She’s covered presidential campaigns since 2008 and I live in the middle of the mountains and spend easily half my time cleaning up the poop of various species. I also know exactly how hard it is to get any politician or public figure to agree to an interview, let alone behave like an actual human and not a robot pre-programmed with talking points in that interview. If you make a celebrity look stupid in a story, their publicist will never work with you again and it’s more or less the same with politicians. But the difference between celebrities and politicians, and yes this also goes for celebrities-turned-politicians, is that telling the truth about the latter actually matters to the public and, not to get too highfalutin about it, to the health of our democracy.

So while journalists have been worrying about whether it’s really fair that they call a non-truth coming out of Trump’s mouth a lie when they can’t know whether he was being intentionally misleading or not, what they ought to be focused on, if they’re doing the actual job they’ve been hired for—you know, informing the public, holding the powerful accountable and all that—is whether it’s fair that they sugar coat the things they are seeing and hearing, that they present the opinions of the very people they’re reporting on as unbiased input from “anonymous sources familiar with the story,” that they keep sitting there taking notes and pretending like this is all normal when Sanders, or Trump for that matter, flat-out lies to them in a press conference.

The argument can be made, of course, and has been made, that access is also important for informing the public. That if Trump were to stop talking to anyone in the press tomorrow, that would also be a problem. Would it, though? With a White House that leaks like a sieve and a ton of truly talented investigative journalists digging tirelessly for the truth?

It seems more likely that being searingly truthful about Trump and his administration would hurt the careers of journalists who have made their bones on the back of his rise. Here’s a question: Where would Maggie Haberman be if Trump had lost? Would she be the best-known reporter at The New York Times, or would she be just another faceless campaign reporter, gearing up to cover whatever schmo she’d been assigned to follow for the midterms? Would Katy Tur have a book deal? Would CNN and MSNBC be posting record ratings and actually hiring people for the first time in years?

As much as I love to see so many people consuming the news these days, recounting, wild-eyed, the latest Trump gaffe or bizarre policy reversal, I have to wonder: at what cost?

 

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I am torn about Michelle Wolff's performance. Yes, it is her First Amendment right to say what she wants and Dumpy has said far worse. However, I wish we could be above the third grade atmosphere. On the other hand, some of the responses have been interesting. Case in point:

 

Are these people in those provoking t-shirts deliberately trying to be offensive? Yes. Yes they are. Are they hypocrites with their attitudes? Quite probably. Do I like these people, and what they stand for? Most assuredly not. But that doesn't mean we should treat them the way they are treating others. Where would that end? Oh, you're being obnoxious? Well we can be even more obnoxious. Oh, you're trying to one up me? I can do you one even better. Like you say, @GreyhoundFan, it's childish and foolish third-grader behavior.

That's why when I see these kinds of messages, my instincts are to want to distance myself from this sort of attitude. You see, I do care about other people's feelings. Even if I don't agree with their opinions and actions. For better or worse, we're all stuck on this planet together. If I were to stop caring and think only of myself and my own fee-fees, I will become somebody I don't want to be. How can we create a better world without showing a little empathy? 

That said, I don't believe in simply giving way to this behavior either. I won't do a tit-for-tat, but I will show you that I won't put up with what you are saying or doing if you are being nasty and hateful. I will tell you exactly what I think of you, and I won't mince my words when I do so. But I won't stoop to your level. I'd rather lift you up to mine. That way we're all better off.

For this reason, I think we actually should hold ourselves to a higher standard that the presidunce and his BT's. That's not being a snowflake or overly politically correct. That's simply trying to make a better world for all of us.

[Cartmann99]

 Since the narrative is already changing into Michelle viciously attacking Sarah's appearance instead of her character, how long until Fox or the White House begins pushing the idea that any criticism of Sarah is unacceptable? 

[Cartmann99]

Matt and Mercedes Schlapp riding to Sarah's rescue:

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[milkteeth]

2 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

I highly doubt that any of the media folks were actually feeling sorry for Sanders (though it does say a lot about what they really think about her when they interpreted Wolf's comments as attacking her looks). What they were really upset about was how Wolf called them out on how Trump is entirely their creation, and how they're still using him for ratings and to sell books. How dare she interrupt their fun night by telling the truth. They had the same reaction when Stephen Colbert did the same thing to George W. Bush in 2006. 

 

 

 

[milkteeth]

On 4/30/2018 at 7:55 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

I am torn about Michelle Wolff's performance. Yes, it is her First Amendment right to say what she wants and Dumpy has said far worse. However, I wish we could be above the third grade atmosphere. On the other hand, some of the responses have been interesting. Case in point:

 

I understand how some might not like the vulgarity of Michelle Wolf's chosen words, but personally I don't think that there is anything wrong with taking away whatever veneer of respectability people like Sanders and others in the Trump  administration have. You hear over and over again how this administration is a threat to our republic, how we're teetering on the brink of fascism....but it's too much to make one of their spokespeople feel sad and uncomfortable for a few minutes when someone calls them out on their grotesque behavior. She's a grown woman who chose to accept this position of power as the public face of president Trump. 

Personally I don't think Michelle Wolf's jokes were anywhere near as vulgar or disgusting as say, GWB's joke at the White House Correspondent's Dinner about being unable to find Iraq's WMDs or Obama's jokes about using predator drones. Those jokes of course got lots of polite laughs and little to no pearl clutching about civility. 

 

 

[SilverBeach]

Fuck SSH and the horse she rode in on. No,on second thought, leave the horse alone. But fuck SSH, no sympathy here. 

[Cartmann99]

I'm putting this tweet under a spoiler, because it has pictures of Trump fans in the sort of t-shirts they wear/sell at his rallies.

Spoiler

 

 

 

[JenniferJuniper]

4 hours ago, milkteeth said:

 What they were really upset about was how Wolf called them out on how Trump is entirely their creation, and how they're still using him for ratings and to sell books. How dare she interrupt their fun night by telling the truth. 

Exactly.  The media is completely complicit here.  Trump could not have survived the very earliest rounds of the Republican primaries without them and they are still thriving and making tons of money on the monster they created.  It's sickening.

As for Sarah Slanders, Wolf did not make fun of her appearance in any way.  She had great line about her perfect smokey  eye makeup being created from the ashes of all those facts she burns every day.  In other words, she's a prolific liar who is a threat to our democracy. 

And yet it's just great fun when Trump calls women everything in the book, up to and including "fat pigs".   Give us more, dear leader, we love what it does for our ratings!

[milkteeth]

2 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

I'm putting this tweet under a spoiler, because it has pictures of Trump fans in the sort of t-shirts they wear/sell at his rallies.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

That reminds me of this tweet series I saw...

Edited May 2, 2018 by milkteeth

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"As a willing warrior for Trump, Sarah Sanders struggles to maintain credibility"

Spoiler

The West Wing shouting match was so loud that more than a dozen staffers heard it.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders cursed and yelled at White House Counsel Donald McGahn during the February confrontation, according to two people familiar with the episode. Misleading statements about the domestic abuse scandal that felled staff secretary Rob Porter had dragged the administration into a maelstrom of chaos and contradictory public statements.

Exasperated, Sanders told McGahn she would not continue to speak for the administration unless she was provided more information about Porter’s situation.

The dispute, which erupted in a hallway outside deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin’s office, was resolved after Sanders received the clarity she sought, the people familiar with the argument said. Hours later, Sanders returned to her lectern to field queries from a skeptical press corps, though her answers still left reporters with more questions.

The moment illustrates the precarious role Sanders has chosen to fill as the public face of the Trump administration — and the doubts about her credibility in representing a president who proudly traffics in mistruths and obfuscations. 

Sanders was thrust into an especially harsh limelight over the past week. She was the subject of an acerbic broadside about her “bunch of lies” by comedian Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Then she was forced to explain the seemingly inconsistent accounts from her, President Trump and his new personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, about the hush money paid to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. The week was punctuated by an onslaught of commentary about Sanders’s character.

By virtue of her position, Sanders is inextricably bound in the mistruths of the Trump administration. She is a willing warrior for Trump, and her critics believe she should be held accountable for his utterances — from the untruthful to the racist to the sexist. Since taking office, Trump has made more than 3,000 false or misleading claims, according to an analysis by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.

“When the president blithely admits to lying, it makes all those who are paid to repeat and defend his stories liars, as well,” said David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser under former president Barack Obama. “Their credibility is tied to his. It’s a high price to pay for a job, even in the White House.”

Sanders, 35, is no political ingénue. She was raised in the wild-and-wooly politics of Arkansas, the only daughter of former governor Mike Huckabee who grew up to work on his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns.

By the time she took over as White House press secretary from Sean Spicer last July, the administration’s penchant for misleading the public at the president’s direction was well-established. At his very first press briefing, Spicer vigorously misrepresented the size of Trump’s inaugural crowds, soaring to national fame for the wrong reasons.

Those in Trump’s orbit argue that the attacks on Sanders have been more sustained and more personally vicious than those faced by press secretaries in previous administrations. They argue that in a hyper-polarized nation — and amid the frenzied environment nurtured by a president who is at war with what he calls the “Fake News” media — Sanders has become an unwitting Rorschach test for the opinions of Trump’s critics.

Allies of Sanders say she often pushes back on Trump, who wants her to attack the media even harder and more frequently, and that other administrations have also faced credibility issues. 

“It doesn’t matter who holds this job for President Trump, they’re going to be unfairly attacked and ridiculed,” said Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign adviser. “Since Sarah Huckabee Sanders works for President Trump, it seems to be open season on her professionally and personally.”

Sanders declined to be interviewed for this story.

Fresh trouble for Sanders arose Wednesday night, when Giuliani, in a freewheeling interview with Sean Hannity, told the friendly Fox News host that Trump had reimbursed his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen for the $130,000 in hush money he paid to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. The payment helped secure her silence shortly before the 2016 election about an alleged sexual affair with Trump a decade earlier, which the president has denied.

Giuliani’s disclosure appeared to be at odds with Sanders’s repeated insistence that Trump was not aware of Cohen’s payment to Daniels. The interview, which Sanders did not coordinate, left her in an untenable position, she told colleagues.

So did Giuliani’s proclamation that three American prisoners soon would be released from North Korea, a development the White House had not confirmed.

Reporters pressed Sanders on Thursday, was she a liar or simply in the dark? And why was the president’s personal attorney authorized to announce news about sensitive hostage negotiations?

“I’ve given the best information I had at the time,” Sanders said, a line she repeated in general six times. “Some information I am aware of and some I’m not.”

Sanders said she first learned that Trump had reimbursed Cohen by watching Giuliani’s interview with Hannity. At another point in her briefing, she repeated her assertion that she does not intentionally mislead the public, but acknowledged that she is not always provided the most accurate or complete information about her boss. 

Sanders also offered a general criticism of peddling untruths — or, as White House counselor Kellyanne Conway once memorably dubbed them, “alternative facts.”

“I would always advise against giving false information,” Sanders said. “As a person of human decency, I do my best to give the right information.”

Sanders’ defenders say she spends considerable time crafting talking points that convey the president’s wishes but also are technically truthful. If she is guilty of anything, they say, it is providing incomplete information.

In the Daniels episode, for instance, Sanders has largely cited the president’s own statements and referred questions to his outside attorneys.

Before most briefings, she meets with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss how he would like her to answer news-of-the-day questions, White House officials said. The president sometimes dictates lines for her to read or orders her to use precise words on particularly sensitive matters.

Sanders routinely dodges questions on hot topics by telling reporters she has not asked the president about it — a deliberate strategy to avoid having to wade into delicate issues, according to a Sanders confidant.

She deflects nearly every question about the Russia probe, unless she has a prepared statement from the president to read — a protective move against creating legal exposure for herself with extemporaneous answers.

“Sarah has done a fantastic job of keeping in line with understanding how to effectively communicate what the president’s thoughts are at any given time, recognizing that it is a very dynamic and fluid situation in many cases,” Spicer said. “What she has done is she has realized, you can’t get in trouble for what you don’t say.”

Behind the scenes, Sanders has joked with colleagues that she has no idea whom the president will fire, what he will tweet or when he might change his mind. Unlike the more pugilistic Spicer, Sanders has privately displayed a gallows humor.

Sanders sometimes finds herself out of the loop and is not the ubiquitous presence that former communications director Hope Hicks was in the president’s daily life. 

When Trump offered John Bolton the job as national security adviser, the president had already begun configuring his own press strategy before Sanders was alerted, according to White House officials. Sanders was soon hustled into the Oval Office shortly before Trump tweeted about the hiring.

After Trump revealed that he was urging states to send troops to the U.S.-Mexican border, Sanders scurried to figure out why he had said that and how it would work, only to learn he had been briefed on a proposal the week before, officials said.

In a West Wing riven by infighting and a revolving door, Sanders is one of the only senior officials who does not generally draw arrows. She has lasted longer than some of her colleagues expected. 

During the Porter saga, colleagues say they frequently saw Sanders upset as she managed the fallout. She helped craft a statement that defended Porter and that later became an embarrassment to the administration. But, officials said, she was careful not to betray the administration’s missteps publicly like her deputy Raj Shah had when he said that “we all could have done better” — which attracted criticism from the president.

Although combative with reporters on camera, Sanders is largely regarded as more pleasant and helpful behind the scenes. She works to provide reporters answers to their questions, including hunting down colleagues for help.

Sanders often mentions her three small children during her briefings, reminding the millions of viewers tuning in on television that she is a mother. She sometimes makes hokey jokes to leaven the mood in the briefing room, and is known to wish some reporters a happy birthday from the lectern.

“Sarah has always been coolheaded and professional and always gives our arguments for greater transparency and openness a respectful hearing,” said Olivier Knox, the chief Washington correspondent for SiriusXM, who will assume the presidency of the WHCA this summer. 

Last Saturday night, she sat next to Knox at the head table for the correspondents’ dinner. She did not stand up to congratulate the journalists who were presented awards — including a team from CNN, which Trump has assailed as “fake.” And as Wolf mocked her, joking that she “burns facts, and then uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye,” Sanders sat stoic.

Later that evening, Sanders and her husband, Bryan, were spotted at the invite-only MSNBC after party, greeting friends and reporters well after midnight.

 

[Botkinetti]

What a bizarre life Sarah leads. She spends her days defending a chaotic,lying administration . She is the object of ridicule. She must worry about being pulled into the Mueller investigation. She has to spin half-truths and outright lies into some kind of palatable pablum. Her position could be taken away at any moment , for any reason by trump.

If , like most people she is trying to raise decent children how does she square telling her children not to lie with what she does all day every day. How does she model kindness and empathy when she defends the indefensible.

 I don’t understand her. I don’t know how she sleeps at night. 

[Cartmann99]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo?]

I've gotten so accustomed to seeing Sarah Huckabee Sanders with a scowl of one kind or another, that when I saw a picture of her smiling, it startled me.

Spoiler

I really have to wonder how she rationalizes all the lying she does for her job with whatever moral beliefs she holds. I wonder how many smiles she'll have left after the Drumpf WH has chewed her up and spat her out. 

[Cartmann99]

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Why didn’t any of the reporters ask her how that logic works? 

She should constantly be confronted with the lies and logical phallacies she tells at the time she does it. 

Make her feel the consequences.

Call her out.

[GreyhoundFan]

"WATCH: Sarah Huckabee Sanders Says North Korea Reversal ‘Is Something That We Fully Expected’". Way too many links, videos, and tweets to quote, but it's a good read. I'm wondering if this will get her "Mooched" out of a job.