Kellyanne and George Conway 2

[fraurosena]

Her alternative facts have reached peak absurdity levels. 

Kellyanne Conway Claims Martin Luther King Would Be Against Trump Impeachment

She is, however, glad to share her birthday with MLK day. Just so you know.

Quote

Kellyanne Conway on Monday responded to a question on how the president is observing Martin Luther King Day by claiming the civil-rights leader would oppose the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

During a press gathering at the White House, NBC News correspondent Geoff Bennett asked the senior Trump aide how the president was observing Martin Luther King Day, prompting Conway to first note that Trump was preparing for his trip to Davos before saying the president “agrees with many of the things that Dr. Martin Luther King stood for.”

From there, it only got more bizarre.

Adding that the president and Dr. King would see eye-to-eye on “unity and equality,” Conway complained that it’s not the president who is “trying to tear the country apart through an impeachment process and a lack of substance that really is very shameful at this point.”

“I’ve held my opinion on it for a very long time, but when you see the articles of impeachment that came out, I don’t think it was Dr. King’s vision to have Americans dragged through a process where the president is not going to be removed from office, is not being charged bribery, extortion, high crimes and misdemeanors,” she continued.

After declaring that anyone who cares for the phrase “and justice for all” should appreciate that the president has a “full-throttle defense” when it comes to impeachment, Conway concluded by linking herself with MLK.

“I, this morning, was reading some of the lesser-known passages by Dr. King and I appreciate the fact that we as a nation respect him by giving him his own day,” she proclaimed.

“I’m happy to share a birthday with this day,” Conway concluded.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I truly despise K-Con, the author of this op-ed: "Kellyanne Conway: President Trump shows us that electability is no match for electricity"

Spoiler

Donald J. Trump upended Democrats’ presidential business model.

For decades, Democrats elevated and elected candidates that represented youth and energy, fresh faces and new blood: John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. Their young families, “outside the Beltway” careers and promises of a new dawn directly challenged the old-guard sclerosis and channeled a future filled with optimism and change.

With the exception of Ronald Reagan, the modern Republican Party establishment was never as bold, failing to look past “who’s next” in line, while often reducing its presidential nomination to either coronation (“he can win”) or consolation (“he lost last time”).

The political parties have now swapped roles.

Candidate Trump showed that so-called electability is no match for electricity and a relentless focus on the electoral college. “You can’t win” — and later, “she can’t lose” — were the common refrains in 2016. Yet the unorthodox Trump candidacy produced massive crowds, ubiquitous media coverage and a center-stage spot at the first debate that the candidate retained until all 16 other Republican candidates were gone from the race. In the general election, candidate Trump’s willingness to campaign in areas that had been elusive for Republican presidential candidates, and thus written off by many of their establishment consultants, made the difference.

Seeking to become the first U.S. president to never have held either elective office or military service, he assumed the outsider’s mantel and took his case directly to the people. He owned “energy” and fresh ideas, and turned the “experience” of his opponent into a liability. Hillary Clinton was what was wrong with Washington’s definition of power; polls showed people didn’t trust her. In Trump, the outsiders finally got an insider.

Four years later, Democratic candidates, party leaders and primary voters have been seduced into the trap of focusing on electability. Multiple polls show that Democrats value “beating Donald Trump” above all else.

In a CNN poll this month, 57 percent of Democrats said it is more important to nominate a candidate who can defeat Trump than choosing one who agrees with them on the issues. Former vice president Joe Biden leads the field on electability: 45 percent say Biden has the best chance to beat Trump. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is a distant second at 24 percent. Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg recently said he might spend $1 billion to “get rid of Donald Trump” and that, $200 million in, he has a “reasonable chance” of doing so. (Polling suggests otherwise.)

In fact, if Democrats were serious about electability, they’d nominate the guy who actually won primary contests and proved he can play David to Goliath in key places four short years ago. Sanders bested Clinton in 22 states in 2016, including battlegrounds such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, while earning more than 13 million votes and 1,800 delegates.

Now, with the first caucuses and primaries just weeks away, Sanders is showing strength in the polls and in fundraising, having outraised Biden last quarter, having taken the lead from Biden for the first time, and having outlasted candidates who were media darlings and more in the mold of “transformative” and “historic.”

The Democratic Party fancies itself as inclusive, unafraid to promote unconventional nominees or to tackle issues of the day. Yet the myopic question of “who can win” against the incumbent has already resulted in the withdrawal, before a single vote has been cast, of the following actual presidential candidates: two black senators, one female and one male; a female U.S. senator running on “women’s empowerment”; a Hispanic former Cabinet secretary; a two-term governor running on climate change; a two-term governor from a swing state; and a congressman in his 30s running on gun control. In the top ranks, only a bunch of white people and billionaires remain. “Woke” is broke.

“Only I can beat Donald Trump,” Biden crows off of a cue card, even as he confuses Iowa with Ohio and lies about his past positions on the Iraq War and whether to kill Osama bin Laden. Biden lacks electricity, but owns “electability.” Democratic voters are buying it, despite his shortcomings and the humiliating snub by the president he served. Barack Obama last month offered up an end-of-the-year endorsement list. It included books and movies — but not Biden.

Jill Biden, too, whistles right past policy debate and into the heart of electability while campaigning for her husband. “Your candidate might be better on, I don’t know, health care, than Joe is, but you’ve got to look at who’s going to win this election,” she said last year. “And maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, ‘Okay, I personally like so-and-so better,’ but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.” In Iowa this month, where a poll showed Joe Biden in fourth place there Jill Biden nonetheless insisted that only her husband can beat Trump in the fall, that the other Democrat candidates are unelectable and should be appointed “secretary of whatever” instead.

The electability pitch may seem rational, but it is neither philosophical nor inspirational. It is also not provable. There is no true evidence that someone can or cannot win until they do or do not win. In one CNN poll in August 2007, Clinton trounced Obama in electability. She went on to be a two-time presidential loser; he, a two-term president.

 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I truly despise K-Con, the author of this op-ed: "Kellyanne Conway: President Trump shows us that electability is no match for electricity"

  Hide contents

Donald J. Trump upended Democrats’ presidential business model.

For decades, Democrats elevated and elected candidates that represented youth and energy, fresh faces and new blood: John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. Their young families, “outside the Beltway” careers and promises of a new dawn directly challenged the old-guard sclerosis and channeled a future filled with optimism and change.

With the exception of Ronald Reagan, the modern Republican Party establishment was never as bold, failing to look past “who’s next” in line, while often reducing its presidential nomination to either coronation (“he can win”) or consolation (“he lost last time”).

The political parties have now swapped roles.

Candidate Trump showed that so-called electability is no match for electricity and a relentless focus on the electoral college. “You can’t win” — and later, “she can’t lose” — were the common refrains in 2016. Yet the unorthodox Trump candidacy produced massive crowds, ubiquitous media coverage and a center-stage spot at the first debate that the candidate retained until all 16 other Republican candidates were gone from the race. In the general election, candidate Trump’s willingness to campaign in areas that had been elusive for Republican presidential candidates, and thus written off by many of their establishment consultants, made the difference.

Seeking to become the first U.S. president to never have held either elective office or military service, he assumed the outsider’s mantel and took his case directly to the people. He owned “energy” and fresh ideas, and turned the “experience” of his opponent into a liability. Hillary Clinton was what was wrong with Washington’s definition of power; polls showed people didn’t trust her. In Trump, the outsiders finally got an insider.

Four years later, Democratic candidates, party leaders and primary voters have been seduced into the trap of focusing on electability. Multiple polls show that Democrats value “beating Donald Trump” above all else.

In a CNN poll this month, 57 percent of Democrats said it is more important to nominate a candidate who can defeat Trump than choosing one who agrees with them on the issues. Former vice president Joe Biden leads the field on electability: 45 percent say Biden has the best chance to beat Trump. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is a distant second at 24 percent. Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg recently said he might spend $1 billion to “get rid of Donald Trump” and that, $200 million in, he has a “reasonable chance” of doing so. (Polling suggests otherwise.)

In fact, if Democrats were serious about electability, they’d nominate the guy who actually won primary contests and proved he can play David to Goliath in key places four short years ago. Sanders bested Clinton in 22 states in 2016, including battlegrounds such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, while earning more than 13 million votes and 1,800 delegates.

Now, with the first caucuses and primaries just weeks away, Sanders is showing strength in the polls and in fundraising, having outraised Biden last quarter, having taken the lead from Biden for the first time, and having outlasted candidates who were media darlings and more in the mold of “transformative” and “historic.”

The Democratic Party fancies itself as inclusive, unafraid to promote unconventional nominees or to tackle issues of the day. Yet the myopic question of “who can win” against the incumbent has already resulted in the withdrawal, before a single vote has been cast, of the following actual presidential candidates: two black senators, one female and one male; a female U.S. senator running on “women’s empowerment”; a Hispanic former Cabinet secretary; a two-term governor running on climate change; a two-term governor from a swing state; and a congressman in his 30s running on gun control. In the top ranks, only a bunch of white people and billionaires remain. “Woke” is broke.

“Only I can beat Donald Trump,” Biden crows off of a cue card, even as he confuses Iowa with Ohio and lies about his past positions on the Iraq War and whether to kill Osama bin Laden. Biden lacks electricity, but owns “electability.” Democratic voters are buying it, despite his shortcomings and the humiliating snub by the president he served. Barack Obama last month offered up an end-of-the-year endorsement list. It included books and movies — but not Biden.

Jill Biden, too, whistles right past policy debate and into the heart of electability while campaigning for her husband. “Your candidate might be better on, I don’t know, health care, than Joe is, but you’ve got to look at who’s going to win this election,” she said last year. “And maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, ‘Okay, I personally like so-and-so better,’ but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.” In Iowa this month, where a poll showed Joe Biden in fourth place there Jill Biden nonetheless insisted that only her husband can beat Trump in the fall, that the other Democrat candidates are unelectable and should be appointed “secretary of whatever” instead.

The electability pitch may seem rational, but it is neither philosophical nor inspirational. It is also not provable. There is no true evidence that someone can or cannot win until they do or do not win. In one CNN poll in August 2007, Clinton trounced Obama in electability. She went on to be a two-time presidential loser; he, a two-term president.

 

I know the saying goes that opposites attract, but Kellyanne and George are taking it to a whole other level.

(posting this for George’s comment, not the retweet)

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting NYT article about K-Con and George: "When America’s Oddest Political Couple Fight, Those Sparks Are Real"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — George T. Conway III has described the work of his wife, Kellyanne Conway, for President Trump in terms usually reserved for hostage situations: brainwashed by a cult, suffering from Stockholm syndrome, an overwhelmed mother protecting a destructive man-child.

And if you think it’s all shtick, some wink-and-nod act by a couple who fights by day and snuggles by night, planning a payday after Mr. Trump leaves the scene, think again, say some people close to America’s oddest political couple.

“Those who think this is a 14-dimensional chess game are mistaken,” said Rick Wilson, who with Mr. Conway and several other Republicans formed the Lincoln Project, an effort to beat Mr. Trump in the 2020 election.

Mr. Conway “has taken unequivocal and irreversible actions that have established his bona fides as someone who opposes Donald Trump, and she’s going to be for Donald Trump until the last dog dies,” he said, adding a question that many Americans have asked themselves about the Conways: “Who knows the secrets of the human heart?”

In a sense, the passions in the Conway household have come to represent the societal agonies of the Trump era, a couple and a nation deeply divided, unsettled by the storms around the presidency, and asking themselves, when it’s all over, can there be reconciliation?

The Conways bring to mind a previous Washington “It” couple: Mary Matalin, who worked for President George W. Bush, and James Carville, the Democratic strategist who helped engineer President Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory over Mr. Bush. Ms. Matalin and Mr. Carville turned their political dissonance into a lucrative brand, joking about their vast differences.

The Conways agree politically on most things because Mr. Conway, for all his anti-Trump activities, remains deeply conservative. But the couple does not appear to be having much fun.

“Coming of political age in 1992 is significantly different than coming of age in 2017,” Mr. Carville said. “Trump people have much more of a sense of personal assault or grievance, and the Trump opponents have a high, high dose of doing the right thing for the country. You can hardly even tell jokes about it anymore.”

Ms. Conway, 53, Mr. Trump’s senior counselor and 2016 campaign manager, has largely held her tongue about her husband, though she told The Washington Post in 2018 that his sniping “disrespects his wife.”

In recent months, Mr. Conway, 56, a constitutional lawyer by trade and Trump opponent by conversion, has become more embittered, and more public. During the presidential impeachment, he took to CNN and Twitter as a commentator, calling Mr. Trump a “criminal,” “pathological liar” and “Idiot-in-Chief.”

To mark Mr. Trump’s acquittal by the Senate, Mr. Conway wrote a sarcastic, bitter column, concluding, “I believe the president’s call was perfect. I believe he is deeply concerned about corruption in Ukraine.” Mr. Conway live-tweeted his derision as the president celebrated last week in the East Room of the White House. “Let it out, @realDonaldTrump. Let it all out,” he mocked.

For someone who labored in Republican legal vineyards for decades — in the 1990s, he was a lawyer for Paula Jones, who accused Mr. Clinton of sexual misconduct — Mr. Conway did not cut much of a swath in Washington social circles. He rode his wife’s coattails into the nation’s capital.

But of late, he has surpassed her on Washington’s party circuit.

“She was the superstar for two and a half years, and now George is the superstar,” said Sally Quinn, a journalist, author and Washington hostess who has been inviting Mr. Conway, but not Ms. Conway, to her parties in Georgetown.

The Conways met in the summer of 1999, when Mr. Conway was a securities lawyer and partner at the New York firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Ms. Conway was a Republican pollster who appeared frequently on television. Mr. Conway told a mutual friend, the conservative commentator Ann Coulter, that he wanted to meet Ms. Conway, known then by her maiden name, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick. The future Ms. Conway drove out to a Hamptons beach house, rented by Ms. Coulter, and the couple remained planted at the house’s kitchen table, chatting for hours.

They married in 2001 and moved into a Trump tower in Manhattan. Mr. Conway impressed the future president by taking his side in a condo board battle over removing the name “Trump” from the building, and he introduced Ms. Conway to Mr. Trump.

Politics was less bruising then. In 2005, Ms. Conway teamed up with Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, to write a book about how American women were erasing political lines. By reputation, Ms. Conway was smart and empathetic, the type who remembered birthdays and weddings.

The Conways now have four children: the twins, George IV and Claudia, 15; Charlotte, 11; and Vanessa, 10; and a pair of Corgis, Skipper and Bonnie, which Mr. Conway nicknamed Concerned and Troubled after the terms that Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, has used to describe her reaction to Mr. Trump’s behavior.

Friends say the Conways are staying together for their children, although the couple is not always in the same city. Mr. Conway spent chunks of time last year in New York before leaving his firm, while Ms. Conway remained in Washington, where the Trump crowd has largely blackballed her husband.

In November, Mr. Conway attended a “Resistance” party at the New York apartment of Molly Jong-Fast, an author and daughter of Erica Jong. The comedian Kathy Griffin posted a photograph on Instagram of Mr. Conway hiding coyly behind the liberal journalist Soledad O’Brien. Nearby were E. Jean Carroll, a writer who has accused Mr. Trump of rape, and the Hillary Clinton stalwart Philippe Reines.

In Washington, Mr. Conway tends to hole up in his home office, writing opinion pieces and firing away on Twitter. In a July piece titled “Trump Is a Racist President,” he wrote about the first time he heard someone tell his mother, who emigrated from the Philippines, “‘Go back to your country.’”

The gulf between the Conways developed slowly before turning into a chasm. After Mr. Trump’s victory, the Conways jumped into Washington with both feet, buying a 15,000-square foot house with eight bedrooms and 11 bathrooms. “Kellyanne Conway Just Bought This $8 Million D.C. Mansion,” blared Town & Country magazine, through Mr. Conway’s legal partnership accounts for most of the couple’s net worth of about $40 million.

Mr. Conway wept for joy on election night and called his wife’s achievement “the best thing that ever happened to her.” He turned down two potential posts in the Justice Department, calling the administration “a dumpster fire,” though he told the president at the time that he supported him.

In those days, Ms. Conway went out alone, or with Adrienne Arsht, a philanthropist and arts patron with homes in Miami and across the street from the Conways. Ms. Arsht, who calls Ms. Conway “a lovely neighbor, a great mother” and “a fabulous cook,” played down their relationship.

“Our garages face each other, so why not go out together to save on emissions?” she asked.

Early on, Mr. Conway tweeted his disapproval of the president’s tweets about the travel ban, then hastened to tweet his support for the president and “my wonderful wife.”

In February 2019, at a British Embassy party for female members of Congress, Ms. Conway approached Ms. Quinn, the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and the NBC News journalist Andrea Mitchell.

“It was like, ‘Oh, I love your shoes and what a great bag, blah blah,’” Ms. Quinn recalled, until she asked Ms. Conway about her husband, and Ms. Conway, she said, grew angry that Ms. Quinn had even brought him up. “She just took off on all three of us,’’ Ms. Quinn said. “She really went crazy.”

“I said, ‘Kellyanne, you’re married, and you’re working for the president, and he’s writing against the president,” Ms. Quinn recalled. “‘Guess what? This is a story.’”

The next month, the Conway marriage appeared to have become an issue in the White House. Mr. Trump had spent the weekend of March 16 retweeting conspiracy theorists and insulting Senator John McCain when Mr. Conway tweeted, “His condition is getting worse.”

The next day, Brad Parscale, who now manages Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, tweeted that Mr. Conway “hurts his wife because he is jealous of her success.” The president piled on, “A total loser!”

Mr. Conway then gave an interview to The Washington Post, saying that he tweets “so I can get it off my chest and move on with my life that day.” He added, referring to his wife, “Frankly, it’s so I don’t end up screaming at her.”

Mr. Trump clapped back: “George Conway, often referred to as Mr. Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!”

It fell to Ms. Conway to spin Mr. Trump’s attacks on her spouse.

“He left it alone for months out of respect for me,” Ms. Conway said of the president in an interview with Politico. “But you think he shouldn’t respond when somebody, a nonmedical professional, accuses him of having a mental disorder?”

Mr. Conway has not let up. In October, he used clinical terms in The Atlantic to say Mr. Trump’s narcissism made him unfit for office.

At Ms. Quinn’s home recently, Mr. Conway and William F. Weld, the former Massachusetts governor and Mr. Trump’s long-shot 2020 primary challenger, embraced like lost brothers, then posed for a photo with the former Democratic presidential candidate and self-help author Marianne Williamson.

Mr. Conway “was one of the last to leave,” Ms. Quinn recalled. “He was just glowing, you know?”

 

[fraurosena]

13 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Interesting NYT article about K-Con and George: "When America’s Oddest Political Couple Fight, Those Sparks Are Real"

  Hide contents

WASHINGTON — George T. Conway III has described the work of his wife, Kellyanne Conway, for President Trump in terms usually reserved for hostage situations: brainwashed by a cult, suffering from Stockholm syndrome, an overwhelmed mother protecting a destructive man-child.

And if you think it’s all shtick, some wink-and-nod act by a couple who fights by day and snuggles by night, planning a payday after Mr. Trump leaves the scene, think again, say some people close to America’s oddest political couple.

“Those who think this is a 14-dimensional chess game are mistaken,” said Rick Wilson, who with Mr. Conway and several other Republicans formed the Lincoln Project, an effort to beat Mr. Trump in the 2020 election.

Mr. Conway “has taken unequivocal and irreversible actions that have established his bona fides as someone who opposes Donald Trump, and she’s going to be for Donald Trump until the last dog dies,” he said, adding a question that many Americans have asked themselves about the Conways: “Who knows the secrets of the human heart?”

In a sense, the passions in the Conway household have come to represent the societal agonies of the Trump era, a couple and a nation deeply divided, unsettled by the storms around the presidency, and asking themselves, when it’s all over, can there be reconciliation?

The Conways bring to mind a previous Washington “It” couple: Mary Matalin, who worked for President George W. Bush, and James Carville, the Democratic strategist who helped engineer President Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory over Mr. Bush. Ms. Matalin and Mr. Carville turned their political dissonance into a lucrative brand, joking about their vast differences.

The Conways agree politically on most things because Mr. Conway, for all his anti-Trump activities, remains deeply conservative. But the couple does not appear to be having much fun.

“Coming of political age in 1992 is significantly different than coming of age in 2017,” Mr. Carville said. “Trump people have much more of a sense of personal assault or grievance, and the Trump opponents have a high, high dose of doing the right thing for the country. You can hardly even tell jokes about it anymore.”

Ms. Conway, 53, Mr. Trump’s senior counselor and 2016 campaign manager, has largely held her tongue about her husband, though she told The Washington Post in 2018 that his sniping “disrespects his wife.”

In recent months, Mr. Conway, 56, a constitutional lawyer by trade and Trump opponent by conversion, has become more embittered, and more public. During the presidential impeachment, he took to CNN and Twitter as a commentator, calling Mr. Trump a “criminal,” “pathological liar” and “Idiot-in-Chief.”

To mark Mr. Trump’s acquittal by the Senate, Mr. Conway wrote a sarcastic, bitter column, concluding, “I believe the president’s call was perfect. I believe he is deeply concerned about corruption in Ukraine.” Mr. Conway live-tweeted his derision as the president celebrated last week in the East Room of the White House. “Let it out, @realDonaldTrump. Let it all out,” he mocked.

For someone who labored in Republican legal vineyards for decades — in the 1990s, he was a lawyer for Paula Jones, who accused Mr. Clinton of sexual misconduct — Mr. Conway did not cut much of a swath in Washington social circles. He rode his wife’s coattails into the nation’s capital.

But of late, he has surpassed her on Washington’s party circuit.

“She was the superstar for two and a half years, and now George is the superstar,” said Sally Quinn, a journalist, author and Washington hostess who has been inviting Mr. Conway, but not Ms. Conway, to her parties in Georgetown.

The Conways met in the summer of 1999, when Mr. Conway was a securities lawyer and partner at the New York firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Ms. Conway was a Republican pollster who appeared frequently on television. Mr. Conway told a mutual friend, the conservative commentator Ann Coulter, that he wanted to meet Ms. Conway, known then by her maiden name, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick. The future Ms. Conway drove out to a Hamptons beach house, rented by Ms. Coulter, and the couple remained planted at the house’s kitchen table, chatting for hours.

They married in 2001 and moved into a Trump tower in Manhattan. Mr. Conway impressed the future president by taking his side in a condo board battle over removing the name “Trump” from the building, and he introduced Ms. Conway to Mr. Trump.

Politics was less bruising then. In 2005, Ms. Conway teamed up with Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, to write a book about how American women were erasing political lines. By reputation, Ms. Conway was smart and empathetic, the type who remembered birthdays and weddings.

The Conways now have four children: the twins, George IV and Claudia, 15; Charlotte, 11; and Vanessa, 10; and a pair of Corgis, Skipper and Bonnie, which Mr. Conway nicknamed Concerned and Troubled after the terms that Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, has used to describe her reaction to Mr. Trump’s behavior.

Friends say the Conways are staying together for their children, although the couple is not always in the same city. Mr. Conway spent chunks of time last year in New York before leaving his firm, while Ms. Conway remained in Washington, where the Trump crowd has largely blackballed her husband.

In November, Mr. Conway attended a “Resistance” party at the New York apartment of Molly Jong-Fast, an author and daughter of Erica Jong. The comedian Kathy Griffin posted a photograph on Instagram of Mr. Conway hiding coyly behind the liberal journalist Soledad O’Brien. Nearby were E. Jean Carroll, a writer who has accused Mr. Trump of rape, and the Hillary Clinton stalwart Philippe Reines.

In Washington, Mr. Conway tends to hole up in his home office, writing opinion pieces and firing away on Twitter. In a July piece titled “Trump Is a Racist President,” he wrote about the first time he heard someone tell his mother, who emigrated from the Philippines, “‘Go back to your country.’”

The gulf between the Conways developed slowly before turning into a chasm. After Mr. Trump’s victory, the Conways jumped into Washington with both feet, buying a 15,000-square foot house with eight bedrooms and 11 bathrooms. “Kellyanne Conway Just Bought This $8 Million D.C. Mansion,” blared Town & Country magazine, through Mr. Conway’s legal partnership accounts for most of the couple’s net worth of about $40 million.

Mr. Conway wept for joy on election night and called his wife’s achievement “the best thing that ever happened to her.” He turned down two potential posts in the Justice Department, calling the administration “a dumpster fire,” though he told the president at the time that he supported him.

In those days, Ms. Conway went out alone, or with Adrienne Arsht, a philanthropist and arts patron with homes in Miami and across the street from the Conways. Ms. Arsht, who calls Ms. Conway “a lovely neighbor, a great mother” and “a fabulous cook,” played down their relationship.

“Our garages face each other, so why not go out together to save on emissions?” she asked.

Early on, Mr. Conway tweeted his disapproval of the president’s tweets about the travel ban, then hastened to tweet his support for the president and “my wonderful wife.”

In February 2019, at a British Embassy party for female members of Congress, Ms. Conway approached Ms. Quinn, the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and the NBC News journalist Andrea Mitchell.

“It was like, ‘Oh, I love your shoes and what a great bag, blah blah,’” Ms. Quinn recalled, until she asked Ms. Conway about her husband, and Ms. Conway, she said, grew angry that Ms. Quinn had even brought him up. “She just took off on all three of us,’’ Ms. Quinn said. “She really went crazy.”

“I said, ‘Kellyanne, you’re married, and you’re working for the president, and he’s writing against the president,” Ms. Quinn recalled. “‘Guess what? This is a story.’”

The next month, the Conway marriage appeared to have become an issue in the White House. Mr. Trump had spent the weekend of March 16 retweeting conspiracy theorists and insulting Senator John McCain when Mr. Conway tweeted, “His condition is getting worse.”

The next day, Brad Parscale, who now manages Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, tweeted that Mr. Conway “hurts his wife because he is jealous of her success.” The president piled on, “A total loser!”

Mr. Conway then gave an interview to The Washington Post, saying that he tweets “so I can get it off my chest and move on with my life that day.” He added, referring to his wife, “Frankly, it’s so I don’t end up screaming at her.”

Mr. Trump clapped back: “George Conway, often referred to as Mr. Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!”

It fell to Ms. Conway to spin Mr. Trump’s attacks on her spouse.

“He left it alone for months out of respect for me,” Ms. Conway said of the president in an interview with Politico. “But you think he shouldn’t respond when somebody, a nonmedical professional, accuses him of having a mental disorder?”

Mr. Conway has not let up. In October, he used clinical terms in The Atlantic to say Mr. Trump’s narcissism made him unfit for office.

At Ms. Quinn’s home recently, Mr. Conway and William F. Weld, the former Massachusetts governor and Mr. Trump’s long-shot 2020 primary challenger, embraced like lost brothers, then posed for a photo with the former Democratic presidential candidate and self-help author Marianne Williamson.

Mr. Conway “was one of the last to leave,” Ms. Quinn recalled. “He was just glowing, you know?”

 

In other words, they're married in name only, for the kids. That explains a lot. Although I do wonder if it is really best for the kids. They must know how things stand. I feel rather sorry for them, caught in the middle as they are.

[justwatching]

In other words, they're married in name only, for the kids. That explains a lot. Although I do wonder if it is really best for the kids. They must know how things stand. I feel rather sorry for them, caught in the middle as they are.

The best thing for the kids is for them both to shut the heck up and get out of the public view. Can you imagine growing up and having your parents’ ridiculous behavior preserved for all the world to see? It would be mortifying.

[apple1]

1 hour ago, justwatching said:

The best thing for the kids is for them both to shut the heck up and get out of the public view. Can you imagine growing up and having your parents’ ridiculous behavior preserved for all the world to see? It would be mortifying.

I agree with this.

Not sure even that could make up for having Kellyanne as a mom, however. Ms. Alternative Facts, obvious liar still wouldn't meet my mom standards.

[GreyhoundFan]

The latest op-ed from George: "George Conway: There is no one to stop Trump now"

Spoiler

When the subject of Attorney General William P. Barr comes up these days, it’s hard not to think of John S. McCain. Not the late senator, mind you, but the USS John S. McCain, the naval destroyer named after his father and grandfather.

It was an incident involving this ship that, as much as anything else, captures how the Trump administration — and its attorney general — operates. It explains Barr’s intervention into the criminal sentencing of Trump’s longtime friend and adviser, felon Roger Stone, and much, much more.

The McCain was docked at the Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan in May 2019, when the 7th Fleet issued a directive that had originated from conversations with the White House Military Office. The president was coming to Yokosuka on Memorial Day, and so, accordingly: “USS John McCain needs to be of sight.” So sailors were ordered to hang a tarp over the vessel’s name, and they removed any coverings that bore the words “John S. McCain."

President Trump didn’t need to say a word. It just happened. He didn’t even know, he later said. But he was hardly displeased. “I was not a big fan of John McCain in any shape or form,” Trump said. “Now, somebody did it because they thought I didn’t like him, okay? And they were well-meaning.”

Anticipating Trump’s narcissistic whims and desires in just this fashion remains the key to survival in his administration, and outside the White House proper, no one does it better than Barr. It’s thus entirely believable, as both Barr and Trump have said, that Trump never gave Barr any instruction about Stone’s case.

But no one could doubt, least of all Barr, what Trump’s reaction would be to line prosecutors’ recommendation of a seven- to nine-year sentence for Stone. When Stone was convicted in November on seven counts of witness tampering and lying to Congress, the president of the United States tweeted, “Well, what about Crooked Hillary, Comey, Strzok, Page, McCabe, Brennan, Clapper, Shifty Schiff, Ohr & Nellie, Steele & all of the others, including even Mueller himself? Didn’t they lie?”

So when it came to Stone’s sentence, Barr likely knew what to do, without ever being told. And he has known what to do, whenever feasible, to keep Trump happy all along. Even before he became attorney general, he was singing a tune that must have been music to Trump’s ears: He sent an unsolicited memo to the Justice Department arguing (wrongly) that Trump was legally incapable of obstructing the Mueller investigation.

Later, when he received Mueller’s final report, Barr misled the public about it, facilitating Trump’s endlessly repeated — but false — mantra that the report exonerated the president. Since then, Barr has personally supervised a mysterious re-investigation of the Russia investigation, seemingly trying to substantiate his boss’s conspiracy theories about the original investigation’s origins. And now we have his intervention in favor of Stone, which duly earned him the president’s praise, and his reported review of politically sensitive (meaning, sensitive to Trump) criminal cases, such as the one against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The most important thing Barr did for Trump, though, involved the arms-for-dirt-on-Biden Ukraine scandal — which should have prompted a full-blown criminal investigation with a special counsel. Any U.S. attorney’s office would fall over itself to investigate, for example, a state governor who, while running for reelection against a former mayor, so much as hinted to the mayor’s successor that, say, highway funds would be restricted unless the current mayor were to announce an inquiry into her predecessor’s alleged corruption.

But instead of investigating the Ukraine shakedown, Barr’s Justice Department immediately gave the president a clean bill of health. Saving Trump from that criminal investigation was more than what Roy Cohn ever did for any of his clients.

So when Barr announced this week that “I think it’s time to stop tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases,” and that the president’s statements “make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors and the department that we’re doing our work with integrity” — he wasn’t actually standing up for the Justice Department’s integrity, or its independence, or for the rule of law.

To the contrary, as his (and my) friend Fox News host Laura Ingraham put it, “Barr was basically telling Trump, don’t worry I got this.” In other words, don’t blow this by calling attention to all that I do for you. Don’t say the quiet part out loud.

But the president will never listen, and what Barr does for him will never be enough. Now having been acquitted by the Senate, Trump thinks he’s bulletproof, legally and otherwise. He now brags, as he tweeted on Saturday, that he is “‘the King’” who was targeted but not taken down. And, drawing on a story in the New York Times that suggested he is stained but unshackled, Trump boasted that he has indeed survived “'triumphant'” and “'emboldened'” and “'focused'” more than ever on prosecuting “'his case of grievance, persecution, and resentment.'”

So Trump wants to say the quiet part out loud; he wants to say he’s got this. And there’s no one to stop him.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good read: "Kellyanne Conway’s ugly deceptions preview the Big Lie to come"

Spoiler

The Big Lie that President Trump’s campaign will employ to rescue his reelection chances amid his catastrophic mishandling of the biggest U.S. public health emergency in modern times is edging into view.

Fittingly, it is being telegraphed by the author of the perfect catchphrase of the Trump era — “alternative facts.”

White House spinner Kellyanne Conway has offered a new defense of Trump that telegraphs the coming strategy. It doesn’t rest simply on the idea that Trump’s handling of coronavirus has been a decisive success, but also on the crucial idea that this crisis could not have been anticipated.

This new defense of Trump comes amid a truly seismic event: a massive capitulation to reality, in which Trump acknowledged that coronavirus deaths could be far higher than anyone can bear, leading him to extend strict social-distancing guidelines until at least the end of April.

The extraordinary emerging accounts of this abrupt reversal all tell a similar story. Horrifying TV imagery (mounting corpses in Queens) and attention-grabbing statistics (advisers told him a best-case scenario involves 100,000 to 200,000 U.S. deaths) finally penetrated for Trump.

This combined with hard-nosed politics to force Trump to abandon his reelection-driven desire to reopen the economy quickly. His political team is mindful of polls showing broad public support for keeping the economy on hold until the coronavirus is tackled, and it fears that a resurgent spike in deaths this fall could be worse for him than an immediate economic collapse.

It is in this deeply fraught context that Conway put forth her defense of Trump, as reported by The Post:

Trump “is presiding over the country’s response to an unanticipated, unprecedented pandemic of global proportions, and he is getting credit for his handling of the pandemic … In due time, he will preside over the great American comeback, which is more likely to be in the summer or fall, depending on the effectiveness of mitigation and relief efforts and the uncertain path of the virus itself.”

All the ingredients of the coming Big Lie campaign are there. The pandemic was not just an unprecedented challenge; it was one that no one could have anticipated. Trump has risen to the occasion in spite of the fact that everyone was caught off guard.

And any hard times to come, far from having been created in no small part by Trump himself, will be the occasion for him to rally the country back to (resumed) glory.

What all this suggests is that Trump’s political team appears to have decided that on the coronavirus, it cannot concede error of any kind on his part. This explains a great deal about this moment, but it also suggests the potential for extreme peril ahead.

Trump’s acceptance of reality is selective

On a conference call with governors on Monday, Trump was pressed by Montana Gov. Steve Bullock about his state’s dire need for more testing equipment.

“I haven’t heard about testing in weeks,” Trump claimed, as a leaked audiotape of the call revealed. “I haven’t heard about testing being a problem.”

This is a ludicrous lie: Governors have been frantically demanding new testing equipment for some time. Investigative reporting has documented an extraordinary string of failures on the Trump administration’s part leading to current shortages. Those in turn spawned a “lost month” that helped allow the coronavirus to rampage out of control, with untold horrors ahead.

But what this shows, again, is that Trump’s acceptance of reality (when it comes to mounting deaths) only goes so far: He will continue to employ his magical reality-bending powers to mask his own previous failures to whatever degree he can.

That project rests heavily on the idea, as Conway put it, that this crisis was “unanticipated.” But that’s verifiable nonsense.

“It was only unexpected to people who chose not to pay attention — meaning Trump and a White House that has consistently downplayed and marginalized preparedness and readiness for exactly this scenario,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, told me.

Trump vastly minimized the crisis in real time for weeks and weeks, at a time when his own health-care officials, as well as members of Congress and outside experts, were frantically doing the opposite, badly hampering the federal response.

Indeed, the Obama administration handed off a series of projected dire pandemic scenarios to the Trump administration as part of the transition, and it’s now overwhelmingly evident that none of those were taken to heart.

Trump’s pathologies threaten future damage

All of that failure is well documented. But importantly, the emerging posture — in which no error can be acknowledged in Trump’s response — threatens the country going forward.

“It’s not merely misleading — it’s actively damaging to the response," Konyndyk told me. “One of the core principles of good disaster management is you have to be able to recognize and correct mistakes.”

“If the president’s perfect decision-making is the first principle from which everything else originates, that dynamic is a huge handicap,” Konyndyk continued. “It makes it really hard to rapidly acknowledge and correct errors.”

We’re seeing this on multiple fronts. The aforementioned failure to ramp up testing, and the ongoing failure to get needed testing equipment to desperate governors, is compounded by Trump’s insistence on claiming that no such testing failure exists — or ever has.

Meanwhile, Trump’s running failure to coordinate industry to produce lifesaving equipment on the needed scale flows directly from his long-running refusal to deploy the Defense Production Act to the degree required. After all, doing so would also require an admission of previous catastrophic error.

We simply don’t know how bad the consequences of all this will get. But we do know that Trump will never take responsibility for any of those consequences — and that his team will employ the Big Lie to create the impression that his only agency consists in his glorious success in rallying us back to greatness.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

George is now a poet!

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Why would Biden waste his time? Twitler listens to nobody:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Some replies under spoiler:

Spoiler

 

[justwatching]

Some replies under spoiler:
Spoiler

 

That thread is hysterical!!!

[GreyhoundFan]

10 minutes ago, justwatching said:

That thread is hysterical!!!

I found some more responses that made me laugh:

Spoiler

 

[Henri205]

They’re both revolting money-grubbing pigs. 

[GreyhoundFan]

George wrote an op-ed for the WaPo. It's an interesting read: "George Conway: Trump went ballistic at me on Twitter. Here’s why he reacts with such rage."

Quote

Americans died from covid-19 at the rate of about one every 42 seconds during the past month. That ought to keep any president awake at night.

Not Donald Trump.

Just days ago, the president flipped out at a detailed New York Times article that described how he watches television at all hours, obsessed about how he’s covered in the news. As though to prove the story’s thesis, Trump rage-tweeted that it was a “phony story” and that the media would say “Anything to demean!”

And then, as though to prove the point again, at 12:46 a.m. on Tuesday, Trump went ballistic on Twitter — at me.

In a four-tweet screed, he attacked me and my colleagues at the Lincoln Project as “LOSERS,” “loser types,” “crazed” and “a disgrace to Honest Abe.” About me, he said, “I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, Moonface, but it must have been really bad.” Ten hours later, on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, Trump was still enraged, ranting about us for nearly two minutes in front of the media.

What triggered his ire was a 60-second online ad we released Monday. Entitled “Mourning in America,” it’s an inversion of President Ronald Reagan’s famous 1984 reelection campaign ad, “Morning in America.” Reagan’s ad took credit for the resurgence of the American economy. Our ad puts the blame for the government’s failures in responding to covid-19 right where it belongs — on Trump. He dithered for 10 weeks, from January to mid-March, misleading the public about the severity of the crisis, pretending that the virus would never take hold here. History will record that each day of delay cost American lives.

It may strike you as deranged that a sitting president facing a pandemic has busied himself attacking journalists, political opponents, television news hosts and late-night comedians — even deriding a former president who merely called for empathy and unity in response to the virus. It may strike you as nuts that Trump bragged about his supposed Facebook ranking in the middle of a virus task-force briefing, asserted that millions would have died were it not for him, boasted that “the ‘Ratings’ of my News Conferences etc.” were driving “the Lamestream Media . . . CRAZY,” and floated bogus miracle cures, including suggesting that scientists consider injecting humans with household disinfectants such as Clorox.

If so, you’re not alone. Tens of thousands of mental-health professionals, testing the bounds of professional ethics, have warned for years about Trump’s unfitness for office.

Some people listened; many, including myself, did not, until it was too late.

Now, it’s more obvious than ever. Trump’s narcissism deadens any ability he might otherwise have had to carry out the duties of a president in the manner the Constitution requires. He’s so self-obsessed, he can only act for himself, not for the nation. It’s why he was impeached, and why he should have been removed from office.

And it’s why he reacts with such rage. He fears the truth. He fears being revealed for what he truly is. Extreme narcissists exaggerate their achievements and talents, and so Trump has spent his life building up a false image of himself — not just for others, but for himself, to protect his deeply fragile ego. He lies endlessly, not just in the way sociopaths do, which is to con others, but also to delude himself. He claims to be a “genius,” even though he apparently can’t spell, can’t punctuate, can’t do math and lacks geographic literacy, and even though his own appointees have privately called him a “moron,” an “idiot,” a “dope,” and “dumb.” Now, God help us, he fancies himself an expert in virology and infectious diseases.

But the jig is up. When Trump lied and claimed credit for “the greatest economy in the history of our country,” even though it wasn’t, and even though he inherited a strong economy, and goosed it up with trillions of dollars in debt, it didn’t matter to most people. The economy was good — so what? The debt? That won’t come due for decades.

When he tried to obstruct the Mueller investigation, that didn’t move them either. The rule of law and the violation of a presidential oath are abstractions; the Dow Jones industrial average and the unemployment rate aren’t. And when he used his presidential power to try to extort a foreign ally into smearing a political opponent, not enough cared then, either.

Now it all matters, painfully and concretely. Trump’s lying, his self-regard, his self-soothing, his lack of empathy, his narcissistic rage, his contempt for norms, rules, laws, facts and simple truths — have all come home to roost. Now he sees his poll numbers fall accordingly, and lashes out with ever-increasing anger. For deep in his psyche he knows the truth. Because he fears being revealed as a fake or deranged, he’ll call others fake or deranged. Because he fears losing, he’ll call them losers instead.

And while Trump’s mind roils in rage, too many Americans are losing their lives. That’s the losing that matters, to everyone but him.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

K-Con is being helpful, allowing people to understand the concept of irony.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

An op-ed from G-Con: "Trump’s soulless nature has done the nation incalculable harm"

Spoiler

Just as crises can provide a test of anyone’s character, they do so especially with presidents. We stand burdened with watching a president fail his test, in cataclysmic fashion, and with the nation suffering the consequences.

Until three brief months ago, President Trump never faced a serious crisis, at least one not of his own making. But now he has faced two, and is failing two, in short order: the covid-19 pandemic, with its concomitant economic devastation; and now social unrest, and rioting, stemming from the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

Lacking in humanity, Trump has had no idea how to handle either one. He has responded to the police-brutality protests only by making matters worse. Faced with circumstances warranting calls for calm and restraint, he answered with almost sadistic invitations for more violence, fulminating about “THUGS” and extrajudicially “shooting” looters, issuing threats about “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons,” and celebrating “Domination” and “Overwhelming force.”

Tweeting about “LAW AND ORDER!” and “Anarchists,” and ignoring the distinction between peaceful, aggrieved citizens and the relatively few lawbreakers among them, Trump castigated governors in a phone call as “weak,” effectively upbraiding them for not spraying more fuel on the fire. And then, after he was wounded by mockery about having been hustled to a White House bunker as protests mounted, his administration used chemicals and projectile munitions to disperse peaceful demonstrators so that this morally deficient, scripturally ignorant payer-off-of-porn-stars could awkwardly pose with a borrowed Bible as a stalwart defender of public order and Christian values in front of a Lafayette Square church.

And all with little more than token acknowledgment of the tragedy that triggered it all, and of the righteous outrage that has caused the streets to fill. Little more than a few robotically recited lines tucked into a speech at NASA about a rocket launch, and a speech at the White House that prefaced his parade to the church. He made a sympathy phone call to Floyd’s family, but the dead man’s brother, Philonise, said it went by so quickly that he was barely given a chance to speak.

So, too, with covid-19: The pandemic response sorely needed a leader with competence and intellectual understanding, guided by a basic humanity. Instead, Trump began with denials, lies, delusions — cases going down to zero, and the deadly pathogen would miraculously disappear. He veered from extreme to extreme: from covid-19 as a flu-like problem to a national emergency, from calls for precautions to demands for “liberation” from them, with miracle cures sprinkled about along the way.

Erratic press briefings featured Trump blathering and preening, and treating government experts cavalierly, as if he were on a phone call with Philonise Floyd. The briefings mercifully ended after Trump apparently realized they did him political harm.

And all without appreciation by the president of the human toll exacted not only by the virus itself, but also from his own inattentiveness to it. On Memorial Day weekend, as the death count approached 100,000, he indulged himself with two days of golf. When asked during a March virus briefing a simple question that any humane politician could have knocked out of the park — “What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now and are scared?” — he responded not to the American people, but with an angry attack on the journalist: “I’d say that you’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I’d say.”

So much of Trump’s inaptness and ineptness in these and other matters stems from his exceptional narcissism, and the empathic deficit that attends it. Few who have considered it would today doubt, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) so perceptively put it in 2016, that Trump was “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen.”

But it’s more than just narcissism that drives this failing, flailing president. However difficult they can be, even extreme narcissists can have consciences. They don’t necessarily cast aside behavioral standards or laws, or lie ceaselessly with reckless abandon. Trump’s behavior is conscienceless, showing utter disregard for the safety of others, consistent irresponsibility, callousness, cynicism and disrespect of other human beings. Contempt for truth and honesty, and for norms, rules and laws. A complete inability to feel remorse, or guilt. As a New Yorker profile of Trump put it nearly a quarter-century ago, Trump lives “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.” That’s Donald Trump’s problem yesterday, today and tomorrow.

It’s our problem, too, for now: We remain governed by a soulless man with a broken mind. The damage will continue, and it won’t stop until voters end it. Come November, it will be up to the eligible human population of this country to look to their souls, their consciences, their humanity — and to cast their votes for one of their own.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I bet this makes K-Con grind her teeth:

 

Edited July 2, 2020 by GreyhoundFan

[Howl]

As noted in George Takei's tweet, Claudia Conway is George and Kellyanne's daughter. 

 

[fraurosena]

Kellyanne stands out from the rest of her family like a sore thumb. I don't get their relationships at all...

[Exchange Atheist]

Apparently the Conways now want to make Claudia delete her social media. When in the history of teens has that ever worked? Also, were they seriously expecting their children not to follow in their footsteps?

 

[nausicaa]

Even their underage daughter is involved now? This family is such a mess and I've been deeply uncomfortable with this "private issues exploited for public attention" dynamic for a while now. 

And some part of me wonders if this is some weird kink between Kelly and George. I really wish the rest of us weren't forced to be the voyeurs of all of this. 

[fraurosena]

As a parent, I can understand the Conway's concerns about Claudia's being on social media and being hounded by paparazzi and Trumplicans and kooks. She is a minor, and that is not being respected at the moment, so George and Kellyanne's protectiveness in this case is entirely understandable.

Of course, Claudia being a rebellious teen and not afraid to voice her opinions is not helping matters. She wants to do what her peers can do freely, and express herself on social media. I feel sorry for her in that regard. She's being confronted with the unwanted and undeserved consequences of being the kid of, in her case, two famous parents.

[nausicaa]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

As a parent, I can understand the Conway's concerns about Claudia's being on social media and being hounded by paparazzi and Trumplicans and kooks. She is a minor, and that is not being respected at the moment, so George and Kellyanne's protectiveness in this case is entirely understandable.

Of course, Claudia being a rebellious teen and not afraid to voice her opinions is not helping matters. She wants to do what her peers can do freely, and express herself on social media. I feel sorry for her in that regard. She's being confronted with the unwanted and undeserved consequences of being the kid of, in her case, two famous parents.

I'm disappointed with the adults on Twitter encouraging her with this and acting like her parents are unfairly censoring her. She is a young teen and inexperienced with the machinations of PR. It'd be pretty easy for her to impulsively post a stupid video that haunts her for years.

Also, a lot of her posts are very sexualized. I'm not mentioning that to shame her; it's completely normal for her to be testing her sexuality at that age. But she is also only 15, and there's a ton of adult creeps on the Internet. She is high profile by virtue of who her parents are so it's not just teenage classmates sliding into her DMs. George and Kelly have every right to be clamping down on this.