Ivanka and Jared 3: Treason Barbie and Ken

[GreyhoundFan]

Continued from here:

 

 

We can all use a laugh:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Yes, let's focus on Barbie:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Ivanka guitared while the US burns.

 

[Flossie]

On 10/20/2020 at 5:25 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

Yes, let's focus on Barbie:

 

You have to sign in to the above article, but if you don't want to do that, I've copied it here:

OPINION
Enough about Hunter Biden. What about Ivanka Trump?

Trump’s strategy of focusing on Hunter Biden becomes a way to turn the corruption spotlight away from the Trumps and onto the Bidens.
     By Joan Vennochi Globe Columnist, Updated October 19, 2020, 3:55 p.m.

A recent Senate committee report entitled “Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Corruption: The Impact on US Government Policy and Related Concerns” contains this statement: “The extent to which Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board affected US policy toward Ukraine is not clear.”

Translation: Despite their best efforts, Senate Republicans could find no evidence that Hunter Biden’s role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company directly affected US policy toward Ukraine. If Senate Republicans had uncovered such evidence, they would deliver it, gift-wrapped, to Sean Hannity, all in the interest of tainting former vice president Joe Biden. But they could not. So, denied an official smoking gun, President Trump’s political allies turned to the smoke of a New York Post story so dubious that the staff reporter who wrote much of it refused to put his name on it, The New York Times reported.

Trump’s strategy is clear. His own children are brazenly trading on the Trump family name to advance the Trump Organization’s business interests. Changing the subject to “What about Hunter Biden?” becomes a way to project the corruption spotlight onto the Bidens and away from the Trumps. Plus, if the final weeks of the campaign are all about Hunter Biden, that allows Trump to distract from what are the real issues: Trump’s failed leadership, especially regarding the coronavirus pandemic; Trump’s ongoing commitment to dividing the country by race and political ideology, rather than trying to unite it; and Trump’s utter lack of character, integrity, and honesty.

[Flossie]

On 10/20/2020 at 5:41 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

Ivanka guitared while the US burns.

 

I don't know where she was at, or just what question she was responding to, but here is Ivankas response:

"For a lot of us, during this pandemic we have reconnected to some of life's more simple pleasures.  Board games for example.  Um, we've dusted off all of ours for sure.  I took up playing guitar because my husband was working very late nights.  I'd come home after putting the kids to bed and after I'd went back online and, and finished my work.  I'd be sitting there and, uh, so I just taught myself or am teaching myself how to play guitar so -"  Video cuts off.

Ivanka does seem to be very happy and animated.  Her hair and makeup are nicely done, and I'm sure she looks great in her dress.  Glad she's having a good time.

I'm sure that if she was delicately reminded that many others aren't finding their lives so easy, she put on her empathetic face and said something about how things could be so much worse.  Her father might have done some things a bit better, but on the whole he did more than anyone else could have done.  People need to understand that her father wrung himself out trying to get us (America) through this thing, and until the pandemic hit everything was great.  

Don't blame Daddy, he didn't cause the pandemic, he was just doing the best he could with the hand he was dealt.  The president is her father, so she knows how all of this is weighing down on him, and her husband works closely with her father, so she has an even better understanding of the situation.  Her father has been so supportive of the American people, he was out there walking among them, while Biden was hiding in his basement, and as a result her father caught the virus himself.  Her stepmother and little brother even caught the Covid, but Daddy is now healed and immune and those other two are also doing well.

Do you want to put the nation in the hands of a frail old man who hid from the virus, or want to continue another four years under the leadership of her father, the man who met the virus face to face and defeated it, and now wants to save everyone else?

Daddy has a better understanding of the situation.  Better than the doctors, the CDC, the WHO, and most certainly Dr. Fauci.  Trust in Daddy.  If you survive, it's because of him.  If you get sick, you probably screwed up somehow.  If you die?  Well, shit happens, but it's not Daddy's fault.

VOTE TRUMP!

[GreyhoundFan]

So the Lincoln Project decided to focus on Jarvanka just a bit:

 

Someone tweeted back to them that it was dumb because it's not like Twitler is going to win NYC, but it was pointed out that most native NYC people don't hang out in Times Square, far more tourists are there, including tourists from red states.

[GreyhoundFan]

If this happens, I'll be blocking it from my cable lineup, just like I do with Faux, OANN, and Newsmax.

[Audrey2]

Could you imagine all Trump all the time? It would be like a maga rating on steroids. How many days do you think it will take to convince all the red hats (and I don't mean the red hat society for women over 50) that their toasters are talking to them?

[Becky]

10 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

If this happens, I'll be blocking it from my cable lineup, just like I do with Faux, OANN, and Newsmax.

Oh, it will happen.  We are never, never going to be rid of this vile family, and there will always be gullible fools to buy what they are peddling.  When Donald J. Trump loses this election, one of his spawn will start running for the next one.

[Alisamer]

14 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

If this happens, I'll be blocking it from my cable lineup, just like I do with Faux, OANN, and Newsmax.

Plan A indeed - I'm still convinced the whole intention of Trump running for office in the first place was to drum up an audience for the new Trump TV channel he was planning to debut. He screwed up and won, and is too desperately hungry for attention to let go, so they had to muddle through a presidency no one expected or was ready for. 

I wonder if Melania thought to make sure her revised pre-nup (done after the election, when it became clear she'd have to actually be First Lady) included what will happen if he is re-elected. She's vile as him, but I bet she'll be pretty pissed if he wins again. She'll have to keep living in the old building he called a "dump" and be under constant media scrutiny, and have 4 more years of Christmas decorations to deal with. You know full well she'd rather be jetting around lounging on beaches somewhere while Trump plays golf.

[fraurosena]

4 hours ago, Becky said:

When Donald J. Trump loses this election, one of his spawn will start running for the next one.

Oh, I'm sure they're planning this. 

It will never happen though. Because they were all complicit. This family and the Trump organisation is going down. With the exception of the underage kids, all of them are going down. 

[Cartmann99]

23 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

If this happens, I'll be blocking it from my cable lineup, just like I do with Faux, OANN, and Newsmax.

I'm imagining this as some sort of low-rent variety hour. Donnie's pouting and whining from a gaudy throne surrounded by fast-food wrappers, while the rest of the Trumps sing and tap-dance around him in glittery red, white, and blue outfits with top hats and canes.

[GreyhoundFan]

Awww, their fee fees are hurt.

 

 

Here is the Lincoln Project's response:

[mamallama]

All while the Trump campaign is running adds with clips of Joe Biden saying "if you make more than 400,000 a year I will raise your taxes" but with out the if you make over 400,000 part cut out.

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Walter Shaub's response:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"While Her Father Rails Against ‘Idiot’ Scientists, Ivanka Trump Talks Ice Cream"

Spoiler

FRANKLIN, Wis. — President Trump had just been on Fox and Friends, demanding that his attorney general “act” against his opponent before the election. He had, the day before, called Joseph R. Biden Jr. a “criminal,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci a “disaster,” government scientists “idiots” and members of the media “real garbage.”

Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, was visiting suburban Milwaukee and here for none of this.

“I learned that the first ice cream sundae was created in this amazing state!” the president’s older daughter and senior White House adviser said from a small stage of a sunlit function room overlooking a pond.

There would be no mentions of Hunter Biden in here, no reference to Hillary Clinton, “Barack Hussein Obama,” China Virus, witch hunts, fake news, Antifa or rigged elections.

Instead, the first daughter came armed with local fun facts and pleasing asides. She skipped the Trump-branded red meat and went straight to dessert.

“Wisconsinites eat 21 million gallons of ice cream a year,” Ms. Trump shared as an icebreaker. She likes to collect souvenir trivia like this from the road, which she will then serve up at home as cool mom fodder.

“My children, upon hearing this, want to move to Wisconsin,” she continued. “So, the Kushners might be coming to town!”

The crowd was heavy with the just the kind of white, suburban female voters who have become her father’s demographic kryptonite. They have been fleeing his coalition with such abandon that he has recently been reduced to begging. “Suburban women, will you please like me?” the president pleaded at a rally in Pennsylvania last week.

By wide margins, they do not, especially the white suburban voters who went for Mr. Trump last time. A remarkable 56 percent of white women said they held a very unfavorable view of the president in a New York Times/Siena College poll. These include many independents and former Republicans who self-identify as moderate or conservative and are likely to be put off by the president’s more boorish inclinations.

As much as it’s possible, the Trump campaign is attempting to deploy the first daughter as a demographic paratrooper targeting at-risk women of the changing suburbs.

Speaking to a gathering in the wooded outskirts of Milwaukee — a polite, professionally dressed and economically comfortable group — she focused more on points of friendly consensus (who doesn’t love ice cream?) and seemed determined to offer a stark departure, at least rhetorically, from the tornado of grievance and belligerence that has marked so much her father’s campaign.

She was happy to leave that to her dad and brothers and the rest of the boys. Eric Trump did a raucous, partially masked rally in the packed basement of a bowling alley here last week. Later, Donald Trump Jr. would appear on Fox News and link Hunter Biden, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son, to “human trafficking and prostitution rings.” Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, told a Trump rally in Janesville last weekend that supporters of Mr. Biden “don’t particularly love America.”

Wisconsin is home to both the fierce devotion and revulsion that has burned for Mr. Trump from the outset. It is as hotly contested and divided as any state. The discord has even extended to the stars of Happy Days — set in the Milwaukee suburbs of the 1950s. Ron Howard (who played Richie Cunningham), Henry Winkler (Fonzie) and other alums of the show joined a “virtual reunion” of the cast to raise money for Democrats. But Chachi was not cool with this at all.

“What a shame to use a classic show like Happy Days about Americana to promote an anti-American socialist,” tweeted Scott Baio, a vocal Trump supporter who played Fonzie’s apprentice cousin on the beloved sitcom.

It is not clear that any safe zone is possible inside the Trump enterprise, given the president’s all-consuming personality and the commotion of his presidency. “The first family, including the president, are all going to have different styles,” explained Mercedes Schlapp, a former White House official and campaign surrogate who asked questions of Ms. Trump onstage during her appearance in Franklin. “It’s important to talk about what the president has done for this country in a short period of time,” Ms. Schlapp said in an interview. “It’s important not to get lost in the noise that so much of the mainstream media is wrapped up in.”

Ms Schlapp was asked whether President Trump himself was responsible for creating some of that noise.

“Look,” Ms. Schlapp said, chuckling, “The president punches when he needs to punch.” His daughter has her own story to tell, and her own way of telling it.

Still, a surrogate can stray only so far from a campaign’s dominant message and messenger. Ms. Trump could speak with endless poise about all the important lessons her father instilled (“Find something you’re passionate about, because that’s the path to happiness”). She could focus on suburban parenting concerns such as school choice and education reform, and lament “the loss of social interaction for our kids” during the coronavirus outbreak. She could avoid any talk of immigration, caravans, walls or family separation.

And then, later in the day came a report that the parents of 545 children who had been separated from them at the southern border could not be located.

“On the one hand, a president’s family member can offer a softening and humanizing touch,” said Gil Troy, a presidential historian who has written extensively on first families. In such a polarized and binary environment, he added, Ms. Trump can still offer some measure of reassurance for Republicans who do not like her father but who would be loath to support Mr. Biden. “Ivanka can still be proof that is ‘See, he’s not that bad,’” Mr. Troy said. “She is trying to be some port in the storm.” At a certain point, though the contrast becomes too stark. “It becomes almost a countercampaign rather than a supporting one,” he said.

And while Ms. Trump may avoid the vitriolic language of her father and brothers, she has been connected to policies and actions that critics find just as distasteful or ill-advised. She was, reportedly, a proponent of her father’s march across Lafayette Square last spring during protests against racial injustice, culminating in a Bible-waving photo-op in front of the fire-damaged St. John’s Church. The widely-derided performance stands as one of the most notorious spectacles of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

She has shown a knack for oblivious, tone-deaf gestures: drawing backlash, for instance, after she tweeted a photo of herself cuddling her two-year-old son amid reports of migrant children being forcibly taken from their mothers by border agents. Ms. Trump’s official position at the White House — along with that of her husband, Jared Kushner — has brought a host of criticism over nepotism and potential Hatch Act violations.

As perhaps the president’s most influential aide, his daughter tends to be studiously quiet in public, even over policies she is believed to personally oppose. She inspired a spoof perfume commercial on Saturday Night Live — a fragrance called “Complicit.” (“She’s beautiful. She’s powerful. She’s complicit.”)

On the re-election trail, Ms. Trump is offering a campaign version of daytime TV.

“It’s a breath of fresh air to hear that positive tone,” said Joe Krupa of Franklin through a navy blue, MAGA-emblazoned mask. “I’m really sick of all the Debbie downers and the negativity,” he said. To be clear, Mr. Krupa said he blamed this negativity on the rampant “hatred for Trump” that exists from Democrats and the biased media. Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian energy company, he added, “should be an even bigger scandal than Watergate.” Mr. Krupa seemed to be getting slightly worked up for a second but stopped himself — as if this was not the right vibe for the Ivanka Hour.

“It’s more of the boys’ role to talk about Hunter Biden and all of the other stuff that’s wrong with Joe Biden,” said Mr. Krupa’s friend, Lois Dombrowski of Caledonia, another Milwaukee suburb.

In her remarks, Ms. Trump spoke of her father’s willingness to look beyond party orthodoxy and support creative solutions: one local example involved an initiative to help Wisconsin farmers whose goods were shut off from supply chains after the coronavirus hit. “Farmers were literally taking this beautiful milk and pouring it down the drain,” Ms. Trump said.

Like her father, Ms. Trump is fond of breathless adjectives (“amazing” “unbelievable”) and applying them to common nouns (“beautiful milk”)

“Why do you do what you do every day?” Ms. Schlapp asked the first daughter. How does she endure all the incoming — all the attacks, biases, hatreds and all she had to deal with?

In short, Ms. Trump said she does what she does for the same reason her father does what he does — for love.

“We love this country, we love the people of this country,” she said. “For all the negativity, for all the noise and all of the biased reporting that the president receives, the outpouring of love and prayers” — the she paused — “The love is just a beautiful counterbalance.”

In a sense, Ms. Trump is still attempting to serve as a counterbalance of her own to an otherwise dark campaign. She aims to present, for what it’s worth, an alternative reality check to a version of Donald Trump that seems deeply embedded at this late stage.

Of all the Trump ambassadors, she offers the most disciplined message, sharing a pitch that rarely makes reference to “idiot” scientists or hoaxes of any kind. Among family surrogates, she makes an odd kind of black sheep.

 

[Xan]

The Lincoln Project's latest legal salvo.  The letter is a thing of beauty.  They even used footnotes!

Spoiler

 

[fraurosena]

@Xan, those footnotes are the best thing about that letter too! Especially #7... ?

[GreyhoundFan]

LOL

 

[CTRLZero]

7 hours ago, fraurosena said:

@Xan, those footnotes are the best thing about that letter too! Especially #7... ?

Great letter.  I loved that they found some case law on the subject of reputation with a mobster named "Boobie."  Seems fitting. 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, Treason Barbie is a hypocrite. What a surprise. /s

 

[fraurosena]

On 10/27/2020 at 1:03 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Sorry, Trump's cut off face in that photo made me laugh. It looks like he's slowly lifting his head into view in an attempt at attention grabbing photobombing. 

[fraurosena]

Jared Kushner told Bob Woodward Trump took the country "back from the doctors"

Quote

The president's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner boasted to journalist and author Bob Woodward in an April interview that President Trump had taken the country "back from the doctors," amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to audio obtained by CBS News. 

In an interview taped on April 18, as the virus was overwhelming New York City and spreading throughout the country, Kushner told Woodward there were three phases — the "panic phase," the "pain phase," and the "comeback phase."

"The last thing was kind of doing the guidelines, which was interesting," Kushner told Woodward. "And that in my mind was almost like – you know, it was almost like Trump getting the country back from the doctors. Right? In the sense that what he now did was, you know, he's going to own the open-up."

"There were three phases," Kushner also said in the interview, which was first reported by CNN. "There was the panic phase, the pain phase and then the comeback phase. I do believe that last night symbolized kind of the beginning of the comeback phase. That doesn't mean there's not still a lot of pain and there won't be pain for a while, but that basically was, we've now put out rules to get back to work. Trump's now back in charge. It's not the doctors. They've kind of — we have, like, a negotiated settlement."

When Kushner spoke to Woodward, the White House had just released guidelines for reopening the country in an "Opening Up America Again" document. Though he did not specify what "last night" meant, on the night before the interview, on April 17, President Trump had said at a Coronavirus Task Force briefing that he was leaving coronavirus testing to governors. He had also tweeted, "LIBERATE MICHIGAN," "LIBERATE MINNESOTA," AND "LIBERATE VIRGINIA" in response to stay-at-home orders by those states' governors. 

Mr. Trump told Woodward in one interview for Woodward's book, "Rage," that he always wanted to play down the virus.

The president, who appeared to defer to experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx in the early days of the pandemic, became increasingly frustrated by the economy's downward trajectory as the disease spread and governors locked down their states. He and his administration pushed for reopening without a comprehensive testing and tracing plan in place. The president has been open about his irritation with Fauci, in particular, whom he has called a "Democrat" even though Fauci says he belongs to no political party. 

In the same interview, Kushner also described the two political parties as more like "collections of tribes," and said the president "basically did a full hostile takeover of the Republican Party." 

"So you have a disproportionality between what issues people are vocal on and what the people, the voters, really care about," Kushner said. "And what Trump's been able to do is – I say he basically did a full hostile takeover of the Republican Party. And I don't think it's even as much about the issues. I think it's about the attitude."