It’s time to open a new filing cabinet, next to the one marked “You Can’t Make This Shit Up” and call it the “You Can’t Bottom This” file. Today, in day five of Trump’s Alabama-hurricane obsession, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) issued a statement denying the National Weather Service tweet, issued in response to Trump’s tweet that Alabama was in the path of Dorian. NOAA is saying that Trump was right, and the Weather Service was wrong, so that he can stop looking like the total fool that he is. The Hill:
The NOAA statement, which was unsigned and posted to the agency’s website on Friday, said that the “Birmingham National Weather Service’s Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.”
“From Wednesday, August 28, through Monday, September 2, the information provided by NOAA and the National Hurricane Center to President Trump and the wider public demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama,” the NOAA statement reads.
Nothing like damage control, when you have an out-of-control lunatic in the White House who won’t take everybody’s advice and let.it.go.already. But this NOAA statement is just part of in-house desperate administration scrambling to make Trump look like less of a moron.
The NOAA statement backing up Trump is one of the latest moves the administration has taken this week to defend the president, even as the storm has lashed the Carolinas with heavy rain and intense wind after devastating the Bahamas earlier this week.
On Thursday, the White House released a statement from one of Trump’s top advisers on Dorian that said the president was briefed Sunday morning on information indicating the storm could possibly strike Alabama.
“These products showed possible storm impacts well outside the official forecast cone,” [Rear Adm. Peter] Brown said in the statement released on White House letterhead.
“The president’s comments were based on that morning’s Hurricane Dorian briefing, which included the possibility of tropical storm force winds in southeastern Alabama,” he added.
They had to do something fast in Washington, because even Friday morning, Trump wouldn’t let it alone. He’s right, he’s right, he’s right and it’s all a plot by the Enemy of the People, the Deep State, the Democrats, you get the idea. Donny the Delusional Dotard has to be right, no matter what.
The Fake News Media was fixated on the fact that I properly said, at the beginnings of Hurricane Dorian, that in addition to Florida & other states, Alabama may also be grazed or hit. They went Crazy, hoping against hope that I made a mistake (which I didn’t). Check out maps…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2019
….partner should start playing it straight. It would be so much better for our Country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2019
Another president has never made a gaffe and then septupled and octupled down on it, in doggedly blind and downright stupid persistence, in the face of all advice to the contrary. So now Trump has an unsigned statement from NOAA, on White House letterhead, and this controversy STILL rages on, Sweet Jesus.
This is from AMS Certified Broadcast Meteorologist James Spann in Alabama.
The tweet from NWS Birmingham was spot on and accurate. If they are coming after them, they might as well come after me. How in the world has it come to this? https://t.co/73376v7Zpj
— James Spann (@spann) September 6, 2019
There’s a saying in law about carelessness, negligence and recklessness: careless is being a fool, negligence is being a damn fool, and recklessness is being a goddamn fool. I would analogize it to making a mistake, lying about the mistake, and going batshit insane trying to defend the mistake, which is what Trump has done here. He just doesn’t know where the line is drawn and moreover, he doesn’t give a damn. He is just fine with rending the fabric of reality, tearing it to shreds with his lies and conspiracy theory, and mangling the social fabric of news and normal discourse along with it.
This is a simply unbelievable development — although, when it’s coming from Trump, nothing, unfortunately, is unbelievable. We can only speculate about where this issue is going to devolve to from here. When Donald Trump got elected the bar of behavior for a president was lowered so far and so fast, that it swiftly went through all the sub-basements and wells, all the way to the molten core of the earth. I guess now it’s come out the other side, in China. I just hope it has to pay a tariff.
And are you sitting down? The Trump campaign is making money off of this. Politico:
Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has added a Trump-branded permanent marker to its web store, capitalizing on the Sharpie-gate drama and expanding the campaign’s culture war offerings that already include stick-it-to-the-liberals plastic straws.
The marker, announced on Twitter this morning by campaign manager Brad Parscale, is the latest effort by the campaign to amplify and then commodify what could have been a relatively minor controversy.
“Buy the official Trump marker, which is different than every other marker on the market, because this one has the special ability to drive @CNN and the rest of the fake news crazy!” Parscale tweeted.
Trump’s Sharpies are selling at five for $15, whereas normal Sharpies sell at five for $3.99. You know the expression, a fool and his money are soon parted. Have at it, Trumpites. Better thee than me.
Will someone please tranquilize himself and lock him in a padded room for about a month, so the rest of us can get some peace and quiet?
This is the weirdest thing he’s done to date. This, and getting POed at Fox News. That’s the other biggest joke.
It definitely is. A normal person says “I made a mistake.” An egotistical person stops talking about it and hopes you forget, or deflects you by talking about something else. And then there’s Trump. I went to an event tonight that included a pop-up display and discussion on civil rights and black lives in the U.S. One of the magazines on display had an article about what photographs of President Obama and his family in the White House signified about him, copiously illustrated. I just started crying on the spot.
I’d make a mistake at work doing QC, and then go to whoever had done the work and apologize to them.
And another trusted American institution goes down. For God’s sake, even NOAA has been corrupted by this idiot traffic cone and his morally-void, reckless enablers. NOAA, goddammit! I live in New Orleans, and that agency’s hurricane accurate and timely information has always been literally a matter of life and death for us and others, so now I have to wonder whether we’re being told the truth? This recent escalation of already utter insanity should scare all of us witless–liberals, conservatives, apathetic nonvoters, RWNJs; red, blue or purple states–for nobody will escape harm caused by the GOP’s war on truth.
He’s apparently getting bad enough that people in the WH are worrying.
The whole point of this is being missed…..I emailed a friend in Delaware that the hurricane was going to skirt the East coast rather than simply plow into Florida as had been earlier predicted so it needed closer watching…..I had this information at 3:47AM on the morning of August 31st……shitferbrains made his tweet that first mentioned Alabama at 10:51 on September 1st, over 24 hours after the forecast had been changed.
Dumb Quixote had stated that he cancelled his trip to Poland so he could monitor the storm and then promptly went golfing.
He lied about monitoring the storm and was caught in that lie when he published an old forecast mentioning a Florida landfall. He hadn’t been, nor had he made any effort to monitor the storm and was caught red handed.
Everyone I have run into today is talking about his, not because it’s so important in and of itself but because of what it signifies about Trump’s confused enfeebled mental state. It is beyond belief. Norma people don’t carry on for six days about something like this.
“In the event that your inane tweets are caught or logic behind them killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existence. What’s left of your credibility will self-destruct in three seconds…good luck in prison!”
MoscowMitch, TRUMP THE IDIOT WEATHERMAN, it can’t get any worse until tomorrow, when Trump delivers more evidence of his failure at solving the raging internal conflict he is having with his maniacal malignant narcissism ….
Something has finally clicked … his ABSOLUTE need to always be right, along with a gaggle of YES people clapping like seals at the marine AF-1 copter take off, once again for a day of golf as the worthless pretend president he is ….
This Dotard does not care one bit about anyone else, but his intense dislike for anything Obama still kicks common sense to the curb, while he should be volunteering to pose for a laser scanner to make original art for the “Whack-a-Mole Game, every other, “Mole”,, will be Moscow Mitch …
This is outrageous but no big surprise. I only hope that people aren’t getting de-sensitized to all of this shit. Did I miss something? Was Alabama in the cone and was it mentioned in any of the hurricane updates that it was now in the cone? It doesn’t matter – the Asshole in Chief has to be right at all costs. When is this nightmare going to end?!
Alabama was never in the cone.
I hear NOAA’s senior communications person is a former assistant to Mrs Moscow Mitch. Ask about *that* chain of command….
And NOAA management puts their foot even deeper.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/NOAA-staff-told-not-to-contradict-Trump-14422206.php