Well, the morally inexcusable Sarah Huckabee Sanders certainly was a bird of ruffled plumage today. One would think that when she was conducting her first press briefing in 3 weeks, she’d be well rested, and ready to play the game. But no, not the Nurse Ratchett of press secretaries.
Rather predictably, the topic of questioning almost immediately turned to the President’s rhetoric as related to the Trumpaholic pipe bomber, and the bigoted Pittsburgh synagogue shooter. Her response was pure, unadulterated Trump bullshit; “It’s as ridiculous to say that the President is to blame for the actions of the pipe bomber as it would be to say that Bernie Sanders was responsible for the person who shot Steve Scalise.” Actually, that’s true, but it also wasn’t what was asked. The question wasn’t whether or not Trump had called these two idjits up and told them to do it, it was about the influence of his rhetoric on these two morally and mentally defective losers. And naturally, being the clueless twit that she is, she immediately turned around and “blamed” the media, for their “fake news” coverage of Trump. I don’t get it. If Trump’s words can’t incite violence, how can the words of the “fake” media?
This is the Trump media playbook, stripped to its core. Whenever anything happens, find somebody, anybody else to blame. A cat 4 hurricane knocks out power to the entire island of Puerto Rico? Blame it on the stupid Puerto Rican power company for not having hurricane proofed their antiquated, shitty power grid. Farmers lose millions in revenue from Chinese imposed tariffs? Blame the stupid Chinese for having been such dicks as to dare to respond to the tariffs that Trump put on them first. Victim, thy name is Trump.
But it’s also a con, and one that we cannot allow them to get away with. The “blame game” is to Trump what the ink sac is to the octopus, it’s a way of muddying the waters while Trump escapes to safety. The questions that are being lobbed at the White House like hand grenades are not about whether or not Trump is to blame for these incidents. They are about another word entirely, R-E-S-P-O-N-S-I-B-I-L-I-T-Y.
And that’s the word that Trump and Flackabee Slanders can’t tolerate, because they can’t rebut it. Slanders is fond of remarking that “When the President feels that he has been unfairly treated, he is going to hit back.” Well, guess what Blarah? Actions aren’t the only things that come with consequences, so do reactions. When the President of the United States feels that he has been unjustly criticized in an article, and then calls the members of the press “the enemies of the people,” and theatrically points them out at the back of the room, restrained in a roped off area, to a mob of drooling, frenzied half wits, and after the rally, one of his less tightly wrapped supporters punches out a reporter, the President is blameless for setting the table because the press “started it?” It’s ridiculous on the face of it.
Look. If I insult some guy’s girlfriend in a bar, and he bops me in the snoot in the parking lot, if my response is to whack him over the head with a brick, I’m gonna have a kind of a hard time playing the victim card at my assault trial. I had every right to defend myself, even from my own stupid actions, but what IÂ didn’t have the right to do was to weaponize my response. And that’s exactly what Trump, Sanders, the White House, and the entire Republican party are doing. They’re blaming the kids that are bouncing off the walls like neutrinos until 4 AM for eating the bag of Oreos, but accepting no responsibility for leaving the damn bag on the living room coffee table, and then going in to take a bath.
This is what the media must focus on, and what all of us have to pay more attention to. All of us, and especially the media, have to stop allowing Trump and Sanders from deflecting the issue of responsibility into one of blame. Every time that Sarah Sanders uses the word “blame” as a way of deflecting a question of responsibility, the immediate follow up must be, “But Sarah, I’m not talking about the President taking blame, I’m talking about the President taking responsibility for his own words.” If that happens, the daily press briefings are gonna be about 5 minutes long, if they happen at all. Because, as Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, “The truth? You can’;t handle the truth!”
