Another toadie steps up
by digby
In case you haven't been following the ongoing brouhaha known as "Sharpiegate" the latest is that NOAA came out and said Trump was right and Alabama's weather service was wrong. It's caused quite the stir among meteorologists everywhere who see this as abject BS which, of course, it is. He said what he said because he's and idiot and he won't admit it. He got a rear Admiral to fall on his sword and now this.
That's right. The NOAA director is a political appointee who served on Trump's inaugural committee. In other words, another Trump toadie.
Greg Sargent points out that government employees lying to cover Trump's lies is an ongoing scandal:
By my count, this has happened at least seven times:
- In January 2017, after the media reported on Trump’s paltry inaugural crowd size, resulting in enraged but preposterous pushback from Trump, he dispatched then-press secretary Sean Spicer to tell multiple lies buttressing his stance. As Glenn Kessler crucially noted, some of these were part of a prepared White House statement. Trump also ordered his then-acting National Park Service chief to hunt for helpful photographic evidence. The NPS does not estimate crowd sizes, and the official was shocked, but he carried out Trump’s request, finding nothing.
- After Trump repeatedly alleged widespread fictitious voter fraud in 2016, the White House set up an official commission to “study” the issue. When it flopped, a dissenting member explicitly declared the motive was to make Trump’s lies true. Remember that this was rooted in rage at losing the popular vote.
- When Trump declared before the midterm elections that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with migrant caravans, multiple officials tried to bolster this claim by offering an official-seeming statistic about terrorism arrests that was entirely spurious and proved nothing of the kind.
- When Trump vowed a surprise 10 percent middle class tax cut before the midterms, officials were caught off guard, but nonetheless sprang into action to try to create the impression this was a real promise by, for instance, discussing a nonbinding pledge. The tax cut never happened.
- To justify suspending the credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta after he annoyed Trump, then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders shared a video that experts determined had been deceptively edited to make Acosta look physically abusive toward a press aide.
- To fear-monger for his wall, Trump repeatedly told stories about traffickers tying up migrant women and silencing them with tape. After The Post flatly debunked Trump’s assertion, a top border official circulated an internal request for “any information” that would support the claim.
- To buttress Trump’s distortions of the migrant threat, the Department of Homeland Security produced a slick official presentation about the border that claimed nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists had been blocked from entering the United States. But this number had nothing whatsoever to do with efforts to cross the border, a distinction multiple officials also dishonestly fudged.
Some time ago, Dana Milbank noted that in multiple cases such as these, government officials are using “federal resources in vain attempts to turn the president’s lies into truth.”
I would add the big kahuna: Bill Barr declaring Trump innocent of Obstruction of Justice charges.
I think we are at a point at which we must acknowledge that every Trump appointee is as corrupt as he is. This is what happens when personal loyalty to the man supersedes their oath to protect the constitution.
It is quite the indictment of these people that virtually all of them are perfectly willing to do it. And sadly, the so-called "adults in the room" who did leave are still pretending that this is not a major crisis.
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