How are all these Fox News reporters still alive considering they're constantly being beaten to a bloody pulp by Wisconsin protestors' surf boards? Be careful out there, you guys. Wear sunscreen. [YouTube]
"The people have got to know whether or not their president is a murderer. Well, I'm not a murderer. I've earned everything I've got and never once committed armed robbery." -- Donald Trump, tomorrow. PROBABLY.
We've now reached the stage of the Trump administration where the president's defenders are cold calling reporters to tell them to quit making such a big deal, because HELLO, THERE'S NO DEAD BODY. (Yet.)
"Nobody got killed, nobody got robbed… This was not a big crime," Giuliani told
The Daily Beast on Wednesday. He added, sardonically, "I think in two weeks they'll start with parking tickets that haven't been paid."
This is also the stage where there is a new
OMG, breaking! every ninety minutes. So let's type fast to run down the latest on Trump's backroom fuckery with The National Enquirer before this tabloid stuff metastasizes any further.
Last month, the
Wall Street Journal reported that Trump met personally with David Pecker, CEO of the Enquirer's parent company American Media, Inc. (AMI) in August 2015. Would Donny's old pal David like to become an unofficial member of Team Trump? HE WOULD.
What can you do to help my campaign? he asked, according to people familiar with the meeting.
Mr. Pecker, chief executive of American Media Inc., offered to use his National Enquirer tabloid to buy the silence of women if they tried to publicize alleged sexual encounters with Mr. Trump.
Well, there goes Trump's defense that he was just racing to buy up those stories to protect poor, delicate Melania -- ten full years after rawdogging a pornstar while she was home recovering from childbirth. Would that be the same meeting described in AMI's corporate immunity deal published five minutes after Cohen got flayed in open court by SDNY prosecutors?
NO. IT CAN'T BE! Does the Republican-led United States Senate have ... a limit? Is there somehow a line they won't cross in this era of "Let's just go along with whatever Batshit McBigMac up there at 1600 Pennsylvania says and who cares if we destroy America in the process?" Turn out the answer to that question is maybe, and the limit is apparently when the crown prince of Saudi Arabia bone saws a Washington Post journalist to death and the president and the secretaries of State and Defense lie about it to their faces.
Senators do not like being lied to, no matter what party they're in. (Unless they're Chuck Grassley and it's Trump people lying about Russia and they're dangling sweet, delicious corn cobs in front of his face. Or if it's Lindsey Graham, when Trump's mouth is open. But otherwise they hate it.)
The Senate has been holding hearings and offering strongly worded resolutions aimed at forcing Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to take responsibility for the Jamal Khashoggi murder, and also stop genociding the fuck out of Yemen and blockading Qatar and kidnapping the Lebanese prime minister and jailing dissidents, and SO ON. In short, the consensus is that MBS is out of goddamn control and needs to be reined in, yesterday.
On Thursday, the Senate followed that up WITH VOTES. Indeed, the Senate voted unanimously to blame MBS for the murder. (Right here, we are using the definition of "unanimously" that means ALL OF THEM, KATIE, because that is what "unanimously" always means.)
