I was going to write this entry about the two biggest stories from the White Madhouse of the previous week, the U.S. attack on a Syrian airfield and the possibility of placing U.S. nuclear weapons in South Korea. Then Sean Spicer makes his biggest WTF gaffe to date, comparing Bashar al-Assad and Adolf Hitler.
In less than 3 months, Sean Spicer has made the office of White House Press Secretary a complete joke. The office has been official since the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, although his predecessor Herbert Hoover had a private secretary who was his official spokesman. If you’re curious, George Akerson and Theodore Joslin held that spot for Hoover, Stephen Early served for FDR. Pierre Salinger became famous as John Kennedy’s press secretary. Ron Ziegler became semi-infamous as Richard Nixon’s press secretary. Any screw-ups they and all of the 29 who preceded Spicer were guilty of collectively pale to Spicer’s, which culminated in the WTF press conference of April 11.
If you were on a mountain in the Andes and didn’t have good wi-fi, Spicer was trying to state that Russia should question its alliance and support of Syria. He said "We didn't use chemical weapons in World War II. You had someone as despicable as Hitler didn't even sink to using chemical weapons. If you're Russia, you have to ask yourself if this is a country and regime that you want to align yourself with."
Spicer was asked to clarify his comments on Hitler by members of his presumably shocked audience and proceeded to dig his hole deeper. "When it comes to Sarin gas, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing," Spicer said. "In the way that Assad used them where he went into towns and dropped him down on innocents in the middle of town was not the same. I appreciate the clarification — that was not the intent." Spicer presumably was implying that Hitler did not use chemical weapons.
Almost anyone who has made it past elementary school knows (and damn their eyes if they don’t know) that Hitler directed “The final solution”, which was carried out by killing 6 million Jews in gas chambers. Apparently Spicer failed to gain that knowledge. Oh wait, he apparently knew it because, in his clarification which did little or no good, Spicer said Hitler brought people into "Holocaust centers". He amazingly managed to make gas chambers at Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, et al. sound like a combination of visitor center and community center.
Spicer has targeted members of the press in an antagonistic manner, lied (oh wait, those were alternative facts), and generally represented the Oval Office Bozo as we have come to expect from this freak show of an administration. It’s gotten so that nothing that the White House Follies presents will be a surprise.
When Bobby Thomson hit his famous “Shot heard ‘round the world” home run in 1951, Red Smith wrote the following in The New York Herald Tribune. “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.” That sums up the administration of the Dark Lord to date. Stay tuned for more insane reality.
~Exile in Medford, Oregon
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