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Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave White House at the end of June

Dude you should be angry. You should be mad as hell and your party should be staging a revolution against new leadership. Why are y’all so mealy-mouthed and defensive of Trump and his band not nitwits ruining your party?

TITCR
 
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That’s a good piece.

...The White House press secretary—the office, if not the person—is an outgrowth of the idea that, in a democracy, information matters, and facts matter, and while politicians and the press may tangle and tussle, they are ultimately on the same team. Sanders, who ascended to the press-secretary role in July of 2017, after the brief and peevish tenure of Sean Spicer, publicly rejected that idea. To watch a Sanders press conference, or to watch her representing the White House on cable news, was to be confronted with a vision of America that is guided by political Darwinism—an environment in which everything is a competition, with the winner determined by who can shout the loudest, who can distract the most effectively, who can get in the best insult before the time for questioning is over...


...Her broader legacy, though, is an acquiescence to the idea that facts themselves have a political bias. The agent of a president who has transformed “fake news” from an offhanded insult into a democratic anxiety, Sanders has used her powerful pulpit to promote the “Fake News Awards,” her boss’s carnivalesque attempt to institutionalize his mockery of the American media. She has accused reporters of “purposefully misleading the American people.” She has deflected; she has belittled; she has eye-rolled; she has condescended; she has obfuscated; she has misled; she has lied. And she has treated it all as a battle to be won. So many of the public interactions Sanders has conducted with reporters—whether Acosta or April Ryan or Jim Sciutto or Brian Karem or the many other members of the press who are charged with reporting on the daily doings of the White House—have been wars in miniature. And, day by day, the martial logic lurking in the way Americans talk about their politics—the campaign and the press corps, the war room—has been made ever more literal. What is true about the world we all navigate, together? That becomes a less important question than who is winning in it.

Sanders has stood behind the lectern of the White House briefing room, the ground zero of American democracy, doing what every press secretary will: articulating an idea of what the country is—and of what the administration that is guiding the nation most readily prioritizes and most wholeheartedly believes. Her tenure serves as a reminder of what happens when partisanship, aided by the power of the presidency, is allowed to subsume everything else: traditions, norms, truth, people’s lives. In 2018, at the Women Rule Summit with Politico, the reporter Eliana Johnson asked Sanders what she hoped her White House legacy would be, when the time came to have one. “I hope that it will be that I showed up every day and I did the very best job that I could to put forward the president’s message,” Sanders replied. By bringing into existence the particular cynicisms of the post-truth press conference, that is precisely what she did.
 
Dude you should be angry. You should be mad as hell and your party should be staging a revolution against new leadership. Why are y’all so mealy-mouthed and defensive of Trump and his band not nitwits ruining your party?

+1
 
There also seems to be a big element of insecurity. Like part of their identity is tied to conservstivism or being a republican so they can never truly let go of an ideology rottened by years of bad policies that led to trump because that would be changing their world view which is hard. So they maintain that element of their identity inwardly while outwardly saying they don’t like trump while castigating the party that’s actually putting forth ideas that doll progress society instead of calling openly for reform within conservatism. So they know their party has become rotten to the core (president) but it’s too hard to accept that fact. Like alcohol or a drug they cope with it with whatabouts and false equivalencies.

Yep
 
As much false witness as she bore against so many, it's quite hypocritical for her or anyone to think she's a Christian.
 
Can you quote it?

Sarah Sanders was the disdainful Queen of Gaslighting

When Sarah Sanders said Thursday that she hopes to be remembered for her transparency and honesty, the first impulse was to laugh.

But lying to citizens while being paid by them really isn’t all that funny.

Sanders took on an impossible job when she became President Trump’s spokeswoman, a job that’s about to reach a welcome conclusion.

She would claim to represent the truth on behalf of a president who lies.

She did it disrespectfully and apparently without shame or an understanding of what the role of White House press secretary should be.

She misled reporters or tried to, and through them, misled the American people. And all with her distinctive curled-lip disdain.

Thus, she delivered on what New York University professor Jay Rosen has called the “brand promise” of the Trump administration’s treatment of the press: “Watch, we will put these people down for you.”

Her quintessential moment came in the May 11, 2017, White House press briefing in which she was skeptically questioned by Michael Shear of the New York Times about her statements that she’d heard from “countless” FBI employees about how grateful they were that Trump had fired the agency’s director, James B. Comey.

“Really?” asked Shear.

She replied without a shred of doubt, and as if Shear were the dumbest guy she’d ever seen.

“Between, like, email, text messages, absolutely. Yes,” Sanders said. “We’re not going to get into a numbers game. I mean, I have heard from a large number of individuals that work at the FBI that said that they’re very happy with the president’s decision.”

Eventually, she was forced, under oath, to admit that this was made-up nonsense.

The report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III: “Sanders told this Office that her reference to hearing from ‘countless members of the FBI’ was a ‘slip of the tongue.’ . . . She also recalled that her statement in a separate press interview that rank-and-file FBI agents had lost confidence in Comey was a comment she made ‘in the heat of the moment’ that was not founded on anything.”

Utterly unfounded, but insisted on as if it were carved on tablets, and don’t you dare doubt it. That is a pretty good description of gaslighting.

And gaslighting was a Sanders specialty, day in and day out. (After a while, of course, that became week in and week out, then month in and month out, and finally, not at all, as the once-daily briefings were phased out. The last one was more than 90 days ago.)

“Sanders failed at all aspects of the job,” Joe Lockhart, press secretary for President Bill Clinton, told me Thursday.

Lockhart elaborated: “She didn’t keep the public informed, including canceling the briefings, she was not honest, according to her own testimony to the special counsel, and she stood by and allowed the normalization of labeling the press the enemy of the people.”

In August, CNN’s Jim Acosta challenged Sanders publicly on Trump’s disparagement of the press.

“It would be a good thing if you were to state right here, at this briefing, that the press — the people who are gathered in this room right now, doing their jobs every day . . . are not the enemy of the people,” Acosta said. “I think we deserve that.”

Sanders refused, deflecting to say that she had suffered media criticism, putting her in danger. At other times, she parroted the president with more destructive language: Some media people were not enemies of the people — only the “fake news” types. (In Trump World, fake news is almost always coverage that reflects poorly on the president.)

And always, with Sanders, the sneering denials of the obvious:

In late 2017, for instance, Trump called Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) “a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them).”

Asked in the briefing about what sounded, in that tweet, a lot like sexual innuendo, Sanders went straight to gaslighting, telling the reporter, “Your mind is in the gutter.”

Undoubtedly, there were media people who enjoyed a friendly relationship with Sanders behind the scenes.

Some journalists defended her when she was mocked by comic Michelle Wolf at last year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

That’s all part of access journalism, mixed with some garden-variety humanity, and it shouldn’t matter a whit in any true evaluation of how she performed.

The role of press secretary is, at its core, a public-facing one.

On that stage — whether in the briefing room or in an informal driveway gaggle with reporters — Sanders was set up to fail by a president who doesn’t value the truth or the press.

And oh, how she rose to that challenge.

Announcing her exit, Trump tweeted warm praise: “She is a very special person with extraordinary talents, who has done an incredible job.”

Since incredible literally means “impossible to believe,” he got that part exactly right.
 
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