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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Because of wow. / Open Thread: Occam’s Razor Suggests He *Is* That Dumb…

Open Thread: Occam’s Razor Suggests He *Is* That Dumb…

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… And his fellow Repubs ain’t looking too smart right now, either.

… The [Wall Stree Journal]’s esteemed board argued that any talk of impeaching Trump is silly, in large part, because this president is likely too bumbling to execute that kind of scandalous quid pro quo.

“Intriguingly, Mr. [Bill] Taylor says in his statement that many people in the administration opposed the [Rudy] Giuliani effort, including some in senior positions at the White House,” the editorial board wrote. “This matters because it may turn out that while Mr. Trump wanted a quid-pro-quo policy ultimatum toward Ukraine, he was too inept to execute it. Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government, and most presidents at some point or another in office.”

Trump, a routine morning reader and skimmer of several newspapers’ print editions, saw this editorial—which was obviously meant to defend him—last week. And the president promptly began complaining about it to some of those close to him…

“He was clearly unhappy. He did not like the word ‘inept,’” the first source added…

This is Bill Taylor:


(Okay, maybe that was meant for sarcasm… )

Reader Interactions

40Comments

  1. 1.

    dmsilev

    It ain’t the way I wanted it! I can handle things! I’m smart! Not like everybody says… like dumb… I’m smart and I want respect!

  5. 5.

    Jeffro

    This was always my number one argument against electing him and main source of irritation after he “won”: he’s way, waaaay too fucking dumb to even hold the office as a ceremonial post.

    Glad to see it biting him, and the GOP, in the ass. And hard.

  6. 6.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    repost:

    Andrew Lawrence @ ndrew_lawrence
    Actually just said by Donald Trump Jr: “I wish my name was Hunter Biden. I could go abroad and make millions off my father’s presidency. I’d be a really rich guy”

    riposte

    Mark R. Yzaguirre @ markyzaguirre
    I bet Donald Trump Jr. wishes his name was Hunter Biden because that would mean he had a dad who cared about him.

  9. 9.

    Ruckus

    @NotMax:
    Just because he failed doesn’t mean he didn’t try……
    Also I’m wondering what the rules of evidence are in an impeachment?

  12. 12.

    Ruckus

    @Jeffro:
    There were so many fantastic reasons for not wanting him as any thing more substantial than a…. can’t think of anything he’s more substantial than, other than a big pile of shit.

  14. 14.

    scav

    And besides, they’ll no doubt argue that insomuch as he when he was pro-ing his quid (he’s no amateur! Total pro on the quidding!) he hadn’t smoked anything, this was absolutely not a high crime. 1000% perfect and presidential. No president until this time has ever been so perfectly presidential, not that he’ll ever get credit for it.

  15. 15.

    BC in Illinois

    And on a different tangent . . .

    “BC in Illinois” (so-called) has lived in Missouri since the Obama administration, but was actually born in our Nation’s Capital during the Truman administration.
    (Why was I born in DC ? Same reason Obama was born in Hawaii — we wanted to be near our mothers.)

    So . . . GO NATS! ! CONGRATULATIONS TO THE 2019 CHAMPIONS !!

    Next step – – DC Statehood.
    DC Statehood song.

  18. 18.

    Duane

    @feebog: When republicans attack impeachment of Trumpov on substance, telling everyone he has no intellectual substance is all they got.

  19. 19.

    SectionH

    @BC in Illinois: DID THEY? Good. /ex Mo-Ilian I’ve always “got” the places you were living in. SE MO and Little Egypt weren’t very different. But my grandparents had different backgrounds were both amazing pioneer, and I got an amazingly good Democratic upbringing. Oh Yes I did…

    Congrats to the Nats!

    Next step: Impeach the criminal Traitor. I’d vote for DC statehood as soon as it would be onna ballot. No problem there.

  20. 20.

    Aleta

    Dahlia Lithwick

    It’s been just over a year since I sat in the hearing room and watched the final act of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. (… …) The morning was spent as I’d anticipated: all of us—the press corps, the country—listening, some clearly in agony, to Ford’s account. And then Kavanaugh came in and started screaming. The reporters at the tables around me took him in with blank shock, mindlessly typing the words he was yelling.

    The enduring memory, a year later, is that my 15-year-old son texted—he was watching it in school—to ask if I was “perfectly safe” in the Senate chamber. He was afraid for the judge’s mental health and my physical health. I had to patiently explain that I was in no physical danger of any kind, that there were dozens of people in the room, and that I was at the very back, with the phalanx of reporters.

    Kavanaugh is now installed for a lifetime at the highest court in the land. Ford is still unable to resume her life or work for fear of death threats. And the only thing the hearings resolved conclusively is that Senate Republicans couldn’t be bothered to figure out what happened that summer of 1982, or in the summers and jobs and weekends that followed.

    In the year-plus since, I have given many speeches in rooms full of women who still have no idea what actually happened in that hearing room that day, or why a parody of an FBI investigation was allowed to substitute for fact-finding, or why Debbie Ramirez and her Yale classmates were never even taken seriously, and … why books … are doing the work of fact-finding that government couldn’t be bothered to undertake.

    Women I meet every week assure me that they are never going to feel perfectly safe again, which makes my son somewhat prescient. Two out of the nine sitting justices have credibly been accused of sexual impropriety against women. They will be deciding fundamental questions about women’s liberty and autonomy, having both vowed to get even for what they were “put through” when we tried to assess whether they were worthy of the privilege and honor of a seat on the highest court in the country.

    What I have not acceded to is the routinization and normalization of the unprecedented seat stolen from President Barack Obama in 2016 …. And what I have also not acceded to is the routinization and normalization of an unprecedented seating of someone who managed to himself evade the very inquiries and truth-seeking functions that justice is supposed to demand.

    And so, while I cannot know conclusively what happened in the summer of 1982, or at… Yale, or … with the gambling debts, or with the leaked Judiciary Committee emails, I can say that given Senate Republicans’ refusal to investigate, acknowledge, or even turn over more than 100,000 pages of documents relating to Kavanaugh, it is surely not my job to, in the parlance of Justice Antonin Scalia, America’s favorite grief counselor, “get over it.”

    Two of the three women justices spoke out this summer to support their new colleague. They hailed him as a mentor to his female clerks or as a collegial member of the Nine and urged us, in the case of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, to look to the future and turn the page. It is, of course, their actual job to get over it. They will spend the coming years doing whatever they can to pick off a vote of his, here and there, and the only way that can happen is through generosity and solicitude and the endless public performance of getting over it. I understand this.

    As a Supreme Court reporter, I am also expected to afford the new justice that same generosity and solicitude. As a journalist, I am finding it hard to do. After all, he is a man who has already publicly condemned his critics to suffer his wrath for embarrassing him. He is a man who has promised that his doubters and detractors will “reap the whirlwind.”

    He should know full well that after such behavior, he will be celebrated as a hero by some, and he should understand that for millions of others, the choice will be whether to let him back into the centrist, reasonable D.C. insider fold or to push him to become what Clarence Thomas became after his own hearings: a vengeance machine that neither forgives nor forgets. Nobody other than the most radical conservative wants another vengeance machine on the high court, not one who could otherwise be a fifth vote on occasion. So the name of the game is forgiveness and forgetting, in service of long-term tactical appeasement.

    That is the problem with power: It incentivizes forgiveness and forgetting. … The problem with power is that there is no speaking truth to it when it holds all the cards. And now, given a lifetime appointment to a position that is checked by no one, Washington, the clerkship machinery, the cocktail party circuit, the elite academy all have a vested interest in getting over it and the public performance of getting over it. And a year perhaps seems a reasonable time stamp for that to begin.

    The problem with power is that Brett Kavanaugh now has a monopoly on normalization, letting bygones be bygones, and turning the page. American women also have to decide whether to get over it or to invite more recriminations. That is, for those keeping track, the very definition of an abusive relationship.

    It is not my job to decide if Brett Kavanaugh is guilty. It’s impossible for me to do so with incomplete information, and with no process for testing competing facts. But it’s certainly not my job to exonerate him because it’s good for his career, or for mine, or for the future of an independent judiciary. Picking up an oar to help America get over its sins without allowing for truth, apology, or reconciliation has not generally been good for the pursuit of justice. Our attempts to get over CIA torture policies or the Iraq war or anything else don’t bring us closer to truth and reconciliation. They just make it feel better—until they do not. And we have all spent far too much of the past three years trying to tell ourselves that everything is OK when it most certainly is not normal, not OK, and not worth getting over.

    I haven’t been inside the Supreme Court since Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed. … I don’t judge other reporters for continuing to go, and I understand the ways in which justices, judges, law professors, and clerks must operate in a world where this case is closed. Sometimes I tell myself that my new beat is justice, as opposed to the Supreme Court. And my new beat now seems to make it impossible to cover the old one.

  21. 21.

    Rusty

    Per the WSJ, he wasn’t too bumbling to execute the quid pro quo, but he was too bumbling to get away with it. (When the best you’ve got is the president is too stupid, you don’t have anything at all).

  22. 22.

    Matt McIrvin

    Did you catch the rhetorical switcheroo they pulled? We wouldn’t be impeaching him for incompetence in corruption; we’d be impeaching him for being corrupt, regardless of whether he could pull it off!

  23. 23.

    Wapiti

    But there’s no requirement for a quid pro quo, right? The fact that he tried to get foreign assistance is a crime by itself.

  25. 25.

    Mary G

    The pitcher who collected the final out of this World Series was the man who missed an earlier playoff game to attend the birth of his daughter, not the guy in the middle of the domestic violence scandal.— Molly Knight (@molly_knight) October 31, 2019

  28. 28.

    SectionH

    @Aleta: I’m not going to be able to even read some of it, but DAMNATION! And fuck that shit: I SO judge everything these days. And every one of the “journalists”. VDE has it totally right.

    I never joined the military*. I did do GOTV when I was 16 – and I couldn’t vote then but I didn’t care. It was a lot about Fuck Nixon – we knew he was BAD from forever.

    *The Navy once took me to a serious lunch though… 4 of them, one was a woman…to recruit me for OCS or whatever the Navy calls it. I was recently out of grad school and seemed to not fear vector analysis. And they totes knew I had table manners. JFC, I am not making that up.

    I’d have probably done very well, but there just this one thing: my son, who has so been even more amazing than, what he’d have had to go through, and I’ve also gotten to get to every continent and have fun anyway, and my son included.

    But srsly, I was incredibly flattered that they wanted me, and I am completely admiring the standards the Services were looking for.

  30. 30.

    trollhattan

    @Aleta:
    A goddamn good piece of writing that makes me exactly as goddamn mad I was a year ago at the travesty that was the Kavanaugh hearings. Crimes do not get higher than that.

  31. 31.

    trollhattan

    Kiddo placed 2nd in her metro varsity XC meet today and the team goes on to regionals or sectionals or whatever they call the next phase of torture. So yay. Her team had the top six finishers and they were all chuffed at the effort. Finding myself enjoying track and XC more than soccer because the support among athletes seems genuine, not forced. If we’d only learned ten years ago….

  33. 33.

    prostratedragon

    … and is surrounded by deeply weird people fully prepared to exploit his dumbness to the hilt. Sorry if this came up earlier, but I haven’t read through all the threads thoroughly.

    Meet Kashyap Patel:

    “The U.S. government policy community’s view is that the election of Zelenskyy and the promise of reforms to eliminate corruption will lock in Ukraine’s Western-leaning trajectory, and allow Ukraine to realize its dream of a vibrant democracy and economic prosperity,” Vindman said in his opening statement.

    But he was instructed “at the last second” not to attend the debriefing, Vindman told lawmakers, because Trump’s advisers worried it might confuse the president: Trump believed at the time that Kashyap Patel, a longtime Nunes staffer who joined the White House in February and had no discernible Ukraine experience or expertise, was actually the NSC’s top Ukraine expert instead of Vindman.

    Vindman testified that he was told this directly by his boss at the time, NSC senior director for European and Russian affairs Fiona Hill.

    That last sounds a little odd at first, but maybe Hill was concerned about this tangle (sorry for the extensive quote, but a summary would not do it justice):

    Vindman also testified that he was told Patel had been circumventing normal NSC process to get negative material about Ukraine in front of the president, feeding Trump’s belief that Ukraine was brimming with corruption and had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Democrats.

    That upset Vindman, along with Hill and Bolton, he testified, because they were constantly having to counter that narrative with the president.

    It’s still not clear what materials Patel was giving Trump, or where he was getting them. But he was not interacting with Ukraine experts at the State Department and Pentagon on the issue, and never had a conversation with Vindman, the NSC’s director for Ukraine, about Ukraine — or about anything for that matter, Vindman testified.

    Patel joined the National Security Council’s International Organizations and Alliances directorate in February and was promoted to a senior counterterrorism role around the same time as Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky, in which he urged the newly elected leader to investigate Biden and “get to the bottom of” Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.

    Patel had previously served as Nunes’ top staffer on the House Intelligence Committee and worked to discredit the FBI and DOJ officials investigating Russia’s election interference. [My emphasis]

    The swiftboating of Lt. Col Vindman makes Hill’s moves seem prescient. Not all this is new, but sometimes one just has to stand back and take it all in.

  35. 35.

    Chris Johnson

    It’s still not clear what materials Patel was giving Trump, or where he was getting them. But he was not interacting with Ukraine experts at the State Department and Pentagon on the issue, and never had a conversation with Vindman, the NSC’s director for Ukraine, about Ukraine — or about anything for that matter, Vindman testified.

    Patel joined the National Security Council’s International Organizations and Alliances directorate in February and was promoted to a senior counterterrorism role around the same time as Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky, in which he urged the newly elected leader to investigate Biden and “get to the bottom of” Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.

    Patel had previously served as Nunes’ top staffer on the House Intelligence Committee and worked to discredit the FBI and DOJ officials investigating Russia’s election interference. [My emphasis]

    So, another literally-working-directly-for-Putin. Since Trump is more of a loose cannon, and the guys like McConnell and Nunes are simply traitors rather than some sort of secret foreign agents, here come the actual foreign agents apparently. If he all of a sudden had lots of ideas, specifically WHERE DID he get them? I think that’s a super-relevant question: ‘what the materials were’ is rather predictable.

    ‘cos that’s how you do it, if it’s that you want to do. You have to bring in people and claim they are the experts, to steer your largely unsteerable orange patsy.

    “had no discernible Ukraine experience or expertise” is not relevant to what the guy’s real job was.

  36. 36.

    Juju

    @Chris Johnson: It sounds like Patel’s information about Ukraine came from that packet of information that Giuliani gave to Pompeo and then the State Department’s inspector general brought to the attention of the Intelligence committee in the House. That is my guess, for what it’s worth.

  37. 37.

    J R in WV

    @prostratedragon:

    Patel had previously served as Nunes’ top staffer on the House Intelligence Committee and worked to discredit the FBI and DOJ officials investigating Russia’s election interference. [My emphasis]

    Sounds a whole lot like Mr Patel is a Soviet Russian agent, doesn’t it ?!!! what a Surprise!!

  38. 38.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    WSJ ed board: Trump’s too inept for a quid pro quo.

    You can almost hear the cranky, half a foot in the grave, half foot into his second childhood, CEO giving the Ed Board their orders and the Ed Board saying “Well if that’s that what you want,..”

    That has to be the most hilarious defense of Trump so far. All snark aside there is a lot more with Trump that this lame attempt to smear Biden.

  39. 39.

    J R in WV

    @J R in WV:

    Le’ssee if I can fix this after edit time ran out before I noticed my typo:

    Sounds a whole lot like Mr Patel is a Soviet Russian agent, doesn’t it ?!!! What a Surprise!!

    ETA: There, that’s better!

  40. 40.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Chris Johnson: Illumantius went into this; this is the problem with being a conspiracy theory believer,because of the pseudo skepticism involved the conspiracy theorist is to busy rejecting the conventional wisdom to realize he’s being played by a real conspiracy. They latched on to the fake narrative the Russians are providing because they don’t want the reality.

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