Jared Kushner told Woodward, “The most dangerous people around the president are overconfident idiots.”
Irony is dead, its corpse was chopped into little pieces, the pieces were burned and the ashes were fired into the sun.
— Joshua Holland ? (@JoshuaHol) September 9, 2020
If we all get out of this alive, I really want to spend some extra time on how unbelievably fucking dumb Jared Kushner is. https://t.co/MwiF9QvdRh
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) September 9, 2020
Bob Woodward's new book portrays Jared Kushner as both the most important adviser in the White House and someone who couldn’t quite grasp how government works—even though he was handed responsibility for wide swaths of it https://t.co/npRXoyQvM9
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) September 10, 2020
MBA wisdom at work: When things go well, it’s because the Boss is a GENIUS. When things go badly, it means the staff screwed up.
… “[I]t’s not that he changes his mind. It’s that he wasn’t staffed correctly,” Kushner said to the Republican leaders. “People weren’t giving him all the facts and so he found out different facts. So you can’t try to trick him into making a decision and then expect he’ll hold to that decision.” (Former White House chief of staff John Kelly summed up Kushner’s theory in one word, “Crazytown.” )
Kushner describes Trump as seemingly going out of his way to kick up certain arguments, believing that he can manipulate the media into covering topics he likes.
“Controversy elevates message,” Kushner says. And by this, Woodward writes, he means that “a controversy over the economy… only helps Trump because it reminds voters that the economy is good…”
I’ll believe that Jared Kushner is growing into his role as a White House staffer when he stops being viewed as a cheerleader. https://t.co/mnx9tMJgtz pic.twitter.com/8L0lR22cN3
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) September 9, 2020
Biden has some really good people working for his campaign, but none of them have helped him as much as Jared Kushner.
— Daily Trix (@DailyTrix) September 10, 2020
Elsewhere, Daddy-in-Law Dearest:
Admirable candor. https://t.co/v2N2XGbdRs
— Benn Steil (@BennSteil) September 9, 2020
Video https://t.co/HmFiu7ptpv
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) September 8, 2020
NotMax
Commoderp.
Wag
Fail up?
Misterpuff
Pro-Crime Judges – probably another Jared suggestion. /s*
*We all know its the brainworm’s suggestion.
Patricia Kayden
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I was struck by this bit:
it’s the “disruptor” douchebag MBA version of my brother’s thankfully disappeared “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” bumper sticker. Alexandra Petri has actually read the book, and so gave it more thought than I did.
Misterpuff
@Misterpuff: Sitting here listing to Pink Floyd Live From Pompeii (a pure shot of Space Floyd), thinking about Brainworms and I was enlightened as how Drumpf is Pink in The Wall.
But then, I’m quite inebriated right about now.
HumboldtBlue
As if anyone is surprised by this — NYT reports Trump Nobel nomination was forged.
Kent
Kushner isn’t MBA dumb. He’s rich dilettante douche guy dumb. That’s a whole different other category. What he studied in college makes no difference. Rand Paul is exactly the same and he has an MD from Duke.
Kent
No, it’s self preservation. He meant what he said. He has so many multiple and diverse crimes under his belt that he needs “pro-crime” judges to get him off.
With Trump the simplest and most venal answer is usually correct. There is a Josh Marshall rule to that effect.
danielx
The jokes, they write themselves….
HumboldtBlue
Here are some videos and pics of yesterday’s local conditions on the coast.
Kent
@HumboldtBlue: Are any fires getting close to you or is it just smoke?
JaySinWA
Once again Jared is the butt of the joke. One more sinking ship in the parade of fools.
HumboldtBlue
@Kent:
Just smoke.
Vixen Strangely
I haven’t sorted out whether it was really supposed to be Jared or Lindsey Graham who “talked Trump into” doing 18 phone calls with Woodward, but the funny thing is, I suspect Trump is seldom “talked into” so much as “nudged from an original trajectory”. So, say Trump has the idea that talking to Woodward would be supergreat and once the man hears Trump’s side of things, he’ll lavish him with praise for being a clear-eyed, level-headed SOB and runs it past the husband of Ivanka or Graham? The best case scenario is agree mildly and stand back from the blast site, because disagreeing with Trump makes him mad and then he goes and does what he wants anyway. But only Jared is dumb enough to strongly agree, because “branding”.
HumboldtBlue
The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office has had enough of the Antifa bullshit, they are being burdened by dipshits calling 9-1-1 for information on those dastardly arsonists.
Cacti
Every one of these people considers themselves part of a meritocracy.
Amazing, innit?
Anya
@HumboldtBlue: the article is from 2018.
Jared should be shunned but sadly loathsome rich white men rarely pay for their crimes.
HumboldtBlue
HumboldtBlue
@Anya:
Well shit, there I go trusting Roy Edroso. Never clicked the link.
Jay
Jay
RaflW
I just saw this photo from the indoor rally for Trump this evening in Michigan. These people are bugfuck nuts.
Meanwhile ‘militia’ people (in scare quotes because what they are bears little resemblance to 1791) are setting up armed check points in Oregon looking for Antifa arsonists.
I think Biden can win, and win a sufficient popular vote margin to be convincing, except for the nuts. But if the nuts are 27% of the population, the next 4 (or maybe 24) years are going to be …. rough.
Jay
HumboldtBlue
It’s dangerous out there for anyone in Oregon who isn’t white.
Chetan Murthy
@RaflW:
Disarm them. And tax the ever-lovin’-fuck out of bullets. Let the daughter-rapers make their own reloads, and get lead poisoning doing it.
Jay
@RaflW:
morons who don’t know the difference between the Bureau of Land Management and Black Lives Matter,
who of course, are heavily armed.
Jay
patroclus
@Vixen Strangely: What I don’t understand is why people continue to believe that talking to Woodward will necessarily result in a critical book. All the Bush people spoke to him and he responded with multiple hagiographical stenographies lauding Bush and his minions as strategic geniuses and military heroes. Mark Felt, Woodward’s famous Deep Throat, was one of the principal players in COINTELPRO, which suppressed dissent against the Vietnam War and Woodward somehow made him come out as a kind of a hero. His USSC book, with Scott Armstrong, derided the court’s liberals and celebrated centrism. For years, Woodward considered the sliming of Joe Wilson and Libby/Rove’s central roles as “inconclusive.” Why is Woodward continually regarded as some sort of saint? His actual record doesn’t reflect that.
He’s a smarmy money-grubbing non-journalist and the epitome of what people describe as the Washington Swamp. And the “revelation” that Trump lied and downplayed COVID has been obvious to anyone with a brain since the beginning of this year.
Chetan Murthy
@patroclus: Heh, maybe Woodward got tired of not being able to safely eat out in nice restaurans.
Jay
RaflW
@Vixen Strangely: “the husband of Ivanka or Graham” sounds a lot like a poolboy who one is inclined to believe is at loose ends at the moment.
(I’ll see myself out)
TS (the original)
@RaflW:
I will never understand how they can believe his lies – let alone go to covid-fest events.
Is his plan to have no-one left to vote for him? or to spread the virus to every election day voter?
Jay
@patroclus:
Woodward has a “nym”, so did Kennedy.
it’s mediocre white men coasting on their “nym”, for either something they once upon a time did, or a relative did.
Decades a go, I commuted to Milwaukee, 3 weeks a month, to be the Milwaukee Plant’s Master Production Scheduler, while still being a Purchaser in Vancouver, (BC), ( gotta love the time difference and 16 hour/7 day weeks).
Guy who got the promotion.? Married money, f’d up production in Vancouver by constantly making changes inside the supply lead time, and spent most of his time getting an online MBA at work.
Cacti
@patroclus: I’ve not thought much of Woodward since he credulously swallowed everything about the Iraq invasion and propagandized in support of it.
Chetan Murthy
@TS (the original):
Fredo: I’m your older brother Mike and I was stepped over! … 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!
Kaiser Quisling doesn’t have a plan: he doesn’t have the neurons to have a plan. He just acts on his short-term schemes, and when they fail, he just hopes that something will come along to save him. That’s how he burned thru $400m of his father’s money (well over $1B in today’s money) in short order and needed Russian money to stay afloat. He’s been able to avoid consequences all his life that way. The idea of consequences, I’m sure, doesn’t occur to him … or when it does, he just concocts another scheme to somehow avoid them.
That others might die doesn’t even register for him.
West of the Rockies
Said it before, will say it again: Kushner looks like ventriloquist dummy Jerry Mahoney. It’s weird.
Vixen Strangely
@patroclus: True enough–he’s basically coasting on the Watergate thing and is the personification of access journalism: even Trump decided he wanted to give Woodward his fresh hot takes so he could get a better treatment in the book because he vaguely understood that’s what Woodward was here for and figured the last book suffered from his lack of input–it’s only Trump’s misfortune that any of it was damning enough to normal people when said out loud where they could hear. It’s that damning because Trump is uniquely bad. But Woodward did not “go to the authorities” (as Trump charmlessly put it, which I see as “Hello, 911? I’d like to report a criminally negligent mass homicide.”) because he didn’t actually see the entire issue, either. Or I guess it could have been a Page 1 story. Only I have my doubts that mass negligent homicide is even a needle-mover with Trumpers. (There goes that “gotcha media” again.)
Jay
patroclus
@Jay: I understand that. But my point is that people who talk to him almost invariably come out looking good. Felt did; Bush’s minions did; the clerks and Justices at the Court did. Only Belushi stands out as an exception but Woodward had no prior relationship or desire or need not to burn him. Jared’s advice to talk to him was not necessarily bad advice – Woodward’s track record is to suck up to powerful sources. Burning Trump is out of character for Woodward (although he did sit on the tapes/interviews for months and months).
Martin
@Cacti: Meritocracy as a concept was a warning. It was known that the rich would buy their credentials, and use the meritocracy to justify their appointed position.
Jared is the poster child for why a meritocracy is a bad idea.
Vixen Strangely
@RaflW: Poor hypothetical fellow, torn between the Daddy issues of one and vitamin D deficiency from being so deeply closeted of the other. I shudder to think he’d have any time to clean anyone’s pool.
Jay
Jay
@patroclus:
there is a Club,
we arn’t in it.
Jay
Jay
Jay
Brachiator
@West of the Rockies:
Reminds me of a cross of that dummy and a dishonest undertaker.
Jay
Frankensteinbeck
@Kent:
Kushner is MBA dumb. I won’t speculate on how much that overlaps with ‘rich dilettante’ dumb, but Kushner does MBA shit. He spouts buzzwords as if they were genius plans, then leaves employees to try to turn that into sense. He replaced all the PPE and ventilator buyers in the government coronavirus response with young business executive types, believing those would make faster, better deals. Of course, that was a disaster. That’s MBA stuff.
Jay
@Frankensteinbeck: yurp
Gvg
@patroclus: what the heck are you talking about? He wrote scathing books about how incompetent Bush was. Some of my most enjoyable reading from those years.
Gvg
@patroclus: did you even read the books? Bush did not come out looking good. His whole administration came out looking like self absorbed reality denying idiots, many with no morals.
Dupe1970
@Patricia Kayden: Jim Gaffigan being all out of fucks to give is the best.
Adri
@HumboldtBlue: My nephew is at HSU and we are in the Bay Area. We were exchanging images like this all day Wednesday. Crazy, crazy stuff.