The Rude Pundit: Trump Is Obsessed With Adam Schiff's Parody of His Phone Call with Zelensky

[babylonsister]

The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
10/29/2019
Trump Is Obsessed With Adam Schiff's Parody of His Phone Call with Zelensky

ech·o·la·li·a: meaningless repetition of another person's spoken words as a symptom of psychiatric disorder. repetition of speech by a child learning to talk.


One of the things we know about President Crimey McPantsshitter is that he brooks no insults (unless he's in on the joke, a la his Comedy Central roast, which, yes, is a thing the president of the goddamn United States has done). You could make a strong case that one reason he ran for president is because Barack Obama said some mean shit about him at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011 and he wanted to destroy Obama's legacy for it. We know that Obama had other things on his mind that night, like the operation to get Osama bin Laden. We know that Trump was mightily pissed off at all the jokes at his expense all evening. A rational, real billionaire might be able to brush it off, in a kind of "Laugh all you want, peasants. I'm still rich enough to buy your companies and have you fired" way.

But not Donald Trump. And that leads to another thing we know about him: once he gets something in his tiny brain, he will not let it go. Some call that "marketing genius," the idea that if you repeat a phrase or idea over and over, people will love it, no matter how shitty or dishonest it is (see: "We're gonna build a wall and Mexico will pay for it&quot . However, it's less marketing than it is a kind of dullard's echolalia, along with an inability to move on, like the endless, endless, truly, madly endless replay of Hillary Clinton's missing emails and her acid-washed, missing server. Or whatever the fuck.

In the realm of Trump's batshittery related to the impeachment hearings, one of the weirdest is Trump's utter obsession with Rep. Adam Schiff's opening statement of the impeachment hearings weeks ago, spurred by Trump's phone call with Ukraine's President Zelensky. Schiff gave a paraphrase of the phone call that he said twice was not a quote. Hell, later in the hearing, he called it "at least in part a parody." Before going into a not-un-Trump-like wannabe mobster tone, Schiff prefaced the summary with, "It reads like a classic organized crime shakedown. Shorn of its rambling character and in not so many words, this is the essence of what the president communicates." Then he does the paraphrase before saying, "This is in sum and character what the president was trying to communicate with the president of Ukraine."

Now, maybe "essence" and "sum and character" are words that are too fancy for Trump, but in the hearing, a Republican, Mike Turner, declared that Schiff was "just making it up" and "Because sometimes fiction is better than the actual words or the text. But luckily the American public are smart, and they have the transcript. They’ve read the conversation; they know when someone’s just making it up." Apparently, they're not and they don't.

Why is this important? After all, this took place on September 26, which is like thirty years ago in Trump time.

Well, see, nearly every day, Trump attacks Schiff, and, in most of those, he brings up Schiff's parody of him. Just last night, at almost midnight, Trump tweeted, "The only crimes in the Impeachment Hoax were committed by Shifty Adam Schiff, when he totally made up my phone conversation with the Ukrainian President and read it to Congress."

more...

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2019/10/trump-is-obsessed-with-adam-schiffs.html

[dem4decades]

1. Trump could end the problem by releasing the entire transcript........ and his taxes.

But there's a reason he doesn't release documents that could prove his innocence. They don't.

[malaise]

2. What Schiff did really well was to explain in simple terms the extent to which

the Con shakedown paralleled the behaviour of mobsters and thugs. That is what pissed him off.