Sean Spicer's Stalinist apparition

[dalton99a]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sean-spicers-stalinist-apparition/2017/01/23/76fe0704-e197-11e6-a453-19ec4b3d09ba_story.html

Sean Spicer’s Stalinist apparition
By Richard Cohen Opinion writer January 23 at 7:22 PM

Sean Spicer is the appropriate face of the new Trump administration. He is the White House press secretary, the spokesman and all of that, and he came into the briefing room on Saturday wearing the blank expression of Laurence Harvey after turning over the queen of diamonds in “The Manchurian Candidate.” You’ve heard of a molotov cocktail. Spicer was wearing a molotov face.

Vyacheslav Molotov was Joseph Stalin’s foreign minister. He was so scared of Stalin that when the Soviet dictator ordered Molotov’s wife exiled to Siberia and called for a vote by the leadership on the issue, Molotov abstained. In his dealing with foreign governments, Molotov never strayed from Stalin’s line, no matter how unreasonable. When confronted with facts, logic or the truth, he might break into a sweat. Usually, though, he just looked like Spicer.

The humiliation of Spicer, apparently ordered to babble lies about crowd size, was highly significant. He chastised the media for “deliberately false reporting” on the size of the inaugural throng. It did not matter that photographs showed that Barack Obama’s inaugurations outdrew Trump’s. Spicer maintained otherwise. He denied the undeniable and insisted on the farcical — and then fled without taking questions. Monday he was back in the briefing room. This time he expanded the inaugural audience to embrace TV and the Internet and re-asserted that “it was the most watched inaugural.” Possibly so. Probably not. But in inaugural crowds, as in other things, size should not matter. It clearly mattered to Trump.

Who ordered Spicer to soil his own credibility? This was essentially the question Chuck Todd kept putting to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway Sunday on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.” Conway, who will tell you that a hissing snake is just a harmless hunk of rope, would not say. She kept deflecting the question and, in a tour de force of Orwellian creativity, defended Spicer’s use of “alternative facts.” Todd was laudably persistent, but really we know the answer to his question: Trump is an unhinged narcissist, and Conway is his mirror. Reality must conform to what he wants.

[Ovida11]

1. Interesting

Seems pretty petty to lie about the size of a crowd, especially when you've already won the election. Sounds really insecure.

[fleabiscuit]

2. It's camouflage. nt