On NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, David Greene cited Donald Trump’s remark to James Comey about putting reporters in jail for a few days to get them to reveal their sources — something Trump suggested after Comey spoke of the value of “putting a head on a pike as a message.” Jailing reporters would be bad enough. But Trump said more. From Comey’s memo describing a meeting on February 14, 2017:
He replied by saying it [finding leakers] may involve putting reporters in jail. “They spend a couple days in jail, make a new friend, and they are ready to talk.” I laughed as I walked to the door Reince Priebus had opened.“Make a new friend”: it doesn’t take great powers of imagination or inference to conclude that Trump was joking about sexual assault. NPR did not mention that part of Trump’s remark.
See also remarks by Trump’s lawyer Jay Goldberg, speaking to CNN‘s Erin Burnett yesterday about Michael Cohen’s unfitness for “the rigors of prison life”:
“I think, in many ways — and it’s difficult to say this — prison has a racial overtone, and a person like Michael doesn’t see himself walking down Broadway while people are clamoring, ‘You’re going to be my wife.’”Nothing about the pain of separation from loved ones and everyday life: just fear of becoming a black man’s “wife.” Burnett didn’t address Goldberg’s remark: instead, she followed up by asking whether Cohen has “the goods” on the president.
Media decorum about such brutal imaginings won’t help our democracy, or what’s left of it.
[Broadway: “the ground floor of a prison.”]
comments: 6
Oh, the things I learn here! I doubt I will drive down our Broadway here in Hanover, ever again, without thinking about prisons. What crude, ignorant, bigoted people there are befouling our People's House!
I’ve given up thinking that they can’t go any lower, because they always do.
Their persistence in office makes me wonder if those who cannot bear it have given up hope, or if those few we abhor really are representative of the majority, are actually the tip of the frozen cesspool.
I know I have a hard time listening to the Squatters' sewage anymore. Perhaps, though, that's their plan, to wear us down into accepting the abnormal as normal, to become numb to their crap and quit trying to get rid of them.
At least Mother Nature is steady, dependable and beautiful. I'll hold on to that. Trees are fuzzy with emerging leaf buds and pastel blossoms (I live in orchard country). Neighborhood gardens are full of outrageous colors and scents, plus songs from birds and insects. Lawnmowers are beginning to roar, a sound I look forward to every year. Came home yesterday to the noise of Mike the Neighbor's mower (needs a tune-up) and the aroma of fresh-cut grasses wafting in the air. I love the odors of freshly mown grass and hay; memories from childhood.
Well, that's enough of that, all of it. Later, friends.
I haben’t given up hope, and I’m intent upon finding occasions for happiness wherever they can be found. As in the greenness of the grass these days (after huge rains) and the rock I found near our raised beds. It looks like a large tooth-destroying Sugar Baby.
They need to close the White House for unconscious-bias training.
Except it's not unconscious...
Good one! They’ll have to figure out a time that doesn’t cut into the boss’s “Executive Time.”
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