GOP - Religious Right à la the Korean Kims

Who are you going to believe? Dear Leader or your lying eyes? All publicity will be good publicity.

Wonder why the National Park Service doesn't keep release official estimates of the number of people at events there?

[A]ccording to the Associated Press, the National Park Service stopped releasing official estimates for events at the National Mall following a dispute over the Million Man March in 1995.

  Guardian

The big babies.

Before Spicer’s briefing room tirade on Saturday, Trump had told an audience at CIA headquarters that he had given his inauguration address to a “massive field of people … packed”, he estimated, with between 1 million and 1.5 million people.

How stupid is that? Like the CIA doesn't know?

To his eye, Trump said, the crowd stretched “the 20-block area, all the way back to the Washington Monument” – but a television network he didn’t name had broadcast a shot of “an empty field” and put the crowd at 250,000.

He went on to say that God had stopped rain from falling during his speech, before adding that he had “caught” the news network in a lie: “We caught them in a beauty.

He's saying this stuff to the CIA?!? I'm going to have to rething my assessment of him as simply a disgusting huckster to a delusional disgusting huckster. What else did he say to them?

Traveling to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia in what the White House pointed out was Trump’s first official act in office, Trump stood before the agency’s memorial to its dead officers and delivered an often self-referential and highly political speech.

[...]

Trump vowed “a thousand percent” support for an intelligence corps he has repeatedly and publicly insulted – including recently likening intelligence officials to “Nazi Germany” – and suggested they would have an open checkbook in his White House. Any feud between himself and the agency was the result of a dishonest press corps, the president astonished some by saying.

  Guardian

Does he really think the CIA doesn't know for itself? Or is this just pure hucksterism for the public?

The CIA crowd applauded Trump’s derisive comments about the press.

Well that's not encouraging, but it's also not surprising. The CIA has no more use for the US press than leaking self-serving information to the public - just like the Inflatable Rooster. At least they can understand him.

“They made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence agencies. It is exactly the opposite,” Trump said, adding: “I love you, I respect you, there is nobody I respect more.”

Wait a minute. He said the same thing about women.

He went on to discuss the crowds attending his events, said he felt “35 or 39” again, and boasted of being on more Time Magazine covers than the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.

[...]

The speech’s tone, contrasting with the solemnity typically shown to the CIA memorial, prompted the just-retired director of the agency to proclaim his disgust.

Through a spokesman, John Brennan proclaimed himself “deeply saddened and angered at Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement”.

Well, the Trump public doesn't much like the CIA, either, since they appeared to be on the side of Hillary Clinton during the campaign. So that probably won't mean much.

The three-decade agency veteran added: “Trump should be ashamed of himself.”

But a true narcissist has no shame.

Trump suggested that “sometimes you haven’t always gotten the backing” from the White House, suggesting Obama had “restrained” the agency, and said to laughter and applause: “You’re going to say, ‘Please don’t give us so much backing.’”

He just recycles the same old stupid shit from his campaign everywhere he goes. Will he talk to foreign assemblies the same way? That was rhetorical.

The reference to “restraint” appeared to be a reference to Obama ending the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, something Trump has repeatedly endorsed restarting and about which his pick to run the CIA has sent mixed messages.

[...]

Suggesting he would provide the CIA greater latitude than under Obama, Trump said it would be “one of the most important groups” in combatting Islamic State and what he called “radical Islamic terrorism”.

If memory serves me correctly, it was the CIA officials who said torture doesn't work, but the pressure from Cheney's office to get some results and get them fast, together with Bush's approval of torture, forced their hand. (Not that the CIA is to be believed on anything.) I have a feeling the CIA is not eager to get caught up in that shit again.



Christ.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.