Like night follows day

Good Sunday morning, Mr. God worshiper

Little Donnie is whining early this morning

Must not have slept well.

What he means is, they covered it, but they didn't praise him for it. And SOMEbody told him it was a really big deal, so why didn't they?

Actually, she's not.  What he means is, he hopes they keep talking about her and not talking about finding out what actually happened in Niger. This is a hard one for him, because he doesn't really want them talking about anyone but himself. And when they talk about Congresswoman Wilson, they're pointing out that The Most Notable Loser and his minions Kelly and Huckabee Sanders are lying.

Rock and a hard place, but he chooses Wilson, so I'll be waiting for the leaks that explain Niger.

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

And here it is....

Federica Wilson's building dedication that John Kellylied about.  We assumed it was out there.  How come Kelly didn't?

Suppose Kelly will call up another press conference to apologize?

Trump-Johnson-Kelly-Wilson feud shifts

Anything to avoid asking the important questions about US perpetual wars.

It seems General Kelly didn't just satisfy his boss' need to refute Congresswoman Wilson, he went along with smearing her further as well.

The chief of staff said he was "stunned" by Wilson's public comments at the ceremony dedicating the building.

"And a congresswoman stood up, and in a long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise, stood up there in all of that and talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building, and how she took care of her constituents because she got the money, and she just called up President (Barack) Obama, and on that phone call, he gave the money, the $20 million, to build the building, and she sat down," Kelly said. "And we were stunned, stunned that she'd done it. Even for someone that is that empty a barrel, we were stunned."

  CNN

That should be easy enough to prove. Surely there's video. And what in the world is he playing at, absolutely pulling a Donald Trump on this woman?

At any rate, the Congresswoman says it's not true.

Rep. Frederica Wilson said Friday that White House chief of staff John Kelly lied when he criticized her for allegedly taking credit for securing funding for an FBI field office two years ago.

[...]

"I was not even in Congress in 2009 when the money for the building was secured," the Florida Democrat said Friday on CNN's "New Day." "So that's a lie. How dare he. However, I named the building at the behest of (then-FBI Director James Comey) with the help of (then-House Speaker John Boehner), working across party lines. So he didn't tell the truth."

Well, mission accomplished. The media's peewee soccer ball is now squarely at General Kelly's feet, and off The Most Notable Loser.

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

UPDATE:   Looks like General Kelly needs to call another press conference to apologize to Congresswoman Wilson.  The video of her dedication has been published.  He lied.

John Kelly does his master's bidding

Now you can stop counting on John Kelly. You never could. But you may have been fooled for a while.

This is the "adult" in the White House.

Chief of Staff John Kelly just spoke during the White House press briefing about the entire military bereavement phone call controversy. It was volcanic. He mercilessly attacked Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, both for her comments a couple days ago and for an earlier incident (which frankly seemed like a cheap shot). Kelly took basically complete responsibility for everything President Trump had done, what he had said, how he handled the phone calls to the families of the four who died in Niger.

[...]

Kelly has walked the walk and suffered it. He rose to the highest ranks of the Marine corps and lost a son in Afghanistan. He speaks with great credibility and experience. But I must say that the fusillade he delivered turned things almost entirely upside down.

[...]

Kelly also said, in addition to his other criticisms of Rep. Wilson that he was stunned she had ‘listened in’ on a call from the President to a bereaved widow. It seems quite clear from everything we know that the family took President Trump’s call on speaker phone with Rep. Wilson there with them. My understanding is she had a personal relationship with the family. He made it sound like she was violating some trust, eavesdropping almost. That seems deeply misleading and dishonest.

  TPM

Of course it is. And it's also his set up for Trump to tweet this:

[Congresswoman] Wilson made a very direct and damaging attack on the President. But this is a member of Congress, caring for and being with a bereaved family. Invited by them, sharing their pain. ‘Listening in’ is just an attack that turns everything on its head.

[...]

Kelly has a lot of credibility he has earned. I don’t want to question his motives simply because his description and comments seem so at odds with what I have seen over recent days. But the entirety of his comments seemed exploitative, an effort to turn people’s certainly reasonable (and I believe accurate) sense of being appalled at the President into an attack on military service and military sacrifice. [...] It’s a more emotion-packed version of Trump’s effort to turn the anthem/police brutality protests into dishonoring military sacrifice. He ended up by refusing to take questions from reporters who couldn’t say they personally knew a Gold Star Family.

[...]

I understand that he said this in a moment of peaked emotion. But we individuals or reporters don’t earn our spurs of civic freedom by being proximate to military service. [...] President Trump is a blowhard and a phony and a liar. Kelly isn’t. He brings prestige and a lifetime of military service to every remark. But at the end of the day this seemed like putting that wrapper of dignity around the most Trumpian of traits: never apologize, always attack, let the truth defend itself.

And check out this part of his speech:

"You know when I was a kid growing up a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor."

  Daily Caller

Bullshit. The man is a child of the 50s when women were relegated to the kitchen.

"That’s obviously not the case anymore as we see from recent cases. Life, the dignity of life, was sacred. Religion, that seems to be gone as well.  [...]  I just thought the selfless devotion that brings a man or a woman to die on the battlefield, I just thought that might be sacred.”

Right. Because his son died in Afghanistan. I'd feel sorry for Kelly for that, except that he's the guy who mostly influenced his son's choices. What else could the boy do to live up to his father, the great general?

But, more to my point here is that John Kelly is using that fact and his influence now to smear another family who dared to tell the truth and make his boss look bad. The selfless devotion he's talking about hasn't been sacred since at least Viet Nam, and probably before that to Korea. He knows that.

Part of the reason Kelly was so offended and "stunned" is no doubt because he's the one who gave Trump the words to say to Johnson's widow. (The question here is does Kelly not realize Trump can't pull off sensitivity and concern for others?)

“[Trump] called four people the other day and expressed his condolences in the best way he could and he said to me, ‘What do I say?'”

Kelly went on to say that he told the president what Kelly’s friend Marine Gen. Joe Dunford told him when Kelly’s own son died. “He said, ‘Kel, he was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into by joining… that 1 percent. He knew what the possibilities were, because we’re at war. And when he died… he was surrounded by the best men on this earth, his friends. That’s what the president tried to say to four families the other day.”

The Most Notable Loser had to ask Kelly what to say because he himself has no human empathy. If you're going to tell a man like that what to say in times like this, you need to be very careful and give him something to say that nobody could take in a bad way. Kelly missed that point. He screwed up. And he knows it.

Take, for example, this line: "When I was kid growing up a lot things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor."

Kelly was presumably referring with disdain to the myriad allegations against Harvey Weinstein, a prominent movie executive and major Democratic donor. But it's hard to square Kelly's call to venerate women with Trump's lewd comments made in an "Access Hollywood" tape. "Grab them by the pussy" isn't exactly treating women as sacred.

Or Kelly's plea that Gold Star families be off-limits from the political back-and-forth ...

Remember that Trump -- against the wishes and advice of virtually everyone in the Republican Party -- attacked Khizr Khan, a father who had lost a son in Iraq, following Khan's speech, which was heavily critical of Trump, at the Democratic National Convention. "Who wrote that? Did Hillary's script writers write it?" Trump said of Khan's speech at the time. "I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard."

And it was also Trump who questioned the status of Arizona Sen. John McCain -- who was tortured and held in captivity in Vietnam for years -- as a war hero. "He's not a war hero," Trump said of McCain. "He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."

  CNN

Sorry, but Kelly knows all those things about Trump. He's out in front of the cameras giving that speech because he gave Trump the words to say, and they weren't the right ones. Because Trump got in trouble for saying what Kelly told him to say. So now, just like every other lickspittle in Trump's kingdom who has had to go in front of the cameras because of something that made negative news for The Most Notable Loser, Kelly has to "fix it".

At any rate, we've now turned this into a news story about who's the most patriotic in a situation where a young man died in circumstances that are murky (the FBI has joined the investigation), without any discussion of what the Hell the US is doing putting young men in the position that this could happen in the first place, and John Kelly has reduced himself to, at best, a bumbling enabler, and at worst, a self-serving dick covering for the inexcusable POS that is the top dog in the dog-eat-dog world Kelly lives in.

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

UPDATE:

WTF?

As the back-and-forth continues over the content and tone of Donald Trump’s phone call to the widow a service member slain in Niger, other Gold Star families are coming forward with their interactions (or lack thereof) with the president. But the Washington Post reports on what may be the most peculiar story yet: The father of a deceased soldier says that Trump offered him $25,000, but he never got the money.

  NY Magazine

President Trump, in a personal phone call to a grieving military father, offered him $25,000 and said he would direct his staff to establish an online fundraiser for the family, but neither happened, the father said.

Chris Baldridge, the father of Army Sgt. Dillon Baldridge, said that Trump called him at his home in Zebulon, N.C., a few weeks after his 22-year-old son and two fellow soldiers were fatally shot by an Afghan police officer on June 10.

[...]

The Washington Post contacted the White House about Baldridge’s account on Wednesday morning. Officials declined to discuss the events in detail.

[...]

But in a statement Wednesday afternoon, White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said: “The check has been sent. It’s disgusting that the media is taking something that should be recognized as a generous and sincere gesture, made privately by the President, and using it to advance the media’s biased agenda.”

  

It's disgusting that The Most Notable Loser makes magnanimous, but hollow, "gestures" - or as some of us call them, "lies".

It took 18 months for President Barack Obama to fulfill a similar promise made to the family of Kayla Mueller, who was killed in 2015 while she was held captive by the Islamic State in Syria. Obama’s undisclosed sum, for a charity set up in Mueller’s name, arrived only after a report by ABC News called attention to what the president later described as an oversight.

Well, that makes it okay, then.

Trump said this week that he has “called every family of somebody that’s died, and it’s the hardest call to make.” At least 20 Americans have been killed in action since he became commander in chief in January. The Post interviewed the families of 13. About half had received phone calls, they said. The others said they had not heard from the president.

Let me get back to Mr. Baldridge...

Because his ex-wife was listed as their son’s beneficiary, she was expected to receive the Pentagon’s $100,000 death gratuity — even though “I can barely rub two nickels together,” he told Trump.

Dick. He needs to profit from his son's death, at least. Had the son not been killed, would that make a difference in his finances? Also, his son would have been the one who named the mother as beneficiary. I presume there was a reason for that.

And now, he wants to shame The Most Notable Loser into coughing up that 25 grand. Okay, I'll go along with that. I'm still not feeling the love, though.

“He said, ‘I’m going to write you a check out of my personal account for $25,000,’ and I was just floored,” Baldridge said. “I could not believe he was saying that, and I wish I had it recorded because the man did say this. He said, ‘No other president has ever done something like this,’ but he said, ‘I’m going to do it.’ ”

And that's exactly what we would expect The Most Notable Loser would say.

Baldridge said that after the president made his $25,000 offer, he joked with Trump that he would bail him out if he got arrested for helping.

Ah. Two peas in a pod. I can see the man's agony over his son's death shining through, can't you?

The White House has done nothing else other than send a condolence letter from Trump, the father said.

“I opened it up and read it, and I was hoping to see a check in there, to be honest,” the father said. “I know it was kind of far-fetched thinking. But I was like, ‘Damn, no check.’ Just a letter saying ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

Also, just like Trump - someone doesn't "pay up" and you go public to bad-mouth them.

Such respect for our soldiers both these assholes have.

Or even if it's true.

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

UPDATE:  WTF again?!  He DID cut a check.  It's dated October 18 (which doesn't mean that's when it was sent.)  He's totally nuts.