Flowers For Socrates

By ann summers

High Holy Days, Batman. 9/11 is the release day for Bob Woodward’s book, Fear and the Trump regime is scrambling.

It now seems more obvious the anonymous Op-Ed in the NY Times was designed to offset Woodward’s book, even as it continues to portray an infantile POTUS*, while preserving the GOP agendas. CBS describes the op-ed as an “unusual confirmation” of the danger posed by Trump’s impulsiveness.

They are connected, that anonymous NY Times op-ed piece providing cover for rationalizing the consolidation of RW judicial power and the malevolence of the WH, by trying to assure an angry populace of what they claim is the beneficence of their treachery. By their RWNJ allies we do know them, even as fractures appear to separate the clinically insane racists from the merely pathological liars.

The NY Time’s anonymous op-ed and its resulting snipe hunt are still distractions, telling us by omission that we shouldn’t worry about Russians’ past mischief or their forthcoming electoral attack. Just trust the GOP as much as Shera Bechard should have trusted Elliott Broidy and his herpes.

Aides like then-Chief Economic Adviser Gary Cohn and White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter literally stole documents off the president’s desk in the Oval Office, such as a letter terminating a trade agreement with South Korea, so that, Woodward explained,

Mr. Trump could not sign them: “Because they realized that this would endanger the country.”

Martin asked, “How’d they get away with that?”

“[Trump] doesn’t remember. If it’s not on his desk, if it’s not immediately available for action, it goes away.”

Unelected officials like Cohn and Porter intentionally thwarting the actions of the elected president – the exact reverse of what a White House staff is supposed to do.

In the first TV interview about his upcoming book “Fear,” Bob Woodward tells @CBSSunday that “people better wake up to what’s going on” in the Trump administration. “You have to say, ‘Let’s hope to God we don’t have a crisis'” https://t.co/G73fNN4KHJ pic.twitter.com/wHJQ3ZfAFF

— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 9, 2018

Trump: “‘Rocket Man’ is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

The president later made that “Little Rocket Man” on Twitter, which he told Rob Porter “may be my best ever.” When Porter asked if it might provoke Kim, according to Woodward, the president replied, “It’s leader versus leader, man versus man, me versus Kim.”

The most dangerous moment of the standoff, Woodward says, came when the president went to work on another tweet: “He drafts a tweet saying ‘We are going to pull out dependents from South Korea … Family members of the 28,000 people there.'”

That tweet was never sent, because of a back channel message from North Korea that it would regard a pullout of dependents as a sign the U.S. was preparing to attack. “At that moment there was a sense of profound alarm in the Pentagon leadership that, ‘My God, one tweet and we have reliable information that the North Koreans are going to read this as an attack is imminent,'” Woodward said.

[…]

The theme of Woodward’s book – that aides fear what the president might do if allowed to follow his impulses – received an unusual confirmation last week, when The New York Times published an anonymous article written by a person described as “a senior official in the Trump administration.” “I work for the president, but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations,” he or she wrote.

www.cbsnews.com/…

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