The Very Stable Genius lets loose with hot-headed tweets and word-salad responses in a NYT interview, all over perfectly reasonable testimony by his intelligence chiefs

What they had to say:

A few days ago his intel chiefs went before Congress for a hearing and either contradicted or qualified some of his biggest foreign-policy boasts. Is ISIS defeated? Well, they’ve lost almost all of their territory, said Dan Coats and Gina Haspel, but they still command thousands of fighters and we need to stay on top of the problem. Not a great talking point for Trump’s withdrawal from Syria. How about North Korea? Is there in a fact a “decent chance of denuclearization,” as Trump now says? (Last summer after his summit with Kim he flatly declared that North Korea is “no longer a nuclear threat.”) Coats and Haspel each claimed that the NorKs remain committed to retaining their WMD capabilities and developing a long-range missile that would target the U.S.

And how about Iran? Trump’s position is that Obama’s nuclear deal wasn’t worth preserving since Iran wouldn’t comply with it. Haspel told the Senate panel, though, that Iran *is* “technically” in compliance with the agreement, although there are signs that that might be changing soon.

This catalyzed a tweet storm by the VSG in which he lambasted these people, whom he had appointed, as "passive and naive," suggesting that maybe they should "go back to school."

But you know how the VSG rolls. Attacks on his own team members are strictly business. Hey, it's a rough and tumble world! Ya gotta have sharp elbows!

So all was expected to be make-nice when he brought them into the Oval Office for a face-to-face. "Just concluded a great meeting with my intel team," doncha know.

His account, given to the New York Times' Maggie Haberman was that he felt they'd characterized Iran as a "wonderful place," and that he'd straightened them out saying, "It's not a wonderful place. It's a bad place, and they're doing bad things."

Allahpundit at Hot Air (linked above, and excerpted throughout this post) cleans up the slop that the VSG has spilled here:

Read the Iran section of Politifact’s piece. Nowhere do Coats or Haspel imply that Iran is a “wonderful place,” whatever that means. I can’t imagine that any media outlet characterized it that way either, notwithstanding their interest in promoting conflict between Trump and his intel chiefs. The written report prepared for the Senate explicitly said of Iran that it “almost certainly will continue to develop and maintain terrorist capabilities” and that “Iran’s regional ambitions and improved military capabilities almost certainly will threaten U.S. interests in the coming year.”

It's this stuff, people. It lends veracity to trite formulations of adults in the room.

Somebody needs to be watching over this guy at all times.

He lets accurate depictions of what the hell is going on get muddied real fast, and we can't afford that at a time when the forces of God-, freedom-, and West-hatred are becoming ever more clever at portraying him as the face of what we seek to defend and preserve.

He's not up to assuming that role.

Barring him not being in his position anymore, he needs a babysitter.