It's this kind of stuff - today's edition

It's getting worse.

There's his dissing of retired Admiral William McRaven. It's so typical of the grade-school way the Very Stable Genius deals with being criticized.

Longtime LITD readers know I have little patience for digression. We're either discussing a given topic or we're just jacking around. Jacking around is the VSG's stock in trade. McRaven's criticism had to do with Trump's treatment of the press. The VSG decided that meandering off into McRaven's supposed political leanings (which McRaven has denied) and even the timing of the bin Laden killing would be an effective way to counter-argue:

Retired four-star Admiral William McRaven – the leader of the operation that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden – fired back after President Donald Trump dismissed him as a "Hillary Clinton fan" and an "Obama-backer" in a Fox News interview that aired Sunday. 

Trump made the comment during an exchange with "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallaceabout the president's labeling of the news media – or at least the media he doesn't like – of being the "enemy of the American people." 

Wallace brought up McRaven's assertion that Trump's attitude toward the media constitutes "perhaps the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime." 

"Hillary Clinton fan," Trump said, interrupting Wallace the moment the Fox News host mentioned McRaven. 

"Excuse me, Hillary Clinton fan," the president repeated, as Wallace tried to continue. 

" ... who led the operations, commanded the operations that took down Saddam Hussein and that killed Osama bin Laden, says that your sentiment is the greatest threat to democracy in his lifetime," Wallace said. 

"OK, he’s a Hilary Clinton backer and an Obama-backer and frankly ... " Trump replied.
"He was a Navy SEAL 37 years," Wallace interjected.
Trump then pondered how "nice" it would have been "if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner" and implied finding him in Pakistan should have been easy. 

Former acting CIA director Michael Morrell said on Twitter that there was a "correction needed" in Trump's insinuation that McRaven should have found bin Laden sooner. He said it was the CIA that did the "finding" while McRaven's team did the "getting.'  

Then there's this flourish, which must be what the VSG means by "modern presidential":

President Donald Trump described Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California as "little Adam Schitt" in a tweet Sunday, criticizing the likely incoming House Intelligence Committee chairman for his comments about acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker earlier in the day.

The tweet was still up on the president's Twitter page more than an hour after Trump first posted it.

"So funny to see little Adam Schitt (D-CA) talking about the fact that Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker was not approved by the Senate, but not mentioning the fact that Bob Mueller (who is highly conflicted) was not approved by the Senate!" Trump wrote.

And this is what we get with a president so without philosophical moorings that anyone has a shot at selling him on an idea, however untethered from facts:

President Trump has announced his support for a proposal to ease federal sentencing laws that proponents call the “FIRST STEP Act” — and that Senator Tom Cotton has tartly labeled the “jailbreak” bill. There may not be much time for debate, since the bill’s ideologically eclectic array of champions hope to ram it through the lame-duck session of Congress. For now, though, I want to focus on an absurd assertion the president made Wednesday afternoon, in remarks touting the proposal.

Trump stated that, among other things, FIRST STEP

rolls back some of the provisions of the Clinton crime law that disproportionately harmed the African-American community. And you all saw that and you all know that; everybody in this room knows that. It was very disproportionate and very unfair.

It was not disproportionate or unfair. The argument that it was, commonly made by race-obsessed Democrats, is rooted in the noxious “disparate impact” theory of racial discrimination and a misrepresentation of history.

At issue is the wide disparity between criminal penalties for crack cocaine and powder cocaine — known, respectively, in the ’80s and ’90s as “cocaine base” and “cocaine hydrochloride.” This policy did not begin with President Clinton. In 1986, President Reagan signed legislation prescribing prison sentences that were much more severe for crack, at a ratio of 100:1 (e.g., a five-year mandatory minimum prison term applied to offenses involving 500 grams of powder cocaine or 5 grams of crack).

Clinton-era crime legislation built on this foundation, enhancing the phenomenon critics call “mass incarceration” (and the rest of us call “felons who prey on society being held in prison”). President Clinton signed into law the “three strikes and you’re out” provision, requiring mandatory life sentences for career criminals who commit a “serious violent felony” after having previously been convicted of at least one other such crime, in addition to another crime (which could include drug felonies). Clinton, moreover, encouraged states to adopt federal “truth in sentencing” provisions that require the sentence served in prison to approximate the sentence imposed in court.

 

Andrew McCarthy, the author of the piece being excerpted here, makes it plain that the race-baiters got to the VSG. He's surely approaching this as a way to "redeem" himself with those who think he's a bigot:

. . . it is specious for President Trump to insinuate that the enforcement policies he wants to change were driven by racism, or should be thought racist because of their effects.

The laws, of course, did not distinguish among defendants based on race. If you were a white or black offender, the law applied exactly the same way. A narrative developed that powder cocaine was the drug of well-to-do whites and crack the drug of inner-city blacks. This was a gross exaggeration, but, more important, it had nothing to do with why the federal criminal law (and a good deal of state law) treated the two forms of cocaine differently. Rock coke was thought to be hyper-addictive and, therefore, more profitable to dealers, more dangerous to individual users, and more destabilizing to communities than powder coke. It wasn’t a race thing; it was a peril thing.

There is, of course, the way Peter Navarro has the VSG's ear on international trade policy and Larry Kudlow and Steven Moore do not.

And finally, if you are as sick of Michael Avenatti's unfolding personal drama hogging headlines as the rest of us are, remember that he wouldn't have ever been on our radar screen had not the VSG diddled Stormy Daniels mere months after the VSG's third wife had given birth to his fifth child, an act of adultery concurrent with his ongoing affair with Karen McDougal.

None of this matters to his shills, and the resultant damage to the Republican Party rests solely on them.