Quote of the Day posts

“You can normally only do 10 percent of what he tells you to do. Ninety percent is fucking crazy.”

— a former West Wing official talking about Donald Trump, in Gabriel Sherman's Vanity Fair piece, “Everybody on the Inside Knows It's True”: Woodward's Reality Bomb Is Blowing Up the West Wing,“ about White House reactions to Bob Woodward's upcoming book, ”Fear." Yesterday, Trump tweeted fervent denials (from Sec. of Defense James Mattis and WH Chief of Staff John Kelly) to some of the scenes/quotes from the book that were previewed in The Washington Post.

“Don't testify. It's either that or an orange jumpsuit.”

— attorney John Dowd advising his client, Pres. Trump, to not testify before Special Counsel Robert Mueller, according to a Washington Post account of Bob Woodward's upcoming book, “Fear: Trump in the White House.” The Post story is startling both for Trump's vindictiveness and the amount of fear/contempt his advisers have for him and what he might do to the country. Put it this way: I‘ve long thought Trump is a disaster but (if this holds up) it’s worse than I imagined.

“The President we get is the country we get. With each new President the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into, and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail.”

— E.L. Doctorow, “The Character of Presidents,” 1992

Portion of “MORNING TRUMP!” by Herr Seele and Kamagurka, seen last year in Haarlem, Netherlands. Yes, my shadow.

“So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty. Trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It's a politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born of fear.”

— Barack Obama, speaking at the funeral of Sen. John McCain, and referencing the absent man who keeps up his petty pace from day to day. 

Earlier this summer, some idiot on Twitter thought they'd shut down John Cleese by calling him a snowflake. His response. 

Yes I've heard this word. I think sociopaths use it in an attempt to discredit the notion of empathy https://t.co/6tKNUdRAJ5

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) July 8, 2018