Can Sean Spicer (Trump’s Press Secretary and Director of Communications) even comprehend when he’s being mocked? Here’s tw**t he issued:
Well, perhaps—à l’Onion—Spicer was just playing a huge trick on America. Regardless, this tw**t, which appears to have been emitted on Saturday, is unseemly for a man in Spicer’s position.
Spicer also appears to have accidentally tweeted out two of his passwords (from The Independent):
Idiocracy is now the most terrifying movie ever made.
“Idiocracy is now the most terrifying movie ever made.”
Didn’t you mean: “… DOCUMENTARY ever made.”
Was his account hacked or has he lost his mind???
Or is he just that stupid. Seems plausible.
Maybe he is expertly communicating that he is no expert in communication!?
Well, the date of the revelation of the apparent passwords is two days before the date of the Onion quote, so maybe…
Nah, never mind. Occam’s Razor says he’s an idiot. It’s as simple as that.
Speaking of White House communications, go to the White House website and look for information on the branches of government. Something is missing there.
OMG!!! The Judicial Branch is missing!
The Prez is such a dangerous clown he can’t handle the lower courts doing their job b4 he appoints his dopplegangers to the Supreme court. Like his childish carry on about inauguration crowd size.
This evening Trump is announcing his nominee to replace Scalia. I’m not looking forward to it.
The Senate Democrats can block any nominee using the filibuster, which would require 60 votes to confirm the nominee.
As Reuters puts it:
————
The nominee must be confirmed for the lifetime post by the Senate, where Trump’s fellow Republicans hold a 52-48 majority. Democrats, however, could use procedural hurdles to try to block the nomination.
Trump said last week he would favor Senate Republicans changing long-standing voting rules to allow a simple majority of the 100-seat Senate to confirm his nominee, eliminating the need to gather 60 votes to overcome a procedure hurdle, or filibuster.
Some have dubbed such an approach the “nuclear option.”
—————-
The Democrats should block every one of Trump’s nominees. Mitch McConnell will get a taste of his own medicine. It is an open question whether the Republicans will resort to the “nuclear option” because several Republican senators support the filibuster in principle and know that the “nuclear option” can be used against them when the Democrats regain control of the Senate.
No. Since Harry Reid used a rule change — the “nuclear option” — to evade the filibuster that means the GOP can do it too. And likely will, for the USSC nominee. 50 votes plus Pence is enough, and the GOP has 52.
Some of us warned that Reid was making a big blunder …
We can debate the wisdom of Harry Reid’s decision, when he was Senate Democratic Majority Leader, to assert the “nuclear option” and eliminate the filibuster for some presidential nominees, but not for the Supreme Court. If the Senate Republicans end the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees it may start a snowball effect that could ultimately result in the total elimination of the filibuster.
Again, we can debate whether the filibuster in principle is good or bad. However, many senators, particularly on the Republican side, support it because it is the only way for the minority party to have any influence over legislation or nominees. In the House of Representatives there is no filibuster rule meaning that the majority party could do anything it wants. The minority party has no power.
As I noted earlier, it is an open question whether the Republicans will assert the “nuclear option.” Until and if it happens, the Democrats should block every one of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees.
You really think the GOP needed Harry Reid to figure that one out?
If you are interested in a rather depressing reflection of the recent political moves of trumpkin, go over to medium.com and read Yonatan Zunger’s piece “Trail Balloon For A Coup?” Chilling. I am truly fearful of the future.
That was rather depressing, the coup angle is convincing. Thanks for pointing out the article. Small correction: “Trial”, not “Trail”
oops. typing fast before work…
It seems to be out of date, it still lists Obama as president.
Still there https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/judicial-branch
I wonder if Trump and his TV show cast were told as children they can be anything they want when they grow up.
Well anything that’s not important. In Trump’s world there are no wannabe scientists. They do not even know what it means to comprehend the natural world.
Bill Maher posits that those tweets were actually coded messages to Vladimir Putin.
Seems an unnecessarily complicated way to communicate with Trump’s good buddy!
I’m willing to reserve judgment and make Donald Trump earn his title as to the presidency, but the contest is over for Sean Spicer, his having already lapped the field: Worst. White House Press Secretary. Ever.
Yes, well, he has earned a few titles but Mr. tiny hands and huge crowd are the only ones I can recall. His presidency is just as legit as GW Bush, but then who is counting.
*Smacks forehead* I forgot to check The Onion for almost a month!!
Gee, I wonder what they have been posting during this time?
You haven’t checked it because headlines these days are frighteningly Onion-like already.
The Onion doesn’t have anything to do right now (I suppose they could write about alternative, alternative facts).
They could write a completely true issue on all the “Onionesque” topics coming from the current US administration. (For example, write the actual details from the inauguration.) That would be a head bender!
Trouble is, organs like the NYT & WaPo are doing so already. So much of what Trump says sounds like it’s already straight out an Onion parody–no need to rewrite at all.
sub
Retweeted this gem to my – um – many followers. It appears also from other related stories that Spicer has twice accidentally posted two of his passwords onto Twitter
Hacked or my guess he was just having a little fun.
Okay, this is so bad that I’m a bit skeptical. This could be FAKE ACCOUNT.
I’d agree except it’s got one of those blue ticks that mean it’s not a fake.
I suspect he’s been hacked.
A sane, intelligent person would hire a couple social media professionals to take press releases and other news and tailor them to specific platforms and handle those accounts as monitoring and managing them can be a full time job. He’d also stop using his personal account while acting as a public official because that can cause PR problems. Then there’s Sean Spicer.
Misinformation sounds like a beauty pageant contestant that the POTUS couldn’t help himself from kissing.
I guess letting your password out twice in a day gives you plausible deniability in the event one of your tweets causes the feces to really hit the fan. You can always claim you carelessly let your password out in some other venue and some unscrupulous person posted using your account.
He should get a couple of points for those kick ass passwords…. what kind of IQ could remember those gems. I would have his password would be ‘password’ or ‘1234ABCD’.
I expect he does what the rest of us do – write it on a Post-it note and stick it on his monitor.
cr
I would assume that the government’s IT systems don’t permit simple passwords. It’s not hard to set up.
Spicer’s behavior thus far makes it clear that no one in the administration should share secrets with him. Fumblebrain!
I do not think that Spicer is that dumb. He is up to something
Say what you want about Trump, but having been in entertainment for many years he is good at manipulating the press.
Accidental release of passwords – maybe. But when I first saw them I immediately recalled (and I think this is right, but could be off a bit somewhere) that the Enigma machine codes were changed daily, and so it required everyone to be on the same page at the start of the day. There was a text string that was broadcast, and I want to say it was eight characters, that let the operators set the dials so they’d be in synch for the day. What helped break the code was a message that followed – a sort of cross-check – that was the same every day, to let operators know that they had correctly re-set their dials.
(There was a Physics professor @ Wm&Mary who had taken a great interest in the Enigma machine, and used to give lectures on it at Homecomings, that PCC(E) will recall.)
Not quite true. There were various settings on the Enigma machine.
– the plugboard settings which listed pairs of letters that were transposed via the plugboard
– which rotors to use (at the start of the war there were five rotors to choose from, of which you used three) and in what order.
– the ringstellung: each rotor has a ring with the 26 letters on it that could be moved relative to the rotor’s wiring. This setting specified the position of the ring with respect to the wiring
– the daily key which was a three letter sequence for the starting position of the rotors.
At the beginning of the war (in the airforce and army, at least) the procedure was to set the machine up as above (the settings were distributed in a special top secret book) and pick a “random” three letter sequence. The random three letter sequence would be keyed twice and the resulting cipher text would be the first six letters of the transmission. The rotors would be reset to the random sequence and the rest of the message keyed. To decipher, the machine would be set up the same and the first six letters keyed which would reveal the starting rotor positions for the rest of the message. The keying of the same six letters twice was a major weakness and was changed later in the war. Another weakness was that the random letters were chosen by humans who might use their girlfriend’s initials or even just the same letter keyed three times if in a hurry.
Another way of recovering the settings would be to look at certain types of message and guess what was in them. A German weather report would almost certainly contain the word “wetter” in it somewhere and there were ways of finding out where. Or they might send a plane to lay mines outside (say) Wilhemshaven, in which case Wilhemshaven could be relied on to transmit a message saying “British planes have laid mines outside the harbour” (but in German).
Typical, you read the draft many times but the typos still get through:
Should read
The hypocrisy about “misuse of official accounts” is amazing.
Poor Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway are gonna be exhausted trying to keep up defending the Orange Monstrosity in Chief. Given Trump’s massive insecurity and thin skin one or both of them will be fired by The Cheeto Head in Chief before long. Because he could make such simple mistakes like not recognizing satire from The Onion or fumbled tweets, I’d wager Spicer will be the first to irritate Trump enough to get the axe.
The password tweets amused me the most and Maher put them on Real Time Friday. I hope the US government has good security staff to fix it in a hurry. Good grief.
Everyone seems to have assumed that Spicer actually read and comprehended the Onion’s tweet.
I reckon he read it in a hurry ‘…American public… robust… clearly artmumble mumble…information’ and hit the Retweet button before his brainlet had finished processing it.
cr
Incompetence, or stupidity? What a choice!
Look, I have problems remembering passwords, maybe he does too & he wants folks to be able to remind him.
I promise to not tell ISIS, if you promise to not tell Al Quaeda.