It’s our fault for listening

By far the worst “defense” yet offered for Trump’s crazy accusation that Obama illegally “tapped” his phones comes from Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. It amounts to, “The media should be ignoring this clown.” Asked about the accusations, Nunes said,

“The president is a neophyte to politics — he’s been doing this a little over a year. I think a lot of the things he says, I think you guys sometimes take literally.”

First of all, I wish someone would explain to me what the options are for “taking” a 140-character message from the President of the United States, if we aren’t to take it literally. Figuratively? Allegorically? Ironically? Medically? Also, we’ll need some guidelines to help us apply the correct method to any given tweet.

Just for the record, here again is the thing we’re not supposed to take literally.

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

Second, the idea that we need to cut Trump a little slack on this kind of thing because he has only been in politics for a year is preposterous. How many years does it take to learn not to blurt out paranoid fantasies like a deranged toddler? Ten? If the guy hasn’t learned it by age 70, guess what?

But what I really love is the Republican double-speak of taking something that is obviously a major weakness and presenting it as a strength, at the same time as blaming others for not correctly understanding it as a strength in the first place.

Trump continues to place his supporters in Congress and elsewhere in the position of having to defend the indefensible. And, for some reason, no one seems to mind very much. All part of Making America Great, I guess.

Ya just gotta laugh. Here’s something that will help. It’s a clip from five months ago, which, in Trump-time, is the Paleolithic period: