A detention centre. They’re horrible places - regrettably, our government locks foreigners up in them when they show up here without the right paperwork.
Not at all. It sounds pretty cromulent to me, as does “Holocaust Centre” in the context he used it.
Spicer isn’t so good at the whole public speaking thing (“Sean Spicer Has The Best Words” by Super Deluxe).
Interesting. I thought sure “Holocaust Hub” would do it, for the alliteration if nothing else. How about “Holocaust ‘R’ Us”? (Okay, Spicer’s locution wasn’t THAT bad. But it was edging in that direction.)
We have detention centers in America too, but while I suppose things could change in Trumpmerica, at the moment the commercial kind are more likely to spring to people’s minds.
(We also have “community centers” where people get together to have fun, suggestive of the frivolous nuance though not the commercial one.)
We also have welcome centers for tourists.
Not the same thing at all, though. A “Holocaust Centre” or “Holocaust Hub” is at least readily interpretable as “A location where terrible Holocaust-related activities took place”; “Holocaust R Us” sounds like something from a very black satire.
We have community centres and shopping centres and visitor’s centres in Australia too - but detention centres are regularly in the news here as refugees and offshore processing and other immigration related things are frequently notable news items.
Raventhief asked me for the worst “____ Centre” I could think of in common use and Detention Centre was it. They really are horrible.
I guess we don’t hear as much about detention centers here, at least not identified as such.
Pretty much this. And even if we can excuse him being baffled in the moment at the press conference (which is a problem, because he’s the person who introduced Hitler into the discussion in the first place), he went away and produced a written statement that apologised, by clarifying that Assad is targetting “innocent” civilians. That’s a whole new level of grotesque historical ignorance.
Holocaust centers or Hub is perfectly understandable. The operative word there is “Holocaust”.
Spice is a jackass, but this is clearly an example of the outrage machine getting winded up.
No, it is an example of how people seize on a particular misstep because it so perfectly encapsulates what an incoherent jackass the man is.
If Spicer were otherwise a model of clarity and common sense, a few eyebrows might be raised for a moment or two, but then we’d move on.
True dat.
What is making everyone get outraged is that the White House spokesman apparently never considered that the Holocaust would come up during a discussion of Hitler and the use of Chemical weapons, and so he had no answer whatsoever when it was brought up.
This incident will be spun in all sorts of ways, but it’s important to remember that Hitler and the Holocaust were not a part of the conversation until Spicer brought them up. This was not a journalist catching him out with a ‘gotcha’ question, this was him thinking he had a slam dunk historical analogy. Instead, it showed up that he apparently has no historical understanding, and all the nit picking is just a post-hoc attempt to salvage some coherence out of what he said in his first statement, his answer to the journalists, and then his written statement.
I’m not outraged, just amused at the ineptitude. I actually gave him a pass at the chemical weapons statement (even though I was saying to myself, “erm, Zyklon B anyone?”), but “Holocaust center” just sounded so absurd to my ears, that he couldn’t fucking remember the phrase “concentration camp” and landed on that choice of words, which is something quite different to me.
Yeah, one shakes one’s head in bewilderment. Is there no other person Trump can hire for this job? Does he not care about putting some sort of sane face on his administration. Or is it that this is the best you can get for a thankless job?
Yeah, I honestly almost felt bad for the guy for being so publicly bad at his job. Like I said, in both cases, I knew what he was trying to say but, holy shit man, come on. This is the big leagues. Or bigly. Or whatever.
Max Clifford couldn’t make Trump look good, come on just how exactly is Spicer supposed to be “good at his job?”.
I’m frustrated that, of all the questionable things done and said by the Trump administration, this is what the media is focusing on. This is a stupid controversy. It’s perfectly valid to make a distinction between using gas chambers for execution vs. bombs or artillery filled with chemical weapons. Even the US used to use gas chambers for executions.
When I heard “holocaust center,” my first thought was people going to brunch and a conference at the Adolf and Eva A. Hitler Center for Final Solutions or something like that.
Is that the message of the Trump administration, though? Like, has there been a formal decision by the president and his foreign policy staff that use of chemical weapons will result in swift use of force by the United States? Or did they just bumble into it based on a whim because the President saw something bad on TV, and now there are people running around trying to turn that into something that looks like policy?
How can anybody defend Donald Trump on a day-to-day basis and not look like a blithering idiot? Everybody knows what’s behind the curtain.
Well, it might start at being smart enough to know that invoking the name of Hitler is generally a bad PR move, no matter what, and, I dunno, not brain-farting at the words “concentration camp.” Really, I’m not asking for a lot here.
Wolf Blitzer destroyed Spicer during the “apology” segment. If there was ever a time that faking a heart attack was a better exit strategy, this would have been that moment. Can’t wait to see what Saturday Night Live does with this…
It’s Pervitin