Bolton’s place in history as a squalid functionary has long been established. That said, his tell all about Trump is certainly going to entertain and confirm many things everybody already knows or suspects. So while not ‘news’ it will certainly serve to greatly vex an audience of one. To the extent that it contributes to Trump’s growing catalog of personal and intellectual failures, I consider the book ‘a good thing’. If in addition, it leads to giving Trump a massive aneurysm, or even inflame his hemorrhoids, well, that’s just a bonus.
It will be interesting to see if it moves the needle among the MAGATS. Given Bolton’s neo-con creds, it just might make a number of them stay home on November 3.
And I am disappointed with liberals falling victim to the self-protective cynicism that says “who cares, we already knew Trump was a scumbag, this won’t influence anybody to change their minds.” That’s mostly true. By now, we ought to know that no single bombshell is going to blow up Trump’s support. This is partly because of the conservative “circle the wagons” mentality, but also because people have individual tipping points regarding what is intolerable behavior.
For instance… maybe the Ukraine bribery case was too confusing for some people. Is an investigation a quid-pro-quo., or is it a totally cool and legal a thing Trump can do? What even is Ukraine? Are they friends or enemies? Are they even white? But given a clear-cut narrative like “Trump asked China to buy subsidized soybeans to help him get re-elected”, that might hit more of the right notes. We see Trump starting a trade war to put some tough-guy pressure on China, then Trump goes hat in hand to Xi Jinping begging him to buy more soybeans. It makes him look not only like a weak, lying loser, but he’s also debasing himself in front of a non-white adversary. And he’s making a laughingstock of farmers, making them become welfare recipients to serve as pawns of his backroom machinations.
Again, not saying that’s going to tip all of them over. Just that people have different tipping points, so every shocking info release is important even if it isn’t surprising.
I think Republicans are going to have to decide between the two current excuses that Bolton’s book is both lies and classified. Because if it’s lies, then it’s not classified, and if it’s classified then it isn’t a lie.
It seems that, somewhere in the world, there’s a version of the book with markups of what the White House has decided is still classified.
If I was John Bolton and I wrote a book where I call Donald Trump a cannibal, that wouldn’t be classified information, it would be libel. It’s not a secret, it’s a false statement that was invented, not leaked.
Where the markup denotes “classified information”, it’s a White House confirmation that those lines are factually accurate. I would find it quite interesting if the publisher were to issue a list of these markups as part of its suit.
The reason books and music come out on a Tuesday is that’s the first day of the week for tracking sales. Which makes the first week sales as high as possible.
This really did remind me of a classic Daffy Duck cartoon from WWII, to avoid revealing the classified message Daffy swallows the message but the evil female Nazi bird puts him in an X-ray machine and contacts Hitler and henchmen (Via TV!!) to reveal the message to the Führer himself, when the machine is turned on the message comes:
“Hitler is a stinker!”
Hitler: “Hitler is a stinker!!?!, Dat ist no military secret!”
Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels: “Ja. Everybody knows dat!” [Hitler frowns and looks at them angrily],[Henchmen realize their error and shot themselves in their heads]
Fuck Michael Bolton. I mean John Bolton. He should have said anything he had to say during the impeachment inquiry or during the trial. Fuck him, and it’s not likely, but I hope he loses money on his book.
Interesting, albeit lamentably ignorant, anecdote from the book:
Trump asked Kim Jong Un if the North Korean media gave him a hard time (the way U.S. media gives Trump grief.) Kim looked astounded, then laughingly said of course not.
I watched Bolton on with Stephen Colbert, and good lord, what an imbecile. Colbert LOL’d at several points Bolton tried to make during the course of the interview regarding why he chose to work with Trump after everything Trump said during the campaign.
I got the impression that Bolton went to work for Trump partially because he was so desperate to have his hands on the wheels of power that he didn’t care who provided it, and partially because he perceived Trump to be similar on foreign policy to George W. Bush: specifically, that Trump was an empty suit who would go along with whatever crazy scheme Bolton hatched. Bolton learned quickly that Trump was such a moron that it would be impossible to get anything done, which is why he ultimately left.
Bolton also made a number of ridiculous claims regarding the impeachment, re-hashing his claims regarding the Democrats maybe getting Republicans to go along with it if they had just looked into all the other illegal stuff Trump allegedly did (instead of, ya know, the one blatantly illegal thing he did that was staring all of us directly in the face, and which was practically teed up for impeachment). He also tried to re-write history a little bit regarding Watergate, claiming that the Republicans were the driving force behind the attempted impeachment of Nixon.
