WaPo: Stephen Miller and Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Ask a reasonable question, get a stupid answer

[Renew Deal]

This is 100% awesome...

I have a probably erroneous notion (stemming from watching too many utopian fantasies about well-run governments like “The West Wing” and “Veep”) that in the distant past there was a time when news conferences were informative and gave useful answers to members of the media that allowed them to write better stories about the things that were happening.

If such a time ever existed, it is over now. Here is a summary of Wednesday’s news conference. It is, I think, representative of how every news conference goes in this Trump era, on-camera or off-, in that it was both uniquely alarming and entirely predictable. You can print all the answers in advance except for the one terrible and alarming surprise that is guaranteed every day to take the news cycle by storm and devour it slowly.

[Twenty minutes pass after stated start time of news conference]

Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Here I am. First, an attempt at folksy and winning banter that will go over like a lead balloon. Now here is a terrifying person who will speak on behalf of President Trump, or maybe just a Cabinet secretary. Not Rick Perry, as he turned out to have charisma and at one point during his Q&A, which lasted more than the regulation eight seconds, he gave something that almost resembled an actual answer to a reporter’s question and I could barely drag him off in time. Today, to alarm and unnerve you, I have brought Stephen Miller from the large rock outside the oval office where he customarily suns himself and feasts on the bones of small rodents. He is here, as our custom is, to defend a policy idea that is bad.

Stephen Miller: The president’s new green-card policy is really not so bad, and we did it to make black people’s lives easier.

April Ryan: That doesn’t seem true.
<snip>

much more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/08/02/stephen-miller-and-sarah-huckabee-sanders-ask-a-reasonable-question-get-a-stupid-answer

[Hieronymus]

1. Interesting info on Stephen Miller ...

Miller grew up in a liberal-leaning Jewish family in Santa Monica, California.[4] Though his parents were Democrats, Miller became a conservative after reading Guns, Crime, and Freedom, a book by National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre.[5][6] While attending Santa Monica High School, Miller began appearing on conservative talk radio.[5] In 2002, at the age of sixteen, Miller wrote a letter to the editor of the Santa Monica Lookout, criticizing his school's pacifist response to 9/11 in which he stated that "Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School."[5][7] Miller invited conservative activist David Horowitz to speak, first at the high school and later at Duke University, and afterwards denounced the fact that neither of the centers would authorize the event.[5] Miller was in the habit of "riling up his fellow [high school] classmates with controversial statements"[8] and telling Latino students to speak only English.[6][8][9][10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Miller_(political_advisor)

[Bladewire]

2. Sarah Huckabee Sanders

She has the WORST negative attitude I've ever seen on television. She hunches over on screen, mumbles, reads off prepared notes as quickly as possible, brushes off every question as if nothing asked matters and her quick snipey answers are a gift, like when I walk my dog and it leaves me a turd 💩