Heather Digby Parton at Salon incites a couple of hernia inducing guffaws out of her column on “Devil’s Bargain,” a new book by Joshua Green about the Bannon-Trump relationship, which she likens to Rasputin’s hold over the Romanovs...
….and adds a couple of well aimed zingers of her own.
She recounts Greene’s story that Bannon commissioned Ann Coulter to write a campaign White Paper on Immigration and deadpans…
”Think about that. They actually called on Ann Coulter to write a policy paper on immigration.”
She then writes an absolutely devastatingly hilarious paragraph on Bannon’s candid assessment of Paul Ryan (which I obviously couldn’t put in my title).
“Bannon is also quoted calling House speaker Paul Ryan a “a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation,” when he heard that Ryan was being floated as a possible replacement for Trump in the event of a contested GOP convention. It’s a colorful insult but it’s imprecise. Paul Ryan wasn’t born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation; he was spawned in the kitchen sink of the Ayn Rand institute. They are on related shores of the conservative movement fever swamp but they aren’t the same, and Bannon knows that. He gave a scathing critique of Rand’s Objectivism in a notorious speech he delivered to the Human Dignity Institute in 2014, a conservative Christian group that promotes the “Christian voice” in European politics.”
Too bad Steve’s such a turd, I could almost grow to like someone who said that about the granny shover.
(Talk me down, Heather...)
“Bannon’s Weltanschauung is that we are living in a dark dystopian period of cultural disintegration and loss of tradition in which the West is in sharp, perilous decline. He is not an upbeat guy. His philosophy meshes nicely with Trump’s more shallow “get off my lawn” nostalgia, and plays well to the anxieties and insecurities of people for whom the modern world is changing much too fast.”
Yeah, Steve, I’ve noticed a lot of that since November.
Parton closes by linking to an NPR interview with Green, in which he nicely encapsulates Rasbannon’s difficulties with Tsar Niclolfatass.
“Green told NPR, “the kind of tragic, Shakespearean irony of the Donald Trump-Steve Bannon relationship is that Bannon finally did find the vessel for his ideas who could get elected president . . . [but who] now doesn’t have the focus, the wherewithal, the self-control to even do the basic things that a president needs to do.”
Nice column, Heather.