Sarah Huckabee Sanders's Faustian Pact With Donald Trump
Sarah Huckabee Sanders was just kicked out of a Lexington, VA restaurant. Her crime? Working (and lying) for President Trump. This follows DHS Secretary/baby jailer Kirstjen Nielsen being jeered out of a Mexican restaurant in DC, and Reinhard Heydrich double Steven Miller's also being hounded from another Washington Mexican eatery. (Are they kidding? Mexican? Better focus on sushi till all this jailing of Central American kids blows over, one would think.)
Of all of Trump's henchmen and henchwomen, I dislike Sarah the least. And it isn't because she's eased up on the drug store eye makeup, making her now looking less like a trailer park assistant manager and more like an urban career woman. Or that she disarms aggressive reporters with cute anecdotes about her adorable kids. It's because she actually does her job well in a political space that more resembles the Battle of the Bulge than a sedate press room.
And in an administration in which "alternate facts" predominate and the press is viewed with hateful scorn for having the audacity of calling out the president and his people on their lies and corruption, everything is relative. Would you prefer to have a possessed shrill marionette plucked from an old Hitchcock horror episode in the form of Sean Spicer? Or, someone who flunked his audition for "Goodfellas" - Anthony "The Mooch" Scaramucci? Or, the ravishing Princess of Silence, Hope Hicks? Not me, by golly. We could have (and have had) worse than Sarah. I'll take her muted wry responses, unflappability in the face of withering questioning and thin veneer of humanity over any of Trump's other twisted minions from across the River Styx.
Sarah tells as many lies as the others - but without the toxicity of Spicer, the facile unctuousness of Conway, or the toilet-mouth blasts of The Mooch. How she squares this with her Christian devoutness only she can answer.
While by no means in the same major league of mendacity as her boss, Sarah has chalked up quite a record of falsehoods (and increasing by the day) - a Whitman's sampler:
After the dismissal of James Comey by President Trump in May 2017, she said that she "heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the President's decision" to fire the FBI director. Oh, really? Care to release the names?
"I can definitively say the president is not a liar and I think it's frankly insulting that question would be asked." Go back to remedial Bible study, Sarah: Proverbs 14:5: "An honest witness does not deceive, but a false witness pours out lies."
Sanders has criticized the media for spreading "fake news" against Trump. Sounding like Sean here.
In August 2017, she said President Trump "certainly didn’t dictate" a statement released by Donnie Jr. regarding the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians. Ahem. Your masters have reversed themselves once caught in the lie.
In March 2018, she said regarding the Stormy Daniels–Donald Trump scandal "there was no knowledge of any payments from the president" to Daniels. See the previous point.
She asserted that Trump has never “promoted or encouraged violence.” Oh yeah? See Politifact.
She has repeated her boss's claim that “multiple news reports” prove that Barack Obama had wiretapped him. DOJ - oh, pardon me - Dept of The Deep State says not true.
She claimed that that laws allowing for the separation of parents and children at the border "have been on the books for over a decade." This is not true. There are no laws that require separation.
In Catch-22, Joseph Heller said, “Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.” The thing about Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her cohorts in this misbegotten administration is that they are all of these. Throw in inept and, in many cases, corrupt. What this leaves us is a toxic work environment populated by backstabbers, people who've checked their conscience at the gates to power. Many of Trump's pirate crew are either too venally stupid or irredeemably evil to know or care. But some, Kirstjen Nielson, Sarah Sanders, and likely John Kelly, know better. Like thieves, they recognize when they're committing wrong. But they've made a Faustian pact, bargained their souls away. And for what? Another reactionary SCOTUS justice?
Message to Sarah Huckabee Sanders: when you blithely lie in the service of malice, you are no Christian, but a morally bankrupt self-deceiving tool. Think about it when you read scripture before your next press briefing. And be prepared to explain it to your kids one day.