"[Ex-White House Chief of Staff John] Kelly has always seen the role we shared, that of White House chief of staff, differently than I."

"We both knew we were the only ones in the West Wing whose job it was to tell the president things he didn’t want to hear. But... I saw the role as one that would enable the president to be as successful as possible in fulfilling the agenda that got him elected. Kelly saw the job as that of a self-appointed overseer, charged with protecting the country against a president that those same people had elected...."

Writes Mick Mulvaney, in "I was Trump’s chief of staff — ex-aide’s Hitler claims are deranged" (NY Post).

Prime civility bullshit headline from WaPo's Karen Tumulty: "The people concerned about Neera Tanden’s incivility sure didn’t seem to mind the Trump era’s."

I've been writing under the tag "civility bullshit" for years. It represents my longstanding opinion that calls for civility are always bullshit. Certainly in the area of politics, calls for civility always come out when the incivility is hurting your people. When somebody is deploying incivility effectively for your side, you hold your tongue and enjoy the damage. 

But let's consider the Neera Tanden problem. Her incivility is in the past. People on her side enjoyed the damage she inflicted at the time and I don't think any of her people tried to pull her back with calls for civility. It's just that now she's Biden's nominee to head the Office of Management and the Budget, and the old incivility makes her seem like too much of a political hack to be trusted in that position.

Nobody bellyaches about incivility when it's working as a weapon for their side, and the charge of incivility is another political weapon, whipped out when the other side is landing incivility punches on you. 

Here's the Karen Tumulty piece: 

With the defection of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, [Tanden's] nomination looks to be sunk in the evenly divided Senate if she cannot win the support of at least one Republican.... [Manchin's] stated reason, the “toxic and detrimental impact” of Tanden’s “overtly partisan statements,” is hard to take at face value.

"Mick Mulvaney... blamed the media for exaggerating the seriousness of coronavirus because 'they think this will bring down the president, that’s what this is all about.'"

The NYT reports on remarks by the acting White House chief of staff at the Conservative Political Action Conference today.

Mr. Mulvaney also criticized the news media for generally not wanting to portray Mr. Trump in a positive light. But he chose a bizarre example, claiming it refuses to cover what he described as Mr. Trump’s loving relationship with his 13-year-old son, Barron.... “[T]he press would never show you that because it doesn’t fit that image of him, the press wants him to be this terrible monster.”

Wonkette laughs at the idea of "duct taped Messicans wandering around the desert."

Obviously, Wonkette assumes you know Wonkette is good and the assholes are on the other side:

Mick Mulvaney ran around the Sunday shows to threaten ANOTHER government shutdown if nobody gives Trump a goddamn wall to "defend the nation" from the duct taped Messicans wandering around the desert, and also to threaten an invasion of COMMUNIST Venezuela. Mulvaney boasted that Trump will get his goddamn wall money "with or without Congress," but declined to say who in flyover country would suffer when Trump starts looking for the cash.

I'm seeing a lot of stories questioning Trump's statement on Friday about duct-taped women — "Women are tied up, with duct tape on their faces, put in the backs of vans" — but I wanted something more soberly written. Here's Monica Hesse in WaPo, "Why does the president keep talking about women and duct tape on the border?"

But women are not tied up, experts have said. They do not have tape on their mouths. When Trump repeated this claim a few weeks ago, my colleague Katie Mettler contacted many authorities on trafficking who have spent time at the border, and none of them had seen or heard anything resembling the violence he described.

Nevertheless, there was Trump on Jan. 4, dramatizing the traffickers who “have three or four women with tape on their mouths and tied up, sitting in the back of a van or car.” There he was on Jan. 6: “They nab women, they grab them, they put tape over their mouths.” On Jan. 11: “Taping them up, wrapping tape around their mouths so they can’t shout or scream, tying their hands behind their back and even their legs.”

Sometimes the tape is explicitly duct tape, sometimes it’s electrical. Sometimes it has a specific color, as it did on Jan. 10: “Usually blue tape, as they call it. It’s powerful stuff. Not good.”...

[T]here’s... a purity to the duct-tape anecdotes, in the sense that it describes behavior that’s purely evil. Black and white. Human trafficking, however, is often complicated: women who believe they’re coming to America for a job, for example, that later turns out not to exist.

The women are initially deceived — that makes it complicated? Really, I find that idea more puzzling than the details about tape.

Allegations of sexual assault are also complicated, as the president should know: He’s been accused of assaulting or inappropriately touching 19 women — and while he’s engaged in “locker room talk” suggesting he’s grabbed women, he’s also said his accusers are all lying. He nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and later mocked Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s own accuser. He’s mocked the whole #MeToo movement, implying that victims have gone too far.

Sex trafficking is plainly much worse than even the most negative interpretation of what Trump and Kavanaugh are said to have done, and Hesse is not only equating these things, she is buying into the defense that when it comes to sex, you never really knows what goes on in private. I imagine that she might feel that she's only criticizing Trump, but look at the text. She asserted "Allegations of sexual assault are... complicated." Are. Then she shifted to talking about Trump and saying that he "should know." Know. You don't know things that are not true. To say he should know is to say it is true. Hesse sounds upset that Trump has "mocked the whole #MeToo movement," but to my ear, she too is diminishing the movement with this whole it's complicated business.

Now, I see what her point is. She's saying Trump created the especially evil picture so people would know to be angry at something that, portrayed accurately, might make them wonder whether the women are choosing to undergo suffering to get something they want. That is, Trump is lying because that's his motivation to lie. But is Trump lying? What is the true story?

I see this addition to Hesse's story: "Correction: An earlier version of this story cited a misleading statistic about assaults of migrant women. The reference has been removed." Shouldn't a "correction" be the right statistic? I'd like to know how wrong Hesse's original statement was. (Neither Google Cache nor Archive.org found it.)

This column would feel quite different if it nailed down the correct facts and then speculated about why Trump exaggerated. As it stands, I'm still wondering what the truth is, and how close Trump is to it. I see Hesse just giving up on what is true, and that's not the spirit of the #MeToo movement. Hesse engages in that who-really-ever-knows shrugging that rightly enrages those of us who care about rape.

"Busy day at the CFPB. Digging into the details."

Busy day at the @CFPB. Digging into the details. pic.twitter.com/yfs0gmh28F

— Mick Mulvaney (@CFPBDirector) November 28, 2017

I'm glad Mick Mulvaney — who won a big lawsuit yesterday — has such an unprepossessing office.

That's the first time I've used the word "unprepossessing" in the entire 50,000+ posts on this blog. I did quote it once, in "A 'balding, blunt, unprepossessing, listed-at-5-foot-7 policy wonk would be a strong contender to take on President Barack Obama...." That was in 2010, and the unprepossessing guy — "the un-Obama" — was Mitch Daniels, whom I'd hope to see get the GOP nomination in 2012. I was interested in moving away from adulation of an icon and toward humility and modesty and workmanlike ordinariness. That didn't happen in 2012 and it sure didn't happen in 2016. I don't know why our politics has gotten so over-inflated and dramatic. I can't answer that. I'm just saying I like Mick Mulvaney's office. And by "office," I mean the physical place, not the abstraction of power.