In a January 8 New York Times column, novelist and self-proclaimed dog lover Jennifer Weiner showed that she has problems with the Trump family not owning a dog. In the process, she lied like one about Trump's attitude towards the family pets of Vice President Mike Pence, and repeated the lie on Saturday when she appeared on Michael Smerconish's CNN show.
Apparently there was nothing else important to cover at CNN Saturday morning (we know better).
Lost in the obsession over the Trump family is the fact that former President Barack Obama's household never had a dog, or even a pet, until April 2009, over two months after his first inauguration.
Of course, there was never any analysis of the character flaws traceable to Obama's prior lack of dog ownership. But now that Trump is President, not owning one is, according to Weiner, evidence of the Commander-in-Chief's deep personal problems.
In her Times column, Weiner first smeared the President's sons, and then repeated the lie about Trump and Pence which has been refuted at least twice (HT Twitchy; bolds are mine throughout this post):
What the President Doesn’t Get About Dogs
... Our president ... mocked Vice President Mike Pence for allowing his family to bring their cats, snake and rabbit to Washington, deriding them as “low-class” and “yokels.” Meanwhile, his adult sons are big-game hunters, whose relationship to higher mammals seems to be informed by questions like “Am I allowed to kill it?” and “Can I cut off its tail before I pose for the picture?”
The Trump-Pence-pets story's denials include this definitive rebuttal by the Vice President's press secretary when Newsweek revived it by referring in December to an earlier piece in The Atlantic:
The Times should not have allowed Weiner's fable to appear without noting the administration's denials.
Here are other condescending, insulting anti-Trump tidbits found in Weiner's column, including one which implies that Stephen Miller is Trump's lapdog:
(about Michael Wolff's truth-challenged book) (a) vicious portrayal of a clueless, childlike president whose courtiers are forced to produce daily episodes of Short Attention Span Theater.
(Trump is) a man whose life goals seem to be deepening America’s divisions, lining his pockets and starting a third world war on Twitter, not necessarily in that order.
... in an endlessly feuding, turmoil-ridden White House of warring factions, shifting alliances and endless leaks, all the president has is Stephen Miller.
On Smerconish's Saturday CNN show, In her appearance, Weiner, doubling down on and adding to the stack of insults of and insinuations about Trump seen in her Times column, showed that she has perfected the art of appearing to be a nice person while saying mean things. The video below contains three snips; in the final one, note how Weiner decides what kind of dog she thinks Trump should get, not the type of dog which would be best for him:
Transcript:
(Snip 1)
JENNIFER WEINER: I've been searching for like my grand unifying theory of Trump, and I think I've finally found it. He doesn't get dogs.
And I think dogs — dogs teach you so much about how to be an adult, how to be a human being, how to have compassion, how to get through a death in many cases, because many of us who've had pets have lost our pets. And Donald Trump has none of that.
And this is a guy who wants loyalty, right. He demands loyalty. What is more loyal than a dog? Nothing!
(Snip 2)
WEINER: A lot of people have talked about President Trump as sort of this black hole of need. He wants everyone to like him. He needs everyone to love him. Get a dog! Get a dog, and then you can function as a human being and let some people like you, some people don't.
(Snip 3)
MICHAEL SMERCONISH: What kind of dog suits him?
WEINER: Well, I think it's got to be a rescue dog. I think there's so many dogs that need homes.
SMERCONISH: For sure.
WEINER: And I think that the message that that would send after the whole, like, "bleep-hole countries," for him to go to a shelter and just pick out, you know, some poor dog that maybe doesn't have a pedigree, that maybe doesn't look like it's from Norway, that's not blonde and beautiful. (Smerconish laughs) If he just gets a mutt, don't you think?
You know what he'd want, you know, which would be the best Golden Retriever, but I'd love to see him get one of those like dust-mop dogs, you know, that's like a little bit of everything, and just love it.
In unexcerpted video from the full segment found here (at the 32:36 mark), readers will see that Smerconish repeated Weiner's Pence-pets fable and the Trump sons hunting smear on the air. The host, who had just gotten done congratulating himself for challenging Wolff the fabulist, didn't challenge Weiner's myths. Instead he told her, "I shouldn't be laughing at the subject matter, but you write so beautifully."
He should have said, "You smear and lie so effortlessly."
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
