Quote Of The Day: Normalizing Trumpkins

"Now that he’s no longer at the White House and is willing to make the rounds cracking jokes about that lie, [Sean] Spicer is getting the celebrity treatment, with a cameo at the Emmys and jovial appearances on late-night talk shows, to say nothing of an appointment as a visiting fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics.

This is all gross. Sean Spicer should be a pariah. The fact that he started off as a laughingstock—awkward and uncomfortable in an ill-fitting suit as he told an obvious lie to soothe his boss’s vanity—does not mean that all of Spicer’s lies were trivial or funny. Shoot, it doesn’t mean that the inauguration lie itself was trivial. The fact that Spicer wasn’t a completely fluid and confident liar does not minimize his lies. He knew what he was doing and he did it anyway because he was fundamentally on board with Donald Trump’s divisive, bigoted agenda and the crusade to take health coverage from tens of millions of Americans." (emphasis added) -- Laura Clawson, writing in Daily Kos about the strange and inappropriate appearance of former White (Supremacist) House propagandist Sean "Spicy" Spicer at last night's Emmy Awards.

We know that the entertainment industry loves controversy, intrigue and outrage. But normalizing the personas of Trumpkins like Spicer, who was integral to spreading falsehoods and disinformation to benefit con man and demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump, is to pardon and trivialize the damage he and his associates continue to do to this country.  There's a big difference between satirizing an eager liar in Rump's employ, and creating the impression that he's in on the joke with the rest of us, too.