Here's why the Cohen tapes of DT aren't a distraction.

[fleur-de-lisa]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/07/20/michael-cohen-has-tapes-of-trump-heres-why-this-isnt-a-distraction/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ac36e3ebc382

Although we can’t be sure, it sounds to me like the idea was for Trump to essentially pay AMI back for what they paid McDougal, since $150,000 is exactly what the company paid her, and it’s difficult to imagine another reason Trump would want to purchase the rights to her story when AMI was already sitting on it in order to help Trump. As for Trump’s suggestion to keep a record of the transaction, call me crazy, but I doubt it was because he wanted to be scrupulous about the whole affair; maybe he was thinking about deducting the payment on his taxes.

In any case, something tells me there is more to learn about this, and that perhaps it will shed some light on why a well-known adulterer such as Trump was so eager to keep women like McDougal and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels quiet. And who knows what other tapes Cohen has. But I’m sure some people will react to this news by saying something we’ve heard before — that we shouldn’t pay attention to this kind of trivial stuff because there are far more important things going on, and we don’t want to get distracted.

It’s an understandable argument. None of us has an infinite attention span, and it’s often only when a story comes to absolutely dominate the news that people in power feel enough pressure to alter their behavior, as we saw with the Trump administration’s abhorrent family-separation policy (an issue that, by the way, is not yet resolved; there are still hundreds of children who haven’t been reunited with their parents).

But even as we try to make the most reasonable decisions about what’s worth focusing on and what isn’t, we need to make peace with the fact that every serious Trump scandal will be preceded, followed and occasionally upstaged by a trivial Trump scandal. That’s the world we live in, and there’s not much we can do about it. It is not because Trump is such a clever media manipulator that he is able to continually distract us from what’s important. It’s because he is quite simply one of the most comprehensively corrupt individuals now living in the United States — and he happens to be the president.

[rzemanfl]

1. K&R. Waiting for someone to call this a distraction (again). n/t

[Garrett78]

2. The distraction line is so nauseating and insulting.

Sure, when Trump and Republicans are producing horrors at an unprecedented rate, there may be some things that don't make it onto the radar right away. But people are capable of being aware of many things at once.

[Wounded Bear]

3. K & R...nt

[Achilleaze]

4. "A well-known adulterer" Typical republican family values

skuzzbucket city.

degenerate republican values are poisoning the whole planet

[RandomAccess]

5. . . . and he happens to be the President

BECAUSE of that corruption.

[Scurrilous]

6. K&R