Great job white people

You’ve really showed everyone that there’s no place for affirmative action in a true meritocracy:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Friday disavowed a tweet from the National Weather Service’s Birmingham, Alabama, office that had contradicted President Donald Trump’s false assertion that Hurricane Dorian was likely to hit the state.
In a statement attributed to an unnamed NOAA spokesperson, the agency said Trump had been given information from August 28 until Monday that Dorian could impact Alabama.

“From Wednesday, August 28, through Monday, September 2, the information provided by NOAA and the National Hurricane Center to President Trump and the wider public demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama,” the statement read. “This is clearly demonstrated in Hurricane Advisories #15 through #41, which can be viewed on the center’s website.

“The Birmingham National Weather Service’s Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.”

Thanks to the Wisdom of the Framers, we could never have a corrupt kleptocrat install his own cult of personality, because we’re so exceptional.

And be sure to buy your Trump sharpies here:

Despite Sharpie-gate and a report that President Donald Trump himself altered a Hurricane Dorian forecast map to support his claim that the storm would hit Alabama, the president and his campaign have decided to sell official Trump markers — for a whopping $15.

“Buy the official Trump marker, which is different than every other marker on the market, because this one has the special ability to drive @CNN and the rest of the fake news crazy!” Trump campaign manager Brad Pascale tweeted on Friday morning along with the hashtag #KeepMarkersGreat.

Pascale included a link to the product on the Trump campaign website. The page states it is a set of five “Official Donald Trump Fine Point Markers” for $15, with Trump’s signature printed in gold on the outside of the permanent ink fine-tip marker. The markers are “non-toxic” and “Proudly Made in the USA,” according to the website.

“Set the record straight!” the product description states. “Get your set of Official Donald Trump fine point markers today!”

That’s a fairly narrow definition of non-toxic.

. . . I’ve seen several arguments in various places that maybe this absurd story will be Trump’s undoing. These people all make the point that it’s a very easy story to cover and to understand, which makes it perfect for “low information” potential voters who usually pay almost no attention to politics, but who might actually be concerned by the spectacle of an obviously deranged president. MIJ in comments:

Ok, I’m going to take a different tack on this one.
Trivial as this may be on some levels this may be the one that actually does Trump in. They’re working way too hard on this one. It’s beyond crazy that this is a story five days after the original tweet. There are far too many people in the NWS and NOAA who know the truth. The original charts and plots are all archived on the net. To hold onto a lie at this level of tenacity goes beyond silly, stupid, or even defensively paranoid and straight to Nero level crazy.

At this point the harder the Trump people push the deeper and harder the media digs. On a couple of the previous posts here I made comments about the timelines of the tweets and charts and bemoaned the fact that the media hadn’t even questioned that aspect of the story. Today both The Atlantic and CNN had timeline stories which showed that when the original Tweet on 9/1 that started this crap was made the chart Trump was subsequently using was 72 hours old.

This is maddening and crazy but it also says something about the utter stupidity of Trump and his enablers. The harder they push this, the more they try to rewrite history or, as I put it, memoryhole in an Orwellian fashion the deeper they dig themselves in. It’s the cover-up that always digs the grave. The effort to fraudulently remake NWS tweets and charts is so transparently inept that it will ultimately fail. This is Caine Mutiny strawberry theft.

It would be both ironic and apropos if the beginning of the end of Trump was caused by a dumbass tweet that he not only refused to walk back but spent days defending. Sure some of the true believers are going to believe this and we’ll get Alex Jones level conspiracy explanations about Deep State interference but Trump’s poll numbers aren’t getting better and meanwhile the economy isn’t looking all that healthy (crappy jobs report) and in ways that another Fed rate cut probably won’t help.
And maybe I’m grasping at a flimsy paper straw here but there is likely a level of crazy that is just one step too far and Trump has no guardrails and apparently no advisers with even a modicum of common sense. It will get worse before it gets better but clearly the utterly futile flailing has begun.

I think this is plausible.