CREDIT: 1600 Daily email.
This week, the White House began sending out an official email newsletter, “Your 1600 Daily,” to promote video clips of the president, pertinent news articles or endorsements, and other items of note happening that day.
On Friday, there was an odd inclusion at the bottom, where normally one can find friendly headlines from Fox News, Breitbart, or other conservative outlets that have become media safe harbors for the administration. One of the two featured articles was a parody piece titled “Trump’s budget makes perfect sense and will fix America, and I will tell you why,” written by Alexandra Petri, who writes satirical pieces for the Washington Post’s lighthearted ComPost blog.
[…]
ThinkProgress asked the White House press office if they were aware the article was a parody, and if so, why they selected it, but received no response by press time.
If this was a simple mistake, then the staff member who chose and approved the article’s inclusion on official White House communications did not read beyond the first paragraph, which makes abundantly clear that the headline is deeply sarcastic:
Some people are complaining that the budget proffered by the Trump administration, despite its wonderful macho-sounding name, is too vague and makes all sorts of cuts to needed programs in favor of increasing military spending by leaps and bounds. These people are wimps. Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney has called it a “hard power budget” which is, I think, the name of an exercise program where you eat only what you can catch, pump up your guns and then punch the impoverished in the face. This, conveniently, is also what the budget does.
The article concluded, “RAW POWER! HARD RAW POWER GRRRRRR HISSS POW!”
[…]
Other sections of the newsletter are anodyne White House agenda items that urge supporters to “get involved” or share important tweets “from President Trump,” promote “Oval Office highlights,” link to press room briefings, and detail Trump’s schedule.
Sometimes these links, always titled “News Reports,” are op-eds or letters to the editor by friendly voices or administration officials, or a straight news piece about a positive economic development or administration announcement. None of the other days of the “News Reports” section featured anything like Petri’s parody.
The links included in Tuesday’s newsletter, for example, are representative of Trump allies’ favorite outlets:
CREDIT: 1600 Daily email.
Wednesday was the second day in a row the newsletter linked to a Breitbart article about Obamacare. Other featured items include stories from Fox News, Townhall, Washington Post, Washington Examiner, Yahoo, and an endorsement of AHCA by the National Federation of Independent Businesses. On Thursday many mainstream outlets were cited, as well as the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s news site, called The Daily Signal.
Oh my. It seems this is amusement Friday, with some kind entity somewhere answering Voltaire’s Prayer. Full story at Think Progress.
Ya, when someone posted that satire piece to facebook I was saddened by how accurate it was. Thankfully it was also hilarious, made the sadness less difficult.
But now this…also funny and sad.
On the other hand, this may be serendipitous. We might be able to exploit this effect!
Look, they haven’t read their beloved bible, you expect them to read a news article?