“Is that a deep state move or is there something the average American should be worried about?”, a completely serious Joe Kernen asked Larry Kudlow, who chatted with his former CNBC colleagues on Thursday, in a mind-bogglingly silly interview the purpose of which was impossible to discern.
“Look, it was a congratulatory call, corruption came up”, Kudlow said of Donald Trump’s infamous July call with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, who the public now knows was subjected to a relentless pressure campaign orchestrated by Rudy Giuliani, Trump donor-turned EU ambassador Gordon Sondland, former special envoy Kurt Volker and Rick Perry.
“I think President Trump was saying, why don’t you help clean up the last, 2016, 2015, 2014. I don’t think the president was aiming at 2020″, Kudlow attempted to explain.
To be clear, this is farcical for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that exactly nobody would have cared what Larry Kudlow had to say about this even if CNBC had grabbed him in the minutes after the transcript of the call was released.
Now that the public has seen the whistle-blower complaint, been privy to the details of depositions from a parade of former officials (see here and here) including Marie Yovanovitch and read the indictment of Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine fixers who were arrested last week on campaign finance charges tied in part to the scheme to have Yovanovitch ousted, Kudlow’s opinion is even more unnecessary and irrelevant than it would have been a month ago.
Larry – with his Gordon Gekko costumes and penchant for eliciting something akin to sympathy from the public – was an amusing stage prop for the White House for around six months. But starting earlier this year, he morphed into an economic propaganda minister and began to encroach on Fed independence. At that point, he wasn’t funny anymore. Now, he’s no different from everyone else in the administration – he lies for a living.
On Thursday, during the same interview with CNBC, Kudlow actually claimed that the Fed board staff are “deep state” operatives.
Asked by Andrew Ross Sorkin – who continues to co-anchor on CNBC despite tacitly lampooning the network in real time – to “explain the role of Rudy Giuliani and his two associates who have been indicted”, Larry said “I don’t want to explain that”.
We bet you don’t, Larry. We bet you don’t.
Impeachment Train rolling forward with great speed!
“The president has already established that he’s done something wrong. He didn’t hand us the smoking gun, he handed us the bullet when he released the transcript,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) “You cannot solicit any assistance from a foreign national or foreign government. That’s the law in the United States. He’s already violated that law.”
“All the committees have made it very clear that they will treat a refusal to appear to comply with a lawfully-issued subpoena or to produce documents as evidence of obstruction of Congress, which in and of itself, can be a basis for impeachment of the president,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), “It is my hope at least that we will not engage in a months-long litigation.”
Was it me, or did Kudlow toss out a vaguely anti-Semitic swipe when he sneeringly referenced Ross-Sorkin’s NYC neighborhood (the Upper West Side). Hey, Larry, those are your peeps, too,
If Joe Kernan keeps delivering this BS he should join Maria Bartiromo over at Fox.
Maria was making so many ridiculous supply-side comments, and asking her CEO guests supply-side leading questions that they flatly contradicted and did not provide her the answers she wanted, she came off looking….ill-informed.
Larry’s just a whore. (Sex-workers of the world, forgive me)
They (kiss ass Kernan and Maria) would make a good pair.