Slate on Kellyanne "A Bulldozer and a Ballerina"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/01/is_kellyanne_conway_a_true_believer_or_a_skillful_performer_of_true_belief.html

Kellyanne Conway uses brute force to push Trump’s message, then slippery footwork to get away with it.

by Katy Waldman


In the 1990s, Kellyanne Conway counseled corporations on what women want to buy and how to sell it to them. Among her clients was Vaseline, makers of the Kellyanne Conway of products. Petroleum jelly adds shine to lips and soothes delicate skin. It is glossy, softening, and relaxing. It exists to reduce friction, to make rough things easy and pleasant, to glamorize surfaces. It is also very, very slippery.



Cartoons often depict the highest-ranking woman in the White House as a lion tamer, the only soul capable of controlling a beast who would otherwise destroy us all. Saturday Night Live evinces more sympathy: Kate McKinnon plays Kellyanne as a hapless careerist in the thrall of forces greater than herself, swept into a position she doesn’t want and wracked with guilt at the damage she’s unleashed. On her day off, she dances down a staircase to make pancakes for her handsome lawyer husband and four cute kids, only to be dragged back into the fray by Trump’s itchy Twitter finger. When Steve Bannon enters the room, she recoils in horror. She is constantly burying her face in her hands.

The SNL Conway is a liberal fantasy, a vision of a secretly sane woman who can’t abide the vile creature she so vigorously defends. (Also see: Ivanka Trump.) In reality, Conway is close with Bannon—he reportedly accepted the Trump campaign CEO position in August on the condition Conway be hired as well—and they both share ties with conservative hedge fund manager and Breitbart investor Robert Mercer. On TV, her cloudless, near-psychotic self-confidence never wavers. Behold the beatific joy that suffuses her face when the hosts of The View ask her about Trump’s fat-shaming of Miss Universe Alicia Machado. “I’m sure that on your Twitter feed right now you have viewers discussing my looks and my intelligence,” she beams, apparently delighted at the thought. “I never knew how ugly and stupid I was until Twitter!”

Conway is no lion tamer, either. The president-elect’s senior counselor has not and will not moderate Donald Trump’s views. Rather, she markets his lies, evasions, and personal attacks better than he ever has himself, transforming his latest fetid PR squash into a horse-drawn carriage equipped with diamond-encrusted wheels and coachmen tipping Make America Great Again chapeaus. Conway, who appears to believe in nothing, is a Meryl Streep–caliber performer of true belief. Her conviction is as unshakable as it is ephemeral, at once adamantine and erratic. She’s a feminist and a mouthpiece for anti-woman policy, a bulldozer and a ballerina. She is a strategist who believes successful campaigns are about “values and vision, not just trying to make the other person look like he takes the wings off of butterflies” and an operative who, pressed on Trump’s ties to Putin, fires back, “What has the current president done vis-à-vis Russia for the past eight years that makes you proud?” She is a solid, a liquid, and an ignoble gas.

snip

long and interesting and infuriating

[madaboutharry]

1. In other words, she is amoral.

[JI7]

2. yeah, i hated the SNL phony version of Conway

[Sunlei]

3. republicans will let her nag on protestors & front twitter attacks. shes slate style antidemocracy