Trump blames the press for Putin's bad behavior

Trump was an hour and a half late for an impromptu presser he personally called, that went about an hour and a half.

And you can get so much utter bullshit into an hour and a half that it would take a week for the press to respond.

Basically, he charged the press with lying about him, with putting out an ocean of fake news about him every hour of every day because of their extraordinary hatred for him.

The shortest lived lie, shot down by a journo in a question that came up quickly, was Trump's claim, not even within shouting distance of the truth, to have had the greatest electoral college victory since Reagan.

Perhaps the most pointed truth was his remark that he won the election talking to the press personally in his own free-wheeling way.

The most important point was Trump explaining Putin's recent provocations, including the flyovers and the spy ship off the coast and the deployment of cruise missiles contrary to an agreement with the US, as a result of him concluding, from the constant hoopla in the press about Trump, his people, and Russia, that the improvement in Russo-American relations Trump has been talking about cannot happen.

After giving this remarkable explanation, and in a sense even defense, transparently false as regards deployment of those cruise missiles, of Putin's conduct by laying the blame for the Russian's hardening attitude on the press, a journo asked whether he thought Putin was testing him.

Trump shrugged and said no, and in substance that the explanation of Putin's behavior lies in the bad behavior of the press and the Democrats, who have by their hate-driven attacks undermined his efforts toward improved relations with Russia, though he still hopes for improvement and will continue to try.

Oh, I forgot.

He began the presser announcing nomination of Alexander Acosta for Secretary of Labor.

About Flynn talking to the Russians and perhaps telling them not to sweat the new US sanctions because Trump would be a lot less confrontational, the Democratic news agencies are denouncing the move as a horrifying violation of a "long-standing policy that we have only one president at a time."

Uh huh.

Nobody has yet made the comparison to Nixon sabotaging the Paris peace talks during the campaign of 1968, which perhaps actually did prolong the war for another 7 years - certainly not the intended consequence - and which Democrats have damned as a crime of the century.

But that will come, I think.