Wondering on Wednesday (v118)

Here we go again, everyone - it's Wednesday!

Buffalo Congressman Chris Collins was one of the earliest supporters of Donald Trump's presidential candidacy, and he has continued to be a staunch defender of Trump as president. On Tuesday, Collins was on CNN's 'Cuomo Prime Time' broadcast, talking about the warm fuzzy president that we're supposed to recognize when we see him (full disclosure: I'm really bad at picking him out of a crowd even a crowd of one).

Here's the Congressman's take on what happened at the meeting where Trump's um, colorful comment drew so much attention:

It's disappointing that anyone would leave a private meeting and politicize that, and certainly a lot of that language was denied. All I know is this is a president who is not a racist, who cares about the young people who are here now, who have lived here most of their lives. He will be generous and compassionate with them, but he needs what he needs on the border wall, on border security. That's a reasonable compromise.

So, now that it's officially the day of Wondering, I can't help wondering why it is that every Republican who has commented on this whole debacle, Collins included, has managed to completely conflate DACA with shitholian nations such as Haiti and the African continent? And I wonder how on earth can we rely on our elected officials if they don't even know that our southern border separates us from Mexico, not Africa? And, staying with the Republicans, shouldn't they be worried about the potential for a Bernie Sanders victory in 2020 if we let in all these Norwegians we should be coveting? What are they thinking, I wonder?

We've learned, with this president, that the most important thing on his mind, or the position that's the most important one he has is whatever was said by the last person he talked to, Hence, Norway was the anti-shitholian comparison.  Given how many world leaders Trump has talked to - you know, all those ones he 'respects' -  in his first year in office, it's hard not to wonder how much worse this could have been.

The president tweeted on the stroke of 8 PM the winners of the Fake News Awards. Here's the celebratory tweet, in case you missed it. 

Note that to get to the list of winners, you don't get them from the White House website, you get them from the GOP website. I wonder about that right off the bat. Are these the president's awards, or the Republican party's awards?  Whose fake news is this, anyway?

I should tell you I certainly tried to see if there were any red carpet pictures -- what's an award show without those, right? -- and I certainly tried to see who the winners were, but that's all on hold until the website gets up and running,it seems (cue the ketchup commercial), although I did see an unconfirmed tweet about CNN winning some...

One more wondering before I go.  Facebook is in hot water these days, as some tech folks called them out for not doing enough to keep us safe from those pesky Russians pushing their fake news false narratives pro-Trump and/or anti-Clinton news stories. Seems these folks thought that more could have been done, especially since the 'screeners' who reviewed reported accounts and posts were not instructed to look for stuff that was fake and pull it down.

Speaking from experience, I know that it can be hard to convince the reviewers to take stuff down (in my case, it was a porn thing not a political thing), so I get there could be some frustration. 

But here's the thing that has me wondering: what difference does it make, at this point, if the fake stuff that was posted to try and influence our election came from a Russian bot or from an American in the Russian River Valley wine region in California, or having dinner in the Russian Tea Room, or from an American sitting in a corner dive having a white Russian?

Is a Russian bot more of a threat to us than we are to ourselves?  Just wondering...