POLITICO’s Glenn Thrush did an interview with the guy who could claim to be Donald Trump’s political muse, the vile and cretinous Roger Stone. It is eye-opening for two reasons. First, Glenn Thrush is utterly subservient to the guy. Roger Stone could have said “the moon is made of green cheese” and Thrush would have said, “you know, that is very insightful.” In short, he handled Stone the way Sean Hannity or Joe Scarborough would handle Trump: like his career depended upon the interview being agreeable to Stone. I’ll touch on that a little more in a second. The other thing that is really obvious is that Stone is a mediocrity who believes just about any conspiracy theory you want to toss in his direction. I would be shocked if he doesn’t have the original of this photo:

Next to Lee Harvey Oswald is Rafael Cruz “Ted Cruz’s dad” After JFK was assassinated he worked for Papa Bush pic.twitter.com/Due0SAanTm

— ConspiracyWATCH ▲ (@ConspiracyWATCH) April 16, 2016

You can listen to the whole interview here, if you think your stomach is strong enough. I’ll hit some high points below.

ROGER STONE: He talks like you talk at the dinner table. So, people, I think, have found it refreshing and entertaining, which is above all the most important thing. I think it’s why it worked.

I found this the most horrifying quote in the interview. If true, Western Civilization has ended and there is nothing left for us to do but hoard gasoline, food and ammunition and await the Apocalypse. If someone at my dinner table called some a liar or discussed a woman’s menstrual cycle they would wake up next week. YMMV.

GLENN THRUSH: Does he communicate when you’re talking and you introduce a concept to him? Will he say, ‘I’m not going to say it like that. That’s bullsh–. I want to say it my own way.’ I mean, how does that kind of work?

ROGER STONE: No, no. You don’t know how it comes out until he says it. So, for example, like most Americans, I don’t think he’s read the 9/11 Commission Report page for page and, therefore, I don’t know how aware of the fact that the [George W.] Bush administration had multiple warnings about 9/11 that they did nothing about. I’m not sure how much of that he knew. He never read the report and, frankly, that was not the angle the media played up.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

Roger Stone is a 9/11 Troofer. That is a shock, isn’t it? I’m not going to refight this fight again. I have read the 9/11 Commission report. In fact, my very first post on RedState, August 5, 2004, was an analysis of the warnings available prior to 9/11. (The original RedState archives are no longer on line but I have preserved some of my early stuff.) That Stone believes moron-level stuff like this is not unsurprising. After all, he ran in the same circles as Trump, who also believes it. What is stunning is Thrush’s response, “Right.” And he moves onto the next subject.

ROGER STONE: I had a very serious illness that was debilitating for a couple of years where I literally couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs or get out of bed, where I was really completely incapacitated, and it was really depressing because my mind was working fine, but my body was not cooperating, and I overcame it. So, it is —there is the lesson there.

Hmmmmm??

ROGER STONE: Well, I think he’s already doing that. I mean, clearly, Paul Manafort’s charge is to set up a serious policy shop in Washington to spearhead a congressional outreach operation. I think there’s going to be a very substantial outreach to conservative intellectuals in the non-neocon camp for some of this policy formulation.
Actually, I find the way that Trump assimilates and uses information to be very similar to Reagan. Nobody gave Reagan his notecards. Reagan made up his own notecards. Nobody hands Donald Trump his notes for a speech. He writes out his own notes. And, if you notice, when he goes to the podium, he takes a piece of paper out of his pocket and puts it down on the podium, big Sharpie.

GLENN THRUSH: Right.

This is bizarro world territory. It is little short of obscene. In several places in the interview Stone tries to compare Trump favorably to Reagan. Other than their age they have nothing in common. Reagan was a gentleman, for instance. He had a natural knack for speech delivery that came from his background in film. But Reagan did use speechwriters, the most well known is Peggy Noonan. He was a two term governor who understood public policy and politics. He was a voracious reader and an original thinker who gave over 1,000 on-air commentaries on conservatism. He didn’t give campaign speeches that called others names and pandered to the worst sort of racists. Glenn Thrush: “Right.”

GLENN THRUSH: What catalyzed that? What made him realize that it was time for him to move to somebody like Manafort?

ROGER STONE: This would be speculation on my part, but I think the shorter answer — the short answer is the delegate theft in Louisiana, the loss in Wisconsin.

This is another of the lies that Thrush just allows to slide by. There was no “theft” of delegates in Louisiana. The rules were available to everyone. Trump chose to blow them off and he got exactly the number of delegates that the rules say he should have. But the best is coming:

ROGER STONE: …I also have done a — I read a terrific study by Richard Charnin, who is a mathematician, a liberal Democrat, an eccentric but brilliant guy, who concludes on the basis of the exit polls and the actual vote on a precinct-by-precinct basis that the swing cannot be that wide without widespread voter fraud. It’s just mathematically impossible.

So, I suspect that the system there — he’s been making this case through several cycles in Wisconsin, focusing only on that state …

GLENN THRUSH: That there’s voter fraud.

ROGER STONE: That there’s extensive voter fraud, which I presume is executed through the electronic machines.

GLENN THRUSH: In terms of your — geez, you know, I wrote a ton — you just reminded me. Like, 20 years ago, I wrote a ton about the move from mechanical here in New York — we had problems yesterday here with the primary —mechanical to electronic. The one thing about the mechanical machines is, you can’t really rig them.

ROGER STONE: Yeah, I’d like to go back to them. The fact that we’re still using in some states machines with no paper trail at all really …

GLENN THRUSH: That is — I think that’s absolutely nuts.

Another example of Stone making a claim so wild and slanderous that, in a polite society, would have had him horsewhipped through the streets of Madison, WI, and Thrush going along with it. If you think the state apparatchiks in Wisconsin are going to rig an election to please Scott Walker you are huffing Drano.

ROGER STONE: I lived through the ’68 campaign. I worked for Nixon.

ROGER STONE: Well, look, it’s very simple. I was first attracted to politics by Barry Goldwater.

Roger Stone was born in 1952. You can believe that he was “attaracted to politics” in 1964 (age 12) or “worked for Nixon” (age 16) if you wish but these are extravagant claims that are little short of blatant lies… if short at all. I can’t imagine Thrush interviewing someone and not knowing their age.

ROGER STONE: Nobody puts words in Donald’s mouth. He is his own conceptualizer. All you can do is present information and let him either assimilate it or not. When you write something for him, keep it short and staccato. He’s not going to read a 40-page white paper on the economy; zero chance of that. It’s just too boring. Don’t blame him; I don’t like it either. So keep it simple and direct because that’s the way he communicates.

Because being president requires you to be pig-ignorant?

GLENN THRUSH: Yeah. I mean, like, what would you — if you were sort of looking at — a if you were, like — and you do advise him. You are not — by the way, you are not disallowed from communicating with him in your role at the super PAC, you just can’t talk with him about fundraising, right? That’s the —

ROGER STONE: Well, we can’t talk to him about fundraising or communications. But the super PAC I’m involved with is specifically spending its money documenting voter irregularities in Oklahoma, Kansas, Utah, Wisconsin, so that the Trump campaign — or a Trump supporter — will have the option of challenging the seating of those delegates in the Credentials Committee.

If I had a wish for this convention, I would wish for Stone to do attack the credentials of Cruz delegates because you can be sure 1) that pro-Cruz delegates and anti-Trump delegates will outnumber the pro-Trump ones significantly and then that would open the door to challenging the apportionment of delegates that have a awarded Trump a majority of delegates and putting it up to a vote of the not-Trump delegates. The bloodbath would be awesome to watch.

ROGER STONE: Well, I think he — I do think — aand he’s already said this, that he would be better off with somebody who is — who has some experience in government, who could then function as an implementer of his policies.

He’s an outsider. He would be the first outsider president really since Reagan. You can argue that Reagan was an insider because he has two terms as governor, but I reject that. He comes to politics and government from acting and being a union president, which is an important factor.

Reality is always rejected by people who don’t like reality. Reagan was president of the Screen Actor’s Guild. He was a two-term governor of California. He served eight years as the chairman of the National Governors Association. He chaired the Republican Governors Association for two years. He spoke at the GOP convention in 1964. He ran for president in 1968 — and won more votes than Richard Nixon — and 1976 before winning in 1980. To call Reagan an “outsider” is to make the word have no meaning.

ROGER STONE: You know what? We both know that Lyndon Johnson authorized the break-in at John Kennedy’s doctor’s office here in New York to secure his medical files and then, only days later, his chief operative, John Connolly, has a press conference to announce that John Kennedy’s far too sick, may not even live through a first term.

GLENN THRUSH: I love it.

This didn’t happen. A doctor who treated JFK provided the information to one of Johnson’s hired investigators.

You can’t read this interview and not be struck by the flaming mediocrity of Roger Stone. He, like his buddy Manafort, are simply political fixers who could probably qualify as an ongoing RICO violation. He believes a lot of stupid stuff. He lies reflexively. He puts himself in positions of influence that he never held. In short, he’s a not very bright and very dishonest guy would would naturally gravitate to a guy like Donald Trump.