This dipsomaniacal chode is about to become Secretary of Defense.
A hostage deal in the Mideast; Joe Biden says goodbye; the Senate beclowns itself; and Trump sends his thank you note to Nikki Haley. Happy Thursday.
Really, who would you rather hang out with? Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos or the Coalition for the Sane here?
Trump’s Pre-Inauguration Purge
Donald Trump heads toward his second presidency trailing clouds of grievance.
In Congress, Trump is demanding the purge of the last remnant of non-lackeys and Speaker Mike Johnson is more than happy to oblige. On Wednesday, he unceremonously defenestrated Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Johnson reportedly cited “concerns from Mar-a-Lago” as the reason for the removal. Via CBS: “Turner… had been an advocate for U.S. support of Ukraine in its war with Russia, putting him at odds with the ascendant MAGA wing of his party.”
But the most vivid picture of Trump’s mood came via a ranty social media post in which he announced the purge of anyone who “worked with, or are endorsed by, Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), “Dumb as a Rock” John Bolton, “Birdbrain” Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, General (?) Mark Milley, James Mattis, Mark Yesper (sic), or any of the other people suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome…”
Nikki, you may recall, gave Trump her “strong endorsement” and offered to campaign with him. I think it’s safe to say that Karma is having a moment.
No oligarchs. No billionaires. No PAcs. No paywalls. Just the dogs and me.
The Senate defines deviancy down
In 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his essay, “Defining Deviancy Down” in which he described how society was lowering the standards of acceptable behavior as a response to the increase of deviant behavior in society. Things that were once considered abnormal or immoral, he wrote, were being redefined as “normal” or “acceptable” as society began to adjust its standards so that it could tolerate the previously intolerable.
Moynihan was largely concerned with social breakdowns — the rise of out-of -wedlock births, and criminal and other anti-social behaviors. But if Moynihan were amongst us now, I suspect he would be gobsmacked at the degree we have also normalized deviancy in our politics, including in the august body in which he once served.
**
You will have to take my word for it, but at one time, the U.S. Senate was a serious place.
Tower’s rejection was remarkable on a number of levels: He was former senior member of the Senate — the first Republican senator from Texas since Reconstruction — and a former chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee. No presidential cabinet pick had been voted down in 30 years.
“Have I ever drunk to excess? Yes,” he said. “Am I alcohol-dependent? No. Have I always been a good boy? Of course not. But I’ve never done anything disqualifying. That’s the point.”
His former colleagues disagreed. (Bush’s next nominee— Dick Cheney — was confirmed easily.)
**
Fast forward to this week’s absurd hearings for absurd nominees.
After hours of denials, evasions, fumbles, and cliches, we are told that the deeply absurd Pete Hegseth — a man who makes John Tower’s transgressions seem quaint by comparison —emerged “largely unscathed” from his Senate confirmation hearing. His confirmation as the nation’s Secretary of Defense — which just weeks ago seemed improbable — now seems likely.
Hegseth’s hearing was followed by the hearing for AG-designate Pam Bondi, who alone would define the unseriousness of this moment, except in comparison with the egregious Matt Gaetz.
Thus, the world’s greatest deliberative body defined deviancy down with barely a whimper.
“What America and the world saw today,” wrote Tom Nichols in the Atlantic, “was not a serious examination of a serious man. Instead, Republicans on the committee showed that they would rather elevate an unqualified and unfit nominee to a position of immense responsibility than cross Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or the most ardent Republican voters in their home states. America’s allies should be deeply concerned; America’s enemies, meanwhile, are almost certainly laughing in amazement at their unexpected good fortune….”
How dumbed down was the senate’s charade?
“The words ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ barely came up today,” notes Lawfare’s Ben Wittes.“The words ‘China’ and ‘Taiwan’ made only marginally more conspicuous an appearance. The defense of Europe? One would hardly know such a place as Europe even existed.
“By contrast, the words ‘lethality,’ ‘woke,’ and ‘DEI’ came up repeatedly.…”
Hegseth was neither an outlier nor an aberration. One of the central tenets of Trumpism, writes Wittes, is “the contempt for expertise and traditional qualifications; the insistence that the only real qualification is authenticity—and that authenticity is somehow wrapped up in performative masculinity; the belief that sounding tough and being tough are the same thing; and the conviction that complexity necessarily reduces to weakness.”
It’s all right there in the nomination of a proudly unqualified individual who frames his lack of qualifications as qualification of a different, more authentic, variety that reflects what he calls a “warrior ethos” America has somehow lost in its infatuation with equity. And this idea has the apparently silent assent of all of the Republican members of the committee and a few, at least, enthusiastic takers.
…This is the philosophical core of the Trump era. And it is interesting to watch it migrating from Trump himself down to his cabinet. In the first term, after all, Trump’s defense secretaries and cabinet officers were, generally speaking, well qualified in the traditional sense of qualifications. The cult of unqualified authenticity was then mostly confined to Trump himself. But in the Hegseth hearing, you can see it trickling downward.
The poll finds that only about 2 in 10 Americans approve of Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense… A similarly small share say they “somewhat” or “strongly” approve of Tulsi Gabbard being tapped to serve as intelligence chief and Patel being selected as FBI director. About one-third of Americans disapprove of each of the picks, while the rest either don’t have an opinion or don’t know enough to say.
**
And yet the redefining of deviancy continues apace — by both the GOP and what used to be the mainstream media. Consider the contribution of Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, which issued a mass endorsement of nearly every Trump cabinet-level nominee all of whom, according to the Post, are free of “disqualifying deficiencies in competence, temperament or philosophy.”
Jamison Foser offers a list of the worst of the Washington Post’s endorsements — starting with its thumbs up for Pam Bondi (FFS).
On November 22, 2024 the Washington Post editorial board wrote of the relationship between Donald Trump and Pam Bondi:
Mr. Trump’s charity contributed $25,000 to a political group backing Ms. Bondi in 2013, around the time she decided not to pursue fraud complaints against Mr. Trump’s for-profit seminar business, Trump University. Both Mr. Trump and Ms. Bondi denied wrongdoing. […]
More important than any of that, however, is her view about the proper role of the Justice Department. Mr. Trump has been explicit that he doesn’t value or respect the traditional independence of the federal government’s law enforcement function. He soured on both his attorneys general during his first term when they showed independence […]
In contrast, Ms. Bondi led chants of “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton in 2016 and parroted false claims about fraud on television in 2020. She was one of his impeachment defense attorneys and has led the legal arm of the Trump-tied America First Policy Institute.”
Seems bad!
Last month, the news side of The Washington Post published a lengthy report about Bondi’s “baseless claims about election fraud” in 2020, noting “Pennsylvania officials from both parties say there were consequences to her actions, arguing that Bondi spread misinformation that helped wreak long-lasting damage to the electoral system.”
Again, not really what you typically want from an Attorney General!…
Still, The Washington Post editorial board gives Bondi a thumbs-up:
1Hegseth’s confirmation was assured when Iowa’s Joni Ernst caved to pressure and announced that she would support him. Steve Schmidt writes of Ernst:
What makes her such a sick and broken person and a reprehensible US senator is that, with absolute clarity of mind and premeditation of purpose, she is prepared to make a credibly accused rapist, a drunk and a moral Chernobyl the secretary of defense.
She will vote yes because the 19-year-old army private who will be raped clearly doesn’t matter to her at all. Zero.
For all those who reject expertise, I would suggest that, when you have your next medical emergency, you consult your neighbor who fixed your garbage disposal. He can certainly watch something on YouTube and successfully remove that hot appendix. Save the doctors (who are in alarmingly short supply) for those of us who believe in science and revere expertise.
"The poll finds that only about 2 in 10 Americans approve of Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense… A similarly small share say they 'somewhat' or 'strongly' approve of Tulsi Gabbard being tapped to serve as intelligence chief and Patel being selected as FBI director. About one-third of Americans disapprove of each of the picks, while the rest either don’t have an opinion or don’t know enough to say."
Well, here's the thing. Most people will do the mental math there and see that there is somewhat more disapproval of the nominee than approval for him. Then they will go about their business in the belief that it isn't a big enough gap to matter. They aren't giving any more than a passing glance at the fact that half of the people polled, and probably more in real life, haven't paid enough attention to know anything about him and his track record, and don't care what happens because it is someone else's responsibility to take care of, regardless of the eventual impact. As long as they are not bothered by or disturbed in their tech-addled addiction to social media, reality TV, and other distractions that allow them to insulate themselves from the process, they're good to go. It matters more to so many of them which teams win the NFL playoff games this weekend than what happens to our democracy. Because it's always someone else's job to do, their voice doesn't matter, and it's all a waste of their time and attention span. And so they go happily onward with the bliss that comes from willful ignorance.
That is how democracy dies -- less by action and more by apathy. In life we get what we deserve more often than what we want when we give up our power to make informed choices and become active participants in the outcome. And it always will be someone else's fault in our mind when things go wrong, because we weren't warned, we weren't warned loudly enough, and other people didn't do their job. Just leave me alone and let me play with my toys. We have become a fat, lazy, underachieving society not because we must or should, rather because we could and did. It has been the downfall of so many other cultures that did not appreciate what they had and respect the effort that it takes to keep it. Now we are on the clock. Pretty serious stuff. That's, like, not my thing, man. So let's talk instead about the price of eggs, if we can watch people dance on TikTok after this week, and if the Chiefs can make it three Super Bowl wins in a row. It's great to be an American.
For all those who reject expertise, I would suggest that, when you have your next medical emergency, you consult your neighbor who fixed your garbage disposal. He can certainly watch something on YouTube and successfully remove that hot appendix. Save the doctors (who are in alarmingly short supply) for those of us who believe in science and revere expertise.
"The poll finds that only about 2 in 10 Americans approve of Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense… A similarly small share say they 'somewhat' or 'strongly' approve of Tulsi Gabbard being tapped to serve as intelligence chief and Patel being selected as FBI director. About one-third of Americans disapprove of each of the picks, while the rest either don’t have an opinion or don’t know enough to say."
Well, here's the thing. Most people will do the mental math there and see that there is somewhat more disapproval of the nominee than approval for him. Then they will go about their business in the belief that it isn't a big enough gap to matter. They aren't giving any more than a passing glance at the fact that half of the people polled, and probably more in real life, haven't paid enough attention to know anything about him and his track record, and don't care what happens because it is someone else's responsibility to take care of, regardless of the eventual impact. As long as they are not bothered by or disturbed in their tech-addled addiction to social media, reality TV, and other distractions that allow them to insulate themselves from the process, they're good to go. It matters more to so many of them which teams win the NFL playoff games this weekend than what happens to our democracy. Because it's always someone else's job to do, their voice doesn't matter, and it's all a waste of their time and attention span. And so they go happily onward with the bliss that comes from willful ignorance.
That is how democracy dies -- less by action and more by apathy. In life we get what we deserve more often than what we want when we give up our power to make informed choices and become active participants in the outcome. And it always will be someone else's fault in our mind when things go wrong, because we weren't warned, we weren't warned loudly enough, and other people didn't do their job. Just leave me alone and let me play with my toys. We have become a fat, lazy, underachieving society not because we must or should, rather because we could and did. It has been the downfall of so many other cultures that did not appreciate what they had and respect the effort that it takes to keep it. Now we are on the clock. Pretty serious stuff. That's, like, not my thing, man. So let's talk instead about the price of eggs, if we can watch people dance on TikTok after this week, and if the Chiefs can make it three Super Bowl wins in a row. It's great to be an American.