Welcome to the family Bears Ears (& Gold Butte) NM! A hopeful slot in our front desk maps has long been held for you
You’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger gap in temperament or intellect.
The choice of H.R. McMasters to replace Michael Flynn has been widely praised, but there are some limitations in the new Cabinet.
All ye need to know
The one maybe decent outcome of the Trump presidency may be the de-festishization of the office.
This man is literally evil.
You know what doesn’t care about how you like sticking it to liberal scientists? The planet.
The brilliant novel by George Saunders is about memory and pain and the ghosts that make us who we are, as people, and as a nation. It is a novel that is stunningly important for the now.
Yesterday on Twitter, I noted that Stephen Miller liking a David Duke tweet about Pizzagate might be the perfect crystallization of our moment, which is equal parts psychopath and nitwit.
Thinking about that, it occurred to me this morning, with a juddering sort of start, that there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people in this country who think the evidence that Hillary Clinton and John DePodesta run a child prostitution ring out of DC pizza joint is, at the least, compelling enough to look into, but believe that the fact every one of Trump’s major advisors has either emotional, political, or financial ties to Putin’s Russia, and that his administration has thus far been extremely pro-Russia, is conspiratorial gibberish.
Life is really something, huh?
Reminder: there are millions of people who think this photo is everything right about the world.
Even if there is a decent idea, the President’s ignorance and pathological need to seem smart (reminder: he isn’t) ruins everything. That might be the ultimate danger of Trump.
Flynn tenders his resignation.
I tend to be super-wary of pundits who say things like “the American people will do X” or “at some point, the American people will realize”, partly because phrases like that are cheap dodges, a way to hide your opinion behind an imaginary consensus, but mostly because it is impossible to guess what 330 million people are thinking. I don’t think there is an American opinion, and if I did, it was largely shattered in November.
That said, when a candidate who runs on his business acumen and ability to manage things and hire the best people loses top advisor after top advisor for being too close to Russia and lying about how close they are, it is possible the American people might realize he is an incredible clod and blow-dried fake.
There are really only two options when considering the resignation of Michael Flynn, who only spent a hair over three weeks as Trump’s Jack D. Ripper and was brought low by (possibly) lying about his communications with the Russian ambassador. One is to accept the narrative, which is that Flynn, a top advisor throughout the general election and one of Trump’s first hires, was working behind everyone’s back, and was criminally unreliable and rogue from the get-go. If that is the case, it speaks to an astonishing lack of vetting by Team Trump, a laziness that is part of his character, and a constitutional inability to judge people by any measure other than obsequious loyalty.
(And, if this is the case, if Flynn really went behind Trump’s back, it wasn’t even real loyalty: just flattery, which means Trump can’t spot a jackal if it coos sweet nothings to him.)
The other option is that Trump assembled a team that was deliberately close to Russia, for reasons of white supranationalism, or cruel geopolitics, or money, or whatever reason you prefer. They cozied up to Putin, and to global Putinism, because that is their kleptocratic vision of the world. The only problem came when it became too obvious, and the people who weren’t involved (Pence, maybe Priebus) tried to distance themselves when things started leaking.
This theory is backed by evidence, namely that Trump has been praising Putin since Day 1, even going so far as to compliment him for defying the US (at the exact same time Flynn was making the phone calls that would bring him down).
What’s going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence official, who stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM,” meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. “There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in wry frustration.
Look at the man to your right, Jared, and the one next to your wife. You helped this happen. You are not a good person.
The main front-pager in yesterday’s Times was about how Jared Kushner, top trump advisor and son-in-law, is going to be handling peace in the Middle East, especially in Israel, because he cares about it a lot. Well, he cares about Israel. It’s important to him. The Times is fairly delicate about his shortcomings.
Mr. Kushner, on something of a crash course in diplomacy, has been speaking with Arab leaders in recent weeks. But he is a mystery to most Middle Eastern officials. He has no experience in government or international affairs. His up-close exposure to the Arab world amounts to little more than trips to a handful of Persian Gulf countries and a star-studded jaunt to Jordan.
Though Mr. Kushner has visited Israel since childhood, and more recently to do business, he is little known there. He holds strong views about the state of Israel, but he has not been outspoken about them, save for editorials in The New York Observer, the newspaper he owned. His thinking on matters like settlements is not well understood.
The thrust of the piece, and of Trump’s and Kushner’s ideas, is that a coalition of anti-Iran players such as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states can form an alliance of sorts with Israel, given a mutual enmity toward Iran, and that can be used to forge peace.
Now, there certainly is an idea there. Mutual enemies are always important. What is left out, of course, is Palestinian national ambition, or how that will actually fit in, and how the governments of these Arab nations will be able to maintain internal peace if they work with Israel without fulfilling Palestinian hopes, which of course will be very hard to do given the tightness team Trump has with Netanyahu, and of course that Kushner seems never to have considered Palestine at all in his equations.
But, for the sake of arguments, let’s stipulate a few things. Let’s stipulate that Kushner is a bright kid. He seems smart, and he did help Trump get elected, which was still a sort of dark genius. Let’s even stipulate that he’s a good person, which I don’t really consider anyone who helped elect a white nationalist know-nothing vacuous reality-show strongman dope to be, but still. Family is family, I guess. This is just for the sake of argument.
Let’s even stipulate that his is taking his crash course very seriously, and that during it, he has found an enormous wellspring of empathy for the plight of the Palestinians, and wants to be an honest broker. Let’s also stipulate that fresh ideas might be best in this stale conflict.
Even stipulating all that, some of which rely on facts not in evidence, it still is the case that Donald Trump, while assuming the most awesome power on the planet, had a chance to consider every single person in the United States to handle one of the most difficult diplomatic challenges on the globe, and came up with the guy who married his daughter.
Think of how lazy that is. Think of how insulting that is. Think of how insular and ridiculous that is. Now, maybe Kushner will turn out to be the exact right guy for this but it would really be a remarkable coincidence that of everyone in the world, including people who have spent their whole lives learning about the region and its players, the one guy who can solve it happens to be in Trump’s Christmas card.
It stands more to reason, one thinks cynically, that Kushner has shown some interest, and that Trump likes him so: sure. Give it to Kushner. If my daughter thinks he’s good enough, so should the Palestinians and the Israelis.
You might love Trump’s politics. But it is hard to argue that this isn’t the single laziest and most insulting Administration we’ve seen.
The Oroville spillway is both gigantically and terribly small
A reminder that, no matter your politics, nature wins.
Shooting Irrelevance 