Just another Wednesday
It’s pretty much the story of the day, that Trump issued a statement tweeted that the intelligence people are stupid and wrong the day after they told the Senate the truth as they understand it via evidence collected by professionals, as opposed to telling the Senate what Trump thinks is the truth via the fuzzy moldy rattling slum that is his brain. He’s mad at them for not saying what he says and instead saying what they consider true via chains of evidence. He’s mad at them so he trashes them on Twitter.
Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said it was dangerous for the president to dismiss the findings of his own intelligence agencies.
“If you’re going to ignore that information, then you’re going to make poor decisions,” Mr. Schiff said in an interview on Wednesday. He added, “It means the country is fundamentally less safe.”
That’s all the more true when to “ignore that information” you add “and just make shit up.” If you’re going to ignore evidence-based information and just make shit up instead, then you’re going to make bad bad BAD decisions.
The threat assessment — an annual report to Congress that ranks threats to American national security from around the world — provides the public with an unclassified and up-to-date summary of the most pressing national security threats to the United States.
Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, had told lawmakers that North Korea’s leaders “ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival.” He said that there was “some activity that is inconsistent with full denuclearization” in the country and that most of what it had dismantled was reversible.
Yeah but Trump had a meeting with Kim, and it was awesome, and Kim loves him, and there’s no way Kim is going to do what Kim thinks is good for Kim instead of what Trump thinks is good for Trump. No way.
Douglas H. Wise, a career C.I.A. official and former top deputy at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said Mr. Trump’s criticism of the intelligence chiefs threatened to corrupt the process. Intelligence officers do not like to be at odds with the president, he said, and Mr. Trump’s comments put them in an uncomfortable position.
“This is a consequence of narcissism but it is a strong and inappropriate public political pressure to get the intelligence community leadership aligned with his political goals,” Mr. Wise said. “The existential danger to the nation is when the policymaker corrupts the role of the intelligence agencies, which is to provide unbiased and apolitical intelligence to inform policy.”
Oh my, he mentioned the narcissism. He’ll probably be in prison before the sun sets.
I’m sure that in Revelations one of the final signs of the impending apocalypse is the discovery of an intersection between the US president and trans ideology. Well, there it is. If you need me, I’ll be in my bunker, riding out the storm.
You’d think that this sort of shit would make the Republicans wake up instead of looking upon Trump as the crazy uncle at the dinner table, trying to keep the tinfoil hat on his head. Republicans in the past would go after Democratic presidents whom they thought were “soft” on whatever enemy was most topical. I know they’ve ginvested too much in him and followed him too far up his own backside to see light or reason, but it would be nice if some of them woke up and acknowledged that this idiocy is threatening to the security of the United States and is-or at leastshould be- non partisan. That makes it a problem for everyone else on Earth if and when Trump lashes out in response to imaginary dangers or fails to respond in a timely, or appropriate fashion to real ones. Can we please put another layer or two of command between his small, greasy fingers and the launch codes?
The main problem IMHO is that the US Constitution gives the President the power of an 18th C English monarch.
Trump is an elected king, elevated to that high office by the Marge and Homer B. Simpsons of America, who all took America’s disaster in Vietnam personally, and want a Leader who will restore the GREATNESS America enjoyed from 1945 to 1975.
“Make America Great Again” was a carefully crafted slogan, aimed at precisely those people. That, plus the Electoral College system was what put Trump over the line, even though Clinton won more of the popular vote overall.
Yep, Trump is the knower of everything.
Dotard!
Omar, the Constitution does not give the President that power. The Constitution created a president that didn’t have much power. He had no budget, no money to work with until Congress decided to give him a discretionary budget. He had no power to go to war until it was seized (with Congressional acquiescence) in the 20th century. The framers of the Constitution wanted nothing to do with a monarchy, or a strong single individual at the head of things, and they dispersed the power, giving the President actually not that much.
American people (perhaps people everywhere) have a fondness for the “great man” story, and the idea of a strong central figure that everyone could look up to was a sore temptation, and there were enough ambitious presidents and weak-kneed legislators to make it a reality. Now people assume it is that way because some eighteenth century men wanted it that way. No. What we are seeing is a late arrival on the scene.
Iknklast:
Thanks for that. Noted.
But the Constitution is as the Constitution does. President likewise.
Politics has always been the art of what they can get away with.
Exactly. The Constitution is only as good as the men who enforce it.
From the NYT: “His outburst laid bare the rift between the bureaucracy and a president who came into office determined to challenge decades of foreign policy orthodoxy. It also revealed Mr. Trump’s deep frustration at what he believes is the lack of credit he has received for his efforts, be it his diplomacy with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, or his more confrontational policy toward Iran.”
A huge failure is the media (even the “radical left” like the NYT) normalizing the situation. Did Trump really come “into office determined to challenge decades of foreign policy orthodoxy”? Do we believe he would even understand those words? Does he truly experience “deep frustration” with the lack of credit he’s received for his “efforts” at “diplomacy” and “policy”? Or is he simply raging at any disagreement with his most recently regurgitated pronouncements? Doesn’t “deep frustration” imply a depth that simply doesn’t exist?
To be clear: the primary failure is in the presidency, but most of the media has failed to report the failure sufficiently.
(I intend that “efforts”, “diplomacy”, and “policy” double as both actual quotes and scare quotes.)
@Helicam
That is especially apparent at this side of the pond. The BBC in particular is desperate to create and fiercely maintain a narrative that makes all this crazy behaviour seem normal. There’s no doubt that the BBC feels Trump=bad but they steadfastly refuse to say why. By, say, reporting on a few of his tweets every so often and explaining why they are batshit insane. They don’t do that. Neither does any of the major news outlets, as far as I can tell. Probably because most of them are owned by Murdoch.
I find it really distressing. I visit sites like this that show exactly what Trump is doing and saying then Mrs Latsot turns on the TV news and the BBC is discussing it in terms of actual normal politics and non-crazy human behaviour. It’s a kind of snobbery, I think, that we could really do without. The BBC seems to think that discussing Trump by using such things as what he says and does is sinking to his level, and they’ll have no part of it. Even the satire shows don’t tend to go after Trump much, perhaps he’s too big and obvious a target. But look at the way shows like Spitting Image went after Reagan. That’s a show we could use right now, imagine how great puppets of Trump, Johnson and May would be (Spitting Image wasn’t by the BBC, of course).
It reminds me of how criminally complicit the BBC and other UK news outlets were with the ant-vax thing a few years back. They had Andrew Wakefield on speed-dial, he was in the news studio practically every day for months as ‘balance’. Even after he had been thoroughly discredited, fired and banned from practicing medicine ever again, the BBC felt compelled to strongly hint that vaccines might be bad. That measles outbreak in America at the moment? You can blame the BBC more or less directly: ant-vax didn’t really get any traction in the US until we mishandled it so badly over here.
The same thing over here with global warming. The news outlets believe they must be “fair and balanced” (which are not the same thing, and often balanced isn’t fair), so they keep the handful of scientists that are virulent global warming deniers busy being the counterpoint to the global warming scientists. They don’t realize that global warming is news; they think it is a debate.
Funny, though, I rarely see them feeling the need to have a non-religious person on to counter the mountains of dreck they peddle about the beauties of religion. And right now, most of the atheists they could come up with I don’t want to see…I recommend Ophelia for that job. She’s both secular and a decent human being.
We have our fair share of global warming denying idiots (often our MPs) but they don’t seem to be taken very seriously in the mainstream media. That could all change in a few weeks, of course, when Britain hurtles into the abyss of its own making and spunklords like Johnson and Rees-Mogg emerge, rubbing their hands together with glee.
Here, we seem to have only one person who does all of that and it’s Kate Smurthwaite. And even then, she usually just manages to make her way into audiences and gets shouted down, often in disgust. by all those loving religion fans.
Sometimes she makes it as a proper guest, though. As in the recent exchange with Piers Morgan who wasn’t at all happy that she doesn’t shave her entire body from the eyebrows down and has multiple sexual partners.
But she’s pretty much all we’ve got. If there’s a tragedy of any sort, the BBC will speed-dial a vicar in it’s sleep as if nobody else has anything to say about bad things happening. But if there’s a story about priests raping nuns or something, they don’t call Kate or any other atheist. They get a priest and a nun to say how it’s just a few bad apples.
I wish to apologise about the conduct of my apostrophe in the last post.
Apostrophes! You just can’t trust ’em. Like bats, they sneak in through every nook and cranny. They insert themselves into words where they know they are not wanted, just because they can.
I’ve known how to apostrophe for nearly 50 years. It can only be their fault that I keep putting them in the wrong place.
I see apostrophes preceding the letter ‘s’ so often, I have started to feel a vague sense of anxiety whenever I see an ‘s’ without one. The funny thing is, I was completely confident about where they go when English was my second language. It’s living amongst the native speakers that has ballsed it up for me.