From “Letters From an American:. 11-11-24:
- The Taliban congratulated Trump. The Taliban is bad. Trump began the withdrawal from Afghanistan. (QED?)
- Rusia. Russia. Putin. Russia.
- Trump "claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department." Heather says this show his "determination to reorganize the federal government around himself". It couldn't mean he doesn't trust the Biden State Department?
- Elon Musk seems like a "shadow vice-president" according to someone at The Guardian. He has (gasp!) sat in on a few phone calls. Might have some influence on appointments. Hmm. The guy runs half a dozen companies doing breakthrough work. Maybe he knows a thing or two?
- There's some jockeying over who is going to run the Senate. Oddly, Heather seems a bit wistful about Mitch McConnell.
- The "Mandate" maybe wasn't. And Heather says voters both elected Trump and supported "Democratic" policies like abortion rights and a path to citizenship for immigrants. I think this is a very interesting development, but I don't think it means what Heather thinks it means. I suspect there may be a future where sensible measures could be pursued without painting them with a team color.
11/12: Another dig at Musk before a summary of a WSJ article sounding the alarm about a "purge" in the uppermost "brass" ranks of military leadership. HCR seems focused on the idea of "Trump loyalists" in high positions and compares this prospect of some firings to "Stalin's officer purges in early WWII". This is absurd. Stalin actually killed people; Trump is at this point talking about replacing some political appointees in top military leadership roles with people more to his liking. Sort of like what every incoming president does.
She goes on to accusing Trump of planning to "drill baby drill" and "eliminate the Biden administration's policies to address climate change". But then she admits, "In fact, the production of oil and gas hit an all-time high during the Biden administration and the U.S. exports those products". So which is it?
Heather expresses an academic's disdain for dumb people when she makes fun of SD governor Kristi Noem's mistaken claim that Texas was a signatory of the US Constitution. Texas became a state two generations later. I get it, but it'a a bad look. More concerning is the idea that an evangelical apocalypticist like Mike Huckabee is being considered for US Ambassador to Israel.
HCR concludes by invoking the "Framers of the Constitution" who she says hoped the Senate would serve as a check on wannabe autocrats. This will be tested, she suggests, in the fight over recess appointments and the confirmation process. Her general approach seems to be that the results of small-d democracy represented by the MAGA victory need to be tempered by professionals and the "adults in the room". Unfortunately, in her mind that also seems to mean turning government over to Neocons of the career bureaucracy (AKA deep state).
11-13: Heather remarks on the rift between the traditional Republicans in the Senate and the MAGA wing, which I think is interesting as well. I think she is right that the secrecy of the balloting for majority leader probably helped the Senate defy Trump's wishes a bit. So checks and balances (guardrails) aren't completely a thing of the past. Heather pushes this a bit far, I think, when she says that although Republicans have long wished to dismantle the activist government first created in the New Deal and maintained by both parties (she says until 1981), they have not previously tried to dismantle the "rule of law" or "rules-based" international order. So she's right back to that claim, which I think is a bit like Senator McCarthy and his list of 205 communists. "Trump has made it clear that his goal for a second term is to toss overboard the rule of law and the international rules-based order," Heather says. Show me the list.
11-14: Heather again claims "President Joe Biden rejected the “neoliberalism” of the previous 40 years that had moved about $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%...Biden’s policies worked, enabling the U.S. to recover from the pandemic more quickly than any other country with a modern economy, sending unemployment to historic lows, and raising wages faster than inflation for the bottom 80% of Americans." She doesn't actually provide facts to back up these claims. The "Notes" section at the end lists a series of White House briefing statements and newspaper articles that seem to blur the line between reporting and commentary (hat-tip to Mary for explaining to me the difference!).
11-15: The Biden administration did some good things for America's infrastructure. Then Heather launched into her typical daily feed:
And then there is Trump’s tapping of former Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence (DNI). Gabbard’s ties to America’s adversaries, including Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, have raised serious questions about her loyalty. Making her the country’s DNI would almost certainly collapse ongoing U.S. participation in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance in which the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have shared intelligence since World War II.
As former Illinois representative Joe Walsh wrote: “Donald Trump just picked someone to oversee our intelligence who, herself, couldn’t pass a security clearance check. She couldn’t get security clearance. She couldn’t get a job in our intelligence community. Because she’s too compromised by Russia. Yet Trump picked her to run the whole thing.
Remind me again of the facts behind the statement about Gabbard's "ties"? Remind me again why Gabbard was placed on a "Quiet Skies" watchlist? Is there ANY evidence this wasn't politically motivated? Seems maybe Gabbard is in a good place to know something about the overreach of the surveillance establishment. Or, as Glenn Greenwald said on X, “If Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset, why has the US military allowed her to serve in it for 26 years, up to and including today as a Lt. Col. in the Army Reserve? It's rather to difficult to explain that except with the conclusion that the accusation is utter baseless bullshit.” And finally, did Heather just come out as a FAN of the Five Eyes?
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