Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I happened to catch the movie “The Apprentice” recently about the relationship between Donald Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer who was involved in many of the mid 20th century’s most high profile political events. I don’t know that the film told me anything I didn’t already know but it did remind me of just how vicious Cohn was and how much Trump loved that about him. He learned his lessons well. The thru line between Cohn’s nefarious career and Trump’s own ruthlessness is about to manifest in this second term. It’s almost as if it’s coming full circle.

Cohn’s first big splash in national politics took place when he was only 23 years old when he was one of the lead prosecutors in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He was so well-liked by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that he recommended him to be the lead counsel for Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations communist witch hunt. (McCarthy had  launched his famous crusade in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950, by waving around a piece of paper which he claimed held the names of 205 Communists in the US State Department and he was off to the races.)

Cohn became a household name and was known as the “subcommittee’s real brain” according to Time Magazine and he and McCarthy instigated a massive investigation and purge of government employees whom they accused of being communists or outed as homosexuals. (The latter was especially cruel on Cohn’s part since he was gay himself.) This was the second Red Scare, the first having been in the years after WWI. But the focus on expelling people from the government, including the military, on thin suspicions of disloyalty was a specialty of McCarthy and Cohn.

When the fever finally broke, (“at long last sir, have you no decency…”) McCarthy was censured and died before he could complete his second term. Cohn, on the other hand, went on to hob nob with the rich and famous including just about every powerful politician in America. He mentored the young Donald Trump in the ways of the world of business and politics and Trump took to his cutthroat philosophy very naturally.

Facing his second term in office today, Donald Trump and his transition team have hit the ground running with a series of stunning cabinet appointments that have knocked the political establishment for a loop. Trump is drunk with power having staged an epic comeback after leaving office as ignominiously as any president in history, being indicted for federal and state crimes as well as losing lawsuits charging him with fraud and defamation. He believes he is invincible.

According to various reports ,while he’s enjoying the fealty and attention of the richest man in the world who seemingly never leaves his side, he is making these decisions impulsively, totally relying on instinct which he believes are what got him to where he is today. No longer restrained by the need to get elected or fear for his freedom, he can do anything, And right now he appears to be obsessed with setting up the conditions for his revenge on the “Deep State” and the people he believes stabbed him in the back during his first term.

But there’s a lot going on in Trumpworld aside from his high profile appointments. And, interestingly enough, one of the most important projects harkens back to Cohn and McCarthy’s government purge in the 1950s. And it has been worked on for several years by outside groups preparing the ground for a Trump restoration. This time there’s no national security pretense or a rationale that people are betraying the country. It’s all about loyalty to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. But then in Trump’s mind, “l’etat c’est moi” so it adds up to the same thing.

CNN reported that just before the election the Department of Transportation received a pile of FOIA requests asking that emails and text messages pertaining to Elon Musk be turned over. Apparently, this was just the latest wave of such requests that have been received by all the various federal agencies sent by Trump aligned groups over the last two years demanding to identify “perceived partisans.” They have used a variety of methods to determine that including DEI programs or even just emails with the key words “climate change” in them. CNN calls it a “massive fishing expedition.”

One of the groups is the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project, another is the America First Policy Institute, a group with close ties to Trump’s transition team and there are more, all with the intention of rooting out anyone suspected of not being sufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. They are looking at whether employees have ever donated to Democrats, written anything critical on social media or claimed that they have done something suspicious such as “helped immigrants who arrived in the US seeking legal status.” The Heritage Oversight Project has even attempted to find out if any employees might be trying to subvert this investigation by aseeking evidence of plots to subvert the president-elect’s expected purging by asking for emails that include the words “Trump” and “reduction in force.”

Trump signed an executive order at the end of his first term called Schedule F which allowed him to order mass firings of employees he believed he could not trust to do his bidding. Joe Biden rescinded it but Trump plans to reinstate it upon taking office. But since there are millions of federal employees who could conceivably be disloyal to the Dear Leader, it was extremely helpful of these groups to do the investigative work ahead of time.

Unions and other advocacy groups say they are determined to fight, hoping they can find some allies in congress to step up and “hoping public shaming and outrage may protect them.” I’m pretty sure that’s no longer operative in American politics but I suppose it’s worth a try. The courts will undoubtedly be asked to determine whether a mass purge of employees because of perceived partisanship is constitutional but in the meantime it’s scaring the hell out of many of them fearing that they are about to lose their jobs if they happened to have said something Donald Trump and his minions thinks is disloyal.

Roy Cohn would be so proud of his boy today. His witch hunt had to be conducted in the name of saving the country from communism. This one is a purge for the sheer pleasure of punishing people Donald Trump doesn’t like and a message to all who might think of opposing him in the future. It’s pure depravity, just the way Cohn taught him.

Salon

Advice from Carole Cadwalladr

Friends have already secured permanent residency in Canada. Others are headed there in January. But then they have the means. Following post-election racist texts targeting Black people come a spread of similar intimidating texts targeting Hispanic and LGBTQ people. They warn recipients they have been “selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp.” The FBI still does not know their origin. “The FBI did not say whether it believes the offensive messages to LGBTQ and Hispanic recipients are from the same source as the previously reported messages,” NBC News reports.

Some of my LGBTQ friends were concerned even before this report.

In this threat environment, Carole Cadwalladr offers “How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world.”

The Guardian investigative journalist acknowledges that her list is an homage to Timothy Snyder and his 2017 “On Tyranny.” His first rule for surviving a tyranny is the now-famous: “Do not obey in advance.” Serendipitously, Snyder called her as she was crafting her own list on how to survive what comes next (for however long it lasts). Snyder’s updated piece of advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”

Many of Cadwalladr’s rules are familiar. Others, more practical than one might see elsewhere, since she was been the target of a SLAPP suit over her 2019 TED talk. A couple in particular caught my attention:

8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.

And this:

11 Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.

Cadwalladr has been there.

You’re next

But the message that stood out to me most in Cadwalladr’s list, and may to those of us not (immediately) planning on leaving the country, is this:

10 Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.

I wrote The Niemöller Countdown a week ago and urged readers not to wait to speak out until they get to the Jews.

Listen. Digby and I treated the threat letter I received from a Trump lawyer in August 2019 largely as a joke. Standard Trump operating procedure. Threaten a lawsuit against someone without pockets deep enough to resist to get them to back down. We simply got caught in the fallout of a Trump tantrum against NBC-Universal.

That was then. Now Trump is drawing up enemies lists that we are not likely high-profile enough to be on. Then again, I would have thought we were too small to notice in 2019. As Cadwalladr warns, “Know that you’re next.”

Cokie’s Law über alles

Longtime readers recall Cokie’s Law. Digby coined the term in 2008 for how skillfully the right wing tosses smears into the air to be carried by the media like the wind. Smears, lies, and disinformation become a “legitimate” subject of mainstream reporting not because they are true or meaningful but because they are “out there.” The law is named for the late NPR/ABC reporter Cokie Roberts:

“At this point,” said Roberts, “it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

Thus right-wing smears, lies, and disinformation become, in campaign parlance, “earned media.”

James Fallows on Saturday did not reference Digby’s law, but essentially conceded that “the death-cloud of misinformation, ignorance, lies, myths, fears, stereotypes” has come to represent, like the shadows in Plato’s cave, an “artificial reality playing out in the minds of citizens.”

Fallows:

—It’s not a new problem in American democracy. Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published when Warren Harding was in the White House, was about people’s inevitable reliance on “pictures in our head,” often stereotypes or half-truths, to judge events they had not witnessed themselves. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, about the convergence of information and entertainment (with entertainment coming out on top), was published nearly 40 years ago but grows ever more prophetic-seeming.

—It’s not even a new insight into this election. In the past week, while traveling, I’ve seen excellent essays by Nathan Heller, Julie Hotard, Brian Beutler (and Beutler again), Michael Tomasky, and a growing number of others on the “news” problem that extends far beyond the official “news media.”

Facts no longer define reality in a post-truth world. “All anyone was talking about” does. The right is more skilled than the left at ensuring its version of reality is in circulation at the beauty parlor and part of the culture. Watch any The Good Liars or Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse videos shot at Trump rallies. The MAGA faithful absorb extremist disinformation like sponges and, like sodden sponges, refuse to accept anything more, like objective fact.

There is a sad irony to the phenomenon. I’m so old that I remember rednecks beating up hippies for having long hair. Until country music discovered the mullet. Lefty New Agers later inhabited their own alternate reality of unseen energies and aliens (and QAnon-esque conspiracies):

As Larry Massett observed in “A Night on Mt. Shasta” (recorded during the Harmonic Convergence), “I met a lot of people I liked and almost no one I believed.” People following their spiritual journeys seemed alienated by modernity, and suckers for whatever snake oil came peddled by people who seemed genuine enough.

Today it’s the right’s turn to be alienated by modernity. For their tastes, a bigoted, 34-time felon/reality star and showman seems more genuine than a world of uncomfortable facts and neighbors who seem alien. Nothing feels right anymore. They’ve given themselves over to a cargo cult of truthiness supported by Trump rallies and right-wing influencers. News is curated disinformation. It’s the right’s version of the New Age only, considering Jan. 6 and Project 2025, far less benign.

Fallows again:

In essence, “news” is everything you don’t see or experience yourself. And with each passing year, a growing share of the “news” on which people base their sense of reality has come neither from personal experience2; nor from “regular” news organizations, flawed as they may be; but instead from the surrounding climate of social media and other sources that have been skewed in a nihilistic, suspicious-and-hostile direction. A large part of that skewing is intentional—a supercharged version of Fox News, as those I’ve linked to above all argue. Part of it just comes with the technology. And evidence suggests that in 2024 this mattered more than anything the official news media did.3 People had “heard” that the economy was terrible and no one could find a job and illegal immigrants were everywhere and Kamala Harris was an affirmative-action cipher. And they could see that eggs were expensive—and that Donald Trump had come up, fist-first, after the bullet whizzed by. No contest.

The result explains a lot about these past week in public affairs. If nothing matters, if everything is terrible, if elections are just about swapping one liar for another, why not just shake it all up? Or burn it all down? At least it will be entertaining along the way.

In 2016, actress Susan Sarandon, an advocate for Sen. Bernie Sanders, suggested to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that a Trump presidency would, in Marxist terms, hasten the revolution:

“If you think that it’s pragmatic to shore up the status quo right now, then you’re not in touch with the status quo,” Sarandon said. “The status quo is not working … I think it’s dangerous to think that we can continue the way we are.”

LET’S FUCKING GO!!!! pic.twitter.com/LOkm4HKYlQ

— Maureen Bannon (@maureen_bannon) October 29, 2024

Right on cue (roughly a decade later), the Trumpist right is ready for its revolution. It’s Mullet Time. In his War Room, Steve Bannon is humming Springtime For Hitler.

“The thing you’ve gotta know is everything is show-biz!”

After the shock of the 2016 election, as I felt I was emotionally drowning, I recall writing more than once that the only thing I could do going forward was try to see things as clearly as possible and convey that to the best of my ability. It’s not easy at times like this, and it’s especially difficult when your own friends and allies are often siezing on the opportunity to validate their priors and ride their hobby horses without a whole lot of evidence. It’s human to do that but I’m rarely persuaded by those arguments at times like these and I suspect most of you aren’t either. It’s just too soon and there are too many variables to be sure of any particular analysis.

I have missed reading Michael  Bérubé in recent years. As a founding member of the old liberal blogosphere his wit and wisdom were hugely influential of me so I was glad to see that he’s written one of the best critique of the critiques I’ve yet seen. You’ll see what I’m talking about:

By now, everyone knows why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump: because she didn’t do the thing I wanted her to do.

As with every other crushing Democratic defeat since 2000, the usual suspects have emerged to say precisely what you would expect them to. Right on cue, Bari Weiss, former New York Times columnist and founder of The Free Press, claimed that running on “extraordinarily niche issues like gender fluidity or defunding the police” was out of touch with “ordinary Americans.” Since the number of Democrats who ran on these issues was precisely zero, and since Harris herself made a point of touting her career as a prosecutor, one suspects that this strange utterance might in fact be code for “Democrats refused to throw trans people under the bus,” in which case, they are guilty as charged — though in the coming months, they will surely be urged by other familiar voices to do precisely this.

On the left, two hot takes have gained serious traction. One is that Harris lost because of Gaza; the other is that she lost because the neoliberal technocrats of the Democratic Party have given up on the working class. The first of these is hard to substantiate, though the broader criticisms of Harris’ position on Gaza have merit. The second is demonstrably wrong, and wrong in a way that points to a deep and long-standing problem on one wing of the American left.

He takes on Gaza with sensitivity and I think it’s well worth reading so click over to do that. I’m more interested in the economic argument because I feel like we’re about to party like it’s 2000 and 2016 and that’s not good:

If the Gaza argument is vexing, the economic populist argument is simply maddening. It has a 20-year history, dating back to Thomas Frank’s influential book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” It was always dismissive of cultural and social issues, seeing the culture wars as a sideshow meant to distract the rubes from their exploitation by plutocrats. In an oft-cited passage, Frank claimed that right-wing culture warriors aren’t really serious about the things they crusade on: “The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. … Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished.” I’m guessing that Frank would like a do-over on that take today.

This year, the economic-populist left came out of the gate storming, as Bernie Sanders issued a day-after statement that “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” As MSNBC columnist Michael A. Cohen noted, this “amounted to the proverbial act of coming down to the battlefield and shooting the survivors.” As Cohen also noted, it “simply isn’t true.” 

Still, if one wanted to debate this claim on its merits, one could start by looking at Harris’ policy proposals: things like childcare tax credits, earned income tax credits for families without children, subsidies for first-time homebuyers, incentives for building affordable housing, an increase in the minimum wage, tax cuts for the middle class and tax increases on people making over $400,000 a year, support for unions and protection for workers seeking to unionize, lower costs for health care and prescription drugs, student loan forgiveness, support for in-home medical care and legislation to combat price gouging (which was immediately ridiculed by sensible centrist commentators like The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell). In what world is this not an economic plan targeted to the working class?

More importantly, one could look at recent history — not just some candidate’s wish list, but the real, demonstrable accomplishments of the Biden administration. As Nicholas Lemann recently pointed out, those accomplishments not only mark a decisive break with 40 years of neoliberalism; they are also astonishing political achievements, given the razor-thin congressional margins Biden was working with. “On Biden’s watch,” Lemann writes, “the government has launched large programs to move the country to clean energy sources, to create from scratch or to bring onshore a number of industries, to strengthen organized labor, to build thousands of infrastructure projects, to embed racial-equity goals in many government programs, and to break up concentrations of economic power.”

Let’s zero in for a moment on the fact that so-called “Bidenomics” focused on reenergizing American manufacturing and strengthening unions. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act created 700,000 manufacturing jobs. Biden also managed some oh-by-the-way victories like saving the 40-hour work week and resolving a longshoremen’s strike that threatened to tank the economy at the worst possible time. (That resolution alone should have sparked coast-to-coast celebrations.) And on the symbolic-and-therefore-important front, Biden was the first U.S. president to walk a picket line, in support of the United Auto Workers strike in September 2023. You would think that things like this might be important to economic populists.

But don’t take my word for it. Check out someone with much more experience with economic populism:

The Biden administration, as a result of the American Rescue Plan, helped rebuild the economy during the pandemic far faster than economists thought possible. At a time when people were terrified about the future, the president and those of us who supported him in Congress put Americans back to work, provided cash benefits to desperate parents and protected small businesses, hospitals, schools and child care centers.

After decades of talk about our crumbling roads, bridges and water systems, we put more money into rebuilding America’s infrastructure than ever before — which is projected to create millions of well-paying jobs. And we did not stop there. We made the largest-ever investment in climate action to save the planet. We canceled student debt for nearly five million financially strapped Americans. We cut prices for insulin and asthma inhalers, capped out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs and got free vaccines to the American people. We battled to defend women’s rights in the face of moves by Trump-appointed jurists to roll back reproductive freedom and deny women the right to control their own bodies.

Who, you ask, spoke so generously — and accurately — about Biden’s economic record? If you guessed “Bernie Sanders, in the pages of The New York Times this past summer,” you win today’s “spot-the-political- opportunism” prize.

The reason this matters — the reason that Sanders’ postelection statement isn’t just garden-variety political opportunism — is that Biden was, remarkably, almost precisely the kind of president that economic populists said they wanted. (I say “remarkably” partly because I was an Elizabeth Warren supporter in 2020 and didn’t expect much from Biden. I was pleasantly surprised at almost every turn.) Perhaps Sanders was simply more simpatico with Biden than with Harris; it certainly sounds like it, since his op-ed was explicitly an argument for keeping Biden as the nominee. I will not offer hypotheses about this possibility. I will simply point out that the Bernie Sanders who wrote that op-ed knew perfectly well how to argue that the Democratic Party had not abandoned the working class.

The economic populist left is not wrong on the merits. Quite the contrary. It has been clear for four years that working-class and middle-class people were feeling the effects of inflation, that their pain was real and that the costs of everything from eggs and gas to childcare and housing weren’t just opportunities for right-wing demagoguery. They were lived experiences, day to day. That issue, together with immigration (fanned by hysterical xenophobia and propaganda), turned out to be decisive for this election. Should Biden himself have done more to promote and publicize his administration’s considerable achievements? Absolutely — although communicating them was not his strong suit. That’s where the economic populists with better communication skills should have stepped up and said, “Folks, we feel your pain, and we really do have a plan. Some of it is already in place, and there’s more like that to come.”

Don’t get me wrong. This would have been the right message, and it would have done justice to Bidenomics. But I’m not saying that messaging would have worked. On the contrary, I’m fairly sure it would not have. To return to Michael Cohen: “under Biden, Democrats adopted one of the most pro-working class policy agendas in recent political memory, enacted much of it — and accrued no electoral benefit.” I’m just saying that the argument that Biden and Harris neglected the working class is false.

Instead, I’m in the camp that believes my side lost because every incumbent party in every wealthy democracy paid a political price for presiding over post-COVID-19 inflation, whether they deserved it or not. Granted, it’s galling that the American version of this global phenomenon entailed losing to a petulant and amoral individual with a criminal record, who continually flirts with the idea of political violence. That loss is incalculable, and may wind up being worse than the debacles of 1980 and 2000. I hope for the sake of future generations that it is not.

But I’m also in the camp that believes that although Harris didn’t run a perfect campaign (most likely because there is no such thing) and should at least have given voters a clearer sense of how she would be different from Biden (because of the stench of incumbency), the 2024 election was looking like a Trump landslide four months ago. The amazing thing, then, is that a Black woman fighting the headwinds of racism, misogyny, gale-force far-right disinformation and the mainstream media’s “sanewashing” of her opponent managed to boost her favorability rating in record time, crushing her only debate with Trump, ably battling Bret Baier’s bullying on Fox News and coming within a whisker of holding the Blue Wall states that would have secured her the presidency.

The question shouldn’t be: “What did the Democrats do wrong?” The question should be, given the profoundly inauspicious political conditions they faced as an incumbent party in a country where two-thirds of the population thinks that things are on the wrong track: “How did they come so close?”

It is always tempting to believe that your candidate lost for the reasons you care about most. I feel that temptation every single time. But there was so much more going on in this election: Latino men moving to the right, the widening gender divide among white voters, the struggle for reproductive rights and affordable health care being muted by the delusional belief among low-information voters that Trump would protect these things, and the stubborn, unavoidable fact that long-term investments in working-class families mean less to many people, on a day-to-day basis, than the cost of groceries and gas.

We are now left to live with the bitter irony that many of those long-term investments in American manufacturing and infrastructure will bear fruit during Trump’s second term. Sometime in late January 2025, I suspect, we will begin to hear how Trump tamed inflation and reinvigorated the American working class simply by taking office. And we will continue to hear, as Bidenomics takes root and Trump takes the credit for its successes, that the Democrats lost by turning their backs on that working class.

I don’t want to give up on the idea that another, better world is possible. It’s all that keeps me going. For now, I just want the left to remain in the world it once claimed as its own — the world of the reality-based community.

That’s pretty much where I’m at. I will point out that there is another hot take gaining traction on the left, or center-left, and that is that the Democrats must win (duh) and therefore it is imperative that they move to the center on culture war issues. We’ve been there before too. And it’s a post for another day.

I’m not going to get too worked up about this (yet) because I think it’s mostly a primal reaction to losing to that freak again. It’s understandable that people would grasp for any explanation for that except the idea that way too many people believe the garbage that Trump spews and really like what they are hearing. It’s disorienting. So we need to believe that it isn’t that they like him it’s that the Democrats just aren’t “messaging” right or “delivering” enough.

But I’m afraid our problem is bigger than that. I’m trying to keep the faith that we’ll all calm down soon in the face of what these monsters are doing and accept the truth that that isn’t the real reason people keep voting for the Trump circus. They aren’t living in the same reality the rest of us are living in and figuring out what to do about that is far more important than fashioning a better economic message.

Here’s Donald Trump accusing a pollster who got it wrong of causing great distrust in the electoral system and he wants her investigated. You CANNOT make this shit up!

this is gross — asked about RFK Jr's nomination, Markwayne Mullin deflects by bringing up a number of LGBT people Biden put in his administration, including Pete Buttigieg

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2024-11-17T15:43:58.653Z

He’s a former MMA fighter which is considered”highly qualified” for the US Senate in Oklahoma. Of course he thinks appointing LGBTQ people is equivalent to appointing a lunatic weirdo like RFK Jr. He is a very, very stupid person.

There have always been a fair number of fools in Senate. But MAGA has really upped the numbers. This fellow is a perfect example. And for some reason he’s all over television lately. I guess they figure he’s one of their new poste boys.

THIS SEEMS SERIOUS…

🚨 NBC is reporting that Trump’s transition team is making a list of officers involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal for possible court-martial. The goal is to bring charges of treason. pic.twitter.com/t7V6HlnAu8

— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) November 17, 2024

They’re really going after the military. I suspect a lot of this is an intimidation tactic to keep the brass in line and possibly push some into retirement. But you never know. This psycho administration is clearly high as a kite right now and areliable to do anything:

The Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan. 

Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, including gathering information about who was directly involved in the decision-making for the military, how it was carried out, and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason, the U.S. official and person with knowledge of the plan said.

“They’re taking it very seriously,” the person with knowledge of the plan said.

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Matt Flynn, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics and global threats, is helping lead the effort, the sources said. It is being framed as a review of how the U.S. first got into the war in Afghanistan and how the U.S. ultimately withdrew.

This is weird:

“Matt Flynn has nothing to do with the Trump transition team, much less leading any review concerning military justice matters,” said Mark S. Zaid, Flynn’s attorney. In a statement Zaid said that “no one has sought out Mr. Flynn’s views on this hypothetical legal scenario.” 

I wonder if that little nugget was passed on to the source as a way of rooting out leaks? I dunno. But it’s odd.

Trump sure knows how to keep the cultist thrilled:

To his detractors, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s cabinet looks like a rogues’ gallery of people with dubious credentials and questionable judgment.

His supporters see something different.

“It’s a masterpiece,’’ Eileen Margolis, 58, who lives in Weston, Fla., and owns a tattoo business, said of Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks unveiled over the past week. “If it was a painting, it would be a Picasso.”

A “brilliant alliance,’’ is how Joanne Warwick, 60, a former Democrat from Detroit, described many of the nominees.

“It’s pretty much a star cast,’’ said Judy Kanoui of Flat Rock, N.C., a retiree and lifelong Democrat who voted for Mr. Trump for the first time this month.

{…]

In Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee for health and human services secretary, Mr. Trump’s supporters see a crusader searching for new solutions to chronic illnesses, not a conspiracy theorist promoting questionable and debunked ideas about vaccines and fluoride.

In Matt Gaetz, the nominee for attorney general, many Trump supporters look past the ethical investigation into allegations that he had a relationship with a 17-year-old girl and possibly violated federal sex trafficking laws, and see a provocateur who is willing to punish the Democrats who unjustly prosecuted the president-elect.

“I think it’s so crazy, and I love it,’’ Merrill McCollum, 60, of Bozeman, Mont., said of the nominees.

I we get austerity and civilizational collapse all these celebs will no doubt be blamed as “low IQ”, “dumb as rocks” etc. And they will love him even more.

Love these billionaire tech bros. But hey, at least Elon has the heart to warn us that it’s going to cause us all hardship — but it’s for our own good.

“We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk said. “And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”

Many economists agree that Trump’s economic and fiscal proposals could spark an economic calamity, though it is not clear whether they have considered, or given credence, to Musk’s calls for austerity. 

Is austerity what people voted for? I’m going to guess no. But if these miscreants have their way, they’re going to get it:

BARTIROMO: Are you expecting to close down entire agencies? President Trump has talked about the Department of Education, for exampleRAMASWAMY: We expect mass reductions. We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2024-11-17T16:07:56.701Z

On RFK Jr:

We sat down with RFK Jr. back in May 2023, when he was still challenging President Biden for the Democratic nomination.

As we noted then, he’s an independent thinker who sees through a lot of bull, an incisive critic of some of Biden’s worst policies, who saw that “the Democratic Party lost its way most acutely in reaction to” Donald Trump’s first election.

But the insights we were impressed with had nothing to do with health.

When it came to that topic his views were a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines.

“Neocons” are responsible for America’s policy ills. “Pesticides, cellphones, ultrasound” could be driving an upswing in Tourette syndrome and peanut allergies.

He told us with full conviction that all America’s chronic health problems began in one year in the 1980s when a dozen bad things happened. 

Convincing to the gullible conspiracy-hungry crowd on Twitter, but not to the rest of us. 

In fact, we came out thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts.

And even where he makes fair points as a critic, it’s hard to see how he’s the guy to lead HHS and its staff of 83,000 to practical solutions.

The relationship between Big Pharma and the feds is deeply dysfunctional, for example — but drug companies do a lot of good, and employ a lot of people.

Sending the industry — or even just its stocks — into a tailspin would be a disaster in its own right.

His views also put him at odds with Trump’s aim of supporting energy and farmers, as RFK Jr. wants to ban fracking and many pesticides and fertilizers. 

Look: The HHS chief oversees over 100 programs across 11 operating divisions; keeping the trains running is a major job in its own right.

A radical, prolonged and confused transition ordered by a guy like RFK Jr., who will use his high office to spout his controversial beliefs, leaves a lot of room for things to go wrong — and for people to wind up harmed or even dead.2.6K

All that, of course, if the Senate actually confirms RFK Jr., which will be a challenge in its own right: Republicans only have three votes to spare.

Donald Trump won on promises to fix the economy, the border and soaring global disorder; his team needs to focus on delivering change on those fronts — not spend energy either having to defend crackpot theories or trying to control RFK Jr.’s mouth. 

We fear the worm that he claims ate some of his brain some years ago is contagious and there’s been an outbreak at Mar-a-Lago.

This isn’t complicated. He’s batshit crazy.