PEOTUS Donald Trump's cabinet, etc., picks have, in retrospect, come to not actually look like the "best people" as was foretold in the Prophetic Book of Big Daddy Trumpisms. For one terrible example, it turns out that being Secretary of the Department of Energy actually has a lot to do with maintaining our nuclear infrastructure, both regarding weapons stockpiles and energy generation, which is probably why the last handful of Energy Secretaries were actual scientists. Trump didn't have the least idea what the Energy Department did. Neither did former Governor of TX and Dancing with the Stars contestant Rick Perry. Rick Perry once actually wanted to do away with the Department of Energy. Having no idea at all about what it actually did. Now he will sort of know. But I think the actual comprehension, arriving this late in his life, sort of renders him at very poor odds of understanding his new role in this department which is actually very important, and which he deemed dispensable.
He chose snaggle-toothed former NY mayor Rudy Giuliani, who utterly fucked up ops during 9/11, to be his cyber-security guy, and it turns out he is shit at cyber security. His Health and Human Services pick, the guy who will oversee the death of the ACA, seems to have benefited from insider trading which is very illegal. Another of the people Trump has selected to help with Technology issues is apparently a hardcore racist.
Betsy DeVos is actually really unfit as all hell to be involved with Education. She doesn't know the difference between testing for proficiency vs growth. She doesn't seem to know that most kids in America attend public schools, or that public schools are responsible for living up to our ideal of educating disabled youth. I think she's awful.
But even while Trump is presiding over a crisis situation where he isn't appointing staff in line with the operational needs, he engages in Twitter Wars of shocking uselessness. All this while his own legitimacy is questioned. Because it has to be. There is too much information out there to pretend his legitimacy can't be questioned. The sad finale to all this being, there will be no end of scandal after this inauguration goes down.
2 comments:
Hi Vixen, as you will have noticed, President Obama has installed 2,700 soldiers with artillery in Poland. He has also deployed 300 Marines in Norway.
He has done this a couple of days before leaving office. President-elect Trump has said nothing about it.
This demonstrates that actually there is coordination at the top between President Obama and President-elect Trump. Naturally, there is a great deal of hysteria being genned up on the side of the regional party for the benefit of the rubes, but there is cooperation and planning secretly being done at the top.
As you know President-elect Trump is trying to use the offer of sanctions in exchange for reduction of nuclear weapons. Now that the Obama-Trump policy has installed troops in Poland and Norway, the negotiations for nuclear reductions will have more teeth. If for some reason the negotiations do not bear fruit (and this is all about why Trump has highlighted the concept of possible friendship between him and Putin), we will already have troops in place to strengthen the hand of our allies and to act as a deterrent against Russian aggression.
At the moment it is hard to see how the Trump-Obama policy can fail to strengthen the hand of the United States in our negotiating positions in Europe, once again being encouraged to cement relationships with the US as they understand we have their backs. All of which is to say that the hysteria, including things like stink bomb plans, are strictly for future vote-getting process and has little to do with policy.
To an extent these politicians are like lawyers who oppose each other in public but get together on deals in private.
The other day there was a Democratic senator on Meet the Press, and he said he agreed with the populists that the Russians did try to hack our elections, but it did not actually influence our election in any way. This is more or less the way the populists see it. However, you have to take into consideration that a number of Democratic senators are up for reelection in 2 years in states that have gone red. If they want to keep their offices they'll have to cooperate with the populists. Bearing in mind that the populists are a combination of conservatives and Democrats who have switched to populism once it was offered. Your own state is one of them, along with others in the Rust Belt.
Thank God all of this will be over in a few days. Right now the regional party is pursuing the same path that caused them to lose the election and be stuck in the wilderness. I assert that Democrats can come out of the wilderness, but not by constantly demonstrating the tactics, behavior, and lack of policy that put them there.
I think this has been one of the more hopeful things I've read--I'd like to suppose that there is a kind of coordination and that Obama's "bad cop" legacy and Trump's "good cop" approach re: Russia keeps things reasonably in check--I don't think I've come across an explanation quite like it but don't know how it can't necessarily be so. I'm sort of looking for silver linings because there is an abundance of doom-shouting--it's not all entirely wrong, but it isn't helpful to just lose hope and decide there can't be any room for good things to happen. (I don't think my side is doing that exactly, but there is an unhelpful tendency to strike out at outrages without thinking tactically. There's a good thing we forget--do what you can, where you can, when you can get away with it.)
Also on the cabinet picks, Mattis and Tillerson aren't the worst of the worst, and I actually am a bit impressed with Nikki Haley--she doesn't have any foreign policy experience but she seems to be very intelligent and the sort who would simply try her best. Basically, they aren't much different than what I would expect with any generic Republican Presidential Administration. Also, to the extent that some of his picks don't seem to have the knowledge base relevant to their positions, I'm hopeful they have the executive wherewithal to know when to delegate effectively.
The election is done. I don't have to like the result to know there is, come what may, a way we'll manage.
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