The overnights
A person can’t have a life these days, if all these things are going to be happening after she firmly closes the laptop for the day and tries to think about other things. Donnie from Queens, do me a favor and take the evenings off.
But I shouldn’t complain. Rachel Maddow had to do a second broadcast, at midnight her time.
So, the Times on the firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates:
Ms. Yates’s order was a remarkable rebuke by a government official to a sitting president, and it recalled the so-called Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, when President Richard M. Nixon fired his attorney general and deputy attorney general for refusing to dismiss the special prosecutor in the Watergate case.
…
At 9:15 p.m., Ms. Yates received a hand-delivered letter at the Justice Department that informed her that she was fired. Signed by John DeStefano, one of Mr. Trump’s White House aides, the letter informed Ms. Yates that “the president has removed you from the office of Deputy Attorney General of the United States.”
Two minutes later, the White House officials lashed out at Ms. Yates in a statement issued by Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary.
“Ms. Yates is an Obama administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration,” the statement said.
The government is not an athletic competition. It’s not a dick-swinging contest. It’s not supposed to be a street brawl, but currently that is what it is.
Ms. Yates, like other senior government officials, was caught by surprise by the executive order and agonized over the weekend about how to respond, two Justice Department officials involved in the weekend deliberations said. Ms. Yates considered resigning but she told colleagues she did not want to leave it to her successor to face the same dilemma.
By Monday afternoon, Ms. Yates added to a deepening sense of anxiety in the nation’s capital by publicly confronting the president with a stinging challenge to his authority, laying bare a deep divide at the Justice Department, within the diplomatic corps and elsewhere in the government over the wisdom of his order.
“At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities, nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful,” Ms. Yates wrote in a letter to Justice Department lawyers.
In other words, what we have here may be an unlawful order. Those two words carry a heavy freight of history – think Nürnberg, think My Lai, think “I was just following orders.”
The president decided quickly: She has to go, he told them.
The official statement from Mr. Spicer accused Ms. Yates of failing to fulfill her duty to defend a “legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States” that had been approved by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
How does one deal with the claim that the order was “designed to protect the citizens of the United States” when the mechanism involved is so very invisible? It’s like passing a law that no one may combine cheese and bananas in one sandwich and saying it’s “designed to protect the citizens of the United States.” Just saying it in your head doesn’t make it true or a reasonable belief. It’s a fantasy that slamming the door closed on seven random majority-Muslim countries will do anything to “protect the citizens of the United States.” Trump must think, in that tiny little cupboard he uses for a brain, that a mere show of “toughness” will do the trick. It won’t do the trick: it will do the opposite.
“It is time to get serious about protecting our country,” Mr. Spicer said in the statement. He accused Democrats of holding up the confirmation of Mr. Sessions for political reasons. “Calling for tougher vetting for individuals traveling from seven dangerous places is not extreme. It is reasonable and necessary to protect our country.”
“Dangerous places”? What is that even supposed to mean? And why those seven and not Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Nigeria? Not to mention the fact that the vetting already is “tough.”
I’m seeing people saying this is a cunning plan of Bannon’s, to distract us with a Shock so that he can get away with something much worse while we’re still staggering around dealing with the Shock. I don’t find that very convincing. I think it’s more that he’s getting his fun while he can, because he can tell they don’t have much time.
It is now. That’s what happens when we elect self-proclaimed alpha males to office (especially when they don’t even really understand the concept of alpha male, but just thinks it’s the one who growls the most and throws the most poop).
Halleluja, he’s finally seen a flas of light. In a tunnel.
Make it so.
I want to know what the people who claim it’s all a distraction or 11-dimensional chess think we should do with that insight. Ignore all these outrages? How is that not playing into their hands, too?
Besides, wars get fought on multiple fronts, and the other side has limited resources, too. If the Democrats in the Senate delay confirmation of these Cabinet nominees, that delays the process of getting subcabinet positions filled, too. Which means it takes longer for Trump to fully install “his people” in leadership positions, which means more opportunities for people like Sally Yates to stand up, resist, call attention to what’s going on.
I think the former AAG had pledged to uphold the Constitution. As has the Present Pres et al (can we call him Al?). One of them was true to the pledge and did their job.
Heil to the thief does not come into it. <— wishful thinking by Founding Fathers
Rrr – the Founders didn’t expect that this would happen because they limited the vote. They assumed only educated landowners would be voting.
Of course, the people who elected Trump were in that group – wealthy landowners. People who don’t want anyone else to be able to succeed. So their thinking was terribly flawed, but then they probably didn’t expect the Greed is Good decade of our most recent celebrity president, one R W Reagan, who had very few thoughts in his head that his handlers didn’t put there. Bread and circuses…
Here: https://ofliberalintent.com/blog/2017/1/16/wha-happen
iknklast: I was thinking of the balance and division of powers, which seems to have evaporated now, along with the principle of keeping promises.
How much will US Promissory notes be worth once buyers and holders thereof realize how little that promise to honor them is actually grounded? What will that do to the Almighty Dollar, I wonder? And by inference, to world trade in general.
That fish is rotting from the head, IMO.
Y’know what this reminds me of? It reminds of one of those contrived Sam Harris hypotheticals: What if a terrorist had a secret nuclear device… That sort of shit.
But in this case it’s…
What if a 70 year old toddler from a reality TV show took over the government of the world’s sole remaining superpower, and was advised by a cabal of neo-nazis, and was controlled by Russia…
By the way, there’re toys flying out of the pram all over the place:
The Democrats are doing what the Republicans did to Obama for eight years. Obama should have been able to fill a lot of the vacant federal judgeships (including the replacement for Antonin Scalia), but Republicans would rather have a non-functional government than one run by a democratically elected Democratic president who was also non-white. They felt it was their obligation to ensure that the government didn’t fall into the hands of the “wrong” people. Well, the Democrats just have a different vision of who the “wrong” people are, and they’re using the tools that were demonstrated to them by the obstructionist Republicans.
Cue mass Temper Tantrum all across the right wing.