Fears continue to swirl
Now about this coup at the Defense Department and how scared we should be…
Politico finds it pretty alarming:
The firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper kicked off a rapid-fire series of high-level departures at the Pentagon on Tuesday, setting off alarms on Capitol Hill that the White House was installing loyalists to carry out President Donald Trump’s wishes during an already tense transition.
In quick succession, top officials overseeing policy, intelligence and the defense secretary’s staff all had resigned by the end of the day Tuesday, replaced by political operatives who are fiercely loyal to Trump and have trafficked in “deep state” conspiracy theories.
Anybody who’s “fiercely loyal” to Trump is a danger in government.
Fears continue to swirl over what these newly installed leaders will do as Trump fights the results of last week’s election, and after he has shown he is willing to use troops to solve political problems.
Tuesday’s exodus led one top Democrat to accuse the administration of gutting the Pentagon in a way that could be “devastating” for national security.“It is hard to overstate just how dangerous high-level turnover at the Department of Defense is during a period of presidential transition,” said House Armed Services Chair Adam Smith.
“If this is the beginning of a trend — the President either firing or forcing out national security professionals in order to replace them with people perceived as more loyal to him — then the next 70 days will be precarious at best and downright dangerous at worst.”
Well, great. Do we just sit and watch, or what?
All told, the moves are stoking concerns that those who would serve as guardrails against rash Trump decisions have left the building, even though Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley has said repeatedly that politics holds no place in the military. Milley, for his part, has been able to push back on Trump’s threats to deploy active troops to deal with unrest, and demands from the White House to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, all while keeping his job.
Julian Borger in the Guardian:
Extreme Republican partisans have been installed in important roles in the Pentagon, following the summary dismissal of the defense secretary, Mark Esper, at a time Donald Trump is refusing to accept his election defeat.
Democrats immediately demanded explanations for the eleventh-hour personnel changes and warned that the US was entering dangerous “uncharted territory” with the reshuffling of key national security roles during a presidential transition.
I think it’s considered, at a minimum, bad manners for the lame duck to make big changes after the election. With Trump of course the problem is never minimal.
However defence experts argued there was little the new Trump appointees could do to use their positions to the president’s advantage, given the firm refusal of the uniformed armed services to get involved in domestic politics.
There; that’s what I wanted to know. He’s making messes but there’s a limit to what he can do.
The fate of CIA director, Gina Haspel, was also in question. In a show of support, Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell invited Haspel to his office on Tuesday and Republican Senator John Cornyn tweeted: “Intelligence should not be partisan”. But he was attacked on Twitter by the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, who asked if he or other Republicans backing Haspel had “actually discussed this with anyone in the Admin[istration] who actually works with her … or are you just taking a trained liar’s word for it on everything?”
What does the president’s idiot son on Twitter have to do with anything?
Former officials and military analysts argued that the post-election changes, while highly unusual, were not a reason to fear that the Pentagon would be weaponised in Trump’s desperate efforts to hold on to power.
“Remember all the senior military officers are still there,” said Mark Cancian, a retired US marine colonel and former senior defence official. “Their attitudes remain the same. They’ve been quite emphatic that the role of the military is very limited in civilian civil disturbances.”
Eugene Gholz, a former senior adviser in the Pentagon and the author of US Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy, agreed: “Among military officers at all ranks it is deeply, deeply ingrained that the military is not used for settling politics.”
Gonna be a long 70 days.
So now they’re the deep state. Of course it’s okay when Republicans do it. It’s one of those irregular verb things: we have principles, they have politics, you have ideology.
Well thanks a fuck of a lot you hypocritical bastards. Where were you when the Senate voted against hearing witnesses during Trump’s impeachment. You might be trying to distance yourselves now, I hope his stink stays with you for the rest of your lives.
.
Leaving Barron out, does that make the other one the “moron son,” or the “imbecile son?” And what rank does Jared hold in this pecking order of stupidity?
What about those heavily armed, uniformed goons without identification who were disappearing people off the streets? Trump probably has those guys on speed dial for just such occasions. Trump doesn’t need the military if he has cops, ICE, DHS and prison guards to draw upon. They don’t have the scruples the military has, and seem willing to assault civilians without compunction.
Yes that’s an ambiguity in language – I didn’t mean the president’s one idiot son, the president’s unique idiot son, the president’s only idiot son – just, the president’s son, who is an idiot. I don’t for a moment intend to imply that Eric is not also an idiot.
I hope they stew in their own putrid juices, the nasty lot of them. Go down with the ship already.
Even if the on-going purge at the DoD ultimately doesn’t help Trump it does raise another potential panotherthat I haven’t seen mentioned. There will be much confusion caused by the sudden, wholesale changes of management across departments, with experienced leaders replaced with unqualified amateurs whose loyalties are known to lie with Trump before country, plus a knock-on effect on morale of those working under the new arrivals whose focus may shift from the job to their own futures.
All of that has to leave the country in a uniquely vulnerable position to both domestic and international terrorism, because if there’s one thing that terrorists are good at exploiting it’s weaknesses in the enemy’s defences, and right now America’s defence department is in disarray.
Another potential what??
Damn my ‘smart’phone! First sentence should read ‘ another potential problem that I..
Honestly, correct a spelling or change a word and the sodding phone takes it upon itself to fuck up the whole sentence.
Anyway I get your drift. I don’t actually know how true that is. I don’t know how the political bosses interact with the military, and how essential they are to normal functioning. It could be that they manage policy but not day to day stuff, and that DoD policy is one of the many things Trump couldn’t care less about at this point.
AoS, lol, I used to have that problem with my phone too, but I disabled all the spell check, punctuation, and predictive stuff, and now my mistakes are all my own doing. My text messages look like a 3rd grader now, but at least the resemble what I want to say. :D
Dana Milbank in the WP;
Just one more swindle before I go. (Cue violins.)
I’m starting to wonder if these last-minute appointments are also just another Trump graft, masked behind his usual ‘make chaos’ tactics. After all, once appointed, don’t these jamokes all get government pensions of some sort, even if Biden ousts them before sundown on Jan 20? If so, this could all just be a massive attempt to pay off a bunch of loyalists. This might bear researching….
Hmmm. I don’t think so. I think usually one has to work x amount of time before being eligible for benefits in a regular civil service type job…and my guess is that political appointments don’t come with benefits at all. Just a guess though. I wonder if Google can help…
This says permanent employees get benefits and temps don’t. Political appointees are temps by definition, but maybe they’re not even classified as “employees” at all.
I don’t know; when I worked for the state of Oklahoma, our administrators were politically appointed, and they got benefits. They weren’t considered “temps”, but unclassified employees, which is a different category. I don’t know how the feds work it, but I suspect similarly.
Huh. Pensions though? Aren’t pension entitlements spread out over time? It’s not usually possible to work a job for six weeks and leave with a full pension, surely? No, I’m sure it’s not – in city jobs and the like it takes 20 years to get the full pension. I just read a reminder of that in a New Yorker piece about NY cops the other day. It was the same in the Parks Department when I worked there (as a temp).