Category Archives: national security

military news, national security

Hegseth: an unqualified disaster!

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Manning a post that puts someone in charge of the finest miliatary organization in world history requires an individual with immense talent and knowledge of the intricacies of geopolitics.

What did Donald Trump get when he selected Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense? He got a buffoon who has spilled the beans hither and yon about deeply classified military intelligence. Now we hear that Hegseth, the former Fox talking head, has let his phone number be known around the world.

This clown is a threat to the 1.5 million men and women who wear the uniform of this great country.

Hegseth’s top staff is bailing on him. The Pentagon has turned into a clown show. Think about that for a moment: the Pentagon has become a laughingstock!

And why? Because the president of the United States needed a blind loyalist to lead the world’s most lethal military force. He didin’t look for anyone with any smarts, any organizational skill, any sense of the gravity of the information he possessed.

Instead, he hired a dipshit.

And a dangerous one, too!

I guess we can set aside all the crap about his alleged mistreatment of women, or his alleged heavy drinking on the job. Now we need to worry that this moron is blabbing to anyone who will listen about top-secret military matters.

Get him the hell out of there!

national security

Yep, it’s Trump’s party

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If you harbored any doubt that Donald J. Trump has hjiacked a once-great political party and molded it into his plaything, look no further than the reaction to the hideous security breach involving the national security adviser and the secretary of defense.

Republicans have been, shall we say, tame in their response to reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Mike Waltz leaked classified battle plans to a reporter for Atlantic Monthly magazine.

Imagine, too, if a Democratic leadership team had done such a thing. What would be the outcry among Republicans? We know what it would be. Republicans would be bellowing “lock ’em up!” just as they did in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was caught using her personal email server while working as U.S. secretary of state.

This time, the relative silence among GOP operatives is deafening and so very telling about the selective outrage among those who now call Donald Trump their master.

national security

Gabbard as DNI? Ugghhh!

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Tulsi Gabbard, the one-time “far-left Democrat” who switched parties and then backed Donald Trump’s candidacy for POTUS, is the new director of national intelligence.

It’s fair to ask: What would Republicans think of her had she been nominated as DNI by a Democratic president? Today she garnered 52 of 53 GOP votes in the U.S. Senate, with only Mitch McConnell of Kentucky showing a semblance of courage in bucking his party.

Yep, make no mistake that the MAGA wing of the Republican Party — led by the aforementioned POTUS — has taken complete control of a once-great political organization.

Gabbard has no business leading the 18 intelligence-gathering agencies under her command. She cozies up to dictators, such as Vladimir Putin, despite the Russian thug’s illegal and immoral war in Ukraine. She once called whistlebower Edward Snowden a traitor but now wants him pardoned for his treasonous acts.

She is as unreliable a Cabinet official as one can imagine. What’s more, her unreliability puts all of us — you and me — in dire peril.

Today was a dark and dangerous day with Gabbord’s confirmation.

national security

Trump brings chaos back to White House

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Jeb Bush perhaps had the most apt description of Donald Trump’s candidacy back when the two men competed against each other for the 2016 Republican Party presidential nomination.

Bush, the former Florida governor, said Trump would be the “chaos president” if elected. Well, he was elected that year and by golly, he brought chaos into the Oval Office with him.

Here’s some cheery news for those who voted for him the second time around: The chaos hasn’t gone away, as there will be plenty more of it when he takes office on Jan. 20.

Spoiler alert … I was not among those who voted for Trump either time, but you knew that already. Allow me to say, “I told you as well that this would happen.” 

An attorney general nominee already has backed out amid a tidal wave of criticism over his (lack of) qualifications for the job. The defense secretary-designate is facing another storm of criticism, as is the proposed health and human services secretary, the next director of the national intelligence and the FBI director-designate.

Chaos, anyone? Anyone?

Trump keeps boasting of his intelligence. How he plans to recruit the “best people” to serve in his administration. He is recruiting nincompoops to key national security posts. I will concede that not all of his picks fall into that category, but damn!

What the hell is this guy thinking when he chooses a sworn anti-vaxxer to serve as HHS head, a guy who wants to destroy the FBI while serving as its director, an accused sexual assailant and a right-wing TV blowhard to run the Pentagon, and someone who sympathizes with an accused war criminal as DNI.

I thought we were better than to elect someone such as this guy. I guess I was mistaken.

national security

How can Gabbard serve as DNI? She cannot!

How in the name of all that is holy and sacred can Donald Trump select a former Hawaii congresswoman who has zero intelligence background to be director of national intelligence?

Oh, wait! She’s a loyal Trumpkin. That’s all the next POTUS needs.

Tulsi Gabbard has zero business being considered for DNI. She was an obscure congresswoman. She was a Democrat once. Then she flipped to the Republican Party.

Events in Syria have called Gabbard’s many shortcomings into sharp focus. She once called former Syrian murderer Bashar al Assad a minor player. She met with the madman not long before he was deposed by rebels. Assad is gone from power, to the relief of millions of Syrians he terrorized during his reign.

Gabbard also is pals with Vladimir Putin, the thug/goon/tyrant in Moscow.

This is the individual Donald Trump wants to entrust our national security secrets? Give me a fu**ing break!

I am astonished way beyond belief at what Trump is seeking to do to our security apparatus. He distrusts our intelligence gatherers, which he all but admitted in that hideous 2018 presser in Helsinki.

My hope now is that Republicans in the U.S. Senate who will have to confirm this moron as DNI will come to their senses and reject her nomination out of hand.

national news, national security, political news

‘Weaponized’ DOJ? Hah!

How in the name of legitimate political discourse does the MAGA wing of the Republican Party justify accusing Joe Biden of “weaponizing” the Department of Justice?

Why pose the question? Because the MAGA minions’ main man, Donald Trump, took weaponization to a new level … and pledges out loud and with crystal clarity that he plans to do even more of it were he allowed to return to the White House!

Trump said he intends to rid the nation of the “vermin” he says occupy key offices in D.C. Think about the use of that particular term for just a moment. Does it ring a bell? It should. It’s the same kind of language Adolf Hitler used when talking about his desire to rid the world of Jewish people.

How would Trump accomplish that moronic notion? By deploying federal agents. In other words, by weaponizing the Justice Department.

The MAGA morons are lining up behind the idiotic rants of a disgraced, twice-impeached, multiple-times indicted former POTUS who stands at this moment of being a convicted felon by the time the GOP presidential nominating convention kicks off next summer.

We are witnessing in real time, ladies and gents, the dumbing down of a voting population that calls itself “patriotic” when, in reality, they are the exact opposite; No patriot would dare endorse the notion of siccing federal government agents on Americans whose only “crime” is to disagree with politicians who crave power.

But … listen carefully to the rants that pour of out of Trump’s pie hole and you hear a fraudulent pol pledge to toss democratic principles into the crapper.

He pledges to turn the Justice Department into a weapon he can use to punish anyone who dares challenge the idiocy that is bound to become this individual’s benchmark.

He must not be allowed anywhere near the White House.

local news, national security

Is Walker a Georgian … or not?

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Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensberger, has been in the news around the nation for the past two years.

His notoriety isn’t about to expire, given what has been revealed –allegedly — about the GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate in Georgia.

Herschel Walker keeps a “primary residence” in Tarrant County, Texas. Walker is running for the Senate from Georgia. What’s wrong with this picture? Well, it might be that Walker doesn’t live in the state he wants to represent in the Senate.

Oh … my. What does that mean for Raffensberger, the chief election official in Georgia? It means he might be forced, just a week before runoff Election Day, to disqualify Walker. Does he act now, sending a message to Georgians who are set to vote either for Walker or the Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock?

Raffensberger, newly re-elected as secretary of state, is no stranger to controversy. Donald Trump pressured Raffensberger to “find” 11,780 votes for Trump to swing the state that had voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 president election. Raffensberger declined, saying he could do no such thing under the law.

A part of me cannot escape the poetic justice that would be delivered if it is determined that Herschel Walker — a one-time University of Georgia football star — no longer calls Georgia home. That he actually is hanging his hat these days in Texas.

Why should anyone care? Because Democrats have a chance to win a 51st Senate seat, given them an actual majority in the upper legislative chamber.

It also goes to demonstrate in graphic terms the miserable quality of Herschel Walker as a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

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military news, national news, national security

Mullen to POTUS: cool the rhetoric

Mike Mullen wore a Navy uniform for many decades; he went to war for this country and served as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

So, when a distinguished officer admonishes the commander in chief over some tough talk about “nuclear Armageddon,” I am inclined to take the admiral’s words seriously.

So should President Biden.

Mullen went on TV this weekend to offer his take on the Ukraine War and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s implied threat to use tactical nukes to put down the Ukrainian resistance to his illegal invasion. Biden has talked about Armageddon and said we’re closer to that catastrophe than we have been since the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Mullen wants Biden to cool it. We need to persuade Putin to negotiate his way out of the quagmire in Ukraine. Issuing warnings about what will happen to Putin if he decides to use more dangerous weapons against Ukraine won’t work, Mullen said.

He’s right. At least I am going to presume he is right. The man knows a thing or three about warfare. Pay heed to his advice.

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crime news, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, legal news, national news, national security, political news

Will Trumpism outlive its founder?

It has been said by more than one commentator that the movement Donald J. Trump spawned will live long past the time he no longer is a political factor.

Pardon the skepticism, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.

I’ll start with this notion: I have doubt that Donald Trump is (a) going to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and (b) that the GOP has gone totally braindead to nominate him if he does enter the fray.

The Republican Party has shown itself in the past, oh, six years to be a party full of gullible numbskulls who are willing to swallow the swill delivered by Trump. They ignore the threat he continues to pose to our democratic process; they give him a pass on the idiocy that flies out of his mouth; they proclaim a desire to “defund the FBI” after the feds find top-secret documents squirreled away in his Florida home.

So, what is going to happen to Trump’s movement — his cult — once he’s no longer a political player. The way I see it, and I’ll admit it is from the cheap seats, whatever “movement” that Trump has stoked will disappear. Why keep telling The Big Lie about a “stolen election” if the Main Man is no longer calling the shots?

I am going to hold tightly onto my own hope that the law’s lengthy arm is going to corral The Donald sometime soon. The Justice Department is examining whether Trump broke the law in taking those classified documents from the White House; the House select 1/6 committee is considering whether to ask for indictment related to the insurrection that Trump clearly incited; the Fulton County (Ga.) district attorney is looking into whether Trump broke state election laws by demanding that officials “find” enough votes to overturn that state’s 2020 presidential election result.

Oh, and the New York attorney general already has filed a $250 million lawsuit against the Trump Organization for allegedly falsifying its worth to obtain favorable loans.

We have, as they said in a movie, “a target-rich environment.”

The cult leader, it appears to me, is going down in flames. May the fire consume what is left of the movement that bears his name.

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crime news, legal news, national news, national security, political news

Constitution works!

Gerald Ford spoke a fundamental truth only minutes after taking office as president of the United States in August 1974.

“Our Constitution works,” President Ford reminded us, as if we needed reminding about the crisis that preceded his becoming president. His predecessor, Richard Nixon, resigned just as he was about to be impeached and tried (and likely convicted) for high crimes against the Constitution.

I want to remind everyone who worries about whether the Constitution will hold up under the pressure being applied to it these days by a former POTUS who all but vows violence if he is indicted for criminal activity.

I am going to remain somewhat calm about the strength of the Constitution. It did survive the Watergate scandal. President Nixon had to quit. President Ford took office as the Constitution had been battered and bruised by the calamity of Nixon’s abuse of power.

It survived then. I am going to continue to believe in the strength of the Constitution now as the nation awaits the outcome of several investigations into a former president’s effort to upend the “peaceful transfer of power” from one administration to the next one.

I will concede that the transfer of power was not peaceful. It was bloodied by the 1/6 insurrection. However, the transition did occur.

Our Constitution works, indeed.

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