Category Archives: national security team

national security, national security team

Sen. Hothead joins Trump team

Well now, Donald Trump has just fired one of the most incompetent members of our national security team and replaced her with a fellow who once challenged a Senate committee witness to a fistfight in the middle of a hearing.

I don’t know about you, but I do not feel one little bit safer now than before.

Kristi Noem made a hash of our Homeland Security Department with her handling of the ICE goons she loosed on the streets of our cities. She spent $200 million of our tax money to produce glam-shot ads featuring her and touting the successes she insisted occurred during Trump’s administration.

We started a war with Iran, several American warriors died right away, and Noem couldn’t bring herself to offer a word of condolence to the survivors of the soldiers who died.

Trump cut her loose. Fine. Good bye and good riddance!

Up steps Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin to become the Homeland Security secretary. He’s a Trump loyalist through and through. No surprise there, given that’s what Trump wants in Cabinet nominees. What is astounding to me is that Trump would select a guy who about a year ago had to be called down by a committee chairman for wanting to settle a dispute with a witness with his fists.

Sen. Hothead actually stood up and challenged the witness right there in front of the whole world!

This is the guy whom Trump has chosen to lead our homeland security defense team? Trump said he always intends to hire “the best people” to advise him. Markwayne Mullin, to my eyes, appears to be one of the worst.

national news, national security, national security team

Trump can’t stomach being told the truth

Donald Trump’s decision to nominate John Ratcliffe as the country’s next Director of National Intelligence reveals a frightening, outrageous aspect of how the president wants to run our national security network … as if we didn’t see this already.

Ratcliffe is a congressman from Northeast Texas, representing a district once represented by the late, great Sam Rayburn. Ratcliffe would succeed Dan Coats as DNI and would be charged — according to the playbook — with providing the president unvarnished analysis of the threats to the nation’s security.

Ratcliffe is not wired that way. Coats has done it, as have many of the preceding DNIs who have held the office.

Trump wants a “loyalist,” someone who likely adheres to his own idiotic view that the Russian hack of our 2016 election is a “hoax” cooked up by the “fake news” and Democratic opponents.

Can there be anything more inherently frightening than to have a DNI who cannot or will not tell the president the truth? More to the point, can there be anything more dangerous to the nation to have a president who won’t hear the truth?

Rep. Ratcliffe showed his partisan stripes while questioning former special counsel Robert Mueller this past week. He challenged Mueller’s probe into the Russian electoral attack. As some commentators have noted, Ratcliffe appeared to be auditioning for the nomination once it became known that DNI Coats would be “stepping down.”

For the ever-lovin’ life of me I cannot grasp how this president continues to lie, deceive and flim-flam his way through the duties to which he has been charged. Even more astonishing is how he manages to cling to that 38 to 40 percent core of Americans who insist he is “telling it like it is” and speaks for them.

John Ratcliffe comes from that fervent base of Trump supporters. The nation does not need a Trump lackey in the post of DNI, which requires someone who is unafraid to tell the president the hard truth about the existential threats that put this country in danger.

If the president has a vast reservoir of talent waiting for the call to come to work in the White House — which he boasts of having — he can do a lot better than John Ratcliffe as head of the nation’s intelligence apparatus.

My fear, though, is that he doesn’t care about quality. It’s all about political loyalty.

Dangerous.