Reading any of these books on American politics far more informative than watching Fox….
So we’ll begin our commentary with an analysis of 4 different books on American politics before getting to the other stuff. Below are excerpts from books/review/michael-hayden-as
The “idea of this book,” he writes, “is not that civil war or societal collapse is necessarily imminent or inevitable here in America” — thank goodness — “but that the structures, processes, and attitudes we rely on to prevent those kinds of occurrences are under stress, and that many of the premises on which we have based our governance, policy and security are now challenged, eroded or simply gone.” Whatever disagreements Hayden may have had with George W. Bush and Barack Obama — and he argues that several of Obama’s policies were ill conceived — Trump’s predecessors, he says, largely respected the independence and judgments of the bureaucracy. Trump does not. He not only accuses the F.B.I., Justice Department and other agencies of forming a “deep state,” but also seeks to challenge, disrupt and exert control over them. Trump does not think in institutional terms, but in personal ones. These lines of criticism intersect over Russia. Hayden acknowledges that intelligence agencies were slow to pick up on the Russian challenge to United States elections: “Committed to a path of cyber dominance for ourselves, we seemed to lack the doctrinal vision to fully understand what the Russians were up to with their more full-spectrum informationdomin
ance.” That lack of vision was compounded by the reluctance of both the Obama and Trump administrations to counterattack. “Russia has been actively seeking to damage the fabric of American democracy,” Hayden writes, “and the Trump administration’s glandular aversion to even looking at this squarely, much less mounting a concerted response to it, is an appalling national security lapse.”
Reading this book, I could not help being struck by the divide separating officials like Hayden from followers of Trump. Hayden’s narrative is filled with accolades for media institutions and figures distrusted by large numbers of Americans. He makes frequent mention of various panels and conferences he has taken part in and celebrities he has met. But his laudable case for the intelligence community does not dwell on the things the community has gotten wrong, from the fall of the Soviet Union to 9/11 to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Nor does he reckon with the questionable practices of officials who leak secrets, misrepresent themselves to Congress and respond in kind to Trump’s outlandish rhetoric. Hayden’s “Assault on Intelligence,” then, is more than an indictment of Trump. It is evidence of the social and cultural divide between everyday Americans and the highest levels of their government. What we learn from Hayden is that the upper echelons of the intelligence community are filled with patriots who can tell you what is happening in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan — but are at a loss for words when the scene shifts to a Pennsylvania bar.
More on Hayden’s book is here in ex-cia-directors-advice-not-se
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has some surprising advice for onetime colleagues who ask whether they should take a job working for President Trump: Don’t do it. You will only endanger your own future and reputation. In a new interview featured on the Yahoo News podcast Skullduggery, Hayden said it’s been hard to watch top Trump administration officials — including former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, former Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert and others — defend an often indefensible president. “The longer they were in the administration, the more their personal credentials were being threatened,” Hayden said. “At what point do you stop being a guard rail and become an enabler and a legitimizer?”
Hayden lays out his views in his new book, “The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies,” which serves as a searing indictment of a president who Hayden depicts as a congenital liar and a “useful idiot” of Vladimir Putin. The former CIA chief is quick to acknowledge that Trump is not the first modern president to have an attenuated relationship to the truth. Hayden himself served as CIA chief under a president (George W. Bush) who took the country to war based on false claims about the threat posed by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. “We’ve had presidents who lie, who have argued with us, who have disagreed with our version of objective reality,” said Hayden, without naming which ones he had in mind. But Trump, he said, is in a category all to himself.
“The difference here is, this seems to be a president who bases a fair number of decisions on something other than a view of objective reality,” he said. Just as troubling as Trump’s propensity to misrepresent reality, according to Hayden, is the president’s constant demand for extreme fealty from his subordinates—an extreme threat to vital American institutions. “What we have is the president inarguably demanding of both the institutions and their leadership that their first priority is personal loyalty to him rather than to the norms that have governed their behavior for a couple of centuries,” Hayden said.
The other 3 outstanding books on American politics have recently come along explaining the dangerous direction America has been heading, so read these reviews in ronan-farrow-on-the-sad-
Authoritarian Traits
Here are more warnings on the dangers of a president with an authoritarian nature constantly conflating & gaslighting the truth, as seen in these excerpts from another-week-of-lies-
But would that even matter? Trump has weathered endless scandals by creating a new one to distract from the last. He’s a carnival huckster running a three-ring circus; there are constant reports that he thrives on chaos, which is nice for him, and devastating for democratic norms and the rule of law. Trump has made it abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that he is amoral. He has no motive other than self-aggrandisement; his only principle is power. When I suggested onQuestion Time, two days after his election, that Trump had no interest in serving, David Dimbleby scoffed at me, demanding why else he would have run. My recollection is that I goggled and then said: “Power?” Or maybe I said “money”. They both ran through my head, as I tried to absorb the news that an intelligent, experienced BBC journalist was being blinded by norms. There is a clear bias among the media towards normality. We see this every time a journalist announces that Trump became “presidential” when he read a few words written by someone else. Trump is not “presidential”. He is ignorant, impulsive, undisciplined, undignified, uncouth. This makes him popular with some of his electorate but it does not make him presidential. We see the bias towards normality every time a journalist asks about a given aspect of his “policy”. Trump doesn’t have policies. He is an opportunistic chancer who changes his story with the wind and listens to whoever last spoke to him. We see it when newspapers refuse to say the president lied, hiding behind euphemisms such as “misrepresented”, “reversed his position”, “told an untruth”.
Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany who knew quite a lot about how lies and chaos buttress fascism, has been finding new currency lately. In her book The Human Condition, she wrote: “The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.” The social contract is based on the faculty to make and keep promises. Trump is setting fire to it, because he doesn’t recognise promises, or the presence or acting of others, while too many of those others, blinded by ambition or deluded by the lies, support him. Trump may not be ideological – or consistent – enough to be a fascist. But he is clearly an authoritarian, as his “jokes” about becoming a president for life and demands for military parades attest. He claims to prize loyalty above all else (although he seldom demonstrates it), insisting that government officials offer unquestioning loyalty to him, rather than to their offices, that they worship their “dear leader”. (It’s not a coincidence that he’s so interested in Kim Jong-un.) This is the allegiance demanded by fascists and mafia capos. In 1937, a journalist named Dorothy Thompson, who was one of the voices of the American anti-fascist cause, wrote: “The enemy of Fascism is reason… Its enemy is humanism.” When they flood the zone with shit, we must counter it with reason and humanism. We have no choice, because of course it matters.
The damage being done will most likely be lasting: the-damage-of-trumps-low-bar-p
President Trump represents the United States, but he is not representative of federal employees. If they, like he, repeatedly lied and disgraced the nation, they would face termination. Federal regulations allow for action against employees who engage in “dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct.” A Trump emoji would be well-placed next to that line. While it certainly describes Trump, it is just the opposite of federal employees who are devoted to mission, whose examples could provide needed instruction to the chief executive.
It’s so baffling roughly 1/3 of the population seem to be believing the repeated blatant lies (there’s a song for them in part 3), which our nation & any democracy could never survive for very long when the citizenry can’t even agree around what the facts are. Here is yet more proof Trump is even lying about the lies: donald-trump-stormy-
This president has, for months, demonstrated the precise opposite, seeking to undermine the legitimacy of the Justice Department generally and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in particular. “This is a witch hunt like nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said Friday of Mueller’s probe. It is on us, the American people, not to accept this. We must not collude with him, however unwittingly, in lowering the bar for the behavior we should expect from a president. In the current context, that would not only mean refraining from the kind of scurrilous criticism that has emanated from the president and his minions about the Justice Department and the Mueller investigation. See, for another example, Rudy Giuliani describing the New York FBI agents who raided the office, home and hotel room of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen as “stormtroopers.” That it is possible, now, to imagine Trump taking the Fifth and surviving is a measure of the brilliance and effectiveness of his scorched-earth strategy to discredit the investigation and investigators. If everything is rigged and everyone is crooked, good-faith compliance is for chumps. But buying Trump’s narrative would make chumps of us all and a laughingstock of the rule of law. We cannot let that happen.
Fox Fake News
We always feature Fox fake news in part 2. Most Fox shows, especially early mornings & evenings, are pure lying propaganda. CNN tries to play it more middle of the road, but it sort of defeats the purpose when the conservatives they bring on to argue from the right come across as morons. MSNBC viewpoints are overwhelmingly from the left, but ironically the conservatives they do bring on as regular contributors are among the most perceptive center-right voices found on TV. So if the conservative viewers who watch Fox would tune into MSNBC once in awhile, they’d actually be treated to far more rational conservative viewpoints than what they’re watching. Imagine that irony of ironies, the smartest conservatives are actually on MSNBC! It’s because they’re objective & not in servitude to the Trump psychopathy, evil echo & that crazy far-right base.
These links take us to excellent insights & questions: the-media-can-be-
What strikes me most about the angry responses Cavuto got from his Fox viewers after he correctly called out Trump’s lies, although it really doesn’t surprise me, is how willing the Fox audience is to deny truths even when those echo-falsehoods are irrefutably wrong, proving their fanatical Foxian tribal loyalties are more powerful than logic. See these comments he got from angry nutball viewers: fox-news-neil-cavuto-
Nunes & Other Nudniks
In some entertaining TV over the weekend, see the SNL opening at the very bottom. We also saw one nitwit interviewing another inside this link: guiliani-returned-to-fox-news-
Nunes & his Freedom Caucus cohorts want to expose highly sensitive classified info to use in helping Trump create alternative narratives to beat his Russian crimes. There’s no doubt Nunes has very little interest in the documents for good intent, he’s just among that handful of Trump’s congressional GOP henchmen trying to create a plan to entrap Rosenstein, looking for any trick possible to invent infractions they can use to fire the Deputy Attorney General for the DOJ. The transparently hypocritical Nunes is also attacking Sessions with no cause: devin-nunes-threatens-jeff-ses
That spate of firings would create what we all should fear, a constitutional crisis because removing Rosenstein &/or Sessions sets the stage for interrupting the Mueller probe. Should that occur, it would be the exact time Trump would delegitimize his presidency once & for all. Beware of such an insidious plot to impede the rule of law: adam-schiff-lays-out-his-
The president should recognize that we all fall short of God’s grace and must repent for our shortcomings because no one is perfect. Yet, he does not appear to believe that is necessary. There is nothing conservative about this disposition because true conservatives recognize that humans are imperfect and that it is an innate part of our nature to make mistakes and seek forgiveness. At this point, it becomes difficult to argue that Trump is hurting not only the Republican Party but conservatism as an authentic political ideology. It is also clear that the silence of many Republicans who have acquiesced to him also are playing a role in the demise of conservative ideology. A lack of a “posteriori” knowledge of conservatism coupled with a lack of “priori” knowledge has resulted in the intellectual decline of conservatism. The experience of the president is not that of a man who has been willing to expand his knowledge of conservatism, nor is it of one who at least has a cursory understanding of the universal truth that human nature is flawed. If it was, Trump would have never believed it was okay to mislead Americans about a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels. Many people believe his word because he is the president and, when a president speaks, he does so with great command. Instead, he has let down each and every one of those people who gave him the benefit of the doubt.
When you reflect on the current state of conservatism in the United States, there can be no doubt or confusion about it being an ideology that is in contempt of its former self. Consequently, we must acknowledge its current state of disarray in order to correct its course and preserve it. Conservatism must remain driven by reason and logic as a guiding force for the traditional norms that it advocates, while being careful not to force itself on others indiscriminately. The conservative ideology of today has nothing to do with the real conservative philosophy of Ronald Reagan or great thinkers and writers such as William Buckley or George Will. Instead, it is a worldview that finds itself on an express train heading off a cliff. This is not a result of well-founded critical objections to the original conservative doctrine but because, as Immanuel Kant said, “ignorance, with paralogisms of reason” have combined to create a new ideology of unthinking unreason. My concern for the direction of conservatism as a result of Trump is not out of disdain for the president, because he was duly elected by the people, but out of concern for the future when he is no longer in office. To stay true to its historical and philosophical roots, American conservatism must continue not only to advocate for the limited role of government but also for a return to the values that should govern all men and women, such as the truth. Conservatism must remain rational and informed by empirical facts, logic, and a deep understanding and respect for values and traditions such as decency, respect and the truth, which should govern all people. Conservatism must once again embrace “fact to mystery, limited to unbounded, sufficient to the superabundant and convenient to the perfect,” as once noted by conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott. In order to survive, American conservatism must represent the highest ideals of our country and of human relations. Yet, right now, we’re an ideology in search of direction.
Evangelicals
As a center-right conservative, I’m sounding the horn my country, my (ex)-party & my faith are being imperiled! I’ve had rather choice words for how many in my evangelical faith have sacrificed their principles in their blind support of Trump. But coming from a fellow conservative, the criticisms in here are pretty good Conservative-blog-slams-E
I’m extremely disappointed in my fellow-conservatives whom I once aligned with politically, religiously & otherwise: white-evangelicals-would-keep-
SNL portrays Team-Trump
If you missed SNL, check out the opening skit in the video here inside stormy-daniels-trolls-
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