4724

I hear that an awful lot but I don’t really buy it. I think he talks tough all the way up to the moment of truth and then he blames and lies and weasels his way out.

4725

What’s frightening is another false reading of an American nuclear launch by one of our enemies. A launch seems more plausible under Trump than under any other recent President.

4726

Speaking to the Guardian, Walter Shaub, who quit this month as director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), condemned the president for using his hotels and other properties for government business in what is in effect a free advertising campaign.

“His actions create the appearance of profiting from the presidency, and the appearance here is everything, because the demand I’m making is so much more than ‘have a clean heart’. It’s: ‘Have a clean heart and act appropriately,’” Shaub said.
ead more
“The fact that we’re having to ask questions about whether he’s intentionally using the presidency for profit is bad enough, because the appearance itself undermines confidence in government.”

4727

Not just seem.

4728

The Republican leader is aiming to thwart Rep. Mo Brooks and former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore in a special election in Alabama next month. Both men are campaigning against McConnell as a despised symbol of the establishment — and both would exacerbate his already stiff challenge wrangling his GOP Conference.

McConnell is responding in kind. His super PAC is set to spend much as $8 million to boost his favored candidate, recently appointed Republican Sen. Luther Strange. McConnell has activated his sprawling donor network and pressed the White House for more resources. And the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Senate GOP campaign arm McConnell controls, has warned consultants they’ll be cut off from future work if they assist Strange’s opponents.

And in a highly unusual step, one of McConnell’s top political lieutenants has begun quietly advising a long-shot Republican primary candidate running for Brooks’ House seat. The move is designed to get in the congressman’s head and dissuade him from emptying his campaign war chest in the race for Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ old Senate seat.

It’s a massive undertaking by McConnell and his allies on behalf of Strange, who was appointed a mere six months ago to fill the seat until a special election. In part, McConnell’s urgency reflects his long-standing promise to protect besieged Republican incumbents in primaries. But it also underscores his struggles managing his narrow Senate majority, which were punctuated by the collapse of Obamacare repeal legislation last week after three Republicans broke ranks.

4729

Who, if he had any real zeal for office, would have already changed his name to Luther Strangelove.

4730

This is all I can picture with that name.

4731

All these years later, I’m still angry about that omitted apostrophe.

4732

Whoah, this is pretty scathing. Author: Jeff Flake (R-AZ). Edit: After a second read, I take that label back. These are probably not much more than “concerns”.

Who could blame the people who felt abandoned and ignored by the major parties for reaching in despair for a candidate who offered oversimplified answers to infinitely complex questions and managed to entertain them in the process? With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.

I will let the liberals answer for their own sins in this regard. (There are many.) But we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure. It was we conservatives who, upon Obama’s election, stated that our No. 1 priority was not advancing a conservative policy agenda but making Obama a one-term president—the corollary to this binary thinking being that his failure would be our success and the fortunes of the citizenry would presumably be sorted out in the meantime. It was we conservatives who were largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on Obama’s legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us. It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued. To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.

I’ve been sympathetic to this impulse to denial, as one doesn’t ever want to believe that the government of the United States has been made dysfunctional at the highest levels, especially by the actions of one’s own party. Michael Gerson, a con­servative columnist and former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote, four months into the new presidency, “The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased,” and conservative institutions “with the blessings of a president … have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion.”

For a conservative, that’s an awfully bitter pill to swallow. So as I layered in my defense mechanisms, I even found myself saying things like, “If I took the time to respond to every presiden­tial tweet, there would be little time for anything else.” Given the volume and velocity of tweets from both the Trump campaign and then the White House, this was certainly true. But it was also a monumental dodge. It would be like Noah saying, “If I spent all my time obsessing about the coming flood, there would be little time for anything else.” At a certain point, if one is being honest, the flood becomes the thing that is most worthy of attention. At a certain point, it might be time to build an ark.

4733

95.5% in-line with Trump.

4734

True enough, Telefrog. And I revised my opinion above in an edit: this piece isn’t much by itself. Still have a feeling it could be an important indication of something, or that it could itself have a catalytic effect, but that’s probably fantasy.

4735

Maybe it’s a missing comma.

4736

One thing is for sure, as we watch the Trump administration go down in flames, we will see a LOT more columns and editorial comments like those from Jeff Flake.

“I saw it all along. We were in bed with the devil, but you can’t blame me, I saw through it all along.”

Distancing tactics, the lot of them.

4737

In fairness, flake actually did call out Trump early on. I believe he’s the guy who Trump threatened to not support him when flake refused to back him, and flake had to point out that he wasn’t up for election in 2016.

4738

That’s the problem. Mere words. Let’s see some actions, like refusing to vote on an ACA repeal without a better plan attached, or the realization that big tax cuts cannot be tied to big social spending cuts, etc. Let’s see some moderation rather than voting as a bloc with the other Rs.

4739

And to @Timex’s point, until their actions (voting, more words than an editorial,) meet their talk, it doesn’t mean much.

Change my mind, Jeff Flake, add your name to the impeachment requests.

4740

That would actually be a much better title.

4741

Quoth Senator Flake:

With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.

It’s still not clear to me. I will go to my grave baffled by this grotesque abdication of an electorate’s gravest responsibility.

4742

By failing to fill numerous senior positions across the State Department, promulgating often incoherent policies, and systematically shutting out career foreign service officers from decision-making, the Trump administration is undercutting U.S. diplomacy and jeopardizing America’s leadership role in the world, according to more than three dozen current and former diplomats interviewed by FP.

“I used to wake up every morning with a vision about how to do the work to make the world a better place,” said one State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “It’s pretty demoralizing if you are committed to making progress. I now spend most of my days thinking about the morass. There is no vision.”

Foggy Bottom initially had high hopes for Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO Trump tapped to become his diplomat-in-chief. But those hopes have evaporated as diplomats grow increasingly exasperated by his isolation and aloofness, all while the White House and Pentagon steamroll the State Department’s role in foreign-policy making.

4743

Tillerson initially didn’t want the job. His wife convinced him to take it. I don’t think he’s intent on wrecking the State Department. I think he’s just not really into the job, especially now that he realizes Trump is crazy. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him resign. Rex, are you into it?

Very loose reason to link to one my favorite Conchords songs. I don’t need much reason!