A few weeks ago, some friends were getting all excited that there was a possiblity that Trump would pick Mitt Romney as Secretary of State. Not for any substantive reasons, mind you, just that he was sane and would be a mature voice in the cabinet.
I wrote back at the time to say that I thought Trump was only just screwing around to embarrass Romney who had slammed him during the primaries and had no intention of naming him Secretary of State. That seemed to be his stated, standard procedure for holding grudges agaisnt enemies. Alas, I wish I was wrong.
That said, as I also had written before, I think Romney would have been a lousy Secretary of State since he is without any foreign experience and had several embarrassing international muck-ups when he ran for president. But even at that, he would have been worlds better than the King of Exxon choice we ended up with...
I'm pleased to see that there is a growing bi-partisan concern about the nomination of Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State. I have no idea what will transpire at his confirmation hearing, though it should be spritely. However, whatever does occur, the one thing that -- at the very least -- I hope does happen is that the Senate Committee insists that he divests himself of all his Exxon stock. There should be no question of the Secretary of State being able to profit personally in the slightest, let alone massively, from any action he takes.
And as for cabinet appointments, it's so cool to see it reported yesterday that Rick Perry (R-TX) will likely be nominated as Energy Secretary (Note: sarcasm alert). It makes so much sense in TrumpLand given that Perry not only is on record wanting to close the department, but also he famously couldn't even remember the department's name... Add one more nominee to the Trump list of potential cabinet-rank secretaries like Labor and the EPA, as well as Education who are against what their department is about and supposed to do. (Not to mention Interior, whose nominee has a 3-percent rating from the Conservation League.)
My friend Bart Baker wrote that one should "Wrap your head around the fact that Rick Perry will be taking the job from a nuclear physicist. I find this perfect analogy for what is going on." He's mind-numbingly right, of course, but the problem is that I'm still dealing with Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon, taking over HUD and after saying he wasn't qualified.
Actually, to be fair, I'm still dealing with Steve Bannon being chief adviser to the president.
Actually, I'm still dealing with Donald Trump becoming...oh, you know.
We'll get around to nuclear scientists eventually. Hopefully the eye-rolling, head-shaking and twitching will lessen by then, or at least there will be medication for it.
And then there were two tweets (sigh) that Trump made that each separately slammed aerospace companies and caused both of the companies' stocks to plummet. Worse (yes, that's possible), In the case of the first one against Boeing, it turns out it can minutes after the Chicago Tribune printed a story that the company's CEO Dennis Muilenburg had had been critical of Trump’s international trade policies. (See "Romney, Mitt, holiding grudges" above)
And as long as we're talking about tweets (sigh) then, it's worth noting that Trump lied once again (sigh) when he tweeted (sigh...) that the CIA had said there were WMDs in Iraq. In fact, no, they didn't say that at all. It was the Bush Administration that came up with that. And yes, I know that calling out TrumpLies (tm) may seem a Sisyphean effort at times, but you still have to push the rock and call it out when there is a lie, otherwise it becomes normalized and accepted as the truth. When, in fact, it is a lie.
In the end, it did not come as a shock when the President-Elect tweeted (insert "you-know-what" here...) his petulance at negative coverage on NBC, which he called "so biased, innacurate and bad", as bad he said "as CNN." Someone close to Trump should tell him to get used to it. After all, if he can't take this, imagine what it'll be like when he's actually President of the United States (sigh) and has an actual record to justify, and is getting slammed all over, hourly.
All this, again, within just a couple of days. And he isn't even yet president. And this doesn't even include the latest Newsweek cover story just out yesterday about horrific conflict-of-interest issues with foreign countries that already risk jeopardizing U.S. security, most notably in the Philippines, Taiwan and especially Turkey where Trump business associates who pay him millions a year in royalties were just arrested as a way clearly to extort the incoming U.S. president into releasing a Turkish dissident living in assylum here. Or Trump cancelling his supposed-press conference to explain how he's going to supposedly put aside these business interests..
It's going to be a long, four years. Or however long he lasts in office before impeachment or jail.
I wrote back at the time to say that I thought Trump was only just screwing around to embarrass Romney who had slammed him during the primaries and had no intention of naming him Secretary of State. That seemed to be his stated, standard procedure for holding grudges agaisnt enemies. Alas, I wish I was wrong.
That said, as I also had written before, I think Romney would have been a lousy Secretary of State since he is without any foreign experience and had several embarrassing international muck-ups when he ran for president. But even at that, he would have been worlds better than the King of Exxon choice we ended up with...
I'm pleased to see that there is a growing bi-partisan concern about the nomination of Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State. I have no idea what will transpire at his confirmation hearing, though it should be spritely. However, whatever does occur, the one thing that -- at the very least -- I hope does happen is that the Senate Committee insists that he divests himself of all his Exxon stock. There should be no question of the Secretary of State being able to profit personally in the slightest, let alone massively, from any action he takes.
And as for cabinet appointments, it's so cool to see it reported yesterday that Rick Perry (R-TX) will likely be nominated as Energy Secretary (Note: sarcasm alert). It makes so much sense in TrumpLand given that Perry not only is on record wanting to close the department, but also he famously couldn't even remember the department's name... Add one more nominee to the Trump list of potential cabinet-rank secretaries like Labor and the EPA, as well as Education who are against what their department is about and supposed to do. (Not to mention Interior, whose nominee has a 3-percent rating from the Conservation League.)
My friend Bart Baker wrote that one should "Wrap your head around the fact that Rick Perry will be taking the job from a nuclear physicist. I find this perfect analogy for what is going on." He's mind-numbingly right, of course, but the problem is that I'm still dealing with Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon, taking over HUD and after saying he wasn't qualified.
Actually, to be fair, I'm still dealing with Steve Bannon being chief adviser to the president.
Actually, I'm still dealing with Donald Trump becoming...oh, you know.
We'll get around to nuclear scientists eventually. Hopefully the eye-rolling, head-shaking and twitching will lessen by then, or at least there will be medication for it.
And then there were two tweets (sigh) that Trump made that each separately slammed aerospace companies and caused both of the companies' stocks to plummet. Worse (yes, that's possible), In the case of the first one against Boeing, it turns out it can minutes after the Chicago Tribune printed a story that the company's CEO Dennis Muilenburg had had been critical of Trump’s international trade policies. (See "Romney, Mitt, holiding grudges" above)
And as long as we're talking about tweets (sigh) then, it's worth noting that Trump lied once again (sigh) when he tweeted (sigh...) that the CIA had said there were WMDs in Iraq. In fact, no, they didn't say that at all. It was the Bush Administration that came up with that. And yes, I know that calling out TrumpLies (tm) may seem a Sisyphean effort at times, but you still have to push the rock and call it out when there is a lie, otherwise it becomes normalized and accepted as the truth. When, in fact, it is a lie.
In the end, it did not come as a shock when the President-Elect tweeted (insert "you-know-what" here...) his petulance at negative coverage on NBC, which he called "so biased, innacurate and bad", as bad he said "as CNN." Someone close to Trump should tell him to get used to it. After all, if he can't take this, imagine what it'll be like when he's actually President of the United States (sigh) and has an actual record to justify, and is getting slammed all over, hourly.
All this, again, within just a couple of days. And he isn't even yet president. And this doesn't even include the latest Newsweek cover story just out yesterday about horrific conflict-of-interest issues with foreign countries that already risk jeopardizing U.S. security, most notably in the Philippines, Taiwan and especially Turkey where Trump business associates who pay him millions a year in royalties were just arrested as a way clearly to extort the incoming U.S. president into releasing a Turkish dissident living in assylum here. Or Trump cancelling his supposed-press conference to explain how he's going to supposedly put aside these business interests..
It's going to be a long, four years. Or however long he lasts in office before impeachment or jail.
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