The Enemy Within

The people most in charge of the military -- Trump and Hegseth -- laid out their long-range plans yesterday in front of hundreds of military brass. You can connect the dots, right? 

"We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard," said Trump, who claimed "We're under invasion from within .... Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is gonna be a big thing for the people in this room, because it's the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won't get out of control."

Hegseth called for troops to ignore “stupid rules of engagement ....We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”

I believe any fair interpretation of Hegseth's words, following Trump's lead, means they're okay with war crimes, and the people worthy of demoralizing violence are Trump's political opponents. They're pretty explicit that we'll soon (?) be seeing beat-downs of peaceful American citizen protesters. And who knows what other trumpian bullying will come for the accredited reporters and social media influencers who continue to document Trump's lawless, corrupt presidency.

Mr. President, I'm your enemy, shure nuff. And I'm within. What are you gonna do about it?

I'm not forgetting the cowed institutions which preemptively punish free speech. They seem to fear the wrath of Trump and intend to please him. An example just this week at UNC-Chapel Hill, which acted unilaterally based on pure speculation, rumor, and unverified accusations and placed on "administrative leave" (often the first step toward firing) a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies, Dwayne Dixon:

The move to place Dixon on leave came after Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet posted a photo on X of a flyer at Georgetown that read: “Hey, fascist! Catch!” The same phrase was printed on a bullet recovered by police after the fatal shooting of Turning Point founder and conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University last month. 

The flyer, according to Kolvet’s post, included a QR code linked to “the John Brown Club” and also read: “The only political group that celebrates when Nazis die.” ... It’s unclear whether Dixon had ever been a member of a John Brown Gun Club.

On Saturday, Fox News reported that Dixon is a member of Redneck Revolt, a group founded in 2016 that describes itself as “an aboveground militant formation” that “stands for organized defense of our communities.” The group is against white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy, according to its principles.

Dixon ... told The Daily Tar Heel that he has not been a member of Redneck Revolt since 2018. The organization itself disbanded in 2019, according to a pop-up message displayed on its website Wednesday. And there does not appear to be any evidence Dixon was involved with an incident at Georgetown University — hundreds of miles from Chapel Hill — that spurred concerns over the group among conservative activists and media.

The North Carolina chapter of the American Association of University Professors on Wednesday criticized UNC’s actions against Dixon, writing in a statement: “Right-wing activists are attacking Dixon for prior membership in a group that has been inactive since 2019, and are baselessly connecting him to flyers allegedly posted by a different group on a different campus outside of North Carolina.”

Trump's Cabinet Reflects Trump's Values -- Surfaces Are Everything

 

It’s a paradox: If you choose your cabinet based on looks, you are likely to end up with a cabinet that makes you look bad.

--Maureen Dowd

 

How did Kristi Noem get her job at Homeland Security, and how's that going? Dowd supplies the short answer: "Even good-looking dodos are still dodos." What qualified Noem for her job? Not just good long hair and pouting lips but blind loyalty to Jethro, and the imagination to do what she thinks Trump will applaud -- not to mention a history of snap judgements, like shooting a puppy. Elevated to high office and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Noem has rotely done the trumpian things: fired a bunch of people, froze a bunch of money, insulted the press, demonized foreign brown people.

But as an administrator over crucial Federal disaster agencies, for which no one ever swore she was remotely qualified, she's been a disaster. She doesn't know what she's doing, though she obviously thinks she's doing right, executing Trump's threat to shut down FEMA. She had already fired hundreds of emergency call center workers, so that almost two-thirds of all calls from the Texas flood zone went unanswered. She had also demanded tight control -- her personal authorization -- of any expenditure over $100,000. Can you not guess what happened next? Her personal authorization means FEMA’s deployment of rescue teams to the Texas hill country didn't get the orders until more than 72 hours after the flooding began.

The Trump Cabinet: Absolute loyalty plus a good Q rating* on TV, which means Fox News, which means MAGA's gonna cheer another dodo named Pete Hegseth, a 2nd-tier Fox host. Most recently he likely thought he was doing something Trump would applaud -- cut off arms shipment to Ukraine -- but he only managed to embarrass Trump in public. At a White House press conference, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked the president who authorized the pause on weapons shipments to Ukraine. Trump replied, defensively: “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?” Yikes.

And consider the blondie loyalty of Pam Bondi, who has played the MAGA crowd like a virtuoso choir director, but then she stepped on her weenie. She baited the conspiracy theory hook, promised a salivating MAGA a big Epstein scandal revelation, and then took it back: "There is no Epstein client list."  She's thereby and quite inadvertently reminded everyone of Trump's many connections to Epstein, and if there's one thing Trump wants everyone to forget, it's any connection he had to Epstein's life style and criminal activity. At a recent Cabinet meeting, with the press in the room, a reporter asked Bondi a followup Epstein question. But before Bondi could answer, Trump cut her off, turned on the reporter: “Are people still talking about this guy, this creep?” 

What's the old country saying? A hit dog will holler. "Are people still talking?" is a total self-own.

No end of Trump Cabinet brilliance. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins suggested people on Medicaid could replace deported immigrants as field hands. Some people think Robert Kennedy Jr. is beautiful like classic architecture, but he's leading us into a medical wilderness, starting with a spreading measles epidemic.

 * Q score is a measurement of the familiarity and appeal of a TV personality to a specific audience. 

They Want You To Believe That Bullying Worked

On February 5th (yesterday), the U.S. Department of State published this on its Facebook page:

That announcement came after not one but two new Jethro lapdogs, Little Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, met with Panamanian officials over Low T's threat to take back the Canal and his complaints that Panama charged too much for passage through.

This morning the President of Panama, Jose Raul Mulino, said that was a big fat honking lie (and by implication, Marco and Hegseth are little eager bitches who hit "SEND" too quickly). Speaking to journalists, Mulino expressed his "absolute rejection" of the US State Department's announcement. "Mulino said he had told U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Wednesday that he could neither set the fees to transit the canal nor exempt anyone from them and that he was surprised by the U.S. State Department's statement suggesting otherwise."

And by the way, Fat Boy, the Canal is the property of Panama and is not up for sale, lease, or gifting.