Yes, all of us lucky folks who don’t have to salute Donald Trump1 can have a chuckle at the fate of H.R. “Herbie” McMaster, and particularly have a chuckle at his defenders, like Michael Crowley at Politico and Fred Kaplan at Slate, who join in the cry “Say it ain’t so, H.R.!”, reacting to McMaster’s…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Of course, when that happened during the Obama Administration, he threw them in jail
“Some brave patriots in intelligence and law enforcement and elsewhere in the federal government have taken risks to get the facts out.” Thus quoth WashPost columnist Dana Milbank, celebrating the appointment of Robert Mueller as special prosecutor for l’affaire Russe. As Dana sums things up, a little too generously, “With the stroke of a pen,…
David Helbock’s Random/Control—“Trinkle Tinkle”
Tired of Trump? Yeah, baby! David Helbock lets us escape with a multi-instrumental approach to Monk’s music, featuring Dave, Johannes Bär, and Andreas Broger playing, well, a lot of things. Recorded live at the Jazzahead 2015 in Bremen (DE).1 Posted by David Helbock “Bremen (DE)” is German for “Bremen, Germany” (as in “DEutschland”). ↩︎
Gen. H. R. McMaster: I only lie when I really need to
Okay, Gen. McM didn’t really say that. But he has been willing to lie before, when it was, you know, necessary, like when Congress might not give the Army all the money that it really, really needed. When H. R. first got the job as national security advisor, I recalled in a brief post, “Lt….
Trump trumps Trump
I was going to write a column saying that “we” (i.e., Democrats) were extraordinarily lucky that President Trump managed to sabotage the Comey dismissal as completely as he did. The original deed was clumsy enough, but adamant denials surely would have put a lid on the matter in a week or so. Only when Donald…
Rod Rosenstein, a shande fur di goyim
As I’ve already noted, the New York Times has called upon Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to save “us” and himself by somehow leveraging his “sterling reputation” to make the Trump Administration’s ax murder/defenestration of now former FBI Director James Comey not look like the gaping wound in the body politic that it so obviously…
Meaner than a snake and smarter than one too: Inside the mind of Mitch McConnell
I once called Mitch McConnell a “reptilian vote-counter”. Well, that insult still goes, because it’s true. Mitch can count votes, and here’s what he comes up with. The last time the Republican candidate for president won an “honest” majority was George H. W. Bush in 1998. And if George H. W. ran today, he’d get…
Thank God for Charles Krauthammer! Pretty much.
Yes, Charles Krauthammer, whom I’ve often harangued and harassed, “sometimes … displays a sense of honor” (to quote myself), and one of those times is right now, as he weighs on Trump v. Comey with a well-titled commentary, “A political ax murder”. True, Charlie clings to the now-standard right-wing meme that FBI Director James Comer…
Dear New York Times: Rod Rosenstein will not save us
The New York Times writes a dreadfully earnest “open” letter1 to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein beseeching him, “[a]t this fraught moment”, in light of his “sterling reputation”—“including a 27-year career in the Justice Department under five administrations, and the distinction of being the longest-serving United States attorney in history”—yada, yada, yada to basically “save…
All that stands between the United States and moral disaster is a Republican Congress. That’s a comforting thought.
Well, the first shoe has dropped. Donald Trump’s vast capacity for unreason has moved from potential to kinesis, from words to deeds. The president who bellowed about American “carnage” in his inaugural address is now inflicting said carnage on our already sullied body politic, by firing our infamously bungling FBI director James Comey, who incidentally…