Republicans Still Don't Give a Damn About National Security

About three weeks ago, I pointed out how laughable it was that Trump shut down the government, ostensibly in the name of national security.

Today, we saw more evidence of how little the nation's security actually means to Trump:

Jared Kushner's application for a top-secret clearance was rejected by two career White House security specialists after an FBI background check raised concerns about potential foreign influence on him — but their supervisor overruled the recommendation and approved the clearance, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

. . .

After reviewing the file, CIA officers who make clearance decisions balked, two of the people familiar with the matter said. One called over to the White House security division, wondering how Kushner got even a top-secret clearance, the sources said. Top-secret information is defined as material that would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security if disclosed to adversaries.

And if that isn't bad enough, Kushner's case is hardly an isolated one (emphasis mine):

The sources said they did not know whether Kline was in communication with senior political White House officials. They say he overruled career bureaucrats at least 30 times, granting top-secret clearances to officials in the Executive Office of the President or the White House after adjudicators working for him recommended against doing so.

Senator Ron Johnson, Republican head of the Senate committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, naturally spent the day focused on blaming Chuck Schumer for the fact that air traffic controllers weren't getting paid during the government shutdown.

It's really fascinating how Republicans can pretend to be outraged when a Secretary of State fails to follow email protocol (but only when the SoS is a Democrat, naturally), but literally could not care less when a Republican president is handing out top-level security clearances to his family and flunkies like candy.

 

 

Halfway There ---

These lyrics by Jon Bon Jovi never rang more true.

Conservatives Sure Enjoy Whining

I have a rather startling confession to make --- I'm a liberal (try to contain your surprise).  But someone somewhere made the wise point that we should expose ourselves to opposing points of view, so as to test our assumptions and biases, and not become detached from reality in a bubble of like-minded thinkers.

So in this spirit, I follow S.E. Cupp and David French on Twitter.  I have learned that Cupp occasionally takes a break from her fact-free attacks on the left and exercises in false equivalence to level the occasional well-placed attack on Trump.  I haven't followed French for very long, but if most of his views are like his recent essay on masculinity, I have very low expectations.

French is unhappy because the APA (American Psychiatric Association) just released it's first-ever guidelines for working with men and boys.  And French disagrees strongly with it:

The APA sees the challenges facing young men and rightly seeks to overcome those challenges, but then diagnoses the wrong cause. As Stephanie Pappas notes on the APA website, the new guidelines conclude that “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.”

French presents his case citing essentially no facts other than two charts which show that women have seen greater wage gains than men over the past 40 years --- which is kind of to be expected, considering the stark gender-based wage discrimination 40 years ago (not to mention the fact that women were still largely shut out of lucrative fields like law and medicine).  And he certainly makes no effort to refute any of the APA's 13 years of research.  The rest of his piece is the kind of primal scream one typically hears from the right any time someone suggests that it's possible for men to improve their behavior.  A typical passage:

Yet as we survey a culture that is rapidly attempting to enforce norms hostile to traditional masculinity, are men flourishing? And if men are struggling more the farther we move from those traditional norms, is the answer to continue denying and suppressing a boy’s essential nature? Male children are falling behind in school not because schools indulge their risk-taking and adventurousness but often because they relentlessly suppress boys and sometimes punish boys’ essential nature, from the opening bell to the close of the day.

Are men flourishing?  Well, we're currently suffering under the misrule of history's most corrupt and incompetent president, in part due to the fact that his opponent was a woman.  Women's earnings are still only 80% of men's.  And to the extent that men aren't flourishing (suicide rates are rising generally, but it is much higher among men than women), French makes no effort to relate it to 'norms hostile to traditional masculinity'.

Is the answer to continue denying and suppressing a boy's essential nature?  I wonder whether French is familiar with the concept of a straw man.

Male children are falling behind in school . . . Without even the pretense of a factual basis to back it up.

The whole essay is like this, and I wouldn't bother writing about it, except that his closing argument is: a) Anecdotal, and b) A tremendous self-own:

Then, one day after I returned from overseas, I was on a Cub Scout hike with my son. We were at the bottom of a ravine, when one of the boys threw a rock that hit my son square in the head. The gash was deep, blood was everywhere, and he started to lose consciousness. Our cell phones worked to call 911, but there was no way the ambulance could come down to us. We had to run up to it.

So, with the pack leader applying direct pressure to his head, I picked him up and started to run — straight up a steep incline. I ran, carrying him, until I was about to pass out. Then my wife (who is very strong but couldn’t carry him as far) would spell me for a bit. Then I’d grab him and run some more. We got to the top of the hill just as the ambulance arrived, and they were able to stop the bleeding before the blood loss got too serious.

Exciting!  And in French's mind, the perfect example of why we shouldn't listen to the APA when they say that "stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful."

French doesn't explain which of these traditionally male traits --- stoicism, competitiveness, dominance or aggression --- was the key ingredient in getting his son to the top of the hill.  Nor does he explain how his wife came by those same traditionally male traits when she took her turn.

But the 800-lb. gorilla that French ignores is that there would have been no need to carry his son up a ravine in the first place if another boy hadn't thrown a rock and hit his son in the head, in exactly the kind of dominance and aggression the APA wants to address.

What's more amazing than French's lack of self-awareness is that of his right-wing buddies, who jumped on Twitter to praise him for writing such a marvelous rebuttal to the APA.

In sum, we have:

1. The nation's most respected body in the study of psychology releases a document which is the result of 13 years of clinical study and analysis.
2. A right-wing commentator with no background in psychology (who probably didn't even read the full APA document) throws together a response full of right-wing grievance and unsupported whining, concluding with a self-refuting anecdote.
3. The rest of the right-wing applauds him on his accomplishment.

I don't think I'll be adding other conservatives to my list of Twitter follows any time soon.

Spolier Alert: Republicans Don't Give A Damn About National Security

Tweets like this are infuriating:

AP-NORC POLL: “Immigration among the top concerns in 2019.” People want to stop drugs and criminals at the Border. Want Border Security! Tell the Dems to do the inevitable now, rather than later. The wait is costly and dangerous!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2019

Any time you hear a trumpian use the phrase 'national security', that's a clue that they're handing you a load of BS.  To them, national security is just another tool in their collection of partisan talking points.

For example, anyone with a pulse and a memory which extends longer than 2 years is aware that the trumpians want Hillary Clinton to be locked up due to her email practices, which supposedly put our national security at risk.  But their hypocrisy is exposed when stories about multiple officials in the Trump White House doing the same thing disappear with barely a ripple, or when Trump himself is allowed to use an insecure iPhone for official business.

But it's not just engaging in poor security practices with official information --- which, for the record, was wrong when Hillary did it and it's wrong when the trumpians do it --- Trump is blatantly and repeatedly putting our national security at risk, and at worst a few Republicans have engaged in some quiet tut-tutting.

Take for example Trump's admission that he makes decisions based on his gut, rather than the consensus wisdom of the U.S. intelligence community.  Intelligence analyst Malcolm Nance warns:

At some point, the reality gap between Donald Trump‘s personal psychosis that imagines all sorts of mythic threats that are generated from his ‘gut’ will constitute the true national security threat to the nation.

Of course, given Trump's narcissistic personality disorder, this reliance on his gut doesn't necessarily demonstrate a disdain for U.S. national security.  But one thing that DOES indicate such disdain is the way Trump has politicized security clearances.

In February 2018, it was revealed that there were still dozens of White House staff working without appropriate security clearances more than a year in to Trump's term of office.  This included Jared Kushner, who didn't receive a proper clearance until May, and even then there were problems.  And finally in July, Trump used security clearances as a political weapon by revoking ex-CIA Director John Brennan's clearance for political purposes --- another act which put our national security at risk.

Of course, our national security really takes a beating when it goes up against Trump's personal business interests.  Since the day he was sworn in, Trump has been trading on the presidency to personally enrich himself and his family, and nearly 200 members of Congress have filed suit in an effort to stop his violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitition.

It's self-evident that the president has a conflict between his personal financial interests and the nation's interests when he makes business deals with foreign powers, and there are at least two concrete deals which clearly run counter to the nation's security interest.  First, there is Trump's decision to scrap the long-planned relocation of FBI headquarters.

More stirking (and shockingly underreported) is Trump's decision to end sanctions on Chinese telecom ZTE, despite bipartisan consensus that ZTE poses a serious national security threat:

. . . it was congressional investigators who sounded the alarm about possible cyberespionage by ZTE and Huawei in 2012, after an 11-month probe by the House Intelligence Committee concluded that the companies were essentially arms of the Chinese government that could be used as conduits for spying on American citizens and companies. And Rubio along with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) introduced a bill earlier this year that would bar the U.S. government from buying or leasing telecommunications equipment from the companies over those concerns.

In February, FBI Director Chris Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Americans shouldn’t use ZTE or Huawei products or services. He was joined by the heads of the CIA and National Security Agency, and the director of national intelligence, who also cautioned against the public using ZTE's products.

This isn't a partisan issue; it's a Trump issue.  Republicans, Democrats and the intelligence community ALL agree that ZTE is a national security threat, but Trump dropped sanctions on them in return for a $500 million loan from the Chinese government.

And yet, the Republican party continues to pretend that they care about national security.

Finally, let's focus on border security specifically, since that's the theoretical rationale for Trump's stupid $25 billion wall.

For starters, one might expect that a president truly focused on border security might spend a lot of money on it, and one who is willing to shut down the government over border security would spend every penny on it that Congress allocates.  In Trump's case, however, only 60% of the money available has even been allocated to contracts, and only 6% has been spent.

For another thing, a wall is one of the least effective ways to spend $25 billion on border security.  And Trump's focus on the southern border is misguided at any rate, as the number of unauthorized immigrants from the southern border has been steadily declining for more than a decade.

So let's mock the trumpians' supposed concern about 'border security' for what it is: A naked attempt to politicize national security for the purpose of pleasing Trump's xenophobic base.  And then let's change the conversation to focus on the national security disaster which is the Trump presidency.