It’s as bad or
worse than we thought. I guess I still held out hope that actually getting
the job would make Mr. Trump sensible and not need any longer to pander to the
alt-right. As David Brooks said, hit “pause,” let the democratic mechanisms do
their work, and see what happens. But I am just appalled at his first choices.
I gleaned these reports from various news outlets…
Steve
Bannon: Just
appalling! It has become clear in the past few days that Democrats, and even
some Republicans, aren’t happy with President-elect
Donald Trump’s choice for chief strategist in the White House, campaign CEO Steve Bannon. Bannon,
who runs the conservative news site Breitbart, has been called racist, anti-Semitic
and white nationalist -- and he runs a site that has, in addition to having
been unapologetically pro-Trump throughout the election, is known as a home for
the so-called “alt-Right.” A quick look at the headlines on
Breitbart shows that there is substantial fodder for critics of Bannon. Stories
published on the site include items such as: “Bill Kristol: Republican spoiler,
renegade Jew,” “Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy,” “Would you
rather your child had feminism or cancer?” and “Gay rights have made us dumber,
it’s time to get back in the closet.”
Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn has already accepted the
position of national security adviser, the office of President-elect
Donald Trump announced Friday. Flynn, who
advised Trump’s presidential campaign, had been considered a leading contender
for the position, given his support of many of Trump’s most grave foreign
policy proposals. Earlier this year, he defended Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslims from
immigrating to the U.S. and said he was open to
bringing back waterboarding as a torture method and to killing the families of
accused terrorists, which constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Conventions! General Flynn served as the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency but
was forced out due to his controversial views on Islam and vocal opposition to
the Obama administration’s policies to fight Islamic State. He claimed that “political correctness” was at fault in the U.S. efforts
against terrorism. He also called Islam a “cancer” and argued that fearing Muslims is “rational.”
Jeff Sessions: Republican Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions was
rejected as a federal judge in 1986 due to allegations of racist comments. Jefferson
Beauregard Sessions III, 69, would serve as the nation’s top law enforcement
official if confirmed by his fellow members of the Senate. Sessions, an early
Trump backer, is an immigration hard-liner who has been in the Senate since
1997 and previously served as attorney general for the state of Alabama. Back
in the mid-1980s, when Sessions was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of
Alabama, President Ronald Reagan nominated him to become a federal judge. But during
the nomination process, allegations emerged that Sessions had called a black
attorney “boy,” that he suggested a white civil rights lawyer was a race
traitor, that he joked he liked the Ku Klux Klan until he found out they smoked
marijuana and that he referred to civil rights groups as “un-American”
organizations trying to “force civil rights down the throats of people who
were trying to put problems behind them.”
John Bolton, top candidate to serve
as President-elect Donald Trump’s
secretary of state, is publicly calling for the U.S. to help overthrow the
existing government in Iran. “The only long-term solution is regime change in Tehran,” the former
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily on
Thursday morning. “The ayatollahs are the principal threat to international
peace and security in the Middle East.” The call for regime change is very much
in line with past
statements from Bolton, a hyper-hawkish Bush administration official
who stands by the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. He has repeatedly urged the
U.S. to help Israel
bomb Iran or do it alone. Even as Iran was in the final stages
of negotiating an international agreement that requires it to dramatically
scale back its nuclear infrastructure, Bolton recommended a military attack.
It seems as if is as bad as it could possibly be and yet still
slip through whatever teeth congress and American checks and balances has left.
What happens when the bully gets voted in a homecoming king and principal of
the school at the same time? Folks just do not feel safe.
Contrast that with the homily the Holy Father gave the
other day at the consistory that created the new cardinals. Reported by Phillip
Pullela on Huffington Post:
On Saturday Pope Francis said an “epidemic of animosity” against people of
other races or religions was hurting the weakest in society, striking a note of
caution against the rise of populist nationalism. Little more than a week after
Donald Trump was elected the next US president, buoying anti-immigrant parties
in Europe and elsewhere, the pope noted “how quickly those among us with the
status of a stranger, an immigrant or a refugee become a threat, take on the
status of an enemy… An enemy because they come from a distant country or have
different customs. An enemy because of the color of their skin, their language
or their social class. An enemy because they think differently or even have a
different faith,” he said at a ceremony to induct new cardinals.
While not naming any country, Francis
appeared to refer to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attitudes that surfaced
during the U.S. campaign and since the election.
The US Justice Department said on Friday
it was investigating reports of intimidation and harassment in schools,
churches and elsewhere since the election. One of the new cardinals, Archbishop
Blase Cupich of Chicago, told Reuters the pope was “very much aware of the fact
that if that (animosity) is not checked, it is very contagious and it can
spread quickly, it can be like a wildfire.”
So, how are we going to check this epidemic of animosity?
