You Will Anyway: There goes Esper

Thursday, November 5, 2020

There goes Esper

I don't know if Franklin Leonard is right, but it certainly is odd.

Or maybe not.

NBC News points out it is common for cabinet members to write undated letters of resignation as administrations anticipate a presidential transition; however, three anonymous defense officials told the outlet Esper has been preparing for his departure for quite some time, as he is one of the several administration officials who was expected to be ousted if Trump managed to secure a second term.

The Defense Secretary has had multiple disagreements with POTUS over the last several months. Back in June, he opposed Trump's call to use active-duty military members to stop Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country. Trump also took issue with Esper effectively banning the Confederate flag from military bases, and disagreed with Esper's openness to remove the name of Confederate figures from American forts.

[...]

According to NBC News, Esper reportedly plans to work with Congress on law that would remove the names of Confederate leaders from military bases.

[...]

The defense officials told NBC News that Esper was thinking about his legacy, especially after he was perceived as one of Trump's many "yes" men.

"He cares about his legacy and prefers to be remembered as someone who was fired because he stood up to the president, rather than being remembered as 'Yesper,'" one of the sources said.

Yahoo

Then I suppose he figured he might not get fired since Trump is losing.

UPDATE 11/9: He got his wish.

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"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.