You Will Anyway: The New Amerika

Tuesday, December 10, 2024

The New Amerika

The Heritage Foundation is going to spend $1 million to pressure Republican senators to approve Hegseth’s nomination. Trump ally Mike Davis, a former GOP Senate aide who is helping lead the online assault, told Playbook he will hire private detectives to investigate the past of any Republican senator who opposes Hegseth’s nomination.

This pressure campaign has materialized because Hegseth is both unqualified and unfit to lead the Pentagon. He is a blackmail magnet—a reckless man controlled by urges, from adultery to alcohol. And Donald Trump wants him anyway.

Bulwark

Trump wants him because of it.

America’s enemies knew that another Trump term would feature additional foreign financial conflicts for the Trump family, more nepotism, and an explosion of grifting as the president-elect and many of his allies hawk merch from perfume to pills. They knew Trump didn’t release his tax returns the first time he was president, nor meaningfully divest from his business interests, so he certainly won’t do so now.

[...]

Trump backed Hegseth with an emphatic Friday post on Truth Social in which he noted Hegseth’s Ivy League degrees and his “Military state of mind,” and declared “Pete is a WINNER, and there is nothing that can be done to change that!!!”

[...]

From Trump’s point of view, a cabinet composed of people with such baggage is a cabinet that will remain loyal to him.

But from the point of view of America’s enemies, this is like Christmas morning.

Remember these days. One day you'll be able to recall where you were when America fell.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 10:23 am:

Sen Joni Ernst had a second meeting with Pete Hegseth today. She is currently seen as the biggest obstacle to his nomination. With all the pressure being brought to bear on her from Trump and MAGA activists, it is hard to see how she doesn’t cave. They always cave. Ernst sounded mostly positive about the meeting after, but said she was going to wait for the process to play out with a full background check.

The only news from the meeting was that Hegseth apparently promised Ernst that he would not try and remove women from serving in combat roles, and that made her happy.

Meidas Touch

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"It takes only a bit of knowledge of history to realize how dangerous it is to think that the people who run the country know what they are doing." -- Howard Zinn

"It’s not about not having something to hide; it’s about having something to lose. What we lose when we’re under observation is our humanity...Rights are inherent to our nature, they’re not granted by governments, they’re guaranteed by governments. They’re protected by governments." -- Edward Snowden

"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

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack." ~ Molly Ivins

"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plane....When you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, 'Except in wartime.'" -- George McGovern

"I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one." ~ Bill Moyers

"When did hope become a political dynamic? Hope is right below wishful thinking and right above performing a rain dance on the scale of activity." ~ Rich Hall

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.